"The growth in viewing of long-form content online is also a boon for the growing online video ad market, he (Gian Fulgoni, chairman and co-founder of comScore) said. The longer people watch, the more advertising opportunities there are. The average online Internet user is watching 3.5 minutes at a time, and that keeps increasing. “That’s a really important metric because if we just stick with three-minute video clips that limits the number of ads,” he said. “You want these longer-running shows so you can maximize ad dollars. This is one of the key components of the future of online advertising.” However, work still needs to be done in where ads should live in online video, whether as pre-rolls, post-rolls or another form, he added."
Daisy Whitney @ comScore Chairman: Down with Clicks, Up with Video
video content on the web is a ripe advertising medium.
"Google recently spent more than $3 billion to acquire DoubleClick, a banner-ad-serving company that derived its value from having profiles on visitors to the net’s most popular sites and letting companies target their ads to particular groups. Google will now combine DoubleClick’s targeting with info from its sprawling AdSense network … and will quickly be able to build up robust profiles on Google users, whether they have an account or not. But more intriguingly, Google also announced YouTube ads will become targeted by categorizing what you watch, say and do on YouTube — combined with the other info from its DoubleClick. … That’s Google slyly telling you where all this is heading. Google says its mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Google often says that it believes ads are information. What it doesn’t say, but clearly believes, is that you are information to be indexed, made accessible and useful."
Ryan Singel @ Analysis: Google’s Ad Targeting Turns Algorithms on You | Epicenter from Wired.com
here comes creepy.
"Say hello to the Fixed Panel, which is a huge vertical banner that “scrolls to the top and bottom of the page as a user scrolls”, the XXL Box, which is pretty much exactly what it says, and the Pushdown, the biggest of the bunch, which rolls down from the top of the page to get right in the user’s face. The trade group behind these new formats says they are “designed to help stimulate a renaissance of creative advertising on the Internet that meets the needs of marketers by better integrating their messages into the fabric of the Web.” That sounds like a lot of buzzwords, but conspicuous by its absence is any mention of the user’s experience of these ads. These ads might grab users’ attention through brute force, but will the experience be a positive one?"
Carlo Longino @ Online Publishers’ Solution To Falling Ad Revenues: Bigger, More Annoying Ads | Techdirt
great. bigger ads.
"For years, it has been assumed that home internet usage would cannibalize live television viewing, but there’s something interesting happening between social networking and live television. Could it be that what Pete Blackshaw termed “telecommunities”-people simultaneously watching live television programs and chatting in real time with an online network of like-minded fans—will gain scale and give consumers a reason to stick with live viewing? Let’s look at what happened during the Oscars. … More than 1 in 10 people (11%) watching the Oscars this year did so while logged onto the Internet. … While there was some expected surfing to places like IMDB for more information on movies, the true winner of the night was Facebook. People who used Facebook during the broadcast used it for an average of 76 minutes. … People who used Facebook while watching the Oscars watched about 50% more of the broadcast than the average Oscar viewer."
John Burbank, Nielsen Online @ Could Social Networking Bolster the :30 Spot? | MEDIAWEEK
people are finding their own added value. they want it.
"Put aside your demographic notions of gender, age and location for a moment. People are more than all that when they are online. They create identities, behavioral patterns and personas based on the community they most frequently use. This constructed online identity is a proxy that can be used to not only engage these users but develop a favorable impression of your brand."
Maki @ DOSHDOSH: Building Complementary Services: A Powerful Long-Term Social Media Marketing Strategy
social networks must be integrated into everything.
"We don’t post and share clips just because of what we have to say about the ad, but also because of what it might have to say about us, so the ad must be capable of users express something beyond their affinity for the product it promotes. Only when commercials have enough ambiguity in meaning that they give up control of their promotional function can they develop the gaps and spaces to becomes producerly. When that happens, instead of giving meaning to a pair of sunglasses, the ad itself becomes a cultural commodity not unlike a pair of designer sunglasses that we can “wear."
Henry Jenkins @ Confessions of an Aca/Fan: If It Doesn’t Spread, It’s Dead (Part Six): Spreadable Content
if a viewer can add his own message to the content, make it his own, it spreads. and content needs to spread.
"Advertisers, I think, are questioning the entire notion of buying bits of real estate on the periphery of content. It’s just not that enticing – and with good reason. Despite all the studies showing banner ads increase search conversions and do some to lift brand metrics, consumers don’t seem to care. Think about it this way: U.S. Internet users saw 4.5 trillion banners last year, according to ComScore. That’s 2,000 per user a month, 24,000 for the year. … Solving the problem will take many things, including better creative, targeting and forms, but it also starts with admitting there’s a problem, not shifting blame to the economy or advertisers who “don’t get it.” I’m with these HBS guys: publishers need to think more like marketers and, like it or not, mesh advertising with their content."
Brian Morrissey @ @bmorrissey: Banners in crisis
do you click on the ads?
"The problem with the notion of branded content being a sort of “direction we should all go in” is that it will end up hurting content, which in the end is going to hurt the industry. … So what’s the answer? The biggest change needs to happen with how we treat content, particularly how online and television content interact. Television is a viable medium — it’s current, it’s passive. We all need to turn our brains off once in a while. And it’s still better than the Internet in terms of really absorbing someone else’s story. But storytelling also needs to have an element of participation or interaction for when we don’t want to turn off our brains. For that to exist on a grand scale, like it does on television, in our ad-supported capitalist society it needs to have a model where it can be “free” because of advertising. On top of that, in case you haven’t noticed, the Internet is hard. It’s difficult to create this stuff, far more so than linear content. … So the answer really is that we as an industry — and by “we” I mean big agencies and more specifically big agency/media companies — have to find a way to make and/or fund online content, utilities, games and platforms that can be owned or sponsored by many brands."
in search of a new platform.
"These narratives unfold in fragments, in all sorts of media, from Web sites to phone calls to live events, and the audience pieces together the story from shards of information. The task is too complicated for any one person, but the Web enables a collective intelligence to emerge to assemble the pieces, solve the mysteries, and in the process, tell and retell the story online. The narrative is shaped — and ultimately owned — by the audience in ways that other forms of storytelling cannot match. No longer passive consumers, the players live out the story. Eight years ago, this kind of entertainment didn’t exist; now dozens of such games are launched every year, many of them attracting millions of followers on every continent."
Frank Rose @ WIRED: Secret Websites, Coded Messages: The New World of Immersive Games
more @ “Year Zero” Project = Way Cooler Than “Lost” : Rolling Stone : Rock and Roll Daily
NIN’s ARG experiment got people talking in preparation to it’s new album launch. it worked.
"Until now, advertisers have underwritten mass media to reach mass audiences. Indeed, they’ve paid increasing premiums for the opportunity as audiences have shrunk, because even in a fragmented media world, the largest fragment – network TV – is the most valuable. But now they realize that they are losing not only mass but critical mass. They see the old model collapsing before them, and they have $67 billion to spend and no idea where to spend it. Because, at least until recently, the Internet has lacked both the riveting content and ad space inventory to absorb it. But what if there were a means to approximate the reach and mesmerizing power of television online? … And what if, as a bonus, the medium were able not merely to command eyeballs for marketers but to target content especially relevant to what the marketer is selling? … “They’ve got the audience,” says John Montgomery, CEO of MindShare Interaction, a digital media arm of the WPP Group communications conglomerate. “In order now to monetize what they’ve got, they need to figure out a revenue model. But it’s a very, very hard thing to do around user-generated media."
Bob Garfield @ Wired 14.12: YouTube vs. Boob Tube
the holy grail of online video: targeted advertisement.
more @ VCAM = Viewer Created Ad Message | Millennial Marketer
more @ CULTURE HACKER: Crowdsourcing TV Ads
more @ Current.com
viewer created ad message = crowdsourced advertising. win win?
"On the one hand, personalized advertising could open the door to a new forms of invasive annoyances. I am reminded of the scene in Minority Report where sales avatars on screens call out to you by name as you walk past. On the other hand, personalization may offer the key to relevance. We are all bombarded by advertising in our daily lives. Junk mail, ads in magazines, it is all ineffective mass market noise pummeling us with things we don’t want. But, companies with a helpful product need some way for interested people to find out about it. What I would like is a way for the ads to be limited to only interested people. Don’t waste my time, tell me about something that actually might interest me. I’d like the advertising to be useful."
Greg Linden @ Geeking with Greg: Is personalized advertising evil?
creepy vs. useful.
"Viral marketing and viral advertising refer to marketing techniques that use pre-existing social networks to produce increases in brand awareness or to achieve other marketing objectives (such as product sales) through self-replicating viral processes, analogous to the spread of pathological and computer viruses. It can be word-of-mouth delivered or enhanced by the network effects of the Internet.[1] Viral promotions may take the form of video clips, interactive Flash games, advergames, ebooks, brandable software, images, or even text messages. The basic form of viral marketing is not infinitely sustainable."
harnessing the network to sell stuff.
BMW Films - The Hire - Ambush (via abmwfan)
entertainment content + brand integration = branded content
"The genius of the game is that it starts out by making you feel like a protagonist, and eventually turns you into part of an actual team. As it’s progressed, the puzzles have gotten far too complicated for any one player to work out, and an online community called Cloudmakers has convened to solve them and crack the central mystery (the death of an engineer named Evan Chan) collaboratively. … Within the game, there’s a mock academic bibliography featuring a paper called “Multi-person social problem-solving arrays considered as a form of ‘artificial intelligence’ “."
Douglas Wolk @ Signs of Intelligent Life - Slate Magazine
more @ Reality blurs, hype builds with web ‘A.I.’ game | CNN
spielberg’s A.I. and it’s mystery campaign. the birth of alternate reality games in mainstream media.
