5 Digital Tools to Boost Your Brand in 2012 [INFOGRAPHIC]

5 Digital Tools to Boost Your Brand in 2012 [INFOGRAPHIC].

Three in 10 Display Ads Go Unseen by Internet Users – eMarketer

Three in 10 Display Ads Go Unseen by Internet Users – eMarketer.

Brand advertisers are accustomed to paying for views—both on TV and online. In the digital world, impressions have long served as a proxy for views, but findings from comScore and ad verification solutions company AdSafe Media found that paying for raw impressions is costing brand advertisers money not correlated to effectiveness.

To better understand the true number of display ad impressions seen by internet users, comScore analyzed the display ad campaigns of 12 major brand advertisers. The study found that an average of just 69% of ads were in-view. By comScore’s definition, to be in-view, a user had to have seen 50% of an ad’s pixels for at least 1 second.

The larger the website, the greater the percentage of in-view display ads. The top 50 sites for each brand’s industry vertical, as classified by comScore’s MediaMetrix ratings, had the highest in-view percentage (77%). That number declined when broadening to the top 100 sites (74%) and top 500 sites (70%).

The fact that larger publishers’ sites tend to have greater quantity and variety of premium ad inventory space could be one influencing factor. And additional data from AdSafe Media showed publisher sites had a greater percentage of in-view ads than ad networks and exchanges.

On average, publisher ads were more likely to be in-view than those from the other two inventory sources: Just 24.3% of publisher ads were never in-view, compared to 45.5% of platform and exchange ads and 41.3% of network ads.

The size of the ad unit also appeared to affect how frequently the add was in-view. comScore found leaderboard ad units—728×90 units displayed across the top of a page—were in-view most often: 74% of the time. Medium rectangles were in-view 69% of the time, and wide skyscrapers—ads that typically span vertically down the page—had the lowest in-view rate (66%). This is unsurprising, given that users must often scroll down the page to see these ads in full.

Regardless of ad size and placement, it’s undeniable that a good portion of all display ads served never make their branding impact. The digital ad industry is working to correct this problem through the Making Measurement Make Sense (3Ms) initiative. Among their many goals, the group aims to standardize digital branding measures so advertisers can better quantify the true impact of display advertising efforts. Such standardization could also affect future ad-pricing models as well as expectations that inventory providers’ should show greater accountability and transparency for units sold.

Le Groupe Hi-Media lance son Ad Exchange | Boursorama

Le Groupe Hi-Media lance son Ad Exchange | Boursorama.

Paris, le 20 septembre 2011 – Le groupe media online Hi-Media (Code ISIN FR0000075988 – HIM, HIM.FR), un des leaders européens de la monétisation de l’audience sur Internet annonce le lancement de son Ad Exchange en partenariat avec Appnexus, un des leaders américains du Real Time Bidding.

Grâce au partenariat avec Appnexus, Hi-Media vient enrichir sa palette de technologies propriétaires utilisés notamment dans son activité de marketing à la performance.

En s’appuyant sur les fonctionnalités de Real Time Bidding d’Appnexus, Hi-Media pourra proposer aux annonceurs ou aux agences d’achat media d’enchérir directement sur son inventaire d’espaces publicitaires en régie exclusive pour rendre leurs campagnes prioritaires. Hi-Media permettra également aux annonceurs de petite et moyenne tailled’accéder directement aux emplacements publicitaires de la régie en créant et pilotant eux-mêmes leurs campagnes.

Enfin, cette plateforme d’enchères constitue pour les partenaires éditeurs de Hi-Media une opportunité supplémentaire de développer leurs revenus.

C’est en effet grâce aux mécanismes d’enchères et à la mesure de la performance de chaque campagne que les acteurs du search marketing ont réussi à faire progresser très vite ce segment du marché publicitaire et à augmenter le prix de vente des inventaires.

Appnexus est une des seules sociétés à proposer une gamme complète de solutions technologiques pour opérer des achats et des ventes d’espace publicitaire totalement automatisés et en temps réel (Real Time Bidding et Real Time Selling). Sa technologie permet ainsi à des acteurs qui disposent de la taille critique sur leurs marchés de créer une bourse électronique aux inventaires et aux formats publicitaires (les Ad Exchange ).

Appnexus a été créé en 2007 par des anciens cadres de Double Click/Google et de Right Media/Yahoo. La société a opéré plusieurs levées de fonds pour un total de 65 millions de dollars auprès d’investisseurs prestigieux comme Andreesen Horowitz, Koshla Ventures, Microsoft etc. Appnexus compte déjà parmi ses clients des groupes media et Internet de référence sur le marché américain dont le Groupe Microsoft, Technorati, Collective …

Aux Etats Unis, l’étude réalisée par www.adexchanger.com, indique que les ventes d’espaces publicitaires automatisées via des Ad Exchange représentent déjà 10% des investissements en display advertising (publicité graphique) et devraient doubler, voire tripler dans les deux années à venir. Au-delà de ces perspectives de croissance, cette technologie permet d’accroître l’efficacité et la transparence du marché stimulant ainsi les investissements des annonceurs. Les analystes sectoriels aux Etats Unis estiment ainsi que le marché du display se développera plus vite que celui du search marketing (liens sponsorisés) et le dépassera en 2015 (source : emarketer.com).

Cette nouvelle plateforme s’inscrit dans la continuité de la stratégie de Hi-Media : l’ouverture à de nouveaux annonceurs et le système d’enchères sur les prix de certains espaces publicitaires accroît les capacités de monétisation d’audience proposées par Hi-Media au bénéfice de ses partenaires éditeurs.

Le PDG et cofondateur d’Appnexus déclare « Appenexus se réjouit de ce partenariat avec Hi-Media, le premier réseau publicitaire indépendant d’Europe avec plus de 15 ans d’expérience en publicité Branding et performance. Hi-Media a saisi l’opportunité unique de disposer de la meilleure offre technologique afin d’offrir les solutions de monétisation les plus performantes à ses éditeurs et un outil de pilotage de campagnes à ses annonceurs. »

« Nous avons étudié différentes options technologiques afin d’aller plus loin dans l’optimisation des revenus sur notre inventaire publicitaire en régie exclusive et de continuer à développer notre couverture du marché. Appnexus nous est apparu comme le partenaire le plus avancé pour créer un Ad Exchange leader en Europe. Avec cette plateforme, nous apportons au marché publicitaire européen du display encore plus d’efficacité et de transparence. Nous sommes convaincus que cette initiative constituera un moteur de notre croissance ces prochaines années. », ajoute Cyril Zimmermann, PDG et co-fondateur, Hi-Media.

Cisco: 50 Billion Things on the Internet by 2020 [Infographic]

Cisco: 50 Billion Things on the Internet by 2020 [Infographic].

The Internet of Things, when real world objects are connected to the Internet, is a trend that we’ve been actively tracking since early 2009. So far a lot of big technology infrastructure and solutions companies have gotten behind the trend, for the simple reason that they see a huge market opportunity. As more and more ‘things’ go on the Net, it creates more demand for network infrastructure like sensors and routers. Enter the likes of Cisco and Verizon Wireless. Likewise, more technology solutions will be developed to upload and manage data from real world objects. Enter the likes of IBM and HP.

Cisco has designed an infographic that offers a simple example of how Internet of Things will affect you in your everyday life. It also states that by 2020, there will be 50 billion ‘things’ connected to the Internet – everything from your body, car, alarm clock and even cows.

There has been some contention about the number of connected things and by when. Cisco’s prediction of 50 billion devices by 2020 matches Ericsson CEO Hans Vestberg’s prediction earlier this year within a similar time period. However IBM recently put it at 1 trillion connected devices by 2015. Indeed in April 2010, Cisco’s own CTO Padmasree Warrior said that by 2013 the number of devices connected to the Internet will reach 1 trillion. So even Cisco doesn’t seem to have a consistent prediction.

Regardless, as the infographic below shows, the number of things connected to the Internet has already exceeded the number of people on earth. So this is a big trend – and big business for Cisco and other technology companies.

Infographic via All Things D

Quick Stat: Google Display Ad Revenues to Pass $1 Billion This Year – The eMarketer Blog

Quick Stat: Google Display Ad Revenues to Pass $1 Billion This Year – The eMarketer Blog.

eMarketer estimates Facebook’s share of US online display ad revenues will grow to 17.7% in 2011, up from a 12.2% share last year. Facebook is expected to see $978 million in additional display revenues in 2011—more than display revenues will grow this year at Yahoo!, AOL, Microsoft and Google combined.

US display advertising revenues at Google will top $1 billion for the first time in 2011, as the company’s share of overall US display revenues grows to 9.3%, eMarketer estimates. That’s up from an 8.6% share in 2010, when Google’s US display revenues grew an estimated 140.5% to $855 million.

For more of eMarketer’s coverage on US display advertising revenues at top ad-selling companies, click here.

How Media Buyers Should Approach Display Campaigns – eMarketer

How Media Buyers Should Approach Display Campaigns – eMarketer.

JULY 12, 2011

Multitude of sources can complicate media plans

Not long ago, display advertising was considered merely a direct-response vehicle. But with the rise of online video, the increasing success of Facebook and ongoing improvements to audience targeting and buying technology like real-time bidding (RTB), media buyers are returning to display with big hopes—and even bigger ad budgets. eMarketer estimates display spending will reach $12.33 billion this year, nearly two-thirds of which will go toward standard banners.

Today’s display ad buyer must navigate hundreds of inventory providers, including ad exchanges, ad networks and publishers, to emerge with a successful media plan. By approaching the ad buying process objective-first, media buyers can pinpoint select sources to efficiently craft display campaigns.

“The need for better audience scale and efficient inventory purchasing has fueled the rise of ad exchanges and real-time buying platforms,” said eMarketer’s Lauren Fisher, author of the new report, “Buying Display Ad Inventory: Making Sense of Multiple Sources.” “Media buyers are turning to these ad exchanges and demand-side platforms (DSPs) for their massive reach and audience scaling capabilities.”

The efficacy of each display ad source and inventory buying method depends greatly on campaign objective. Premium inventory sources that work well for brand-based objectives might not work as well for direct-response advertisers looking to retarget site visitors.

For example, premium publishers and ad networks—often used for relevant content or contextual targeting—can be effective at generating brand awareness, according to DIGIDAY and DataXu.

“By focusing on objectives, marketers can best determine the appropriate mix of providers that will most likely help them to meet and exceed their advertising goals,” said Fisher.

Advertising – Online Video Ad Effectiveness Rivals TV\’s, Budgets Shifting : MarketingProfs Article

via Advertising – Online Video Ad Effectiveness Rivals TV\’s, Budgets Shifting : MarketingProfs Article.

Ad agency executives say online video is an increasingly powerful tool to reach audiences and, largely because of video’s targeting capabilities, fully six in ten say online video ads are more effective than (30%) or as effective as (31%) ads delivered via television, according to a survey from BrightRoll.

Moreover, nearly two-thirds of ad execs (64%) say they are shifting TV dollars to video, while 86% say they are shifting at least part of their display dollars to video.

Ad dollars are also shifting from search, social media and direct response, though in slightly more modest numbers (28%, 27%, and 26%, respectively).

Below, other findings from the third annual Online Video Advertising Report, which surveyed 100 ad agency executives and media buyers on their spending patterns and sentiments toward online video advertising.

http://c5.zedo.com/jsc/c5/ff2.html?n=647;c=11/9;s=1;d=9;w=300;h=250;q=basic

Nearly three in ten (28%) ad execs expect the largest increases in ad spending in the online video category for 2011, followed by mobile video (27%) and social media (25%).

Targeting Capabilities Valued

More than two in five ad execs (41%) cite online video’s targeting capabilities as the medium’s greatest value, up 9 percentage points from 32% in 2010.

Reach is viewed as a key benefit (23%), up from 19% in 2010, followed by ad unit format (11%), price relative to TV (10%), and ability to reuse creative (10%).

Among all forms of targeting, ad execs say behavioral targeting is the most valuable (28%), followed by contextual (24%) and demographic (21%) targeting.

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Looking for great digital marketing data? MarketingProfs reviewed hundreds of research sources to create our most recent Digital Marketing Factbook (May 2010), a 296-page compilation of data and 254 charts, covering email marketing, social media, search engine marketing, e-commerce, and mobile marketing. Also check out The State of Social Media Marketing, a 240-page original research report from MarketingProfs.

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Purchasing Platforms, Ad Units

On average, ad execs buy more than one-half (52%) of their online video via ad networks, 31% of their video directly through publishers, 10% through broadcasters, and 6% through portals.

Most (91%) of ad execs say pre-roll performs better than in-banner video; two-thirds (67%) say pre-roll is more effective and 61% say it’s more engaging.

About the data: BrightRoll conducted the survey among 100 executives and media buyers at advertising agencies across the US from March 23 to April 10, 2011.

Read more: http://www.marketingprofs.com/charts/2011/4985/online-video-ad-effectiveness-rivals-tvs-budgets-shifting#ixzz1LXvZ0t00

The Geico Gecko meets The AOL Way: Are display advertisers too obsessed with click-through rates? » Nieman Journalism Lab » Pushing to the Future of Journalism

The Geico Gecko meets The AOL Way: Are display advertisers too obsessed with click-through rates? » Nieman Journalism Lab » Pushing to the Future of Journalism.

By Simon Owens

Late last year, AOL announced it would be revamping its ad platform, shrinking the number of ads it serves and expanding the sizes of those ads. In some cases the ad units would be four times larger than they were before. The move was seen by many as AOL’s attempt to address the abysmally-low click-through rates on display advertising, and senior executives admitted that they would see an immediate drop in revenue as a result of it; their hope was that in the long run advertisers would flock to the new platform and pay higher rates for these more successful ads.

According to several studies, click-through rates — the number of people who actually click on an ad — run well below 1 percent on most sites, and each year these rates get lower and lower. Some industry analysts have said this is a result of “banner blindness,” the idea that we inadvertently train our eyes to ignore certain parts of a web page, including sidebar and banner ads.

Depending on which side of the aisle you are on, these metrics are either a blessing or a curse. On the one hand, the Internet allows us to measure ad success like never before. In the past, advertising agencies would have to employ arcane formulas using Nielsen or circulation numbers to guess how many eyeballs saw a 30-second spot on television or a full-page ad in The New York Times. Now, we can open up Google Analytics or click-tracking software to determine exactly how many users engaged with an ad. We can even in some cases determine conversion rates, measuring not only how many people clicked on an ad, but also how many actually purchased a product after making the click. These metrics are a welcome relief to the client who famously said, “I know I am wasting half my advertising budget; I just don’t know which half.”

But many publishers and advertising agencies have expressed frustration that their industry is beholden to such confined measurement. By focusing so much on direct response, they argue, advertisers are missing out on the larger branding opportunities afforded by creative advertising. The Geico Gecko is not successful because he inspires people to jump up from their couches and purchase car insurance; he’s successful because when a person decides months later to shop around for car insurance, his image springs to mind.

Earlier this month, a company called MediaMind released a comprehensive study on the performance of financial services display ads. MediaMind specializes in hosting ads and collecting a variety of performance metrics for advertisers. If Goldman Sachs wanted to advertise on NYTimes.com, for example, MediaMind would host the ad on its own servers and give the NYT a link to pull the ad onto its site. The company would then measure how many times the ad is loaded, how many people click on it, and even how many hover their mouse over the ad without clicking — what MediaMind refers to as “dwell.”

For this particular study, MediaMind analyzed 28 billion ad impressions and terabytes of data to determine what kinds of financial service ads — whether for banks, credit cards, or insurance companies — performed best. The average click-through rate on such ads is .09 percent, with an even lower post-click conversion rate of .03 percent. Perhaps more encouragingly, though, the “dwell” rate for these ads was 4.26 percent, meaning that nearly one in every 20 users hovered his or her mouse over an ad — an indication, MediaMind said, that the ad carried influence even if it didn’t lead to a click. The study claimed financial service ads had an overall conversion rate higher than their click-through conversion rate — .16 percent vs .03 percent — because some of the users who didn’t actually click on the ad still visited the advertiser later. One of the biggest takeaways from the study was that a user’s engagement with an ad sharply falls after the first time he has seen it, meaning that if he sees an ad on NYTimes.com and then later on WashingtonPost.com, he’s much less likely to click on the Post’s ad than a reader who is seeing it there for the first time.

To understand the click-through rate dilemma many advertisers face, one merely has to dive into MediaMind’s findings about which kinds of ads perform best: The highest click-through rates were for credit cards, while the lowest were for car and home-owners’ insurance. Ariel Geifman, MediaMind’s principal research analyst, explained to me in a phone interview that the credit card ads perform better because many people are almost always willing to try a new credit card with a better rate. But why did the insurance ads perform so poorly? “We think it’s because users only need a policy once a year, so you only need to get people at the point when they’re thinking about it — which is really hard,” Geifman said. “Unlike credit cards, users are not actively shopping for better insurance offers all the time, only once a year. You have to tempt them with an offer exactly at that point in order to get them to consider it.”

Display advertising, in other words, is lacking a Geico Gecko strategy.

Geifman told me that despite pushes for advertisers to take a much more “holistic” view, they’re still measuring their success on click-through and conversion metrics. “People try to focus more on the tangible rather than the intangible metrics,” he said. “In the furture, display advertising is going to be a lot more focused on branding.”

But will it? John Battelle, founder of Federated Media and a board member of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, has spent a lot of time contemplating this question. Federated Media is an ad network that provides advertising for hundreds of publishers, seeing more than a billion ad impressions a month. (I’ve written for some outlets that use FM advertising.) “No matter what, we have to live in a world where the question, ‘Does the consumer click on my ad?’ is the fundamental and only consistent signal in display advertising that is universally understood,” Battelle said in a phone conversation. “That impulse has a lot of implications. When people optimize click-through rates, it changes all sorts of decisions that can inevitablly lead down a path towards, in essence, the direct-response approach to advertising. Which is to say, if you optimize your creative — your media buy, your placement, everything — to this one signal, and you tell your agencies and your publishing partners that’s what’s most important, you’re going to get behaviors that drive clicks. And that sort of ignores a very large percentage of the value of advertising, which has to do with changing the perception, awareness, and potentially other important signals of value in the ecosystem. Unfortunately, it’s something we’ve had to live with because it’s the only standard that’s easily measured.”

To show the short-sightedness of such metrics, Battelle cited a comScore study that found in 2009 that 4 percent of Internet users drive a whopping 67 percent of all advertising clicks. Do we really want to target our ads, he asked rhetorically, to such a small user base — the online equivalent to those who respond to late-night infomercials?

Though the display advertising industry has been slow to battle this trend, it has taken steps to ameliorate it. Part of the problem, as the recent AOL ad revamp indicated, is that display ads are small. It’s very difficult to replicate the full-page ad of a print newspaper or magazine, and there’s only so much you can convey in a tiny box on a website’s sidebar. In 2009, Federated Media launched a product called an Ad STAMP that allows an advertiser to purchase multiple ad slots and effectively take over an entire page. The same year, Daily Kos hosted a “skin” advertising platform for a then-upcoming Frontline program called “Obama’s War.” The skin wrapped around all the Kos content, effectively bombarding the reader with the brand (while not intruding on the actual blog posts). BlogAds, a North Carolina-based ad network that serves ads to Daily Kos and hundreds of other blogs, has also experimented with including social content from sites like Twitter directly into the ads themselves.

In an interview last year, I asked BlogAds founder Henry Copeland which industries should rely less on click-through rates and more on long-term brand influence. He pointed to the entertainment industry as one example. “For instance, with TV shows or with a movie, very few people buy the ticket online,” he said. “So the real measure is you spent X amount in advertising and then you put this many seats in movie theaters.”

In the AOL Way, leaked to the Business Insider last year, the company indicated that an individual blog post needs about 7,000 pageviews to generate a profitable amount of advertising revenue. With the average cost per piece of content pegged at $84 and a target of an average gross margin of 50 percent, that puts AOL’s CPM at $18. In other words, it hopes to generate $18 for every thousand pageviews it generates. At a .09 percent click-through rate, we’re looking at about $18 per click. Given that you can get much better rates on advertising platforms like Google Adwords and Facebook’s targeted display advertising, it isn’t hard to see why a publisher would want to steer an advertiser’s focus away from raw clicks alone.

“You don’t build brands by optimizing for clicks,” Battelle told me. “There needs to be other measurments as to whether your audience is aware of and gaining value from the messaging you’re doing on these sites through display advertising.”

Of course, some would accuse these publishers of trying to put the new clothes back on the emperor. But as AOL shifts further away from its declining subscription revenue and more toward an ad-based model, it’s not surprising that it wants to convince advertisers that there is, in fact, value in a banner and sidebar ad. How much value is there will determine whether Tim Armstrong’s quest to build a content-based company will result in success or dismal failure.

Portrait of the Geico Gecko by Thomas23 used under a Creative Commons license.

Long-Tail Websites Boost Ad Efficiency – eMarketer

via Long-Tail Websites Boost Ad Efficiency – eMarketer.

Placements on smaller, niche sites increase response to ads

Many advertisers stick to the top sites on the web when planning an online campaign, but overlooking less-trafficked sites could be a mistake.

A study by contextual targeting firm CONTEXTWEB of more than 1,000 ad campaigns across 18,000 publisher sites during the second half of 2010 found that ads placed on long-tail sites—those with an overall reach smaller than 1.5% of the internet population—had a significant lift in clickthrough rate compared with ads on larger web properties. Overall, long-tail sites lifted click rates by 24%.

All advertiser verticals studied showed lift when ads were placed on sites in the long tail. Alcohol ads enjoyed the highest lift, at 50%, while automotive advertisers experienced a lift of only 12%.

 

 

The site categories that provided the biggest lift in the long tail were education, technology and computing, and hobbies and games. Some site categories, including pets, home and garden, arts and entertainment, parenting and family, and automotive had a negative lift.

 

 

However, accounting for the decreased cost of placing ads on long-tail sites, even a negative lift often translates into a more efficient ad.

Not only can the long tail provide greater efficiency in clicks for advertisers’ dollar, according to the report, it is critical in providing a truly mass reach for ad campaigns. The large crop of long-tail sites frequently provides access to a large audience unduplicated by top sites in the same category, and often with similar demographics as visitors to those top sites. And according to comScore, the vast majority of time spent on the web is spent with long-tail sites, while the lion’s share of ad dollars is spent on the short tail.

Advertising on top websites is, of course, still critical, especially for major campaigns or for branding. But advertisers can use the long tail as a low-cost, efficient way to augment the reach and scale of their campaigns.

Impact of Digital Revolution on Ad Agencies