More, Better Clicks

Posted By Vidar

Monday at 3:40PM EDT

3 Comments

Tags:

branding, facebook, socialmedia, socialmedia ads, weather channel, weather.com, widgets

Categories:

Best Practices, Display Advertising, Online Marketing, Pricing Alternatives, Social Media Advertising

I see too many brands that are approaching social media marketing and widgets, in particular, with the same kind of paranoia that prompted many companies to put up websites at the dawn of the web: everybody else is doing it – therefore so must we.

With 40,000 widgets developed for Facebook alone over the last year, it’s already too late to stand out by merely having a widget.

Yet brands are creating their own ‘me too’ widgets. They’re afraid to be left out as they’ve been told that widgets are the new ads. That’s correct – they are the new ads – but why think of them as such? Ads are shallow and by design, one-way and ephemeral.

If you ask me, creating widgets with the goal of engaging the user once or twice and spam their friends, is about as forward-looking as putting radio on TV. But hey, Howard Stern & Imus found that to be worthwhile too.

So, I’m not going to say that it’s a waste of money – it’s just a waste of the medium, channel and audience attention. Read More »

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Posted By Vidar

Monday at 3:03PM EDT

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Tags:

banner ad format, display ads, Forrester, Linkstorm, measurement, report

Categories:

Ad Analytics, Ad Measurement & ROI, Best Practices, Display Advertising, Online Marketing, Reporting & Reconciliation, Rich Media Banners

It’s hard to be a marketer today with so many new, exciting technologies to pick from, each one casting itself as the holy grail of campaign performance. Video, widgets, search advertising, social apps, in-game ads, virtual worlds, expanding banners, behavioral targeting, location based mobile ads, digital out of home advertising, even radio via Google!

I can’t tell if it’s a media planner’s dream or nightmare, but a fair share of us probably feel more confused than enlightened.

What I am pretty sure about, however, is that they all have some merit, but none of them is a one-size-fits all solution. What’s good for branding might not be a recipe for lead generation success. Choice of format, targeting, message and measurement all need to align with campaign goals.

In a recent report from Forrester research called “Getting more out of online ads” advertisers are encouraged to take a more holistic approach to planning and executing online advertising programs. Read More »

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Posted By Scott

Tuesday at 2:43PM EDT

1 Comment

Tags:

coca-cola, coke, coketag, coketags, facebook, Linkstorm, Social Media Advertising, widgets

Categories:

Online Marketing, Social Media Advertising

If only the baby had a third eye in the back of the head—that would really be something!

In the hyperventilating world of widgets and their producer companies’ celestial valuations, it’s easy to fall into the “if only…” trap by feeling compelled to incorporate the latest technology rather than focusing design on a clearly defined user desire. I’m reminded of EchoStar Founder and CEO, Charlie Ergen, ten years ago, saying the main reason people want DVRs is so they can pause the game or movie and go to the bathroom without missing anything. So make it as simple as possible for them to do that. Charlie got to be worth about $10 billion by keeping his company’s products and services focused on the basic needs of his customers not on cool technology.

This was our intent when Linkstorm and Coca-Cola launched CokeTag, a personal, customizable widget that lets people promote and share content with their friends and fans . Give people the ability to make a personal advertisement, then listen and learn. Coke wanted to make this kind of marketing tool, which it uses for its own advertising, available to anyone. OK, they also want you to drink more of their products. Read More »

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Posted By Vidar

Tuesday at 10:09AM EDT

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Tags:

clearspring, coketag, facebook, gadgetads, gigya, kickapps, Linkstorm, pup, social ads

Categories:

Best Practices, Display Advertising, Online Marketing, Rich Media Banners, Social Media Advertising

These are exciting times for marketers wanting to get involved with social media. Virtually all the major social networks are opening up their platform with their own APIs or adopting open ‘standards’ like OpenSocial. This means more opportunities for marketers to develop meaningful, interactive, social applications to bring their brands to life.

It’s also exciting to see that when it comes to serving advertising to social network users, advertisers are starting to get that they can’t just re-purpose their old banner ads – but need to engage their audience in meaningful ways.

While building custom social applications from scratch is a bold move that may pay off for many brands, the cost and time to market for applications is far greater than traditional ads.

It’s fantastic to see the variety of hybrid ad-widget formats that are becoming available to advertisers, including Linkstorm’s PUP, Google GagdetAds, Gigya, Clearspring and Kickapps widgets.

However, it is still incumbent on the advertisers to take advantage of the interactive possibilities these formats present and not forget that they also need to find ways for users to personalize and make these widgets “their own”.

The last thing we need is another distribution network of ads where the brand remains front and center.

- vidar

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Posted By David

Monday at 11:27AM EDT

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Tags:

coke, coketag, coketags, facebook, facebook application, Linkstorm, pup

Categories:

Online Marketing, Social Media Advertising

We’re happy to announce that CokeTags, using Linkstorm’s PUP (Personal Universal Profile) technology, has gone live on Facebook today.

CokeTag is a Coca-Cola sponsored, customizable widget for individuals, bands, bloggers, artists, activists, and others to showcase themselves and drive traffic to content they select. From a professional marketing point of view, it carries brand messaging into the Social Media space. While it launches on Facebook, we plan to expand the app into other social networks soon.

You can make a CokeTag for yourself today—it’s free, fast and easy.

A micro-site, www.CokeTag.com has been set up to support the marketing and PR around the launch, and Coke’s social media press release can be found here: http://www.coketag.com/announcement

I look forward to any reactions or questions.

Best wishes,

David

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Posted By David

Wednesday at 6:52AM EDT

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Tags:

ads, banners, behavioral targeting, BT, Display Advertising, Mediaweek

Categories:

Behavioral Targeting, Display Advertising, Online Marketing, Rich Media Banners, Targeting

Just a quick note this morning to acknowledge comments from Blogger Jim Nichols, from Catalyst in SF, with respect to my podcast interview.

Jim wrote:

Not only does he communicate that their menu banners are a form of BT, but also he explains that they can be a complement to BT. Rather than me paraphrasing the content, here’s an interview excerpt:

“So, to use a football analogy, behavioral targeting will get you into the red zone — but no farther. We don’t do our own ad placement. However, if a customer already using BT has the data to know you are a certain profile, we can take that data and further customize the way menus are structured. If you know from their browsing that a customer, let’s say, is a bargain hunter, then you can organize your different offers by price range.”

I’m happy to see this aspect and nuance of our solution getting recognition, and for those who want to delve even deeper into the logic here, check out my article in MEDIAWEEK, called “What Customers Want.”

- David

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Posted By Vidar

Wednesday at 1:10PM EDT

No Comments

Tags:

clickthrough, conversions, optimization

Categories:

Ad Analytics, Ad Measurement & ROI, Best Practices, Display Advertising, Online Marketing, Reporting & Reconciliation, Targeting

David L. Smith suggested yesterday in a post in the Metrics Insider that the clickthrough, as a measure of banner ad campaign performance, is losing its relevance. What matters is conversions, and optimizing ads for conversions and not clicks, is the only thing that makes sense. I agree on many levels, except that we shouldn’t blame a lack of metrics for what I think is a problem created by fundamentally bad ads. Read More »

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Posted By Vidar

Thursday at 6:54AM EDT

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Tags:

Display Advertising, Linkstorm, podcast, sidman

Categories:

Display Advertising, Online Marketing, Rich Media Banners, Video Advertising

Listen to Linkstorm CEO David Sidman discuss the company’s technology, solutions and client results.

The interview was conducted by Latino Print Network’s Kirk Whisler during the 2008 AdTech San Francisco trade show.

Click on the picture below to hear the podcast.

_______

Addition June 4th, 2008: Also check out this post for comments.

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Posted By Vidar

Tuesday at 9:51AM EDT

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Tags:

bestpractices, CTR, display ads, Display Advertising

Categories:

Best Practices, Display Advertising, Online Marketing, Rich Media Banners

Banner ads on the web are analogous to storefronts on a busy street. It’s a menagerie of businesses promoting their products and services, enticing you to take a closer look or come in. Some pedestrians might throw a sales sign a passing glance or even stop by the window to see what’s on display.

Banners generate very similar behavior from customers. The goal, naturally, like the real-world storefronts, is to slow the customers down, get them to evaluate the advertiser’s offer and enter the store. This means one, noticing the ad, two, evaluating the ad for relevance and finally, clicking through to the advertiser’s site

It seems we’re asking a lot from a small little graphic on a very busy page. Are advertisers trying to make banners do too much? Could banners be more effective if their objectives were less ambitious?

Read More »

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Posted By David

Wednesday at 2:07PM EDT

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Categories:

Uncategorized

In reading Tameka Kee’s Mediapost article “Advertisers Get Buzzed On YouTube With New Targeting Capability“, I came across the following quote about video advertising - which I’ve heard a million times but this time I was inspired to respond.

Here’s the quote (from Court Crandall, creative partner at Ground Zero):

“At the moment, any online advertisement that delays or impedes the enjoyment of online content is perceived as a hassle and an infringement on your Internet rights,” Crandall said. “But that will change in the same way that “The Ed Sullivan Show,” sponsored by Lincoln Mercury, eventually became “Saturday Night Live” with 246 commercial interruptions per hour. The purists won’t like it, but it represents the future.”

I believe there’s a middle course here that is a win/win for both user and advertiser: make the ad more truly useful to the customer – WITHOUT impeding the flow of the video – so that it drives high click-through and conversion because it is intrinsically intriguing. By “useful” I don’t mean attention-grabbing, as in flashy (no pun intended) rich media effects – I mean actually making it useful by providing deep navigation back to the advertiser’s content or product info.

Consider the following demo example of an NBC “Heroes” video clip, where you can watch the video and yet while it’s rolling, you can still browse the newest car models from the advertiser Nissan: http://www.linkstorms.com/demo/nbc/heroes_nissan_video/

Or here’s a video ad per se (from an actual Cisco Linkstorm campaign) where we overlaid our menu onto a DoubleClick Klipmart ad: once again, you can enjoy the video (which does a great job of grabbing your attention), yet at the same time you can navigate directly to actual Cisco product information. http://www.linkstorms.com/clientresults/liveexamples/cisco_video/

There are many example of Linkstorm’s regular banner advertising on http://www.linkstorms.com, including case studies showing how we routinely drive CTR increases of 3x-5x compared to the same ads on the same sites running without a Linkstorm menu.

But video is an even more extreme case where there’s still such a zero-sum game between the user wanting to simply enjoy a video and the advertiser wanting to jump in front of the screen and stick a message in her face. One would think that here Linkstorm represents a win/win, hands-down. Surely video-based advertisers would want the same performance gains as regular banner advertisers, and might not even mind treating their customers well in the process.

Who out there would like to see us marketing more actively to the Video world?

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