Filed under: Ad Budgets, Ad Buys, Ad Sales, Social Ads, Social Meda

On Thursday I had a chat with Shiv Singh, Vice President of Social Media & Global Strategic Initiatives at AvenueA/Razorfish and the leader of the company’s social media efforts. He’s behind the upcoming launch AdLife, and effort that AA/R and Pluck, the social media technology company.

The service will combine traditional digital marketing - ad units - with social media aspects. In other words, consumer generated content. This sounds like an excellent idea and I hope it works. It’s in it’s early stages and won’t be up and running until this fall.

I’ve never been anti-banner. At first they got too much hype and then became unfairly trashed as being useless. But they still, in my book, put a product or a service name out there, giving would be stakeholders inadvertent exposure.

What AdLife offers is rich media models in which the public - you and me - can contribute to the marketing message. Be it a short product review, a small piece of artwork, a photo. At this point, it can’t include video or audio, but who knows? At some point it may.

I did, and still do, have some concerns about the feature. Some of the content will have to be vetted so as to keep the presentation consistent with the brand. And vetting could lead to client control - doing away with a negative review. But vetting will be needed. Heck, I could add a “Hire Me” post and it could appear all over the place.

Secondly, Shiv mentioned that they’ll be working with their Fortune 100-1000 clients and the ads will probably appear on larger sites. My concern their is that, as we see with social media, targeted sights based on demographic similarities or by interest may be the spots where this plays best. The more targeted, the more people usually want to share information. Sites for moms, for geeks, for sports fans. Many of those sites are huge enough.

The bottom line here is that online marketing needs this. Traditional digital could use a means to involve the viewers of the ads and social media needs to be able to be seen by those who aren’t necessarily looking for it at the time they see it.

I think this will be a success for those reasons.

Thanks to Shiv for the interview and AvenueA/Razorfish PR person Katie Lamkin for setting it up.

1 Comment » Posted on August 15th, 2008 by Jonathan Trenn

Filed under: Ad Budgets, Ad Buys, Ad Sales, Advertisements, Advertising, Consumer Generated Media, Social Meda, ads

Avenue A/Razorfish, the digital ad and media planning service has partnered with Pluck, the social media technology company to create AdLife, which apparently will be a traditional digital advertising tool with social media marketing elements.   It will incorporate things like user-generated content in online ad units.

This could be a big deal.  Or maybe not.  I want to know more.  I’m wondering how the content will be generated.  In real time?  How will it be delivered/transferred to an ad unit?  If a guy in Boise writes a review for a book and it ends up on an ad, will I get that ad even though I have no idea who the guy from Boise is?

Sounds like I’ll be contacting some PR folks.  Or, for that matter, I’ll just ask Shiv Singh.

No Comments » Posted on August 10th, 2008 by Jonathan Trenn

Filed under: Ad Budgets, Ad Buys, Ad Sales, Advertisements, Advertising, Online Ads, Online Advertising

I just witnessed the most disgusting ad presentation I’ve ever seen on the internet.  The ad itself wasn’t intentionally meant to offend, but it’s format did something that was inexcusable.

Being a native New Englander, I often  got to  Boston.com to check out sports stories.  That’s what I just did a few minutes ago.  Right there, in front of me, was a story “Northboro Native Killed in Washington DC Accident”.  A photo of her shows a pretty, young fresh faced young woman, with a beaming smile.  Now that I live in the DC area, I was especially intrigued by this.  I was once 22 and lived in DC.  Young.  Idealistic.

So I went to click through to read the story.  In the corner of my eye, I began to notice  a ‘growing’ ad coming across the page.  One of those ads that form images across a web page.  In this case they were images of the walking footprints of what looked to be that of a hiker.  The footprints continued across the woman’s face and would not let me click through to read the story.  That’s because just as I pressed down on my mouse, the ad crossed over the exact spot where it was pointing to.  Suddenly, I was transported to another site, the landing page of the ad.  Tourism in New Brunswick.

When I finally got back to the site I wanted to be at and clicked through the story I wanted, I began reading:

A Northborough woman and Amherst College graduate beginning her career in Washington, D.C., was killed in the nation’s capital yesterday morning when she was run over by a garbage truck while riding her bicycle to work.

…beginning her career…killed in the nation’s capital…run over by a garbage truck”…riding her bicycle to work”…

Her young life snuffed out just like that.  Full of promise, full of life, now gone.

But we want to show you this ad first - the ad is more important.

This is definitely not the way to do things, folks.  These ad formats, while enticing, should not be used by news outlets.  At least on their front pages.  News outlets cover news and news is more often bad, or in some cases, tragic.  It isn’t worth the ad dollars.

Advertisers shouldn’t necessarily shy away from using these formats, but they should be very judicious in where they buy them.  They should look for sites that viewers come to be entertained.  I don’t care how effective they are.  Use another formats on front pages of news sites.

No Comments » Posted on July 9th, 2008 by Jonathan Trenn

Filed under: Ad Budgets, Ad Buys, Ad Sales, Online Advertising, Online Media, Traditional Marketing, Traditional Media

A slowing economy usually means that companies cut back on their advertising dollars.  The wisdom of this is debatable, but the inevitability of it is almost assured.

But times are changing somewhat.  In a survey conducted by Advertising Perceptions, we find that the long term traditional advertising outlets are the ones that ad execs - be they in house decision makers or agency professionals - see as being the ones that are likely to experience a decrease in ad spending over the next six months.  Meanwhile, online and mobile are not likely to take any substantial hits.

This is pleasant news for those of us in the online arena.

The survey asked 1811 marketers - 40% from the marketing side, 60% from the agency side - if the share of spend per advertising would increase, stay the same, or decrease.  National newspapaers and local newspapers took the biggest hit by far, with 44% and 40% of responders saying that they expected a decrease in spend, respectively.  Only 10% and 14% expected an increase for those categories.

This somewhat surprises me.  I would have thought the upcoming elections would mean more news media usage, regardless of the medium.  And while, yes, most of the growth in usage would be online, local coverage, in print, will still matter.

Guess not.  Newspapers are worse off than I thought.

The same can be said for broadcast 30% expecting a drop-off while only 14% expecting an increase; and radio, which is doing even worse.  Thirty three per cent expect less spend with seventeen per cent expecting an increase.

The real story here are the increases in online.  Seventy-two percent of those interviewed said they felt that online would see an increase in the next six months.  Only 4% saw a decrease.  That an 18 to 1 ratio.

In many industry verticals, online is not yet the automatic buy.  But it’s becoming the best buy.  The following numbers prove it.

No Comments » Posted on July 8th, 2008 by Jonathan Trenn

Filed under: Ad Budgets, Ad Buys, Ad Sales, Advertisements, Advertising, Blogvertising

From Drew B’s Take on Tech PR via Nixon McInnes & Chris Abraham:

“Only 18% of TV ad campaigns generate positive ROI”

“The average person is exposed to 3000 advertising messages a day”

“36% of people think more positively of companies who have blogs”

No Comments » Posted on July 6th, 2008 by Chris Abraham

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