Written on December 22, 2008 – 6:09 pm Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Advertisements like these two from Apple and BASF make me wonder how we will look at recent ads in about twenty years. “Haha, check out that vintage iPhone, with that ridiculous touch screen”. More at Royal Pingdom.
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Written on December 12, 2008 – 12:56 pm Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
“Everybody wants communication, why the hell do we need to pay for that?” That’s Antti Ohrling, founder of BLYK, talking at Youthwatching ‘09 - a marketing conference in Ghent, Belgium. He started a free mobile network for young people, funded by advertising. Mind you, it’s quite a success - BLYK is the fastest growing interactive media outlet for young people in the UK.
Yes, there are actually some British teens lucky enough to make their calls for free. You know how much money that would’ve saved me?
“Most advertising in media shares benefit with the audience. Take the skin creme sample in a magazine for example.”, Ohrling explains. “What’s different for mobile? Exactly, nothing. What would happen if somebody would offer free calls and text for advertising? An operator would become a media company.”
There’s no contract, no phone bill
BLYK focused on youngsters, as they’re a hard to reach but a profitable target group. Ohrling: “If you talk with them and use language they understand, then you have to change to get involved.”
One of the brands British kids most distrusted were operators, so BLYK had to develop a different way to talk to them. Here’s what Ohrling came up with it: there’s no contract, no phone bill. But you do have to get invited. (so that BLYK can get a balanced target audience).
When invited, people had to complete personal profile online so that BLYK can target the advertising better. 95% of the 200,000 people did so.
Does it work?
“If there’s a balance between value for advertisers and customers, BLYK is a success”. Well, it seems like that’s the case. The 2000 campaigns had a 25% average response rate. Normally this rate for mobile advertising is four percent. BLYK has 200 brands on board, of which 66 percent did repeated business.
The obviously proud BLYK founder mentions some success stories. Like a Will Ferrel trailer, 44 percent of the users requested to see it. A Penguin book, Slam by Nick Horby, was also a blast on BLYK. 67 percent wanted to hear a Skins star reading the first chapter out loud. Lucozade supplied users with free drink vouchers. 35 percent was redeemed.
Closing in on YouTube and Facebook
BLYK has the highest net advocacy score among mobile networks in the UK and is closing in on YouTube and Facebook. Why? Ohrling: “In mobile marketing, interaction is key. The power of the question is much higher than the power of the answer. Make people think, and they engage with you. If they engage, you’re in the game. We’re in the game”.
British youngsters become slaves to advertising to avoid paying phone bills. Why wouldn’t they? What are the negative consequences for them? Other than clicking ads away.., none.
The truth just sounds different. I heard that saying once when in grade school, I don’t know why but it always stuck with me.
The social game on Twitter
Lately on twitter I am starting to get a lot of noise from social gamers. These are the people who think that having the most followers is the key to online fame and or fortune. They probably read Chris Brogan’s blog religiously and implement every strategy that can be automated, duplicated or easily implemented. Unfortunately by doing this they are missing the entire point.
The noise I am talking about specifically in this blog post are the automated responses to new follows. They usually read something like: “Thanks for the follow! I look forward to your tweets! Check out my URL.” Besides being generic and lazy these automatic messages just wreak of the old school advertising numbers game. It rings false to me and I usually choose not to follow or unfollow the owners of this noise.
Demand truth in advertising
I believe we are selling ourselves all the time, and we are buying with our time from those who demand it. Getting what we want when we want is the key to all the things we talk about in Social Media. Relevancy, authenticity, accountability.
In a world that is increasingly on demand and unique to each audience member, it is only relevancy that will rule the day. The days of noise inserted for the masses between the content that we want to consume are waning. Truth in advertising will happen when the advertisements are as valuable to me as the content I am watching, reading or consuming. I hope it will become indistinguishable from the content.
We will likely never get away from the numbers game, it is an important part of being human and social. We want to believe that we are connected to each other and share a common experience. Accountability however, speaks to a personal responsibility in choosing your own content. The more you choose to manage your personal experience the more you will attract a positive one. This way I think the numbers will take care of themselves.
My content filter
Personally, I prefer truth over automation, personal connections over the most connections, accountability over laziness and community over empire. These preferences just feel better than the alternative and I believe that is my truth.
What is your content filter built out of, what is true to you?
The study measured the impact on Kellogg’s Sultana Bran by tracking the responses of two separate groups, one that had been targeted using Kellogg’s full marketing force including it’s online ads and the other the same but without online ads.
The results will be good news for online advertising agencies as they highlighted favorable sentiment, propensity to purchase, a boosted brand recall and a higher willingness to recommend the product. The study has defintely taken steps towards disproving marketers who believe the internet is useless to brands looking to expand and enhance their brand image.
The next step for the Internet Advertising Bureau is to conduct further studies to learn which types of advertising seem to reap the most benefits. The bureau’s chairman, Paul Fisher, quoted in the SMH says “It should make TV people sit up and think about how they can get the maximum impact for their clients.”
An article in the Economist published today also highlighted the stability and potential growth of online advertising in 2009. The article highlights the fact that the web has changed greatly over the last few years particularly from an advertising standpoint. Nowadays, search engine advertising and interactive rich media ads play a far larger role than in earlier on in the decade - accounting for over 70% of ads online. Thanks to this, tracking performance is far easier than it once was and in doing so, makes ads online a much more concrete investment.
This week, Market-research firm eMarketer predicted that online-advertising spending in the US will increase by 8.9% in 2009, search advertising alone will grow by 14.9% and rich-media ads by 7.5%.
So maybe not such a bad year ahead for online advertising after all…?
Stanford artificial intelligence researchers have developed software that makes it easy to place a photo on the wall so realistically that it looks like it was there from the beginning. The photo is not pasted on top of the existing video, but embedded in it.
It works for videos as well - you can play a video on a wall inside your video. The technology can cheaply do some of the tricks normally performed by expensive commercial editing systems.
Can you imagine how much fun we are going to have with this? I can’t wait! More information at ZunaVision but first watch the demo video:
Written on November 13, 2008 – 6:19 pm Zee, Internet Marketer, Design Connoisseur & Web App Devotee
Lonely Planet, who on Thursday relaunched their own website have made further changes, this time to their content. In an innovative move, the BBC Worldwide outfit will begin to republish online reviews written by travel bloggers and will pay the bloggers for their efforts via a revenue sharing scheme.
To be launched in February, the scheme (codenamed BlogSherpa) appears to be an attempt to combine the popularity of Lonely Planet with the passionate knowledge of travel bloggers to create unique content from a broad base of sources.
Matthew Cashmore, Lonely Planet’s Innovation Ecosystem Manager, explained “What Lonely Planet has is traffic. If we can provide a gateway to your content and if you let us put that content on lonelyplanet.com, we’ll give you the advertising on that page. Imagine how much you’ll be earning if your AdWords ID is on a Lonely Planet page.”
It seems like a terrific opportunity for bloggers worldwide to promote their content, earn money and prestige from their writing. However, is this possibly a reaction to the current economic climate and an attempt to gradually reduce costs and therefore the number of professional writers Lonely Planet currently employs?
Last week a new Twitter Money making scheme launched by a company named Magpie. You give them your Twitter account data and they insert regular commercial messages in between your own tweets. They get access to your loyal followers, you both make money.
You can imagine that this sparked some controversy amongst the Twitter audience. One thing the company did very well was include a simple test to find out how much your Twitter account is worth. Our results are here on the right:
Even people who hate the idea of selling their tweets couldn’t resist checking their virtual worth and sharing that with their followers. The result: everybody is talking about Magpie and I’m sure they get a lot of sign-ups. Whether they have enough advertisers is another story though. All Magpie commercial messages are preceded by #magpie and the only ads you currently see are for their own service. You can see this yourself by searching for #magpie. (UPDATE: looks like they found some advertisers. I see lots of different ads now.)
One thing a lot of people are wondering about is how many followers you would lose by using Magpie so we decided to set-up an account for our own Twitter username and will let you know what the result is in 30 days. We now have 1280 followers on Twitter and gain about 5 new followers a day. We should have 1512 followers by November 30. We will let you know how this turns out.
Here are some of the mixed reactions to Magpie on Twitter:
Written on October 28, 2008 – 12:01 pm Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Jason Calacanis predicted in his last night’s newsletter that online advertising spending would go up. After a rather depressing forecast, which included terms like “the Death Spiral of the American Economy” and “The Group Belt Tightening”, Calacanis comes up with the good news. This consists of four parts. Firstly, experience becomes more important than expenses. Good news for Digg, StumbleUpon, and other discovery services. Moreover, there’s no competition (2) for bootstrapping start-ups (3). Lastly, a measurable advertising boom will occur:
Advertisers will start cutting print, outdoor, TV, and radio (probably in that order) in favor of the internet’s action-based offerings such as CPA (cost per acquisition), CPL (cost per lead), and CPC (cost per click).
Jason Calacanis
Although Calacanis is talking about the US, his prediction can be projected on different parts of the world. It won’t be surprising to see it happen in Europe as well - as it makes sense to cut marketing costs and look for attractive alternatives. In Russia this trend is already visible.
Online advertising boom in Russia
Sfnblog reports that online marketing communications in Russia have experienced a surge in financial backing since the beginning of this year. Total marketing numbers for 2008 will average between $1.04 billion and $1.48 billion, says market analysis firm Tagline at the annual Russian Internet Week. They based their findings on a study of 600 companies.
In the UK they’re still waiting
However, in others parts of Europe, the online marketing industry has been noticing a decline in advertising spending. Patrick Smith from Paidcontent UK reports:
IPA’s recent Bellwether report showed that online ad spend in Britain was flat in Q308 and Enders cut its 2008 forecast from £3.56 billion [€4.44 billion] to £3.33 billion [€4.16 billion], despite most in the industry predicting – or at least hoping – that online ad spend would weather a downturn and continue to grow.
Of course I hope we can look back in a few months and say Calacanis was right - that most online markets did follow the Russian pattern. It would further professionalize the blogosphere, including this blog.
Written on October 23, 2008 – 7:38 pm Mircea Goia, Next Web US Webtipr
Not everybody likes Google, although many of them uses it.
It seems some high power people in Russia don’t like Google either. At least, they don’t like how Google tries to enter in each and every regional market.
This time Google tried to buy the contextul advertising firm Begun (a subsidiary of Rambler.ru search engine and the second biggest player in the russian contextual advertising field). The russian search engine (among the top three in the country) agreed to sell its division to Google for a reported $140 million.
But the authorities (Federal Antimonopoly Service - FAS) said that Kokuna Holdings Limited (owned by Google) failed to provide all the documentation needed to close the deal.
The chief of the FAS Igor Artemyev told Vedomosti, that “Google has not provided accurate and adequate information about the structure of ownership and therefore was refused“.
A source close to shareholders Rambler told Vedomosti that Prime Minister Vladimir Putin was not pleased by Google taking over the local market as it did in other markets.
It’s not that hard to believe this rumour considering Mr. Putin’s past actions.
Written on October 7, 2008 – 9:20 am Mircea Goia, Next Web US Webtipr
Times are tough: the economic downturn shows its teeth. Lots of companies are feeling its bite, and some will go belly-up because of the wounds. Tech companies are not an exception. Maybe they won’t be hit as hard as the finance and banking sector, but, nevertheless, they will get bitten.
One of the companies that is playing with the fish now is JellyCloud (they are playing with the jellyfish, just to be in the family).
JellyCloud is (correction - was - may they R.I.P. now) the new reincarnation of the former ad network named Gator (renamed Claria after a while).
Gator was an 8-year old company which used to be an online vault for usernames and passwords for different sites. They also got us “accustomed to” their annoying pop-up ads (after they gathered personal details about our surfing habits without telling us). That caused them to be blacklisted as spyware and labeled a “black sheep” in online advertising (they weren’t alone, but they were among the well-known ones).
The team tried different business models: password keepers+ad network thru Gator, personalized home pages thru Claria, and now again an ad network thru JellyCloud.
It seems that they didn’t succeed in any of their attempts, so finally the company is giving up (according to Valleywag).
JellyCloud had taken several rounds of financing:
- as Claria: 40 million — from SOFTBANK America, Rogers Communications, Asia Pacific Ventures and Sand Hill Capital
- as JellyCloud: 11,5 million - U.S. Venture Partners, SoftBank, Sand Hill Capital and Cross Link Capital
Over 50 million dollars gone with the wind and about 36 employees fishing for another employer. It’s not a pleasant story, but the lesson is that there are lots of ad networks (over 400), so the market is saturated (partly because the online advertising spending was growing year by year and everyone tried to jump on the ship).
This year, it’s a different story. Financial and banking industries are among the top advertisers (especially using display ads), and their problems are reflected in the online advertising numbers.
According to CNET research firm eMarketer lowers the online ad spending forecast. It’s expected to be 23 percent this year…after it was nearly 35 percent in 2006, 25 percent last year, and dropped to around 16-17 percent for a few years. It’s expected to rise to 24 percent in 2012, when online video advertising is expected to boom amid a large economic recovery.
The Nielsen report shows that while, overall, online spending increased 11% in the first half of 2008 (compared to last year), display ad spending by financial services companies declined 6 percent. The financial services industry spent only $1.1 billion in online advertising in the first two quarters of the year, compared to $1.5 billion last year.
Apparently, JellyCloud is still hiring (according to their website).
But, I guess, they should hire a lawyer and a priest to finish up the burial.
Written on December 22, 2008 – 6:09 pm
Written on December 6, 2008 – 12:50 pm
Written on November 27, 2008 – 8:34 pm
Written on November 27, 2008 – 2:27 pm
Written on October 23, 2008 – 7:38 pm
Not everybody likes Google, although many of them uses it.
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