Check this video. It is a commercial by Microsoft Digital Advertising Solutions as blogged by bringtheloveback
The video shows the relationship between today's advertiser and today's consumer. It is funny..
The newly published TRUSTe report on consumer perception towards targeting has some interesting statistics.
- 71% of respondents were aware that their browsing history is collected for targeting purposes
- 40% of those polled are familiar with the term "behavioral targeting"
- 42% said they would sign up for an online registry to prevent advertisers from tracking them
Now compare the above numbers with the following from the same survey
- 72% said ads are annoying if not relevant to their needs
- 87% users said that only about 1 in 4 ads are well targeted towards them
The numbers are surprising to me and lead to an interesting dilemma for ad providers. On one hand our consumers demand more relevant advertising, but they are also reluctant to share information that is required to deliver personalized advertising. At an industry level, we need to do a better job at educating users about how targeting works and the way data is collected. Amazon's recommendation engine is a great example of targeting done right that is received positively by the users.
At Microsoft, we do not use any information that can be tied back to personally identifiable data about the users. All the data we collect for targeting is anonymized. We are also working on a feature that will let users opt-out of Microsoft's ad targeting network. Stay tuned for more details on that.
There is a nice post by Jigar, a Program Manager on our team that highlights the new features in adCenter Analytics Beta refresh.
You can read it here. Please send us your feedback and questions.
Matthew Creamer in his article in Advertising Age questions the viability of Internet as a great medium for advertising.
Here's the issue: The Internet is too often viewed as inventory, as a place where brands pay for the privilege of being adjacent to content, like prime-time TV and glossy magazines relics of the pre-blog days when getting into the media game actually required infrastructure and distribution.
He raises concerns around monetizability of social networks
There are already tons of reasons to be skeptical about hopes for mingling the intense sociality of the web with an interloper like an advertisement. In its fourth-quarter results, Google noted the difficulty MySpace, with whom it has an ad arrangement, has in monetizing its immense traffic. Before that, Facebook, the fast-growing No. 2 player, lost momentum when its plan to turn user recommendations of products and services into ad inventory ran smack into a wall of privacy complaints. While users might be eager to talk about brands and products, as Facebook has maintained, they don't necessarily want to do so with some drooling corporation looking over their shoulders and broadcasting their recommendations to the world in sponsored boxes. The difficulty begs several important questions, among them whether all this is just an attempt to make money off the unmonetizable?
He then raises concerns about display ads
Submits that search-engine and classified advertising work because people who come in contact with those ad forms generally are looking to buy something, which is why they searched in the first place. The same isn't true of display ads, which Mr. Nielsen concludes "aren't very well-suited for the web" and are holdovers from a way of thinking best applicable to other, older media.
Matthew raises several good points. Advertising on social networks has not been very successful. Display ads can get annoying if not done right. But while the observations are right, I don't agree with the inference. The question is not what whether internet is the right medium for advertising, but it is about what are the right and engaging formats for ads.
Lets look at some numbers. [Source: eMarketer]
There is an interesting trend line in the numbers above. Search and Display the current dominant formats have a healthy growth rate but it tapers off slightly. Rich Media/Video ads is a rapidly growing format. This is due to the increased media consumption on the net by users.
Advertisers will go where the users are. The most effective form of advertising will change based on where user's attention is.
I remember the dot com bubble burst of 2000. There were lots of articles that predicted the death of online advertising. But look at what happened in that period, Google came and reinvented the field with data driven advertising. The annoying pop-up ads died and we got extremely well targeted search and context ads.
So as long as people shift their attention from TV to the net, from movies to the web enabled phones, the future of online advertising is safe.
Silverlight Streaming is a Windows Live service that provides 10GB of free storage to host your media content and rich internet applications. At MIX08, a pilot program for injecting advertising into Silverlight applications was announced. The Silverlight Streaming ads pilot program is now open.
You can nominate yourself for the program here: http://advertising.microsoft.com/publisher/sls
This is a US-only program and the pilot will start in mid-April.
The program is powered by adCenter Content Ads and participants will earn real dollars for their applications.
We launched a new community website named www.adcentercommunity.com
This new site enhances the adCenter customer experience by providing a one-stop online community for advertisers, publishers and analytics users. You will find user forums and product specific blogs as well API documentation and tips/tricks. Having launched today, it is light on content, but overtime should serve as a valuable resource for the community. This new site consolidates all the previous adCenter blogs and forums.
The new video site Hulu is out of private Beta and is now open to public. I am really impressed with this site. NBC and News Corp. have signed up lots of partners for some great content and the UX is absolutely amazing. I am not going to cover all the features of the site here but I am definitely interested in the advertising model that they have and how it evolves over time.
The site seems to be full of ads. Pre-rolls, banner video ads, overlays, they've got it all.
Users have time and again voted against pre-rolls but Hulu seems to be full of them. Their TV shows and movies have ads inserted that cannot be forwarded like on your DVR. Will this format work? Will users be more tolerant because of the premium content? Remains to be seen...... I would imagine Hulu has plans to experiment with other more user friendly ad formats.
According to research firm eMarketer, spending on Internet video ads is likely to grow from $410 M in 2007 to $4.3 B in 2011.
Lets look at some of the common video advertising formats:
Pre-rolls: the video ads that users are forced to watch before viewing a clip. This has been the traditional internet video advertising format but it has extremely high abandonment rates and is generally not preferred.
Overlays: graphics that slide over the screen without interrupting the user's watching the clip. YouTube has been experimenting with this format.
Skins: branded graphics that surround the video player. The advantage of this format is you can show multiple branded skins for a single video thereby increasing your inventory.
Bugs/Tickers: small graphic at the bottom of the video that users can click to get more information. Break.com has had some success with this format. Tickers resemble the headlines that stream underneath TV news programs.
Video Hyperlinks: this is a great interactive format in which the user can click on products/items of interest that they see in a video. You can see a demo of this here.
Contextual ads for Video: uses speech recognition to transcribe and segment a conversation. By using lexical analysis the technology understands when the conversation changes and the ads change along with it. This was demo'ed at the adLabs Demo Fest this year and will be in production in near future.
Contextual Video ads: not to be confused with the above, these are video ads that compete with text and graphical ads on a content network like Google adWords.
Following is a video in which Arun Surendran, Senior Researcher on our team explains contextual ads for video.
According to Guardian, these are the world's 50 most powerful blogs. One of my favorites, Techcrunch makes it to the third spot.
How many of them do you have on your blogroll?
This report in NY Times talks about a new project named Canoe that brings together 6 of the biggest cable companies together to form an ad network.
I have always imagined the set top box sitting in my living room as the best data collection point. It knows about the shows I record, the ads that I skip over, my viewing habits, times and patterns. Its a goldmine of information that can be used for targeting. The opportunity is even more lucrative when you think about local advertising. An ad showing a discount on pizza from my neighborhood store when I am watching NFL on a Sunday morning is bound to get good conversion rates.
Interesting data shows that TV still gets bulk of viewer's attention.
While much ink has been spilled over the rise of Internet video and the decline of television, about 90 percent of all video consumed in the United States last year was done the old-fashioned way — watching shows as they came on TV — according to Starcom USA, whose clients include General Motors and Procter & Gamble. About 7 percent was via digital video recorder, 2 percent was online, and 1 percent was through video-on-demand services.
With rich data on user's as a negotiating chip, the cable networks can also demand more time for advertising. Currently, they get 2 min/hour while the networks like ESPN etc. get 15mins/hour.
Companies like Spot Runner that cater to long tail customers who want to do TV advertising stand to gain if this platform gets traction.
Gatineau is invitation-only. You can request an invite code here.
Create a profile
Once you have entered the invitation code, and clicked next, you are ready to start the installation process. Go to Analytics tab, you will see two icons: profiles and users. Click on the profiles icon to add the URL of the site you want to track. In other words, profiles are the sites you want to track. You can collect data on various sites separately through the profiles or you can combine data for two or more to track their performance in one profile.
In the profile name box, type a display name to identify the Web site. Select the Time Zone for the Web site. Select the Automatically adjust for daylight savings changes checkbox, if appropriate. Click Save.
Add tracking code to your website
Once you saved your site parameters, you will prompted to set up your site with a tracking code. Copy and paste the adCenter script into your site before <body> tag on each page you wish to track.
Get the data
Within a few hours, Microsoft adCenter Analytics will begin collecting data.
adCenter Analytics (aka Project Gatineau) Beta Update is now Live!
Visit: http://adcenter.microsoft.com/analytics
Some of the key Beta Update features are:
- Free analytics-only account. We listened to the customer feedback and have removed the $5 adCenter sign up fee.
- New tool for auto-tagging your web site
- Commerce ROI reports
- 3rd party paid search campaign import for Google and Yahoo! paid search campaigns
- Campaign timeline report
- Tree-map reports for Traffic and Inbound referrals
- Age-Gender composite segment
- Domain white-listing (only data from domains you specify are included in reports)
- Visitor loyalty metrics (depth & length of visit, frequency, loyalty, new versus returning visitors)
Take it for a spin, and send your feedback.
This piece of software is absolutely awe inspiring. I cannot wait for its release and for all of us to get our hands on it. I am talking about the World Wide Telescope. It is developed by Microsoft researchers and was presented at TED today.
Amazing.
I will be at MIX08 in Las Vegas beginning next Tuesday, March 4. Its my first time at MIX, so I am excited to see the keynotes by Ray Ozzie and Steve Ballmer. I am doing a demo of analytics with Silverlight about which I will blog more during MIX (in addition to the other sessions that i'll be covering). If you are going to be at MIX and want to chat about targeting, analytics or any of our other adCenter initiatives, please drop me a line.
Microsoft announced a new tracking standard to measure campaign performance today. Today the "last click" is attributed with the conversion that results in a somewhat broken view of campaign effectiveness.
With engagement mapping, advertisers can assign weights to different campaigns across search, display, mobile and get a complete picture on what led to a conversion. The Atlas folks have done some good studies on this and will be testing this metric with the advertisers.
The official press announcement is here: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2008/feb08/02-25EngagementMappingPR.mspx
This paper highlights the combined impact of display and search advertising.
