Just received my Bloggers Secret Santa present in the post and although it’s only the 16th, I couldn’t resist opening it and having a look.
Happily, I received one of the books I’d been eyeing for a while. A lovely addition to my rapidly growing cookbook collection.
Thanks Santa!
This week I was doing some research for a client presentation and I kept thinking, “Oh yeah, I remember that display ad, it would be great to find it and to show the client that.” Working in the advertising industry, I have the tools to be able to do exactly that. Then, I thought to myself, what happens for people who don’t have access to those tools?
What happens to the average person who sees a great online display ad, doesn’t want to click on it, but wants to remember it and refer to it later? The person who goes off and does something else / gets distracted and by the time they’ve come back to their computer, has completely forgotten the name of the brand in that cool, whizzy ad they saw earlier? Well, they’ll probably do a few things:
None of these actions will benefit the brand with the cool, whizzy ad, because it’s highly likely that they haven’t created a search adgroup that references any memorable qualities from the online display ads. But when post-impression (when someone sees an ad, doesn’t click, but goes to the brand website at a later date) to post-click (when someone sees an ad, clicks on it and goes to the brand website immediately) conversion ratios average at 95:5, why wouldn’t you? Why wouldn’t you give people who want to find you a helping hand?
For everyone’s talk of banner blindness, good creative execution in any format, even the dreaded 468 x 60 banner will make people stop and have a look. Whether or not they click, is a different story. Clickthrough rates have been decreasing, to the point where a CTR of 0.30% is considered ‘good’. Given this, it would be silly to use CTR as a primary metric and it would be an uphill battle to rely solely on post-click conversions to deliver a positive ROI.
Yahoo have put together some very interesting research on ‘digital memories’, which says that 76% of the women and 75% of the men surveyed cannot remember anything relying on memory alone. Both sexes rely hugely on sending information to themselves as a memory aid, with 60% of men and 66% of women sending emails to themselves. Interestingly, there are people who are taking photos of ads (14% of women and 23% of men) in order to remember them.
So what’s the solution?
According to the Yahoo research, “men are different to women with their opinions to ads; improvements to advertising would make them think more highly of internet ads whereas women would feel less frustrated.”
Wouldn’t it be so much easier if we gave people the tools to remember online advertising within the ads themselves? Some brands are already doing this, but they seem to be few and far between. Just as media owners are adding sharing tools alongside the ubiquitious ’send to a friend’ CTA at the bottom of (almost) every piece of audio, video and text content they release, advertisers should be doing the same.
Should we start adding a ’send this to me later’ or ‘remind me later’ to ads? Should ads be ‘bookmarkable’?
What do you think?
What an ace headline from the currant bun. Admittedly, I don’t read the Sun, but their chutzpah makes me laugh.
They’ll be going great guns to get their numbers back up for December’s ABC audit.
Google continue to push innovation in the search space and judging by this video, aren’t messing around when it comes to mobile. Their acquisition of AdMob means that they will be a major player in this space and have pretty much got both mobile display and PPC advertising covered.
I know that this is just a prototype, but in the future, this will probably be the way that we read magazines. I love how interactive the experience is and how a media owner, in this case, Time Warner, is pushing for innovation in their category.
The way they’ve set up the magazine and the experience reminds me a little bit of Rio Ferndinand’s #5 magazine. If you haven’t seen it, I urge you to have a look. It’s surprisingly good and makes great use of the Ceros platform.
Saw this as I was walking to work today.
Did you know that these panels are two stories high and are the equivalent to the length of half a football pitch?
We can all agree that this recession has knocked a lot of people and companies for six.
But in some people, it’s also sparked an old fashioned entrepreneurial spirit and there are many interesting and exciting new companies launching. For people who are trying to get their first foot on the employment ladder, this has been a tough time.
But there have been some great examples of ingeunity, including this ad that keeps popping up on my Facebook.
Curiousity overcame me and yesterday, I clicked through to see what this person who was willing to ’sell her soul to get into Account Planning’ was all about. Happily, the ad clicks through to her Linked In profile rather than to a naff, unlocked Facebook page.
I love this approach to finding a job and urge anyone looking for a grad to get in touch with Di.
Just discovered this lovely little site.
5 minutes in and I’d already bought 3 books and signed up to an Amazon Prime free trial.
I’m suggestible, aren’t I?
This popped into my inbox earlier today – a really nice partnership between Swiftcover and Spotify. Much better than the full-screen overlays they’ve been running recently, I might add.
With this and the Tories running ads on the service, I wonder how many more premium memberships Spotify are going to sell?
I guess they need to sell many, many more, just to prove the naysayers wrong.
If anyone wants this offer, let me know and I’ll send it on.
A lot of people have been talking about the book Nudge recently. To quickly sum up, the book is about the irrational ways that people behave and the little things or ‘nudges’ that can be employed to create behavioural change.
I haven’t read the book yet, but it’s on my Amazon wishlist.
At work we’ve recently been having a problem with mice – the cold weather brings them in, apparently. The messiness of the our work kitchen seemed to exacerbate the problem, so two weeks ago, we had at least 10 ‘new’ Rocketeers join us.
The state of the kitchen has always been a pet peeve of mine - if you make a mess, clean it up. Anyway, after we got the exterminators in, I decided to run a little experiment in ‘nudging’ my colleagues to be tidier.
Two weeks on, I’m very happy to report that the experiment has been a success, the kitchen is in much less of a state than it was before and our furry friends have found new homes.
IPA Social kicked off quite nicely two weeks ago with a big old event / ‘unconference’ at the IPA.
There were about 80 people in attendance and there’s since been a few debates about the event and about the 10 principles.
A few things struck me on the evening of the event and I’ve been mulling over them since.
1) The 90 / 9 / 1 principle is alive and well on the internet as well as in real life
We work in a industry of extremely opinionated, knowledged, curious and interested people. Recently, there’s been a lot of interest in all things social – otherwise the IPA Social launch event would not have completely sold out. The event attendees had a lot to talk about, as seen from the amount of chatter during the ‘unconference’ section of the event and the pub chat afterwards.
What was most interesting and surprising for me was the unwillingness of the attendees to ask questions during the event or to host one of the ‘unconferences’. When James was going around the audience trying to get questions and hosts, it really was like pulling teeth. I was shocked at the shyness of people who (for the most part) are more that happy to share what they think or their ideas in other circumstances. Was it stage fright? Fear of speaking out in a large group of people?
The next day, Graeme launched the IPA Social Facebook page in order to harness some of the questions, comments and thinking that came out of the IPA Social launch event. James gamely put a few questions out on the discussion board to which only a few people responded, despite there being over 100 members of the group.
This led me to think that…
2) Some people just want the answers handed to them and want to be told what to do
It’s funny how hard it is sometimes to get people to just think for themselves – behaviour that books like Nudge and Herd go into extensively. Some of the feedback from the event was that it was “too fluffy” and “there should’ve been more presentations and less talking”.
Is this one of the reasons why there’s been very little debate on the Facebook group? Have the right questions not been asked? Do people care? I’m happy to be proven wrong, but I have the sense that with this topic, some are just waiting to be given the answers.
What do you think?
