Research - Eyeblaster

Eyeblaster used isolated data from a sample size of 42 billion rich media impressions spanning across all formats and global regions, analyzing Dwell Time, a metric that measures engagement as the average time consumers intentionally spend with online ads.

Recent years saw click thru rates (CTR) dropping from 5% to way below 0.4% (or 0.1% for standard banners). This has led some to conclude that ‘display advertising is dying’. On the other hand, data such as Comscore and OPA’s recent research showed that consumers exposed to display ads spend over 50% more time on an advertiser’s site the following month, viewing over 50% more pages than average visitors. This may lead to the conclusion that display advertising is more critical than ever. Human attention has become a scarce commodity.

The main findings in this research include the following:

• Consumers are 25 times more likely to spend meaningful time on the ad than click it
• When they do spend time, consumers spend close to a full minute of active engagement
• Video increases Dwell Rate by 30% and Dwell Time by 200% (in the US) or 100% (globally)
• Consumers react to ads differently depending on the time of day, week, or year
• Home-page media offers one of the highest Dwell Rates, but lowest Dwell Time

 View the electronic version of 'Trends of Time and Attention in Online Advertising'.

Economics of 'Free': 'Maybe Media Will Be a Hobby Rather than a Job' - SPIEGEL

In a SPIEGEL interview, Chris Anderson, the editor in chief of US technology and culture magazine Wired discusses the Internet's challenge to the traditional press, new business models on the Web and why he would rather read Twitter than a daily newspaper.

• I don't use the word media. I don't use the word news. I don't think that those words mean anything anymore. They defined publishing in the 20th century. Today, they are a barrier.
• More and more people are choosing social filters for their news rather than professional filters. We're tuning out television news, we're tuning out newspapers.
• The problem is not that the traditional way of writing articles isn't valuable anymore. The problem is that this is now in the minority.
• The problem is not that there isn't money to be made online, it's just that our costs are too high.
• Advertisers spend $22 to reach 1,000 people on wired.com -- and $100 at the magazine. I don't think we have discovered the perfect online advertising vehicle yet.
• It's all about attention. That is the most valuable commodity. If you have attention and reputation, you can figure out how to monetize it. However, money is not the No. 1 factor anymore.
• Free is the force of gravity.
• What is left for mass media -- it's the kind of stuff that niches don't do well. Politics, war, disaster, scandals, etcetera. You can't charge for it and advertisers don't like it.

Nielsen Global Online Consumer Survey

Global - The most trusted forms of advertising globally are personal recommendations and online opinions, with text ads on mobile phones the least trusted, according to a new survey by Nielsen. The Global Online Consumer Survey found that nine in every 10 internet consumers trust recommendations from people they know, while seven in every 10 trust consumer opinions online.

Interestingly, the next most trusted form of advertising was brand websites (70%), followed by editorial content from media (69%), brand sponsorships (63%) and TV ads (61%). The least trusted forms of advertising globally were mobile text ads (24%), followed by online banner ads (33%), online video ads (37%) and ads served in search engine results (41%).

"The explosion in consumer generated media over the last couple of years means consumers' reliance on word of mouth in the decision-making process, either from people they know or online consumers they don't, has increased significantly," Rebecca Tan, executive director, media group, The Nielsen Company Singapore, said in a statement.

"However, we see that all forms of advertiser-led advertising, except ads in newspapers, have also experienced increases in levels of trust and it's possible that the CGM revolution has forced advertisers to use a more realistic form of messaging that is grounded in the experience of consumers rather than the lofty ideals of the advertisers."

Chart of the Day - Online Ad Rates

Online display ad prices haven't fully recovered to last year's peak, but according to one source, they're getting there.
At the end of June, ad rates among the 6,000 Web publishers working with ad-optimizing firm PubMatic were up 35% since a low point at the beginning of the year. Rates climbed 15% between May and June.“Although ad pricing has not returned to year-ago levels, the industry has gone up consistently every month since January 2009.

Business Magazines Head For The Abyss

At the same time, the big business magazines are tanking along with the economy.  McGraw-Hill is trying to dump BusinessWeek while it still can. Earlier, Condé Nast pulled the plug on Portfolio. And Forbes has shed a large portion of its staff this year.

In Q2, magazine ad revenue dropped an average 22% year-over-year, according to the Magazine Publishers of America. The big business mags had it even worse: BusinessWeek was down 30%, Forbes down 35%, and Fortune down 43%. Even the Economist, which has outperformed its peers in recent years, was down 20%. (Subscription revenue and online revenue -- the lone source of growth for many publications -- is not included in these tallies.)

Study by Altimeter Group and Wetpaint

What big brands do the best job with social media? A new study by analyst Charlene Li of the Altimeter Group and Wetpaint ranks the top 100 brands by social media engagement. You can find the report embedded below.

The study scores the engagement level of each of the top 100 brands across more than ten social media channels, including blogs, Facebook, Twitter, wikis, and discussion forums. Starbucks scored the highest, with 127 points. The top ten brands are:

1. Starbucks (127)
2. Dell (123)
3. eBay (115)
4. Google (105)
5. Microsoft (103)
6. Thomson Reuters (101)
7. Nike (100)
8. Amazon (88)
9. SAP (86)
10. Tie – Yahoo!/Intel (85)

 View the electronic version of 'ENGAGEMENTdb'.

Microsoft Research TechFest 2009 Virtual Event Room

In existing online-advertisement platforms, the relevance between advertisers and users is decided largely by advanced keyword matching. Typically, in a pay-per-click model, advertisers specify the words that should trigger their ads and the maximum amount they are willing to pay per click. When a user enters a search query, browses a Web page, or interacts with text, the advertisement platform will select and show relevant ads based on the text content in the query or the page. Though other context, such as location, time, and user profile, can be taken into consideration, text understanding remains the main technology.

We will present an image-centric advertisement platform in which advertisers bid on images instead of keywords. For example, a toy seller could bid on the image of a related movie poster, while a restaurant could bid on the image of a cooking-magazine cover. Users would receive ads based on the content of images they recently browsed or used. Components of this platform include an advertisement editorial tool and image-content-understanding, imagematching, and user-understanding.

 Download the electronic version of 'Research Gallery Project Details'.

By Brian Solis and JESS3

The colour of money - Change Agent (by Synovate)

Research conducted by CCICOLOR $the Institute for Color Research$ has revealed that people make a subconscious judgement about a person, environment, or product within 90 seconds of introduction, and that up to 90% of that assessment is based on colour alone.

The retinas in our eyes have three types of cone-shaped colour receptors, which can only detect red, blue, and green, the additive primaries. But our incredibly clever brains can mix and match these three colours, creating 7,000,000 visible shades and tints.

Some of which appeal to us more than others. The theory is that each colour evokes an emotional response in humans, and the level of emotion detected in that response describes the respondent’s personality.

• “Even if a person tries to be angry or aggressive in the presence of pink, he can’t,”
• Consider appealing to a colour specialist before painting your office wall yellow – it’s the most visually fatiguing colour, and can decrease the productivity
• Cars are now a technological purchase as much as an automotive one. As such, we’re unconsciously drawn to the greyer end of the spectrum (i.e. silver)
• Colour increases brand recognition by up to 80%
• Blue is an appetite suppressant & traditionally a signal that a food is poisonous
• Lemon yellow is also said to make people look much younger
• Red, a colour that stimulates and provokes rushes of adrenalin

Colours are used in supermarkets, to invoke our emotions into spending more money red is used because it stands out above all other colours, also it causes our adrenaline to start and makes heart beat faster. Blue is used as a trust symbol blue invokes trust, green makes us think of fresh.

Asian Publishing Convention

The Consumer is control and ignores standard Advertising. He spends most of his time online and the online populations in Asia are exploding. Advertisers are trying to keep up and struggling with finding the right way to reach and engage them in a meaningful manner.
Measuring this engagement is another challenge. The presentation highlights key consumer trends, their online behavior and illustrate a way forward.

Presented at the APC on 17.07.09 in Manila, Philippines by Chris Schaumann:

The Planner’s Digital Dilemma – Online Research from Microsoft Atlas Institute

Existing media planning tools may help identify sites that have the highest concentration of a target audience, but digital publishers write contracts in terms of ad impressions. So brand marketers are left to guess if the plan that nets out to an $18 CPM is better or worse than the $9 CPM plan. This Digital Marketing Insight will bring traditional media planning to digital media.
Although targeting and frequency capping promise a bright future of less media waste, the vast majority of impressions delivered online are neither capped nor targeted.

The shape of the curve explains why doubling the impression size of a buy will not result in doubling the audience for that buy.
While the audience segment reach curves are not widely available today, planning tools that incorporate the reach curves will emerge within the coming year.

Example of a shorthand technique for calculating digital media plan audience metrics.

 Download the electronic version of 'Planner’s Digital Dilemma' report.

Fluent: The Razorfish Social Influence Marketing Report « Amnesia Blog

Razorfish has just released the inaugural issue of Fluent: The Razorfish Social Influence Marketing report.

This report highlights how Social Influence Marketing encompasses every part of marketing and every dimension of an organisation, as well providing a new metric for the measurement of SIM.

Convergence of Social Media and Traditional CRM - Next Generation Listening and Engagement

Social Media Monitoring systems now offer social CRM solutions. Social media, customer support, and sales teams can use these capabilities to associate and cross-reference social web content with customer and prospect information.

Enhanced capabilities and features to help companies and agencies answer the question: "How well is our brand performing across the web?"
Some of the benefits of the integration:

• Enable social media and community teams to see a customer's entire service case history from a dashboard, providing context for outreach and engagement
• Build new contacts, leads, or service cases and push them to the sales team for follow-up actions to streamline workflow
• Link social properties like blogs or Twitter accounts to existing CRM contacts, or create new contacts or leads from social properties discovered through monitoring
• Automatically capture social conversations mentioning your brand generated by your customers or prospects in social media
• View your team's engagement notes from a dashboard within each customer or prospect record

Post written by Paul Greenberg on How a Social CRM System would work and how it would relate to channels like Twitter:

“Twitter's benefit and its relationship to CRM is that it is a location, a community of people who are engaging with their peers in honest open discussions about things that benefit or hurt specific businesses, among many other things. Because there are operational CRM tools and will be new tools that can potentially tie business rules and workflow, processes and systems to communities of prospects and customers who are conversing, then a channel or location like Twitter becomes eminently valuable. The first reason? Because a problem can be monitored, noticed and acted upon. The second reason? Because gathering data on the actual discussions around brands - both yours and competitors is invaluable.”