Youtube instead of TV: It´s coming...

We see more and more brands these days creating interactive ads on youtube instead of  TV.  The Bear Hunter by Tippex was a great example and so is this latest campaign by Desperados. They’ve managed to create a fabulously immersive and interactive experience on YouTube  including page morphing, video annotation and Facebook Connect integration.  Someone buy these guys a drink.

Check it out at http://www.youtube.com/desperados

@Richard Pentin

Desperados online : custom t bottle label with Desperados creative studio

Desperados online : custom t bottle label with Desperados creative studio

Facebook copies Google and Google copies Facebook, the history continues...

Starting this afternoon, Google will allow users to vote plus-one on search results they find useful, and to share that preference with their connections in Gchat, Gmail, Google Reader, Buzz, and soon, Twitter. Users will see both the total number of plus-one votes, as well as the names and photos of their contacts who have stated a preference.

It's the most aggressive foray into social search to date and the first time Google has added a direct social signal into search results. Over time, Google will integrate the plus-one into the search algorithm itself so human votes will impact search ranking.

"When someone recommends something, that's a pretty good indicator of quality," said Matt Cutts, Google principle engineer for search. "We are strongly looking at using this in our rankings."

Google is also adding the ability to vote plus-one on search ads. Internal tests have shown that plus-one votes increase clicks; Google won't charge for the functionality, but expects better ads to return more plus-ones and in turn, more clicks. Higher click-through rates can improve quality scores meaning marketers with better ads could pay less for a given keyword or position.

"We will provide reporting in AdWords for plus-ones," said ads group product manager Christian Oestlien. "Our belief is that advertisers will see increased performance from ads with personalized annotations."

The changes are some of the biggest to the visual architecture of search, the classic list of blue links, as well as its functional underpinnings. Plus-one buttons and social connections are going to join a search results page getting more and more complicated with both real-time and local search results, in addition to search ads which have also added functionality.

Traditionally, inbound links have been the strongest indicator of relevance and component of page rank. Last year, Google added Twitter results to also surface results that are more recent. Adding the "plus-one" will add another social component.

"Injecting a social layer into the algorithmic search is key to relevance," said Dave Karnstedt, CEO of Efficient Frontier. "Do a search on 'DVD player' today now you will see 35,000 results in less than 3 miliseconds. It's meaningless, but if you can sort through those by people who have given a social signal and those rise to the top, I think that can only enhance the user experience."

But the biggest move here may not be about search at all, but about taking another swing at the social networking business, and at Facebook itself. The first time any user clicks on a plus-one button, they will be prompted to create a Google profile, as well as given the opportunity to adjust privacy settings.

Microsoft's Bing integrated Facebook "likes" into search results late last year but hasn't integrated them into its actual algorithm, meaning a "like" has no impact on search rankings. Google has no immediate plans to add Facebook connections to the system, partly because they don't have the right to do so. "It would depend on whether that data were available," Mr. Cutts said.

"Its important for Google to bring in social influence into search results to prevent the social web from becoming a parallel universe," said Bryan Wiener, CEO of 360i, a unit of Dentsu. "I do think they need to have the Facebook ' likes' in there because you're going to have two webs, the social web and the open web."

In addition, Google will be allowing publishers to add the plus-one button, so users can vote plus-one on content outside of search, and ultimately improve the ranking of that content in organic search results. Google has by far the largest publisher network, including web sites that use DoubleClick for ad serving or Google's ad exchange, so penetration of the "plus-one" will be immediate and comprehensive.

The question is whether Google can keep bad actors from gaming the "plus-one" system for fun or for profit. Google, to its credit, has a lot of experience filtering out attempts to game its algorithms. "The worst case is you just ignore them," Mr. Cutts said, adding that more complexity makes that more difficult. "If you give somebody five signals -- and give them five more -- it can actually get harder for spammers." 
@Adweek

Are clicks overrated?

Late last year, AOL announced it would be revamping its ad platform, shrinking the number of ads it serves and expanding the sizes of those ads. In some cases the ad units would be four times larger than they were before. The move was seen by many as AOL’s attempt to address the abysmally-low click-through rates on display advertising, and senior executives admitted that they would see an immediate drop in revenue as a result of it; their hope was that in the long run advertisers would flock to the new platform and pay higher rates for these more successful ads.

According to several studies, click-through rates — the number of people who actually click on an ad — run well below 1 percent on most sites, and each year these rates get lower and lower. Some industry analysts have said this is a result of “banner blindness,” the idea that we inadvertently train our eyes to ignore certain parts of a web page, including sidebar and banner ads.

Depending on which side of the aisle you are on, these metrics are either a blessing or a curse. On the one hand, the Internet allows us to measure ad success like never before. In the past, advertising agencies would have to employ arcane formulas using Nielsen or circulation numbers to guess how many eyeballs saw a 30-second spot on television or a full-page ad in The New York Times. Now, we can open up Google Analytics or click-tracking software to determine exactly how many users engaged with an ad. We can even in some cases determine conversion rates, measuring not only how many people clicked on an ad, but also how many actually purchased a product after making the click. These metrics are a welcome relief to the client who famously said, “I know I am wasting half my advertising budget; I just don’t know which half.”

But many publishers and advertising agencies have expressed frustration that their industry is beholden to such confined measurement. By focusing so much on direct response, they argue, advertisers are missing out on the larger branding opportunities afforded by creative advertising. The Geico Gecko is not successful because he inspires people to jump up from their couches and purchase car insurance; he’s successful because when a person decides months later to shop around for car insurance, his image springs to mind.

Earlier this month, a company called MediaMind released a comprehensive study on the performance of financial services display ads. MediaMind specializes in hosting ads and collecting a variety of performance metrics for advertisers. If Goldman Sachs wanted to advertise on NYTimes.com, for example, MediaMind would host the ad on its own servers and give the NYT a link to pull the ad onto its site. The company would then measure how many times the ad is loaded, how many people click on it, and even how many hover their mouse over the ad without clicking — what MediaMind refers to as “dwell.”

For this particular study, MediaMind analyzed 28 billion ad impressions and terabytes of data to determine what kinds of financial service ads — whether for banks, credit cards, or insurance companies — performed best. The average click-through rate on such ads is .09 percent, with an even lower post-click conversion rate of .03 percent. Perhaps more encouragingly, though, the “dwell” rate for these ads was 4.26 percent, meaning that nearly one in every 20 users hovered his or her mouse over an ad — an indication, MediaMind said, that the ad carried influence even if it didn’t lead to a click. The study claimed financial service ads had an overall conversion rate higher than their click-through conversion rate — .16 percent vs .03 percent — because some of the users who didn’t actually click on the ad still visited the advertiser later. One of the biggest takeaways from the study was that a user’s engagement with an ad sharply falls after the first time he has seen it, meaning that if he sees an ad on NYTimes.com and then later on WashingtonPost.com, he’s much less likely to click on the Post’s ad than a reader who is seeing it there for the first time.

To understand the click-through rate dilemma many advertisers face, one merely has to dive into MediaMind’s findings about which kinds of ads perform best: The highest click-through rates were for credit cards, while the lowest were for car and home-owners’ insurance. Ariel Geifman, MediaMind’s principal research analyst, explained to me in a phone interview that the credit card ads perform better because many people are almost always willing to try a new credit card with a better rate. But why did the insurance ads perform so poorly? “We think it’s because users only need a policy once a year, so you only need to get people at the point when they’re thinking about it — which is really hard,” Geifman said. “Unlike credit cards, users are not actively shopping for better insurance offers all the time, only once a year. You have to tempt them with an offer exactly at that point in order to get them to consider it.”

Display advertising, in other words, is lacking a Geico Gecko strategy.

Geifman told me that despite pushes for advertisers to take a much more “holistic” view, they’re still measuring their success on click-through and conversion metrics.“People try to focus more on the tangible rather than the intangible metrics,” he said. “In the furture, display advertising is going to be a lot more focused on branding.”

But will it? John Battelle, founder of Federated Media and a board member of theInteractive Advertising Bureau, has spent a lot of time contemplating this question. Federated Media is an ad network that provides advertising for hundreds of publishers, seeing more than a billion ad impressions a month. (I’ve written for some outlets that use FM advertising.) “No matter what, we have to live in a world where the question, ‘Does the consumer click on my ad?’ is the fundamental and only consistent signal in display advertising that is universally understood,” Battelle said in a phone conversation. “That impulse has a lot of implications. When people optimize click-through rates, it changes all sorts of decisions that can inevitablly lead down a path towards, in essence, the direct-response approach to advertising. Which is to say, if you optimize your creative — your media buy, your placement, everything — to this one signal, and you tell your agencies and your publishing partners that’s what’s most important, you’re going to get behaviors that drive clicks. And that sort of ignores a very large percentage of the value of advertising, which has to do with changing the perception, awareness, and potentially other important signals of value in the ecosystem. Unfortunately, it’s something we’ve had to live with because it’s the only standard that’s easily measured.”

To show the short-sightedness of such metrics, Battelle cited a comScore study that found in 2009 that 4 percent of Internet users drive a whopping 67 percent of all advertising clicks. Do we really want to target our ads, he asked rhetorically, to such a small user base — the online equivalent to those who respond to late-night infomercials?

Though the display advertising industry has been slow to battle this trend, it has taken steps to ameliorate it. Part of the problem, as the recent AOL ad revamp indicated, is that display ads are small. It’s very difficult to replicate the full-page ad of a print newspaper or magazine, and there’s only so much you can convey in a tiny box on a website’s sidebar. In 2009, Federated Media launched a product called an Ad STAMP that allows an advertiser to purchase multiple ad slots and effectively take over an entire page. The same year, Daily Kos hosted a “skin” advertising platform for a then-upcoming Frontline program called “Obama’s War.” The skin wrapped around all the Kos content, effectively bombarding the reader with the brand (while not intruding on the actual blog posts). BlogAds, a North Carolina-based ad network that serves ads to Daily Kos and hundreds of other blogs, has also experimented with including social content from sites like Twitter directly into the ads themselves.

In an interview last year, I asked BlogAds founder Henry Copeland which industries should rely less on click-through rates and more on long-term brand influence. He pointed to the entertainment industry as one example. “For instance, with TV shows or with a movie, very few people buy the ticket online,” he said. “So the real measure is you spent X amount in advertising and then you put this many seats in movie theaters.”

In the AOL Way, leaked to the Business Insider last year, the company indicated that an individual blog post needs about 7,000 pageviews to generate a profitable amount of advertising revenue. With the average cost per piece of content pegged at $84 and a target of an average gross margin of 50 percent, that puts AOL’s CPM at $18. In other words, it hopes to generate $18 for every thousand pageviews it generates. At a .09 percent click-through rate, we’re looking at about $18 per click. Given that you can get much better rates on advertising platforms like Google Adwordsand Facebook’s targeted display advertising, it isn’t hard to see why a publisher would want to steer an advertiser’s focus away from raw clicks alone.

“You don’t build brands by optimizing for clicks,” Battelle told me. “There needs to be other measurments as to whether your audience is aware of and gaining value from the messaging you’re doing on these sites through display advertising.”

Of course, some would accuse these publishers of trying to put the new clothes back on the emperor. But as AOL shifts further away from its declining subscription revenue and more toward an ad-based model, it’s not surprising that it wants to convince advertisers that there is, in fact, value in a banner and sidebar ad. How much value is there will determine whether Tim Armstrong’s quest to build a content-based company will result in success or dismal failure.

Facebook May Hire Robert Gibbs, Former Obama Aide

Facebook is in talks to hire Robert Gibbs, President Obama’s former White House press secretary, for a senior role in helping to manage the company’s communications, people briefed on the negotiations said.

Facebook is seeking out Mr. Gibbs ahead of an initial public offering planned for early 2012, these people said.

Olivier Douliery/European Pressphoto Agency
Robert Gibbs left the White House in February after two years on the job.

The talks are still at an early stage and no formal offer has been made, these people said, adding it remained possible that the discussions could collapse.

Mr. Gibbs, who left the White House in February after two years on the job, had been planning to help establish President Obama’s re-election campaign before taking a private sector job, these people said.

Facebook, however, is pressing Mr. Gibbs to consider the job more quickly, according to these people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the conversations were supposed to remain confidential.

A job for Mr. Gibbs at Facebook could be worth millions of dollars. While details of his potential compensation package have yet to be discussed, people briefed on the talks said that he would receive a cash salary as well as shares ahead of the initial offering. Facebook is being valued by some investors at more than $60 billion and could be the largest offering in history.

In recent weeks, Mr. Gibbs has consulted several of his former White House colleagues about whether he should take the job, including David Axelrod, President Obama’s former senior adviser, who is helping to head a re-election team, these people said.

Mr. Gibbs and a spokesman for Facebook declined to comment. 

Facebook is increasingly in the public eye and is looking to build its communications team ahead of an initial offering.

Investor interest and the attention the company received from the movie “The Social Network” have put increasing pressure on the company communicate better with the public about its products and its policies.

Facebook has also become a focus of Washington as lawmakers and regulators grapple with online privacy issues and Internet security. Facebook has already stepped up its lobbying efforts in Washington, which have included discussions with the Federal Trade Commission, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Defense Intelligence Agency.

The company had a minor public relations headache when a planned offering of private stock by Goldman Sachs to investors in the United States had to be shelved because of worries the offering would not comply with Securities and Exchange Commission rules.

Goldman completed the offering instead with foreign investors.

While Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s co-founder, often acts as the public face of the company, Mr. Gibbs may be able to help communicate the company’s message in the media, to investors and policy makers.

The job is based at Facebook’s headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif., these people said. Mr. Gibbs would be brought in to work under Elliot Schrage, Facebook’s vice president for global communications, marketing and public policy. Mr. Schrage came to Facebook in 2008 from Google.

Last week, Mr. Schrage hired Caryn Marooney, the co-founder of the OutCast Agency, a large public relations firm in San Francisco, to become the director of technology communications at Facebook.

Mr. Gibbs has recently held talks with a number of other companies, people briefed on those conversations said. His name has also been floated as a possible chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Politico reported.

@Andrew Ross

First UK augmented reality digital outdoor campaign - Lynx Excite

Cable TV on your tablet?

Time Warner Cable is pushing the envelope on video and making some TV networks uncomfortable in the process. The cable provider's new iPad app allows subscribers to watch live shows -- much as they do on TV -- at no extra charge as long as they do it at home using a cable modem authorized by Time Warner Cable.

The plan is to also enable other tablets such as the Samsung Galaxy, and ultimately any device with a screen, such as a laptop or a phone.

The question is whether Time Warner's current agreements with cable networks permit this capability, and how ugly that will make the next round of carriage negotiations with the networks.

Time Warner Cable execs argue that their current deals with cable networks cover the capability because the app doesn't receive video over the public internet. The gatekeeper in this case is the wireless modem, which allows Time Warner to make sure that content is streaming to devices in the home of a cable subscriber.

The notion here is that now that TVs have internet connections and computer chips, increasingly there is little difference between devices. But Time Warner Cable's app has taken things a step further by providing live TV, which erases the difference between traditional TV and devices like tablet computers.

Comcast's Xfinity iPad app streams TV to subscribers -- but only includes individual shows on demand. Comcast has a slightly different stake in all this than Time Warner Cable. Comcast owns a large stable of cable networks, while Time Warner Cable is a pipe to the home. But Comcast still believes it has all the rights Time Warner is asserting right now. "Our rights cover any device in the home and we want to be on all of them," said spokesman Alex Dudley.

But the networks might not see it that way, wanting to control distribution outside of the traditional TV with separate agreements for "TV Everywhere" services letting cable subscribers log in and access content via the internet. Networks also want to distribute content to as many different paying distributors as possible, as well as directly to the consumer.

But where it really gets complicated is when Time Warner Cable wants to extend this capability outside the home, which even cable execs say will require a different agreement with the networks.

Right now the content in Time Warner's app includes most pay-cable networks, but not broadcast or ESPN because Time Warner Cable hasn't worked out technologically how to synch local broadcasts or black out sporting events that aren't sold out locally. Time Warner Cable does have a "TV Everywhere" deal with ESPN, and Mr. Dudley says the technical issues for iPad access will be worked out soon.

This ratchets up the already contentious relationship between networks and cable and satellite operators. Cable watched in awe as the broadcast networks gave programming to Hulu while simultaneously demanding carriage fees from cable and satellite companies, a dispute which made its way into cable negotiations. Expect Time Warner Cable's app to add another layer that will play out at the negotiating table.
@Mediapost