Online Advertising

Google Instant now offers a drop down menu and updates the page in real time when you search so it speeds up the typing and gives you a steer towards what similar terms others might be using. Some people think it's the death of SEO -Steve Rubel for example:

Here's what this means: no two people will see the same web. Once a single search would do the trick - and everyone saw the same results. That's what made search engine optimization work. Now, with this, everyone is going to start tweaking their searches in real-time. The reason this is a game changer is feedback. When you get feedback, you change your behaviors. 
Think about it. When you push a door and it doesn't open quickly, you push harder. When you try to drive a car up a hill and it doesn't go as fast as you would like, you step on the gas. Feedback changes your behavior. 

Eh? I would have thought more people will hit the same phrase on the toggle thus reducing variability on what people see, and SEO will be key to get your website onto that first googlepage, which will now be more samey so the ante will be upped

As always, on the Internet "the death of" is usually somewhat exaggerated.

Postscript - by the way, while I think it's all very clever, the real high impact shift was the original drop down menu. This is bunce, but of course those ads served at lightning subliminal speed probably get charged for

You knew it had to come - RWW:

It won't be long before we start seeing ads in e-books, a business professor and a former book editor wrote in a Wall Street Journal editorial today.

Growing e-book sales and the opportunity for targeted advertising mean space in e-books is ripe for corporate messages. Add rapidly falling e-reader prices and the planned Google e-book store and the pressure is on for publishers and retailers to increase revenue from digital books.

Apparently the only reason there have never been Ads in books before is that the books may not sell, but now all will be wonderful:

In short, physical books can't compete with other print media for advertisers. Digital books can. With an integrated system, an advertiser or publisher can place ads across multiple titles to generate a sufficient volume. Timeliness is also possible, since digital readers require users to log in to a central system periodically.

Well, I'd hate it - but given that many people seeem perfectly happy to pay the same price for eBooks as paper books (despite no production costs) and pay £300+ for a (hard-to-) reader to read them, I suspect they wouldn't care if a few quid were knocked off for the right to put Ads all over the book.

Sometimes I wonder about the wisdom of the crowds........

Update - Terence Eden responds that we've had advertising in "real" books for ages. Check the back of any Penguin paperback. Good point, I should make it clear I am talking about the sort of intrusiveness we see on the web or TV (which is in my view what advertisers will be shooting for) rather than a few flyers for similar books/same author at the back of an eBook.

Another update - I actually suspect the ecomomics will work in such a way that magazines read on eBooks will carry Ads (as they do in Real Media) but the combination of low hit rates and a poor user experience (wrong time, wrong place) will limit Ad acceptance for books.

I think Twitter has just committed hara-kiri. They have introduced un-followed Ad-twts into your twt-stream. But soft, here's John Battelle in typical awestruck mode:

Regardless of where Twitter users consumer their Twitter feeds, the reality is this: Twitter's new ad platform will mark the first time, ever, that users of the service will see a tweet from someone they have not explicitly decided to follow.

And that marks an important departure for the young service. One that I think is both defensible, and, if done well, could be seminal to both Twitter and to its partners - both new (marketers) and old (developers). More on that when I come back....

..........

The key question then becomes, as it was with Google's AdWords - will that which they see be relevant, useful, valuable?

Defensible and Seminal? - mayhap, but it will also be bloody irritating - this seems to bear all the marks of Dick "stuff Ads in Feedburner and sell the f*cker to Google before all the customers bail" Costolo. He claims it will "resonate" with users.

“The promise of Promoted Tweets is this: Brands and companies will not pay for Promoted Tweets that don’t resonate, and users will not see Promoted Tweets that don’t resonate.”

Resonate, eh? I eagerly await the first "AdTweet Killers" in the 3rd party clients (before they get strangled). Given how loved Pop-Ups were, I give it 2 weeks after the first Ads appear. (Unless a condition of operation of the 3rd party sites is not blocking 'em of course )

Still, ya gotta make your bucks somehow. Twitter is the only useful bit of the WebComm world which is largely spam free, so clearly that is unacceptable and could not continue.

So, we await the sale to Google (before all the customers bail) with bated breath

So - the FT is pulling down its paywall for Foursquare users - paidContent:

The Financial Times’ metered online paywall system is considered one of the more successful models, but a new partnership with location-based social net Foursquare is aimed at younger readers who are most resistant to paywalls. The partnership will launch sometime in the next few weeks, Business Insider reports.

The partnership is limited to specific areas on Foursquare, which lets users “check in” at various locations via their mobile phones, alerting users they’re connected with. The FT has chosen a number of cafes and businesses situated within business districts and schools such as Columbia, Harvard and the London School of Economic, among others. When Foursquare users check in at a designated spot, they can earn points that will ultimately unlock the FT.com’s online subscriptions, which can run from $183.04 for 52 weeks (or $3.59 per week) for unlimited access to $299 ($5.75 per week) for mobile access included as part of a premium sub.

At the risk of being seen as un-hip, this made me grumpy. Why? Because I'm curmudgeonly enough to think Foursquare is the sort of service run for oversharing jer....not your usual FT demographic - so I won't use it. My immediate reaction is that I am probably more the FT's natural reader demographic, so what's My Deal then?

It's probably not totally logical, but its an immediate gut reaction (its that "Hey! that's not Fair! behavioural psychology thing I guess).

So, FT, what deal do will give your "natural" user base to earn points to get behind the firewall for free?

I can't believe the Foursquare/FT demographic is that great - I originally wrote 1 in a million tongue in cheek, but Vuk Trifkovic's note about c 1 in 5 of his 4Sq followees being FT-able made me think about it a bit - 1 in 10, 100, 1,000, or 10,000, or 100,000 or 1 million? I'd probably plump for 1 in 1,000 as a guesstimate based on observed FoursSquare users and their behaviour on Twitter

Yes, it is true - Social Media is less trusted as a source of product recommendation, says Edelman's latest trust barometer. Why is this, I hear you cry - well, BBH labs obfuscates it in it's article ""Will Social Media Eat Itself":

In difficult times, we are drawn to authority: we want there to be expert opinions and definitive answers.

As the network expands, connections weaken: It is perhaps inevitable that the bigger our networks get, the less absolute trust we have in the individuals within them.

As social media adopts the behaviours of old media, it loses credibility: We’ve pay per tweet, but the influx of blunt commercial messages into Social Media does seem to be impacting trust.

Genuinely useful and relevant uses of the social graph have been slow to emerge: Some of the developments we’ve collectively been most enthused by seem to have stalled in development.

They offer some solutions to the predicament, but these seem to be much on the line of "how to skew the medium to make people unable to avoid the marketing message" - you will be marketed to, and trust us while we do it dammit

I would argue that they are avoiding the fundamental problem - social media is not trusted as much now because the people driving it and using it are not as trustworthy as they were.

The combination of:

- Perversion of social media from a communication to a commercial medium (the massive rise of flacking on Twitter for example)

- Widespread abuse of people's privacy and information (From Beacon to Buzz - nuff said?)

Its the classic case of marketeering, like tourism, destroying what gives it succour. The solution is obvious - to make social media trusted again, eradicate the untrustworthy people on it. But that includes most marketeers.....

The issue is not so much social media eating itself, but marketeers not realising that then sh*tting in one's own pool is a dumb idea. But so long as a social media system is seen as a flogger's free-for-all, then the tragedy of the (marketing) commons will be prevalent.

Update - Tom Ewing points out the latest survey show trust in all media falling - but this doesn't reconcile with stuff we have from a few years back showing that other media had by and large fallen already. Will have to dig more......

We have pointed out before that women are a bigger economic force online than men, especially on Social Media. Now, as Copyblogger notes, if you want links, you gotta do Lurve - most especially use the words that Women Want. These are:

- Love

- Secret

- King, Queen, Princess, Prince (or some other honorable title)

- Temptation and Forbidden

- Cloud, Moon, Stars (and other celestial bodies)

- Heaven, Paradise

- Kiss

- Virgin

- Magic, Enchanted, Bewitched (and other references to the supernatural)

So, for example, here is how you may write copy:

Plain: “Solve Email Problems”
Heroic: “Battle Your Email Overload”
Romantic: “Love Your Email Inbox Again”

Plain: “Stop Procrastinating”
Heroic: “Defeat Procrastination”
Romantic: “Kiss Procrastination Goodbye”

Plain: “Advice to Help You Do Better”
Heroic: “Advice to Help You Win”
Romantic: “Advice to Make You a Star”

Plain: “Ditch Your Bad Habits”
Heroic: “Conquer Your Bad Habits”
Romantic: “Make Your Bad Habits Disappear Like Magic”

So - thats a little magic secret you'll love - send you over the moon in fact. Of course its tempting to be the Queen of Feminine Copy at once, but you're still a virgin here, so take it slow.

(Update - Charlotte Cooper notes that they forgot to add Unicorn)

Yes, on Facebook this week women have been updating their statuses (statii?) with the colours of their bras. Why? Mumsnetters were nonplussed (It is to spread the awareness of breast cancer, apparently. Darned if I know how, but its a viral meme don't y'know). Mashable played it straight. The npr blog questioned its benefits:

Is this another example of "slacktivism," virtual activism with no real results?

How many of you were inspired to educate yourselves?

How many of you changed your Facebook status, but weren't enticed to learn more about breast cancer?

How many of you decided to opt out, because you didn't want your friends and family to know the color of your undergarments?

We've also questioned the "weak tells" that something like this, or changing a colour on your Twitter picture really signifies about any real commitment. If you really care about Breast Cancer, there is only one useful colour - green (of your money). I could also write all sorts of deep and meaningful stuff about wanting to be taken seriously, the Ladette culture, the Fall of the West, gender hypocrisy and all that, but then you'd realise this article is just linkbait. I must say I'm torn between the wish for both more and less information, sadly there is no way to sort the false negatives (we'll leave the falsies out of this) - ie no bra worn - from the non answers.

I have an uncomfortable feeling that if men did the same sort of thing on a social media platform they would be widely excoriated. But hey, maybe next week its Awareness of Prostate Cancer week, what jolly thing can we disclose about that?

I also hypothesize that by this time next week someone will have done all sorts of mashups linkinging the colour with star sign, personality type, relationship status, location (thats very hot at the moment).

Anyway, its an excuse for us to show a picture of a great rack, so here it is

Apparently lots of money is going to be spent to make people trust Ads more - Grauniad:

The initiative, which has the working title Front Foot, was launched by the AA last month following research that found that fewer than one in six people trust advertisers.

It is not known how much Google has invested in the Front Foot foundation, which is aiming to raise £2m from a "founding constellation" of organisations. The foundation is understood to have already raised about £250,000.

I wonder how they will persuade us - maybe an Ad campaign?

So, the last resort of Advertising is getting people to pimp stuff to their followers - Mr John Chow, with 50,000 Twittwr followers:

....earned $200 by telling his fans where they could buy M&M’s with customized faces, messages and colors.

Mr. Chow is among a growing group of celebrities, bloggers and regular Internet users who are allowing advertisers to send commercial messages to their personal contacts on social networks. For the last month, he has used the services of Ad.ly, a start-up based in Los Angeles, and Izea, based in Orlando, Fla., to periodically surrender his Twitter stream to the likes of Charter Communications, the Make a Wish Foundation and an online seminar about working from home.

In October, Mr. Chow’s income from Twitter ads was around $3,000. “I get paid for pushing a button,” he said.

It is perhaps the last frontier in advertising — getting regular people to send a sentence or two of text, on behalf of paying advertisers, to their friends and admirers.

(From the New York Times)

Brilliant. Just Brilliant. And do you think the next turn of this particular game will be:

(i) Followers are delighted that you are advertising to them and sign up in droves

(ii) Followers will decide you are compromised and sign off in droves

(iii) Followers will ignore the Ads and keep on listening if the other content is good enough

Now your instinct is probably (iii) - to start with. But what will happen as a larger and larger % of people start to pimp Ads through Twitter onto your flowstream? Or as one person pimps more Ads through themself.

Advertising, like tourism, tends to kill the thing it loves over time because it suffers from tragedy of the commons effects (if no in-system mechanism exists to moderate Ads) and its usual response to the lessening impact of Ads is to increase the volume. Which upstets more people....

If I were the Twitterpeople, I'd be very careful..... in the Twitter Ecosystem these act something like parasites, and they may well damage the host if it is not careful.

Update: Useful analysis of the issues from Going Social Now (abridged below):

1. Your users can revolt with mass un-following
The twitterati who stand to gain the most, will need to test how comfortable their followers are with receiving these advertisements. Formats, frequency and content - all need to be figured out. Because these are new formats (and frankly speaking, the whole platform is still very new), we do not know what will work as yet. We all get irritated by people who tweet a bit too much as it is.

2. Lack of technological sophistication may kill the model
If a Google adwords model is put in place and we start seeing ads on twitter in droves, there will probably be a strong backlash. Unlike other platforms, you currently can't cookie a user who's seeing an advertisement on Twitter. So if I follow five twitter users who accept advertising, there's a chance that I may see the same advertisement from each of them in the span of an afternoon. That would be problematic. The networks need to be implemented with the right technology infrastructure behind it. Twitter must help here.

3. Black box ROI that makes it difficult to compare
Click thru rates cannot provide enough ROI - there will need to be CPM models in place as well. The problem is that there are few good ways to measure impressions. Sure you have the number of followers but that doesn't mean that the total number of followers actually saw the ads. The problem is compounded when you have people using twitter applications to access their streams. There's no way of finding out whether a user has actually seen a tweet. You also need to know whether the users fit your target demographics.

4. Advertisers choose not to intrude on conversations
Advertisers are savvy group of people. They're also increasingly sensitive about how their brands are perceived in the social media space. And by sensitive I don't just mean that they're worried about someone speaking ill of them but about appearing to be invading on a user's social world too. It is left to be seen how many advertisers will sign up for twitter ad networks. Many will probably take a wait and see approach. The last thing an advertiser would want is a backlash against their brand. I for one would recommend that advertisers invest in developing their own social voices first before experimenting with twitter ad formats.

5. Lack of transparency hurts the Twitter trust model
It is sometimes easy to forget that twitter is built on trust. We share more than we realize often because we trust that no one will use the information against us. Our followers reward us with their attention and the conversations that ensue. If there's no transparency in the twitter advertising, some of that trust will be broken. Before you know it, the FTC will feel obliged to institute guidelines or requirements for advertising in this space too. So there's a risk that the advertising may not be as transparent as it should be. And that's where disclosure codes like those recommended by Jon Burg will matter a lot. Maybe these twitter ad networks can build disclosure codes into their platforms?

As with popups, I'd assume that there will be an early market for plugins to kill the Ads (TwAkismet anyone?)

OK, its a terrible pun, but the rest of this is funnier. Bain has written a report with a 5 point plan to recapture value in the Online Ad market, which has been falling. Mediapost notes that:

The heart of the findings are that online sales organizations have lacked the "sophistication" necessary to turn the perceptions advertisers and agencies have about the value of online advertising from an either/or proposition of "branding" vs. direct response-like "transactions" to one that is far more holistic and deals with higher order elements of branding such as "engagement."

"It's a pretty big rethink about the way [online] sales organizations work," IAB President Randall Rothenberg explained to OMD, adding that the end goal is what he described as a "triple play offering" that combines brand reach, transactions and "brand engagement."

Major obstacles that need to be overcome to achieve that, the report concludes, include:

1 - Ad formats and creative are not innovating with the medium.
2 - We are awash in undifferentiated, low-cost inventory.
3 - Metrics, metrics everywhere... but not the ones that brand marketers really need.
4 - Media companies lack ideas, strategic expertise and engage too late in the planning process.
5 - Marketers want cross-platform campaigns; instead they get a model rooted in platform-specific silos.

To which we would add a sixth - an infinitely burgeoning amount of inventory set against a fixed amount of Ad spend budget. Anyway, there is a Five Point Plan to get out the deep doo-doo:

1 - Measurement: Work with other associations to establish clear standards for measurement of brand impact and reach/frequency.

2 - Targeting: Address current scale and data limitations for targeting. Identify ways to adjust for overlapping audience in reach buys.

3 - Automated process: Help develop low-cost and/or automated buying processes for brand reach and response buys. Establish common technical standards for the industry.

4 - Online creative: Identify and communicate success factors for marketers, agencies, and publishers in executing cross-platform creative.

5 - Engaging marketers: Create ongoing forums with marketers for discussion of branding approach, limitations, and key developments.

The report, "Building Brands Online: An Interactive Advertising Action Plan," a preview of which was given Online Media Daily on Wednesday, is based on an in depth survey or 700 brand marketers, as well as anecdotal research with ad agencies and publishers. God knows how much the IAB paid for it, but this stuff is not exactly new news - all they would have needed to do is come to a few Measurementcamps and they would have found most of this out.

In fact, what fascinates me more about this is the totally different - probably 4 orders of magnitude different - price you can pay for getting the same information.