Indolent - online marketing, planning, media and stuff.

Want higher click through rate on banners? Sorted!

2009-06-30T17:30:26Z

Maybe more creative like this will sort out the UK’s woefully low average CTRs!

Source: Bridge Worldwide 2009: Cannes Cyber Lions Gold - Pringles Can Hands

Click through rate on UK banner advertising amongst lowest in Europe

2009-06-30T16:05:00Z

This month DoubleClick published a useful benchmark of online advertising performance rates across all activity in 2008. This is pretty much the most solid data you'll ever see on display advertising performance, based according to DoubleClick on: "hundreds of advertisers, thousands of campaigns, and tens of billions of ad impressions."

It's a useful set of benchmarks showing for instance variations in click rates by size and format of ads. The data is also split by geography - which shows some fairly disappointing results for the UK.

The table below shows the average click through rate across all formats (static image, flash, video) for the main economies in Europe, plus the United States. (The DoubleClick report has worldwide performance data for twenty nine countries).

Country Overall Click-through Rate
Spain	0.14%
Germany	0.13%
France	0.12%
Italy	0.12%
United States	0.10%
United Kingdom	0.08%

This is really disappointing - and not just for the online advertising industry. As the Guardian recently pointed out, the British newspaper industry is also desperately hoping for a renaissance from online advertising.

So why the poor performance. Probably no single reason, but possible reasons would be:

banner fatigue - advertising creative not being refreshed often enough
lower percentage of inventory going on larger sizes / more static formats
larger percentage of media going out across networks which tend to deliver a lower CPC
more brand advertising versus direct response campaigns

Any more ideas anyone?

Firefox grows European market share, whilst UK lags behind

2009-06-30T12:53:35Z

Today’s launch of Firefox 3.5 is the latest shot in the long struggle for domination in the browser market.

The data below – from AT Internet Institute - shows that Firefox has steadily been growing its market share in Europe, mostly at the expense of Internet Explorer. Disappointingly for Microsoft, Internet Explorer’s market share actually dropped in March, coinciding with the long-awaited launch of IE 8.

The same AT Internet research, from April 2009 shows the stark differences in the popularity of Firefox around Europe. Of the five major European economies, the UK shows the lowest penetration of Firefox with 17% market share – compared with 30% in France and 42% in Germany.

This competition is driving some genuine innovation in the browser market, which is great to see. Compare and contrast with the situation around email, where Microsoft is lazily exploiting Outlook’s monopoly position to resist innovation and ignore web standards.

Australia – an apology

2009-06-24T14:15:55Z

When I wrote our last company newsletter I added in a throwaway line about Google Wave:

Meanwhile Google Wave looks genuinely awesome, the best thing to
come out of Australia since... er... anyway it makes Microsoft Exchange
look very last century.

If I’d thought about this for more than a couple of seconds I should have realised that some thin-skinned Australians would take offence. Sure enough, our receptionist is now not talking to me – and is putting through endless calls from recruitment consultants. Worse still, we’ve had a very long email from an antipodean who took particular offence to my racist comment:

To whom it may concern,

I am a potential client of Harvest Digital and I recently received the below email from your company. However I do not understand the need to mention Australia and its lack of successful exports!!

I find it incredibly offensive and hurtful that your company represents such a standpoint.

I would like to let you know about some of the successful things Australia has brought to the world,

1. The Bionic Ear - Melbourne University professor made history in 1978 by inventing the world's first bionic ear.

2. The Black Box Flight recorder - Dr. David Warren from Melbourne invented the first black box flight recorder in 1958.

3. The Cow Fan, During summer temperatures in Australia can soar into the fifties, too hot for most European farm animals. Luckily the ever ingenious Australian farmers have come up with a solution to cool our cows.

4. Meat Flavored Water: Inventor Andrew started marketing meat and vegetable flavored bottled water to canine connoisseurs in December 2003. It's like a sports drink for dogs he said and put his Dog Plus K-9 Water on sale across Australia in flavors ranging from bacon and beef to liver, chicken and corn. A 600ml bottle will set you back $2.95

5. Viagra Oysters - Oysters have long been known as an aphrodisiac, but NSW oyster farmer George thought he could do better and started lacing his oysters with Viagra hoping for lucrative markets in Asia where many men are obsessed with all sorts of ways to increase their virility. ( To the point where they will drink urine from tigers and rhinoceros for perceived benefits.) Unfortunately, no matter how good the idea may have sounded, there are always a few whingers out there, and so the NSW Food Safety authority says it is illegal and breaches the NSW Food Act and also Pfizer was not happy with their trademarked name being used in this way and threatened with legal action, but George reckons that countries outside Australia have different regulations so even if they are illegal in Australia he still sells them overseas, and change the name to get Pfizer off his back.

From the above points it is clear that Australia is a great nation and that we in fact contribute greatly to the world on all different levels from Science to Bovine welfare.

I would like to note that your email asked me “how’s it going????” …….Well as a result of this attack on our proud nation I am willing to say that I am not so good and I will be in touch with more Aussie great inventions in the near future.

Regards

Mac

Well Mac (and Mel!), all I can say is sorry! The thrust of my argument was to say how good Google Wave was and not to put down Australia. Now that I have the facts in front of me, I can see that Australian ingenuity clearly out-classes second-rate British inventions like television, the telephone and the internet.

Next time I’ll stick to being rude to the French…

Twitter UK celebrity chart – 11th June

2009-06-11T15:50:46Z

Here’s the latest update in our literally all-star celebrity Twitter chart. Have Coldplay topped the magic one million followers? You know it!

Celeb	Followers
Coldplay	1,003,695
Lily Allen	556,754
Stephen Fry	552,133
Neil Gaiman	521,822
Imogen Heap	461,337
Richard Bacon	427,365
Russell Brand	377,358
Eddie Izzard	364,028
Jonathan Ross	306,404
John Cleese	186,825
Chris Moyles	185,186
Alan Carr	184,622
Phillip Schofield	182,571
Fearne Cotton	144,586
Jimmy Carr	132,807
Richard Branson	122,122
Holly Willoughby	87,640
Alan Davies	71,464
Andi Peters	57,745
David Mitchell	65,234

Almost as shocking, Lily Allen has overtaken the saintly Stephen Fry to take number two in the chart.

With Wimbledon approaching, it would be nice for Andy Murray to make a return to the chart – sample tweet: “Anyone seen andy roddicks hats? They have really nice sweat stains on them cause he never washes them and thinks they r lucky”. Sadly he is nowhere near, with just 27,925 followers.

Another surprisingly poor performer is Aleksandr Orlov with 16,357 followers. Surprising, because our meerkat chum has almost half a million fans on Facebook – then again, the kids aren’t really down with Twitter quite yet.

Trademark bidding on Google Adwords – the saga continues

2009-05-29T09:45:00Z

At my session at SES this year I reviewed the current legal position of trademark bidding and made the confident forecast that this one will run and run.

Seemed like a safe prediction - and for once I was right!

According to Outlaw, the case between Interflora and Marks and Spencer has now been referred to the European Court of Justice for a final ruling, where it joins a bunch of actions from other European brands.

Meanwhile there were a couple of interesting things from the summing up of the High Court judge in London:

It’s pretty strange that Google is running a different set of rules on trademark bidding in the UK and Ireland to the rest of Europe, given that ultimately we are controlled under the same set of laws. But the reason is that trademark laws are quite different here to mainland Europe. And hence any judgement in Europe may not really clear up the situation in the UK.
Interflora has quantified the loss it has suffered from the introduction of competitive bidding. According to the High Court ruling: "Interflora's bidding costs for their keywords during the nine days leading up to Valentine's Day increased from 2p per click in 2008 to 23-28p per click in 2009. Interflora estimate that in total their costs will have increased by about $750,000 in the year from 5 May 2008."

Given that this case will definitely drag on and may not even clear up the UK situation, it’s well worth brands doing a similar calculation of the material loss they believe they may have suffered. There’s always the possibility – however slim – that the case will finally be settled, will go against Google, and that compensation will be paid.

Twitter UK celebrity chart – 22nd May

2009-05-22T05:32:45Z

A month since our last celeb chart, so what’s new?

Celeb	Followers
Coldplay	848,910
Stephen Fry	510,333
Neil Gaiman	425,767
Lily Allen	385,495
Imogen Heap	363,913
Richard Bacon	336,431
Russell Brand	331,545
Jonathan Ross	270,432
Eddie Izzard	251,613
John Cleese	172,803
Phillip Schofield	166,120
Chris Moyles	159,523
Alan Carr	154,538
Fearne Cotton	119,004
Jimmy Carr	114,234
Richard Branson	109,932
Holly Willoughby	74,359
Andi Peters	53,019
Alan Davies	54,557
David Mitchell	56,740

Last month I confidently predicted that Richard Bacon would soon be top five – and naturally I was wrong. He has almost doubled his follower count, but only makes it to number six.

The story instead is of the rise of musicians, with Lily Allen and Imogen Heap both easing into the top five – replacing Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross.

With Coldplay now massively out at the front of the pack, it seems that Twitter could be replacing MySpace as the primary way for musicians to connect with their fans.

Finally one big new entry to the chart – Eddie Izzard rocks in with 250k followers – an unfortunate omission (although he was born in the Yemen, so possibly doesn’t count!). With Eddie’s arrival, Rob Brydon (46k) drops off the chart for the time being.

Google’s Eurovision predictor

2009-05-14T16:23:00Z

Google has turned its gaze away from worthy goals like predicting the spread of flu to more challenging tasks like forecasting the winner of this Saturday’s Eurovision Song Contest.

Like the flu prediction service, Google is studying search trends on particular keywords to come to its conclusions. It excludes searches from a contestants own country, because you can’t vote for your own entry.

Personally I’ll be impressed if Google can pull this off. As any student of Eurovision knows, simple ‘popularity’ ranks quite a bit behind the simmering stew of post-cold war politics across Europe in terms of influence on voting. So the countries of the former Soviet Union may hate Russia at a governmental level, but the large numbers of Russian diaspora guarantee a healthy slug of votes flowing back to Mother Russia.

Presumably search volume – and hence accuracy – will improve closer to the final on the 16th May. Right now Google has Turkey and Norway neck and neck for the win, just ahead of Greece. The punters on Betfair have the same top three, but with Norway clearly ahead of Greece and Turkey.

Rebranding swine flu

2009-04-30T14:36:42Z

Marketing has a story about an attempt in the United States to rebrand swine flu. Swine flu is hitting consumption of pork products (not that you can really catch flu from a sausage) so officials are trying to persuade us to talk instead about the ‘2009 H1N1 virus’.

Well good luck with that.

The marketing industry has a long history of using cuddly animals to bring a brand to life. In fact the ITV Digital Monkey famously proved more durable than the brand and has moved on to promote PG Tips.

So what chance that we can forget about pigs and think about a row of numbers instead? Pretty slim I would think. They would be better off trying to associate the flu virus with another even cuter small animal – perhaps the ubiquitous meerkat could be a useful fall guy?

Or how about ‘piglet flu’? Sounds much friendlier, and it already has its own viral!

Twitter UK celebrity chart – 20th April

2009-04-20T04:52:00Z

Ashton Kutcher became the first person to top one million Twitter followers on Friday (and three days later is up to 1.23 million!), so it must be time for a quick look at our UK celebrity chart.

So what’s new. Well Imogen Heap is new, although only because I forgot to include her – she has been on Twitter almost exactly a year and has added 100k followers in the past month, so my bad.

Neil Gaiman soars into the top three – and were it not for Stephen Fry I think we would talk a lot more about the way he uses the web. Russell Brand is also up into the top five, now ahead of Jonathan Ross.

Finally keep an eye on Richard Bacon – at current rates of growth, he will be easing into the top five in a week or so.

As ever, please point out any errors or omissions – either comment here or tweet me on twitter.com/miketeasdale.

Celeb	Followers	Joined
Coldplay	589,896	92 days ago
Stephen Fry	432,118	274 days ago
Neil Gaiman	253,172	103 days ago
Russell Brand	242,800	69 days ago
Jonathan Ross	216,805	136 days ago
Imogen Heap	192,782	360 days ago
Richard Bacon	181,507	89 days ago
Lily Allen	152,129	75 days ago
Phillip Schofield	145,086	93 days ago
John Cleese	144,102	1.2 years ago
Chris Moyles	134,970	72 days ago
Alan Carr	116,929	292 days ago
Fearne Cotton	93,657	74 days ago
Jimmy Carr	90,149	173 days ago
Richard Branson	85,277	246 days ago
Holly Willoughby	56,655	66 days ago
Andi Peters	48,853	72 days ago
Alan Davies	46,850	70 days ago
David Mitchell	46,637	92 days ago
Rob Brydon	39,088	88 days ago

Wisdom of crowds says Liverpool will beat Fulham

2009-04-03T10:49:53Z

The Guardian has been running a regular feature where readers choose a bet on a sporting event and compete against a betting expert and a former sportsman. This week for instance you can choose a bet for Fulham vs Liverpool on Saturday (with the people opting for a Liverpool win).

The running total is a nice illustration of the wisdom of crowds - each week a £10 bet is placed, and the results so far this season are:

The former pro - betting kitty £166

The expert - betting kitty £143.25

The people - betting kitty £186.59

So the people - voting each week for their preferred bet - are comfortably ahead.

Of course the really wise thing would be to not bet at all - by my reckoning there have been about 30 £10 bets placed this season, which puts all three groups comfortably in loss making territory.

Update: By the way, the crowds got it right once more – Liverpool won one – nil with a goal in the 92nd minute. The ‘expert’ was spectacularly wrong, with a prediction that Liverpool would score in the first ten minutes of the game.

Twitter UK celebrity chart – 2nd April

2009-04-02T14:44:00Z

As I predicted a couple of weeks ago, Stephen Fry has at long last been overtaken at the top of the UK celebrity twitter chart by Coldplay.

We also have two new entries into the top five – Russell Brand eases into fourth place and Neil Gaiman has added almost 100,000 followers in a couple of weeks to get to fourth place.

Neil Gaiman is the only author in the top twenty, which is a bit of a surprise – good to see that his career has survived the dreadful job I made of editing his very first book!

Another big mover is Richard Bacon who has added 50,000 followers in the past two weeks – I set up a Twitter account a couple of days ago and he was one of the suggested people to follow, along with Al Gore, Perez Hilton and Miley Cyrus, so that might explain his sudden leap in popularity.

Celeb	Followers	Joined
Coldplay	425,408	74 days ago
Stephen Fry	370,110	256 days ago
Jonathan Ross	183,898	118 days ago
Russell Brand	162,989	51 days ago
Neil Gaiman	142,566	85 days ago
Phillip Schofield	126,877	75 days ago
John Cleese	126,297	1.2 years ago
Chris Moyles	115,223	54 days ago
Lily Allen	112,268	57 days ago
Alan Carr	94,473	274 days ago
Richard Bacon	80,833	71 days ago
Jimmy Carr	74,917	155 days ago
Richard Branson	71,634	228 days ago
Fearne Cotton	69,617	56 days ago
Andi Peters	43,608	54 days ago
Holly Willoughby	42,708	48 days ago
Alan Davies	41,026	52 days ago
David Mitchell	37,887	74 days ago
Rob Brydon	33,302	70 days ago
Charlie Brooker	30,466	64 days ago

Zappos – happiness in a box

2009-03-16T18:34:23Z

I had heard about Zappos and their relentless pursuit of customer satisfaction, but hearing their founder Tony Hsieh speak at SXSW really brought the message home to me.

OK, so there’s the five week training course that all employees have to go through before starting work. Then there’s the $2,000 dollar ‘reward’ you get at any point during training if you decide that Zappos isn’t for you. Then there’s the insistence on cultural fit as well as talent – Zappos will turn someone down with excellent skills rather than compromise on someone that they don’t feel will fit in.

But I rather liked their interest in happiness as a goal. They like to talk about Zappos delivering “happiness in a box” – but they have clearly gone beyond sloganeering and thought hard about the science behind happiness. So one simple example – they split their promotion process into six six month modules, simply because they felt that giving their employees a regular indication of progress would make them happier.

Some great slogans as well – particularly: “Don’t chase the paper, chase the dream”, which if memory serves is Puff Daddy!

And I liked a quote of Al Gore (quoting an African proverb I think):

“If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”

Twitter UK celebrity chart – 14th March

2009-03-14T13:27:00Z

Bit late this week – my bad, got caught up in travelling to SXSW. My plan is to automate this chart and leave it to run itself, watch this space :-)

Stephen Fry powering away beyond the 300k mark, but I still think that Coldplay will overtake him in a couple of weeks. It’s also interesting to see Lily Allen now firmly in the top ten – she was of course an original poster child of Myspace, but I wonder if she is now putting more effort into Twitter.

Celeb	Followers	Joined
Stephen Fry	301,188	239 days ago
Coldplay	253,474	57 days ago
Jonathan Ross	145,009	101 days ago
Phillip Schofield	106,344	58 days ago
John Cleese	102,956	1.2 years ago
Russell Brand	101,522	34 days ago
Chris Moyles	91,989	37 days ago
Lily Allen	77,797	40 days ago
Alan Carr	73,312	257 days ago
Richard Branson	53,976	211 days
Jimmy Carr	53,302	138 days ago
Fearne Cotton	50,624	39 days ago
Neil Gaiman	46,063	68 days ago
Andi Peters	37,722	37 days ago
Alan Davies	32,907	35 days ago
Holly Willoughby	31,765	31 days ago
David Mitchell	27,357	57 days ago
Charlie Brooker	24,862	47 days ago
Rob Brydon	24,250	53 days ago
Richard Bacon	23,027	64 days ago

Invasion of the aggregators

2009-03-12T06:32:29Z

I’ve published my slides from a presentation I gave yesterday at the Financial Services Forum looking at the impact of insurance aggregators from a search/media perspective.

Most surprising thing for me was the rise in searches for the term “compare car insurance” alongside a down trend for “cheap car insurance”. The rise of aggregators like Go Compare really seems to have changed searching behaviour.

Invasion of the Aggregators

View more presentations from Mike Teasdale.