Taking attention-seeking to a whole new level, rich media company EyeWonder on Wednesday debuted a new home page-takeover ad that appears to manipulate a surrounding Web page by shrinking, stretching, crumpling or otherwise animating a real-time screenshot of the page.

MediaPost Publications EyeWonder Takes Takeovers To Another Level 07/09/2009

Whatever it takes to get noticed…

Social media consultants writing about social media have inherent biases. It’s difficult to take posts like this about social media seriously, as it’s written by someone from a social media consulting firm without an ounce of humility or perspective. It’s hard to come across as authentic if you promote a revolution that you personally stand to benefit the most from. Much writing about social media is PR people writing about the importance of PR – see a problem of authenticity here? When did PR, like advertisers, become a reliable source for what is authentic? How is SEO optimization, or similiar techniques for twitter, authentic? When a system becomes popular the greedy will game it and social media is no different. We should be worried when people with PR and advertising backgrounds or consulting firms are leading us in the ways of authenticity or integrity.

scottberkun.com » Calling bullshit on social media

Awesome write-up by Scott Berkun, covering much more than this one "consultants" point. Quoting because it has been my pet peeve for a while now. 

# 1) The Click Isn’t Everything - Currently, rich media CTRs average about 0.1%, with entertainment sites having the highest CTRs at 0.17% and Fin. Services having the lowest at 0.06%. Also, 80% of display ad clicks come from less than 20% of the Internet population, indicating that clicks are not necessarily as relevant to brand advertisers.

# 2) Display Impacts Search 4 Weeks After Exposure - According to comScore’s analysis, there was more than a 50% lift in ‘Net users conducting a query on a brand term one week after exposure to the display ad. After four weeks, the lift was around 38%, which is still significant. Indeed, a month after viewing the ad, 30% of ‘Net users actually visited the advertiser’s site.

# 3) Branded Display Improves Advertiser Site Engagement - Those who viewed a branded ad in this study spent around 34 minutes per unique visitor on the advertiser’s site, which was a 55% lift in time spent vs. the 22 average minutes per unique when they were not shown the ad.

# 4) Branded Ad Campaigns Improve eCommerce Spend By An Average Of 7% - When comparing the users who were exposed to the branded ads vs. those not exposed, comScore found a 7% lift in average eCommerce spend per ad site visitor. Specifically, travel spend was 9% higher among exposed users, CPG spend was 14% higher, and consumer electronics was 22% higher.

Hey, Online Display Ads Don’t Suck After All!

The 7% eCommerce lift is especially interesting. 

The Online Publishers Association announced Tuesday that 37 of its members, whose sites reach 68% of the total U.S. Internet audience, have begun offering the three new larger new ad units the group unveiled in March. Several — including The New York Times, CNN and MSNBC.com — are already running, or will soon launch, campaigns for brands such as Bank of America and Mercedes-Benz.

MediaPost Publications 37 Sites Ready To Implement OPA’s Bigger, Badder Ad Formats 06/30/2009

I know this is a recurring theme of mine, but this is a great development to see. No amount of data and targeting will help you if the ads aren’t even noticed in the first place. And there are two ways for them to get noticed: 1) Make them bigger; and 2) Make them indistinguishable from main content. 

Certain advertisers insist on targeting ads only to people using Microsoft’s Internet Explorer—and not to those using Google’s Chrome or Firefox. The reason? IE users click more on ads.

Advertisers target Microsoft browser - BusinessWeek

Fascinating, this. Let’s say you’re a CPG company selling soap. Let’s say that IE users click more on your soap ads. Given that Firefox users use just as much soap as IE users, is targeting IE the right thing to do? 

Either you determine that Firefox users do not react to advertising, in which case it’s not worth to waste ad spend on them, OR that click is not the right metric to measure success of display advertising. 

Guess which decision is easier to make? 

And what if Kentucky internet users click on ads more? Or internet users who surf from 4AM to 5AM? 

THE BEST-INFORMED PERSON I EVER KNEW was a friend of my grandfather’s back in the Bronx, where I grew up. Every morning of every day of his life, this elderly man — his name, as I recall, was Boris — would dress impeccably in a suit and waistcoat and shuffle to the public library, where more than a dozen of the day’s local and out-of-town newspapers were threaded through bamboo poles and hung from racks. One by one, Boris would read them all, front to back; at dusk, he would walk home alone. This daily pilgrimage was conducted with ecclesiastic solemnity, a quiet, dignified homage to the majesty of knowledge. Even as a little boy, in that intuitive if primitive way that children comprehend important things, I understood the fundamental truth that Boris was, in some clear but compelling way, a douche bag.

Shift Market

Reblogging myself here, but this is the single best excerpt from a newspaper article I’ve ever read, and I catch myself thinking about this once in a while. 

The number of people who are like Boris grows exponentially thanks to the internet. What’s worse, some of them actually have a lot of success and public recognition based solely on library knowledge of things — anything from "startup culture" to venture capital, to …anything, really.

As I grow older I realize that to really, really know something you need to do it. You don’t become an expert by reading about things, you become an expert by doing things. 

Reading Fred Wilson does not make you a startup or VC expert. Reading Seth Godin and thinking about marketing doesn’t make you a marketing expert. And so on. If all you do is read, you’re a Boris.

Everything is much, much more complicated than it may seem from blog posts. Sorry. It’s experiences that bring the kind of tacit knowledge that make you an expert.

We’ve seen this trend as well. As much as data can be valuable, clients — people — have trouble trusting algorithms. That is why media buyers are still media buyers and not audience buyers.

And a media buyer with experience probably has already been burned by ad networks claiming unsubstatiated behavioral something or other.

Several other Web publishers, particularly in social media — including Facebook and Digg — are moving away from a reliance on typical display ads and pricing methods as the linchpins of their ad efforts. Instead, they’re rolling out unique units and pricing systems, betting advertisers will find custom campaigns worth the extra time and effort.

Thinking Beyond the Online Banner

This trend is accelerating - not only are smaller publishers and ad networks launching their own ad formats and pricing models, but they also take on the production work required to adapt agencies’ creative. 

P.S. Although the title of the article is "Thinking Beyond the Online Banner", I was still greeted by AdWeek.com with a nice bigbox interstitial. 

Survey-based measurement, while it has its own flaws, is one of the staples of advertising measurement, and one that is little known or understood outside of the agency/advertiser circles.

Lucky you, dear readers, for Chen Wang writes a long overview of the techniques and methodologies over at MediaPost which is well worth a read. Keep in mind that the magic really happens when you combine multiple measurement sources and methodologies. The insight of mashing up site analytics, ad server analytics and survey-based measurement is often overlooked but always appreciated when properly executed.

It’s a toy. Express your vision of color. Etc.

Hear that? That’s the sound of thousands of clicks by agency planners checking it out — to figure out how to keep on selling minisites.