AdWonder Blog

Michael Miraflor of Deep Focus has an insightful article on ClickZ today. While I agree with what Michael is saying, I have expanded on them below with the thinking that with the right rich media partner you’ll have a 360 view on your spaceship.

Going through his list, here are my comments on each:

• Prevent sensory overload.  Having the same rich media resized for 2, 3+ other banners running on the same is for the most part a good way to waste your media budget on excessive rich media serving fees. I’ve talked about it before in previous posts (and in conversations if we’ve ever met), but encourage cooperation not competition between rich media banners on the page. If you have a roadblock as part of the buy, why not take advantage of the fact that you know the ads will be served together and have them sync up. Two great examples of syncing the banner and removing the dueling are NG Galapagos - excellent video syncing and only using the 728×90 as the source for subsequent interactivity, and the FedEx Weather the Storm - which is a nice of knowing your placement and provide an engaging and memorable experience about the brand.
• Cap your consumer. This really depends on the campaign and rather than frequency capping the exposures, I would recommend retargeting the user through fine-tuned messaging and especially for longer runs planning creative refreshes to keep the compelling nature of rich media ads available without letting the creative become stale.
• Avoid flammable pages. Page burn is a new term for me, and while I like the phrase, I hate what it means. Check with your account person to have them pull information on placements in the plan or being considered. EyeWonder tracks average brand exposure time and average time before the first interaction. This information can help the media team decide which types of ads to run and help the creative team sharpen the executions with the length of intro animation and when the call to action is available. If users are typically only on Placement X on Site Y for 15 seconds, I would encourage you to display the CTA as soon as possible. In fact, just because the site allows 15 or 30 seconds of animation doesn’t mean you should take advantage of that or at least wait to display the CTA in the last few seconds. In addition to photo albums and slideshows, I would add sign out/in pages.
• Know your folds. EyeWonder will cross-reference the media plan with our spec database and confirm when your ad is below the fold. If you have a placement that is running at the bottom of long-form content, you obviously needn’t worry much about the initial animation and more on an impactful call to action.
• No, your other left. Again, we’ll cross-reference all this information for you, provide you spec matrix and confirm everything with the site. It’s unfortunate when an ad is served on the wrong side, but with EW’s traffic team to confirm the details and advancements in our technology like edge-detection expanding off of the browser’s viewport should become a rarity.
• Dive into metrics. Why wait for the end of the campaign? Take advantage of the real-time metrics available to you and think about ways to tweak the ads for better performance and even tweak the plan by reallocating impressions from underperforming placements to the standouts getting all the ITR, CTR and interaction time love. Post-campaign analysis is super important for the media and creative team. Best practices are there for the taking and doing analysis over several campaigns can provide compelling trends to be shared internally and with your client for future rich media success.

Well, maybe not the death, but the move from the emphasis of the CTR to even beyond the ITR (interaction rate) in measuring engagement and advanced interactivity.

Cam Beck at ChaosScenario has a great post this morning (”Stop What You’re Doing and Read This“) about the ineffectiveness of display advertising as it relates to clickthrough rate urging marketers to stop using the once almighty CTR as a basis for success and begin utilizing the power of display advertising for brand exposure and awareness.

While, I agree with Cam’s take I believe — and have been witness to — display advertising can be used effectively for response driven campaigns. It really is all about knowing what you want to achieve and not losing sight of your goals (sorry to sound like an after school special). Most marketers get this concept as a whole, but sometimes this may be lost in their online initiatives.

If you are trying to get consumers to click through to your site to learn more/sign up/buy/whatever, it is a good idea to stay away from these techniques for failure:

• hide or be vague with the call to action (be clear about what you want the user to do and what they’ll get - Click Here to Print a $5 Coupon works better than just Click Here or Coupon)
• limit the clickable area to just a logo or just the call to action (not all users have laser accuracy with the mouse or are engaged by only the logo/CTA)
• offer loads of interactivity (why would I leave the banner with all this great stuff, tease the user with what they will experience on the site)

There are several more of these that seem like no-brainers and they are! But we have seen these can really be the tipping point for a good campaign to become a great campaign especially for the response driven initiatives where you are measuring conversion in alongside the clicks.

Of course, unleashing the power of rich interactive ads can do wonders for awareness focused projects. We’ve seen amazing results with synced ads and a trend over the last year where smart marketers are realizing the power “dualing” banners versus “dueling” banners.

Last night at the DFWIMA event Geoff Ramsey of eMarketer talked about how back in ‘96 everyone was discussing the importance of impressions and clicks. Even if he said that much of what we say today will be wrong tomorrow (only half jokingly), it’s great to see interaction is becoming a big piece of the equation for measuring success. I’ve seen how looking at the interaction rate and time spent on the page, relative to time before first interaction and total time of interaction can you paint a pretty solid picture of engagement through interactivity.

Cam talks about how most people are not in a sell me something mindset when they visit most publishing websites and the challenge to having users change their intentions of being on that particular page. I’ve talked about this before, but creating an positive ad environment for users is easy if you:

• Engage - don’t enrage
• Interact - don’t interrupt
• Reward - don’t renege

What these mean for your particular brand and campaign is where the fun comes in!

Cam and Geoff both talked about targeting the user, so the ads they see are relevant to them. Targeting, through whatever capacity, in conjunction with smart creative executions can prove to be wildly successful, as long as you know how you are measuring for success.

Just don’t say CTR.

A couple weeks back, I had an article in iMedia about the challenges of unleashing the wonder of rich media. I describe some of the challenges groups face in trying to meet the super tight deadlines, be able to successful manage the execution and launch, and ultimately be able to analyze performance and optimize for further success. The best way to overcome these challenges and end up on top, is of course by partnering with a rich media vendor that has the tools, services and people to have richest possible media that will garner the richest results.

Overall I am pretty happy with how it turned out. Although, I am not sure if it was the pirate themed tenant appreciation lunch today at the EyeWonder headquarters’ building in Atlanta or if it was because I was checking out this ad we did for the recent Pirates video game, but looking back I really wish I had put a pirate twist on the article.

You can read the article, in its entirety, lacking only a peg leg and a parrot, here. Be sure to let me know what you think!

PS: International Talk Like A Pirate Day is less than a month away (September 19th), so start planning!