Tag Archives: digital

Next to Now: Sept 16

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MIC REIMAGINES SPONSORED POSTS

The Wall Street Journal reports on how the millennial news platform .Mic is rethinking video sponsorship. Mic is allowing advertisers to sponsor their highly popular videos on Facebook:

“Instead of selling…ads based on content genre or audience demographics, Mic is putting its editorial videos into categories, such as clips that elicit emotions or videos that celebrate innovation—two popular genres that typically incite people to share, and letting advertisers run ads next to these types of videos.”

While this kind of sponsorship is not useful for any book that needs time to tell its story, it could be very interesting for a book with immediate appeal to millennials with a high education and relatively high HHI.

#mic #facebook #news

 

GOOGLE DISPLAY BENCHMARKS

Have you played around with Google’s Display Ad benchmark tool recently? It can be very useful for setting expectations. Click-through rates seem to be going down across the board. If you set it for U.S. Book ads, the display CTRs range from .04-.6% depending on the size. Mobile only sizes such as 320×50 fare a little better with a .18% CTR. While this is certainly the case for the industry as a whole, Verso’s own click-through rates continue to beat industry averages—ranging from about .10% for desktop to twice that for mobile.

#CTR #Google #data #benchmarks

 

OUT OF HOME GAINS AN EDGE WITH DIGITAL

Long a staple of advertising plans for all manner of products, out-of-home advertising has gained a new edge with digital billboards. Digital capabilities mean advertisers can move much more quickly on campaigns instead of having to plan six to eight months ahead for each iteration. As CMO magazine puts it:

“The integration of data and technology means advertisers can tap into OOH like never before. ‘And it’s really shifting into bringing back the things that digital has kind of lost–the sensory experiences, feelings, and interactions.'”

There’s a reason spending on out of home advertising continues to grow.

#billboards #OOH #digital

 

ESPN BRINGS LONGFORM SPORTS JOURNALISM TO PODCASTS

As part of IAB’s recent podcast upfronts, ESPN announced that it’s bringing it’s acclaimed 30 for 30 series to podcasts. With in-depth reporting about sports news, 30 for 30 videos appeal to sports fans of a more thoughtful bent . . . which is to say, sports fans who might be inclined to buy books on a subject in an effort to go deeper than in-game color commentary or talk show style chatter.  For book publishers who might not be able to afford a :30 ad on ESPN, running mid-roll on a podcast might be a highly targeted ad solution.

#sports #podcasts #espn

 

Next to Now for July 21

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PREMIUM WEBSITE ADS PERFORM BETTER

A new study from ComScore underlines that ads on premium websites—such as the New York Times, WSJ, and various imprints of Condé Nast and Hearst media—deliver better results than ads on non-premium websites. From the Wall Street Journal article on this report:

“The study, which comScore said analyzed the ad campaigns of 15 large brands across a number of advertiser categories, concluded that ads placed on DCN sites were 67% more effective than non-DCN sites. According to comScore, that difference confirmed that ‘premium sites deliver premium performance.’

“The study also found that premium publisher sites were more effective in driving so-called ‘mid-funnel brand metrics,’ which measure consumer attitudes including favorability, consideration and intent to recommend.

“’The primary driver of this increased effectiveness is the halo effect that comes from the value of the contextual environment in which these ads are seen,” the report concluded. Basically, ads perform better when they appear alongside high-quality content.”

This is a value-proposition inherent in the way ads on premium websites are priced—with CPMs often 2-3x as expensive as non-premium sites—and matches with results we see at Verso. But it’s good to have more data backing up our observations.

Here’s a link to more detail from report from AdWeek. And here’s Niemen Lab’s take on the same study. 

#targeting #data #performance #ripepeachestastebest

 

GOOGLE ADDS NATIVE TO PROGRAMMATIC TOOLS

Google announced that it now can deliver native ads programmatically. The best performing native ads are those that are crafted in the unique voice of a particular website, and that ability is still beyond the reach of Google’s system. But adjusting headline and copy to each website’s particular style is a decent, and more affordable second option.

#native #programmatic #google #everypeachisdifferent

 

PRIME DAY BEYOND AMAZON

Amazon’s Prime Day was discussed (and dissed) as an expression of the company’s power, which it was . . . But that doesn’t mean the news was all bad for smaller retailers who took advantage of the “deal hunting” in the communal air to up their own business. In a study of last year’s Prime Day, BloomReach found that traffic to other retailers was up 21% and conversion improved by an average of 57% as a result of Prime Day. It’s a form of the real estate adage, “location location location.” Put your business where the action is, and use the wind as it is (even if you don’t like the source of the hot air) to power your boat.

#primeday #amazon #local #localpeaches

 

SPONSORED LOCATIONS IN POKEMON GO

You knew this was coming, right? Pokemon Go is introducing “Sponsored Locations,” a new revenue stream for Niantic, the maker of the app, and a good idea for marketers, especially if they’re a bricks and mortar retail store . . . or a company that sells its products there.

#pokemongo #geotargeting #peacheeoto

 

THE END OF LANDSCAPE VIDEO?

After Snapchat has declared the rise of vertical video, a new report suggests square video is not only the format needed for Instagram, it’s also proving to be the best performing format for video on Facebook in several head-to-head tests:

“For the past several months, we have started shooting videos for square crop and posting videos in square crop,” said Jason Stein, founder and CEO of Laundry Service. “We are doing this because in executing the media buys for these videos, we found that view-through rate and engagement rate are much higher on square than landscape videos. This is likely due to the larger amount of real estate that a square video gets in feed.”

#video #creative #uprightpeaches

 

CROWDSOURCED AD DELIVERY

A new company called Wrapify is allowing any car owner to let their car become a trackable, digitally connected, moving billboard. Spotify and PetCo are advertisers who have tested the technology for their own products. Here’s a link to the AdWeek story.

#digital #outdoor #peachesforeveryone

 

Photo: Peaches from Union Sq Greenmarket (c) 2016 Martha Otis

Design Notes: Simplicity Rules

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By Verso’s Creative Team

#f8981d" title="Simplicity" src="http://www.versoadvertising.com/inverso/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/Simplicity.gif" alt="Simplicity" width="600" height="125" srcset="https://www.versoadvertising.com/inverso/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/Simplicity.gif 600w, https://www.versoadvertising.com/inverso/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/Simplicity-300x62.gif 300w" sizes="(max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px" />

In the age of complexity, we respond to simplicity. This is as true for good ad design as it is for services like Google search and products like Apple’s iPhone. But two forces, one a legacy of print and the other from the bleeding edge of technology, are leading to more and more complex ads, and this is not necessarily a good thing. In a recent article in Ad Age, ad-effectiveness researcher Philip Sawyer observes that declining click-through rates in display ads may be stemming from increasingly complex ads.
Part of the problem is that technology allows creative departments to do so much more now than we ever could before. From expanding boxes to in-banner video to data-intensive flash tricks, it’s suddenly affordable—both in ad cost and memory cost—to produce exceedingly fancy digital ads. There’s a natural temptation to use all the tools at your disposal for every ad—as if a banner that uses 100k memory is somehow necessarily better than one that only uses 20k.  But complexity is often the enemy of communication.
But the other reason for the complexity is specific to book publishing’s history of print ads. Everybody in publishing knows that the right review in the right place can sell books. So it’s only natural that most print ads are driven by review copy—often trying to pack as many glowing reviews into a space as possible. This can be a highly successful tactic that takes full advantage of the print medium’s relatively large space and its audience’s long attention span. But that strategy must shift in the digital sphere, where ads run in a busy, ever-changing context, and where viewer attention-spans are wickedly brief.
In 2005, Sawyer was the lead analyst for a series of online-advertising-effectiveness studies that revealed that most advertisers made similar mistakes in creating online ads, almost all of which boil down to one bit of advice: “Keep It Simple.” Revisiting the survey, Sawyer found advertisers making the same mistakes in 2010 that they made in 2005. Here are Sawyer’s 7 deadly sins of digital ads:
1. They are too complex. 2. They take too long to get to the point. 3. They are ambiguous. 4. They are visually bland — or, worse, ugly. 5. They use Flash for the sake of Flash — not for a clear purpose. 6. They are often difficult, if not impossible, to read. 7. They are bereft of benefit statements.
This may explain why we occasionally see quick-and-dirty static .gifs perform better than labor-intensive flash masterpieces. When there is only one panel to work with, it imposes a discipline that fosters simplicity of approach and directness of message. And this is why some of our best performing ads did not feature quotes, but a simple free offer.
The best digital ads get right to the point, whether it’s an offer, a deal, or even if the point is simply “Critics Rave.”  Leave the details for the click through — no matter how great the adjectives nor (especially!) the lengths the reviewer goes to shower praise.

In the age of complexity, we respond to simplicity. This is as true for good ad design as it is for services like Google search and products like Apple’s iPhone. But two forces, one a legacy of print and the other from the bleeding edge of technology, are leading to more and more complex ads, and this is not necessarily a good thing. In a recent article in Ad Age, ad-effectiveness researcher Philip Sawyer observes that declining click-through rates in display ads may be stemming from increasingly complex ads.

Part of the problem is that technology allows creative departments to do so much more now than we ever could before. From expanding boxes to in-banner video to data-intensive Flash tricks, it’s suddenly affordable—both in ad cost and memory cost—to produce exceedingly fancy digital ads. There’s a natural temptation to use all the tools at your disposal for every ad—as if a banner that uses 100k memory is somehow necessarily better than one that only uses 20k. But complexity is often the enemy of communication.

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