SuperBowl ads are coming

The Super Bowl is this Sunday, which was the perfect topic for my VideoInsider article this week.  Here are a few additional thoughts to share regarding advertising during the upcoming game.

InfoUSA (which is a sales-lead database business), has purchased two or three spots to promote salesgenie.com.  At a media cost of $5-$7.5 million, not to mention another $1 million for production, InfoUSA is spending a reported 25% of their yearly marketing budget on this one event.  Vin Gupta is the CEO and apparent architect of the ads, including the copy.  If you have ever flipped through different direct marketing publications, you will have probably seen Vin promoting the business through half and full page ads.   

Dell has one spot in the game, which surprisingly makes them a first time Super Bowl advertiser. The ad will reportedly feature Brad Pitt and will include a tie-in to the Red Campaign, which helps women and children affected by HIV/AIDs in Africa. 

And as usual, GoDaddy wins the award for most controversial.  For a sneak peak at the ad, which was rejected by Fox, yet will be available online at GoDaddy.com come game day, you can visit https://www.godaddy.com/gdshop/media/lounge.asp?isc=biggame08&ci=11206.

No ads for Oscar

I am not much of an awards show fan, but I decided to check out the live stream of the Oscars Nomination and Announcement Show.  I was expecting to see ad placements in or around the player, but there was nothing, not even a sponsor logo.  At a reported price of $1.5mm for a 30-second spot, I would have expected ABC to try to monetize or at least bonus some web exposure for their sponsors.  To see for yourself check out www.oscars.com

Presidential Hopefuls Not Voting for Online Advertising

Well, we have four primaries down, and Nevada scheduled for this coming Saturday.  I was holding out a little bit of hope that we might see an increase in online ad spending but that still has yet to happen.  Josh Chaffin with the Financial Times wrote last week and pegged the political online ad spend forecast at $30m – less than 1% of the television forecast.  For comparison sake, online is forecast to be $21.5b in 2008 vs. TV at $78b, putting online at a 27% of TV*.

I had someone on the team pull AdRelevance to see what impression levels the candidates were at for the week of 1/7.

Candidate	Campaign Name	Impressions
Hillary Clinton	None	None
Barrack Obama	Obama for President	675,000
John Edwards	Edwards for President	0
Rudy Giuliani	None	None
John McCain	John McCain	168,000
Mike Huckabee	Mike Huckabee for President	5,000
Ron Paul	Ron Paul 2008 PPC	29,000

With nearly half the states holding primaries on February 5th, there is still a chance we may see a big online push, although I would have expected that to happen by now.

*Reference -  Jack Meyers Media Business Report

A few thoughts on Publisher ad networks

Below is the text of an article I wrote for imedia just recently on publisher networks. 

In early fall of 2007, much of iMedia's commentary on the ad network space focused on the battle between ValueClick and Advertising.com and whether or not folks should use more than one ad network. The consensus from across the industry was a resounding yes, which is a good segue into a new trend that seems to be emerging -- the launch of the publisher ad network.

So while everyone outside of Advertising.com agrees that you need to use more than one ad network, I think some publishers have taken that sentiment a little too far. In the past few weeks, Martha Stewart Omnimedia announced that it is launching an ad network to complement its vertical inventory; additionally, a newspaper consortium of Cox, Tribune, Gannett and others has all but announced it is launching a newspaper ad network to compete with the Yahoo group formed late last year. (For some perspective on this announcement, check out a 1998 BusinessWeek article on the New Century Network, formed by newspapers nearly 12 years ago. If you haven't heard of this group, it's no surprise: the operation had already disbanded by the time the article appeared.)

Lastly a rumor is floating around that Fox Interactive Media (FIM) is planning to launch an ad network. FIM certainly brings tremendous scale to the table with all its properties, but I do not think media buyers are going to be too enthusiastic about running ads across a network consisting of MySpace and Fox News inventory.

Networks today are driving about 15 percent (rough estimate) of the display marketplace. Publishers are trying to figure out how they can capture some of these dollars, which is understandable. However, at the end of the day, these organizations are so much better at focusing on their strength of owned and operated sites than trying to partner with lots of third-party content providers.

When I worked at About.com in the late 1990s, one of the ideas that emerged was the Luna Network. The goal was to bring additional reach to About's specific guidesites, like Pregnancy, Italian Cooking and Computer Networking. By having more inventory, the sales team could garner more budget from advertisers. While this idea looks great on paper, it actually achieved limited success because the About.com inventory is so much more valuable than the inventory from these second- and third-tier sites. How do you price these other sites, manage the inventory and give the advertiser the results they need while managing your publishers? The network business is frankly more complicated and involves more moving pieces than I think many outsiders realize, especially publishers.

One of the reasons networks are so effective is because they employ a more innovative, hands-on approach to campaign set up, management and optimization. Clients also expect more from a network than a publisher, such as various levels of targeting that go beyond what many publishers can currently offer.

The network consolidation we have been seeing in the marketplace continues to be a good development. Long term, the industry cannot support hundreds of players with such similar offerings. Having new networks launch is not a step forward in the goal of making the network landscape more effective for advertisers. I watch with interest to see who will emerge next and how these publisher networks will take shape, although I remain skeptical on what, if any, success they will achieve.

Analyzing the proposed FTC privacy principles

As promised last week, here are a few thoughts on the principles the FTC is proposing. To read the complete text of what the FTC is proposing you can visit: http://www.ftc.gov/os/2007/12/P859900stmt.pdf. Of the four principles proposed, I still have the most concern regarding the first, which says:

“Interested parties cite the need for greater transparency and consumer control to address the privacy issues raised by behavioral advertising. Many criticize existing disclosures as difficult to understand, inaccessible, and overly technical and long. They also stated that, with clearer disclosures, consumers can make more informed decisions about whether or not they want personalized advertising or, alternatively, whether they would prefer not to do business at particular websites. At the same time, panelists recognized that many consumers do not read privacy policies and raised a genuine question about consumers’willingness and ability to read and understand long disclosures about privacy.”

My question when I was at the FTC Town Hall and continues to be is; how do you do this? If we are talking about turning privacy policies, which are currently confusing legal documents into more straight forward speak (Yahoo does a good job of this), then I’m all for it. But, if this is about going beyond that, including executing an online advertising campaign to teach consumers about behavioral, it is not a good spend of time, as I doubt the results will be there.

The rest of the principles seem relatively harmless and easy enough to implement. The fourth principle talks about sensitive data and the role that it plays in behavioral targeting. I believe that you draw a line and not use medical data or searches, nor will you knowingly target children with these practices. I think if someone is looking for medical information on cancer or diabetes the last thing they need is to receive follow up messaging weeks later. And while I think behavioral targeting can be effective and valuable for users of all ages, implementing a policy which forbids advertisers from knowingly targeting a young age group seems to be a logical compromise.

Getting Back to Work

I hope everyone had a great New Year and holiday season.  I took a little break from the blog but plan to get it going again next week. 

One thing I have been spending time looking at and plan to comment on are the FTC ‘principles’ which were unveiled on December 20th.  The abridged version of what the FTC proposed is available at  http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2007/12/principles.shtm