Nobody clicks on an ad to buy a car; but that is exactly what many (most – let’s be real) brand advertisers and agencies demand in terms of campaign performance – to justify renewals.
We all go to conferences, read the industry reports all discounting the value of the click as a good campaign performance metric; but in the end the click wins.
Without a conversion event; most all campaigns are evaluated through the prism of the click – simply because we don’t have anything else to easily measure. But nobody clicks on an auto ad to buy a car – the attribution model is broken.
The following Auto ads (screenshot) ran a few weeks back on my CelebrityMilkshake.com site powered by Google AdSense. There was thumbs up / thumbs down voting built into the ads.
Could a valid attribution model be as easy as thumbs up / thumbs down? Think about it (Google is); could something this simple help validate brand campaign performance?
Have you ever wondered why sites like Pandora.com seam to know who you are – even if you deleted your browser cookies recently?
Up to 100k, difficult to find, non transparent, non expiring, not cleared by any browser “Clear / Delete Cookie” functions – Flash Cookies are oh so very sweet for collecting data – so much better than plain old browser based Cookies.
I have heard the stories of ADNETS using Flash to re-spawn browser cookies when a user deletes their browser Cookies; but I had no idea just how many sites are using Flash Cookies for tracking.
Viewing my own Flash cookies (hundreds of entries) I identified no less than a dozen ADNET’s, ad servers, and online marketer cookies. My bank is even using them – they don’t even have flash on their site… Check Your Flash Cookies yourself…
I started reading Shoptimism by Lee Eisenberg a few days ago. I have only gotten through 50 pages – but so far it’s an interesting read on consumer marketing. An early section on the work of Vance Packard and his exploration (in the 1950′s) of consumer motivational research by social scientist working for advertising agencies reminded me of an incredibly insightful (and somewhat frightening) PBS FrontLine documentary on the same topic. If you have not seen The Persuaders – it’s mandatory viewing for anyone interested in advertising and if your not living off the grid on some atoll in the South Pacific you should be interested in advertising right now.
With respect to Online Advertising check out the narrowcasting section and how marketers and political parties have been working with data vendors (Axiom in this case) to customize their packaging / messaging for every consumer segment – with all the recent talk in the ad industry about customization, personalization, the consumer in charge; makes you think.
An interesting thing happens on Yahoo Video when you disable the safe search function and search on “adult” type keywords. Porn videos and adjacent Brand Ads from multiple AdNets. Advertisers and AdNets beware of cheap inventory, you may just be getting what you pay for.
It looks like Oprah and Dr. Oz want their cut of belly fat ad revenue….. You know the ones you contacted your support rep at all the adnets to block form your site.
Hopefully Oprah and Dr. Oz will NOT go after the AdNets (most all of them ran some variation of this campaign) that facilitated these ads running on pretty much every website on the interwebs January – March 2009.
As of 8/20 there are no more Oprah endorsed Belly Fat Ads on MSNBC – but Rachael Ray is still fair game I guess.
Update: Adotas has a good article with more details here..
It appears brand ads running on inappropriate content is not limited to the traditional banner ad networks and in-page ad units.
Keeping with my theme of picking on Ad Networks and Publishers; here is an example of premium HGTV ads running embedded in Vidilife’s soft core porn video content. From the URL in the screenshot these video ads are being served through YuMeNetworks.com.
