Firetop

For me the biggest problem with selling online advertising at a decent profit is time because, as we all know, time is money. Sales people, ad traffickers and senior management time is an overhead that publishers could do without when selling online campaigns. Unfortunately all three groups of people usually need to be involved from liaising with media buyers, trafficking ad creatives, providing reports and analysing yields. With the long tail of niche micro campaigns to monetise, publishers are struggling to get their heads around the most profitable way forward, especially given their inherited print workflows – free of the metrics headache. (more…)

2007 seems to have been the year of web stats comparison questions for me. I don’t remember a previous year where so many people asked me which of their web statistics data tools was telling the truth. The main issue is that whether you’re looking at a logfile analysis report from WebTrends, or a client-side tracker like Google Analytics, both are correct in their own way – you just have to understand their methodologies. The main difference is that logfiles track all server activity – from browser based surfing to Googlebot visits and non HTML file downloads (PDFs), client-side scripts only run for browsers used by real people viewing HTML pages. (more…)

Having just read an article in Advertising Age entitled ‘How Google Has Helped Build Brand Advertising Online‘ I think it’s worth pointing out that Google has also helped to do the exact opposite. I’m not disputing Tim Armstrong’s description of how ‘Saturn’ used Google Earth and Google Video to let people find dealerships and view product videos… but lets be realistic - how many cutting edge campaigns have we really seen like that recently? Instead what we have is a mass market of long tail niche advertisers, who have often been introduced to web advertising for the first time via Google Adwords… and now obsess over click rates and measurable RoI. It’s hitting everything from the Yellow Pages to standard banner advertising. (more…)

It first got my attention a few weeks ago, there on an advert at King’s Cross tube station were Mark and Jeremy from Channel Four’s ’Peep Show’ - Mark claiming to be a PC and Jeremy an Apple Mac. Then I opened the Metro newspaper and there they were again on a double page spread. Actors David Mitchell & Robert Webb have sold their souls to Apple to help kill the PC with a UK equivalent of a campaign already run in the US and Japan. At first I wasn’t sure if Apple aligning their brand with a good for nothing, lazy, pot smoking lay-about ‘Jeremy’ was a positive thing, but now, having seen the Mac vs. PC adverts online I think it’s a move of genius (whether they were deliberately aligning with character Jeremy rather than actor Robert Webb I’m not 100% certain). (more…)

As we moved into 2007, Forrester Research identified that 81% of broadband users now have pop-up blocking software installed. According to the National Statistics Office, UK broadband users account for more than 73% of the UK’s Internet audience. With such information available it’s fairly safe to assume that next to nobody will see a pop-up campaign on screen. The continual demise of the traditional pop-up advert has surely reached its climax; pop-ups are beyond terminally ill, they’ve flatlined and there’ll be no resuscitation. (more…)

Mozilla Firefox is clearly the largest rival to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser; my own recent analysis put its use at 22% of the 3.5 million audience I sampled (up 2% on January 06). However, whilst popular with web users the browser is not making the life of online advertisers (or ad operations staff) any easier. Firefox is Adobe Flash enabled, but only enabled for standard in-page units such as a 728×90 leaderboard or 160×600 skyscraper. Anything that I class ‘enhanced’ rich media’ such as an ‘expand on mouse-over’ format will malfunction. (more…)

On Thursday I attended the second AdMonsters Operations Leadership Forum at Café Royal on Regent Street. Admonsters brings together the publishers and agencies involved in online advertising production & operations.  Discussion and debate focuses on the issues affecting the global industry and ad trafficking processes. Attendees included members from the IAB and ABC Electronic, publishers like FT.com, CondeNast, Sky TV, MySpace and Yahoo!, agencies like Mindshare and Zed Media plus vendors / sponsors Doubleclick and Mediaplex. The biggest issues discussed at this event included streaming video standards and website auditing and demographic analysis. (more…)

This afternoon I had an online demonstration of Nielsen’s AdRelevance tool, an online reporting interface which enables the subscriber to see which advertisers are running banners across the major media websites. AdRelevance reports show where banners are running, flight durations and stores examples of the creative. From an online ad sales perspective this is wonderful stuff. Auto-triggered email alerts can dispatch emails displaying the latest campaign details from competing websites, enabling a sales person to contact the relevant marketing manager about running a similar campaign on their own network. However, one thing was pretty clear - AdRelevance is generating false clicks on banners when it retrieves creative and URL information, not good news for advertisers. (more…)

According to a new report by the European Interactive Advertising Association (EIAA), there has finally been a marked consolidation in online ad formats used across European websites. Six formats now represent approximately 85% of all display ad impressions delivered - which makes life for online marketers and designers a lot easier! (more…)

I often blog something which I know will go over the heads of those who aren’t familiar with online advertising. However, I know that when I can’t easily find the answer to a question I have, it helps a lot of people out there when I blog the answer. So, if you don’t know what a clickTag is, then look away now. If on the other hand you, like me, are trying to get to the bottom of whether the clicktag instruction on Flash banners should be clickTAG, clickTag or clicktag then join the club and read on. (more…)