AdVantage  Tackling interactive advertising
About this blog

This blog is about online & interactive advertising, new advertising technologies, online video ads, ad networks, web marketing, and more!

We've got a great crew of expert writers, including Andrew Goodman, Chas Edwards, Henry Copeland, Mike Hudack, Steve Olechowski and Ryan & Gillian Carson.

Proven Tips for Improving Your Online Marketing

Sign up for this valuable 3-part series. You can unsubscribe at any time and it's completely free.

:
:
Good advertising blogs

  • adfreak
  • Ad Goodness
  • AdLand
  • AdPulp
  • Adrants
  • Adverblog
  • Ad Age Digital
  • Jeff Jarvis
  • Beyond Madison Ave
  • Bambi
  • B.L. Ochman
  • Digital Axle
  • Digital Examples
  • Duct Tape Marketing
  • Brentter
  • Fast Company
  • Jennifer Slegg
  • Yahoo! Publisher Network
Carson Systems

My Spacers

AdAge discusses ‘What’s the value of a MySpace user letting a brand latch onto his or her page?‘.



Google + Digg?
Apr 16th, 2007 by Ryan Carson

I just something really interesting on Google. I searched for ‘doubleclick’ and I got the below screen.

It looks like Google is experimenting with some sort of direct integration with digg!



Online advertising is a powerful way to reach potential customers. We’ve put together some valuable tips to help you maximize the effectiveness of your online ad campaigns.

In part I, we’ll be focusing on tips for using your interactive advertising budget effectively.

Spending your budget effectively

  1. One of the biggest mistakes advertisers make is to control paid search costs by simply doing less advertising - using a daily budget or by pausing the accounts. ‘Don’t show my ad’ has never been a sound advertising strategy, so don’t think it’s any different online.The best ROI comes from bidding correctly and optimizing all aspects of the campaign, and then maxing out your budgets so you’re exposed to every potential searcher on your terms.Lowered budgets also rob you of valuable data needed to make decisions. Lengthening the timeline on experiments can be more costly than you think. An A/B ad test might require 30 or more sales to be statistically significant. More sophisticated tests might require hundreds of sales to give you conclusive information.

    By Andrew Goodman traffick.com

  2. Make testing part of your budget and an explicit item on your RFP. Too often, campaigns dive into a plan without setting early metrics to determine where to focus resources later in the campaign.By Steve Olechowski feedburner.com
  3. Your media investment should line up with where your customers spend their time. CBS’s Les Moonves brags about rising CPMs for TV advertising as audiences are watching less, http://adage.com/article?article_id=115712. Rising rates against falling ratings is a bad formula for marketers, and for media companies!By Chas Edwards federatedmedia.com
  4. Spend time researching what websites and blogs your competitors regularly advertise on. If it’s working for them, then it’s a good place to start.A great way to do this is by using subscribing to a Technorati watch list (technorati.com/watchlist) for ‘yourcompetitor.com’ (replacing ‘yourcompetitor.com’ with the URL of your competitor’s website).By Ryan Carson FutureOfOnlineAdvertising.com

If you would like to print this article, the PDF version can be found at Proven Tips for Improving Your Online Marketing - Part One

Stay tuned for Part Two!



Marketing’s own Inconvenient Truth?
Apr 10th, 2007 by Greg Stuart

Do you think that Agency and Advertising business is focused on creating effective advertising?

Sure, maybe the direct side is but what about Brand advertising. Based on research against a billion dollars in advertising spending, we found that an extraordinary amount of advertising spending today is wasted. In fact, in our recent book, What Sticks, we estimate that waste to be $112 billion in the U.S. alone. In the 30 studies conducted, we found that 47% of campaigns failed in getting either a motivation or message that mattered to consumers. And that 83% of the media campaigns were seriously sub-optimal. And the real bad news - those projections are based on studies conducted in-house with brands at P&G, Ford, Kraft, J&J, Nestle and two dozen other so called “champions of marketing.”

Why does this happen? Why is this the state of the industry? What can and should be done about? Is this marketing’s own “Inconvenient Truth”?

(Any comments cannot debate whether the research was done correctly, or if the results are legit. The Advertising Research Foundation and a few PhD’s have already validated that.)



AdSense Gets New Look
Apr 10th, 2007 by Gillian Carson

ad format

AdSense gets makeover - well, touch up at least.



The Fat Cats Get Fatter
Apr 10th, 2007 by Gillian Carson

According to a story over on Ad Age Digital the “10 biggest internet players nabbed a whopping 99% of gross online-ad revenue last year“. No shock headlines there but what is shocking is the fact that this figure is up from 95% the year before. If anything, pundits were predicting that spend in online advertising would be spread more evenly now and be a little more about the little guys with big ideas. According to this trend the little guys have a while to wait.



Bob Garfield’s Media Chaos 2.0
Apr 4th, 2007 by Chas Edwards

AdAge’s Bob Garfield paints a picture of today’s media landscape, Chaos Scenario 2.0 he calls it.

Obviously traditional models are under seige …

  • In December 2005, Viacom spun off CBS, the so-called Tiffany Network, lest the broadcast business impede growth and depress shareholder value.
  • Just before Christmas 2005, Time Inc. laid off 100 employees. Just after Christmas, in January 2006, Time Inc. laid off 100 more employees. In April 2006, Time Inc. laid off 250 more employees — the last round of job cuts, the company said. In January, Time Inc. laid off 300 more employees. No wonder. Since 2001, Time Warner’s market capitalization has shrunk to $82 billion from $193 billion.
  • Last fall, ostensibly to promote their new seasons, five broadcast networks bypassed their local affiliates and gave away new programs online.
  • In October 2006, NBC announced a $750 million cost cutback, including 700 jobs and a moratorium on scripted programs in the first hour of prime time.
  • In November 2006, Clear Channel — the boogeyman of media consolidation — sold to private-equity owners and declared that it wants to unload its TV and small-market radio stations. The sale fetched $38 a share. In 2000, the stock sold at $100 a share.
  • The Minneapolis Star Tribune, acquired by McClatchy in 1998 for $1.2 billion, was sold to private investors in December 2006 for $530 million.
  • In 2000, Chicago-based Tribune Co. was valued at $12 billion. It then bought Times-Mirror Co. for more than $8 billion. At this writing, with Tribune Co. for sale as a whole or in part, the value of the merged company is $7.34 billion.
  • YouTube. Two years ago, it — much less Joost and Revver and Brightcove and the online-video industry in general — did not exist.

Yet,

The online space isn’t remotely developed enough — nor will it be anytime soon — to absorb the advertising budgets of the top 100 marketers, to match the reach of traditional media or to fulfill the content desires of the audience…. A collapsing old model. An unconstructed new model. Paralyzed marketers. Disenchanted consumers. It’s all so … chaotic.

Old media clings desperately, perhaps blindly, to failing models and business practices, while — in the process of forging the new models — the digital media innovators want to abandon everything “old media,” the good with the bad. Ad networks, contextual ad-matching bots and auction buying platforms bring much-needed efficiency to cumbersome delivery and transaction systems, but without more human intervention they won’t give brand advertisers the confidence to bring their giant ad budgets online.

Written by Chas Edwards



“Live by SEO, die by SEO”
Apr 2nd, 2007 by Gillian Carson

retire

Hugh MacLeod is not known for his subtlety, so his mini-rant against those who hawk themselves around pertaining to be masters of the new tech advertising phenomenon is peppered with some pretty harsh comments. Here are a few tasters, “Advertising 2.0 does not exist. Marketing 2.0 does not exist,” he spits, “Juicy Fruit? Beyond lame on steroids” he snarks, and my personal Big Brother-esque favourite “Live by SEO, die by SEO.” Sit on that fence Hugh! Read the whole post over at GapingVoid. Agencies please look away now!



Put ads on your blog images
Apr 2nd, 2007 by Gillian Carson

puppy pic with ad

Is there no part of a blog that is sacred anymore? Apparently not! AdBrite has come up with a natty way to slip a quick ad onto your jpegs before you upload them. It’s called BritePic and it’s pure genius!



Advertising in online games?
Apr 2nd, 2007 by Ryan Carson

Adrants has a quick little post on Candystand, a site for mindless one-person games.

If this is any indication of the addiction-inducing nature of simple online games, then we’ll be seeing a lot more advertising dollars spent in this arena.