Is It The Death Or Rebirth Of Digital Advertising?

Editor's Notes

1. Ted McConnell is exec VP-digital for the Advertising Research Foundation recently reported a little experiment he conducted in AdAge: http://adage.com/article/digital/incredible-click-rate/236233/ He and some associates ran six blank ads in three IAB standard sizes, and two colors, white and orange. The average click-through rate across half a million ads served was 0.08%, which would be good for a brand campaign, and so-so for a direct response campaign. When asked half the clickers said they were curious, the other half admitted to a mistaken click. As McConnell admits the experiment is not realistic, after all it was a blank ad, but he states, “At a minimum, the data suggest that if you think a click-through rate of 0.04% is an indication of anything in particular, you might be stone-cold wrong.” So if half the people who click on an ad do so by mistake what does that imply about the value of online advertising? ROI calculations based on click through start to look even more dubious than they do now. And yet we know that the overall effect of an online ad is far greater than immediate behavior would imply.
2. Turkey falls in the bottom half of markets in terms of total video viewing an area dominated by European markets, actually only Japan and South Korea stand out as they fall into some of the lowest consumption globally.
3. Just like it’s important to engage people in the opening seconds, it’s also critical to integrate the brand. Unlike ads on TV, if you don’t feature the brand within the first few seconds of digital video, the brand is unlikely to benefit from any positive impact. These two examples are great examples of intergrating the brand early in the ad without taking away any magic. In the maggi ad, we open up on the brand with them choosing the product to cook with. Begginn is an ad which is effectively a rap specific to the brand combined with humorous close ups of the dog and what he is doing over a day whilst also dribbling and enjoying getting his beggin treats. Beggin opens up with the rap by including the brand name with the brand name also on screen.
4. Finally, we talked about this last year when we looked at video content from 6 seconds to 6 minutes. We said that story telling is of course a great way to engage and ensure key associations can connect to the brand …… but it’s critical the story is told as just the right length. Not too long, not too short for the key elements or intrigue. In an online environment where people can skip, length is even more important. Shorter ads on the whole were far more likely to keep people until the end. The maggi and IGA ads worked well and straight to the point. The Beggin ad which people loved was too long for many. Show: Maggi digital, IGA, and Beggin
5. Our current vision of the future has been played out to us… this feels like the direction we are heading…