Longtime ad agency partner Grey Interactive has fallen out of favor with consumer packaged goods behemoth Procter & Gamble Co., the company confirmed Thursday. P&G also is phasing out relationships with WhittmanHart Interactive and Omnicom Group's Targetbase, due to differences in culture and performance expectations. "We looked at performance, systems, and overall cultural fit to determine which agencies we'd be working with in the future," said P&G spokeswoman Robin Schroeder. The shift was first reported Thursday by Advertising Age. While the three agencies that have been delisted from P&G's interactive roster can no longer compete for new accounts or defend accounts in review, each may hold on to their existing accounts, Schroeder said. Norman Lehoullier, managing director of WPP Group's Grey Interactive, said the decision was a letdown, but insisted the 11-year relationship between Grey and P&G is far from over. "I'm a little disappointed that we didn't get on the list this time around," said Lehoullier. "We sailed on the qualitative rounds but stumbled a bit on the financial round ... There's a commoditization of creative going on right now." P&G's cosmetics brand CoverGirl assigned Grey Interactive to a new project just last week, Lehoullier added. WhittmanHart Interactive did not return requests for comment. Members of P&G's reconfigured roster include imc2, WPP's Bridge Worldwide, Omnicom's Critical Mass, Avenue A/Razorfish, Digitas, Havas' Euro RSCG, and Resource Interactive. Another new official member of the P&G Interactive team, independent Digitas, already handles Gillette--which P&G acquired last October in hopes of reaching a larger percentage of males. The changes represent P&G's first major interactive shakeup since 2002, when the product manufacturer slashed its roster from 40 to nine. Less extensive changes have occurred since then, as in June 2005 when Procter & Gamble replaced Bridge Worldwide for Barefoot Advertising to run its Home Made Simple Web site. Home Made Simple, which Bridge Worldwide had launched five years prior, provides tips and information for homemakers, trial offers, and direct sales of new P&G products before they are rolled out nationally. Bridge continues to handle interactive work for several other P&G brands, including a Health Expressions online marketing program for health brands modeled on Home Made Simple. The list also includes several Olay products, Cheer and Charmin, Luvs, and Noxzema, as well as P&G.com and its BrandSaver newspaper coupon insert. The Joy and Bounty brands, which are featured on the Home Made Simple site, remain under Bridge's purview, according to Michael Graham, chief operating officer for Bridge Worldwide. Barefoot oversees Cascade, Dawn, Swiffer, Febreze, and Mr. Clean products on the site.
Google's program to sell print ads in consumer magazines moved forward Thursday, when the search giant closed the bidding in an auction for inventory in 26 magazines. Ellegirl, Motor Trend, and PC World, among others, will learn early next week which marketers won print ads. Jeff Edman--president and CEO of PC World, one of three International Data Group magazines that took part in the pilot--said that the magazine contracted with Google to run three pages of advertising, either all in its next issue, or spread out over three. PC World will have the right to reject any advertisers. He added that Google agreed to refrain from soliciting any advertisers that PC World's own sales team was courting. Edman said that the Google-sold ads are appearing on pages of PC World that would otherwise run house ads. The advertisers that Google offers, Edman said, are likely ones that his magazine sales team might not have been able to reach on their own. "There's a long tail of advertisers that they have a relationship with who could benefit from print advertising, but they don't have agencies, don't have ad departments, don't have creative," he said. "This is a way to help them get exposure through the print media, which otherwise they would not have." Still, Edman acknowledged that Google's growing share of ad revenues poses a potential threat to the magazine industry. "Any of the big search engines are getting a share of ad budgets that could potentially go to PC World magazine or PCWorld.com. On the other hand, they drive a lot of traffic to us, and now the fact that they're doing print ads makes it even better for us."
NBC's Olympics site soared to become the 116th most popular destination on the Web last week, just 10 spots behind the NYTimes.com, according to research firm Hitwise. One reason for the popularity appears to be that NBCOlympics.com posts results in real-time, so visitors to the site can learn the results hours before the competitions are shown on TV. For instance, visitors to the site at around 5 p.m. East Coast time learned that U.S. figure skater Sasha Cohen lost her bid for a gold medal after falling on her first triple lutz. While that information also was available on online news sites, the NBCOlympics.com site also offered slide shows and near-instantaneous blog entries from the Palavela arena filed by 2002 pairs team of Jamie Salé and David Pelletier. With the wealth of content on NBC's site, the average visit for the week ending Feb. 18 was 9 minutes and 29 seconds--more than two minutes longer than the 7 minute, 20 second average for the Hitwise sports category. What's more, NBCOlympics.com drew a far greater market share of visits than CNN's Sports Illustrated site, which ranked 223rd, and Torino 2006, which placed 588th. NBC heavily promoted the Olympics site through a video partnership with Google. The search engine provides a small photo and link to NBCOlympics at the top of search results for Olympic-related keywords, while NBC provided Google Video with pre-game and in-game 15-second previews.
Continuing to expand its original video offerings, About.com added various ad-supported videos to its Health Channel on Wednesday. The query site, owned by The New York Times Company, branched into gadgets and electronics video earlier this month. Curios seeking heath-related stories on the site now have access to short-form videos covering kids' fevers, real facts about bird flu, and understanding the "new food pyramid," among other topics. The videos come loaded with pre-roll advertising. Pfizer's Bengay brand was running ads on Wednesday, and many additional pharmaceutical brands have already signed on, said Mark Westlake, About's sales and marketing senior vice president. The site's health channel has featured sponsors including Aventis, P&G, Neulasta, Zicam, and Lexapro, among others. Dr. Mona Khanna, MD, MPH is one of the health channel's video contributors, while its new gadget-related video is hosted by its resident tech reporter Brett Larson. About introduced video advertising on its site over a year ago with sponsorships by Honda and Black & Decker, among others. Westlake said he expects About's some 500 "guides" to begin contributing video covering over 57,000 topics in the future.
Google this week fleshed out its offer to provide free wireless broadband in San Francisco. The company has partnered with EarthLink to jointly propose a layered system that offers lower-speed WiFi, of up to 300 kilobits per second, for free--and a faster service, one megabit per second, for around $20 a month. The dual-tier model for broadband, with fees based on connection speed, appears to be gaining ground. Jupiter Research analyst Ina Sebastian, who helped author a report about WiFi last year, said it's not unusual for municipalities to arrange for dual-tier WiFi--especially in rural areas, where the same provider might serve homes and businesses. So far, however, few consumers have paid for WiFi access. A Jupiter Research report last year found that 20 percent of online users had connected via WiFi hotspots, but that just 9 percent of online users had paid for the service. Last summer, DSL providers began a big push to roll out tiered service for consumers. SBC Communications and Verizon said they would begin offering broadband service with Yahoo for around $15 a month, but at relatively slow speeds of around 750 kilobits per second.
Last week, MediaPost's Online Publishing Insider column illuminated some reasons why publishers should forego the use of ad networks. But there are a multitude of reasons why publishers have been leveraging--and should continue to leverage--online ad networks. The author's opening statement was 100 percent correct: online ad networks connect online publishers to advertising revenue the publisher would not have otherwise realized. This is why, for instance, many of the country's largest brand advertisers and Fortune 500 companies have been buying media online for years through reputable online ad networks even though they theoretically have the means to do this in-house. These companies realize that ad networks do so much more than provide a blind conduit between content and inventory--they provide the necessary audience reach, technology scalability, targeting capabilities, quality assurance and performance needed to deliver the right message to the right audience and thereby generate maximum ROI for the advertisers, and increased CPMs for the publishers. Audience Reach. It is widely recognized that even the best single-site sales forces sell no more than 40 percent to 50 percent of their ad inventory, which leaves a large portion of their inventory unsold. An ad network with broad audience reach can tap into other sources to find relevant advertisers that match the entire spectrum of the site's audience. For instance, it's not unusual for a site to receive 50 percent of its traffic from outside the United States. If a publisher's sales force only targets U.S. advertisers, it will have difficulty selling ads to reach this audience. How many in-house publishers have the ability to simultaneously sell impressions in Canada, the UK, Germany, France, South Korea, Australia, Spain, and Japan? Scalability. Scalability is another primary reason why publishers turn to ad networks to manage their inventory--they either don't have, or don't want to, support the manpower and technology needed to effectively manage the complexities of the fluctuating online advertising market. Consider that, in order to fill up its inventory at premium CPMs, an average site serving 13 ads per user per day would need to sell ads to more than 300 advertisers, and run schedules every day of the year. Now consider sites that have a higher ad frequency to user ratio of 50, 100 or up to 1,000 ads per user per day--the resources needed become astronomical, more than any publisher could possibly handle. Targeting. Behavioral targeting (BT) is quickly becoming the most respected tool in an online marketer's arsenal, because it enables advertisers to reach their desired audience anywhere within the BT network-- ypically with better results and at a lower cost. And while one could argue that this benefits publishers more by filling otherwise unsold inventory, advertisers don't particularly care how or where the message is delivered, as long as it reaches the desired audience and delivers results. For instance, retargeting, one of the most effective forms of BT, has been shown to increase click-throughs, conversions and sales by reinforcing a marketer's message each time a user returns to a site or travels to other sites within that same BT network. Our extensive studies show that marketers generate 12 times the number of conversions when consumers return to the site as opposed to those who click on an ad during the initial visit. In addition, we've seen a fourfold increase in click-throughs and conversions when marketers employ BT to engage visitors who return to that site or go to other sites within a BT network. Only an ad network of impressive reach and scale, powered by the most current targeting technologies, can produce these types of values for advertisers and publishers. Quality assurance. All ads have a value regardless of a click and an action at a specific moment in time; however it's quite understandable that a publisher would not want to diminish its value by serving ads that its user base would find offensive, or cause media buyers to negotiate lower CPMs based on undesirable or filler content. Clearly, since the Internet bubble burst, there are ad networks out there that are looking to play arbitrage so that they can make the largest profit possible on every piece on inventory that they buy and sell. Publishers need to look at a network's pedigree and capabilities before signing on, including length of time in business, past and present client base, client longevity, revenue-sharing model and the ability to deliver quality through broad audience reach, scalability and audience targeting. Publishers should consider only those ad networks that consistently deliver this level of quality assurance, and are willing to share the risks and rewards as partners. Performance. Borrowing from the old adage of a "tree falling in the woods," if a network runs an ad on a publisher's site and nobody clicks on it, where is the value? Publishers who rely on advertising as a significant portion of their revenue don't have time to wait for people to click through whatever ad appeared next in the general rotation. Instead, they must continually look for ways to improve operational performance and ROI. Ad networks can enhance a publisher's profitability by streamlining campaign management and increasing the CPMs of lower-tier inventory, which can free up the sales force to pursue premium CPMs for their top-tier inventory. The bottom line is that reputable ad networks provide value-added services that are well above and beyond what most advertisers and publishers could possibly achieve on their own. I don't know of many organizations that could absorb all of the technology and personnel costs necessary to effectively manage multi-faceted, global online advertising operations and still generate a profit. Ad networks with a broad reach, scalable technologies and proven methodologies can deliver significant results for advertisers and publishers, and will continue to do so as networks continue to drive innovation in ad delivery, analytics and behavioral targeting technologies.