In what it calls the latest "evolution" of its ad model, Facebook is testing a new set of ads aimed at boosting click-throughs and further tapping into the social graph on behalf of marketers. The first three types of Engagement Ads now in trial let users post comments, become a "fan" of a brand's Facebook Page and send virtual gifts. Within the units, people can also read friends' comments, and see who else is a brand fan or who shared virtual items. All three flavors of Engagement Ads will appear in the new home page placement alongside the News Feed on the right. They will also show up in members' News Feeds as people interact with the ads. The new Engagement Ads build on Facebook's Social Ads, which typically appear in the News Feed and allow marketers to run ads tied to users' actions within the network. This includes actions that people take on branded applications running in Facebook. Within Social Ads, Facebook is also rolling out a new program that would allow marketers to pay to expand the number of friends who learn about a user's interaction with an application. Currently, Facebook uses an algorithm to figure out who among a user's friends would be most interested in learning about a given activity. Under the new plan, marketers would have the option of sending a sponsored notification (marked as such) to all of a members' friends. So if someone used a Fandango app to buy tickets to see "Pineapple Express," Fandango and Sony Pictures could pay to tell all of their friends on Facebook about it. The social network triggered a privacy backlash last year when it launched its Beacon ad program, which notified members about their friends' e-commerce activity outside Facebook. The company revised Beacon to require members' opt-in consent, but the program was the subject of a class action filed only last week. In a briefing Thursday on the new ad initiatives, Tim Kendall, Facebook's director of monetization, said the new Social Ads program would avoid the same privacy problems as Beacon because it only relates to users' activities within Facebook. Even so, Facebook is capping the paid notifications sent to friends at one per day to avoid alienating users with an influx of ads they have no interest in. While the Engagement Ads are expected to formally launch later this year, Facebook has already run a campaign for "Tropic Thunder" allowing users to comment on the film's trailer. Starting in late August, General Mills' Betty Crocker brand will test an image ad with comments and the ability to become a "fan," while Adidas will run a comment ad with video. Over the next 10 weeks, 30 long-standing Facebook advertisers on the social network are expected to trial Engagement Ads, which will eventually expand beyond the initial three flavors. With ads on social networks drawing abysmally low click-through rates, Facebook is counting on the new ad offerings to spark increased viral activity and brand interaction. But much still depends on how marketers use them. "Brands will only succeed with these 'WidgetAds' if they create content that puts community first, lean on new interactions, integrate with other tools, plan for the long haul, and change how they measure success--traditional Internet advertising tactics won't apply," wrote Jeremiah Owyang, a senior analyst At Forrester Research, in a post Thursday on his blog about the Engagement Ads. In regard to the different types, he described comment ads as well-suited to entertainment, auto and apparel brands, "fan" ads for established brands like "Guitar Hero," and virtual gifts "for consumer products, entertainment, and some media." Freddy Laker, director of digital strategy for interactive agency Sapient, acknowledged that some marketers might balk at having potentially negative comments posted within their ads. That's the risk of "conversational" marketing. "It's not for the faint of heart, but it's exactly what we're telling our clients you need to embrace in the social Web," he said. "They're going to make these comments somewhere, so why not just encourage them to build these conversations around your ad?" Facebook's latest ad push comes on the heels of a recent site redesign aimed at reducing clutter and providing users with a simpler, more streamlined experience. Despite the moves, eMarketer earlier this year downgraded its revenue forecast for Facebook to $265 million from $305 million because of the weakening economy and inherent difficulties in advertising on social networks.
Despite a slumping ad market, online ad network Turn has managed to secure another significant round of funding to the tune of $15 million. Turn plans to use the funds to grow its sales and client services. Turn sees itself as a mid-tier ad network, according to Philip Smolin, the company's vice president of product and marketing. "The emergence of this mid-tier is very much what we're seeing," Smolin said. "What the newer platforms--like Turn, or some of the behavioral networks--do is create a business class, mid-tier that exists between the two. The CPMs generated in this middle tier tend to be in range of $1-$4." Led by Focus Ventures, along with past backers, Norwest Venture Partners, Trident Capital, and Shasta Ventures, the San Mateo, Calif.-based Turn has raised a total of $37.5 million. At least in this case, the trend in spending shifts toward ad networks is trumping the broader forces slowing the industry in general, according to Gartner Research analyst Andrew Frank. "Money is still shifting online, and the traditional publishing brands are still unprepared, which means a larger share is going to the ad networks," Frank said. Indeed, ad networks handled nearly 30% of ad sales online in 2007--up from 5% year-over-year, according to a recent study by the Interactive Advertising Bureau. More recently, the volume of ad spending has shifted in the networks' favor from 10% to as much as 30%, according to Frank. This is despite a recent backlash against ad networks by publishers like Dow Jones and ESPN, who felt the networks were corroding the value of premium advertising. It doesn't hurt that Turn is part of a new breed of ad networks offering more transparent and targeted services, Frank added. Turn specializes in so-called "branded response" campaigns for some 500 advertiser clients, which tie their programs directly back to sales. In addition, going beyond behavioral and contextual targeting, Turn uses various criteria to target ads. According to comScore, Turn is the sixteenth-largest ad network--with a potential reach of 93 million users, and was responsible for 1.9 billion ad impressions in July. Turn's more established rivals include AOL's Advertising.com and Microsoft's DrivePM.
Covario unveiled the Search Synergy Score during the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose. It's a new algorithm bundled into its suite of campaign management tools that helps advertisers determine whether concurrent paid and organic search efforts are behaving synergistically, or cannibalizing each other. SiteTuners, on the other hand, rolled out a guaranteed ROI pricing plan for its landing page optimization services. Covario's Search Synergy Score was developed to give enterprise-level marketers a single interface for analyzing their paid and organic search campaigns to ensure that they are working together and not against each other. "Advertisers understand that there's a relationship between the two, and studies have confirmed that there's an impact of paid on organic," said Craig Macdonald, Covario's vice president of marketing and product management. "The challenge--particularly for larger advertisers--is that they have never been able to do anything about it because there aren't really any operating systems that allow them to take advantage of the synergy." Macdonald said that Covario had spent a number of months developing the Search Synergy Score, but recent tests on a number of client accounts had proven that the methodology was ready for release. "We wanted to find out what the incremental benefit of paid search was for organic listings on a keyword by keyword basis," he said. "And we created a single score that identifies scenarios where there's cannibalization, synergy or a neutral effect." Armed with this data, clients can decide whether to shift spend toward the more beneficial keywords and away from the terms that were dragging down their organic campaigns' ROI and effectiveness. Meanwhile, SiteTuners announced new ROI-guaranteed pricing for its landing-page optimization services. The company, a division of San Diego, Calif.-based Epic Sky, Inc., is offering advertisers a pro-rated or full refund if the landing page tests and tweaks do not generate at least a 5% improvement in conversions. SiteTuners sets a fixed price for landing page testing, and guarantees that the new page's conversion rate will improve by a minimum of 5% after optimization. If not, the company will pro-rate its fees and return a portion to the client. And if SiteTuners can't drive any improvement in conversions, the advertiser pays nothing. "Most competitors typically charge high fees or retainers and do not give any guarantees," said SiteTuners President Tim Ash. "We are confident in our ability to deliver results, and are the only major landing page optimization company to offer this Guaranteed ROI- allowing companies to make higher profits with zero financial risk." SiteTuners offers conversion consulting and self-service landing page testing tools, in addition to the optimization services, and has worked with companies like Verizon Wireless, McAfee and Texas Instruments.
Not so long ago, in an effort to catch up to a generation abandoning appointment TV like it was an STD, ABC launched a promotional campaign "to help consumers quickly identify and locate their favorite entertainment and news programming on television and beyond." This, even though Jack Myers' TV guru Ed Martin writes: "But it occurs to me that one broadcast network (ABC) has in the last two or three years become so identified as a destination for cool, smart young adults that it has gone and branded itself without necessarily attempting to do so." "Using a modular icon system that is tied to the ABC logo, the consumer-oriented strategy simplifies navigation at many access points, proving (sic) information to viewers in what has become an increasingly cluttered world of media. This enhancement will give consumers a unique, clear and consistent set of visual tools to help them find new/additional content and information from one platform to the next," says part of a nearly unreadable press release about the promotion that astoundingly attributes a quote to two people simultaneously as if they were singing a duet. OK, so you want to keep Ed stoked, you want to really show the world just how uber-kewl, 21st century-platform-agnostic-surround-the-consumer you've become--what do you do? Have Kate Walsh, Katherine Heigl and Evangeline Lilly enter wet T-shirt contests at spring break parties in Cancun, South Padre Island and Mazatlan, right? You underwrite a global rock concert, right? You hire Michael Tchong to ride naked on a white horse up Sixth Avenue, right? (aaayyyhhh?... best send that one back to committee). No! You buy all of the advertising in that iconoclastic bastion of the rapidly dying dead-tree industry, TV Guide! Yes, by using this mag, with an average reader age of 44.5 and a median household income of a barely-blue-collar $49,466, there is a fair chance you'll reach not a living soul who even knows what a download is or who has a data plan for his mobile phone. Anyone in ABC's Gen X, Y or Z target audience caught by peers reading TV Guide would suffer ignominy on a scale that would make Ugly Betty feel like Carla Bruni. TV Guide--on the blocks in one way or another for the past 10 years, with circulation dropping from a high water mark of 20 million in 1970 to about 3.2 million today--is the poster child of the ravages the new media age has wrought on magazine publishing. It is a product that lends itself to search-based interactivity, if for no other reason than it takes about 20 pages to cover a single's day's cable system listings. There is nothing kewl or hip about TV Guide. It was a magazine for a generation that now lives in wheelchairs or walkers and complains loudly (often to no one in particular) about ailments like it is an Olympic sport. And which still calls it "THE TV Guide." Now, I appreciate that buying 21 ad pages at $188,200 per 4-color page (rate card; which no self-respecting agency has paid any magazine probably in the entire history of publishing) is a statement unto itself. After all, no one has ever done it before in the 55-year epoch of TV Guide. Or perhaps more to the point, the publisher has never allowed a single network to dominate what should be an objective review of broadcast and cable programming. But we live in difficult times--and an ad page is an ad page no matter where you find it, I guess. I imagine it will be quite a stampede at the newsstand when the issues hits this week. That is, if anyone under 50 ever actually goes to a newsstand any more. The story you have just read is an attempt to blend fact and fiction in a manner that provokes thought, and on a good day, merriment. It would be ill-advised to take any of it literally. Take it, rather, with the same humor with which it is intended. Cut and paste or link to it at your own peril.