The Online Publishers Association announced Tuesday that 37 of its members, whose sites reach 68% of the total U.S. Internet audience, have begun offering the three new larger new ad units the group unveiled in March. Several -- including The New York Times, CNN and MSNBC.com -- are already running, or will soon launch, campaigns for brands such as Bank of America and Mercedes-Benz. The rollout follows the OPA's announcement of the new ad formats three months ago as part of an effort to encourage better ad creative and highlight the Internet's potential as a brand advertising medium. The three jumbo-sized ad units are: • The Fixed Panel (336 wide x 700 tall), which remains in view as a user scrolls up or down the page. • The XXL Box (468 x 648), the extra wide side-of-page ad that expands to 936 x 648 and includes page-turn and video capability. • The Pushdown (970 x 418), which opens big to display the ad and then after seven seconds rolls up to the top of the page (collapsing to 970 x 66). An initial group of 24 OPA members including The Times, Forbes and ESPN committed to begin making the new standards available to advertisers by July. More than a dozen other Web publishers have since joined the effort, with the 37 participating sites reaching a combined 132.2 million visitors, according to the OPA. "The real motivation was to provide marketers and agencies with the opportunity to deliver a branded experience directly on the pages of these very rich content sites," said OPA President Pam Horan. Today's announcement comes on the heels of an OPA/comScore study released this month showing that display advertising, especially on OPA sites, helps drive consumer engagement and online spending. This followed a prior OPA study last year indicating that branded content sites have a greater impact on key metrics such as brand favorability and purchase intent than ad networks and portals. Horan said the three months' lead time for implementing the new units was necessary because many publishers had to redesign their Web pages to accommodate the larger formats. In addition to striving to create more attention-grabbing display ads, the initiative is also intended to show fewer ads per page "so the competition for consumer eyeballs is reduced," said Horan. Among the three formats, she noted that the pushdown has proven the most popular so far in terms of adoption because it's the one that requires the least amount of modification to Web pages. Frito-Lay used the pushdown in the second quarter for a campaign on Discovery's PlanetGreen.com and CAN is using it on Bizjournals.com. Bank of America will soon begin to use the unit on CNN.com and Time.com. Cleveland Clinic will run the fixed-panel unit on NYTimes.com starting in mid-July, and Mercedes-Benz in July will employ various OPA units across sites such as NYTimes.com, WSJ.com, Washingtonpost.com, and FoxSports.com in connection with its campaign for the new E-Class Mercedes. Patrick Frend, senior vice president of client engagement for the Mercedes account at Razorfish, said the new units on top sites were a good fit with the campaign. "Being able to own advertising on the page through one effective ad unit instead of multiple smaller ad units allows us to create a more luxurious experience appropriate for a leading brand like Mercedes-Benz," he said. For publishers, it will hopefully also lead to a bigger payoff in keeping or garnering lucrative sponsorship ad deals. Not all of the ad formats are for everyone, however. MSNBC said last month that it won't use the fixed-panel ad because users did not respond well in the past to a similar unit that follows visitors up and down the page. In response to feedback, Horan said the height of the fixed ad was trimmed from 860 pixels to 700. She also noted that the OPA recommends to members that the frequency of the pushdown ad be capped at once per day per page. "We want to stay close to the consumer," she said.
Advertisers and creative designers will soon have more artistic freedom to turn campaigns on Xbox Live into interactive and interconnected experiences reaching far beyond technology for television, Sean Alexander, director at Microsoft's Advertising Business Group, said Monday. Microsoft plans to bring IAB specifications for rich media technologies, including Silverlight, to Xbox Live within the year. It will enable companies to build advertising campaigns that span four screens: desktop, television, mobile phone, and Surface. Microsoft's Surface debuted last year when AT&T and Sheraton released promotions based on the technology. The vision is for agencies to spend less time repurposing creative pieces for multiple platforms, so campaigns can cut across all screens, Alexander says. "We are just starting to scratch the surface of what's possible," he says. "As a marketer, your job is to build an emotional connection with the brand, no matter the platform." Silverlight-powered media on Xbox will have the same appearance as ads seen on a Web browser. Think technology that competes with Flash, only supported by 6 million Silverlight developers worldwide who now have the option to tap a variety of Microsoft tools and technologies and develop marketing campaigns for Xbox. A proof of concept built by the agency Vectorform used content from a J.K. Rowling Harry Potter movie to demonstrate an application at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival 2009. The prototype relied on .Net and Silverlight to run across the four screens. Silverlight helps pop campaigns to bring advertising concepts to life in video ads, rich media, microsites and animation. Today, movie trailers are available in a high-definition (HD) format, but Silverlight will deliver 1080p HD and 5.1 surround sound without discs directly into the Xbox, Alexander says. "You can use that same creative asset on Web sites," he says. "It also makes it easy to integrate with other applications, such as online movie ticketing. For studios, it's all about selling tickets." Agencies can now focus on creative expression rather than the underpinnings of technology, Alexander says. The biggest challenge is to develop the tools and "jump start resources," using Silverlight and other rich media platforms to make the best of them when building campaigns for the Xbox.
While TV broadcasters have the clear edge in online video, they had better establish some sturdy ad formats "while there are still revenues from the traditional business to support the transition to multiplatform," according to new research from media analyst firm Screen Digest. "The next few years will be critical," said Screen Digest analyst Arash Amel. According to the report, the combined dominance of the leading broadcaster-supported platforms will drive the total ad-supported model for the distribution of online entertainment programming, news, sports and events in the U.S. to more than $1.45 billion in revenues by 2013. "With better targeting and increased ad inventory, online TV services could be generating per-viewer revenues comparable to an average TV broadcast viewing in as little as three years," said Amel. However, based on the current online ad strategies implemented, it will account for 2.2% of all U.S. TV ad revenue by 2013, and surely will not be generating enough revenue to offset the $2 billion Amel expects total U.S. TV advertising to have declined during that period. Meanwhile, third-party platforms like YouTube, Joost and other portals -- which have no direct vertical affiliation with major rights holders, nor direct access to premium content rights -- will struggle to aggregate ad-supported movies and TV shows, the report warns. As a result, third-party ad-supported video platforms may have to either diversify into new forms of their own original programming, exit the content aggregation business and offer technology and advertising solutions to the content owners' and broadcasters' own services, or settle on the low-margin business of becoming affiliates of the player-platforms distributed by the content rights holders themselves. Overall, the online Web-based TV services of the four major U.S. TV networks -- ABC Full Episode Player, CBS Audience Network, NBC.com and Fox.com -- together with Hulu, the joint venture between NBC Universal, News Corporation (and more recently Disney), accounted for a combined 53% of an ad-supported US online TV market that generated $448m in revenues last year. According to Amel, the networks have proven their ability to drive audiences to online TV replay services from prime-time schedules, which accounts for the market dominance. This multiplatform approach has been, and will remain, very important to the future relevance of broadcasters to younger demographics and retaining prime position in the online TV space. The key, according to Amel, will be to create an online platform model that retains control of the content while distributing it widely, and meets the audience's changing demands for TV anytime, anywhere. "A successful online entertainment distribution business model is about establishing and maintaining interest in trusted brands and syndicated services that go hand-in-hand with the content, often free at the point of audience consumption," Amel concludes. Notably, while Amel is obviously bullish on free content, the paid market -- driven by the respective hardware ecosystems of various service providers, and high-value sports events -- will grow by 67% to $1.33 billion by 2013.
Frustrated marketers looking for consumer feedback on high bounce rates, abandoned shopping carts, and a host of actions that derail conversions now have a tool that integrates with Google Analytics. Kampyle, a software as a service (SaaS) feedback survey tool, has revamped its dashboard and platform, allowing marketing and customer service departments to drill down and mine data to determine problems that visitors have related to the Web site. Through an application programming interface (API), Kampyle integrates with Google Analytics to provide data on why, say, 249 people abandon shopping carts, Web site traffic slows -- or insight into the reasons why 1,000 unique users suddenly stop visiting the Web site. The tool can suggest that maybe the purchase path isn't intuitive, they can't easily find product information, or the navigation bar and buttons don't work properly. Kampyle allows companies to customize feedback forms that visitors can access from any page on the site. Each time someone submits a brief questionnaire, the company can respond to the customers one-on-one as feedback comes in. Social media and Twitter are lighting a fire under companies to improve customer service. "It lets companies get back to customers before they go to Twitter and talk bad about their service," says Ariel Finkelstein, cofounder and CEO at Kampyle, Ramat Gan, Israel. "The moment a customer gives a company a bad rating or feedback, an email is sent to support, marketing or sales to take care of it straight away." David Smith, CEO at Hostelbookers.com, London, says the tool opened doors to provide better customer service. When HostelBookers.com, London, unveiled a new Web site in March, it was critical to know what customers thought. The site launch went well -- all except for a glitch on the checkout page, which historically has been the most difficult page to monitor consumer sentiment. The problem: A small percentage of customers couldn't book a room. The button to confirm a booking sporadically produced an error, taking the person back to the home page rather than confirming the sale. Smith says the drop in conversion rate alerted the IT folks to the problem, and the feedback through Kampyle indicated when and where the errors occurred. Smith calls the tool a "simple" and "neat little application" that when integrated with Google Analytics becomes a "more powerful tool" that "enhances" customer service. Everyone who makes a comment on the site gets a response from either customer service or the marketing department. Kampyle matched the time people left feedback with a drop in traffic and lull in conversion rate. "The biggest challenge is to get more people to use the tool and comment, but at the same time it qualifies the people who do," Smith says. "You can spend hundreds of thousands of pounds to do everything you need it to do, but this tool is simple and cost-effective." HostelBookers.com supports about 1 million visitors monthly. The site books accommodations for 2,000 destinations by students, backpackers and others looking for budget accommodations. Prior to the API, customers used the Greasemonkey extension for the Firefox browser to integrate data from Google Analytics. Finkelstein says the biggest challenge is determining the data to pull. Kampyle plans to integrate with other companies offering Web analytics and online support, too.
In a rebuff to Hollywood, the U.S. Supreme Court has declined to review a decision allowing Cablevision to go forward with remote-storage digital video recorders. With the move, announced today, the Supreme Court leaves intact a Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruling stating that remote-storage DVRs don't violate copyright law. The decision is in line with a request by the Obama administration, which had asked the Supreme Court to turn down the case. Industry observers were following the case closely because the decision potentially affects many Web-based companies, including those offering digital music lockers, mixtapes, and other cloud storage services. The dispute dates back to 2006, when Cablevision said it intended to offer a remote storage DVR. A coalition of film and TV studios filed suit to stop Cablevision from following through on its plan, arguing that the device would infringe copyright because Cablevision would itself make and store copies of shows. Older products like VCRs -- which were okayed by the Supreme Court 25 years ago -- as well as traditional DVRs, store programs in consumers' homes. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in Cablevision's favor last year. The appellate court found that consumers would be responsible for making the copies, not Cablevision, which was only going to provide the technology. The studios then petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to review the case. When the Justice Department weighed in on the matter, it argued that the service's remote nature should not in itself make the device unlawful. "From the consumer's perspective, respondents' [remote storage DVR] service would offer essentially the same functionality as a VCR or a set-top DVR," the U.S. Solicitor General argued in a brief asking the Supreme Court to reject the appeal. Gigi Sohn, president and co-founder of digital rights group Public Knowledge, cheered the Supreme Court's decision. "From a common-sense point of view, the lower court, and the U.S. Solicitor General, were correct in their interpretation of the copyright law that a recording is a recording, whether done on a set-top box or at the cable head-end, as Cablevision's proposed service allows," she said in a statement.
As marketers put more salt in accountable ad formats, video ad network ScanScout has launched cost-per-engagement video ad unit. Ad engagement is determined by the consumer's actions, either through sustained interaction with the ad unit or via a direct click on the ad. "The CPE pricing model fully unites ScanScout's and its client's interests in creating and targeting the best performing advertising," said Bill Day, CEO of ScanScout. Still, the Boston-based company is hardly the first to offer marketers an alternative to the increasingly antiquated cost-per-click model. Since early last year, for one, rich media purveyor and ad network VideoEgg has offered a cost-per-engagement model that only bills advertisers after users sit through a 3-second countdown, and an expanded ad unit has initiated. To date, data gleaned from test campaigns across ScanScout's network of over 600 sites show an increase in user interaction rate up to 15 times greater than non-CPE ads. Competing against ad technology vendors like YuMe and WorldNow and ad networks like Tremor and AdBrite, ScanScout has pursued an aggressive strategy of industry partnerships with the likes of widget company Clearspring Technologies to expand the reach of its contextual in-video ad technology. Last year, ScanScout became the exclusive domestic provider of in-stream video ads for Web video network Broadband Enterprises, which helped to expand its network five to seven times, to roughly about a billion monthly streams in the U.S. Despite drawing large and highly engaged audiences, social and video-sharing networks have had difficulty making the experiences relevant and brand-safe for marketers. ScanScout has been trying to change that with Brand Protector, a proprietary technology that scans online video content to determine its appropriateness for a particular advertiser's brand. Its technology breaks up a video into tiny segments, which it lumps into ad categories, making sure the piece of content is both ad-friendly and relevant.
Facebook Monday announced that David Ebersman, the former executive vice president and chief financial officer of Genentech, has been named the company's new CFO. The appointment comes three months after the departure of former Facebook CFO Gideon Yu. Ebersman will start in September and oversee Facebook's finance, accounting, investor relations, and real estate operations. He will also become part of the company's executive management team and report to CEO Mark Zuckerberg. "We received a lot of interest in the CFO position and had the opportunity to meet with many impressive candidates," said Zuckerberg, in a statement. "We quickly recognized that David was the right person for Facebook. He was Genentech's CFO while revenue tripled, and his success in scaling the finance organization of a fast growing company will be important to Facebook." Ebersman worked at San Francisco-based biotech firm Genentech for 15 years and served as CFO from 2006 through April 2009, when Roche Group acquired the company. With that background he brings public company experience, one of the chief requirements Facebook set out for the position following Yu's exit at the end of March. The company emphasized at the time that it was pleased with its financial performance despite the economic downturn. Facebook said it had five straight quarters of profitability (after excluding certain items), 70% year-over-year revenue growth, and was expecting to be cash flow-positive in 2010. Estimates have put Facebook's revenue this year at about $500 million. Zuckerberg hopes to take the company public -- but not for a few years, according to a Reuters report last month. In the meantime, Facebook in May raised an additional $200 million in venture capital from Russian investor Digital Sky Technologies at a $10 billion valuation. That gives the company a sizeable financial cushion as it seeks the best business model for monetizing its 200 million and growing active user base. Part of that responsibility will now also rest with Ebersman.
Betting on consumer demand for increasingly complex video viewing, white-label video technology company Digitalsmiths on Monday debuted a new product for premium video content libraries. The new product provides premium video publishers with new functionality like a free-form single box video search capable of identifying videos by dialogue, objects within a scene, locations and other complex criteria. Based in Raleigh-Durham, N.C., Digitalsmiths provides publishers with video indexing and ad-targeting technology bundled with a white-label video service. Digitalsmiths' suite of visual interpretation tools processes each frame of video using proprietary algorithms such as facial recognition, scene classification and object identification to build a unique time-based, metadata framework -- or "metaframe" -- of informed video tags. The new technology, according to Digitalsmiths CEO Ben Weinberger, quite simply helps content owners make the most of their available content. "An advanced metadata management framework, like MetaFrame, can bolster their digital media strategy, give them a distinct competitive advantage and enable them to deliver content on-demand, anytime, anywhere on any device," Weinberger explained. Rivals in the emerging field of video platforms and indexing include Brightcove, blinkx, thePlatform, Ooyala and Fliqz, to name a few. Brightcove would presently appear to be dominating the industry--having recently signed a number of top publishers, including Time Warner's AOL, The New York Times Co.'s NYTimes.com, and 16 Condé Nast Web properties. Overall, Brightcove is now the online video platform of choice for over 93 magazines across 21 publishing families. Still, Time Warner's hugely popular and video-heavy celebrity gossip site TMZ recently dropped Brightcove for Digitalsmiths. The startup also previously reached a deal to power Time Warner's TheWB.com. Separately, Digitalsmiths debuted a new video search capability packaging its proprietary technology into a single search box that is embedded in a player. The new free-form search technology combs a video library for matches across a set of criteria going beyond the traditional show title and subject matter to include actor names, characters, locations, objects within a scene and specific dialogue. Late last year, the company closed a second round of financing worth $12 million. The round was led by .406 Ventures, and included existing investors The Aurora Funds and Chrysalis Ventures -- the two of which helped the startup raise $6 million last year.< /p>
Until now solely an audience measurement service, Quantcast on Monday launched a product for advertisers to better define and buy audiences online. By incorporating impressions from any site on Quantcast's radar, the Quantcast Media Program is offering advertisers a scalable way to define target audiences via their own "data insights," and apply this custom segmentation throughout the buying process. The product, according to Quantcast CEO Konrad Feldman, "brings the essential qualities of search marketing to display." "This new solution enables scale and end-to-end consistency in media planning, buying and delivery," he said. Taking customer interaction data from marketers' media campaigns, search activity and brand site visitation, the new product endeavors to help marketers discover the distinctive characteristics of their most valuable consumer segments. Typically, marketers buy audiences and behavioral categories defined by publishers and ad networks. Quantcast, however, is offering them the opportunity to use their own data to define their target audience, and then to buy it directly in real-time. Successful or not in its new venture, the San Francisco-based startup is addressing marketers' fundamental goals. "Advertisers ultimately want to deliver the right message to the right audience," said Peter Naylor, SVP of digital sales at NBC Universal, which has agreed to deploy the new service. Said Ed Montes, EVP and managing director at Havas Digital: "By defining audience segments based off our own unique consumer engagements, we are able to obtain a much clearer view of our consumer and to have confidence that our messages are reaching the right audiences." Presently, Quantcast has "visibility" across some 10 million Web "assets," including sites, blogs and videos. Collectively, Quantcast's participants engage all 220 million U.S. Internet users through 180 billion Web-based activities every month. Launched in 2006 as an aggregator of audience impression data, Quantcast more recently introduced a product that pools data based on a brand's or a marketer's unique profile. For the Quantcast Marketer beta program, its unique tagging model was implemented among 40 top marketers and agencies including Lenovo, Scottrade, Kia, Virgin America, Razorfish, and Neo@Ogilvy.
The Internet has long been the place where advertising models go to die, but one measurable -- the click -- is still very much alive and kicking. As Mark Twain once said, "The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated." What we're experiencing now is, rather, an evolution of sorts - online advertising is being pulled further and further away from demographics and readership rates and closer to intent-based targeting. Advertisers want just one result from their hard-earned ad spends: conversions. While the cost-per-action model has hovered on the edge of viability for years now, Google and the PPC movement have revolutionized the targeting of Internet surfers by serving ads based on intent. Why would an advertiser for a major car company care if his or her ads were showing to males in the 18-35 demographic, when they can be shown to people who have actually gone out of their way to search for "2009 SUV"? It is for this reason that advertisers pay more for search engine ads than publisher ads. From a publisher's point of view, it's this level of intent-based targeting that has been missing from website advertising networks. Contextual ads were a good start, and have been more or less successful, but the ads are still based on the entirety of a site's content rather than what individual visitors really want and are actively searching for. The two statistics that are any publisher's lifeblood - clickthrough rate and click value - both drastically improve with better targeting, as readers see more relevance in the ads served and advertisers see better conversion results, making them willing to pay more. The banner ad is essentially obsolete for one very good reason: advertisers saw terrible returns on investment as online readers became numb to the irrelevant, garish splashes of color and Photoshop graphics inserted clunkily into their favorite sites. Except for the richest broad-market brands (Coke, Pepsi, McDonalds, etc.), unmeasurable "branding" in the infinitely measurable world of online advertising is a proposal that will get ad agencies and marketing directors fired, and combined with the historically low clickthrough rates seen by banner ads, a recipe for disaster was concocted. Now, we're seeing contextual ads following a similar path. Advertisers will still buy them, but without the element of user intent, the conversion rates are significantly lower than search engine ads, with the amount advertisers are willing to pay per click lowered to match. This is why in order to continue earning from a website, publishers have to be able to target their readers' intent as effectively as search engines can. Whether that is targeting the search terms of individuals who come to a site via search engine, or another method, it is the next necessary evolution of advertising on Web sites. So yes, the click is still valuable, and publishers shouldn't lose faith in it. However, the old tried-and-true methods of broad contextual advertising are no longer quite so true; target individuals, discern and serve ads to intent, give people exactly what they're looking for in both an ad and an article, and advertisers will happily send you money