The Ad Council's America Supports You Campaign

In March 2006, ASY teamed up with the Ad Council to produce a stellar PSA campaign, consisting of radio, TV and print spots.

Old vs. New Media Advertising

The NYT reports:

A new analysis of online consumer data shows that large Web companies are learning more about people than ever from what they search for and do on the Internet, gathering clues about the tastes and preferences of a typical user several hundred times a month ...

The analysis, conducted for the New York Times by the research firm comScore, provides what advertising executives say is the first broad estimate of the amount of consumer data that is transmitted to Internet companies ...

Yahoo came out with the most data collection points in a month on its own sites—about 110 billion collections, or 811 for the average user. In addition, Yahoo has about 1,700 other opportunities to collect data about the average person on partner sites like eBay, where Yahoo sells the ads.

MySpace, which is owned by the News Corporation, and AOL, a unit of Time Warner, were not far behind ...

Traditional media companies come in far behind.

Condé Nast magazine sites, for example, have only 34 data collection events for the average site visitor each month. The numbers for other traditional media companies, as generated by comScore, were 45 for the New York Times Company; 49 for another newspaper company, the McClatchy Corporation; and 64 for the Walt Disney Company.

Indeed,

The rich troves of data at the fingertips of the biggest Internet companies are ... creating a new kind of digital divide within the industry. Traditional media companies, which collect far less data about visitors to their sites, are increasingly at a disadvantage when they compete for ad dollars.

The major television networks and magazine and newspaper companies “aren’t even in the same league,” said Linda Abraham, an executive vice president at comScore. “They can’t really play in this sandbox.”

During the Internet’s short life, most people have used a yardstick from traditional media to measure success: Audience size. Like magazines and newspapers, Web sites are most often ranked based on how many people visit them and how long they are there.

But on the Internet, advertisers are increasingly choosing where to place their ads based on how much sites know about Web surfers.

Charts here and here.

Online Advertising: Another Arrow in Your Advocacy Quiver

Danny Glover reports:

The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America was equally pleased with its blog ads to enhance awareness of the group's BuySafeDrugs site. The ads were placed periodically on an array of blogs, generally for about a month at a time, according to Ken Johnson, PhRMA's senior vice president of communications. "It's an effective, cost-efficient way to reach select, targeted demographics," he said. It also gives drugmakers direct access to patients without their message being filtered by the media. PhRMA plans to develop more ads this month focused on topical news events, Johnson said.

84% of Facebook Users Are Between the Ages of 14 - 26

According to its official "Statistics" Web page, Facebook boasts "more than 64 million active users." But the devil, as always, is in the details.

As Facebook itself reveals in its process for creating an advertisement, of these 64 million people, only 24 million of them are in the United States:
















Moreover, 84% of these 24 million are between the ages of 14 and 26:

















Hat tip: Marketing Hub.

Corporate America Is Now Advertising Its MySpace Profiles

Check out this ad, from Anheuser-Busch, promoting its Positive Parenting campaign:

Blogvertising

From Clive Thompson, 2006:

For advertisers, the whole lure of blogs is that they’re cheaper than regular newspapers and TV. Plus, blogs offer tightly focused niches, which advertisers love. “You wanna reach New York, you buy on Gothamist. You want to reach mommies, you buy on Busy Mom. How does traditional media match that?” asks Brian Clark, an ad buyer who orchestrated Audi’s blogvertising last year. The Audi campaign—which ran online for three months, and got 68 million page views, and cost only $50,000—was cheap compared with the $500,000 for a Yahoo front-page banner that runs for only one day. . . .

Perhaps more important, blogs are buzz-creation machines: If an ad campaign appears on the blogs, it’ll often become a subject of conversation among the bloggers. “They’re social connectors,” Bassik says. Yet each blog has a different sphere of influence. To get a message out widely, he’ll buy on Daily Kos because it has the largest readership of any liberal blog (though it’s also the most expensive, at $4,000 a week). If Bassik needs click-throughs—someone who’ll click on a candidate’s ad, visit his site, and perhaps make a donation—he might buy Talking Points Memo instead, which has a smaller audience but a much higher click-through rate.

Since blogs set their own ad rates, each one offers a different value proposition, [Henry] Copeland [founder of Blogads] explains. A gossip blog like Perez Hilton has a huge readership—220,000 page views daily—but since the audience is broadly based, the rates are very low, costing $202 to run an ad for one week. Meanwhile, a smaller blog might have only 10,000 visitors daily—but if it’s a lucrative, tightly focused niche, the blogger could charge much higher rates per visitor.

Why Advertise Online?

Henry Copeland and Megan Mitzel, both of Blogads.com, highlight the reasons:

1. pay as little as $5 per day, and 5 cents per click
2. target niches/categories that your competition can’t imagine
3. experiment easily
4. further target your market so that only people from zip codes you’ve specified can see your ads

Is Advertising on Facebook Worthwhile?

For the past two weeks I've been running a Facebook ad for one of our clients. The ad has been viewed 370,000 times and clicked on 200 times, all of which has cost $330. Here are the data:


This makes for a poor click-through rate, but research confirms that this is not uncommon on Facebook. As the Unofficial Facebook Blog has documented, “While [Facebook’s] targeting is phenomenal, Facebook users are more engaged by the content within the site rather than the advertisements.” "What's more," Time's Anita Hamilton adds, "Facebook may not be able to keep up the momentum of its rapid-fire growth because social-networking aficionados are notoriously fickle. Remember Friendster?"

Nonetheless, there are good reasons to stick with FB. First, every person who viewed and clicked on the ad was highly targeted, so we’re not paying for anything extraneous.

Second, $1.65 a click is reasonable, especially compared with the rates on big sites.

Finally, unlike traditional ads, the best of which are animated and typically require a professional both to design and to resize according to site-specific dimensions, FB ads are limited to (135?) characters and one tiny picture.

In short, I think advertising on Facebook which is just getting its feet wet in this field, is well-worth your time and resources.

Who Accepts Online PSAs?

1. Facebook does not accept PSAs. As Ryann from Facebook explained via e-mail (10/28/07), “[W]e receive an overwhelming number of requests for discounted or free advertising from charitable causes and nonprofit organizations. Due to the fact that we are unable to honor all of these requests, it is our current policy not to honor any of them.”

2. Google does not accept PSAs (it's unclear how the one to the right got into the system). As Eileen D. from the Google AdWords Team explained via e-mail (10/31/07), "To find out more information on the public service announcements you referenced, I checked with a Google Grants specialist ... She told me that this program is not currently available, and that we are currently still researching opportunities. However, as it develops, it will only be available to Google Grants accounts."

3. Blogads does not accept PSAs. As Megan Mitzel wrote via e-mail (10/29/07), "No we do not accept public service announcements."

4. Pajamas Media never returned my phone call or responded to my e-mail.

5. AOL accepts PSAs. As Rachel Gross, director of corporate events and community relations, wrote via e-mail (10/31/07), "We do from time-to-time offer PSAs to the community."

Monetizing Facebook

Patrick Ruffini asks, "Could Facebook be the greatest microtargeting engine ever built?" In short, most definitely.

As the NYT observes in an editorial today,

To its users, Facebook is a way to keep up with friends, promulgate a relatively nonfictional online identity, do research, and waste fantastic amounts of time. But to advertisers, it is a universe of self-created focus groups that link more or less virally to other groups.

Specifically, the Times is referring to Facebook's advertising program, Flyers, an updated version of which the company released earlier this week. Like Google AdWords, Flyers allows ad buyers to microtarget their audience by various demographics.

But what makes Flyers so revolutionary is the extraordinary precision it wields. For instance, say you want to target women living in London, age 18-35, who are engaged and like painting. Instead of bothering the 6.5 million Facebookers in the United Kingdom—or even the 1.5 million in London—Flyers allows you to cater to the 140 who meet these exact criteria. Here's the relevant screen shot:



The cost of the ads is entirely up to the buyer: you can pre-set both a maximum price per click and a maximum daily budget.

The Googlesphere

"[B]y acquiring DoubleClick, Google will jump so far ahead of the pack with the technology and knowledge to be the only place marketers have to go to reach you and just about anybody else."

—Joseph Turow, professor of communication at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication and author of Niche Envy: Marketing Discrimination in the Digital Age (MIT Press, 2006).