Google Making Greater Strides to Open up Display Market

Dewey Decimal Online?

At the risk of sounding old and obviously out of fashion, I have to wonder -- has the online space grown too quickly and thus still a version of the wild west?

It struck me last night as I was watching Bravo's the Fashion Show (FYI-- horrible, horrible show I can't stop watching) last night that there is no consistency to marketing URLs. One insurance company is driving to YouTube.com/something something, one company is driving to their Facebook page and many more have varying names-- everything from catchy to predictable. Marketers throw anything and everything at potential customers to get them engaged with our online selves, but are we just making it harder than it needs to be for consumers?

When we know that a significant % of users go straight to a search engine because they don't remember the URL or are just most comfortable starting their research there, are we ignoring the pink elephant in the room?

Special K and a couple of other products have seemingly tried this, and while I've seen their campaigns nominated for awards, I haven't heard them referred to as the gold standard either.

It makes me wonder, what would the world be like if the Dewey Decimal System was in place for online? If companies in mass decided to have a systematically standard URL? For instance, all TV stations-- WSB.TV, ABC.TV, all companies with known names and branches -- hyatt.com/123peachtree, nissan.com/456main?

I know, I know, it's a gross generalization, and consumers are already accustomed to using search engines to start their research, but aren't we feeding traffic to search engines where the competition can steal the consumer in the first place? And aren't we paying thousands of extra dollars (through SEM and SEO) just to make sure we're capturing the fish we threw into the net in the first place? Something seems out of whack here to me and maybe it can't be fixed, but maybe juuuuust maybe... we can improve the way we market URLs just a bit.

I don't have the magical fix, but these are the sort of things I think about as we're stewarding our Client's online efforts.

What you talkin' about, Twitter?

Everywhere you turn these days, people are asking "do you tweet?" With Tweeting being talked about everywhere from coffee shops and the halls of our government it seems to have formed into a social networking frenzy. And yet, while people think it's "hip"... they don't see the value in it. Nielsen Co. recently released this bit of research explaining that a whopping 60% of those who go to Twitter don't RETURN the following month.

Is this perhaps because consumers don't see how this is any different than the status updates on Myspace, Facebook, etc. Heck, even LinkedIN has status updates now.

To pull out some grandma research, the common complaint I hear from people who don't Tweet is that they already do that on other sites and in fact, that's the thing they HATE most about social networking... the inundation of status updates about stupid stuff.

Or is this simply a sign of younger generations being much more comfortable publishing themselves and older generations valuing privacy? Us digital marketers see that more and more consumers are turning to social networking, but need to be cognizant that there is a definite resistance to it as well and make marketing plans with that in mind.

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Social Networking Overload

Don't get me wrong... I have a plethora of social networks that I use... Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, (a rarely touched) Myspace, LinkedIn, etc, but I think at some point, digital entities have to ask themselves... "Do we really need to reinvent the wheel?"

Case in point - Yahoo looks to be trying to make their network more "social" soon. Here is a quick exerpt from the lengthy article:

In the next several months Yahoo will begin rolling out new versions of its most popular products, from Yahoo Mail to the Yahoo home page. A thread of social media features, including a common user profile, list of friends and regular updates about friends, will tie the family of Yahoo properties together.

When an individual recommends a news story from the Yahoo homepage, uploads a photograph on Flickr or makes a trade on a fantasy baseball team from Yahoo sports, Yahoo will send an alert to a network of friends or contacts.

While I totally have Yahoo IM and I've even participated in some of their groups, I have to pause and say... WHAT? I've spent months building up all of these other sites and now they're going to try and revolutionize the social network category by making me work outside of the platforms I've spent so much to build? Maybe it's because I'm not seeing the real life example, but I have to say the move has the early stink of OLD ideas - don't let the content be free range, instead work on putting up virtual walls. It will be interesting to see how this develops over the coming months.

Revitalizing Digital Display

It seems that digital display creative standards are on a pendulum...

• beginning of display - creative tried to distract from content (blinking, crawling over content, etc)
  
• the last couple of years - publishers pushed back and said that an annoyed customer meant a customer who left their site
• within the last few months though - publishers are starting to open themselves back up to big, bold creative
  

With this change, I have to ask... "yeah, but will they even see that rich media ad?" I've been hoping to see some traction on measuring time/exposure and last week I sat down with an ad network that had tested various models such as only charging if the ad had been seen by one user for 1-2 minutes during the course of the campaign. I asked why that model didn't stick -- "CPMs were in the pennies that way."

Surely there is some middle ground that generate revenue for the sites and helps digital ads stand out more.

Part of the issue is that we've accepted the focus on the short term measurements and we're less concerned branding and long-term intention drivers. I think the following could help us look at the branding impact (beyond pre- and post-wave studies) :

• Sites could stand to be more open to product integration. I know, I know... this is church and state in the traditional world, but digital blurs the line between user generated content and site generated content. I'd love to see the same courtesy extended to advertisers.
• Ad units need to be able to "read" if the user can see the full ad in their screen in order for it be counted as an impression.
  
• I get WHY sound isn't allowed on most sites, but doesn't this seem odd to anyone else? TV and radio have the ability to pull you in with sound even if you're driving or in another room. Would it not make sense that one ad on the digital page could have sound to help pull users into their message?
• It's been raised by others in the industry, but I'd love to see one ad unit per page-- perhaps the ad could even follow you as you scroll down the page?
  

The responsibility doesn't just lie with sites/networks...

• Media Planners/Buyers need to push for more information.
  
• Agencies need to take the time to tailor ads to fit the various needs of the consumer-- not just based on their mindset, but also based on their "in the moment" surfing habits.
  
• Creative needs to think beyond telling a story to creating long-term bonds with its consumers.

Thankfully, IAB has finally tried to take on this long-standing concern and will hopefully help turn many individual voices into a discussion that can yield results.