50's Flash Back

Though many of todays browsers did not grow up in the 50's era of black and white television some may still have seen some classic reruns of old black and white television, or listened to some classic radio shows, like The Shadow or the Lone Ranger. Driving up to college once (a six hour trek) I listened to an entire seasons worth of Sherlock Holmes radio plays, a thoroughly enjoyable experience. While listening it always struck me funny when ever they would have one of their strikingly obvious announcer advertisements, for things like Bently's hand cream. It is a means of advertising long abandoned because of its extreme obvious and silly nature...or so I thought.

Then, just the other day, I had decided to entertain myself by watching one of two episodes of the internet television success, Ask A Ninja, when I saw the strangest thing. At the end of one of the more recent installments there it was, the Ask A Ninja guy obviously promoting Take TV. (A new device for watching internet content on your television). I was kinda stunned, to think that the internet would fall back to a form of advertising mostly abandoned by all other mediums struck me as amusing.

It made me realize just how lost advertisers are. They have no idea what works for the web (because for some reason forced video ads and obnoxious pop-unders don't seem to work...wonder why?) and thus they have resorted to trying everything. But, in their defense, it worked. The ad was seemed vastly more endearing coming from the popular net sensation than it would ever have if it was a mid video interruption. I get the feeling that we are likely to see more "dead" methods coming back to grace the interweb with their presence.

Is This Ethical?

Here's a scenario, your writing a paper on, oh lets say... velociraptor attacks and you need a good, well respected, reliable source for perfectly accurate, totally non-biased fact. So where do you turn, Wikipedia where else. Ok, not entirely accurate, but I am not here to debate the finer points of open source information database legitimacy. Sufficed to say people are increasingly willing to trust Wikipedia. Now with such a large, all encompassing, easily editable just about anyone can make an entry, about nearly anything.

For instance an innocent Dell computer programmer could log on to Wikipedia, only to learn that someone has accidentally misconstrued that Dell company as being slightly imperfect, naturally a problem that must be fixed. Or maybe some disgruntled Pepsi fans suddenly find out that Coke has been misconstrued as and equal beverage. Hey even the CIA is getting in on the action.

Now this may seem a tad unethical, but think about it, the fact is that Wikipedia is an incredibly inexpensive advertising tool (ok, I guess it is more like PR), to the point where it is almost stupid not to use it. All questions of ethics aside (because since when has advertising been perfectly ethical) there are fewer more cost effective ways to improve your companies image and reputation.

This Ad is brought to you by...

I must be short today unfortunately, so I will be choosing a rather simply topic. Sponsored ads. Now I could describe these ads and exactly how they work, including screens shots and funny pictures, but I am much to lazy right now. So instead you will perform an experiment. Step one, go to www.google.com (I am not linking it for you type it in yourself), if you have a Google bar that will also work. Now, step two, search for a product, maybe something like edible underware or your future, almost anything will work. Step three, this is the hard one, look at the right side of the screen when results are displayed. Do you see the list of links labeled "Sponsored Links", now you know what a sponsored link is, congratulations.

It was not too long after the creation of the search engine that big business America got the bright idea that they might be able to use it to sell you things. So, whenever you search for a key word in one of the major engines it also searches all its sponsor pages to see if you search coincides. Now I have to praise this as being one of the very few forms of E-vertising that does not attempt to hurl its self at you like and over zealous lemming off a high rock. Each ad sits quietly and unobtrusively off to the left of the screen and waits patiently for you attention.

And it works, it serves its purpose well. Naturally since most searchers are not actively seeking to buy something the majority of the links go unclicked, but every so often I find my self price hunting and actually click through (ok, not entirely true, I usually google search the sponsors site to avoid spyware, but the effect is almost the same). Now since I absolutely hate clicking on any form of ad, anywhere, ever, this is something of an accomplishment.

Well...thats it, thats all I have to say. Good medium, no major changes in sight, nothing new or innovative, unless you consider the fact that for once the industry has something that perfectly serves its purpose and yet they haven't tried to "improve it". Well played sponsored links, two thumbs up.

Search and Display

In my previous post on the rapidly increasing revenues derived from internet advertising, I posted a table. (I will not post it again so you are going to have to scroll down if you want to see it.) On it was a rough and mostly believable breakdown of the most sought after forms of advertising. At the top of that list was search ads. With 40% of the revenues it proves to be a profitable, and hopefully effective medium.

In case you do not know what this is referring. When a buys ads via Google, or Yahoo, or whatever company they may choose, they want to narrow down their results. To do this they choose a list of key words. For instance if you were a company specializing in say velociraptor raptor attack prevention you would choose they pick at words like Attack, Dinosaur, and Raptor. Then whenever someone searched using that engine with your key words, a custom made ad would appear. This is exactly how they do those wonderful sponsored links in you search results.

Second on the list was Display Ads. These cover your more generic moving flash banners, images links, etc. They don't react to search terms, but they are more catchy. However, alone neither are as profitable as the research makes them seem, it is in fact the combination that is their strongest selling point.By making videos that reach to search results you can get the best of both worlds, and dramatically increase click through.

Now, personally, I would have thought this was an obvious connection to make, combining two effective and compatible mediums for greater profit. But apparently I was mistaken, because it seems to be some kind of critical breakthrough. It has received quite a bit of critical acclaim, which is great and shines light on the reason why these two mediums dominate 70% of the profits.

Something Must be Working

I've said quite a few disparaging things about the state of internet, and the poorly chosen means of conveyance. However despite what I might say the fact remains the whatever they are doing, it works. In a recent report released by the IAB internet advertising revenues were (get ready for it)

10 Billion Dollars!!!
The put this in comparison, that is double the last highest revenue of 5 billion. Needless to say that is a very significant rise, proof that this is indeed a growing market. It soon may even overtake new papers in advertising expenditures and revenueBut not all forms of advertising are as profitable as others, in their report the IAB was kind enough to include a rough breakdown of where the profit really lies.

	FH 2006	FH 2007
Search	40% ($3,164)	41% ($4,097)
Classifieds	20% ($1,582)	17% ($1,699)
Referrals/Lead Generation	7%($592)	8% ($799)
E-mail	2% ($158)	2% ($200)
Display Related:	31% ($2,413)	32%($3,198)
– Rich Media (Includes Video)	6% ($475)	8%($799)
– Ad Banners / Display Ads	21% ($1,622)	21%($2,099)
– Sponsorships	4% ($316)	3% ($300)
– Slotting Fees	<1%>	<1%>

Clearly the good old search and display advertisements are a good selling point. In case you don't know what those are, they are advertisements directly tailored to react to certain key works you used in a search engine (i'll cover these in another post). Also interesting in the incredibly vague and all encompassing "Display related". Which, as far as I can tell, encompasses all image ads, except for Search and Display, Rich Media, and Ad banners. Leaving...I'm not sure, I will have to find out.

This is all great, but what does it mean for the industry. Does this mean a greater influx of flash banners and pop-unders (which I have concluded are even more annoying than pop-ups). Maybe the companies will realize that they can rake a greater profit with less annoying ads. Or it could just be the more people are using the internet. What ever the cause, I predict intense and obnoxious legislation before the end, mark my words.

You've got Spam!

Spam, I am sure you have heard of it. It comes in two varieties, the delicious (cough cough) packaged meat variety SPAM (which has one of the most amusing websites I have ever seen), and the annoying monotonous slag heap of crap e-mail, spam. I will mostly be covering the latter.

So how about some interesting statistics? Did you know that around 85% of e-mail traffic is spam mail, a number roughly around 90 billion spam messages sent around the world every day. yes that is 3,750,000,000 an hour, 62,500,000 a minute 1,041,666.6 (repeating) a second. If this was physical mail it would form a stack of letters that would reach to the moon and back, then (with length to spare) wrap around the earth about 5 or six times.

The concern with spam is not just that it takes up space, but it can be dangerous. Many contain links to malicious sites, or clicking them will confirm your existence and result in a greater slew of unwanted mail. I made this mistake on one of my older addresses (it was AOL so they didn't offer much protection) and it resulted in my receiving roughly 100 - 200 dangerous viral spam e-mails a day, essentially shutting down the account.

Needless to say, with all of this crap e-mail flying about it is just about impossible to actually send an e-mail advertisement of any kind without it being marked spam and ignored. We have passed the age when people are actually interested in random mail offers, and are no longer tricked by catchy subject lines. As such the entire approach to e-mail advertising must be rethought.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (iab) has been considerate enough to post together a nice list of sensible practices for e-mail (most of which seems like common sense to me). However, I am afraid it is probably too little to late. People have already been conditioned to ignore ALL advertisements, even the news letters they explicitly sign up for. Basically the method has lost any ability to build a market, and now appeals only to those already deeply interested in your product and old people who don't know what they are doing. It will probably be decades before e-mail advertising could ever be truly viable again.