5 Ways to Add Value to Your Banner Ads
Your banner ads comply with your brand’s style guide. They’re consistent with your other marketing materials. They feature a strong call to action and functionality that’s intuitive to the consumer.
So why aren’t people clicking?
Online banners – regardless of their size, shape, or format – are held to a high standard by Internet users. Consumers know what they like, and what they loathe. In fact, they’re experts on the subject (a massive daily dose of just about anything will do that to a person).
This attitude compels digital marketers to keep their creative fresh, but it isn’t always fresh enough. It doesn’t always leave site users nodding their heads in appreciation or thinking, “Now that’s a useful ad.” What follows are five ways to enhance your existing and upcoming banner ads to stimulate clicks, shares, and buys.
1. Track mouse movements. Internet users may feel that they’ve seen it all in rich media advertising, but several jaw-dropping technologies are still relatively underutilized. One such technology is mouse tracking. Some brands allow mouse movements to alter the look of their banners (a concept so hip even Google is using it). Others take the more traditional route by inviting users to hover over in-banner hot spots.
One ad for Royal Caribbean created by MediaMind (formerly Eyeblaster) combined mouse tracking technology with an expandable banner in an IAB Sidekick format. In it, the user could hover over hot spots throughout an image of one of the company’s cruise ships to reveal information about special services and features, and click to get even more detail…all without leaving the site page.
With Help From Facebook Timeline, Viddy Becomes Top Free iPhone App
With the skyrocketing popularity and billion-dollar sale of Instagram, there’s an ongoing race to apply Instagram’s wildly successful photo sharing model to mobile video. There are a number of startups vying to claim the “Instagram for Video” title, with Socialcam, Viddy, Klip, Mobli, and even the infamous Color all in the running. Yet, today brings evidence that Viddy may now be the one to beat, as the social video sharing app became the top free iPhone app on the App Store — with much of that growth emanating from its new Facebook Timeline app.
Viddy, which celebrated its first birthday on April 11th, enables users to shoot, customize, and share 15-second video clips directly from their mobile devices. Its video creation platform allows users to choose from custom video overlays and audio effects from their favorite musicians, movies, and celebrities, and share their short video clips across across social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTubes.
The startup closed a $6 million Series A round back in February from investors like Battery Ventures, Greycroft Ventures, Qualcomm, and Bessemer Ventures, bringing its total funding to $8.2 million. Viddy saw over 40 million app views in January, thanks to the effort the startup has put into recruiting celebrities and influencers custom premium Video FX layers, giving artists, movie studios, etc. a way to promote their brand through mobile video.
CEO Moore On 24/7 Media: We’re A Tech Company, Not An Agency
At a time when data and technology are an integral part of the advertising/marketing chain, the concept of the traditional ad holding company is changing.
Once thought of as mere tools to be accessed on an ad hoc basis, data and tech are now central to the process of media buying and planning. That was probably part of the thinking of WPP Group’s Sir Martin Sorrell five years ago when he surprised many tech M&A observers and beat out Microsoft to acquire interactive shop 24/7 Real Media for $649 million, which last week shortened its name to 24/7 Media. It followed that small, but noteworthy, bit of news with word of a strategic partnership with DG’s MediaMind, that is intended to put third-party online ad serving and TV ad delivery squarely in 24/7 Media’s hands.
Although unrelated, the two announcements reflect the changes taking place in the larger business of advertising: on the one hand, it’s about the nature of expanding the function of the interactive disciplines within the agency realm.
It’s also about figuring out how to constantly improve the efficiency and accuracy of digital buys along audience buying by asking whether its best to build these skills in-house or out. The answer, Dave Moore, 24/7 Media’s chairman and CEO, told us, is sometimes all of the above.
Read more: AdExchanger
7 Ways to Make Your Brand More Pinteresting
Pinterest has recently emerged as a top social media site, and last month it was officially the third biggest online web property. It seems that Pinterest emerged from nowhere, and it is now the quickest growing independent web property ever.
For those who are new to Pinterest, it is an online pinboard where you can pin content that is interesting to you, organized on different boards.
Why Is Pinterest Great for Marketers? Pinterest is powerful for marketers for a few reasons. First and most importantly, people are on Pinterest and when they are there they are open to exploring. Fish where the fish are.
Marketing is about building awareness and getting in front of your audience, and as your audience flocks to Pinterest, so should you. Second, and perhaps surprising to some, Pinterest refers more traffic to other websites than LinkedIn, YouTube, and Google+ combined. This is because people in Pinterest are in browsing mode – they are looking for new sites and interesting content. The content on Pinterest is all linked to the originating sources. This means that it can be a huge source of traffic to your website. ”Pinterest is the #1 source of referral traffic to my website…”
Read more: ClickZ
4 Mobile Trends to Watch
As a marketing professional, I spend a lot of time learning and educating on digital trends.
With the current rate of growth, mobile marketing has been one of the most exciting to monitor. The data on user adoption is changing almost daily, with consumers actively changing the way they consume, share, and publish. To keep up with these changes, brands and media companies are regularly making advancements that impact our industry.
For this column, I spent some time with my agency’s mobile strategy team to define the top four current trends.
More Data Capture, More Targeting
Advertisers have been able to target by location, content, and demographics for some time now. Recently “social targeting” and retargeting across mobile-enabled platforms has emerged. The new capabilities represent a significant opportunity to hone ad delivery. They also allow for greater customization of messaging. •Social targeting (e.g., partners like LocalResponse, Twitter, and Facebook): Scrapes social conversations tied to location to target users. Great for determining very specific communication opportunities. •Retargeting (e.g., partners like Tapad, BlueCava, and Adelphic): Uses connected devices that require registration to trigger usage patterns. Technology can then serve ads based on data collected. The “Holy Grail” will be a connection point and solid data capture between all digitally enabled platforms (desktop, IPTV, phone, and tablet)…but you can’t be too greedy.
Content Is Adapting
Read more: ClickZ
Say Media Debuts Content Ads
Say Media is among the latest online publishers to adopt a “viewable” impressions standard for display ad campaigns.
The company, which operates a network of sites spanning categories like fashion, technology and food, has introduced a new ad format based on a cost-per-exposure pricing model that charges only for ads visible within a user’s browser.
The new Content Ads from Say Media use technology are developed in-house to recognize when an ad unit is viewable and are geared toward small and medium-sized businesses running ads against endemic content within its network.
Earlier this year, comScore released research based on a study of a dozen brand campaigns showing that nearly a third (31%) of online display ads are never seen. Studies by AdSafe and others have estimated that figure to be even higher.
Ads may not be seen for a various reasons, including a slow-loading ad, users not scrolling down far enough on a page to see an ad “below the fold,” or other technical causes. Say Media’s new ad format and exposure-based ad pricing coincides with a broader industry push to shift from the traditional “served impression” for campaign reporting to the viewable impression as part of the “Making Measurement Make Sense” (3Ms) initiative.
The effort by the Interactive Advertising Bureau, Association of National Advertisers and the 4As calls for a set of standards for measuring viewable exposures, among other things.
Read more: MediaPost
