Starting this week, AT&T, American Express, Microsoft and dozens of other major marketers will pull the veil off their web ads and show consumers what’s inside.
It’s the first trial of what some hope will become the online ad industry’s long-promised self-policing system designed to stave off the growing forces for regulation in Washington, as well as give consumers more control over how they are targeted by advertisers.
The “iAd” platform, Apple’s mobile advertising network, will go live on July 1 with spending commitments already secured by major advertisers such as Nissan, Citigroup, Unilever, General Electric,AT&T (the exclusive service provider for the iPhone) and Walt Disney (where Steve Jobs holds a board seat and is a major shareholder).
From their initial announcement, Apple plans to distribute 60% of the revenue generated from the ads to application developers that use iAd to monetize their apps. While Steve Jobs said that the intent is “to help our developers earn money so they can continue to create free and low-cost apps for users”, I feel that any impression-driven ad model tends to drive development that is counter to what users and advertisers really want.
We saw this with Google Adwords when they opened up their content network to CPM pricing. Marketers have created millions of dummy content pages in an effort to capture traffic, drive up useless impressions and push clicks - often confusing users and stripping advertisers of their media.
Another more recent example of an impression-driven ad model not leading to a better user experience is with Facebook applications, which are riddled with deceptive practices and forced installs.
In my opinion, the only model that takes in to consideration the user experience as well as the advertisers goals is a performance based model, since developers and marketers are forced to show highly relevant, engaging ads to targeted users in order to turn a profit.
Last night, along with millions of other viewers, I was glued to the tube for the Super Bowl. Every year we hear about how much focus (and money) is put on the advertising time available and I’m usually surprised by the shortcomings of these multi-million dollar spots. In the past, extremely creative and often humorous commercials meant to get people talking fell short with brand connectivity. This is still an issue to some degree, such as a 4th quarter spot with Jay Z and Don Shula orchestrating the game using a holographic game board…although the post production effects were “neat” (and reminiscent of the rappers “CEO of Hiphop” spot that he did for HP last year)…will anyone recall that this was a promotion for Bud Select? What really surprised me this year was the lack of URL references for some campaigns that had a high potential for attracting additional information seekers. One good example is Revlon, who I had read would be going out on a limb this year by promoting their “Not Fade Away” campaign featuring Sheryl Crow. For some reason, this spot failed to provide any reference to an online destination. In fact, by visiting their site, the only mention of the campaign is a link to iTunes, where you can download a song by Crow. From the looks of the commercial spot, I would imagine that there is a wealth of tour footage, out-takes and other content that hungry consumers would garble up and spread throughout the web.
