In terms of Web 2.0, there are some cracks being seen in the advertising model. As one in the trenches I don’t see this as much of a surprise, rather as part of the gradual evolution of the mediums, but they seem to have caused some consternation.
First, a Forresster Research study on online advertising (Marketing on Social Networking Sites) shows that the ROI on social networking and forum sites is not as effective as those same campaigns run on content sites.
Truthfully, this doesn’t surprise me at all. What a person is trying to do on a social networking or a forum site is quite different than what they’re doing on a search site or a content site and they would therefore be less receptive to a Web message that was just shovelled over from a different type of content site.
I view this as being very analogous to the late 1990’s in Web advertising when companies took print ads and chopped out a piece of them for the Web. Ultimately, there was a shift from these branding type ads, to those that actually encouraged user responses and played to the strengths of the medium. What Forrester is saying in their report is that the same shift will need to occur to appropriately market in social sites. People are there to socialize (written broadly) so the marketers will need to get to be part of the conversation.
This is going to be a hard shift though. Getting involved in a community is work, and continuous work at that. It can’t be easily outsourced to an agency and will likely need ongoing involvement of subject experts.
We see some of this going on in individual company blogs being launched — and of course there have been user forums for some time — but to take the next step and participate in someone else’s forum or community will take guts that might not be so easily to accomplish from either side.
Advertisers will not control the message like they can in their own ad or forum and unlike magazines or publishers sites, will have much less certainty about what the message will be. They have accepted this lack of control — oddly enough — in Google adwords (though how much the CMO realizes this might be debatable) so in principle they should be OK with this. However they will also have to participate in the community in an ongoing basis, which is going to be a much bigger “I” (as in ROI) then a lot of companies are used to.
From the point of view of the community, it will mean that the community will actually have to welcome (or at least not be hostile) to the advertiser. This will probably be easier in B2B forums first since there’s a greater degree of professionalism there.
Still its possible this jump won’t be made and the limit of a company’s social marketing would be their own blog or user forum. They’ll be cutting themselves off from a segment of the audience though, so I have to believe that they’ll be the long term losers.
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On a second piece, Jakob Nielsen has updated his studies on banner blindness – Banner Blindness: Old and New Findings. This goes father than showing that banners hare having a decreased click-through rate, but adds eyetracking studies to show that even a branding component doesn’t hold through.
Jakob gives 4 elements that attract attention:
Plain text
Faces
Cleavage and other “private” body parts
making the ad look like content
Now why I am normally a Nielsen devotee, I don’t accept his view that making the ad look like content is on its face — unethical (and I think he himself backs away from his assertion when he actually explains it) but there is clearly a fuzzy line (clearly a fuzzy line?) somewhere when an ad does become deceptive. This is something that might need some standards as it becomes examined more.
I can tell from my experienced that those text based ads that are designed specifically for a site outperform that standard ad.
Also in enewsletters, I don’t see why *anyone* offers a banner spot anymore, be it a banner, tower, or rectangle. By far the most effective ad position is a text-spot and tose few instances where an advertiser has insistedon a different style of placement, it performs abyssmally.
The other interesting conclusion is that ad networks may wind up being a bad bet for a marketer, since an ad network serves up the same ad to multiple Web sites witout any personalization. This gives me some hope that the ROI on direct buys will still justify publication by publication buys — especially if a publication gets aggressive in doing the content ad creation for the advertiser.