Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg on the small, daily touches that pay off the big ad campaigns

By Eleftheria Parpis

If there's one piece of advice that Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg would give marketers, it's to "let customers become part of the process." Interviewed by the Huffington Post's Arianna Huffington at an Advertising Week event called "Social Media (For Adults)," Sandberg said the Web is becoming all about personalization, and in the next several years, a Web site that isn't customized to the individual will look as antiquated as a site from 15 years ago looks now.
  "Going to a Web site that is totally impersonal will be a thing of the past," Sandberg said. "Once people have experienced something that is personal, that is around their identity and friends, they don't want to go back to something that is targeted at the whole world."
  Personalization tools like Facebook Connect have raised privacy concerns, but Sandberg said all the company's decisions about privacy start with the fact that "every individual controls their own information." The company doesn't sell or share information, she said, and simplified its privacy controls to help users maintain that control. "People will only share information if they feel they are controlling it," she said. "It's core to our ability to grow."

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Published on September 30, 2010 | Permalink | Comments (46)
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Why Twitter is not a huge fan of banners

By Brian Morrissey

For all the talk of making display ads bigger and flashier, Twitter plans to go in the opposite direction. The short-message service doesn't see standard display ads, or any rich media not initiated by users, in its future, COO Dick Costolo said in an interview with Adweek.
  "They can only get so big and take up so much of the page," Costolo said of recent efforts to give brands more space on Web pages. Too often, startups rush to adopt existing ad models, he said, a point made earlier in the day by venture capitalist and Twitter backer Fred Wilson. "They maximize short-term revenue at the expense of long-term health of the platform," Costolo said.
  Instead, Twitter is focused on taking cues for its ad products on how people are using the system.

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Published on September 30, 2010 | Permalink | Comments (17)
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Publishers dredge cesspool of Web advertising

By Mike Chapman

What are publishers to do about online advertising?
  They definitely have to do something, judging by the comments from panelists at the Wednesday afternoon Advertising Week session "Digital Publishing in the Age of New Media." The tone was set by Huffington Post vp Andy Wiedlin when he said, "The Web is a cesspool of cheap inventory." The easy availability of low-cost online advertising space was a theme, and a problem, the panel returned to several times at the event, which was moderated by Adweek's Brian Morrissey. The other panelists—Liz Harz, evp of global media at Electronic Arts, Erin Clift, svp of global sales at AOL, and Maria Mandel, vp of marketing and innovation at AT&T—all agreed in various ways that the Web has failed as a venue for brand building.

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Published on September 30, 2010 | Permalink | Comments (32)
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How consumers react to different kinds of ads on their online travels

By Mark Dolliver

An Advertising Week session on Wednesday morning at the Times Center gave a glimpse at a couple of studies commissioned by AOL about consumers' engagement with online content, including online advertising. Here's a detailed look at one of the studies, conducted by Data & Management Counsel Inc. (The full report, "The Consumer and Content: Benchmark Study," can be accessed here.)
  The research finds that consumers understand and mostly accept the tradeoff of having access to online content in return for being exposed to advertising. As the report states the matter in its analysis of the data, "Consumers believe that most of the content they experience online is supported by advertising. With the exception of ads that are invasive, consumers have largely come to accept advertising as part of online life." Nor is that acceptance merely grudging if consumers find an ad pertinent to their own needs: "When these ads are relevant (highly targeted and engaging), they become valued to consumers." (Polling for the study was conducted online last month among 18- to 69-year-olds who have broadband Internet access at home and spend more than an hour a week on the Internet for non-work reasons. The research also included focus groups.)
  More specifically, what works and what doesn't? Sixty-seven percent of respondents rated as very or somewhat acceptable "ads targeted to your likes." Nearly as many (64 percent) said the same about "ads with photos (like in a magazine)" or "sponsored ads in search results" (61 percent). Also deemed very/somewhat acceptable by a majority of respondents were "banner ads" (58 percent) and "ads with functionality—share on Facebook, e-mail to a friend" (53 percent). At the opposite end of the scale were "takeover ads" (very/somewhat acceptable to 14 percent of respondents), "pop-up ads" (15 percent) and "in-video ads" (33 percent). Moreover, adds the report, "Consumers want 'fewer ads' on a page so they are less intrusive (and page is less cluttered)."

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Published on September 29, 2010 | Permalink | Comments (17)
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David Kenny and the rise of the machines

By Brian Morrissey

Speaking in the same room where he announced, more than a decade earlier, that Digitas was going public, David Kenny returned to the ad industry this week in a very different role. Now president of Akamai, Kenny is fully focused on the infrastructure of digital media rather than the agency business.
  The former VivaKi managing partner believes those in media and marketing underappreciate the speed of change driven by faster and more powerful digital content delivery. In five years, high-definition video content of all kinds will be delivered through Internet protocol. What that means is a sea change for the ad world, Kenny predicted in a keynote address at the OMMA Global Conference on Tuesday, part of Advertising Week.
  The result: The Internet will become more like TV, dominated by video, and TV will be more like the Internet, with interactivity and personalization. For agencies, that means a return to the basics of creativity. "No algorithm will connect with people," Kenny said. That doesn't mean Kenny isn't enamored with technology. He noted the difference of working for a company with 44,000 employees to one with 2,000 employees and 73,000 servers.
  "Every year you pay them less," he said of servers, "they never whine, and they work on Christmas."

Published on September 29, 2010 | Permalink | Comments (17)
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Nielsen unveils Online Campaign Ratings system

By Steve McClellan

In a bid to help marketers measure audiences for ads across TV, online and (eventually) mobile platforms by a common metric, Nielsen unveiled a new system Monday—to be launched commercially next year—that will provide, for the first time, TV-type ratings for Internet display and video spots on sites like Facebook and Yahoo!
  The new system, called Nielsen Online Campaign Ratings, presented during Advertising Week, will enable Nielsen to combine data from its own online rating panels with data from third-party contributors like Facebook to more precisely measure how many people—by gender, age, reach and frequency--are viewing ads online. The data is combined through the use of tags known as pixels that alert Nielsen each time a particular ad is displayed in a browser.
  Media, marketing and agency executives heralded the service as a breakthrough. "Impressions and clicks aren't doing anybody a favor" when it comes to understanding the effectiveness of online advertising, said Mike Murphy, chief revenue officer at Facebook.

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Published on September 28, 2010 | Permalink | Comments (12)
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More on AOL's would-be online ad revolution

By Mike Shields

The Internet stinks. And the ads are even worse.
  That is the basic and bold message being delivered by AOL, which unveiled Project Devil at Advertising Week on Monday—its new advertising system, which essentially seeks to blow up what Web pages and Web advertising have been about until now.
  At the heart of Devil are more streamlined, user-friendly content pages anchored by a single, highly interactive display ad. AOL has begun rolling out the new system and new publishing approach on its Moviefone and StyleList sites. But the long-term plan is to expand it to all AOL properties, as well as thousands of sites across the Web.
  In essense, AOL is aiming for a "fundamental redesign of the Web," said Jeff Levick, AOL's president of global advertising and strategy. "This is incredibly bold and ambitious."
  And risky. Getting the industry to follow the lead of one of its biggest publishers and ad sellers has proved challenging in the past—for example, Yahoo!'s APT platform and Microsoft's PubCenter project both promised to solve several of the industry's problems but failed to gain mass traction.
  But according to Levick, AOL has two huge platforms to give Project Devil a boost beyond its own sites: Advertising.com, the company's mega ad network, and Adtech, it's popular ad-serving platform.

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Published on September 28, 2010 | Permalink | Comments (7)
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