Marketing Pilgrim

When we were kids, the promise of a gold star or a sticker was all the incentive we needed to do our very best on a spelling test. As we grew, the incentives did too, a higher allowance for keeping your room clean, then a higher salary for doing a good job at work.

So it’s no wonder that consumers are willing to give a little more of themselves to a brand, as long as there’s a prize at the end.

SocialVibe and KN Dimestore recently conducted a survey to discover just how helpful incentives can be. They placed interactive ads on sites such as Causes.com and Pandora and on games like Farmville. Visitors were asked to play a branded game or take a survey and in return they’d receive an appropriate reward. For Farmville it was game credits, air-time without ads on Pandora and donations on Causes.com.

When comparing similar ads from the same company on both mobile and browser, MediaMind found a big difference in the CTR. After looking at more than 230 million impressions, they found that the mobile Click Through Rate came in at 0.61%, while the
Standard Banners recorded a CTR of 0.07%.

In the past, experts have dismissed these kinds of claims, saying that a lot of ads are being clicked on by accident, but MediaMind says not true. Their stance is that mobile is simply experiencing the same kind of “new and fascinating” curve that banner ads had when they first asked people to punch the monkey.

Positioning also plays a big part in the high CTR. Says MediaMind:

According to AllThingsD, AOL, Yahoo and Microsoft unveiled plans to take on Google by joining forces to sell each other’s ad inventory. The plan is to try a collective approach to battling Google and others.

The strategy is also designed to help them claw back some ad spending that has ended up in the hands of ad networks in recent years.

Executives from all three companies briefed a group of top Web publishers and ad buyers about the plan at a dinner presentation last night in Manhattan. AOL, Yahoo and Microsoft hope to convince big Web properties to share some of their ad inventory as well, and to get big ad holding companies to funnel some of their purchases through the consortium.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo opens in theaters just before Christmas, but the teaser trailer popped up on the web back in March. The studio claimed it was “leaked” but it’s quite likely that it was “leaked” on purpose in order to create buzz for the film.

Early advertising is paying off for the movie biz in a big way as more and more people go online to search for news of coming films. According to an article on MediaPost, studios have seen huge spikes prior to a film’s release such as an 8,510% rise on searches for “The Help” in the past 30 days. That’s a lot of buzz.

Everyone knows you have to spend money to make money, but in the B2B world, that spend is only around 5% of the make.

According to numbers from eMarketer, the majority of B2B marketers say their spend is equal to 5% or less of their company’s revenue. But even though the numbers are tied together, 35% of marketers said they didn’t report their financial contributions to senior management. 33% said they don’t even track their return on investment.

If we talk strictly about smaller B2B companies, it’s easy to see why they aren’t tracking and reporting — because it takes too much time and time is an even tighter commodity than money. There are plenty of tools online to help you gather stats but connecting those stats to income is the tricky part.

Have you clicked on a display ad today? The odds are you haven’t since, “99.8% of users who view an average display ad don’t click.” But if you spent any time at all on the internet today, you probably saw dozens of ads and maybe you even remember a couple of them. See, that’s the interesting thing, you don’t have to click an ad to remember it and clicking doesn’t mean you bought something when you got there. And yet, clickthroughs are still our chief means of measuring ad success.

Moat wants to change that with their “No Clicks Campaign.” Their position is that an ad can be engaging without being clicked and they use a heat map to prove it.

There is a clothing store, Syms, that has forever had the tagline for their advertising “An Educated Consumer Is Our Best Customer”. A noble idea indeed and one that implies that the more a consumer knows about what they are looking to do the better decisions they will make. In the retail industry, that can make a lot of sense and can help the right retailer.

Now, take that same mindset to the behavioral targeting world and there may be some consternation at the idea of a consumer knowing just how much advertisers know about them. This semi-secretive agenda is the game that behavioral advertisers and providers have to play all the time because the perfect world for them would be one where the consumer doesn’t know squat about what an advertiser knows about them and doesn’t care.