Conde Nast research tells us something we know, and something we ought to know

MediaPost reported on a study by Conde Nast and McPheters & Co. documenting that ads running on web sites with related content were 61% more likely to be recalled than ads running on web sites with unrelated content. This is not especially news, but it is always welcome news among publishers, on and offline, who invest considerable time and energy creating quality content for their audiences.

There was an interesting twist at the end of its report about the Conde Nast study, however, that MediaPost may have felt obliged to insert in the spirit of full-disclosure. I should do likewise. It’s truthfully more interesting (and bigger) than the news that the right message in the right place produces better results, which has been shown to be true since, maybe, 1517 when Martin Luther tacked his 95 Theses on the door of a church instead of a tavern. (One wonders if the Protestant Reformation would have got off the ground quite as well if patrons passing through the door were headed in for a drink instead of spiritual reflection.)

According to MediaPost, a Conde Nast study from earlier in the year (April, as I learned) revealed this about online advertising generally versus offline:

“According to data released earlier in the year by Condé Nast and McPheters & Co., nearly two-thirds — 63% — of banner ads were not seen by Web users. Respondents’ eyes “passed over” 37% of the Internet ads and “stopped” on slightly less than a third, McPheters found.

In contrast to online ads, TV and magazine ads generated a strong propensity to be seen and recalled, according to the research.

Full-page, four-color magazine ads were determined to have 83% of the value of a 30-second television commercial, while a typical Internet banner ad has 16% of the value.”

I missed that story last time. It is clearly - sadly- the most newsworthy piece in the context of Conde Nast’s research. And, rats, if you sell online advertising. One assumes Conde Nast went to market with partners McPheters & Co. (and CBS Vision) to bring back answers in defense of print and afterwards went back to the well for news to support their digital team. Well, they got it: Content matters.

Thanks. Very interesting.

Frankly, however, I’m inclined to want to pay careful attention to those results reported again at the end of today’s story. I suspect they may be more right than wrong in regard to Internet advertising, the distribution of which has appeared – and continues to appear – largely indiscriminate despite improved targeting features. Most of those features are late to the game and still devoid of consumer partnership – meaning, consumers don’t get that the messages may be targeted usefully towards them; they just see the same @$%! advertising everywhere and have conditioned themselves to ignore it.

The “content matters” question, therefore, is quite possibly more important than what it has been shown again to contribute to advertising that relies upon it. In the negative sense, advertising (and marketing) that does not offer proper context to its targets and customers may be cheating the advertising body politic as a whole.  

Interesting. This may be an acute side-effect of an Internet pumped-up on data hormones; though magazines, most of which are specialized, might also be vulnerable if they were to suddenly start mainlining data. Consider a Fortune magazine edition with no business advertising and a Parenting magazine with nothing but business advertising. The effect would probably start to chip away at the 83% value quotient that print enjoys versus the :30 spot. The rational basis for the advertising in both publications might be the consumer, but the consumer’s associations are with the media. Eliminate the associations and advertising stops being break-through in the way that data can enhance break-through. It simply breaks. It stops making sense.

Conde Nast’s research is telling us something we know. More importantly, it is telling us something we ought to know and perhaps do something about (quick).

Exit the middlemen: ad agencies are looking to reassert control over media planning and buying

The move by advertising agencies to reclaim media planning and buying authority in the marketplace is shifting into higher gear. This is particularly relevant to planning and buying online, but the implications should extend to offline where new skills and practices learned in the digital arena will offer agencies the chance to re-assert their value to marketers.

The enabling device, of course, is data, and ad agencies are signaling that they can and will invest in the means to manage large audience databases and harvest the information in the interest of their customers. This was the real story that The New York Times missed in its report today (“Put Ad on Web. Count clicks. Revise.”) about how data allows agencies to manipulate ad spending based on results and behavior. Everyone has already heard the news about data (was the headline from the Time’s piece really from 2009?), even Congress. The fact that the Times report was largely about ad agencies and their offshoots, such as Varick Media Management, and that it never mentioned a behavior ad network was the real headline. MediaPost came much closer to the heart of the matter in its story today about Interpublic’s new media trading system, Cadreon, with a title that aptly begins, “Searching for the New Heart of Madison Avenue…”

Indeed, searching for the new heart of Madison Avenue has been the past-time of many people inside and out of the industry for years. Maybe love has finally found a way. Once again, information is power and much of it derives from the sort of relationships that ad agencies have continued to enjoy  – albeit in serf fashion – with their clients. Sitting atop copious amounts of campaign data, which they have watched get turned into fortunes by vendors with shifting attachments to the strategic welfare of a client, ad agencies have decided they are - and ought to remain - media planning and buying vendors of first and last resort.

Good for them. Now they just have to figure out how to get paid for it, but the excitement and opportunities increase when they consider how data can begin to play a livelier role given the expansion of digital media technology to all places offline, especially TV.

Stay tuned for more from the publisher (content) side, as well. Everyone has decided that data is proprietary, not just the advertisers and ad agencies. Cable companies are considering their subscriber boxes, web publishers their audiences. And newspapers, with their backs more against the wall than most, finally held a meeting last week to link arms around the issue of content and audience data.

Provided everyone steps out of the shadows and conducts business transparently, the media planning and buying business is headed for a period of renewed creativity and value led by ad agencies back in control.

Demographic and behavior targeting are just the first steps to the better media value that still awaits advertisers online.

IAB’s (consistently useful) Smartbrief pointed to an article by Ben Kunz in Business Week this week, “A Pricing Revolution Looms in Online Advertising”. It won’t be news to most of us who labor online, but for the benefit of Business Week readers Mr. Kunz’s point is that behavior and demographic targeting are making it possible for advertisers to by-pass the expensive real estate of branded web sites (“FancyOldSite.com,” as Mr. Kunz characterizes them) for the cheaper inventory of other, presumably smaller web sites brought to market by ad networks and companies such is Quantcast (a commercial partner of Burst).

Ben Kunz makes this sound like bad news. It’s not. Behavior and demographic targeting (or, “re-targeting”) rely on a fundamental of media planning passed down through the ages: observed media behavior. Observe what someone reads or views, and you can deduce the sort of person. Online, demographic or behavior targeting has been gloriously easy to scale: set cookie, set timer and serve.  Accordingly, it has also been much cheaper online, which is the effect Mr. Kunz describes.

But the process is leading us in the right direction. Advertisers have been reluctant over the years to explore the Long Tail of the Internet, except as fodder for less descriptive performance campaigns. They have huddled around FancyOldSites at the tip of the market. Now, however, increasingly accurate and meaningful forms of behavior targeting have advertisers running ads across great swaths of the Internet. So, it can’t be argued anymore that advertisers are afraid of what they don’t know about where their ads are running because their ads are probably running there already. Next, therefore, it may dawn on them that they can reliably turn to the many destinations they are already using to target not just behaviorally but in context so that their messages are cloaked in a supportive environment.

This is good news for an industry that needs good news. Why? Because if behavior is the right message to the right person, context is the right message to the right person at the right time. If behavior has been a planning fundamental down through the ages, context has been its foundation. Context has been - and is – the quarry from whence cometh the stone. Google showed us how to dig from that quarry and built a monument to The Media Ages.

FancyOldSites.com should react to Ben Kunz’s warnings in Business Week by getting into the behavior game themselves, leveraging their brand equity to develop vertical ad networks of their own that create cross-selling, behavior-type opportunites. Many are. In the process, they can help unearth – as Google did - the Internet’s essential value proposition, the one they know most about: context. Real context. Vertical niche context. Context without compromise. Exactly the right message in exactly the right place at exactly the right time, for exactly the right audience. It can be exploited just as efficiently as behavior. Indeed, advertisers are most of the way there.  And, it can be just as affordable, making it easier to by-pass the expensive media offline where – frankly – most of the media money remains.

On the backs of farmers and builders

Today, Mediapost’s Online Media Daily features a dizzying collection of stories, one after the other, of targeting new-fangledness – Media6 social graphing, ClearSite ”next generation” behavioral targeting, Expedia’s Passport Ads to reach in-market travelers and paid search Super Converters, which I guess happen by accident. (They sound like quarks). It’s all best summarized by another story talking about the impact all of these features and benefits are having on the ad sales value chain, which now has so many links in it that it’s almost impossible to see the end from the beginning.

Someone once tried to explain to me that the world rests on the backs of farmers and builders. They are the only people that really make anything and the rest of us just mark-up their value and skim off the top. That is surely what seems to be happening to publishers online, today.  I wonder how long it continues?

FTC Urges Marketers to Self-regulate Consumer Privacy – or Else.

I still wake-up nights haunted by a telephone call we got at home sometime early last year. It was evening, around 7:00 p.m., and my wife and I were cooking dinner and having a glass of wine. The telephone rings. I answer. “Hello, George,” the caller said boldly (my first name is George, but I never use it; so when someone addresses me as George, I know we’re not on a first name basis), “This is Mitt Romney and I am calling to ask for your support next week in the primary election. This year, the stakes have…” Who knows what came later. I hung-up. I turned to my wife and explained. “How did he do that?” she asked. “Your name and everything?” Good question, especially since we had long since registered on the “Do Not Call” list with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

So, interesting that the FTC released guidelines yesterday that gave marketers room to self-regulate around the issue of consumer privacy, dangling the “R” word in plain sight to make it clear that if the industry can’t do something to stop all the calls and letters Government keeps getting from angry consumer advocates, then they will. I would like to register my desire to see the calls stop from Government (and candidates).

Most of the brouhaha about privacy points to online behavioral targeting. But honestly, I have never been bothered by an online marketer at home during dinner using my first name.  Most of us recognize that the grocery store down the street has more information about us, personally, than virtually any online behavior marketer, so - with apologies to Butch Cassidy -  what’s the matter with those guys? It is impossible for me to wrest control of my wife’s merchant cards from her hands. I would appreciate some help at the point-of-purchase heading-off future mailings and offers. It would save a ton in the “George” household.

One of the FTC commissioners, Pamela Jones Harbour, gets it, and according to the report on the subject in Ad Age this morning, she acknowledged and expressed concern that the FTC’s report was too narrowly focused on online advertising.

Burst offers behavior targeting as a standard component of its advertising sales product lines and is rigorous about policing the privacy policies governing it and any other remarketing features we use relying on cookie data, all of which is non-personally identifiable. Behavior targeting is a great tool for extending the reach of relevant campaigns against a target audience. Our business relies as much on contextual advertising (e.g. Travel advertising on Travel web sites), which the FTC said does not pose a problem and is not covered by the principals in their report. Good to know in case they invoke the “R “word down the road, but as a consumer I would be more interested to know what the FTC can do about keeping Mitt Romney from calling me at home.