Google Closes in on Yahoo's Leadership in Display Advertising

Meanwhile, Marketers Don't Think the No. 2 Online Player Has Made Strides in Search, According to Poll

By Michael Learmonth

Published: February 02, 2009

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Yahoo's business didn't crater in the fourth quarter -- good news for new CEO Carol Bartz. But the bad news: The No. 2 online player predicts first-quarter revenue will be down 10% as the recession starts to hit online-display-ad budgets in a bigger way. What's more, the display-ad advantage it commanded over its closest competitor, Google, is less formidable than it used to be.

Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz

Research firm Advertiser Perceptions shared with Advertising Age the results of its latest Advertiser Intelligence Report, a poll of 1,212 executives at agencies and marketers involved in online advertising. The results won't leave anyone at Yahoo sleeping well at night: Google is making inroads on the display-ad side and is now perceived to be Yahoo's equal in many key metrics -- yet Yahoo hasn't made commensurate gains in search.

"Perceptions of Yahoo are strong and are improving, but what's surprising is how well Google's display efforts have succeeded in creating equally strong perceptions on Yahoo's turf," said Advertising Perceptions CEO Ken Pearl. "Since positive perceptions lead to increasing ad revenue, it will be interesting to see how the online-display market plays out over the next several months."

Yahoo declined to comment on the poll.

The data break down like this: Advertisers give Yahoo very high marks for the results of their ad campaigns and for the marketing services Yahoo provides. But in a survey conducted in November, Google bested Yahoo when it came to results advertisers felt they were getting from campaigns: Advertisers rated Yahoo 29% better than the average of the 150 online media companies in the survey, but Google rated 43% better.

Customer service vs. user experience
On marketing services, Yahoo is still preferred, rating 42% better than average, compared with 7% better than average for Google. But in terms of audience, advertisers perceive virtually no difference between display ads on Google and display ads on Yahoo. And in customer service, Google is beating Yahoo handily: Google rates 19% above the industry average compared with 9% above average for Yahoo, a sign that some of Google's hard work wooing agencies and marketers is paying off.

Some perspective: For all its effort thus far, Google is still a nonplayer in display, and earns 99% of its revenue from search, while Yahoo dominates 33% of the $7.1 billion U.S. online-display market, according to eMarketer. It will take more than matching Yahoo in advertiser perception to close that gap.

Also troubling for Yahoo: It is losing ground in search in the eyes of marketers. Google accounted for 73% of the revenue in the larger and faster-growing search-ad marketplace, compared with Yahoo's 13%, according to eMarketer.

Yahoo's dominance in display is due in part to its scale and to its skill in providing marketing solutions to Madison Avenue. But Yahoo's year of turmoil, including a revolving door of ad execs in key verticals, came at just the time Google was putting the pedal through the floor.

"[Yahoo's] lack of focus internally bled out and diminished their ability to solve their client's marketing problems," said Steve Kerho, VP-analytics at Omnicom interactive shop Organic.

Keeping search
Ironically, Mr. Kerho said he believes the best way for Yahoo to protect its display-ad business is to find a way to succeed in search. "When you look at how people consume media online, it's search and display. Their ability to give end-to-end solutions is hampered if they have to outsource part of that," he said.

While it's early to know how Ms. Bartz intends to approach search, she indicated last week she's not inclined to part with it. "Search is a very valuable part of our business," she said. "Understanding the intent and goals of our users as they seek information online is extremely useful to our franchise in many ways."

Ms. Bartz said she was eager to get to know Yahoo's sales force and "have a beer with them." Better make that a double, because 2009 could be the toughest they've had to face.

Not ye olde banners

Nov 27th 2008 | SAN FRANCISCO
From The Economist print edition

Internet advertising will be relatively unscathed in the downturn

Illustration by David Simonds

AT THE beginning of the year Jeff Zucker, the boss of NBC Universal, a big television and film company, told an audience of TV executives that their biggest challenge was to ensure “that we do not end up trading analogue dollars for digital pennies”. He meant that audiences were moving online faster than advertisers, thus leaving media companies short-changed. Now, near the end of the year, the situation looks even worse, as the recession threatens to turn even the analogue dollars into pennies. Will this hasten the shift towards internet advertising, or will it decline too?

Advertising rises and falls with the economy, though how much is a matter of debate. Randall Rothenberg, the boss of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, a trade association for digital advertisers, points to the remarkable stability of advertising at about 2% of GDP since 1919, when the data began to be collected. This would suggest that ad budgets will move roughly in line with economic output.

But Mary Meeker, an internet analyst at Morgan Stanley, believes that modern ad budgets rise and fall much more than GDP does. According to her estimates, if the economy stops growing, ad spending is likely to fall by 4%. If the economy shrinks by 2%, overall ad spending may fall by 10%. As for the online segment, recent history is cause for pessimism. Between 2000 and 2002, during the dotcom recession, online ad spending in America fell by 27%.

Yet the web has changed a lot since 2002. Back then, gaudy display “banners” on web portals such as Yahoo! and MSN were the preferred technology. These still exist, but they now account for less than 20% of online ad spending. More than half goes to search advertising on Google and rival search-engines, which place small text ads next to results based on the keyword of the query, and charge only when a user clicks on them. In brand advertising, “rich media” ads are taking over from banners. These allow users to interact by clicking, so their engagement can be tracked.

All this makes spending on advertising much less speculative, so that it starts to be treated instead as a cost of sales. This is one reason why online advertising should suffer less than other sorts. This week eMarketer, a market-research firm, predicted that online-advertising spending in America, which makes up about half the global total, will increase by 8.9% in 2009, rather than the 14.5% it had forecast in August. The firm thinks search advertising will grow by 14.9% and rich-media ads by 7.5%, whereas display ads will grow by 6.6%. In short, online advertising will continue to expand in the recession—just not as quickly as previously expected.

Another reason for optimism, says Mr Rothenberg, is that online advertising is making obsolete the old distinction between marketing spending “above the line” and “below” it. In the jargon, above-the-line spending drives brand “awareness” (probably on television) or “consideration” by a consumer planning a purchase (probably in a newspaper). Such spending is often slashed in recessions. Below-the-line spending includes promotions or coupons to whet the consumer’s “preference” for the brand as he nears a purchase, or schemes such as frequent- flyer miles to increase his “loyalty” afterwards. These budgets are more robust.

Online marketing increasingly aims for awareness, consideration, preference and loyalty all at once. Mr Rothenberg gives the example of a rich-media ad for Kraft, a food company, in which a yummy image raises brand awareness, a click reveals a recipe that increases consideration, another click provides coupons and yet another click initiates a game that can be shared with friends. Marketing managers can therefore defend their online budgets as being both above and below the line.

The industry is also cautiously excited about two new forms of online advertising. The first is video. So far nobody has found a way to advertise inside online clips on a large scale. YouTube, which Google bought for no less than $1.65 billion two years ago, is “a huge end-user success,” says Eric Schmidt, Google’s boss, “and we’re awaiting the monetisation.” This is his way of saying that YouTube, despite showing 5 billion video clips a month, has trivial ad revenues. The site is experimenting with text “overlays” inside clips and sponsored videos for specific search terms, but it is early days. “If only we could schedule the revolution,” jokes Larry Page, one of Google’s founders.

If something close to one is in fact near, it may not come from YouTube. Ads on Hulu, a video site that is a joint venture between Mr Zucker’s NBC Universal and News Corp, another media giant, appear to be selling well. Hulu is different from other video sites in that it only shows professionally produced videos, such as programmes and films from NBC, Fox, MGM and Warner Brothers. It runs a relatively small number of short, fun “pre-roll” ads. These incorporate some of the advantages of the web. Viewers can, for instance, vote on how good a particular ad was.

The lesson appears to be that the problem was not the format but the fact that so much of the footage online, especially on YouTube, is “user-generated”. Brands are wary of putting their ads next to amateur clips because they may be boring or offensive. This is less likely to be a problem with professional content. From a small base, says Mr Rothenberg, online-video ads grew from 1% to 3% of all interactive ads in America in the first half of the year.

The other hope is for ads on social networks such as MySpace and Facebook. They are experimenting with a variety of advertising formats, though none has yet proved very successful. Their big weakness is that users go to social-networking sites to socialise, not to shop (as they might on search engines). Their biggest strength is that users spend so much time there. Two years ago 11% of time spent online was at Yahoo! and MSN, two web portals; now their share is down to 5%, and 5% of online time is spent at YouTube and Facebook.

Online traffic, in other words, is moving towards sites where advertising has so far proved ineffective and is therefore cheap. This, says Ms Meeker, presents an opportunity for innovation and arbitrage by clever marketing managers as they cut their conventional ad budgets. It may also provide a glimmer of hope for the advertising industry as it enters recession.

Search and Display Work Better Together

AUGUST 3, 2007

Tandem use raises conversion rates.

Campaigns which use both display ads and search marketing convert more online shoppers into buyers than those which use only one of these tactics.

That is the main finding of a Yahoo!/comScore study called "From Clicks to Bricks: The Impact of Online Pre-Shopping on Consumer Shopping Behavior."

Among consumers in the study group who had been exposed to both search and display ads, 43% made in-store purchases, compared with 26% of those who had viewed only search ads, and 6% of those who had only seen display ads.

The search/display combination also increased in-store spending. Those consumers who had seen both ad types spent an average of 83% more than those who had not seen either type of ad.

In comparison, consumers who had seen only search ads spent 26% more, on average, than those who had not seen any ads. Exposure to display ads lifted in-store sales an average of 11% over spending by buyers who had not seen any ads.

A similar study of online buyers conducted about a year ago yielded even more dramatic results. Atlas' "The Combined Impact of Search and Display Advertising — Why Advertisers Should Measure Across Channels" found that exposure to both ad types increased conversion rates by 400% over display ads alone.

Many studies on the effectiveness of search and display compare the two, rather than looking at them in tandem. This search vs. display approach often measures click-through rates (CTRs) rather than conversions. CTR is a fundamental metric of pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.

By this measurement, the search click rate tends to surpass that for display ads. Morgan Stanley estimates a steady rise in the search marketing CTR from 10.4% in 2003 to 12.6% in 2010.

Sci-fi projections

http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/tech/sci-fi-projections.html


Systems create images on glass, in thin air
March 22, 2007
By Denise Deveau, CBC News

The Heliodisplay from IO2 Technologies can project computer-based images onto thin particles of moisture. The airborne film of moisture generated by the device - the black box with the large slot pictured in the foreground - captures the light from the projector to allow the images to take shape. Shown here, the laptop in the background is running a video of a woman on a cellphone, while the Heliodisplay simultaneously turns it into an image that appears to be floating in thin air. The Heliodisplay from IO2 Technologies can project computer-based images onto thin particles of moisture. The airborne film of moisture generated by the device — the black box with the large slot pictured in the foreground — captures the light from the projector to allow the images to take shape. Shown here, the laptop in the background is running a video of a woman on a cellphone, while the Heliodisplay simultaneously turns it into an image that appears to be floating in thin air.

Free floating images in thin air that you can move with your hands, windows that morph into touchscreen displays for passersby — welcome to the new world of projection applications that are literally opening up a new window to the world.

Next generation presentation technologies are now delivering a bona fide interactive experience on anything from solid glass to airborne vapour. And all it takes is a projection system, some cool presentation software, a set of infrared sensors and a few complex algorithms to make it happen.

As with a lot of the high-tech "fun stuff" these days, much of the innovation in this area is coming out of Asia, says Chris Synn, chief executive officer of Los Angeles-based Innotive Inc., a developer of interactive presentation software. Innotive's touch-enabled technology, developed in South Korea, is just one example of the types of systems pushing the boundaries of old and familiar interactive display applications.

With the lightest of touches, users can grab and shuffle images around, zoom in and out to see the minutest of details, or simply wave their hands over an image to make it come alive on screens as large as 100 inches or 254 centimetres. "Instead of a stylus you just use your finger to interact," explained Synn.
Adding a touch of interactivity to screens

Since the interface can work with projection technology, retailers can actually turn an entire display window into a screen — and that, said Synn, is where the wow factor comes into play. "Once people try to interact with it, it's breathtaking. Navigation is so fluid."

Toronto-based media specialist Optiadmedia is heading in this "window to the world" direction with its Window F/X offering, a through-glass storefront multimedia projection technology that was developed in Asia. It all works like a floating screen that can run content of all shapes and sizes on store windows or other clear display formats.

Window F/X combines a rear projection system with a near invisible film that is applied to the window to allow light to be captured to display images. It can be programmed to run any kind of digital content, including animated footage and still images. Optional touchscreen features allow passersby to browse catalogues and surf the internet. Window F/X also has the potential to incorporate audio and Bluetooth wireless capabilities into such things as store-window displays.

The Heliodisplay from IO2 Technologies can project any kind of static or moving image, from photographs to movies, without the need for a solid screen. Pictured here, an arrow icon appears suspended in the air in front of a person's hand. The Heliodisplay from IO2 Technologies can project any kind of static or moving image, from photographs to movies, without the need for a solid screen. Pictured here, an arrow icon appears suspended in the air in front of a person's hand.

Optiadmedia partner Michael Dellios is working on new ways to harness this emerging medium, which was launched into the commercial market in the latter part of 2006. "It puts a new spin on the term window shopping. It's starting to be used a lot for event promotion, because it can be used on portable screen — it's very eye catching."

The Nestings Kids junior home store at Eglinton and Avenue Road in Toronto is among the first to explore the Window F/X experience for its display window, said company owner and president Lisa Rosen. The store's new 46 cm by 61cm translucent screen offers rotating images of products, as well as animations — like snowflakes falling or vintage children's shows to catch the interest of passing shoppers.

"It's great because it doesn't interfere with what we're doing with our window displays, and it makes our products more accessible," Rosen said. "It's just a fun way to get attention. As soon as it was up and running at night, we got calls from people saying how great it was."

Rosen hasn't made the leap to an interactive program for the system yet, but that may come, she said. "That's the fun thing about it all. It's a true idea of what window shopping could be in the future."
Images in thin air

A person uses their hand to manipulate the ghostly, floating image of a digital camera, projected by an IO2 Technologies Heliodisplay. The display has optional motion sensors that let people move computer-generated images around with their fingers. A person uses their hand to manipulate the ghostly, floating image of a digital camera, projected by an IO2 Technologies Heliodisplay. The display has optional motion sensors that let people move computer-generated images around with their fingers.

The future has even more interesting possibilities for Chad Dyner, a San Francisco-based developer and founder of IO2 Technologies. He's the creator of Heliodisplay, a projection technology that works with suspended particles of moisture that can create an interactive display experience literally out of thin air.

Heliodisplay projects computer-based images onto thin particles of moisture generated by a particulate emitting device. The moisture film generated by the device captures the light from the projector to allow the images to take shape.

Heliodisplay can project any kind of static or moving images, from photographs to movies. The piece de resistance — or added "wow" factor if you will — is an optional interactive capability that uses motion sensors to let people move images around with their fingers.

So far, commercial applications have included venues such as museums, trade shows and special events, and Dyner is the first to admit that his innovation is still in its developmental stages. Work is still being done to perfect content and image delivery.

"It's not a mainstream product by any means," he said. "But I definitely think it's the future. I believe we'll start to see more ways to have unobtrusive displays and new ways to interact with information. What we use now is from a previous era."

"This type of thing is not just a novelty item," noted Synn. "You can make it interactive. You can update content. It's all free form so you can do so much with it. It's all pretty cool stuff."

Home » Archives » 2007 » May » 14 » Study: Banner Ads Trigger Warm, Fuzzy Feelings...

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Study: Banner Ads Trigger Warm, Fuzzy Feelings
If you flash them, they will come
A recent study in the forthcoming issue of the Journal of Consumer Research posits that banner ads leave a mental imprint, even when users aren't paying attention, Science Daily reports.
The majority of ad exposure occurs when the audience's attention is diverted - flipping through a magazine, waiting for a television show or loading a website. However, given repeated exposure, brief and subconscious ad encounters may endear certain brands to consumer perspectives. This is because repetition leads to familiarity, which in turn yields positive feelings, researchers found.
In addition to more positive associations with brands to which they were frequently exposed, participants also exhibited high levels of tolerance for banner ads in their general periphery, even if their focus was elsewhere. Notably, even 20 exposures did not trigger wear-out effects in the viewers.
The study, entitled "An Examination of Different Explanations for the Mere Exposure Effect," appears in the June edition of the Journal of Consumer Research. Its breadth revisits and reinterprets theories of exposure advertising, particularly those related to Web-based banner ads.

The Promise of Online Display Ads

On the heels of Google's DoubleClick deal, Yahoo! is forking over $680 million for Right Media. Why are ad exchanges and networks suddenly the belle of the ball?

by Catherine Holahan

Days after Right Media Chief Executive Mike Walrath moved into his Park Avenue office, he was scrawling on the dry-erase boards lining the walls. Walrath drew a three-line graph representing the market for the type of ads that are the mainstay of his business.

One line sloped steeply upward to represent the ever-expanding number of Web pages capable of serving display ads, those graphic and multimedia ads in fixed locations on a page. Another line sloped downward to show the average price of those ads as the Web is flooded with new pages that compete for both advertisers and visitors. The resulting revenue went up, but not by much. That, Walrath explained, was the conventional wisdom on the display ad market.

And it was utterly wrong, Walrath hastened to add. Advertising networks and services such as Right Media's that enable marketers and publishers to buy and sell ads in an auction format can significantly increase the average price of display ads by helping marketers target ads across the Web. Factor that into the graph and you get a revenue line that reaches sharply toward the sky, says Walrath. "I think folks have seriously underestimated the display market," he says.

On Display

Yahoo!, Google (GOOG), and other online media companies have seen the writing on the wall. On Apr. 30, Yahoo ( YHOO), the leader in online display advertising, announced it would pay $680 million for the 80% stake in Right Media that it does not already own.

The move came a week after Google's $3.1 billion acquisition of DoubleClick, an ad-delivery outfit that had recently launched its own exchange (see BusinessWeek.com, 4/14/07, "Google's DoubleClick Strategic Move"). Microsoft ( MSFT) has also reportedly been looking for an ad network to acquire. Among those considered ripe for acquisition are 24/7 Real Media (TFSM), Aquantive ( AQNT), and ValueClick (VCLK).

This year, the market for online display advertising—including interactive video ads that run in a fixed place on a page—could reach $5.5 billion, estimates David Hallerman, a senior analyst at eMarketer. That's less than the market for text ads related to searches, which is expected to bring in about $8.2 billion this year. Compare that with 2000, when search ads accounted for just 1.3% of the total online ad market, while display ads brought in 47%, says Hallerman. As companies such as Google were able to make the ads highly targeted, providing marketers with clear returns, search ads became more expensive, eventually dominating the field.

Ad Prices

Ad-exchange services such as Right Media want to do to display what Google did to search. Exchanges increase the price of ads by letting advertising networks that track Web surfing behavior buy space, in front of users they recognize, on nonpremium Web pages—pages with content that an advertiser doesn't specifically want to be associated with, such as Yahoo Mail pages. The networks can afford to pay more for these pages because they are delivering even higher priced ads thanks to their tracking information. "By allowing other publishers access to our inventory…we will ultimately achieve premium pricing from both of those elements," said Susan Decker, Yahoo's chief financial officer, on a conference call following the announcement.

Since acquiring a 20% stake in Right Media for $45 million in October, Yahoo has seen a 50% increase in the price of ads on the so-called nonpremium pages it has made available through Right Media. Other Web publishers have seen their ad prices increase, too (see BusinessWeek.com, 3/6/07, "Right Media's Big Ambitions").


Tailor-Made Ads

A pumped-up price is only part of the reason Yahoo has made 32-year-old Walrath and his team of 20-something executives multimillionaires. Yahoo is able to gather information on the surfing habits of users who flock to its sites and search tools. Right Media helps Yahoo use that data to better deliver tailored ads across the Web. So, for example, if a Yahoo Finance user visited a page on News Corp.'s (NWS) MySpace, Yahoo could buy space on that page, on the fly, to serve a higher-priced investment ad. Arguably, DoubleClick's ad exchange has similar appeal for Google.

The ability to serve ads across the Web to specific audiences is particularly important for advertisers looking to increase brand awareness, says Dave Morgan, chairman of TACODA, an ad network that specializes in serving such targeted brand ads across the Web. "Advertisers want television[-type] reach numbers," says Morgan.

Indeed, it is television and print ad dollars that the portals are trying to bring online with their networks. Even if just 2% of the $70 million in television advertising goes to the Web's audience, that's a lot of growth, points out Hallerman. As those dollars migrate to the Web, the mix of search and display ads could become more even.

The Big If

Of course, for exchanges to fulfill their promise, publishers will have to continue to auction off ad space—even when they are owned by a competitor. That's a big if. "I think other publishers will get concerned," says Bill Gossman, president and CEO of Revenue Science, an ad-targeting network that buys space on Right Media. "Am I willing to mix my inventory with the dominant display advertising player on the Internet?"

Yahoo and Right Media stressed that the exchange would be kept open, akin to the NASDAQ. Yahoo would not, say, get any special knowledge of the bidding prices that it could use to outbid competitors at the last minute. Nor would it overwhelm the ad exchange with its own inventory at the expense of other publishers, said Yahoo's Decker. "We believe this capitalistic approach will yield the greatest experience for publishers," she said.

Scaring away publishers would only decrease the worth of Right Media to Yahoo. Yahoo expects Right Media to bring in $70 million this year from the roughly 7% fee it charges on approximately 6 billion daily transactions. Those revenues alone did not justify the $725 million purchase. Relationships with publishers such as Fox Interactive Network, which includes MySpace, were undoubtedly a consideration.

Without Right Media, Yahoo couldn't fully capitalize on its substantial knowledge of users' Internet habits. And Walrath's initial, less promising depiction of display advertising wouldn't look so wrong after all.

Display Ads Still Get the Job Done

MARCH 16, 2007 Static ads remain an important arrow in the online marketing quiver. onage has brought the high tech of VoIP to the masses, but when it comes to online ads, it still believes in the basics, according to new data from TNS Media Intelligence. The Internet phone company spent over $185 million on display ads in 2006, outspending both rival Verizon Communications and display ad giant Netflix. eMarketer senior analyst and online ad specialist David Hallerman estimates that budget share for display and classified ads will remain relatively flat through 2011, with paid search inching up and rich media and video gaining sharply. Despite display ads' humble stature, Vonage and its fellow big spenders are onto something. A December 2006 study by Datran Media revealed that display ads remain an important tactic for US marketers, behind only e-mail and search marketing. In fact, display ads were named as important by more than twice as many respondents as online video. Plus, Vonage, AT&T and Verizon all run their share of TV ads, and multimedia campaigns tend to be more effective than those using one media type exclusively. A Yahoo! study released by comScore Networks in December 2006 found that campaigns that use both search and display advertising are far more engaging and effective than those viewed individually. Online users who were exposed to both the search and display advertising campaigns increased their share of page views relative to competing sites by 68% and time spent by 66%. More importantly, among those exposed to both the search and display ads, purchases of the advertiser's products and services increased by 244% online and 89% offline compared to online users with similar behavior who were not exposed to these ads. Find out what's going on in online advertising abroad. Read eMarketer's Europe Online Advertising: Spend, Trends and Audience report. Get More from eMarketer eMarketer subscribers have access to thousands of reports, articles and charts related to topics like this one. To learn more, visit: www.emarketer.com ©2007 eMarketer Inc. All rights reserved

Ex Did-It Chief Bill Wise Lands At Remix Media Ad Network

by Shankar Gupta, Monday, Mar 12, 2007 6:00 AM ET
FORMER DID-IT CEO BILL WISE, who left the search engine marketing firm last month citing a disagreement about the direction of the company, starts today as president of Remix Media, a division of auction-based ad network Right Media, OnlineMediaDaily has learned.
Right Media made headlines in October when Yahoo bought a 20% stake in the firm for $45 million. In December, the company created the new brand Remix Media for its ad network, which allows advertisers to bid on display ad impressions from specific sites.
Wise will oversee the growth of Remix, having experience with both auction-based media from his role at Did-It, as well as ad network management from his experience as general manager of DoubleClick Media.
"It's really kind of bridging the ad network business and the concept of an exchange with search marketing and everything else," he said.
Currently, Remix represents mostly lower-cost inventory, but part of Wise's job will entail attracting both big-spending advertisers and more premium inventory, he said.
"They're now serving two billion impressions a day. They've gotten large very quickly. Right now, they're representing a lot of remnant space," he said. "But clearly, the strategy is how to go upstream, and that's going to be a large part of my role."
Wise said the company aims to help marketers manage entire campaigns on an auction-based level.
"More and more marketers and agencies need to embrace the concept of auction-based media, and Right Media has the online advertising piece figured out," he said. "Remix Media, and we're really establishing that as another brand, can really help marketers manage their inventory holistically."

Hong Kong Media Buying Service Opens New York Branch

March 8th 2007 - Adotas

China New Media Advertising, an online and print media advertising buying service based out of Hong Kong, announced the opening of its New York office today.

A limited liability company, CNMA is owned by IMS Companies.

With access to 150 websites and 75 print business publications, CNMA will provide access to its Mainland Chinese Network. Media buying services and business information to global customers and prospects are also included in CNMA’s offerings along with Chinese language translation.

“China’s population of Internet users has risen by 30 percent over the past year to 132 million, and these are just a couple of fantastic stats about this fast-growing marketplace. From day one, our network of Chinese websites can deliver up to 200 million banner impressions per day, reaching 19 million visitors to this unique website network daily,” stated CNMA president Hector Botero.

Within the 75 trade publications, B2B advertisers are allowed to purchase an entire network or select business newspapers by industry.

Botero added, “Advertisers need expert help to access China and they also need help to efficiently reach their target market. It’s virtually impossible to plan, execute and measure on-line and print advertising campaigns without a local presence and inside China knowledge.”

Maurice Johnson, who holds over 20 years of experience in international advertising, will head the New York office. “Our goal at CNMA is to provide — in China — the resources, knowledge and service that international advertiser’s need,” he said.

Don’t Like the Dancing Cowboys? Results Say You Do

January 18, 2007

Advertising

By BRAD STONE

Most online advertisements are becoming less obtrusive and more tailored to the interests of individual Web users. Among the stubborn holdouts are the two-stepping cowboys, frisky rooftop dancers and weird tattoos in ubiquitous Web banners from LowerMyBills.com.

The company, one of the Internet’s biggest advertisers, routinely festoons Web sites large and small with its ads, spending $74.6 million on them in the first 11 months of 2006, according to TNS Media Intelligence. The surprising success of the ads led LowerMyBills to a significant payday: the credit agency Experian bought the eight-year-old company for $400 million in 2005.

But on the path to prosperity, LowerMyBills has run into a lot of people who say the undulating characters in the ads are highly distracting and have so little to do with low-interest loans that they border on the surreal.

The most memorable LowerMyBills banners feature silhouetted dancers like the prancing cowboys, or the couple doing a jig on their roof under a full moon. In another ad, a suited man wildly pumps his fists under the headline “$510,000 Mortgage for under $1,698/month.”

In variations of these ads that are ever stranger, the same figures are tattooed onto arms or shaved into hair.

“The ads are like a Monty Python sketch,” said Dev Ravindran, a software developer from Jersey City who created a blog to track and humorously critique the ads (lowermybillswatch.blogspot.com). “Some of them are so out of the blue they make no sense.”

Rogers Cadenhead, an author and blogger, resorted to tinkering with his computer to block all ads from the company. “I was trying to read a news article and realized the dancing mortgage people were eliminating all rational thought from my brain,” he said.

There may be few online ads less aimed at a specific audience than the LowerMyBills dancers, who are equally likely to perform their fanciful boogie on a bulletin board for hockey enthusiasts as next to an article related to home finance or on a mortgage-related site. (They also appear on the Web site of The New York Times.)

Matt R. Coffin, the co-founder and chief executive of LowerMyBills, said the company’s ad campaign represented a return to traditional advertising principles rather than an embrace of the latest conventional wisdom.

“Building a brand is often about being different, and we are always looking for new and innovative ways to attract the attention of consumers interested in lowering their bills,” he said.

Mr. Coffin said that the company closely tracks the performance of its ads, removing the ones that do not attract clicks, and that the banners are highly effective at getting Internet users to fill out loan applications. “If you keep seeing the same ads, that means they are working,” he said.

Internet companies like LowerMyBills are called lead generators because they take loan applications filled out by customers who click the ads and give them to actual lenders like Citibank, which pay them for the referrals. The company’s success hinges on buying lots of low-cost ad space on Web sites and then persuading users to click.

But on Web bulletin boards, the ads are drawing a lot of criticism. In one discussion of the company, a user calling herself Jane Dough wrote, “Even if they had the best interest rate around, I would still find myself thinking, ‘But aren’t they the cheesy company with the stupid dancing people?’ ”

In another discussion last week on the site of the band the Beastie Boys, fans of the group pondered the prevalence of the ads and in particular the woman on the rooftop, who appears to have cornrows in her hair and an unusual body shape for a model.

Others wonder what the dancers have to do with home equity loans or debt consolidation. Mr. Coffin said by way of explanation: “Our view is that people are crazy about saving money, and when they do save money they are very happy.”

But that does not explain other LowerMyBills ads, like the ones featuring a dog wearing goggles and a scampering duck.

One person who can shed some light on the LowerMyBills mystique is Jennifer Uhll, a 35-year-old graphic artist from Los Angeles who joined LowerMyBills in 2002 and became creative director in 2005. She left the company last summer to start her own firm, Juhll Inc.

Ms. Uhll said the company has included maps of the United States in its ads for years, ever since executives read a brochure about online advertising that said people responded to the chance to specify their home states. Most LowerMyBills ads include this feature, though it seems to have little effect on the loan application that people are asked to fill out.

Ms. Uhll said she first used the silhouettes in January 2005, in an ad featuring a woman blowing colorful bubbles that represented the 50 states. Four months later, another LowerMyBills ad with three prancing, high-kicking sheep under the headline “Mortgage Rates Hit Record Lows!” also performed well.

So Ms. Uhll combined the two concepts, animating her silhouetted, pony-tailed woman with a swaying modern dance. Ms. Uhll said she is a dancer and took a variety of dancing classes for more than a decade. She is also a fan of the pet sequences in “America’s Funniest Home Videos,” which relates to the animal ads.

“I usually put into my creative work what I love and what makes me happy and gets my attention,” she said.

Ms. Uhll said her online advertisements for financial companies, including ones she created before and after she worked for LowerMyBills, typically earned around $4 in lender referral fees for each dollar spent on the ad. The average for most lead-generation companies is less than $2 earned for each dollar spent on Web ads.

LowerMyBills, which is based in Santa Monica, Calif., declined to say exactly how effective its ads are, and it seemed eager to prevent that information from becoming public. After Ms. Uhll spoke to a reporter, she said, the company sent her two e-mail messages and a formal legal letter, warning of her continued obligations and saying it was “extremely sensitive to the disclosure of confidential information.”

Ms. Uhll said she is aware of Internet users who hate the LowerMyBills ads and she does question whether the ads pollute the Internet, as some assert. But she said she decided that “there are lots of people who are glad they saw the ad and ended up paying a lot less money.”

Many online advertising experts express a grudging respect for the work of Ms. Uhll and her successors at LowerMyBills. “I do have a bit of admiration for the company,” said James Gardner of the online ad archive Adverlicio.us, which maintains a collection of LowerMyBills ads. “They are very comfortable flying in the face of scorn and ridicule.”

Timothy Hanlon, a senior vice president at the Starcom MediaVest Group, a media communications firm, called the company a “bottom feeder,” but he added: “The last time I checked, advertising was designed to draw people’s attention. On that level, LowerMyBills succeeds with a gold star.”

Mr. Coffin was not apologetic about his company’s methods. “One thing we will probably expand to the nth degree are the dancing silhouette ads,” he said. “It’s a great opportunity to double down on a proven winner.”

Display Ads Disappearing from E-Mail Sites

JANUARY 17, 2007

Now you see them, now you don't.

Display advertising is a large part of the revenues at major e-mail sites; nevertheless, it apparently is becoming a smaller part.

According to Nielsen//NetRatings AdRelevance, e-mail sites garnered just 44.2% of banner ads in December 2006, down from November's 47.5% and October's 51.1%.

Of course, it should be noted that display advertising fell slightly overall in December. Online advertisers ran 257.7 billion display ads last month, compared to 259.6 billion in November.

The top five advertiser categories for display ads for December was led by financial services, accounting for 29% of online display ads, up from 25% in November. Web media was the second-largest category, with 17% of impressions, though down from 20% in November. Retail goods and services accounted for 16% of impressions, flat from November; telecoms accounted for 13%, up from 10% in November; and public services held the fifth spot with 6%, down from 9% in November.

Nielsen//NetRatings also reported that, as usual, Google was the top search provider in November, as ranked by total searches, followed, by quite a ways, by Yahoo! and MSN.

Nielsen//NetRatings estimated that 3.1 billion search queries were conducted on Google, representing some 50% of all search queries conducted during the month.

According to comScore Networks, in December the story was much the same, with Google sites capturing 47.3% of the US search market, a slight .4% gain over November. Yahoo! grew .3%, maintaining its second-place ranking with 28.5% of US searches, and MSN was third at 10.5% of searches.

By comScore's calculations, Americans conducted 6.7 billion searches in December, up 1% over November.

For more information on online advertising trends, read eMarketer's US Online Ad Spending report.

That Slope Is Just Getting Slipperier

George Simpson

As if air pollution, astronomical real estate prices and the possibility of running into The Donald weren't reason enough to sprint to suburbia, here comes this news item from a New York Times story: "Yankelovich, a market research firm, estimates that a person living in a city 30 years ago saw up to 2,000 ad messages a day, compared with up to 5,000 today."

Since the story was about place-based ads, one assumes the 5,000 messages don't include those we encounter in media--which, you will recall from earlier Over The Line dispatches, is where we bury our noses for about three hours a day. A single network prime-time TV show now has 634 ads per hour (956 if you count the promos they scroll under or paste over the content itself). The only good news is that ads are continuing to disappear from your newspapers and magazines. The bad news is that when they lose those cool auto ads, magazines replace them with cheapo, classified-looking ads from the retail equivalent of penis and breast enhancement creams, crapping up their layouts and just adding to the clutter.

But the bottom line is that overloading consumers with ads to the point that they can't sit quietly in a toilet stall without having to see commercial messages just puts them further over the edge, so they just hate the ad industry more than ever and forget how useful (and occasionally entertaining) ads can be to their lives.

Like everyone else, I have online ad blockers and I fast-forward through TV shows I have recorded. I either change channels during live TV commercials--or hit the mute and read a magazine for the duration of the break. (Given the length of most newsmagazine stories now, I can nearly complete an entire issue in two pods). I never listen to commercial radio anymore, since their ads are THE MOST obnoxious of all media. I am happy to pay for XM, which I listen to in the car and almost all day online. I only look at newspaper ads that have SALE in big letters plastered across them. ANYTHING related to advertising that comes in the mail (no matter how cleverly or deceptively designed to get me to open it) is dumped unread into the trash. In other words, I am a pretty typical consumer.

But at least I acknowledge that I love ads that are relevant to what I am in the market for on any given day. I don't really care which medium delivers them to me, either (except that online has spoiled me with instant gratification, so if a print or TV ad asks me to dial a number or go to a store, our love affair pretty much ends right then and there.)

I grew up on the premise that advertising was a form of information, and therefore useful for the consumer. But as ad exposure has climbed beyond the 5,000 units a day, the contest to gain my attention has resulted in the pollution of most urban landscapes, TV screens, print layouts and my computer screen. There was a story yesterday about a woman who produces some of the Internet's most annoying ads, which use constant motion to get your attention. While some might see her as a kind of ad industry folk-hero for producing ads that seem to work for her client, I suspect most consumers would rather she be drawn and quartered in Iraqi justice system-time.

I appreciate that one man's "best ad of the year" is the next man's "if-I-see-that-goddamned-spot-one-more-time-I-will-pitch-the-plasma-out-the-door," and that at the end of the day, it all comes down to what moves product out the door, but I would not underestimate consumer backlash to too-many-ads-trying-too-hard-to-get-my-attention. I know people who won't buy from companies just because they got a telemarketing call from them, or hate seeing the same ads run during every college bowl and pro playoff game. OK, it's me. But I am not alone (I don't think).

Too many in the ad industry chuckle when people in focus groups say they hate ads--but then go out and buy the product anyway. But all we've done is foster a resentment that will be reflected in enhanced electronic measures to avoid ads at all. Including the ones that we might have really wanted to see.