Advertising

The disaster of movies and adverts

September 17, 2012 By Dan Thornton

Last night I happened to scroll through the TV guide and spotted Swordfish was on, so settled down to watch the hacking exploits of Hugh Jackman.

It was being shown on commercial Channel 5, which as a commercial channel airs advertising frequently throughout the film. And within the first 25 minutes, the adverts had annoyed me so much with their disruption I’d switched on my Xbox, fired up Lovefilm, found Swordfish and watched it on there instead.

Solving TV advertising:

The problem with watching any commercial television channel is the disruption of the advertising. Occasionally there’s an advert interesting enough to merit watching the first couple of times you see it, but inevitably it’s all shown repeatedly until you lose interest in the products and switch off completely.

And while there may be some benefits to reinforcing the incessant brand messages in my subconscious, it’s not like I don’t already have enough cars, foods or gadgets bookmarked and saved as potential future purchases.

But what options exist for a commercial broadcaster? The BBC is funded by TV license payments, so can show films without adverts, as can any service behind a pay-wall.

Well, my suggestion, which I’ve proposed to various print and radio companies with different levels of success is simple:

Stop showing adverts in the middle of programmes. Show them at the end. The risk of people using that time to get a drink or go to the toilet still exists even when you disrupt millions of pounds invested in an entertaining show or film.
Invest more human effort and technology to show hyper-relevant advertising, and take a cut of the affiliate revenue as well.

So what does that actually mean? Take Swordfish as an example – at the end of the film, when people have hopefully enjoyed the film and it may have sparked one or more ideas in their heads, you display items based on the key themes, e.g:

Want to know the real stories of hacking? Check out books by Kevin Mitnick, the real world’s most famous hacker on Amazon. Amazon Link
Want to drive the same TVR as John Travolta? Get a Tuscan from as little as £11,500. Autotrader link.
Want to be an elite hacker? You’ll need a top spec PC. Check out these beauties from Alienware. Alienware link.

For the broadcast transmission, it’d mean having some stock adverts which could be easily changed in line with programming which makes it worthwhile, but there are ways to automate much of this, and also expand on it for digital distribution.

And suddenly as a single male whose entire broadcast TV output on commercial channels consists of the Big Bang Theory and Ice Road Truckers (Everyone has their guilty pleasures), I’ll find myself actually going through the order process to find out how much an Alienware PC would actually cost me, or looking at what it might take to actually pass the HGV test and be licensed to drive a lorry, rather than seeing adverts for ladies clothing or new cars that I’ll never be interested in.

It’d mean changes to the advertising industry, and the booking software and procedures, but suddenly you can start laser-targeting instead of carpet bombing. Because increasingly the collateral damage of advertising will be pushing more people to the ever-increasing and ever simpler alternatives.

The Guardian Pigs advert shows ads can be interesting

March 1, 2012 By Dan Thornton

I’m the first to criticise advertising for generally being ineffectual rubbish, but sometimes on a very rare occasion, it grabs me – the new advert for The Guardian succeeds on pretty much every level I can think of for a television/video advert. It’s entertaining, unusual and thought-provoking.

OK, it doesn’t provide utility, but that would be quite hard to tie into the concept, and there are some small additional elements online to support the advert.

Instant classic, and also capitalizing on recent events whether it’s the economic climate, Occupy etc. OK, advertising industry, you won this time…

Interestingly, the official Youtube version has only had 309 views since being uploaded at some point on February 29th (I don’t know when exactly it was uploaded, but it’s under 24 hours ago). And they do manage a minor blot of their copybook by prefacing a highly sharable advert for their product with generic Youtube advertising for 30 seconds beforehand. So there’s still a little room for improvement!

Lipstick on a pig….

December 21, 2010 By Dan Thornton

Considering the current snow disruption to travel, and the fact that I had to cancel meetings today due to being stranded, the news that East Coast trains are about to appoint a new advertising agency came at the perfect time.

No disrespect to the advertising agencies involved, but I’m not sure any advertising agency is the solution to the problems East Coast has. Even when they’re not stumped by the presence of snow in winter, any advertising has to compete against the daily criticisms being made by paying passengers.

Peterborough station - 7:50am — Image by BadgerGravling via Flickr

Overcrowded, under-resourced, and charging for previously-free and unreliable wifi are just some of the things which advertising won’t solve. Add in the costs, the difficulty of reserving seats, the lack of effective information on delays, and you’ve got a pretty steep challenge to solve.

Misunderstanding cigarette branding…

November 22, 2010 By Dan Thornton

The UK Health Secretary, Andrew Lansley has suggested cigarettes should be sold in plain packaging, as ‘the evidence is clear that packaging helps to recruit smokers’.

Sadly for those who want to prevent smoking, he appears to be talking cobblers – as suggested by the fact the previous Government ditched the same plan two years ago due to a lack of evidence to that effect.

What’s happened is that there’s a misunderstanding of the role of branding in cigarette smokers.

People encourage other people to start smoking.
Branding and People influence which particular product someone smokes.

Removing branding won’t make any difference to the amount of people trying smoking. It might make a difference in the number of cigarette companies, but the spread of cigarette smoking is largely spread by encountering other people that smoke and being influenced by them in some way. There’s a handy chapter in The Tipping Point on the triggers for smoking, quoting examples of being influenced by people who were seen as cool, and also smoked. The basic hypothesis is that some people who smoke happen to be cool, and therefore smoking is perceived as cool (Rather than smoking making someone cool – the reality is that it makes people smell of tobacco, wheeze when they’re running, and end up dying earlier more often than if they hadn’t smoked – but as a smoker for over 10 years, I already know this).

So why do tobacco companies spend so much on marketing, and finding ways to place their brands in your eye, despite cigarette advertising bans?

The first cigarette I ever tried was a Silk Cut Ultra Light – and yet for 10 years I’ve smoked Marlboro. I’m not sure it’s a coincidence that Ayrton Senna drove a Marlboro McLaren, Wayne Rainey rode a Marlboro Yamaha, and I actually suffered through the feature film ‘Harley-Davidson and the Marlboro Man‘. Given the choice, I’ll pay a slight premium for the familiar taste and amount of nicotine, plus the branding and image etc. But if that brand vanished tomorrow, I’d find another one in the time it took to run out of cigarettes. The fact is that in the past I’ve bought John Player Specials (JPS Lotus, JPS Norton), and Rothmans (Rothman Honda in the Wayne Gardner era) as fall-backs which have no relation in taste or nicotine levels.

I’d reveal a more effective way to tackle smoking, but unfortunately there’s a limit to how long I can write about the topic without nipping outside for a cigarette…

Content farms will eat themselves

August 9, 2010 By Dan Thornton

The leading example of web publishing dubbed ‘content farms’ is Demand Media, which has just publicly filed registration for an IPO, and as a result has made it’s financial records public for the first time.

There was some surprise that content farming doesn’t currently make Demand Media profitable – last year it turned over $198 million in revenue, but still managed to lose $22 million. This year is looking better – a $6 million loss on $108 million so far… but it’s also important to note that a sizeable percentage of revenue is actually coming from Demand’s web registrar business, eNom, rather than content farming.

Content farms will peak this year:

I definitely think this is the right time for an IPO, as I honestly believe that this year could be the peak of content farming as a sustainable model for big business – for years, small companies and individuals have gone around creating targeted landing pages, and I still think there are ways to make this work effectively, but sizeable companies dominating the space are going to struggle.

What content farms rely on:

There are two things that content farms rely on for content creation – Search and Advertising. Essentially they’re creating content to respond to popular search queries to arbitrage advertising revenue (sold direct or via networks such as Google’s Adsense). In Demand’s case, it currently has deals with Google which are set to end in 2011.

They’re able to produce this content by farming the work out to a legion of online writers who are submitting for a low cost.

The shakey foundations of content farms:

Search – Traffic comes from responding to search queries. If the nature of search changes, by becoming more personalised and from social recommendations, then the traffic to search query specific sites drops.

This is likely, because the search content is often on sites which have no focus on owning an area with quality content – which is the sort of thing which is more likely to be shared on social networks (It should have also been the sort of content more likely to be highlighted by Google – maybe in 2011?).

Advertising – Ad networks, affiliate deals, and particularly advertising linked closely to search works, such as Google Adwords. If you can optimise a page for traffic and response by targeting people actively searching for it, and it’s something which advertisers will happily bid a significant amount to advertise against, you’re in business.

But the nature of the internet, and relatively open networks like Adwords (which have no minimum barrier to entry), means that there are always going to be an increasing number of options for advertisers. And while there will only ever be a handful of sites getting sizeable traffic from a position on page one of the search results, Adwords is keyword-based, so in aggregate you can achieve a similar scale more cheaply if you start digging into the results (as more people will – search advertising is relatively old in terms of internet revenues, but still a newborn for most advertisers.)

Content creators: Content farms can exist because there are thousands of people who are willing and able to churn out enough content to make a worthwhile return for them despite the relatively low reward – in comparison to traditional freelance costs for someone working in the media. Partly this is because it’s easy – relative to establishing a successful blog in a niche and achieving the same level of earnings for example. And partly it’s down to a lack of options – if you’re not one of the ‘elite’ with a job for traditional media, and you’re not building your own property, there’s an apparent limit to your options for contributing for payment

The earthquakes of algorithms and competition:

Google, (and Bing, Wolphram Alpha, or any other search product) uses software which can be tweaked and changed at any point – and if content farming is producing terrible writing (I’m not saying that’s the case across all companies and articles, but potentially en masse), then that software algorithm can be adapted.

Plus the social web is having an increased effect on both filtering and discovery. Google News is experimenting with human editors, whilst the likes of Facebook and Twitter have made social recommendations more mainstream than the previous traffic drivers of Digg, Reddit and Stumbleupon, because suddenly my none-digitally addicted friends have a quick and easy way to share links beyond their email connections, and for everyone else to pick up on them and repeat them.

And content farming is not a new concept – the segment of bloggers who focus primarily on making money have long looked at search data and advertising as the way to isolate niches which are most likely to make them a reward… So there’s nothing which is protected from unlimited competition, particularly when the likes of aol and Yahoo have also started to use search as a tool for article creation.

Finally, there’s a big element missing from content farm advertising. I’ve spent a long time working for media companies, and whatever you may believe about the media industry as a whole, I’ve seen an enormous amount of respect and faith from audiences for traditional media products. There are flaws in traditional display advertising, but you’re not just buying the ‘last click’ – indeed several attempts have been made to quantify the branding and awareness benefit you get from advertising with a big media brand.

Indeed, the same is true of advertising with a small niche blog in many ways – if I’m actively accepting advertising (which I do), and promoting affiliate products (which I also do), I have a vested interest in vetting them beforehand to avoid losing any trust, respect and loyalty from anyone who visits my site. I’ve never made a direct recommendation for anyone to purchase something I haven’t sampled first, and I take a similar approach to the advertising I sell directly. Only those adverts served by Google Adsense are independent from any editorial judgement, and that hopefully means that the implicit or explicit links mean that there’s an element of trust there.

Whereas people writing solely for search aren’t building that same level of engagement – they’re writing whatever they’re assigned, and that’s not going to translate to the social web effectively. I don’t pay to promote myself – I submit my content to several other locations, and then it’s down to the people who either know me, or see it and like it, to reward it with recommendations, links and traffic.

And there’s a final thought – at the moment there are several big sites allowing you to contribute on a huge range of topics without necessarily benefitting you financially. Wikipedia is one example, but others, for instance, Squidoo, allow you to donate any earnings to charity, for example. At the moment most of the open or non-profit approaches aren’t as prominent in the minds of many people, but as time goes by, more and more people seem to be following the notion of establishing a knowledgeable online presence in order to benefit indirectly, rather than monetising it at the source – Cory Doctorow often quotes Tim O’Reilly as saying ‘ the greatest enemy of a new author isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity’, and the same could be true on monetisation. More and more people seem to be contributing and building elements of online empires to establish reputation over monetisation, and these non-profit approaches could become another source of competition.

So what can content farms do?

In my eternal optimism, I think there’s a future for an evolution of content farming – to establish the leverage to provide a platform which correctly rewards people for displaying a high level of knowledge and engagement, so that those wishing for a direct financial reward can be recompensed, and advertisers can confidently invest in the branding and trust benefits of being associated with them.

But the challenge is that it’s an area in which media companies have existed for years, and they’re coming to the web from the opposite angle as they are getting more and more digitally savvy (there’s still a long way to go, but there’s probably more movement in digital from a lot of big media companies in the last year or so than in the last 5 or 6). If they don’t fall into only developing expertise in a closed application ecosystem, but also continue to invest, experiment and build, then content farms could actual be inspiring and paving the way for traditional brands to have a resurgence.