Whether this goes anywhere or not is anyone's guess but no one thought the online ad banner would become what it is today either. A new online magazine, Dormant Forces, has launched and will be supported by what it calls an AdFrame designed to elicit "curiosity clicks." The Adframe consists of small, subtle squares with nothing but the advertisers name or tagline. Clicking the square takes the visitor to the advertiser's site. The publisher plans to do a similar thing in the printed version of the magazine. Anyone care to predict the future of this venture?
More and more, the advertising business is becoming commoditized with services that make it ever easier for advertisers to circumvent the infrastructure that the industry has built over the last 100 years. Every year, another do-it-yourself service crops up offering companies tools to create their own advertising without the need for an agency. Certainly, these services will not replace ad agencies but they may take a dent out of their revenue stream.
Omnicom Group is hoping to stem any potential loss to this new ad-o-matic approach and launched their on such service through on of its agencies, Zimmerman, called Pick-n-Click which provides automotive advertisers 150,000 components to choose from when crafting an ad. car dealer franchise AutoNation has signed on and is using Pick-n-Click for its 331 car dealers.
more »
If you're a small publisher and you want to insure you are getting the most revenue you possibly can from your advertisers, you might want to check out the just launched RMX Direct from Right Media, a service that pits inventory-bidding ad networks against each other and serves the highest paying one to the publisher. Automatically. Currently, RMX Direct has nine ad networks in its system but publisher can add as many others as they want and pit them against the existing networks for bidding.
We'll admit it's one of the few sites we've been to that actually does a good job explaining what the company does and how it can benefit the parties involved: advertiser, publisher and ad network. While we haven't used the product, if you're trying to maximize revenue as a publisher, it sure sounds like something one should check out.
Lots of neat new media coming out lately (like this!). This is probably a favourite, as it takes the Youtube concept and turns it into something that benefits video producers many times over.
AdBrite's InVideo service lets you embed video onto your site and share it. When other people put your work on their sites, it reflects your logo and draws clicks back to you.
What a spiffy little service. Our only complaint is the kitschy pitch AdBrite uses to push it. Why is everybody all up on this neurotic hipster laugh-with-us-as-we-laugh-at-ourselves kick? It's cute and all but sufferers of Ad ADD are growing bored with the shtick.
You know those casual-sounding recorded calls that say you should refi your house? Now you too can act like you don't have time to make calls yourself.
Eidoserve presents Abby Me, who does all the dirty work for you. Punch in the number of who you want to call and write a whimsical message. Seconds later a pleasant but eerie female voice will call the receiver from your number and repeat what you scribbled out. It's sure to irritate everyone you know and make you feel more important than you are.
Abby makes good with simple phrases like "Hello, I want to have your babies" but not so well with $10 words like "Supercalifragilisticexpialidoceous." Well, an assistant who at least tries to convey nonsense with a straight face is always a keeper. Best of all, she doesn't charge anything. Why can't most interns be that awesome?
RBLM's holiday card not only greeted us personally but also cleverly showcased their new creative effectiveness tool: the Scooter Challenge.
Find out how your work holds up streetside by uploading your own ads, then getting a view of how it looks from a scooter's perspective. RBLM admonishes detail-happy ad-heads to keep it simple. We agree, we like the idea and we dig how they got it out to us. Boy are those guys smart.
In case the U.K. serial killer who strips prostitutes of their clothing but leaves their jewelery behind was ever in need of some jewelery, John Christian Jewelers is right there to help. In fact, they're right there in the middle of a Guardian article about the murders so if he's reading his own press, John Christian Jewelers has made a great ad placement. Oh wait. They didn't have anything to do with it. It's just a bunch of pre-programed, contextually-motivated ad servers which are incapable of rendering any semblance of common sense. Click here to see the full story with the ad
A new company, Coull, has launched and promises to make it possible to search for specific moments within a video and have those moments linkable to other content. One drawback. It's not automatic. For videos to be searchable, it seems tags must be placed within the video by the uploader. Most people may not take the time to do that but brands might and that's what Coull is betting on believing it has the answer to the pre-roll, post-roll debate. The answer? Brands can inject links into videos allowing people to click out and explore whatever product was linked. Agent Provocateur recently did it with its Kate Moss film.
Writing on his Micro Persuasion blog, Steve Rubel concisely explains why the online metric mainstay, the page view, is becoming useless and predicts its death in 2010. Citing the rise of navigate-within-page technologies such as Ajax, Flash and widgets which negate the need to leave a particular URL to experience new content, Rubel says the media community will need to face the music very soon and stop the chest beating about the importance of page views. While there doesn't seem to be a replacement metric on the horizon, aside from already existing Time Spent and Unique Visitors, the industry may need to come up with one very soon lest the usefulness of online metrics become as useless as traffic count for billboards.
Launched quietly last week, Immese LLC has introduced a product called Walnuts, contextual advertising which appears at the end of videos on the Blip.tv video service and others as the service expands. Currently, ads are priced at 22 cents per click. Adding to Revver's post-roll approach, Immense intends to make contextual advertising a mainstay in online video.
|
|
