GigaOM » Online Advertising

TV ad dollars slow to move online — video ads to hit $5.9B by 2017, says report

Jeff John Roberts — Mon, 10 Jun 2013 22:39:27 +0000

In the future of television land, everyone from AOL to the Wall Street Journal will be making awesome online shows and sponsors will ply them with ad budgets once reserved for TV. And why not? After all, online audiences are growing fast and might provide much better marketing opportunities.

There’s just one problem — it won’t happen anytime soon. According to consulting firm PwC’s annual media report, online video will increase from $2.3 billion in 2012 to $5.9 billion by 2017. The figure represents 9 percent of future online ad spending, but this is still a small amount compared to TV ads — which PwC predicts will pull in $81.6 billion, or 37 percent of all ad dollars in 2017 (the figure includes ads “around broadcasters TV content” so adjust accordingly.)

This slow growth forecast jibes with the assessment of industry experts who spoke at a VideoNuze ad event last week in New York City. Their explanation was simple enough — brands already feel their budgets are spread thin by TV and they’re not in a mood to experiment.

“If you followed viewers across all screens, we’d have to add at least 70 percent to the budget … our clients say ‘we don’t have have any more money and everything’s more expensive,’” said Michael Bologna, Director of Emerging Communications at GroupM.

Bologna and Digitas’ SVP of Media, Adam Schlachter, both said that media companies’ recent “NewFronts” in New York (a boozy, glitzy preview of new shows intended to resemble the Upfronts in LA), had at best “sparked a conversation” but did not lead to any resolutions to turn on the cash spigots.

The main problem, for now, appears to be a lack of consensus on how to measure the effectiveness of online video ads. Here’s how PwC puts it:

There are [..] challenges facing audience-measurement researchers seeking to provide more accurate data for their clients: …Until progress is made on these, migration of advertising revenues from traditional TV to online video platforms will lag consumer adoption of these new services.

The ongoing status quo (whatever its cause) appeared to frustrate at least one audience member at the VideoNuze event, who demanded that someone explain why TV stations charged more even as they bring brand messages to fewer people.

“We don’t want to pay the failure tax any more. It should be more like the stock market [where value declines with performance]. The agency must say, if your audience goes down, you get less.”

The panel host, Forrester’s Jim Nail, suggested a culture of risk aversion may explain the status quo: “Nobody gets fired for buying ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox.”

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Can a new generation of web companies finally bring emotion to online advertising?

Eliza Kern — Tue, 04 Jun 2013 12:00:43 +0000

There’s a common theme among the young founders of social web companies that haven’t yet made money when it comes to advertising: they want it to be beautiful. They want it to inspire people. And they don’t want it to feel like advertising. But is this even possible on the web?

Instagram, Pinterest and Tumblr are all hugely popular social companies that aren’t making much money right now (with the exception of Tumblr, and that might be debatable.) They’ve raised huge amounts of venture capital or have been acquired by companies for such large price tags that they’ll have to make money soon. But the core value proposition for these three services, one that’s certainly reflected in the attitudes of the founders, is that that they are beautiful, creative online spaces. So how do you put ads there without ruining the atmosphere you’ve created and that users have come to expect?

Mad Men advertising executives explore the brand new world of video ads in the 1960′s.

Obviously, many forms of advertising have been around for hundreds of years, but only in the past 15 or so have we seen a change in how search and contexual ads have had an impact on the business. This search-driven model existed before Google, but from the time the company launched AdWords in 2000, the concept of text-driven and contextualized ads based on search really began to take off. This data-driven approach has affected much of online advertising since then, and Google has developed a billion dollar business around the practice.

And along with search, display ads have also been a signficant part of the puzzle. In the early years of online advertising, it seemed that banner ads and other forms of display would be able to mimic more old-school advertising methods, since they weren’t all that different from the then-profitable ads in print. But the format is no longer dominant — in fiscal year 2012, search ads brought in 46 percent of revenue from advertising, compared to the 21 percent of revenue coming from display ads, according to an IAB report.

Why advertising should get to know us

Most recently, the rise of social media and smartphones that track everything in our daily lives from location to spending habits to real-world friends have made keyword search or banner ads start to feel fairly impersonal. Now Facebook can serve you ads for cars if they think you’re likely to buy a car soon, or Twitter can show you promoted tweets based on the messages you post. These companies haven’t totally cracked personalized ad-targeting yet, but they’re working on it. As those companies know, advertising needs to feel useful and relevant if it’s going to work — all without seeming creepy or invading of a person’s privacy, and useful to a person on both desktop and mobile.

That’s a tough balance to hit, and it certainly doesn’t seem that those companies have totally succeeded yet. If the Mad Men era Madison Avenue experts figured out how to tap into a person’s core desires to re-create advertising in the 1950s and 1960s, we’re still waiting for someone to do the same with in the current digital era, by adding a layer of emotion and desire to the social media and consumer data that’s out there.

The idea of the moment, which we’ve written about extensively here at paidContent, is native advertising: creating “sponsored content” from brands that fits in with the look and feel of the site but is labeled as an ad and supports that particular brand. Tons of sites, from Buzzfeed to The Atlantic to the New York Times (to GigaOM itself) do sponsored stories. It’s how Tumblr’s ads are rolling out for companies like Denny’s. And in particular, for sites like Instagram, it seems like potentially the only way to preserve the aesthetics of the site while letting brands in the door.

Young founders look to their history books

When the Yahoo/Tumblr deal closed, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer talked about her intentions for ads on Tumblr and how CEO David Karp (who had previously decried advertising of any kind) imagined them on his site:

“David talks wistfully about the ads that he saw as a child, that would make him want to go see a movie or own a particular type of car,” Mayer said. “He says the current state of internet advertising doesn’t aspire to be as good as the content itself. We think that should change … we’re aligned in those ideals. When you hear us talk about native ads, where the ads are every bit as good as the content, and maybe even make the content better — that’s what we are aiming for. We want the ads themselves to create that aspirational feel that, for example, television ads or movie ads do.”

And speaking at the Commonwealth Club on Thursday in San Francisco, Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom was equally nostalgic about old-school advertising and how it might work for his own company:

“We made a promise that Instagram would be a self-sustaining business, and that promise still holds true today. The deal makes no sense if you think this thing will never make money. We’ve always had plans, and it’s just about when, and it’s just about how,” he said. “Think about the magazine Vogue, for instance, and how half that magazine is advertising, but that advertising is really compelling.”

Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger talk with Google Ventures’s Kevin Rose at the Castro Theater in San Francisco on May 30, 2013.

Finding the Don Draper approach to social

Systrom and Karp might be inspired by old Vogue ads, but it doesn’t seem that Tumblr users are as enamored by Denny’s gifs, and it’s fair to say that I’d be far less offended by a slightly off-target ad on a news website than one posted in my Instagram feed. The founders have accomplished a remarkable feat of creating companies where users feel personally and emotionally attached to the experiences they have there — just ask someone like Om who’s made a digital friend with someone he’s only “met” through Instagram.

But by raising the bar for what we expect on their services, the founders might have made navigating advertising that much harder for themselves. We’re in a whole new world of digital media, just as Don Draper and his executives faced with the rise of the television. But just as those executives saw the change as a new opportunity to reach consumers in their living rooms, so too could Pinterest and Instagram see this as an opportunity: to make digital advertising personal.

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Google gets serious about toolbar scams with new ad policy, forcing AVG to retreat

Jeff John Roberts — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 14:52:45 +0000

A cryptic blog post from Google last week took aim at “bad apples” among its advertising partners, and required pre-approval for certain software offerings that wanted to use Google advertising services. It was hard at first to discern the target of the mysterious message, but now it’s pretty clear that Google fired a shot across the bow of security site AVG and others that might be tempted to trick people into installing unwanted products.

The dispute between Google and its “bad apples” involves technical details but, fundamentally, it’s about crummy products designed to force feed ads.

In the case of AVG, it worked like this: when people downloaded its free security software, they automatically received a “safe search” product (unless they were alert enough to uncheck a box during the download process). The unwanted product then installed itself on their browser toolbars as a default search engine. It also — and this is the critical part — served as a platform for AVG to collect money by showing ads, and proved about as easy to uninstall as resigning from the French Foreign Legion.

Veteran tech writer Emil Protalinski was first to report AVG’s hijinks last summer, calling it the “worst foistware I’ve ever seen.” Since then, investor site Seeking Alpha warned that AVG’s aggressive tactics to get ad revenue would lead Google, which supplies ads to AVG through its AdSense program, to take action. The search giant apparently decided it could do without AVG and, in its new policy announcement, explained:

For example, in the last 90 days, we have seen over 100,000 complaints about software that changed users’ browser settings or about toolbars that they couldn’t uninstall. We want to avoid these kinds of bad user experiences.

Seeking Alpha also warned that if Google jilted AVG, the site would be forced to live on Yahoo ad revenue — which would bring in less money. This prospect appears to have had its intended effect on AVG.

The outgoing CEO of AVG, JR Smith, explained in a Monday phone interview that its “safe search” product was no longer bundled in a way that forced consumers to opt out. He added that AVG recently signed a new two-year deal with Google and said it complied with all the company’s conditions.

“They’ll send you default letters and kick you off the network,” said Smith, adding that Google takes tough lines to promote a clean ad ecosystem.

Google, in response to a request for comment, only repeated its policy announcement. Yahoo did not respond at all.

Tough line or just tip of the iceberg?

Google’s new policy aims to reign in AVG-style tactics by forcing software that uses its ad services to provide “one-click uninstall” and to go through a Google approval process. In the bigger picture, the policy appears to be part of a bigger effort by Google to clean up scammy ad practices involving toolbars.

While toolbars have legitimate uses, they can also be a vehicle for mischief. In addition to AVG, other public companies like Babylon have acquired a reputation for malware; the latter offers a translation program but the installation process can also lead to browser hijacking. Some techniques are even more nasty.

Certain scams typically invite users to download a program like “Find out who unfriended you on Facebook” but really serve to inject unauthorized ads. One example is Sambreel, a notorious ad outfit that forced its way onto the webpages of the New York Times and other prominent publishers last year; the hijacked ad space likely cost the Times and others millions in lost revenues. Even Google itself has been a victim through its YouTube video site.

An executive at a major publisher forwarded new screenshots this month like the one below which shows how a “Browse to Save” toolbar device (which claims to find deals for shoppers as they search the web) has used a Sambreel product to take over YouTube’s ads:

According to the executive, who did not want to be named, Google is doing the right thing but faces an uphill battle. While it can whip sites like AVG into line, unlike companies, sleazy actors will simply shop around for another ad exchange to do the dirty work. He said that some exchanges — which act as trading houses for digital ad inventory — often turn a blind eye to bad advertisers so long as they bring in money. In this bigger picture, Google appears to be trying to raise the bar in the industry in order to prevent a crisis of confidence in the online ads that are its lifeblood.

The toolbar policy comes at a critical juncture for the online display ad industry. On one hand, the industry recently suffered another black eye from a botnet scandal and may also be losing ground to the current mania for native advertising. On the other hand, Google, AOL, Facebook and others are developing a sophisticated suite of programmatic ad tools that could make the industry more efficient than ever before.

(Image by BMJ via Shutterstock)

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‘Do Not Track’ is back — but ad industry has little to fear

Jeff John Roberts — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 19:11:31 +0000

Online ad tracking is a bit like gun control or immigration — Congress is always bringing it up, but never actually passes a law. And like those other issues, even the prospect of a law makes opponents nervous.

Witness the ad industry’s reaction to claims it is dragging its feet on “Do Not Track,” a system to let consumers tell companies not to harvest their online personal information.

“We keep getting demagogued by the FTC,” Stu Ingis, the head of the Digital Advertising Alliance, told AdWeek. The remark came in response to a speech this week in which the head of the Federal Trade Commission suggested new rules might be on the way.

Does Ingis have reason to worry? Perhaps. Consider that after a year of relative silence, the dreaded (in the ad industry, anyway) “Do Not Track” phrase is back in the news on a regular basis. Next week, for instance, U.S. Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va) is holding a public hearing to trumpet his do-not-track legislation. Meanwhile, Microsoft and Mozilla are setting their Internet Explorer and Firefox browsers to block third-party cookies — small, ubiquitous computer programs that record the web pages you visit.

For advertisers, these developments threaten to throw a wrench into an ad system that puts a high value on “retargeted” ads. Indeed, there is already evidence that fewer cookies means lower ad prices.

On the other hand, any type of sweeping law is unlikely. While politicians like beating the privacy drum, the details — and even the definition — of “Do Not Track” are hopelessly complicated. Companies like Google and Facebook (which are giant advertising firms) claim the term is confusing to consumers and, in some cases, have chosen to ignore browser instructions about cookies.

At the same time, these companies are doubling down on ad products that target individual users. Facebook, for instance, now lets customers buy ads based on third party data and is even partnering with retail outlets like drug stores to collect users’ offline shopping information. The social network and other tech companies, which have growing clout in Washington, will lobby hard to prevent any serious change to the current ad system.

Finally, the focus on cookies could ultimately prove to be a red herring in the”Do Not Track” debate. This is because more consumers are using mobile devices to access the internet — and these devices don’t rely on cookies for advertising in the first place. In response, Apple has developed a sophisticated way for advertisers to target users’ devices while companies like TapAd and Adelphic have found ways to identify users no matter what device they use. In other words, any new “Do Not Track” law that targeted cookies would have a limited effect in a world where marketers follow us on our mobile devices.

The bottom line is there has been more sound and fury than usual about “Do Not Track” but that comprehensive privacy reforms are nowhere in sight.

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Google’s Wojcicki: Pepsi prank with Jeff Gordon is future of online ads

Jeff John Roberts — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 21:27:28 +0000

A stunt-driving prank watched by 33 million on YouTube last month shows how online ad-viewing is an increasingly voluntary experience, according to Susan Wojcicki, a senior VP at Google, and how marketers are more dedicated to producing content people want to see.

The stunt-driving video Wojicki cited, in which disguised racing star Jeff Gordon takes a car salesman for a harrowing ride, was produced for Pepsi and has earned the company a ton of free online attention. (The clip is entertaining but also fake, fake, fake).

“We’re moving to a model where the user is choosing to see the ads,” said Wojicki on Tuesday at Ad Tech, an industry conference in San Francisco. She added that tools like YouTube’s TrueView, in which marketers pay only if someone watches their video, are compelling to both advertisers and viewers.

According to Wojcicki, 70 percent of the ads in YouTube videos are now the TrueView type.

This vision of an online ad economy defined by user actions (such as clicks) is consistent with AdWords, Google’s lucrative search ad product that prices ads according to their relevance.

But while the TrueView experience bodes well for Google’s success in video advertising, the company’s prospects for mobile and social advertising are less rosy. So far, newer companies like Twitter and Facebook are dominating the space.

Wojcicki said that, for mobile, “a lot stuff doesn’t exist yet” and that there is a need to create more location based “block we’re on” ad experiences.

“The users first adopt (a technology), then advertisers figure it out.”

On the social media front, Neal Mohan, Google’s $100 million ad VP, noted that “social is an important part of all ads,” and pointed to recent initiatives like Google+ pages for brands and a tool that lets advertisers connect Google+ to their AdWords account.

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Facebook’s ad tune-up: data will lead to dollars (if users stick around)

Jeff John Roberts — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 23:21:22 +0000

Facebook’s approach to advertising can feel incoherent, especially when it flings random marketing messages all over a user’s page. In recent months, however, the social network has introduced tools that make its ad operation more sophisticated — and are likely to net it much more money.

News of the latest tune-up came on Tuesday as Facebook announced it will let marketers buy “sponsored stories” in a user’s News Feed on the basis of websites that the user has previously visited. Until now, Facebook only let brands buy stories based on a user’s profile — which is created from information the user told Facebook (age, location, “Likes” and so on).

The opportunity to use so-called “retargeting” is likely to be a hit with advertisers who regard ads based on a person’s browsing history to be especially effective and who consider Facebook’s news feed to be prime real estate. One industry executive told AdExchanger that News Feed response rates are 10 to 50 times higher than ads on the right side of the page.

Facebook also said it will be selling the News Feed through its FBX exchange, which is like an automated real-time auction house where advertisers bid to appear on your Facebook page. Until now, the tool was only available for Facebook’s right-hand ads.

Building an ad juggernaut

Opening up the News Feed for retargeting is likely to yield a nice cash boost for Facebook but, in the bigger picture, the move is part of a larger story of the company’s efforts to use different forms of data to build an all-knowing ad juggernaut.

Facebook is also, for instance, combining its own data with offline marketing information to help companies hone in on customers. As the New York Times reported, the clothing company JackThreads matched its database of two million customer emails against Facebook’s own email records — and found that two-thirds of them were on the social network. For Facebook, such opportunities are just the tip of the iceberg; the company is also working to tap into offline data on a large scale by partnering with loyalty card programs that collect drugstores and supermarket information.

All of this means that Facebook’s advertisers will be able to draw on three powerful sources of data (browsing history, offline data and Facebook records) in order to blast ads into one of the prime locations on the web — users’ News Feeds. For Facebook investors, this prospect is especially enticing given that this model can transfer nicely to mobile devices where users are spending more and more of their time. Facebook isn’t allowing marketers to buy mobile ads on its exchange just yet, but it’s a safe bet this will happen soon.

In short, Facebook appears well on its way to create a marketers’ paradise and a torrent of ad revenues. But there are still two factors that could scuttle these plans. The first is the familiar spectre of increased privacy regulation – but that is a threat Facebook and others like Google have so far swatted away successfully. Instead, the larger peril may be the prospect of too much advertising undermining Facebook’s user experience and its vaunted design. As this all-ads screenshot from today shows, Facebook still has a ways to go in cleaning up an ad experience that too often remains irrelevant and ugly:

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Content monetization: News licensing and syndication still need marketplaces and infrastructure

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 06:55:25 +0000

Publishers’ lack of strategic focus on licensing and syndication today is matched by nearly equal indifference from software developers, entrepreneurs, and investors. Millions of investment dollars and countless development hours have gone into creating online advertising tools, readership analytics, and aggregation engines. But comparatively little has gone into developing the sort of tools, APIs, metrics, or exchanges that might have aided the emergence of a content licensing and paid syndication business online.

Key highlights in this report include:

For publishers, the first step to monetizing something is to be able to measure it. The analytics tools now available make it possible to track the spread of content on social platforms closely.

Until now there has not been a marketplace where those potential buyers and sellers of content could meet. Nor were there adequate tools to enable verifiable transactions between them. Tools like Cascade and Ricochet are helping put the foundations of such a market in place.

Both publishers and licensees will need to seize the sort of ad hoc syndication opportunities that arise online and on social media networks. One of the major tasks facing publishers over the next three to five years will be to structure their repositories of content so they can be searched, sorted, customized, repackaged, and accessed in real time via standardized APIs.

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How a toothbrush news site can get more visits than the Economist: More on the botnet scam

Jeff John Roberts — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 20:45:22 +0000

A larger picture is emerging about an online advertising scam that is reportedly soaking major brands like McDonald’s and Disney for $6 million a month. The scam, which has rattled publishers and the ad industry, came to light on Tuesday after a London analytics firm revealed that a network of zombie computers tricked the brands into paying to show their ads to robots.

It has also resulted in “toothbrushing.net,” a little-known site with oral hygiene news, likely racking up more visitors than famous publishers like The Economist.

Here are some more details, based on sources close to the investigation and other reports, about who is affected and the scale of the botnet.

Millions of “readers” for a toothbrush news site

The “about” section of Toothbrushing.net says the site is dedicated to “toothbrush enthusiasts” and promises the “latest on dental news.” According to a source, the site is displaying 20 million to 25 million ad impressions a month. Since the site shows four ad slots on every webpage, this loosely translates to at least 5 million visitors. Nearly all of these visitors were bots not people but, for marketers, the effect is the same — they pay either way. (The ad slots were empty when I checked today – see the screenshot at right).

To put the traffic of the toothbrush news site in perspective, consider that a site like the Economist had 1.7 million unique visitors in December and the New Yorker had 3.1 million. These figures refer to unique visitors so it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison but, using this crude calculation, there’s a good chance Toothbrushing.net did better than both of them.

And it’s not just the toothbrush site. Other obscure sites touched by bot networks, including Sodabottle.com and Techrockstar.com, likewise served up 20 million to 25 million ads in a month. According to Spider, the analytics firm that discovered the scam, there are at least 202 such sites tied to one bot network called Chameleon. Nearly all consist of little more than a smattering of cheap content you could pay a high-school student to write.

There is also the egregious example of Directorslive.com, an obscure movie site that AdWeek reports enjoys 326 million monthly pageviews. According to a source, the only site on the web to sell more ad impressions is Facebook.

Who is affected and who is responsible

The list of advertisers that paid to appear on botnet sites include dozens of major brands, and cover a wide range of sectors such as: retail (Snickers, Ziploc, Petco); finance (Citi, Chase, Amex); telecom (AT&T, Time Warner, Sprint); automotive: (Dodge, Ford, Jaguar); services (Zipcar, Seamless).

While advertisers are the direct victims of the botnet, major web publishers are also harmed because marketers lose confidence in the integrity of display advertising and prices drop accordingly.

So who is to blame? An advertising source provided six ad networks it regarded as among those it believed to be “problematic” because their sites receive suspicious traffic. Here are their names along with an example of a suspect websites they control: Alphabird (Driverswhoknow.com); Digimogul (USBuildingDigest.com); Forward Health (Womenshealthbase.com); Precision Media (Toothbrushing.net); HiFi network (Dailyfreshies.com); Relevad Corporation (FFog.net).

(Clarification: the CEO of Spider.io says not all of these networks received visits from the Chameleon botnet but that they may be receiving traffic from other botnets or other “nefarious” sources).

The CEO of Digimogul told AdWeek that allegations of a connection to the bot network were “silly” and that “everything is by the book.” Meanwhile, executives from Alphabird told me that they were surprised by the discovery of the botnet and that they’re working with the London analytics firm to get to the bottom of it. Spider.io’s CEO says that AlphaBird has reached out “via LinkedIn” but that the companies are not working together.

I asked the COO of Alphabird, Justin Manes, how a company staffed by a sophisticated technology and marketing team could possibly remain unaware of the suspicious traffic — especially when the traffic delivered a direct financial benefit to them. Manes responded that Alpahbird works with numerous aggregators to buy website visitors and that the corrupted traffic must have slipped in this way; he also declined to say where the company bought the traffic. As for the company’s prospects in light of the botnet scandal, Manes said he hopes that people will come to see Alphaird was duped too; he also hopes the experience will strengthen the company’s ability to sell tagging and tracking tools in the future.

Fixing the problem: better tools or law enforcement?

The existence of a bot network that hijacks thousands of American computers to perpetrate millions of dollars in fraud appears to be a serious matter. But is it serious enough for a criminal investigation?

I called the Cyber-Crimes division of the FBI to ask if it is investigated this type of activity. A spokesperson provided this response:

“While I cannot comment about the botnet you’re writing about, the FBI’s Cyber Division does investigate botnets. We have had operational successes disrupting botnets used by individuals as well as groups that use malicious advertising as part of their schemes.” The spokesperson also referred to a 2011 investigation known as “Operation Ghostclick” in which the FBI arrested six people for using computers to manipulate the online ad industry.

It’s unclear at this point if the discovery of the new botnet will lead to any criminal investigations. In the meantime, brands and publishers will likely look to self-help solutions to weed out the fraud. There is some encouraging news on this front, as metrics companies like comScore are developing measurement tools to identify and screen-out what the company calls “non-human traffic.”

This story was updated on March 20 at 10pm and March 21 at 11am to provide clarifications from Spider.io’s CEO Douglas de Jager.

(Image by qvist via Shutterstock)

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Here are 5 tools that might juice online video ads

Jeff John Roberts — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 17:20:21 +0000

Website owners drool at the prospect of TV ad dollars pouring into online video. The medium, which is growing rapidly and commands prices far above the sickly display ad market, also offers advertisers a chance to interact with viewers in a way they can’t do through TV.

To spur interest in new video ad formats, the Interactive Advertising Bureau on Monday announced five winners in a contest called “Rising Stars” that is intended to create standards for the emerging industry. The idea of the contest is also to facilitate large-scale video ad-buying through the creation of interactive formats that are “built to work on a range of video players across multiple devices.”

Here’s a short summary of the contest winners along with my quick thoughts:

Ad Control Bar: an interactive tool bar that sits in the ad, inviting viewers to interact (good idea — provided ad makers can come up with reasons for people to interact with an ad in the first place)

Filmstrip (shown at right): a “scrollable, multipanel, horizontal” ad unit that can be stuffed with ad content (is this content overload for someone already trying to watch a video?)

Extender: invites viewers to watch a longer version of the ad (not a bad idea but sounds like wishful thinking that viewers will use it)

TimeSync: a way to insert rich media at the right time in order to invite “interaction at the most appropriate moments”; a visual display of TimeSync shows an American Apparel ad appearing when hands clasp in a Bruno Mars video (this idea of context sensitive ads within a video is impressive but can it work in practice?)

FullScreen: a viewer who clicks will see screen taken over with “a full canvas of interaction possibilities, including more video, social and catalogs” (this sounds intrusive but could be valuable to an advertiser who gets it right).

The IAB only provided short descriptions of the winners so it’s unclear when (or if) these tools will get adopted by ad buyers. The potential seems enormous, however, as a recent report says online ad impressions grew 52 percent in the last quarter of 2012.

The contest winners included a broad spectrum of media and ad tech partners, including CBS Interactive, Microsoft, DoubleClick and Tremor Video.

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Google stands by decision to end tablet-based ad campaigns

Jeff John Roberts — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 22:54:56 +0000

Google is overhauling its flagship AdWords service in an effort to raise mobile ad sales and to simplify advertising campaigns. Some advertisers complain that the changes mean a loss of control, in part because the new “Enhanced Campaigns” mean they can no longer create search ad campaigns aimed specifically at iPad and other tablet users.

Google’s Chief Business Officer Nikesh Arora, however, indicated at the Dive into Media conference in southern California that the company has no intention of changing course. Arora brushed off a question I posed about whether Google would reinstate the more granular ad options, and emphasized that the new AdWords system meant advertisers would no longer have to run hundreds of different ad campaigns to target all demographics and devices.

The changes to AdWords are important since Google has such an out-sized footprint in online advertising and because everyone is watching how the company is responding to internet users’ large-scale migration to mobile devices. So far, ads on smaller screens have proved much less lucrative than desktop ads — frustrating publishers and worrying Google investors.

Google announced its response last week in the form of a blog post describing the new “Enhanced Campaigns.” The new system means mobile ad purchases will be a default option when people sign up to buy Google AdWords (though they can turn the mobile part off). Another major change is Google’s decision to treat tablets and desktops as the same device for ad purposes. This goes against the philosophy of advertisers and publishers who consider the experience tablet a distinct, more immersive experience (though the distinction may be less when, as here, it concerns internet searching).

Ad industry blogs like 360i and AdExchanger have noted that Google is moving away from more granular forms of marketing while advertisers have complained about a loss of control.

On the flip side, some Google watchers have praised Enhanced Campaigns as a much-needed way to consolidate ad campaigns, and to make it easier for small ad buyers to join the mobile ad-buying landscape. At the All Things D event, Arora described how Google is also making it easier for advertisers to take advantage of distinct, new ad options associated with mobile — such as overlaying time and geographic location onto search queries.

In this context, the simplified options make sense, especially as advertisers right now confront the prospect of having to run hundreds of separate AdWords campaigns to account for all demographics and devices. And the Enhanced Campaigns will no doubt juice Google’s ad prices as more people join the mobile auction market, creating more competition for local searches such as “pizza Brooklyn Park Slope.”

But overall, the new system still seems to shortchange publishers and advertisers. Tablets provide a unique user experience and could be a fount of advertising innovation; Google’s decision eliminates some of this potential. A better option would have been to unveil the Enhanced Campaign system but to also make the older, more granular options available to those who ask for it.

(Note: We’re going to be talking about alternative monetization strategies at our paidContent Live conference in New York on April 17).

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