advertising

Maybe mobile's the next big thing, and always will be

Jay Small — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 16:00:49 +0000

Catching up to two posts from mocoNews.net:

Is mobile advertising the next big thing?: In the United States, at least, mobile ads remain hobbled by the persistence of multiple incompatible networks and technologies.
NBCU Wireless GM On iPhone: 'We Didn't Feel That We Had To Be There On Day One': Sure, it's cool to say you built iPhone-compatible editions of all your sites, but isn't a decently designed regular Web site already there?

I keep telling my corporate news media colleagues we are not "behind" on mobile as long as we ensure a few things:

The corpus of our content remains portable enough, and flexible enough, to be "poured" into any interface or format.
We think beyond the current corpus of our content into storytelling forms that do or will make sense in mobile devices. Experimentation here costs little, and that's good because the payoff may be far away at best.
We do not lock ourselves into any exclusive carrier, service provider or content provider relationships in the mobile field.
We do not attempt to go it alone. We own no carriers, cannot engineer reliable cross-platform messaging or data services ourselves, and cannot expect people to go hunting for our local mobile presences by tapping on a 10-key pad.
We follow the money. If advertising revenue in mobile lives at the top layers of mobile data decks, we need partnerships that will put us there, too. If it shifts to messaging services, we need relationships there. If clamshell phones give way to larger smartphone designs as the low common denominator, we need to adjust our thinking regarding the ad form factors that will work.
We don't scattershoot. We will exhaust ourselves trying to chase every incremental technology innovation, especially as long as the field remains overcrowded with inventors solving problems no one has.

What's your mobile strategy?

Update (4:23 p.m. EDT, 7/22/08): Though not perfectly aligned with my logic here, I was interested to see today that, in the United Kingdom, social networking on mobile hasn't caught up to e-mail and Web use.

New research reinforces 'banner blindness'

Jay Small — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 17:29:17 +0000

Jakob Nielsen's latest Alertbox essay, in a nutshell, validates the concept of "banner blindness": people shown pages with graphical advertising units intermixed with non-ad content almost always focus on the non-ad content.

What elements attract attention most consistently? Plain text, faces and "private parts," says Nielsen.

But not most ads, he observes, with one exception:

"In addition to the three main design elements that occasionally attract fixations in online ads, we discovered a fourth approach that breaks one of publishing's main ethical principles by making the ad look like content."

In other words, what's old is new again. Newspapers and magazines have long dealt with advertisers who try to make their messages -- often, it seems, pushing wealth-building or holistic health products -- look and read like news articles. Many periodicals, in their ad-acceptance policies, restrict use of certain fonts that are too close to the editorial design.

That control would be much more difficult in an Internet economy where ad networks, especially remnant networks that serve third-party ads at lowest prevailing rates, deliver many of the ad messages visible on many content sites.

Nielsen's latest work supports quite a bit of conventional wisdom on this subject. It does not provide much good news for content-oriented Web brands that need to make money from display advertising. When people deliberately avoid even looking at a message, that message has no value: just another tree falling unheard in the forest.

What's wrong with Internet advertising

Jay Small — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 17:48:00 +0000

Matthew Roche, writing at MediaPost, describes how a sizzling multimedia ad experience quickly degrades into a game of "throw me in the dumpster":

"The ad is beautiful in its simplicity and it serves its purpose -- but only to an extent. It enticed me to click through, and the splash page enticed me to click through further. But when I got to the Web site, the experience ended with a bone-rattling thud. I was forcefully (and, I might add, brutally) thrown out of the 'ad' and onto the 'site,' and the experience couldn't have been more jarring.

Sorry, you have to be registered and logged into MediaPost to see the story behind the link. I find the best way to see MediaPost commentaries is to subscribe to, and then properly filter and route, the site's many e-newsletters.

But Roche is right: what he describes reflects what's wrong with Internet advertising.

The lines cross in 2011

Jay Small — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 13:31:17 +0000

From the News of the Inevitable department: Online ads to overtake U.S. newspapers (from FT.com, linked by Greenslade).