Get Free Gas; Ugly Cars Need Not Apply

If you are "cool and responsible", work "in a busy retail location" and drive a "high quality stylish vehicle" (or "any nice truck if you work at a large home improvement store") that you routinely park at beaches, sporting events, malls and fair groups, then Take 1 If You Dare has a deal for you. You festoon your "stylish vehicle" with promo magnets, and the company pays for your gas. Which in the age of $4-$5 gas, might not be a bad deal.

And if you need help with your mortgage, there's a deal for you, too.

Amazon Kindle With An Ad for Buick

Buzzfeed's Jon Steinberg received his ad-supported Kindle today and snapped a picture of a Buick ad on it.

Publishers Promote Books On Document Sharing Sites

Random House is promoting its books by publishing illustrated excerpts on Scribd, with over 2 million total reads of 287 documents to date.

The recently uploaded in time with the TV premier and heavily promoted Game of Thrones has its own custom page and background:

Webmasters Share Impressions Of CAPTCHA Ad Programs

Two comments under All Things Digital's write-up about Solve Media left two months after article went live in September:

JDavis:

"I tried this service out and they have *horrible* payout. Around 10 to 20 cents CPM. Except the CPM they refer to is not the amount of captchas served but the amount of captchas solved.

So basically, if you annoy the crap out of 1000 of your visitors with these things, they'll give you, the webmaster, 15 cents on average.

Thats freaking horrible. Normal ad banners have CPMs near that and they dont require visitors to watch a video and type in text."

Michael S:

I am currently using it and experience the same *horrible* payout. When I questioned it I was told that the people typing in the responses where from outside the U.S. and currently they only had advertisers that were targeting U.S. citizens.

Also the payout threshold is a whopping 200 dollars. I am doing the math on what I make and that will take me about three years to reach.

I am still using it with the hopes that things will improve, but looking at my stats over the last thirty days it looks like this.

3,845 Impressions

662 Solved TYPE-INs

$2 Revenue

That's a fair amount of solved Type Ins and so very little in revenue.  And remember that is thirty days of revenue. I make more on two or three adsense clicks. I hope it improves so I am give them a glowing review.

There's also a short but recent thread on a web developer Q&A site with a compilation of thoughts on usability and revenue potential of CAPTCHA ads as well as how they defeat their own purpose by creating an additional incentive for spammers.

Turn Your Video Ad Into CAPTCHA

NuCaptcha announced its video CAPTCHA technology for advertisers today; the image above is a replacement gif from under the standard Flash unit so the tech does work on the Flashless iOS browsers.  The press release says the format will come in three IAB sizes, "pricing is either on a video CPM basis ($10 to $25), or a cost-per-engagement basis ($0.10 to $1.00), for larger, longer videos."

Not sure how it works, but "publishers and advertisers can create “instant” NuCaptcha videos by turning existing video advertisements into NuCaptcha Engage advertisements".

I wrote before how CAPTCHA ads in general have a potential to create incentives for publishers to sacrifice user experience for extra monetization opportunities.

Wonder if connected TVs' users are eventually going to have to deal with CAPTCHAs -- entering squiggles using a remote control doesn't sound like a very comfortable experience.

Now You Really "Like" This Banner

Continuing the topic of bookmarkable advertising: not sure how Mountain Dew integrating Facebook "Like" buttons into their display ads is "the first time the social-networking behemoth will extend its social/sharing functionality to ads appearing on other Web sites," in Adweek's exclusive words. You can roll your own Likeable and Shareable banners with Spongecell; in-banner sharing functionality via third-party services has been offered for a fairly long time now.

Finally, Bookmarkable Banner Ads

The big Monday press release was about the unveiling of AdKeeper, a company whose technology adds a "bookmark" (or "keep", as they call it) button to banner ads of participating advertisers. The idea is based on the fact that people do bookmark advertising if a) it's easy, and b) there is an expectation of future value. Clipping coupons, for example, is both. Until today, banners haven't really been designed for any kind of delayed gratification, being instead all about "click here now" reward mechanism. With AdKeeper, users will be able to clip online banners into a repository for later viewing, which probably means that the creative can be updated with new offers depending on the history of interactions with the ad.

An excellent idea, which I hope takes off.

Here's the demo video:

Coming Soon: Video CAPTCHA Ads

Update [Oct 25, 2010]: NuCaptcha has just launched its advertising offering (here's a promo video).

If you liked ads in CAPTCHAs brought to the world by Solve Media (formerly AdCopy), you'll love NUcaptcha, a company that has developed technology to replace the usual squiggles with animations and videos and that is apparently working on an advertising solution.

Recent (Oct 6) updates to the company's downloadable files talk about how "NuCaptcha can push ads right into a Captcha field, providing a new, highly visible ad space." The description for the WordPress plugin describes NUCaptcha as "a multi purpose product which provides industry leading security combined with brand messaging, advertising and unique user engagement."  The image above with the WestJet spec shows up when you browse to the site on an iPad as a replacement for the default Flash sequence.

I'm curious about the patent side of the story. Last March, I wrote about a company in Germany trying to patent video CAPTCHA ads. Microsoft, too, had submitted an application for a patent that describes a CAPTCHA ad system similar to Solve Media's where users type in ad slogans. One of the examples of Solve Media's ads are for Internet Explorer 8; Microsoft's application is illustrated with an ad for Xbox.

Even though CAPTCHA advertising has been a recurring topic on AdLab since 2005, I'm not sure I'm convinced it's a good idea as it may create strong incentives for publishers to opt against the optimum user experience, similar to breaking up articles into multiple pages and slideshows to ramp up page views.

On a related note, I would love to see a reCaptcha-like system used as a foreign language instruction tool, where you are given a word in one language and are asked for a translation in another.

Custom Branded Dollar Bills To Aid Economy

This artist has estimated the ROI of the media buy that would involve printing custom US dollar bills and created some spec work: "The average 100 USD Note is circulating for 7.4 years, it changes hands on average 3x per week, so each ad on a 100 USD note is seen by more then 1000 persons." The U.S. prints 38 million bills a day. Sell the space for a buck each -- for a Franklin, that will be $1 CPM over each bill's lifetime -- and add $14 billion a year to the ailing economy.

Hey, if it works for the U.S. Postal Service that allows branded stamps, why not for the Bureau of Engraving and Printing?

Your Family Pictures, Now With Limited Commercial Interruptions

Here's one genius idea whose time is yet to come: let people stream online pictures from their accounts on sites such as Facebook and Flickr to the digital frames on their desks, walls and nightstands along with news, stocks and weather updates, and an occasional ad.

There's a company called Thinking Screen Media that does exactly that via its FrameChannel service. Get a wifi-enabled frame, plug into the info stream via FrameChannel and select among dozens of sources, and there you have your own Captivate screen you stare at during elevator rides in the office.  Only now it's in your bedroom. Incidentally, Captivate's founder is on the board of this new company.

The company has done tests with IPG and plans to start selling its ad inventory some time this year. It also has just launched an iPad app that turns the device into digital frame.

The idea is genius because as hardware prices drop and people's comfort with the tech grows, everyone will soon have as many screens on surfaces around them as they now have old-fashioned paper photos. All of these screens will be online.

The idea is early because today wireless frame penetration is at 5%.

Some 5.9 million digital frames shipped in 2008 in the US and the market will remain flat until 2013, and IDC expects that by then two thirds of all frames shipped will have a wireless capability.

Funny, there are people who have already figured out how to block ads on this barely emerging medium (lie about your location during sign-up).

Eventually, digital frames will become wallet-sized. They will be monetized as well: every tenth time that you open your wallet you'll see an ad. Then, our windows will be internet-ready as well.

Two Banners In One Short RSS Feed Item

I'm all for making money, and I know RSS ads aren't known for high click-throughs, but two banners in each non-full RSS feed item?  

Twitter Ads Triggered By Trademarked Keywords, Products

After reading articles like this recent one in NYT, I was left with the impression that Twitter's "Promoted Tweets" ads are triggered when people search for advertisers by their name. See this quote, for example:

"When people are searching on Starbucks, what we really want to show them is that something is happening at Starbucks right now, and Promoted Tweets will give us a chance to do that," said Chris Bruzzo, vice president of brand, content and online at Starbucks.

It turns out that the ads, much like Google AdWords, can be triggered by a bunch of other search terms, including product names or even third-party brands. I noticed that BestBuy's ads are live too (Starbucks's ads went on air earlier this week) and spent some time plugging different terms into the search box to see what will come up.

I am still trying to understand the logic that guides the display of the ads. It seems that there is a list against which the search terms are checked.  The search term (or a variation) needs to be present in the tweet itself, although not every word in a tweet will make it a "promoted" tweet. The list with the terms must be updated pretty often for the recently published tweets to show up as ads; either that, or the tweets must be scheduled in advance.





This tweet above becomes "promoted" when you search for hdtv, 3d tv, bestbuy, best buy, @bestbuy, 3d hdtv, 3d, but not, interestingly, by blue ray, blueray, electronics, tv, or bravia.

Searches for tri-color or Chickenfoot (a BestBuy concert) -- words that can be found in this and this tweets, respectively -- produced nothing.




Some trademarked terms trigger BestBuy's ads as well.  Search for iPad, and this tweet about iPad arrival comes up.  Search for Nook, and you get a Nook tweet-ad. Search for Bosch, though, and this tweet about Bosch appliances (published before the ad platform announcement) does not come up.

MediaPost yesterday wrote that this ad model could open a "PPC trademark can of worms."

More Details About Apple's iAd Platform

Not cheap, well targeted in a rather unique way, good looking, with room for improvement. A much more detailed account of our meeting with Apple's iAd team yesterday here.

Twitter's First Ads Are Live

Just became a part of history by retweeting Twitter's first ad (for Starbucks). If you stay long enough on the search page, the sponsored tweets go in rotation; that is, the sponsored tweet is not necessarily the freshest one.

It's Peanuts: Farmville Reaps Brand Placement

BBR Saatchi & Saatchi Tel Aviv and Saatchi Interactive will launch the first "commercially inspired crop" on Farmville. "The initiative will see Zynga, creators of FarmVille, introduce a new crop – peanuts - as part of Saatchi Tel Aviv's roll-out campaign for Elite Taami Nutz, a new peanut-filled variant of one of Israel's favourite chocolate snacks. The 'peanuts' will be available on FarmVille from the 14th April 2010."

-- from a press release

Burger King Puts Puts Ads On Digg's Empty Searches

As promised, Burger King is now running ads on Digg's search pages that return no results. Pretty cool, although not as cool as ASCII images in Digg's source code for Inferno.

Technology Behind Wired's iPad Magazine App

Cult of Mac wondered last month about how Wired would be able to pull off its sleek magazine app for iPad built with Adobe Air, which, like Flash, doesn't work on Apple's i-devices.

The answer: with the Adobe CS5's packager that publishes your stuff as native iPhone/iPad apps.

Funny, though. This month's Wired has a cover story about how tablets will change everything featuring this (not family-friendly) quote from Fake Steve Jobs: "Do you really think saving newspapers is just a matter of putting your old crap on a new device? Because from what I can see, The New York Times sucks just as bad on a Kindle as it does on paper. That, in fact, is the real problem with The New York Times: It sucks, and everyone knows it, except, apparently, the dumb fucks who write for The New York Times, which is, oddly enough, the heart of the problem."

My question about all the publications with their lofty plans to replicate and enhance the printed page experience on iPad and other tablets -- who's gonna do it?  As in, if you are cutting your headcounts, who is going to produce, lay out, and code all that additional custom-built awesomeness designed for readership that is a fraction of the regular print circulation?

Guess we'll see soon enough.

eBay Banner Knows What I Need

It's as if the Big Brother were wearing a gray flannel suit and had three-martini lunches.  One banner knows were I'm going, another -- what I'm looking for.  This display unit from eBay showed up on YouTube on an unrelated search page and scrolled through half a dozen active auctions for photo gear, including one for a remote cable release for a Canon I've been looking for. The images are actual auction thumbnails. If the banner freaks you out, you can click on the AdChoice link at the bottom that takes you to an explanation: "We sometimes use information we have about you to help ensure the ads you see on eBay and elsewhere are as personalized to you as possible."

I usually find myself in the camp that defends this kind of targeting, but once, an overzealous travel company banner almost ruined a surprise trip by shouting "So, you are going to Vegas?" on a computer I was sharing with the surprisee. Caution, people, caution.

Serving Ads on Images Isn't Easy

I kept coming across these ad overlays on images today, and they led me back to Image Space Media, the company behind the format. AdLab first wrote about them last year when they were still known as PicAdMedia. AdBrite has also tried a similar approach in the past, and the service is still active.

While potentially interesting, it doesn't seem like an easy format to get right. Serving messages relevant to the image is key, for which you need rich metadata or some kind of image recognition algorithm, otherwise you are going to end up with an image-ad combination like the one below, on the company's own site (click image to zoom).

On the other hand, perhaps an ad for an ad blocker served as a layer over "We Love Advertising" image is a perfect match.

Dead Body Spam

It's called "dead body spam" or "corpse graffiti": peddlers of virtual gold in World of Warcraft spell out their site's URL with bodies of dead players, a common practice in the game (watch video).



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