A collection on Flickr, via AdRants.
Also, a Pamela Anderson look-alike Second Life avatar in anaglyph (red-blue) 3D [video].
Lingerie Ads in Second Life
A collection on Flickr, via AdRants.
Also, a Pamela Anderson look-alike Second Life avatar in anaglyph (red-blue) 3D [video].
Debunking The Ad Contrarian
Update (April 12' 2010): Welcome, readers of TAC's fatherly rebuttal and MadMen fans! Did you know that Sterling Cooper didn't have a "television department" until Crane's "appointment" in 1960?
Like many of you, I enjoy reading The Ad Contrarian blog, ran by an agency CEO Bob Hoffman. In a sense, TAC is the ad industry's Perez Hilton: he draws in crowds by doodling on faces of today's idols; more often than not that's online advertising in general and social media in particular. Some of his posts are right on target, others are wildly off, but all are usually entertaining.
I get unduly excited, though, when in one sentence he insists that his ideological opponents should support their claims with solid data and in the next he makes sweeping generalizations that have little to do with reality.
Take his most recent post, for example, which he opens with: "We're about 15 years into the internet revolution as a mainstream phenomenon and by any measure internet advertising has to be deemed a major failure."
This statement, by any measure, is inaccurate.
Internet advertising is as effective as TV at driving sales, if you believe the study published last year by ComScore, who had monitored purchasing behavior of 200,000 of its panelists. "Over the course of twelve weeks, online ad campaigns with an average reach of 40 percent of their target segment successfully grew retail sales of the advertised brands by an average of 9 percent." The advertised brands were all consumer packaged goods. (via)
This, too, is hard to believe.
Let's start from the day the very first commercial aired, which was on July 1, 1941 during the launch of NBC, since TAC's 15-year timeline for the mainstream web apparently begins when the first ad banner went live in 1994, with only 2 percent of the US households online.
For thirteen years after 1941, the share of TV remained way below 5 percent of the total ad spend until it surged to about 15 percent in 1954 (via), as a recession ended and the install base of TV sets had finally tipped over the 50-percent mark (via).
TV advertising during this period was dominated by the "single-sponsor" format, where an advertiser would produce and control an entire chunk of schedule with programs such as Kraft Television Theater, Colgate Comedy Hour, and Coke Time. The modern "magazine concept" format, where advertisers would buy one- or two-minute chunks of air time, was not established until the 1960. "While participation advertising met with some initial resistance on Madison Avenue, many agencies saw that it was the ideal promotional vehicle for packaged-goods companies manufacturing a cornucopia of brand names, such as Procter and Gamble with such disparate products as Tide (laundry detergent), Crest (toothpaste), and Jif (peanut butter)." (source)
Given that there were only four TV networks at the time and a rather limited ad inventory, it is hardly possible that TV was creating "scores of powerful consumer-facing brands" during the single-sponsor era.
Finally, TAC asks, "After 15 years, can anyone name even ten serious non-native [that is, not Google, Amazon, etc] consumer-facing brands that have been created by web advertising?"
To be honest, I can't. But I also can't think of 1) any non-native (not purely web-based) "serious" brand that tried going the online-only route, and 2) many "serious" brands launched in the past 15 years created by any means. Based on what TAC wrote later in the comment section, let's consider a brand "serious" if it does better than Zappos, which had $1B in sales and 10 million customers in 2008.
It's an interesting question, though, and if you know the answer, please leave a comment.
Can you name a serious non-native consumer brand created entirely by web advertising?
On the other hand, "great brands have never been created by 'branding'".
Like many of you, I enjoy reading The Ad Contrarian blog, ran by an agency CEO Bob Hoffman. In a sense, TAC is the ad industry's Perez Hilton: he draws in crowds by doodling on faces of today's idols; more often than not that's online advertising in general and social media in particular. Some of his posts are right on target, others are wildly off, but all are usually entertaining.
I get unduly excited, though, when in one sentence he insists that his ideological opponents should support their claims with solid data and in the next he makes sweeping generalizations that have little to do with reality.
Take his most recent post, for example, which he opens with: "We're about 15 years into the internet revolution as a mainstream phenomenon and by any measure internet advertising has to be deemed a major failure."
This statement, by any measure, is inaccurate.
Internet advertising is as effective as TV at driving sales, if you believe the study published last year by ComScore, who had monitored purchasing behavior of 200,000 of its panelists. "Over the course of twelve weeks, online ad campaigns with an average reach of 40 percent of their target segment successfully grew retail sales of the advertised brands by an average of 9 percent." The advertised brands were all consumer packaged goods. (via)
Here's a different study published by Yahoo! Research together with, again, ComScore in 2007: "Consumers exposed to display advertising spent an average of $6 in the store for every $1 they spent online".
(Since TAC insists on quoting the "99% of all video is viewed on traditional TV" stat from Nielsen's "Three Screen Report", I didn't bother googling past the first available ComScore study.)
TAC then writes: "Fifteen years into its mainstream life, television had created scores of powerful consumer-facing brands."
TAC then writes: "Fifteen years into its mainstream life, television had created scores of powerful consumer-facing brands."
This, too, is hard to believe.
Let's start from the day the very first commercial aired, which was on July 1, 1941 during the launch of NBC, since TAC's 15-year timeline for the mainstream web apparently begins when the first ad banner went live in 1994, with only 2 percent of the US households online.
For thirteen years after 1941, the share of TV remained way below 5 percent of the total ad spend until it surged to about 15 percent in 1954 (via), as a recession ended and the install base of TV sets had finally tipped over the 50-percent mark (via).
TV advertising during this period was dominated by the "single-sponsor" format, where an advertiser would produce and control an entire chunk of schedule with programs such as Kraft Television Theater, Colgate Comedy Hour, and Coke Time. The modern "magazine concept" format, where advertisers would buy one- or two-minute chunks of air time, was not established until the 1960. "While participation advertising met with some initial resistance on Madison Avenue, many agencies saw that it was the ideal promotional vehicle for packaged-goods companies manufacturing a cornucopia of brand names, such as Procter and Gamble with such disparate products as Tide (laundry detergent), Crest (toothpaste), and Jif (peanut butter)." (source)
Given that there were only four TV networks at the time and a rather limited ad inventory, it is hardly possible that TV was creating "scores of powerful consumer-facing brands" during the single-sponsor era.
Finally, TAC asks, "After 15 years, can anyone name even ten serious non-native [that is, not Google, Amazon, etc] consumer-facing brands that have been created by web advertising?"
To be honest, I can't. But I also can't think of 1) any non-native (not purely web-based) "serious" brand that tried going the online-only route, and 2) many "serious" brands launched in the past 15 years created by any means. Based on what TAC wrote later in the comment section, let's consider a brand "serious" if it does better than Zappos, which had $1B in sales and 10 million customers in 2008.
It's an interesting question, though, and if you know the answer, please leave a comment.
Can you name a serious non-native consumer brand created entirely by web advertising?
On the other hand, "great brands have never been created by 'branding'".
Is Wired's iPad App Toast?
Last week, I posted that Wired's app would be built on Adobe Air and then repacked with CS5 into a native iPad app. Now the newly updated language of the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement seems to prohibit apps created with cross-compilers like the Adobe's packager. Which means Wired's app in its current form is dead. Which, in turn, is ironic given Wired's glowing cover story (with iPad on the cover) this month about how tablets will change the face of computing.
Real-Time Web Traffic Stats On Your iPhone [ad]
I had been searching for a traffic counter with a dedicated iPhone interface that I can access on the go for some time, and it turns out that good solutions aren't really that many. There's Mint, which you have to host yourself. There's the Analytics app for iPhone, which is a mobile interface for your Google Analytics account. I tested, I think, every single one of those apps, and Analytics is by far the best, but it comes with all the limitations of Google Analytics itself, most importantly the reporting lag.
Then there's Clicky, which is a hosted service that offers an iPhone-like mobile web interface (the screenshot above), real-time reporting, and detailed activity logs for each visitor. Clicky comes in a variety of plans that range from free to $20 a month. I've been a happy customer of their $10/month Pro plan for half a year now and am happy to recommend them.
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
iPad: The Swiss Army Knife of Media Consumption
I got to play with the iPad at work and here's what I think.
By the way, what would be a good caption for the photo above? All I have is stuff like "We've got plenty of Time".
iPad Media Coverage Thirty Years Ago
This news clip about Compuserve's (?) experimental news delivery service from 30 years ago is a lot like the iPad coverage we have all been enjoying over the past month. "Imagine, if you will, sitting down to your morning coffee, turning on your home computer to read the day's newspaper. Well, it's not as far-fetched as it may seem."
-- via
Splash! The World's Tallest Email Ad
There's so little creative thinking in the mainstream ad world going into one of the most popular digital media around (email's penetration is near 100% of online population) that we take it upon us to celebrate every nugget, starting with the world's tallest email sent out by a Brazilian waterpark. Scrolling down the image 12,000 pixels tall is likely to make you almost as dizzy as the water slide it promotes. Below is a heavily resized version of the original.
A/B Testing Creative for Panhandling
A few years ago, I posted about a business student whose internship project was to increase daily revenue of a panhandler through adjusting the emotional pitch of the cardboard sign. In the same spirit of responsible citizenship, Daily Conversions blog decided to do a split test on another pandhandler's banner. Results? "This experiment improved this man's earnings by over 100% over several days."
An important finding: holding your cup up doesn't do anything for your conversions.
-- via
Canon's Lens-Shaped Thermos Hits eBay
This thermos styled after the iconic white L lens that Canon was giving away to the lucky press during Vancouver Olympics is easily the awesomest piece of schwag I've ever seen and written about. They are now hitting eBay, and this one is already up to over $100 with two days of bidding left. I bet it will go for more than an actual non-Canon lens of similar properties.
Looks like a manufacturer in China has decided to ride the wave, because there's a bunch of eBay offers for pre-ordering one "directly from the OEM", due for shipping in mid-April.
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