Tag Archives: digital media

April 19, 2012 · 10:14 am

Trust Me

For you trivia buffs in the audience, there once was a TV game show called “Who Do You Trust?” The host of the show was a struggling comic named Johnny Carson and a year into the run he picked up a guy named Ed McMahon as his announcer sidekick. The rest is television history.

That bit of history has very little to do with today’s topic other than it asks the question the study I want to highlight answers. Who do you trust? For consumers, the answer appears to be one another.  Nielsen released its Global Trust in Advertising Survey and it shows that

92% of consumers around the world say they trust earned media, such as word-of-mouth and recommendations from friends and family, above all other forms of advertising, an increase of 18% since 2007. Online consumer reviews are the second most trusted form of advertising with 70% of global consumers surveyed online indicating they trust this platform, an increase of 15% in four years.

That’s the good news.  The bad?

…While 47% of consumers around the world say they trust paid television, magazine, and newspaper ads, confidence declined by 24%, 20% and 25% respectively since 2009.

You can read more about this here but the data reinforces the fact that we’re in the midst of a huge transition in marketing.  While most brands are still making the bulk of their marketing investment in paid media, the messages those media disseminate are declining in effectiveness as consumers find other sources of credible information to help with purchase decisions.  Visibility and relevance are not the same thing.

More brands are making efforts in what’s popularly called “earned media.”  They hire an intern to monitor message broads and social media while at the same time they spend millions paying creative types and media buys to work on their TV and print.  While I’m not for a minute suggesting the abandonment of traditional media, perhaps it’s time to look at reallocating resources better to reflect modern realities?  The money spent on the last two titles on your media plan could be working a lot more effectively elsewhere in media more trusted by your consumers.

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April 18, 2012 · 8:04 am

Your Customers vs. Your Partners

Here is an interesting story from the folks at MediaBiz that just cuts to the core of almost every business issue.  It points out the Sophie’s Choice created by some older business models in a time when technology is forcing them to change.  First the facts:

DirecTV

DirecTV (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A handful of DIRECTV subs stopped receiving HBO after the company started blocking the signal on older TV sets that don’t have the encryption standard High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP). DIRECTV… recently added HDCP protection to all HBO-owned channels and “will continue rolling out to other premium services in the coming weeks.” The company said affected customers should replace their HDMI connection with a component video cable and a separate audio cable (emphasis added).

Most folks who do so for a living will tell you that HDMI is a better signal (and therefore picture) than component video.  DirecTV also markets itself accurately as providing a better picture to consumers.  Without content, however, there is no service – it’s a big, empty pipe.  It’s the content providers who are insisting on the use of HDCP.  They’re the ones whose business model is most impacted by what they presume is widespread piracy and are insisting on this protection layer.  DirecTV is placed in the untenable position of either losing the content by catering to their partners or telling customers to degrade their pictures and potentially losing customers who can get better video elsewhere using more current technology.

Ultimately, customers pay the bills.  I believe we win when we serve them and while that may, as in this case, cause problems with partners, suppliers, and others, that downside risk vs. that of angry and vocal consumers is minimal.  In this case, the customers who would most notice the downgrade to component video are probably the ones who would know how to cut the cord and get the content they seek elsewhere, hopefully through legitimate means rather than piracy.  As businesspeople, we encourage that illegal behavior by choosing any segment over our customers – witness what the music business did for a very long time.

That’s where I come out.  How do you see it?

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April 5, 2012 · 8:10 am

If An Ad Falls In The Forest…

comScore published the results of a study they did with a number of major advertisers on the subject of ad delivery.  While the study came out last week, it feels as if there is a bit of a drumbeat starting to happen and I thought I’d join the band (hey – we’re always out front here at the screed).  There is an excellent summary of the study on Exchange Wire and if you care to read the entire thing you can download it by clicking through here.  In brief, to get a better handle on the issues associated with display ad delivery and validation as well as to test-drive  comScore’s method for this validation called vCE, twelve leading marketers participated in a U.S.-based charter study, called the vCE Charter Study.

Image representing comScore as depicted in Cru...

Image via CrunchBase

The biggest point to come from the study, which seems to be the headline on the growing number of blog posts that reference it, is that 31% of ads delivered were never seen by a consumer.  It also called out that 72 percent of the campaigns studied had some ads running beside “unsafe” content as determined by the advertiser and that a small percentage (4%) of ads targeted to the US ran outside the country.

For a medium that touts itself as highly measurable and targeted, these aren’t great results.  Then again, none of the articles I’ve found put these numbers into any sort of context.  How does this compare to print, for example? As we’ve said before, stats by themselves are pretty meaningless unless you have something with which to compare them.  There is also an interesting nugget that surfaces about ads running lower on pages, or “below the fold.”  There is a common misperception that ads delivered “above-the-fold” are seen, while ads delivered “below-the-fold” are not.  Surprisingly, the findings demonstrate that some ads delivered “above-the-fold” were not seen because users quickly scrolled past them before the ad had a chance to load, and many ads placed “below-the-fold” delivered a high opportunity to be seen.  This might mean that inventory “below-the-fold” can be priced as premium as long as the publisher can prove it was viewed.

To me this all screams out for some human intervention.  Digital ad buying has become a mechanized world as one ad platform talks to another and humans stay out of the mix for the most part.  Buyers need to examine sites for more than their audiences.  Sellers need to pay attention to the analytics that show more than traffic but also “heat maps” of usage.  Both sides need to do a better job of quality control.  One can question comScore’s motives a bit since they’re also selling a delivery validation tool that will allow for both sides of the digital media equation to get more accurate numbers.  Commendable, I guess, but I wish there was some way to redo the numbers based on more human involvement as well as to compare the results with TV and print “opportunities to view.”

What are your thoughts?

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