.Web Display Advertising Inexorably Moving to Full-Blown Brand Advertising
Industry big brains Jeremy Liew and Fred Wilson alerted us to a free comScore white paper (free download) that reports on the effect display advertising has on Internet users. Most interesting are the findings that though a person may never click on a display ad, it’s still very common that they later search out that product, find it online or offline, and buy it. This might be surprising to outsiders, but is what our experiences have taught us. When we survey our members they indicate connections to our advertiser even if they report they never clicked on one of their ads.
From the report: “The results presented in this paper will show the manner in which online display ads work in affecting consumer behavior, revealing that there are
indeed latency effects and branding effects even when click rates are
minimal.”
Increased lift overtime for searches of the advertised brand.
Starting in 2005 at Dogster/Catster we came to the conclusion that of all the ads types we ran – Strategic (i.e. long-term brand/product presence), Tactical (i.e. short-term call-to-action), CPA (i.e. sign-up/buy right now), and Text (i.e. “pssst, click this”) – the campaigns that gave the best results to advertisers and were most appreciated by the site viewers are the Strategic Campaigns.
The web is very bad at getting anyone to do anything other than what they are doing. (The exception is when their task is to resolve a problem a quickly as possible and then a multitude of options is what the user is looking for.) So whenever a person is at a site because the content engages them (such as NYTimes.com, Pandora, Kongregate, Dogster, Catster) it’s not a great time for them to explore an advertiser’s message. BUT if that advertiser is there for months on end, possibly offering special content or features, the regular site visitor is naturally going to warm to that product. It’s name, coloring, message become associated with the good experience they have on the site.
The comScore data shows what we’ve been finding with our most pleased advertisers. The web is a great way to advertise a brand in the same way NASCAR and Vanity Fair are, by making prospective customers aware and familiar with your product without denying them the pleasure and benefit they are experiencing while they are there.
I’ll rest our case with this member-uploaded image in response to a multi-month Febreze campaign that ran on our site.
Great post, Ted – thanks for sharing your insights from Dogster, it makes a lot of sense. This brand-awareness approach reminds me of product placement and corporate sponsorships — which are geared towards associating a brand with a positive experience.
This is a great post Ted, and our own, more limited experience, backs this up (our first deal, with Little Tikes, was this more comprehensive type of sponsorship, and I think its been a great value to them).
At the same time, I think there is a significant lag in this type of understanding among brand advertisers, putting a lot of burden on the sales effort to make the pitch correctly.
The other thing to note, is this type of pitch is very difficult to pawn off to a 3rd party…
I’d be curious to know… how long are the terms of the deals Dogster/Catster usually construct – 3 months? 6 months? more? At what point do you think the returns really start kicking in for the brand?
For brand to really work it needs to be over the course of at least 6 months, but 12 to 24 is really ideal. It does not have to be active that whole time. In fact the best campaigns are always dynamic with gaps in between the big pushes. A giveaway one month, a contest 2 months after that, a new display campaign after that (though pick any order). It simply needs to be changing giving reasons for the prospective customer to gain interest in it for different reasons. Meanwhile keep the sponsor logo on every page and run low volume banners through the entire process to keep brand recognition strong.
The return for the brand kicks in immediately (as you want to start with a big exciting push) and varies with the life of the campaign’s tranches, however, it’s much better to view result data normalized over the course of a quarter, or preferably a full year. If you plan the right big campaigns the advertiser will get 10x more clicks then they would on any comparable banner campaign.
Survey your members and find results to a) are you aware of Brand A? b) Have you considered using their product because of their participation in our site? c) Has your opinion of Brand A changed since they joined our site? if yes, how so.
This way you’ll have quantitative and qualitative lift data. Then, of course, there is the lift comScore reports on above
Great post Ted.
I think this is an area with big potential for the next years, since big companies are starting to realize that online advertising really moves offline product. This is extremely powerful in niche sites, just like Dogster.
This article talks about that: http://www.dallasnews.com/mediakit/audience/industry_research/images/acnielsen_1.pdf
Great stuff, Ted.
How do you develop the kind of relationships with advertisers, so that they want to commit to a 12-24 month deal with you? Do you work through ad networks, do you go through traditional ad agencies or do you deal with the companies themselves?