Harvard Business School
People share videos of ads when doing so makes them look good, according to research by Harvard Business School assistant professor Thales S. Teixeira.
After comparing the sharing behavior with the emotional responses and personality tests, Teixeira found that the main motivation for viral sharing was egocentricity—the viewer's desire to derive personal gain from sharing the video. In this case, the potential gain comes in the form of improving the viewer's reputation among friends and family, for example. Thus, it behooves advertisers to create videos that not only will make the product look good but, if shared, will make the viewer look good, too.
Whenever a commercial airs during a TV show, Twitter not only determines where and when it ran, but can identify users on Twitter who tweeted about the program where the ad aired during that program. We believe a user engaged enough with a TV show to tweet about it very likely saw the commercials as well.
An Orange County Register spokesperson confirms a report in the OC Weekly that the news organization will no longer accept adult ads.
The Weekly's Gustavo Arellano quoted a letter from Michael H. Burns, The Orange County Register's senior vice president for sales and marketing:
"While we wish you much success in your business, we believe the decision to not accept advertising of this category serves in the best interest of our audience."
Register spokesperson Eric Morgan tells Poynter in an email that the letter went out in late April and was "sent to select businesses who operate gentleman's clubs and massage parlors that include suggestive language such as 'fully nude club,' 'private rooms' and 'sexy girls' to advertise their services."
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IAB | The Wall Street Journal
Revenues from digital advertising reached nearly $37 billion in 2012, the Interactive Advertising Bureau's annual report says, up 15 percent over 2011. Mobile advertising accounted for 9 percent of the total. Display advertising accounted for 33 percent, and search was 46 percent. Video advertising was up 29 percent over 2011.
As good as that news may seem, there's no guarantee that this wave of cash will wash ashore at news organizations. IAB spokesperson Laura Goldberg tells Poynter the report does not break down revenue by web property category. But analyst Mary Meeker pointed out last year that there is a "steep imbalance between where people spend their time and where advertisers spend their money," as Jeff Sonderman put it.
Digital ad purchasing needs to adapt to new technologies and markets, he says, using the example of real-time bidding, a method of matching online advertises with users when those users visit a site.
Over the last five years we have created RTB from scratch and dramatically scaled this brand new and highly efficient technology. Meanwhile, for the rest of the digital display buy, we are still emailing RFPs and proposals, signing I/Os with pens and in some cases even still faxing them back. This is not just urban legend. I checked and it’s true. Some signed I/Os are still faxed.
He says this over-reliance on outdated methods is the result of four factors: "a disproportionate focus by the tech community on lower-funnel solutions; agency incentives; agency organizational structure; and the chicken/egg nature of changes to established processes."
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AdWeek | spider.io
The increasing reliance of media websites on advertising exchanges has a growing challenge to face in the form of ghost publishers -- media properties purporting to offer generic media content reaching huge audiences to sell advertising, but statistically not drawing a large number of real people.
A company called Alphabird, for example, says it generates 8 billion impressions a month through its more than 80 sites. That's an impressive total for a company that "pays $2.50 for a 75-word post and $15 for a 300-word story for sites like www.ladyshopspot.com."
The ad dollars are conversely very lucrative.
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Newspapers’ fortunes, admittedly from a rock-bottom base, have been looking up lately — Warren Buffett and others have bought papers, digital pay plans are boosting circulation revenue, and new lines of business like digital marketing services are taking root.
The agreement "granted Valassis Direct Mail discounts of 20 percent to 34 percent on new mail pieces containing advertising from national retailers of durable and semi-durable goods," the NAA says in a release announcing the brief. (You can read the whole brief here.) "The issue is not whether Valassis will win a particular advertiser or not from a newspaper – that is competition," the brief reads. "The issue here is the government favoring one mailer over that mailer’s rivals in ways that would affect downstream markets."
Newspapers typically get inserts to customers in weekend editions or in "total market coverage" products that go to non-subscribers. "Advertising inserts comprise a critical revenue stream that supports the original reporting done by local newspapers in service to their communities," the NAA says.
The case is scheduled to be heard by the U.S. Court of Appeals, District of Columbia Circuit.
They want to break out of the constrained 300-pixel display ad box that everyone’s eyes have learned to ignore, and leap into the stream of engaging content that readers actually pay … Read more
The New York Times
Google Creative Lab won a print-advertising contest run by USA Today. Publisher Larry Kramer tells The New York Times "he could see how people may consider it 'hysterical,'" Stuart Elliott writes.
First prize is $1 million worth of advertising in USA Today. “A million dollars is nothing to laugh at," Google Creative Lab Chief Creative Officer Robert Wong told Elliott. The contest was spawned after a conversation between Kramer and USA Today media columnist Michael Wolff, Elliott reports. Wolff was one of the contest's judges.
The winning ad shows the first paragraph of a newspaper story about the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu. Via deft copy-editing marks, the ad shows how visa problems preventing a meeting between the two could have been solved by using a Google Hangout. Still, there's something pretty uncomfortable about the Google unit that created Google News winning this thing, right? After all, Google earned more than the entire newspaper industry in 2011.
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