Reading Week

 The First Fast Food OOH, ca. 30,000 BCE

Browsing through the digital edition of Advertising Age this morning—which is far cheaper than the obscene subscription price it charges to send the print version to Canada—I came across two interesting articles.  The first was entitled, Click-ThroughRates May Matter Even Less Than We Thought, and it’s about the results of a study done by Pretarget and ComScore.  After the obvious “Duh” reaction to the headline came my WTF moments.  

To learn more about the findings—the article was a bit skimpy on details—I checked out the press release.  In it, was a quote by Pretarget’s founder Keith Pieper (get a pen: you’ll want to write this down so you don’t forget): “Your ad being seen matters more than your ad being clicked – if you have a back-end conversion metric...  After all, what good is an ad that can’t be seen? It’s intuitive that an ad must be seen to make an impact, and it’s even more intuitive than someone hovering and engaging with an ad might convert, even absent a click.” 

So the big thing they learned is that ad placement is important, and that being above the fold is better than being below the fold.  Huh.  Guess these guys have never placed ads in old timey dead newspapers.  Yes, placement is important, but ads don’t always need to make an impact (I hate that word) to be effective or noticed.  Some are seen and understood in the blink of an eye without any hovering, clicking, or “engagement.” 

The second thing these guys learned was, now that even the thickest of clients have caught on the fact that CTR is a pathetic metric and that the correlation between clicks and conversion is pretty much statistically zero, a new metric is needed.  And they have it figured out.  It’s called “ad hover/interaction.”  This happens when a user moves his cursor over an ad.  So I guess when I visit a site and a humongous banner takes over my screen and I move my curser over it just to get rid of the damned thing, or when I move through a page and accidentally pass over or click on an ad, these are my moments of “engagement” Lord, take me now.  

To be fair, I haven’t seen the research report and can’t find it on either company’s sites, but if the press release is any indication, we’re still in trouble.  Of a personal note, whenever people in our business mention “engagement,” I feel like Inigo Montoya, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”  Please stop using it, OK? 

The second article was titled, Why Digital Ad Forecasts Are Irrelevant: TheFuture Is Not Display Ads.  Written by James Gross, it was, for the most part, a sensible piece, until he drifted into the touchy-feely, brands have to act more human and social ecosystem stuff.  Anyway, Gross writes that with the rise of Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest et al, there is no room for display advertising on these platforms. A valid point.  His “duh" moment came when he states that whatever form the new ads take, they will need to be more interesting. The one thing Gross missed, however, is how the growth of Mobile threatens ad placement and revenue in general, and it’s a warning Facebook put in its recent SEC filing:

Increasing Mobile Usage. Increasing use of Facebook on mobile devices will also affect our performance, particularly if mobile use substitutes for use on personal computers. Historically, we have not shown ads to users accessing Facebook through mobile apps or our mobile website and we cannot be certain that our mobile monetization approaches will be successful in generating meaningful revenue. We cannot quantify the extent to which mobile usage of Facebook is substituting for, rather than incremental to, usage of Facebook through personal computers, but we generally expect mobile usage to increase at a faster rate than usage through personal computers for the foreseeable future.

I figure Zuckerberg will find a way to buy a solution to this problem before he goes public.  Then again, in future he may find he can make more money packaging and selling user data than from ad placements—it’s the same cash flow generator that keeps big loyalty programmes operating.