ZenithOptimedia

We estimate performance buying tactics to drive 80% of the display ad impressions served across the top 5 publishers in Australia.

Given the nature of Online and its measurability, advertisers tend to use this channel with an acquisition objective and a minimized risk on their return on investment via performance buys, the most common buying model being on a cost per acquisition.
 
This approach in targeting and measuring ROI is now reaching the Soccer World.

In its June 2010 issue, the French magazine Capital is highlighting the Cost Per Goal for each soccer team involved in the World Cup, looking at the value of each team players assessed by Futebol Finance and the number of goals registered since April 2006.

Australia is among the best performers with a E22 million CPG.

Will this become the metric to determine the value of the teams and consequently the individual players?

What hasn’t been clear is what impact the online environment has on advertising effectiveness.

Late last year, News Digital Media engaged market research company Pollinate to explore the interaction between online environments and the products and brands which appear on them.

They tested different ads in different environments, identified what impact those environments have and why it matters. Qualitative research groups explored concepts of brand and trust, while over 1,200 adult respondents from all major states completed online surveys where they recorded their perceptions and responses to different ads in different online environments.

Those results combine to enable a comprehensive analysis of the impact of online environments on brand:

Click here to download:

NDM Better for Brands - Digital Insights Report June 2010.pdf (6.59 MB)

(download)

Click here to download:

NDM Better for Brands - Digital Insights Report June 2010.pdf (6.59 MB)

A thought: news aggregation websites and search engines continue to increase and dominate the way we discover news content. The methods of optimizing news services are mainly technological (code, link building, topic multiplication, etc) whereas they used to rely more on creativity (writing, humour, story angles) and investment in investigation (i.e. real scoops and exclusives, not the manufactured PR kind).

Is this driving news, and other web-based content, to be generic?

Is this an opportunity for creativity, or a threat to taking risks?

And in ten years, will we have such classic headline puns from newspapers such as The Sun's famous "Super Caley go ballistic, Celtic are atrocious" when Inverness Caledonian Thistle FC remarkably beat Celtic FC in the Scottish Cup 3-1 in February 2000?

* Hat tip to Rob WJ in ZOSYD for the headline.

The Hub page can be accessed here and is supported by an Answers sponsorship and a Plus7 Sponsorship.

Additional supporting media can also be found over on BigPond Kids and across the Google Content network.

A nice neat little campaign full of good tips to keep your homes safe from germs this season.

ZO and Publicis Mojo have achieved a strong showing in a number of key categories;

Category: Product Launch

• Emitch - iPhone Application Launch; Domino's Pizza
• Mediacom - Avril Lavigne Black Star; Procter & Gamble
• OMD Australia - Brave Wave!; Neutrogena Wave
• ZenithOptimedia - 5 Seeds; Lion Nathan

• ZenithOptimedia - 6 Beers of Separation; Lion Nathan
• Publicis Mojo – Melbourne - The Art of Walking; Tourism Victoria
• Publicis Mojo – Melbourne - The Adventures of Freddo; Cadbury

• Colman Rasic - You Know Who You Are; Premium Beverages – Coopers
• Publicis Mojo – Melbourne - The Adventures of Freddo; Cadbury
• Leo Burnett - Canon EOS Photochains; Canon

• Publicis Mojo - Members' Lounge; Virgin Mobile
• Bullseye - B Your Best - The Wellbeing Revolution; Blackmores Limited
• BMF - The Hit List; Commonwealth Bank of Australia

Being a massive world Cup fan, I like many others have been glued to SBS One since the launch of the Cup (for about a whole week now). Being an attentive viewer I've noticed the frequency of ad breaks that play between matches and half time breaks is many, and the number of actual adverts are few. What that spells boys and girls is Frequency overkill, did i mention we are still in week one.  Based on a rudimentary scoring system I've devised (i.e how much these ads annoy me already) we shall call it the "Vuvuzela index", I estimate that I'm already at exposure 30+ for most of the probably very expensive creative expressions and media buys from the likes of the tier one sponsors; Castrol, Optus, MacDonalds, Nike etc.

This raises two questions:

1. When does frequency stop being a good thing, and become annoyance?  Sure, I guess I can probably tell you unprompted that Ronaldo is out there in TV land selling Nike sports gear and Castrol engine oil, but these connections are already losing impact, and any brand favourability they might have excited in me is being tarnished by the relentless repetition of these commercials - for example the Nike ad originally seemed interesting, clever and compelling it its sounding more and more like the annoying drone of the Vuvuzela.

leads me to the second question

2. Why don't creative and clients use frequency better to tell a story over time? Upfront it would be clear to all concerned that the World Cup goes for an entire month and there are likely to be lost of ad breaks. Based on the Vuvuzela index i estimate exposure to some viewers will reach close to 100 by the end of the tournament. To me this seems like a missed opportunity to develop a narrative, an unfolding story and hey guess what a chance to surprise the viewer.

Rant over, enjoy the football.

Vuvuzela zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

A couple of months ago Vivaki - a strategic entity of combined Publicis Group agencies including ZenithOptimedia - released the results of a large scale research project about online video advertising conducted out of the USA. The objectives of the research project were to identify the impact of online video advertising and build learnings around the multiple opportunities available.

The project took over 16 months to complete, studied 29 different models and involved 25 million consumers. The key findings were the outstanding results of Ad Selector - which was identified as the best model for online video advertising, one that works for both advertisers and consumers!

The ad selector is a new video ad unit (initially rolled out by Hulu) that gives the user the ability to choose the ad they want to watch: amongst 3 proposed ads, the user clicks on their selected one before launching their video experience and starting a pre roll. See examples on smh.com.au below.

The research found that the “ad selector” tested significantly better than the standard pre roll against all metrics studied:

• Only format to lift purchase intent by over 30%
• 3 in 4 respondents recalled the ad
• Completion rate is 11% higher than pre roll average
• CTR were at least twice as high than standard pre rolls

In Australia, Fairfax Digital was the first publisher to launch this format (soon to be followed by Youtube) and Nestle was one of the first three advertisers to test it with the Chokito says No, No, No campaign.

As per the USA survey the initial results for this new ad unit are very encouraging: Completion rate of the Nestle Chokito TVC through the "ad selector" is over 13% higher than campaign average!

We are already adopting it as a standard format. Let’s see how quickly the Australian market takes it up!

A Digital Learning crash course on “demandside platforms (DSPs)” via Karin Blake, the Vivaki Nerve Center’s associate director for Platform

What is a DSP?
A demand-side platform (DSP) is a media technology platform that powers automated digital media buying and the unification of data for targeting, optimization and reporting. In some ways, DSPs can be considered a next-generation ad serving technology that enable the demand side (i.e., agencies) to target audiences and execute performance media buys at scale.

What are the benefits of a DSP?
DSPs combine both “brains” (algorithms that calculate appropriate bids for inventory) and “pipes” (the actual APIs that allow buyers to communicate those bids instantaneously into the
inventory auctions). This automated process enables real-time bidding (RTB), the most granular level of evaluation, and occurs as the ad impression is being served to a user. In addition to creating efficiency in execution, DSPs serve as an aggregation point for data. With a unified data set, optimization tactics and campaign parameters like global frequency capping or cookie suppression are possible across disparate publishers. They also enable the use of a particular audience target, such as users who have visited an advertiser’s site or a third party data set like in-market business travellers, at no additional cost across broad swaths of inventory.