Advertising

Widgets should be a huge part of most media companies’ strategy in the years ahead, as a way to spread their content around the web widely. (aka, the Distributed Web.) Here’s an interesting widget example from Pulse360 that comes with built-in advertising and revenue sharing, so that there’s incentive for lots of websites to carry the widgets.

This particular one is called the CBS 4 Denver network, and includes content from Channel 4’s news operation in the widgets in either video or story format. Topics include Denver news, sports, politics, lifestyle, arts and culture (standard local news fare). Website owners that choose to carry the widget select from among the general topic feeds. Continued

Here’s more good advice from Newspaper Next 2.0 (American Press Institute). As the report points out, in most newspaper markets, less than half of local consumers are frequent newspaper readers and as little as one-quarter or less of local businesses are newspaper advertisers. The latter figure is the result of most newspapers 1) not having ad programs that are affordable and effective for very small businesses, and 2) newspapers not bothering to court the smallest businesses in their communities. Continued

As a strategy to grow your news website, developing and deploying smartly designed widgets is an important one. This year you’ll see me write and hear me talk a lot about widgets and the overall concept of spreading your content far and wide online. News publishers by now should have deep-sixed the old notion that their content is sacred and should be restricted to viewing only on their websites. They must get used to the idea that their content can be just about anywhere — and that’s a good thing. Continued

The guys over at Evomo must be ecstatic about this. They make stylish mountain biking apparel (including some branded t-shirts commissioned by my former company, the Enthusiast Group), and one of their fans asked if he could get a tattoo using Evomo’s “Braincase” design. The answer from Evomo head honcho Bryan Thombs: “Hell-yeeeaaaah!”

So here’s the pic. The crazy mountain biker didn’t go so far as to brand Evomo’s name on his skin, but that’s still a pretty nice bit of free customer marketing for the company. He’s a walking billboard for Evomo, since everyone’s going to ask him about it.

That is a pretty cool design. If I were younger, I might wear that t-shirt; it doesn’t really fit my 51-year-old sensibilities. Tattoo? Probably not.

I’ve said here that I’m a (qualified) fan of the “social ads” concept that Facebook is implementing. But I’m only a fan as far as the concept goes; Facebook’s implementation still has major problems.

Example: In my Facebook News Feed this afternoon was this social ad, which appeared because someone on my friends list allowed it to be published:

Now that sucks. It’s a stupid way to advertise, because it gives the appearance that David Henderson is spamming my Facebook account with an ad from Blockbuster Video — which is not what he intended, I’m sure.

But if this was done right, it could be a great and cool form of advertising. If Dave had just rented the movie Rent — or had just rated it 4 stars on Blockbuster.com — then I’d be fine with receiving that information in my News Feed. If Dave was (because he agreed to) sending all his Facebook friends a $1 off coupon for Blockbuster, that would be fine. But the ad above is stupid and counterproductive on Blockbuster’s part.

The best way to handle this ad would be to 1) have the News Feed ad above be something like “David Henderson gave Rent 4 stars on Blockbuster.com” (relevant personal information about a Facebook friend’s activities, approved for publication by him in an opt-in manner), and 2) use the ad banner space in the left side of the Facebook News Feed page for a more conventional ad (like “One month free trial…”).

The social ad that showed up in my News Feed is dumb. If Facebook pumps that kind of crap onto user News Feed pages, the Beacon and Social Ad programs will fail.

Done right, they will represent a major positive innovation in online advertising.

WSJ.com’s Kara Swisher interviews Facebook’s Owen Van Natta about the whole social ads things. Yeah, Facebook’s had some privacy problems and it screwed up at first with the implementation of social ads, but this is so innovative. We’ve come a long way from banner ads!

I really like the concept behind Facebook’s Beacon program, which sends information about your purchases to the people in your Facebook friends network. That is, I like it as long as I as an online shopper am in control.

Having online shoppers opt in to having purchase information broadcast to their friends is, of course, the way this program should have been set up in the first place. Instead, Facebook tried to make the program opt-out — and then was surprised (d’uh!) to face a massive public backlash and even a MoveOn.org campaign aimed at getting them to scrap or change the program.

So yesterday, Facebook relented and made the program opt-in. I’m glad company executives listened to reason. How a company as smart as Facebook could misread privacy concerns so badly is hard to comprehend.

Now that it’s settled, though, Facebook has a great program that pushes the envelope for online advertising.

My Editor & Publisher Online column this month looks at the mega-trend of companies becoming more “social.” That is, they’re starting to move money away from traditional advertising and into content, services and community. Companies like Nike are figuring out that they can be media companies, too, in additional to being brand companies.

I think there’s an opportunity for media companies to take advantage of this. The alternative is to ignore it and watch traditional online advertising revenues dwindle in the years ahead.

Take a look at this ad from Facebook, which is in between two items in my account’s Newsfeed:

I’m not sure if this format is new, but until a couple weeks ago I never noticed any ads or “Sponsored” messages in my Newsfeed. There were only vertical banner ads in the left column — which are all but invisible and I’m sure suffered from dismal clickthrough rates. I know that I hardly ever look at the banners. If we did an eyetracking test on Facebook’s left-side banner, it would perform pathetically. (I managed an eyetracking project when I worked at the Poynter Institute a few years ago.)

But the new ad format set within users’ Newsfeeds is brilliant. It follows some of the advice that we gave in Poynter’s Eyetrack III study to make online ads most effective:

• Inset the ad within the flow of “editorial” content, so the eye has no choice but to go over it. (The left-side banner can be avoided; the eye isn’t forced to go there.)
• Use similar colors and design look and feel as surrounding editorial content.

Critics may argue that this approach by Facebook tries to trick users into viewing the ad, by doing the above. I don’t buy that. The “Sponsored” text cue is enough for me; it makes the point without going overboard to announce “Hey, this is an ad!”

A few years ago I remember writing a lot about how website pop-up ads were evil and how I thought that in time, because online users would spurn them, online publishers would be forced to abandon them.

Well, I’m pleased now to see this article by The Guardian: Pop-ups shot down by surfers but ‘relevant’ web advertising thrives.

Every once in a while it’s nice to be proven right on a prediction.