Welcome to Tumblr, mobile ads. Can you guys live with this format?
How a banner ad for H&R Block appeared on apple.com—without Apple’s OK
Hint: Blame the ISP. (Probably.)
You’re sitting in front of your computer at work, and you’re surfing Twitter. A friend shares a link which you find interesting. You click and as soon as the page opens up, your face gets embarrassingly red as everyone in your silent office looks at you. You were just served an autoplay video.
You’ll constantly hear how advertising is moving toward user control. This is mostly true. And yet in some instances, such as autoplay video, interruption is still king. The pop-under is now, for the most part, downmarket, but autoplay video attracts the creme de la creme of publishers, including ESPN, ABC News, The Washington Post and Weather.com. Facebook is even mulling rolling out autoplay video ads in the news feed. And, of course, it’s all about the money.
Click through to read the rest.
“It’s not our job as advertisers or agencies to create a good user experience on the site,” said Danielle Sporkin, senior manager of portfolio management at Universal McCann. “That’s the job of the publisher who’s providing certain ad units for sale. Our job is to evaluate and see how it performs and when it doesn’t optimize out.”
Look, it’s not fair to pick on a single media outlet. I respect the fact that journalists have been lucky enough to keep their jobs in Seattle — during a recession — despite all this. But, this is a potential microcosm of what could happen to newspapers around the country, and we need to talk about this before another flailing big paper tries something similar.
I see what’s happened to the P-I in the past few years, and I worry that this is the model that newspapers — slowly looking to put the genie back in the bottle — are going to have to rely on.
My posts the other night about this ad inspired a Medium rant. I was tough, but fair (I think). Enjoy. — Ernie @ SFB
The promise of the Internet was that anyone with a keyboard and a connection could become a publisher and make tons of money. Like many promises rooted in theory, when it comes to practicality, things are quite different.
The reality of the digital ad system is that scale still matters. Smaller publishers have the deck stacked against them. They’ll never get the traffic numbers brands and buyers want. And in the age of automated ad systems, finding large pools of specific audiences is easy — and cheap. For many small publishers, it all adds up to the need to take a different route.
Click through to learn how publishers like The Awl, The Fader, Vice are generating revenue beyond the pageview.
Pageviews are nice, but if you can drive revenue other ways, go for it. Expect to see more of this as sites figure out ways to expand their business models beyond traffic.
The winner of our competition to find the best print ad is … Google.
This ad was picked as the best of the bunch, and Google will win $1 million in print advertising in USA TODAY.
Google told the New York Times that it would give that ad space to “people who need it.”
More on the contest from the New York Times: http://nyti.ms/VKcP0w
Novel, effective, and makes you want to use Google+. Rad.
Today, the AP ran a sponsored tweet. Here’s the backstory about the tweets, which the Associated Press will run throughout the week, as part of Samsung’s pitch during the Consumer Electronics Show.
Photographer Robert Landau compiled photographs of the larger-than-life outdoor advertising that used to pepper the streets of Los Angeles for his new book, “Rock and Roll Billboards of the Sunset Strip.”
Today in coffee-table books which would also make great Tumblrs.
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Tumblr this morning. [h/t anne]
#@#$%!.tumblr.com
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Last week, Coca-Cola took an intriguing approach to the growing trend of “brands as publishers.”
Calling it Coca-Cola Journey, Coke married the staid, static philosophy of a corporate website with the dynamic, fluidity of a blog. While the Atlanta-based soft drink company has its footprints all over the digital world — it has a robust presence on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn — it also wanted to build its own online home, a welcoming place for its fans.
While it may be a great PR move, there’s also value for its 1.2 million monthly unique visitors. There’s a wide range of content topics — entertainment, brands, business, community, environment, health, history, innovation, sports — that Coke employees write about and curate from around the Web. The stories themselves either discuss the company or issues that the company cares about.
Coke is now firmly entrenched in the storytelling business, minus the whole ad selling aspect. And keep in mind that these are Coke-focused stories, and not journalism, which, some say, is exactly the point. One agency executive, who requested anonymity because his agency represents a competitor, told me that “this is content that is meant to be discoverable and shareable, optimized around topics that Coke feels shows their brand in the best light.”
Click through to read the rest.
How you do social media when your main product isn’t content: Build lots of content anyway.
Currently on the NYT front page: This massive ad arguing from a National Parks association arguing for action on the Fiscal Cliff. This took up way more than half of the front page.
Follow-up to this: Apparently, this was the first time the New York Times had ever run an ad this big on its Web site. Being intrigued by the idea, I got in touch with the National Parks Conservation Association and the New York Times for my main gig at work to ask them why they chose to do this ad. “As part of our ongoing funding campaign, we saw an opportunity to engage the American public surrounding the threat of the fiscal cliff facing our country,” the group’s vice president of communications, Linda Rancourt, said. As far as the New York Times, they said that the ad was their effort to translate the popular “open letter” advocacy ad concept to the Web. Fascinating stuff. — Ernie @ SFB
Currently on the NYT front page: This massive ad arguing from a National Parks association arguing for action on the Fiscal Cliff. This took up way more than half of the front page.
Yes it’s here, a list of the most expensive keywords in Google. This is only a partial list, but you can check out the full list here.
There’s good money in asbestos.
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