nickw

This post by Scott on Search ads vs Brand ads that comments on (and takes quite a bit further) this FT piece on the Cannes Lions Advertising Festival has been sitting on a tab since early this morning. I’ve even followed a great email conversation on it between fellow Performancing folks Chris and Patrick, and now, I’d like to bring it to you. If you’ve not read it, do.

Search ads, or more precisely, text ads do NOT build brands, or at least so the argument runs. For what it’s worth, I agree, it’s somewhat of a no brainer right? What made this particulary interesting was the excellent example of Prada image ad vs generic “get cheap perfume” text ad,.

Ideally, a combination of text and images is needed to build brands and work for good CTR, and although there are some offerings out there (namely Henry Copelands BlogAds) and some Google units (those are not Search ads by the way, they’re just provided by Search engines. There’s a big difference), I think there’s room for something that better addresses both the need for large companies/brands to advertise and build their brand AND for targeted traffic building.

Im hoping I’ll be able to show you what I mean shortly…

Read the post to get the pretty pictures of course, but for those with attention spans even shorter than mine, here’s a key quote:

There is only ONE reason why anyone would click on the Prada Perfume text ad — the Prada brand. And how did Prada build that brand? Through compelling IMAGES.

and here’s Chris on why blogs could play a key part in branding:

We used to discuss this quite a lot in the agencies. The theory goes that direct marketing can be just as effective if not more so than what is considered “broadcast” or mass-advertising but that is sending stuff to highly targeted audiences, while search is a highly targeted audience they are not being sent stuff they happen to see stuff while looking for something; ie. They were already looking. What makes them look in the
first place? What puts that thought into their head? I would argue that blogs, and therefore blog advertising, are perfectly placed to “put the thought into their head”.

Now, if we can just get the best of both worlds…

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I see Opera 9 was released out of beta today and I wondered if it’s as I think, all Firefox all the time with bloggers or if any of you out there are die hard Opera fans?

Back before FF became so popular Opera was the choice of many serious web designers, and had a whole lotta love going for it among the web savvy, but for a long time now I’ve been a fan only of fheir mobile browsers (which i use on my 770).

I find it hard to see how or why they would compete with the mighty Mozilla these days, and with our own metrics showing around 71% for combined FF versions it seems they’re not.

On Performancing, Opera has around 2% share.

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Tris Hussey wrote a cool review of Performancing Metrics recently where he recommends looking at blog stats in terms of trends rather than figures. It’s worth a read if like us,your blog stats are important ot you.

It’s also a pretty good recommendation for Performancing Metrics, which incidentally, passed the 10,000 mark for blogs being tracked a couple of weeks back….

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Whilst reading about Topix’s classifieds system over breakfast this morning I had some thoughts on blogs and classifieds in general. Hardly well thought out but interesting nonetheless.

What if bloggers were able to opt in via a simple plugin to a classifieds program that showed geo targeted, contextual classifieds. If we were able to distribute classifieds across the huge and diverse expanse of the blogosphere it could be awesome.

Of course there are some major considerations that need to be taken into account:

#1 what’s in it for the blogger?

The trend is that classifies are free to place right? But I don’t think that’s necessarily a must, they just have to be cheap to place, and simple to pay for, and hopefully successful. On that basis the publisher could be cut in on a revenue share basis much the same as any other kind of ad network deal.

Another way of looking at it might be that the ad is free to place, but you pay for connectinng to interested parties. So if i see your ad, click it, and get to fill in my email and phone #, you, the advertiser have to pay to get that response —fraught with it’s own issues of course, but worth exploring maybe.

The thing here is that if someone could figure out how to make it financially sound, distributing ads across opted in blogs via a simple plugin would not actually be that complex, someone should try it.

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