In the world of web search, we often recoil in disgust at the thought of buying advertising on the Internet. Likewise, I often hear web entrepreneurs and search marketers decry the lack of value in traditional web advertising - banner ads, overlays, pop-ups, etc. However, there are ways it can be done effectively, and I've got a few examples to share. These are my personal favorites - not only do I think they effectively advertise for the buyer, they're also excellent monetization techniques for the content provider - a very rare combination.
Techmeme's Sponsored Posts
I love what Gabe has done at Techmeme with advertising, because it's so much more valuable to both readers and advertisers than standard banner ads or mind-numbing Google AdSense. In fact, I actually find myself clicking and reading 2-3 sponsored posts each week off the site - which is remarkable. Think about it... Can you picture yourself clicking 2-3 display ads of any kind off of any site?
NBC's "Sponsored" Online Versions of Popular Shows
Finally, someone in the world of traditional media seems to be "getting" the web. NBC shows 3 mini-commercials (~10 seconds each, all for the same advertiser) inside a reasonably high quality, full-screen-able version of their TV shows. Mystery Guest watches these in our home office while she works out on our elliptical, and occasionally we'll crash in there together if there's something we've forgotten to Tivo. The advertiser also gets a permanent display on the screen next to the video (if you don't make it full screen), as in the above screen capture with T-Mobile.
BTW - Yes, I have a huge crush on Tina Fey's Liz Lemon character. She actually reminds me a lot of Mystery Guest. :)
Hakia's Blogger Quote Ads
I really enjoy the idea that Hakia is taking banner ads and customizing them to the actual site they reside on. Not only that, but they use real quotes from the blogger/owners of those sites, which is a great way to actually get readers to pay attention. I'm betting that CTR on those is significantly higher than a standard banner ad, and the engagement value with the thought leaders is an excellent bonus.
StumbleUpon's Stumbletising
StumbleUpon has created what could be the very best contextual, demographic-targeted ad system I've seen. There's several brilliant components that make it great:
- You're catching people at a time when they're not only willing but actively requesting to be shown random, interesting content.
- The subtlety of the ad feature makes it feel like you're stumbling on any other site.
- You get instant feedback - thumbs up and down - on the campaign from a wide swath of visitors
- Brand exposure is a given - they're not just seeing an ad, they're actually on your website
- You can choose your target - Stumbleupon lets you select which segments of their audience you want to reach
Listen up carefully Reddit, Netscape & Digg - you should be figuring out how to make a combination of this and the Techmeme model work for you. It's not right for every advertiser, but it's a huge step forward.
Newsvine's ElectionVine Widget
The idea is simple - let people vote on their potential presidential candidate, but the execution is what makes it genius. The widget enables a community for each site that runs the voting, so you can see if visitors to a particular site are more/less likely to be fans of one candidate or ideology.
BTW - Let's please refrain from discussions of candidates or politics (apart from the relation to advertising on the Internet) in the comments. I'll delete or edit any of these that cross the line, as SEOmoz is not and should not be a home for that particular debate (if you're looking for it, there's tons of places on the web to go - maybe Newsvine?) :)
Please do share some of your favorite web ads or online advertising options. I'd love to see what others are doing to be creative with getting a paid message out in non-traditional ways.
p.s. Happy 4th of July to our American readers, and sorry to our Canadian readers for missing Canada Day - hope you had a great one.
I hadn't stumbled on (literally or figuratively) too many of these, or didn't notice when I did! So thanks for pointing these out.
I think the web is still a bit of a mystery, no not guest, just plain mystery to many advertisers. Here is this medium that has the feel o mass marketing (which has primarily been the approach so far) but can also provide this tremendous, direct, highly targeted approach as well... and I'm not sure that many, advertisers or publishers, have figured out how to tap that.
The early stages are primarily taking whay you've done somewhere else, and applying it the new channel... good, bad or otherwise.
But we are starting to see some branch out, try new things, etc. The web really gives the advertiser/publisher the ability to customize ads in new ways and to pinpoint target on demographics, especially on memberships sites that may have a much deeper demographic profile.
The NBC ad approach is pretty interesting and I'd love to see them take it to another level... what if you could choose between 3 advertisers? Either way, you are going to get a commercial if you want to continue, so why not have the choice to see the commercial you want? And now talk about the demographic and ad effectiveness information that could be gained! NBC could actually offer that information back to their advertisers as a way to drive even more ads.
and thanks Will... after watching the movie "Dear Frankie" earlier and now your mention of "cheap as chips" I'm really craving some good English fish 'n chips, wrapped up in butcher paper and slatherd with malt vinegar! Admittedly, not exactly 4th of July fare! cheers
There's never a bad time for chips ;)
The death of the proper chippie is something that all SEOs (in the UK) should work to stop - my local one just turned into a bloody tapas bar...
off topic? me?
Ours is called 'fishcoteque' ;) We get chips for the office once a week. No more than that or we'd get fat...
Of course - nr Waterloo right?
One of the best business names in the world...
Yep. We're right next to them.
We should catch up for a coffee at some point?
Definitely - I was meant to be going to this Chinwag do tonight but, frankly, can't be bothered!
...or a beer of course. Let me know when suits you. We're busy till middle of next week (seminar on Weds) but sometime after that would be cool.
Will do - I'm off to France next Weds, but will shout when I'm back.
Are we using SEOmoz to organise our personal lives? Sorry!
You on Facebook?
Dude, I so need to come and work where you work!
Head on over. The more the merrier ;)
It's a bit of a way for you, though, right?
Most of my experience came from a little take-away shop called Four Star (probably not so proper) right near the University of Nottingham campus when I was doing my abroad study... oh, so, long, ago.
I must confess that perhaps a greater love is for donnor kabobs ;)
Really? You like the them? You must have the constitution of an ox!
;) then again, maybe more so in my younger years... who knows now.
The closest thing I've found in the States is a gyro.
The other big thing I miss is flapjacks (not pancakes to the US folks)... those granola-like bars with the chocolate coating... they ran about 50-55p. All I now is that if I was going to be eating late or missing a meal, one of those would do you good for hours!
I want to go down the chippie now...
We are working on a fun new concept for promoting your website - take a look at www.theworldsmostexpensivelink.com
Great article Rand and I agree with all the comments above too. Advertising is an interesting thing and if done well (as in the examples above) it can compliment and add value to the site as a whole (and not just the wallets of the site owner).
Since advertising is driven by ROI, hopefully we'll see more advertising like this instead of a truckload of obnoxious banner ads, poorly designed affiliate links and AdWords that grace a lot of sites.
I was on a site the other day that had so many banner ads I almost had an epileptic fit!
Nice post. I particularly think that the ads on NBC are the best - for advertisers anyway. As a viewer when seeing those ads they're a bit annoying (but nowhere near as bad as some of the crap advertising we've seen on the internet before... like popups ;p)
Advertising on RSS feeds is another clever example
Oops, looks like we had a bug when viewing the ElectionVine widget in IE6/7. Fixed now. Apologies.CalvinCOO, Newsvine
Are these pages Ajax based? They do hang the firefox browsers too
I'm pretty sure the hakia ads are actually Federated Media ads.
There was some controversy about these types of ads a few weeks ago, - I think Valleywag equated them with "shilling" and there was some controversy about it. It stemmed from Microsoft being the advertiser for a particular set of these ads.
I really like the NBC model. I am perfectly happy to have a static image (or even one that rotates occasionally) showing up next to the TV show I'm watching if it helps avoid or limit commercials.
I am surprised more TV shows don't do this even on regular TV. Why not a static ticker at the bottom of the screen throughout a particular show with a logo and a tagline? It's certainly a way around the TiVo problem.
Or, better yet, for shows that are in high enough demand, have two or three advertisers that are willing to pay a premium for the entire season in exchange for limiting the amount of other advertisers on that show (or on the website showing episodes online). The Masters / Masters.org does this & even though I get sick of seeing the same ads during the telecast / webcast, it's certainly easy to remember their main sponsors are AT&T, IBM, and Exxon/Mobil, even MONTHS after the event. And I, as a viewer / fan, appreciate that those three companies have spent enough to limit the amount of commercial interruption that goes on.
A golf example david? Wow - I didn't even know you liked golf!
;)
Yeah, real shocker there, huh...
:)
All of your talk about fish & chips makes me crave them now also. Hopefully one of my all-time favorites, the Carnoustie Chippie, will rake in enough money to keep them afloat for years to come at the Open later this month.
You’re exactly right. This is how advertising should work on the Internet. It’s also how advertising should work on television. With the advent of Tivo and other ad free or limited advertising media options advertisers (and publishers) have to realize that customers can no longer be force fed, ads need to be audience targeted and seen as added value. Or they won’t be seen at all.
That's a great roundup, Rand - thanks. There's some I wasn't familiar with at all in there (don't know whether it's just that we don't get NBC in the UK that I haven't been to their website, but either way, I haven't seen that, but it's a great idea). Also the Techmeme inclusion - I haven't spent a lot of time on Techmeme, but if other people are as interested in them as you, it must be a good program.
Stumbleupon ads are a fantastic secret (sorry, were a fantastic secret!). We have had some good success with them - the traffic is cheap as chips and, while it does rely on you having good stuff to show (shouldn't all advertising?), you can get some good interaction going with people, as they are in the right frame of mind (for some things - obviously they are not necessarily about to buy something). A great buzz-building tool.
We've been testing StumbleUpon for a client for the past couple of months - I admit that it's dirt cheap, but as soon as you limit your selection to the UK, the numbers get very small....
Don't you find everything in the UK smaller and less developed (apart from certain physical attributes, obviously!) I know I do... that's what burns me most about working in SEM in the UK... the market's pretty big, but the tools we get are crumbs from the US table. I can't believe this kind of network/tool can't be done on a national rather than global basis to offer real value. Aside from anything else, the noise from US markets pretty much drowns out any UK news. Hell - we're having this conversation on a US blog...
Anyway, rant over. Time for my pills...
Go down the chippie - that'll cheer you up...
;)
Yeah. You're right. We were working on something that was appropriate for anywhere english-speaking (even the US - joke!!). Haven't tried pure UK-targeting, but would expect what you report.
Vaguely serious point on the issue of English - does anyone have any learning as to which form of English (UK or US) is more commonly taught around the world as 2nd language?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language#Geographical_distribution
Not sure if that gives a definitive answer. My gut feeling is that US English is going to be wildly dominant. Even using Google.co.uk to search for "search engine optimisation" gets the response... "did you mean optimization?"
I wasn't aware of the nbc ads either - and i'm from uk. checking them out now though :)
Interesting topic. I like the examples you provided and it certainly does help to be creative when advertising in more traditional ways online. I like the quote example the best. I have seen a lot more SEM industry quotes lately, it's cool to see internet marketers in that arena.
On Mahalo, I noticed a bunch of quotes from SEM's like Lee Odden and Andy Beal. Bet there's even a few from you Rand, although I haven't seen one yet.
Happy Independence Day Mozzers, might see me at Gasworks tonight.
Advertising is a funny thing. We hate it. We disparage it. We invent browser plug-ins to block it. Yet...when it's interesting, compelling or funny, we do nothing but talk about it to all our friends, quote the slug lines in all our jokes and go out and buy that iPhone.Just because many of the implementations of online advertising suck doesn't mean that the need for an effective model is lessened in any way. It's great to see some new ideas popping up. I ALWAYS click on ads that interest me...and am happy to do it.Oh, and as far as the Presidential thing...how could anyone NOT want to support the one TRUE candidate? Actually, they pretty much all disgust me so far. I'll have to wait 'til the ads start to make up my mind. ;-)
SupplyFrame's B2B site has some other kinds of advertising you might find interesting (disclosure: I work there). We're an electronic component search engine for engineers. Many components are standard but made by many companies, or designed to go in sets, or are upgrades of one another. Our ads work by presenting subtle 'value added' content suggesting the researcher investigate other options. We also have some traditional CPM stuff, don't let that distract you.
Here is a good example: https://www.supplyframe.com/partsearchservlet/partdetail/TIS/LM393P. In this case the 'promoted part' from National is a suggested alternative and an ad.
Traditional types of ads are not so effective now as they used to be a year ago. People know that webmasters earn money when others click on banners or google adsense ads. I think widgets have aa good feature because they can be developed by a huge number of freelancers.
Unique new forms of advertising only rocks now. older methods wont run for long now.
Adbrite launched new image advt by name bidbrite which was sucessfull since it was a unique advt option.
Peronally, I don't like any form of banner ads, infomercials etc. I can see where you are coming from with this post though. As long as the ads are relevant they don't really degrade the quality of the site. However, if your site is full of adult friend finder banners and gambling banners you are probably going to loose a lot of traffic.The only way you are going to increase the quality of your site with advertising is if it is tasteful and highly relevant.P.S. Love the JavaScript comment facility. Your web geeks are pretty up to date, which is rare for an SEO firm.
We've used the StumbleUpon ads and can confirm there was a significant rise in CTR and conversions. Even though on the front end it appears to be 'random', these ads are very targeted and the users seem more receptive. I thought it was genius.
I love the StumbleUpon ads. I never really even noticed them before.
I also had great success with Salary.com ads (the ones that show when you look up a salary). My client was offering a secondary education for a specialized field, and it worked wonderfully. They were typcial ads, but very targeted. They had a high CTR and amazing conversion rate.
The stumbleupon ads are a great idea! Thanks for sharing Rand.
I'm a fan of BlogAds. Some of them are of course hideous, but the good ones tend to be very similar to Tech Meme. Small picture and a line or two of descriptive and hopefully engaging text = a pretty solid advertisement.
Re. "Finally, someone in the world of traditional media seems to be "getting" the web."...
Yes, there's no reason why traditional print moreover TV, film etc. media marketers shouldn't get hip to digital advertising mediums. In consideration of comparative cost-per-eyeballs traditional vs. digital is a compelling case of apples to oranges.
Also though, there's no reason online marketers can't reciprocate by practicing the impact of time-honed cinematic values... even when it's just in casual fun it's still worth trying occasionally.
It's much the real spirit behind the idea media convergence IMHO.
I'm a fan of stumbleupon and its contextual way of ad selling..
Good information shared Rand.