Month: June 2010

Crack isn’t just a waste of time. It’s bad for you too

There’s definitely no shortage of research showing the irrelevance of clicks as an indicator of online campaign value.  Our own experience shows it and Nielsen data proves it.  This probably has a lot to do with the fact that the folks doing the clicking are a small portion of population and demographically far from the top of most advertisers’ target lists.   None of this is news, yet there remains a surprising (shocking?) amount of attention paid to click-based “optimization” of campaigns.  Perhaps it’s the crack-like allure that Cory Treffiletti from Catalyst SF discusses in a fun piece from last fall.

For all the richly deserved bad press the click has gotten as a metric, I hadn’t seen anyone focus on the angle that chasing clicks actually works against driving the metrics that do matter (much like how chasing crack limited addicts’ success in other more meaningful pursuits…).  That was the point of Monday’s article by Lotame’s Eric Porres.  Lotame’s research across >100 campaigns shows that “not only do click-through rates fail to measure what marketers are really looking for, they’re often negatively related to brand lift.”  While I haven’t seen the research myself, it looks like it was done based on third-party data from Vizu and Dimestore – both reputable survey technologies.  The findings would also comport with previous research.

The bottom line is that there is no free lunch.  There are tradeoffs that must be made when planning & managing media.  “Optimizing” for a metric that doesn’t matter isn’t just a waste of everyone’s time, it actually degrades performance against the metrics that do matter.


Google flattens

A quick note today to connect some dots with yesterday’s Google release.  Google announced it was streamlining its display product line / positioning by consolidating its various display offerings under the umbrella of  “Google Display Network”.

I thought this was an interesting data point in the context of our previous discussion on increasing format convergence.  It seems Google not only agrees, but is driving the trend forward.

The online ad world is flat and getting flatter every day.

Creative matters.

Very interesting article in Ad Age on Monday.

Not standard fare for this page – I usually focus on media as opposed to broader marketing or creative topics, but I found this article thought-provoking.  The author argues that establishing the right name for a new product category can be just as important in the long term as establishing a brand presence within it and uses several effective examples to illustrate the point.

While his goal is to highlight the importance of thinking carefully and independently about the product name and the category name, I don’t think he would argue that both are essentially branding exercises.  I.e. the same level of thought that goes into branding a product should also go into branding a new category, should you be lucky enough to have that opportunity.

Definitely a theme that we’d be wise to keep in mind in a space as dynamic as online advertising where it seems there’s a new acronym every quarter, whose definitions can often lack clarity even within the industry itself.

I was immediately reminded of the goosebump-inducing carousel scene from the finale of Mad Men Season 1 (worth watching again even if you have seen it several times, by the way).

With all the attention on media and media technology these days, let’s not forget the creative.