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This type of advertising is a little tricky to explain. Some of it’s funny. Some of it’s just strange. But you know it when you see it. And when it’s off the mark, it looks pretty bad. Here are a handful of winners from the past. Emerald Nuts, “Robert Goulet” Edeka, “Supergeil” Sprite, “Sublymonal” Some of the hallmarks of oddvertising can be seen in the following commercials. They often have a deadpan tone. Everyone is treating the alternative reality they live in as normal. Other important points are that the subject must be relevant to the brand and be appropriate for the target demographic. No Baby Boomer has ever jumped off the couch and yelled, “Grab my car keys! I need a bag of Skittles!” after seeing their commercial, “Sheep Boy.” However, Boomers are not the target audience. There are other broad generalities that can be made about oddvertising. Let’s break down a classic commercial from Old Spice, “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like,” featuring Isaiah Mustafa....
If you think the way that retargeting ads follow consumers around the internet is a little creepy, just wait. Retargeting is only getting warmed up. We’re all used to seeing ads for products that we’ve browsed online suddenly pop up ad infinitim on every other site we visit. Retargeting ads are 76% more likely to be clicked than regular display ads. But advertisers are increasingly able to use behavior in one channel to drive a marketing message in another. No longer limited to siloes, retargeting increasingly spans desktop, mobile, and apps. There is even some retargeting experimentation integrating mobile with offline out-of-home billboards....
Now that we have all of these digital touch-points and databases, marketers and their corporate information officers and finance officers are looking for models to organize and manage all of these marketing and advertising activities. And, quite naturally, they are looking for guidance to models that worked on other parts of their business. Not surprisingly, many have focused on what has worked for their supply chain and have tried to apply supply chain-oriented models to their “demand chain.”
I believe that treating marketing – and the creation of customers – with supply-chain models is short-sighted and will be damaging for businesses and their customers. Why? Because is likens acquiring customers to buying commodity raw materials. It assumes that marketing is only a cost, and that customers are commodities. It doesn’t assume that customers are organic assets that can grow. As Wenda Millard famously warned us almost a decade ago at an IAB meeting, trading advertising like “pork bellies” will be damaging to our industry.
Wenda is and was right. Media should not be bought and sold like pork bellies, and not just because much of what makes media special can’t be captured in a real-time-bidded world, but because customers are not commodities, and treating them as such can only hurt businesses that do.
Big-budget advertising used to be the exclusive province of, well, brands with big budgets. But no more. Now, thanks to classifieds mobile app letgo, anyone can sell any old piece of junk with a commercial that will knock a buyer's socks off. Letgo and agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky just introduced the "Commercializer." It's an ingenious addition to the second-hand selling app that takes whatever you're trying to offload and seamlessly inserts it—using motion blur, image blending, motion tracking, color correction and rotoscoping technology—into one of four comical, big-budget ad parodies. You choose a theme—'80s action-movie trailer, home-shopping segment, prescription-drug ad or overwrought perfume spot. Then, the Commercializer scrapes your letgo profile and specific listing to integrate the item you're selling, its description and price into an amusing ad that you can share with friends. ...
YouTube celebrates its 10th anniversary this year, and with that landmark in mind, the video platform asked the advertising community to reminisce over the past decade of YouTube ads.
Google whittled down the thousands upon thousands of ads uploaded over the years to a shortlist of 20, asking adland to vote for its favorite on the Adwords Agency Blog.Combined, the top five videos have been watched for 7.7 million hours — that's over 875 years of people actually choosing to watch ads. Here are the top five....
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Ironically, Netflix, the viewing source that gave binge-watching its name, probably has less instances of binge-viewing than any top-10 cable network with stacked programming. I would think viewers spend more time every month watching “Modern Family” on USA, “Full House” on Nick at Nite, “Criminal Minds” on ION, and “South Park” on Comedy Central than they do watching any single series on Netflix (although Netflix in total probably has more instances of binge-viewing than all of them combined).
So what does this mean for advertisers?
It’s not just that people are continuing to watch these shows. Their audiences are extremely loyal, and often not that easy to reach elsewhere. For example, “Big Bang” on TBS reached only about 30% of all adults 25-54 last season, but was still the most-viewed scripted series on television among that demo. ION’s “Criminal Minds” only reached about 15% of all adults 25-54 during the same period, yet was the fourth most watched scripted series on television. That represents an extraordinary amount of repeated viewing to a single show among a small group of extremely loyal and attentive viewers....
Native Insider: Part of the challenge with "native" is that each organization has a different understanding of what it is. For the purposes of the research, what is your definition of native advertising?
Wu: In our study, we defined native advertising as sponsored content, which features content that is similar and consistent with publishers’ content and is often consumed by readers like non-sponsored content. I agree that there are also other types of native advertising, such as sponsored social media posts or sponsored hyperlinks. We focused on sponsored content because it is widely adopted by many news organizations, including very reputable ones like The New York Times.
Native Insider: Your research found that when content was identified as native advertising, readers expressed a lower opinion of the media outlet it was published in. However, the reputation of the company being promoted was not affected. Can you elaborate on this finding?
Wu: I think this was one of the most interesting findings in our study. We originally expected that both companies and media outlets would be negatively influenced. However, the media outlet was the only source that was affected. On one hand, this indicates that readers are not surprised by the sponsored content from a company, since similar covert marketing techniques have been utilized before, such as video news releases....
In the Gartner hype cycle, advertising technology is firmly stuck in the “trough of disappointment.”
This is, in many ways, patently unfair. The shift from manual and inefficient ad buying practices to automated and data-driven ones is a no-brainer. There’s little doubt that automation will play an ever-larger role in advertising. Yet ad tech in 2016 is a victim of its own success. Few people fight its ascendency, but nagging questions have arisen based on outsized expectations.
Talk to brands and publishers, and the formulation is basically the same. There are plenty of tech vendors but not enough standards, driving marketer frustration to an all-time high. Consumers don’t trust ads, as evidenced by the rise of ad blocking. Meanwhile, venture capitalists are pouring less money into ad tech.
Too much complexity
The LUMAscape lays bare the sheer amount of fragmentation in ad tech: “There are too many vendors claiming they do too many things for too many people. It’s turned ad tech into a commodity market,” said Brian Ferrario, vp of marketing at programmatic ad company Drawbridge.
In what likely is the first comprehensive analysis of actual data from big agency media buys of its kind, Madison Avenue’s major agency holding companies have boosted their spending in digital media by $3 billion during a nine-month period ending with June 2015, and most of it came at the expense of traditional media.
The data, which was released Wednesday by Standard Media Index, looked at the those months, because they happen to coincide with the so-called “broadcast year,” which is the way TV networks and stations typically account for their advertising revenues. Not surprisingly, the biggest hit in Madison Avenue’s digital media shift is coming from their TV advertising budgets.“
The results show that digital is siphoning share away from other media, with the bulk of it coming from television,” explained SMI’s Bree Sutton, noting that national TV ad spending trends have been reflecting that....
It's an eye-opening report that looks beyond the hype surrounding these companies. Some of them are profitable (or at least claim to be), some aren't, but all of them have raised serious cash from starry-eyed investors (e.g., $96.3 million for BuzzFeed, $110 million for Vox).
The business press tends to regard such hefty sums as implicit evidence of success and/or promise -- why would venture capitalists risk so much scratch if there was no there there? -- but Michael reminds us that all of these companies rely, somewhat harrowingly, on advertising for revenue....
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Why Comedy Is the Most Effective Way to Advertise. “And Then Advertising Got Weird: What Is Oddvertising?” is published by Mike Johnston in ReadThink (by HubSpot). Fun reading!