WebProNews

Tag: AdAge

  • Brand Awareness Is The Top Goal For Facebook Ads, Say Marketers

    “Why do you buy advertising on Facebook?”

    That very simple question was asked to marketers in a survey from Ad Age and Citigroup. The respondents were given six different reasons; build brand awareness, drive traffic, build fans or “likes,” stay in touch with customers, generate sales leads, and social commerce. They were then asked to rank those responses on a scale of 1-6, with 1 being most important and 6 being the least important.

    What do you think was the most important to marketers? If you said generating “likes” or “driving traffic” you’d be wrong.

    By an astounding margin, advertisers said that building brand awareness was the most important reason for them to buy ads on Facebook. Out of nearly 500 respondents, 45.9% ranked it as their top priority. The aforementioned “driving traffic” came in second with an average place vote of 2.89.

    Check out the chart below:

    As you can see, social commerce came in dead last.

    Ever since the IPO, Facebook advertising has been a hot topic of conversation. Multiple reports have suggested that many advertisers are souring on paid Facebook ads, some even saying that free promotion (by running a page) is really all that the network is good for in their eyes.

    But just today, one analyst projected that Facebook’s mobile ad revenues would jump to $300 million+ per quarter within the next year, and that they would surpass desktop ad revenues.

  • Huffington Post Suspends Writer After Taking Too Much From an AdAge Story

    Simon Dumenco at AdAge posted a story today about how the Huffington Post regurgitated one of his articles, and bashed the Post’s long-time claims about how its links can drive tremendous amounts of traffic to the original source. It appears, however, that the content in question actually went too far for the Huffington Post’s own tastes.

    Dumenco explains that the article was a hit, but got way more traffic from Techmeme than from the HuffPost piece. Why is it ok for Techmeme to link to it and not for the HuffPost? According to Dumenco, because Techmeme takes a minimalist approach – normally with just a headline and short snippet (a la Google News) as opposed this particular HuffPost case, where the article was essentially rewritten, extracting all of the necessary points form the original piece.

    “Techmeme drove 746 page views to our original item. HuffPo — which of course is vastly bigger than Techmeme — drove 57 page views,” says Dumenco.

    In an update to the post, Dumenco shares an email from Peter Goodman, Executive Business Editor of the AOL Huffington Post Media Group, which calls his criticism “completely valid.”

    “We should have taken what you call ‘the minimalist approach’ or simply linked directly to your story. That is how we train our writers and editors to handle stories such as this,” it said, also adding that what occurred was “entirely unacceptable”. It also said that the complaint has led to greater, yet unspecified efforts to ensure reporters and editors understand that this is “unambiguously unacceptable.”

    @simondumenco
    Simon Dumenco    What It’s Like to Get Used and Abused by The Huffington Post http://j.mp/oDZOwo 20 hours ago via bitly · powered by @socialditto

    @simondumenco
    Simon Dumenco    Huffington Post suspends writer, apologizes for over-aggregated post http://j.mp/q9FCQv 4 hours ago via bitly · powered by @socialditto

    It’s frequently debated just what should be considered fair use. Righthaven has made a practice out of suing those it deems violators as a business model. Judges have been ruling on the side of fair use.

    You have to bring something new to the table, or have some kind of added value if you’re going to base a post on the work of others. An aggregator like Techmeme or Google News gives you just enough for you to see whether or not you want to read the story. They don’t aim to be the source of information as much as the sign pointing you to that source. When you get into articles themselves, it becomes a different matter.

    That’s not to say it’s wrong to quote from original sources. Links and credit are obviously musts, and you should simply bring more and/or different information or commentary to the story than what was in the original source.

    Staci Kramer at Paid Content writes, “If you can’t manage the art of aggregation, stick to the science. Aggregation has been part of our coverage mix at paidContent from the beginning. Done right, it’s a valuable tool that helps readers and benefits the original source. Done wrong, it’s at best, a mess and at worst, theft.”

    Here, for example, I’ve quoted from two different stories: the original AdAge piece and a PaidContent piece discussing it further. The PaidContent piece quoted from the original as well. Are either of us in the wrong for quoting (and linking to) these sources? I don’t think so, but you also don’t see us taking the entire post, paraphrasing, throwing a link on, and not adding anything to the conversation.

    And that’s just it. Conversation. That’s why, in my opinion, it’s not only fair, but critical for publications to quote and link to original reports sometimes. The conversation shouldn’t end with the one report from the one source. There are often new shades of perspective or simply different angles to stories, and that is precisely what makes aggregators like Techmeme or Google News useful to the news consumer. They cluster these different articles on the same topics together to give readers a more rounded spectrum of coverage.

    In this age of social media, things get even more complex. People are going to share stories through social networking channels. They’re going to add their own commentary most of the time, but at the same time there are plenty of people out there simply spouting off something they read in an article to their own circle of friends, or even to the public with no link or mention of the original source. That may be limited to 140 characters on Twitter, but it could be as long as an article on Facebook or Google+.

    Publications have their work cut out for them if they’re to stop this kind of thing entirely.

  • Facebook: Bing Scam Site Was Never Advertiser, Let Alone 3rd Largest

    Updated – See below. 

    AdAge published an article that sent ripples throughout the blogosphere with some questionable information. While not the basis of the article (that was mainly about how Facebook has become a dominant force in advertising), the article suggested that  "the third-biggest advertiser [on Facebook] was a completely unknown brand called Make-My-Baby.com, citing "ComScore’s third-quarter analysis."

    As more information has surfaced throughout the day, we’ve learned that comScore claimed (in an email to Danny Sullivan) that "Make-my-baby was not one of the top advertisers on Facebook."  It remains unclear whether comScore was just initially wrong and AdAge passed on the wrong info, or whether the inaccuracy started with AdAge. 

    Brandon McCormick, a spokesperson for Facebook itself, tells WebProNews, "Not only is make-my-baby.com not one of our largest advertisers, they are not an advertiser at all.  In fact, their practices are against our ad policies and would be rejected as a result.  This is true whether they tried to run ads with us or an affiliate did."

    So let’s back up for a minute. The practices referred to, which are the practices that made this a compelling story from the get go, were that make-my-baby.com was forcing users to install a toolbar that switched their default search to Bing, as the site was apparently run by a company trying to capitalize on a Microsoft affiliate program. 

    Google’s Matt Cutts, who discovered the practice and wrote about it on Google Buzz last night, noted that he was quickly able to find additional sites that were doing the same thing. All of this led to us questioning how much of this was actually taking place, and whether it could be playing a role in Bing’s impressive growth. I think this is still a valid question, but there is a pretty big difference between such a site being one of the top advertisers on the world’s largest social network (with 1.75 billion impressions, as reported by AdAge), and not advertising on Facebook at all. That greatly changes things in terms of reach. 

    While it was never my intent to suggest that Bing owed its impressive growth entirely to sites like this, it seemed  possible that it could at least be padded to some extent, and could still be even if to a much, much lesser extent. 

    Either way, the whole thing appears to have worked out for the best, as a Microsoft spokesperson told us, "Distribution deals and affiliate programs are an important part of how all search engines introduce their product to customers.  That said, we have been made aware of some practices from a specific publisher that are not compliant with the guidelines, best practices and principles put in place by Bing. As a result, the relationship with this publisher will be terminated."

    So, for now, the mystery remains how AdAge came up with the idea that make-my-baby.com was the third largest advertiser on Facebook, if ComScore, the alleged source has denied the information. The original AdAge article has yet to be updated as of the time of this writing. We’ll update further as more info comes to light. 

    Update: Sullivan was sent a copy of the comScore report by AdAge. Apparently the confusion stemmed from make-my-baby.com being listed as the third largest adertiser in social networking, based on comScore’s information – a category, which was comprised of Facebook, MySpace, and other social networking sites). So while the site may not have been a big advertiser on Facebook, it would appear that it was still a big social media advertiser – and still a problem.