WebProNews

Tag: product placement

  • ComScore Reveals Facebook’s Positive Brand Influence

    ComScore is getting ready to release a new study on Facebook’s social marketing and they plan to do it at the upcoming ARF Audience Measurement 7.0 conference in New York, along with the release of their new white paper, The Power of Like 2: How Social Marketing Works.

    What they’ve discovered is that Facebook’s brand exposure actually does have a significantly positive effect on subsequent purchasing.

    Contrary to popular belief, click through rates are a relatively weak indicator of performance and what they call, “view-through” may be what’s of more interest when it comes to brand impression. What they found is the impact or impression is the result of a cumulative effect taking place over weeks or months after constantly being exposed to the message or brand (or both).

    ComScore wants to make it clear that previous polls assessing ad effectiveness overlook the unreliability factor when people report on their own behaviors. They point out a Reuters headline claiming,“Facebook Comments, Ads Don’t Sway Most Users: Poll”.

    ComScore comments:

    “In this particular case, it appears that the research method used was a survey, which asked users about whether or not they had ever been influenced to purchase as a result of exposure on Facebook.”

    “While surveys can be useful in assessing ad effectiveness lifts across attitudinal dimensions such as brand awareness, favorability and purchase intent, people tend not to provide very accurate assessments of their own behavior. And their accuracy in recalling their own behavior over an extended period of time can be especially unreliable.”

    “More importantly, people generally don’t like to believe that advertising actually has an effect on their behavior, even though time and time again various forms of advertising research have shown that it does.”

    “It’s time to advance this discussion of marketing and advertising effectiveness, but doing so requires that the debate centers on meaningful measurement approaches, not on self-reported recollection.”

    We’ll learn more next week after the report is published and the results are revealed at the upcoming conference in New York. In the meantime, pay close attention to those ads you’re constantly bombarded with and truly examine what role they play in shaping your opinions and attitudes.

  • New Prometheus Clip Indirectly Ties Into Verizon Services

    What looks like another promotional piece for the upcoming Prometheus actually serves two roles. Not only is it virally promoting Ridley Scott’s next trip into the universe apparently ruled by the Weyland Corporation, it’s also an exercise in viral product placement. You see, not only is the clip promoting the movie, a quick glance at the party responsible for the upload reveals the product it’s promoting.

    Furthermore, it may also explain why Verizon is getting rid of unlimited data plans. I mean, associating yourself financially with summer blockbusters can’t be cheap can it? Well, it’s probably cheaper than improving your infrastructure to the point where it actually supports unlimited data, but why do that when there’s Alien prequels (or are they?) to associate your brand with? Yes, my digression may be simplifying things, but at some point in the near future, one hopes these mobile service providers will actually address the issues that cause unlimited data plans to be abandoned.

    Until then, product placement and tiered data plans are the the “in” thing.

    As for the promotional clip, besides virally advertising Verizon’s Home Monitoring and Control service, it gives us more exposure to Noomi Rapace’s character, Dr. Elizabeth Shaw. The video, titled “Quiet Eye” is a futuristic voicemail from Rapace’s Shaw, asking the Weyland Corporation for interstellar travel help, and if you’ve seen any of the trailers, Dr. Shaw does indeed get the help she’s asking for. Of course, once she arrives to the destination, all hell breaks loose, at least according to the footage we’ve seen.

    Verizon’s promotional part comes into play when viewers click the Facebook linkprovided on the YouTube page. From here, users can “explore the world of Prometheus and learn about Verizon Home Monitoring and Control.”

    Once the tie-in page is accessed, visitors can either play Verizon’s “Prometheus Mission Connect” game or learn more about the home monitoring service. Naturally, Verizon’s Prometheus game makes use of their monitoring software, which is the point of the product placement/tie-in effort.

  • Draw Something Wants You to Illustrate Their Product Placement

    My addiction to OMGPOP’s “Draw Something” burned out pretty quick. For about two whole weeks, I was pretty obsessed with the game, but the word repetition and game-crashing bugs were enough for me to abandon the app pretty quickly. I briefly considered jumping back in when they added new celebrity names to the mix, though my good intentions were derailed thanks to a little game called Temple Run. I guess I’m what you’d fall a fair weather casual gamer. Besides, I’m really not that great of an artist to begin which, a fact which frustrates me to no end when I’m trying to draw something that seems relatively simple.

    If you purchased a copy of “Draw Something”, then you don’t have to worry about the extremely annoying ads that pop up in-between turns. However, just because you paid for the game doesn’t mean you’re free from Zynga’s attempt to make some money off of the app. The company recently began inserting brand names into the game, which, of course, are paid for by the corporations who make these products. So when you’re asked to illustrate, say, “Doritos”, it’s because the company dropped some serious cash for its inclusion in the game.

    Sorry, but I’m not really interested in drawing your advertisements. Thanks, anyway. However, I’m apparently one of the few people who has some sort of misguided problem with this practice.

    “People loved to draw the Colonel and bags of Doritos,” said OMGPOP CEO Dan Porter. What I would love to see is someone attempting to draw the Colonel or a bag of Doritos while eating a greasy bucket of chicken with their cheese-encrusted fingers.

    Brand names aren’t the only paid additions to the game. The National Hockey League paid to have terms such as “hockey” and “puck” added to the app’s in-game list. The company has even been sharing some of the illustrations on sites like Pintrest.

    Recently, “Draw Something” was picked up by Zynga, who is on a quest to acquire all of the popular apps and games you hold dear to your heart. Although the number of people playing “Draw Something” has dropped somewhat in recent months, the game is still ridiculously popular.

    Am I being a cynical shrub for rolling my eyes at the inclusion of paid brands in the game? Let me know what you think about the latest “Draw Something” update in the comments section.

  • Thinking Outside the Box of Banner Ad Clicks

    Thinking Outside the Box of Banner Ad Clicks

    Think seriously for a moment: when was the last time you legitimately saw an ad online and clicked on it to find out more about the product being advertised? Unless you said, “Never,” you are lying because nobody clicks on those pervasive distractions. The only time I even have an interaction with an ad is when I’m confronted with one of those sprawling bastards that go full-on face-hugger mode on my screen and completely block out all of the content that I’m trying to read/look at so I have to click on the X to remove the obstructing ad. Somewhere, some company might be generating ad revenue because I was attacked by the ad and had to interact with it, but my opinion certainly sours for that brand.

    If you can help it, you probably try to avoid looking at the ads and you may not even realize it. That’s fair, too: we don’t use the internet because we want to view a virtual catalog of products, we use the internet to watch videos of animals falling asleep in hilarious places and then occasionally take breaks to read the news. Get out of our way, ads.

    This willful avoidance of all banner ads is so prominent that it’s even taken on a common industry name: banner blindness.

    Nobody pays attention to these banner ads and yet they persist throughout the internet. How is that? Well, for one, they have to persist because that’s one reason why the internet is able to maintain its vaunted openness. Some news outlets have had to implement a paywall in order to make up for the lack of ad revenue in the digital market, but generally online ad sales are what keep the internet (in its current incarnation, at least) afloat.

    Regardless of your interaction with online ads, though, it turns out that simply having an ad be seen still counts more than anybody actually interacting with the ad. That much might sound obvious, but a new collaborative analysis by comScore and Pretarget today confirms that ad viewability and hover time are more strongly correlated with conversions than clicks or total impressions. The findings of the study suggest that the dusty model used by advertisers and media planners of trying to amass as many clicks as possible might need to be set aside in order to look to more meaningful metrics for evaluating a campaign’s performance.

    This seems to follow what Moat, developers of advertising tools, have anticipated due to their new ad platform, Metrics That Matter. The analytical tool is basically to your ads what Google Analytics is to your search traffic or what Facebook Insights is to your brand’s Page. With it, you will be able to see exactly what kind of engagement that people have with the site beyond just clicking on it.

    There have been some helpful how-tos about how to improve the deployment of banner ads but, realistically, banner ads aren’t sustainable. They get in the way – in fact, all advertising gets in the way: that’s why people change television channels when a commercial break pops up during their favorite Law & Order spin-off. Advertisers in the video medium have created a much better strategy for advertising that wholly circumvents the entire intrusion of ads, though, and it’s only now beginning to be experimented with in the online market: product placement.

    It’s worked out marvelously in the movie and television industry. I hadn’t even so much as thought about eating at Burger King in years until I saw Robert Downey, Jr., as Tony Stark mowing down on some Whoppers in Iron Man. I wanted to be charismatic and adventurous like Tony Stark, and surely if such a lifestyle was achieved by eating Whoppers, then that’s where I should start, too, in order to carve out my piece of the glamorous lifestyle.

    At least, that was the fantasy being packaged up in the product placement of Burger King food in that movie, and much to my embarrassment, it worked stupendously well.

    Granted, I don’t want to see a description of Taco Bell’s Loco Tacos in an article I’m reading in the New York Times about the on-going slaughter of Syrian protesters. But with the legions of blogs and more blogs out there in the internet, it’s somewhat dumbfounding that this hasn’t tactic hasn’t been successfully utilized.

    Facebook and Twitter have attempted some variation of this with their promoted/sponsored Tweets and promoted Stories, respectively, but neither one are really genuine or even compelling. At best, they’re contrived advertisements disguised in the skins of my friends’ and followers’ accounts. Seriously, Facebook, am I really supposed to take it that Mark M_____ is eager to let me know that he likes Hondas? No, and he probably doesn’t give a toss, either. If he thought I did, I’m sure he’s smart enough to know I’m smart enough to ask him.

    Promoted or sponsored posts represent the most prominent application of product placement on a website and so far the strategy appears to be working given Facebook and Twitter both have recently made some notable acquisitions. Since this ad experiment is really still the first generation of this type of embedded strategy, it certainly has some kinks to be worked out. Still, it’s novel, and as Nathan Kaiser expertly explained on nPost, novelty only works so long when it comes to online advertising. Given the ever-shrinking attention span of internet users, don’t be surprised if the half-life of this marketing strategy lasts less time than banner ads seem to have lasted.

    I’ve seen a similar strategy employed in some blogs I read wherein they’re labelled sponsored posts. It took me a few turns before I figured out that they weren’t actually posts from the blog I was visiting but rather an advertisement packaged to resemble a post on the blog. It was clever and, similar to every other advertising strategy, the novelty was lost on me after a while and now I just ignore them. That’s not to say that this innovation couldn’t be improved upon, though.

    Putting all of your marketing faith on click-throughs no longer seems like a safe bet or even a fair bet. Kirby Winfield, Senior Vice President of Corporate Development at comScore, described how the comScore/Pretarget’s study highlights some of the major shifts on the horizon for the digital advertising community. “It demonstrates the perils of relying on click-throughs for measuring the performance of display ad campaigns, with this metric showing virtually zero correlation with total conversions,” Winfield said. “It’s time to start measuring the impact of campaigns using metrics that really matter, not just the ones that are most easily measured.”

    The current model does seem fairly inefficient and one-dimensional when you think about digital advertising in those terms. So for those of you working in the world of online marketing, how do you see the nature of advertising changing in the near future? Think there’s any use for analytic tools like what Moat has developed that could change the way advertising sales are structured for businesses? Let us know in the comments below.