If You Were Reincarnated As An Animal, What Would You Be?

You may think this question falls into the realms of the 'first-date-awkward-silence-filler'. Oh! sweet ignorance! how wrong you are. For a start, everyone knows that the pedestrianisation of Norwich city centre is a topic which lends itself perfectly to such moments where conversation is needed. But what you might not be aware of is that this question is actually bedfellows with the long-running debate of where to direct your media spend. Let me explain.

Standard media. It's cheap. It's nasty. And much like pigeons, it's everywhere. Of course you'll sometimes be lucky enough to see a Wood Pigeon or Collared Dove, but for the most part it's taking every opportunity to use its one good leg to stagger around, defecating on your browser. When it comes to impressing the lady-folk (i.e. 'convert'), the Pigeon's only game-plan is to rely on there being so many of its type that the law of probability states it will eventually garner some interest. Mass exposure to this poor creature does little to enamor you to what it represents; saturation leads to visual immunisation. When was the last time you remember seeing a Pigeon? I mean really seeing a Pigeon?

Rich media. It's complex. It's engaging. It's the Bowerbird of online advertising. Some Bowerbirds are more beautiful, more graceful than others - it doesn't matter. What matters is that the Bowerbird knows how to impress. It doesn't rely on large numbers to entice prospective suitors like it's more numerous but less impressive cousin the Pigeon. It does this through nest building. And it's not just about how nice the nest looks - it's about what it contains as well. The nest may look like a small hut (MPU with overlay), or like a maypole (expand skyscraper), but its contents will be of a similar colour to the female Bower it's trying to engage with (like DoubleClick's Page Scraping technology, enabling ad content to change dependent on page context). This is the evolution of the species and if you're lucky enough to have ever seen a Bowerbird, you'll definitely remember seeing it. And I mean really seeing it.

So, back to the question: "If you were reincarnated as an animal, what would you be?". Well if you want to get as many impressions as you can for as little money as possible, throw your stale breadcrumbs all over the internet and come back as a Standard pigeon. At least you won't go hungry. But if you want more bang for your buck-shot, you'd better start aiming for Rich Media and return to this World of Online Advertising as a Bowerbird. A Bowerbird with a 12-gauge shotgun.

Internet Advertising First Rather Than An Afterthought: Part 2

Something I have been advising people on when about to depart on a video campaign is the overall process of the filming that will have to happen. What is currently happening is, 1: The TV advert is being used for the online ads and stays in this staid linear fashion and is shoehorned into the ad slot, or 2: After all the offline advertising is planned and executed the online team have to go and film something completely different wasting time and money.

I have been trying to persuade the integrated agencies to start planning their online adverts at the same time as the offline adverts. One way this can save money is by adding a small amount of time to the filming schedule, editing schedule and post production so that ultimately it will save time and money in the long run (I am also persuading more and more to cover off their viewfinder when filming so that the video is filmed perfectly to the size of advert it will be displaying, whether expand or not, and this has made for some far more interesting and valid video adverts). This also means the over all campaign will be far better integrated and not leave online as the poor cousin to the offline adverts when so much more can be gained in return than from any other format.

To go back to my first point the other reason that this is becoming more and more necessary is that the new generation of online users (the // generation as they are quickly becoming known as) do not respond well to linear style videos and are becoming used to having a certain amount of second level artistry that they can apply to videos. Through YouTube and other platforms they are making pastiches of videos or re-editing and changing videos to make their own bespoke version. If the advertisers don't realise this change in the mentality of the younger generation soon and how they want to interact with videos then there is a whole section of the younger generation that they will lose out on passing their message to.

Internet Advertising First Rather Than An Afterthought

Since entering this industry I have only seen a few campaigns planned in a manner that seems entirely sensible in my opinion. The idea was to use a small, very intelligently targeted, pre launch campaign to determine the best way to launch a product or campaign. For example one campaign had four case studies within different sections of the advert and timers associated to each of the sections. The adverts were targeted very precisely to the target audience and then the timer metrics were used afterward to decide which case study had the most interest and the most people looking at it. From there the highest ranking case study was then used in all the offline adverttsing (TV, Print) as they knew it would gain the best response.

In another case three versions of the products packaging were lined up against each other, the goal information and clickthrough results determined which package pushed the consumer to purchase and therefore defined which packaging would work best when the product was fully rolled out.

I think this sort of intelligent planning and use of resource should be utilised far more in camapigns and in the overall plan from the client when launching any product as the internet is the only place you can get these sorts of results pre-campaign and the only place you can target to your exact audience in this manner. Ultimately it will save a lot of wasted money in the long run with a little more forward planning and enable you to get instant results from true market research without any of the bias opinions that most market research usually has to deal with.

So hopefully the planners and the buyers out there will start working far more closely with their clients and creative agencies and start implementing these highly useful pre campiagn testers which gain true results from the real consumer, without swaying their opinions through the knowledge that they are taking part in market research.