Display Advertising

In October 2009, Guardian News and Media launched its online Fashion Store, allowing users to browse from over 300 retailers and once again proving its ability and willingness to evolve. With this have they hit upon a business model which works for advertisers, publishers and users alike?

Cutting out the middle-man

With publishers increasingly looking to advertising and sponsorship deals to replace lost revenue from dwindling newspaper sales, the Guardian has effectively cut out the middle-man to provide a useful service for its readers. Given the choice I, personally, would much rather a dedicated area within which I can browse a number of brands and ’shop the look’ championed in this week’s style section, than sidebars full of promotion boxes for brands I may have no interest in.

Indeed, online retail analysis has suggested that people shop for fashion online in a different way to how they might shop for other products. Most clothes shoppers know what stores and labels stock what they’re looking for. So, rather than searching for a particular item, they would look for their favourite clothing brands and then search for the item within the brand’s site. As the Guardian Fashion Store offers the choice to search by brand, it fits with this shopping model much more snugly than side-bar advertising could.

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In what some say is a reaction to an industry that refused to self-regulate, the EU has jumped into the problem of data privacy and cookies, and voted to pass a ruling that requires a user’s ‘explicit consent’ before they receive a cookie. There appears to be some exceptions to this ruling, including cookies used for logging in to sites and for shopping carts, but mostly, permission will have to be sought.

This will have significant impact on all types of digital marketing, including display, affiliate marketing, email, analytics and search; how much impact will depend on each member state’s interpretation of the ruling when they implement the law, something that has to be complete by April 26th 2011. We must not take this as a soft threat - the EU has taken action before in relation to Phorm, the ever controversial ad network that worked on deep packet inspection - and never got off the ground in the UK.

Behavioural Targeting techniques like Phorm are probably the cause of the fuss - thanks to the media exchanges we are going through a mini revolution in display media where we can target consumers more accurately than ever before - but how much is too much? Clearly the EU felt that Phorm had crossed the line and are now redrawing the battle plans to say that ALL Behavioural Targeting is too far without a user’s consent.

I wrote about this on my personal blog as the news broke in the US.  Read more thoughts on the new EU law, the implications for the USA and how this may get implemented.

You may or may not have seen the recent coverage of our display and creative teams being appointed by one of our existing search clients, the Microsoft owned Multimap, to promote their specialist online mapping service. In a nutshell, this is what it’s about…

The new campaign will see Multimap launch a series of tailored creative executions that highlight specific use cases for target audience groups identified by research. Specialised ad-creative focused on promoting Multimap’s user functionality will be targeted at mums, business users, students and outdoor activity enthusiasts.

The campaign has been based around the insights gained through a social media audit. For example we found one common use of the service was to explore where an individuals could find routes for outdoor activites such as mountain biking. The creative has been targeted towards such groups.

…The story has been covered throughout the industry press, and although we don’t like to blow our own trumpets on this platform too much we thought we wouldn’t be doing the campaign justice without some examples of the great creative concepts in action.

So here it is… Read more…

BT recently announced that they would be trialling the Phorm ad network on their ISP backend, and join the ranks of Virgin Media and ‘Talk Talk’ from Carphone Warehouse.

Put simply, Phorm is an ad network that works by recording the pages that ISP customers visit and then serving ads that are more relevant to that user. They use a sophisticated system of unique code numbers as opposed to identifiable consumer data, and will categorise the sites visited in pre-determined buckets.

But there has been consumer backlash, most recently highlighted in a New Media Age survey. It states that 65% of UK adults would leave their ISP if it adopted ISP-based behavioural targeting, and 81% wanted the ability to opt-out.

But I think consumers have got this wrong.

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