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.

Mutual promotion

Many online retailers now create editorial, discussion or community areas on their sites to help build context for their products. But by tying its style editorial in with the Fashion Store, The Guardian has turned the tables somewhat, using products to promote its content.

With items that compliment editorial pieces featured on the home-page or ’shop-window’ of the online store, users can link through to an article to find out why they should be buying this look – promoting both the relevance of the editorial and the products. And such timeliness is intrinsic to the fashion industry.

Link-happy?

Compared to promotion boxes that link out to retailer sites, hosting a site-contained fashion store should mean that users have less incentive to leave the guardian.co.uk to shop the look championed in online editorial.

However, at the minute they could be missing a trick by failing to link to the store, or specific items, within editorial. Of course readers would soon become cynical if all editorial solely featured items sold on the site, but in cases where it is relevant and appropriate to mention such items, user experience may be improved by being able to link straight through to and buy or browse products.

There is a delicate balance between banging the sales-message drum and being useful, and it is this power struggle between advertorial and editorial which sees the publishing landscape change shape so frequently.

What do you think of the Guardian’s online Fashion Store – has it got the balance right?

Post from: Connect

The Guardian Fashion Store – a healthy balance?

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.

Post from: Connect

Opt-in to cookies – its the law

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…

Students

Outdoors

Mums

Business

Post from: Connect

Multimap display creative

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.

There are a multitude of software vendors that sell tools to remove cookies from your computer, like they were an evil plague. But cookies are used for a variety of applications, and in the context of advertising help the user to have a better experience by targeting more appropriate ads.

This is exactly the business that Phorm is in, they are just monitoring and serving using better technology.

Consumers need to realise that advertising pays for most things they do online. Advertising online is not going to disappear. Advertising is not an evil entity, and as such isn’t it more useful or enjoyable for them to at least be shown campaigns that are relevant to them?

What’s more, consumers are already happily engaging this advertising of this type. Visit any major ecommerce site and you will be shown products that best match your purchasing history. Amazon led the way on this?

Is Amazon evil too?

Post from: Connect

Well Phorm’ed Campaigns are Not Evil (and neither are cookies)