Archive for June, 2009
Google Opens Up Digital-Education Portal
With Agencyland, Search Giant Hoping Shops Will Be Hot for Teacher
by Rupal Parekh
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Google has spent a lot of time in the past few years trying to quell fears it’s out to disintermediate advertising agencies. Now it’s undertaking a major effort trying to educate them on all things digital.
Enter AgencyLand. It may sound like an amusement park, but it’s actually an online educational portal Google is developing for ad shops, one that likely will help the search giant deeper entrench itself in an ad-agency community that’s often been wary of it.
The AgencyLand platform, now in beta with select agencies, houses a ton of Google-centric content created for agency staff. Naturally, much of it is focused on digital topics. There are webinars, a searchable library with more than 200 marketing case studies and short, on-demand video segments featuring Google leaders such as Chief Economist Hal Varian. It also aggregates Google’s array of ad tools, such as a media-planning tool that connects advertisers and publishers and a website optimizer, which helps measure user behavior on web pages.
Google maintains it has altruistic intentions of bettering everyone’s digital knowhow, but the program surely doubles as a marketing effort. Given that Google offers advertisers the chance to essentially help themselves create highly measurable and relevant, if unflashy, ads, agencies have been wary that Google could one day get between them and clients. Many shops — perhaps realizing the search giant simply cannot be ignored — have opted to work with Google rather than against it. Most publicly, French holding company Publicis Groupe has publicly touted partnerships with Google to work on digital ad technology. But there have also been moments of friction, such as when Martin Sorrell, chief of holding company WPP, took to calling Google a “frenemy” (which he later amended to “froe”).
So could AgencyLand just be the latest PR flourish in a Google-Madison Ave. history that’s seen plenty of them? That depends on where you sit. “We’re not going to deal with an agency that doesn’t know Google,” said one digital expert at a blue-chip marketer. “It’s a barrier to entry.”
Getting schooled
Asked whether Google’s intention is to use AgencyLand for marketing purposes, Spencer Spinnell, director-agency development and strategy, said: “Our objective is really that it’s an educational tool. … I think it’s good for digital media at large.”
While there are some reasons for skepticism, Google, which needs agency buy-in for a host of reasons, has big ambitions for AgencyLand. Earlier this year it asked 10 shops across different holding companies, including Ogilvy, Initiative, Starcom and Carat, to serve as its guinea pigs while it works out the kinks. It’s in the process of rolling the platform out to a second batch of shops for testing (DraftFCB, Martin Agency, DDB, Digitas, Group M, BBDO, 360i and Razorfish) and estimates it will make AgencyLand widely available to agencies late this year or early next.
Usage of the portal is free. The search giant said it had received requests from the agency community for training that would help employees stay ahead of the digital curve. The timing of the platform’s release is ideal, Google said, because it enables agencies to continue boosting their digital chops even at a time when most are cash-strapped.
“In a down economy, training is one of the first things to get cut” Mr. Spinnell said. He said he believes AgencyLand offers a way for agencies to “take their knowledge workers and make them smarter.”
The biggest piece of feedback from agency users so far has been a recommendation to make the training sessions shorter and more digestible. Google went back to the drawing board and created a series of 15-minute graphical seminars with voice-over instructions. “The idea is that a planner or creative can [complete segments] while eating lunch at their desk,” Mr. Spinnell said.
Certification
AgencyLand is tailored to each agency, co-branded with each company’s logo, and dotted with pictures of agency heads and customized content. Agency management tracks individual employees’ progress, and quizzes are offered at the end of each course.
The user interface as it stands now is Google-esque — simple, tons of white space, no bells and whistles — and the content is very Google-centric. Courses suggested for TV media buyers and planners, for example, are “How YouTube complements Television Advertising” and “Getting the Most Out of Google TV.” For search specialists, “Google Maps and Ads” and “AdWords on the Go: Mobile Activation.” Google is working toward embedding a certification program.
“There’s no question the content is largely skewed to our platforms, today, but that’s because we are in early stages,” Mr. Spinnell said. “AgencyLand … will expand and include the agency’s own training materials and competitive materials.”
“Google really has turned around; they really want to help agencies,” said Amy Auerbach, senior VP-director of digital at Interpublic Group of Cos.’ Initiative, New York. “One of the challenges that agencies face on a daily basis is training staff. Some agencies have established programs and some do not, and that was something that we in the digital space were kind of clamoring for.”
Initiative has historically offered a mix of training programs that are informal, such as its “lunch and learn” sessions, where experts give presentations, or more formal, such as a mandatory, nationwide digital training session the shop held earlier this year. “The good thing about AgencyLand is that it’s a technology platform, so it was very turnkey for us,” Ms. Auerbach said.
Internal affairs
Still, agency leaders are quick to note that Google’s agency training program doesn’t trump internal ones, and should be used only in tandem with existing training programs.
Last fall, WPP-owned Group M introduced its first major online training program, dubbed Mspace — a play on the name and style of News Corp.’s MySpace. More than half of the agency’s staff — some 1,700 staffers — has already gone through the program, and “75% of those people have been people outside of digital,” said John Montgomery, chief operating officer-North America at Group M Interaction.
Group M, one of AgencyLand’s select test agencies, is in the midst of assembling teams that will work on the platform in beta and report back to the search giant.
“Even something like Mspace has to be used as an adjunct to a formal digital training program, for digital and for nondigital people,” Mr. Montgomery said. “If it was their only training I would be worried, and the same would be true about AgencyLand.”
Microsoft is launching its own agency-targeted training program this summer, called Digital Academy. It’s not an online training tool like Google’s but rather in-person educational sessions, expected to push the three-screen approach (web, TV and mobile) that Microsoft evangelizes.
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Contributing: Abbey Klaassen
Add comment June 23, 2009
To Build Display, Yahoo Joins Self-Serve Ad Fray
Targets Small Marketers and Those It Hopes to Convert From Search
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Klaussner Home Furnishings, a 2,000-employee regional furniture manufacturer and retailer in Asheboro, N.C., doesn’t exactly fit the profile of a typical Yahoo advertiser. But Klaussner is exactly the kind of advertiser Yahoo wants to convert to display with a self-service platform targeted at small and midsize local marketers.
Today Yahoo rolls out the first version of its self-serve ad product, My Display Ads, a bid to win over local advertisers and convert search advertisers to display. Yahoo isn’t the first to offer self-service display; Google, MySpace and Facebook have all rolled out similar self-serve display ad systems. AOL’s Ad.com is developing its own self-serve system that new CEO Tim Armstrong wants pushed out the door.
But with its scale and premium display properties, Yahoo is applying some heat to this space, as it hopes to convert search advertisers — or businesses that haven’t done any online advertising — to display.
“This just opens up access to small advertisers, which we think is important to the overall market,” said Yahoo Sales Senior VP Joanne Bradford.
It’s a bit of a free-for-all in the local ad market right now, with both automotive and real estate crippled, and the incumbent media, TV, radio, newspapers and yellow pages all struggling with their own compromised business models. But that doesn’t change that it’s a $13.6 billion market that someone is going to sort out.
DIY
“The opportunity here is to get more share out of the local ad marketplace,” said Curt Hecht, president of VivaKi Nerve Center, a unit of Publicis. “Google got there first, but there’s an opportunity to make the self-service side of media a little easier.”
Yahoo partnered with Seattle-based start-up AdReady, which provides creative tools for advertisers to develop their own ads, a bit like what Spot Runner tried to do for the local TV market. Advertisers can pick creative off the shelf from more than 800 display ad templates — including dancing cellphones, ads proclaiming “Amazing Values” or countdown clocks — or bring their own.
Ads can be purchased on a cost-per-thousand impression basis or as part of a cost-per-click auction. The ad inventory fed into the system includes both Yahoo-owned and network properties through Yahoo’s Right Media exchange.
Klaussner had never bought an online ad until it tried My Display Ads as part of a Yahoo pilot in the spring. For its Memorial Day sale, in addition to its normal TV and newspaper inserts, Klaussner blanketed the Greensboro DMA with online display ads.
Foot traffic turned out, well, pretty good. So Klaussner is a convert, and is increasing its spend for its next sale and adding the Raleigh-Durham and Charlotte markets to the next campaign, which it would not have done if it meant buying TV and newspaper advertising there.
“We use Yahoo for our bigger advertisers; it’s something we could never do in the past with small folks,” said Chris Whitesell, director at Klaussner’s digital shop, Spider Digital. “It’s a great opportunity, and we’re going to use it for another client in High Point [N.C.]“
The second type of advertisers Yahoo hopes to win over are those that use search, and thus are accustomed to creating self-serve advertising. The hope is they might want to try display either instead of or in conjunction with search advertising.
Converting search marketers
“Anybody can run a search campaign, but not anybody can run a display campaign,” said Citibank analyst Mark Mahaney. “It’s a natural product offering by Yahoo.”
But it’s not just local advertisers. Mr. Hecht said he thinks some of the bigger search-advertising shops will avail themselves of display, as will national advertisers that want to do something specific in a local market, or even ad networks looking for targeted Yahoo-quality inventory.
It also gives Yahoo a performance-ad product besides search. “Performance inventory is such a dominant force of online advertising right now,” said David Berkowitz, director-emerging media at 360i. “The recession is only enabling that further with the need for accountability.”
My Display Ads has been in development for some time, and the effort pre-dates CEO Carol Bartz and Ms. Bradford. Indeed, it’s the first significant move into a new market for Yahoo since Ms. Bartz arrived in January, and the first news on display, Yahoo’s core business. Still, observers cautioned not to read too much into Yahoo’s local play.
“There are more systemic issues they need to resolve,” said Quentin George, chief digital officer for Mediabrands. “This might give them something incremental, but it’s not going to have that big an effect.”
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Contributing: Abbey Klaassen
Add comment June 23, 2009
Lack of Film Standout at Cannes Shows That Creativity Is Evolving
The Shift to Digital Makes Integration a More Meaningful Premise
Some people don’t like Cannes. Sometimes I’m one of them. Certainly there are distasteful things about the experience, about awards shows in general. There are the illegitimate ads spawned by the win-at-all-costs mentality that attends the awards-industrial complex. There are those creative directors who are far too driven by awards alone (you know who you are).
But the fact is, for now, Cannes still matters; awards still matter.
Simply, awards are a marketing tool, for individuals and for companies. Especially now that clients are taking more of an interest in what goes on at Cannes, winning a Lion is business.
Any awards show is, by definition, a wank. So let’s move on and look at the work that’s on show and what it means. And I would argue that the work that’s in contention this year at Cannes is far from a disaster. It reflects an industry that is doing the work of evolving.
There is no nucleus of shoo-in work around which the critical mass of debate has revolved this awards season. There’s no one answer to the question “What’s going to win?” But there are a lot of exciting ideas. There’s “Best Job in the World,” a campaign for Tourism Queensland out of CumminsNitro, Brisbane, Australia; Fiat’s Eco:Drive, an in-car application from AKQA, London, that monitors driving data in the name of fuel efficiency; and a kinetic sculpture at the BMW Museum from Art+Com. All won top nods at the One Show.
There’s Burger King and Crispin Porter & Bogusky’s excellent Facebook twister, “Whopper Sacrifice”; there’s Droga5’s “The Great Schlep”; Goodby’s “Hotel 626″ for Doritos; the social/outdoor campaign for James Ready beer from Leo Burnett, Toronto; and of course, nothing less than the all-encompassing campaign to elect Barack Obama president (and we’ll not talk about predicting into which categories things will be slotted. The increasingly arbitrary nature of show categories is fodder for another discussion).
While there are highlights (Nike’s “Fate,” the controversial “Whopper Virgins,” Philips’ surprising hit “Carousel”), in general there are fewer blockbuster film-based moments. The industry’s energies have shifted, obviously, from the broadcast to the digital side. A reminder: This is a good thing. Digital isn’t just an appendage. In a recent Creativity white paper on integrated production, those responsible for executing the huge ideas coming out of leading agencies emphasized this idea over and over and over. In the words of Crispin’s head of integrated production, David Rolfe, “The goal and reality is … that integrated is all about moving the interactive mind-set to the center” (and witness how Crispin, one of the leading ad agencies, expands globally — by acquiring a digital shop).
So now that this shift is happening, if the downsides are a glut of nutty microsites, some of which history shall judge as mildly pointless, and a decrease in blockbuster films, so be it. That’s not to say that as the industry advances even further into digital, design and beyond, film content will fade out. In fact, I’d argue that narrative-type film will see a resurgence as integration becomes a more meaningful premise (witness how one of the leading digital production companies, B-Reel, recently expanded — by acquiring a film-production shop).
And rather than complain about things like Cannes, I would reserve my suspicion, rancor, words of advice or whatever for two constituencies: marketers and holding-company types, the two groups of folks who have perhaps the biggest say in how the industry continues to evolve through this tough time. May they view Cannes in the right spirit — as an inspiration to change and to innovate.
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Teressa Iezzi is the editor of Creativity magazine and Creativity-Online.com.
Add comment June 23, 2009
Fred Wilson: The Value Of Twitter Is In “The Power Of Passed Links”
Venture capitalist Fred Wilson
, who is an investor in Twitter, argues that the value of Twitter is “all about links.” Today at the 140 Characters Conference in New York City, Wilson gave a presentation ostensibly about how to make money from Twitter. The value of Twitter, he says, is in “the power of the passed link.”
He compared Twitter’s recent organic growth to the early growth of Google (minus any mention of Twitter’s recent slowdown) and shared some analysis of traffic to the Websites of his portfolio companies and his blog. Google is the dominant source of traffic, but over the past 12 months Twitter [and Facebook] traffic has been growing 30 to 40 percent per month. It is becoming a significant source of traffic to those Websites, to the point where it is now bringing about 20 percent as much traffic as Google.
Wilson predicts that at current growth rates, Twitter [and Facebook] “will surpass Google [as a source of traffic] for many websites in the next year.” And that just as nearly every site on the Web has become addicted to Google juice, they will increasingly try to find ways to get more links from Twitter. Because Twitter equals traffic. (We’ve noticed a similar trend at TechCrunch, where Twitter is now our second largest outside source of traffic after Google).
Moreover, he asserts that these Twitter links “convert better” than search links because they are often pre-filtered and come in the form of a recommendation from someone you are following. And while spam is a growing issue, it is somewhat mitigated by the ability to unfollow anyone who abuses your trust.
Given these dynamics, Twitter needs to “inject a paid model” into its service, says Wilson. He is clear that he is not speaking on behalf of Twitter:
I am not telegraphing anything here. It is the obvious thing to do. If they don’t do it, someone will figure out how to do it as a third party application.
Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey was sitting right next to me when Wilson said this onstage. He didn’t seem surprised by anything Wilson was saying. But how exactly is the best way to inject paid or sponsored links into Twitter?
Again, looking at Google might be instructive. Google delivers traffic to Websites through a combination of organic and paid links. The paid links amount to billions of dollars in revenues for Google, but they wouldn’t work without the links in natural results. Twitter needs to come up with unobtrusive ways to inject sponsored Tweets with paid links into people’s Twitter streams. It is still not clear, however, how it can do this without turning off users.
Update: Fred Wilson points out in comments that his observations were “about facebook and twitter together, not twitter specifically.” Fair enough, Twitter isn’t the only stream out there. Although, if his referrer logs look anything like ours, passed links on Twitter bring in five times as much traffic as passed links on Facebook. Maybe it is the exact opposite for him. So wherever you see Twitter above, insert “and Facebook.” But he was at a Twitter conference, after all, and passing links is more of a core activity on Twitter than it is on Facebook, which is why I focused on his comments as they applied to the former.
Add comment June 18, 2009
MEDIA ARTS MONDAYS: Beyond the Banner
June 15, 2009
Online media can be a real paradox—an environment that represents such a wealth of creative opportunity, yet has for so long been a slave to the banner ad. Buttons, leaderboards, skyscrapers—the challenge to advertisers has been to cram as much creativity as they can into awkward shapes and sizes. Online ads have been more about geometry than creativity.
But more brands are rewriting the rules of online ads by growing the dimensions of their ideas beyond the traditional banner or video. Of course bigger is not always better—a bad idea is a bad idea in any size. But with a great idea, breaking the boundaries of traditional online formats can really bring to life what this medium does best.
BMW
BMW’s “Expression of Joy” banner can expand across the screen to transform the page into a canvas and a Z4 convertible into an interactive paintbrush.
Nintendo
Wario Land’s “Shake It” ad on YouTube breaks the boundaries of the video viewer as action from the game causes the elements of the page to crumble around it.
Quicksilver
Quiksilver’s “The Spot” turns a skate video into a full screen skate park as Tony Hawk and friends jump out of the ad and dismantle the page with their tricks.
Apple
Apple’s “Second Opinion” on NYtimes.com shows theunique creative opportunities of three different ad units that are talking to each other…literally.
Burger King
Burger King’s “Collapse” uses the browser itself as part of the idea, reducing the size of the window as users scramble to solve the puzzle before time runs out.
Honda
Honda’s “Let it Shine” ad brings the environment of the video to the page around it, turning an already cool video into a full screen experience.
Media Arts Mondays is produced by Media Arts Lab. You can subscribe to Media Arts Mondays here or download this newsletter here.
Add comment June 16, 2009
EA takes Grand Slam Tennis to Facebook
Source: Adverblog.com
Advergames are moving to Facebook or, better, are moving where people are. EA Games has just launched “Quick Challenge”, an interactive Facebook application, to support the release of its new title: EA Sports Grand Slam Tennis.
Quick challenge is a revised version in a tennis mood of the popular game (among our granpas’) “rock, paper, scissors”. The gaming mechanism is therefore pretty straightforward: you pick an avatar (both Rafa Nadal and John McEnroe are available!), you select your three shots: lob, slam, drop shot and then watch it play out against your opponent who gets challenged within Facebook itself.
Once your friend has accepted the challenge, the cool part begins, as you see the three shots in action with real game images taken from the videogame (and this is a nice new way to experience the game they want you to buy).
I must say that I’m always rather skeptical when I receive invites from friends on Facebook, and I tend to ignore them. I believe the brand can really make the difference in driving acceptance of such invitations. In three days the game has been played over 40.000 times, and we can definitel expect it to go viral, given the quality of the execution and the ease of its mechanism.
The agency is Wieden + Kennedy Amsterdam.
Add comment June 16, 2009
