Information Squid

BBDO Netherlands, working for Chrysler, recently created a viral video ad for the new Dodge Nitro SUV. The ad showed the car electrocuting a dog. Chrysler was not pleased. (And they’ve had problems with BBDO Detroit’s ads before.)

Chrysler apologized and tried to have the video pulled from YouTube - apparently without initial success (it’s now down, “due to a copyright claim by DaimlerChrysler”). And the video has spread, to the Detroit Free Press, Jalopnik, SpikedHumor.com, and probably elsewhere.

It’s hard to pull an ad these days. Anything controversial will spread. Even if your ad airs once in an obscure market, or is placed only on a few low-traffic websites, if it’s interesting then someone’s probably made a copy to put online - and they’ll be rewarded with plenty of hits for doing so. (The most prominent example of a small ad buy provoking amazingly more free media coverage is the Swift Boat ads against John Kerry in the 2004 US presidential election.)

There have been media stories about ads being squashed for a long time, but the new element is that people can read the story and see the ad for themselves. It’s not one-day news. An ad you pull can still go viral, being forwarded from one person to another and being copied to too many sites too fast to stop.

But isn’t this what the advertiser wanted in the first place? Chrysler noted in its apology that “European commercials — especially ‘viral’ ads like this one — are often edgier,” so it seems likely that BBDO Netherlands knew its market. The comments at SpikedHumor are mostly amused. The previous BBDO Detroit ad, where a car gets a jump from a Nitro and is blown into the sky, seems different in degree of attack by the Nitro rather than in kind of attitude of the car. Even if this isn’t the brand message Chrysler wants (and if it’s not, they apparently haven’t conveyed that to BBDO anytime in the last six months), hasn’t this controversy helped reach the Nitro’s target audience?

Well, Apple’s iTunes has finally given in to variable pricing pressure - a little bit. iTunes’s new “Next Big Thing” section lists albums for $5.99 and $6.99, instead of the normal $9.99. While it’s not the per-song variability the record labels have been pushing for, the door has cracked open.

The labels would love to sell new, hot songs for more than iTunes’s standard 99 cents, since their price elasticity is probably pretty low - people will buy them regardless of how much they cost. And the labels want to sell older, less popular songs for under 99 cents, since they hope more people will buy if they’re cheaper. So far Apple has resisted. Their only concession has been to price the EMI tracks without digital rights management (DRM) at $1.29, since they’re both transferrable without DRM restrictions and encoded at higher quality.

But now Apple has set up the “Next Big Thing”, and it’s producing results for the featured albums. Sara Bareilles’s Little Voice hit the number one spot for albums with about 14,000 downloads. The Wall Street Journal compares that to “albums from Paul McCartney and the White Stripes [which] sold around 16,000 digital copies during their first week of release earlier this year,” and mentions, “Atlanta rapper Unk’s 9-month-old album, which had been down 1% the week before the promotion, enjoyed a 152% spike in digital sales.”

Apple is coy about who picks the abums to showcase, saying, “Just who decides what the Next Big Thing is? Is there a committee? A grand jury of elite tastemakers who have the power and influence to push something into the arms (and ears) of the pop marketplace? Honestly, there’s nothing of the sort (we hope). … Well, we’re halfway through the year and iTunes has a fine selection of artists who we think have the true grit (or pure luck) it takes to beome the next big thing.”

Absent any actual information, I have to assume this is like bookstore coop, as described in an AIGA Journal of Design article: “You may have thought the books on the front tables at B&N were hand-selected by a local book-loving manager, or that the titles on view are “bestsellers” or the books being talked about in the press. In actuality, the publisher has paid the store for this placement in a deal known as “co-operative advertising” or cost sharing between the retailer and supplier. Those books on the table often do end up being bestsellers, in part because of this positioning in the store.”

So have the labels paid for coop? If they have, so far they’re probably getting their money’s worth. And will this satisfy them, or will they keep pushing for per-song pricing? Universal is currently renegotiating its contract with Apple and trying not to sign anything long-term, and the labels have been more insistent about variable pricing each year iTunes has stuck with the flat 99 cents price. Will Apple be able to keep all songs in lock-step? Or what interesting concessions can they wring from labels for letting them break the ranks?

ETA: It has been pointed out to me that album prices have historically been somewhat flexible (the White Stripes album is $10.99, for instance, and T.I. versus T.I.P. is $12.99), and iTunes has run sales that look like this before, with a special page of “these things are cheap”. This seems to be the first ongoing discount program, though.

Following up on the concerns about how to use Yahoo SmartAds, the answer is probably to use a souped-up creative optimizer, ideally hooked into the ad serving system itself. That way you can analyze your results and then show your most effective ads most often (or modify the less effective versions). Creative optimization has been around for a while for search campaigns, trying to improve performance for certain keywords. Advertising.com in November 2006 released a study of keyword performance using three optimization techniques.

It’s harder to find information about optimization solutions for advertising, perhaps because everyone is trying to keep their methods proprietary. WPP’s (Ogilvy’s) mOne developed a tool called mEuclid and publicized it in 2005. That seems likely to be the same tool mentioned in The Quest for the Perfect Online Ad (Business 2.0, 4/3/2007). The Atlas Institute of aQuantive has done some writing about creative optimization (also in 2005), though the referenced white paper says to worry more about ad placement than about exactly what’s in your creative.

Still, given the option to have potentially thousands of combinations of ad components, agencies that take advantage of SmartAds will need a way to manage and analyze the data they collect. Erick Schonfeld’s The Next Net picks up the same concern about how many items marketers will need to juggle. Seems like Ogilvy has a good setup already - I wonder whether the other agencies are behind or just quiet?

Via Nick Wright’s Vir(tu)al Marketing and Media, online video and its inserted ads are getting more and more press.

Google launched an AdSense for video pilot at the end of May. Google Video has had ads since the beginning of the year, so presumably the insertion technology is coming from that program. Their setup allows the video creator to choose when in the clip the ad runs.

But picking the timing of an interstitial ad is only one possibility for advertising in online video content. Collected from several recent articles, here are some of the options:

Pre-roll or blipverts, before a clip starts
Midroll or interstitial, sometime in the middle of the clip
Post-roll or endcap, after the end of the clip
Bug or superimposed logo, not clickable
Bug or superimposed logo, when clicked pauses video and opens link in a new window
Bug or superimposed logo, when clicked opens additional ad content within the video frame
Ticker, generally across the bottom of the screen, like cable news channels
Link from items’ images in the video content to where you can purchase them
Sponsorship information inserted into the content
Show an advertiser’s video every certain number of other videos

What options did I miss?

The articles:
Make Way for Must Stream TV, Business 2.0, 3/1/2007
Will Video Ads Evolve?, Forbes.com, 2/23/2007
Video Ads: Every Startup Has a Different Solution, TechCrunch, 7/6/2007
The Revolution of Video Advertising, Entrepreneur.com, 5/30/2007

Just finished watching the (fabulous) Wimbledon final between Federer and Nadal. Aside from the amazing tennis (the one sport I turn on the TV to watch), I was fascinated by a great Nike ad, in a format I don’t remember seeing before.

Essentially, the ad plays as a human interest segment, like the ones larded onto the Olympics every five minutes. It’s not identifiable as an ad for most of its playing time.

We hear “He was born in Basel, Switzerland…” with pictures of Roger Federer as a baby, kid, “started playing tennis at six years old.” Roger playing tennis. “He could have been a soccer player, but chose tennis.” Roger in a soccer uniform, then playing tennis again. Roger as a young adult. “He once had a temper,” throwing rackets, “but found his cool - and became a champion.” Lifting the champion’s cup at Wimbledon (the first time). “His forehand is feared by all.” More action shots. “He’s the only player to win three majors three times.” More lifting trophies. “He’s definitely the man to beat. His name is Roger Federer. He’s won ten majors, and counting.” More playing time, more dramatic music.

And then the music stops, and we cut to the top of a baseball cap, and a very familiar face looks up. “But my name is Tiger Woods. I have twelve majors and counting. So keep up, buddy.” Just do it tagline on screen, Nike swoosh and nike.com.

Did I mention this ad is a 60? The length, along with the adulatory words, music, and images, make it seem like editorial content, not an ad. And the production values and sense of humor mean it doesn’t feel like a waste of your time even after you hit the Nike tagline.

The best touch? After Federer finally won his five-set, dramatic title match, the ad played once more. And this time, it said, “He’s won eleven majors, and counting.” Beautiful job, Nike.

Via Leisa Reichart’s disambiguity, Andy Rutledge has a discussion of “quiet structure” on the new CNN site design, contrasted with the busyness of the new USA Today design.

He mentions simplicity (in header and structural elements) and consistency (in element and whitespace dimensions) as keys to making your content stand out from its presentation and having it be easy to actually read - creating the right kind of affordances for large quantities of content meant to be read rather than just skimmed. I read a lot online - here’s hoping more news (and blog, for that matter) sites will listen to Rutledge.

Separate from all the hoopla this week about the iPhone, advertising has also made a leap forward. Yahoo has announced a system called SmartAds for on-the-fly composition of display ads - meaning a firm could set up an ad for an item the user has recently searched for, with its price in their location, as well as images/colors appealing to their demographics. The system can use behavioral, geographic, and demographic information to pick ad components.

This isn’t the first system to use behavioral information, but it seems to be the first offering customization at the level of parts of ads rather than at the level of the whole image. So then the problem is figuring out how to use it.

The NYTimes’s Bits blog brings up the point that most companies don’t know yet how to take full advantage of behavioral targeting. Thousands of versions of an ad are hard to manage - how do you tell what’s working? Tracking the clickthrough information will be as much work as tracking web analytics for a good-size website - especially as companies move toward microsites in display ad spaces. Will this become a new specialty within marketing/advertising companies?

NYTimes article (registration required)
NYTimes’s Bits blog
Wall Street Journal (subscription required)
CNet
Editor and Publisher
ClickZ
Search Engine Land
PC Magazine’s AppScout blog
Red Herring
New Media Age (UK)
NewsFactor.com
Marketing Shift blog