• Lincoln, an existing advertiser with The New York Times, has targeted 200,000 heavy readers of the newspaper’s website with an offer to sponsor their digital subscription for 2011. – I almost didn’t read this offer. It came up as an interstitial, between the homepage and the article I wanted to read, so the first two times I clicked by without actually seeing it. Then I belatedly noticed it had said something about the NYTimes paywall, went back and looked at the banner version on the NYTimes homepage, and clicked through to accept a gift from a brand that is basically irrelevant to me.

  It’s not that I’m not a good target demographically – MBA students fit “‘thought leaders’ in a younger-age bracket” and “the kind of consumers who are interested in the newer Lincolns” pretty much perfectly, I’d guess – but personally I don’t expect to buy a car in the next five years, and if I did it would be chosen for function not luxury. I feel a little weird about accepting the offer, and now feel some obligation to find out something about Lincoln to be sure I’m not dismissing it unreasonably. Reciprocity is a powerful trick (“techniques used in advertising and other propaganda whereby a small gift of some kind is proffered with the expectation of producing a desire on the part of the recipient to reciprocate in some way”).

• Chuck vs the delicious Subway sandwich – Chuck has been my favorite TV show for the past several years (funny, geeky, and the geeky stuff sometimes saves the day). It has repeatedly been almost-canceled, and one of the things that saved it was a relationship with Subway – aggressive product placement led to a fan campaign in which the show’s star participated (demonstrating to Subway that its sponsorship led to sales), which then led to more aggressive product placement.

  But they deliberately make the product placement stand out (not like the “oh, hey, it’s Windows Phone 7 and we’re going to linger on the phone for a really long time for no reason” placement I saw elsewhere this week), and they make it a joke all the fans are in on. One review commented, “I don’t know who is ever against product placement because every time the people at Chuck mention the greatness of Subway, I find it hilarious.” I’m aware I’m being sold, and yes, the next time I see a Subway around breakfast time I’ll try to go buy the relevant product, because I appreciate their sponsoring content I love.

• The Washington Post redesign – I’ve been reading the Post almost every day for 19 years, 13 of those online. I’m not a fan of the redesign. The links are black, making it harder for me to scan for things I can click on to get more information. They used all-caps for a long headline. It took me several days to pick out where they’d put the sections of news I care about and what parts of the page I could safely ignore. But most of all, that first day made it very clear what one thing I was supposed to do when I arrived on the homepage: click on the ads. This on a day when the main headline was about nuclear catastrophe.

  

  They’ve since added back photos to the top content area, so it’s not quite so much “there’s some boring black and white stuff and – ooh, shiny, a brightly colored ad! and another!” but it still looks visually like the right column, with ads and links, is the dark-colored important area. I’ve taught myself to be pretty ad-blind (see above about not reading the Lincoln offer), and the design makes it harder to ignore the ads in favor of the content that brought me to the site. The ads aren’t helping provide the content I want: they’re getting in the way of it. I’m the product being sold, and the Post isn’t even winking at me as they sell me. This isn’t the way I want to see sponsorship go.

There are plenty of issues with patronage models. Editorial independence is a big deal. But while selling lots of little ads preserves independence better, it’s much more demanding for the reader/watcher in terms of cognitive load. I’d rather have one sponsor; then I know whose influence I might have to discount – I’m used to that model from white papers, stadium names, and opinion columnists. With one sponsor, I know who I’m selling my attention to, and I can decide without too much difficulty how much weight I want to give their coin.

I was in Macy’s, looking for a coat. Since it’s fall, I’d have expected there to be an outerwear section in the store where I could look at all the possibilities. No such luck. Instead the coats were scattered by designer: a clerk explained that the Ralph Lauren coats are over here, the Nautica ones are over there, and there are a few more scattered on the floor.

Certainly that can be the right organization. If I’m shopping for myself, I often look first at brand, then color, then size. But in this case, when I wanted an overview of all the options within a particular category, the fact that the store hadn’t sorted by that category made it nearly impossible to shop effectively.

At macys.com, I can see all the coats. Sorting by type of apparel is even listed in the left navigation above sorting by brand – bricks-and-mortar stores, take note. Once I’m looking at coats, I can narrow my view further by brand. Some stores (i.e. Nordstrom) will let me sort by brand also, so I can still see everything but can easily compare within each line. But I’m still not happy with my shopping experience.

Why? I still haven’t seen a department store that will let me search only for “brands I wear”. Simple customization, right? Checkboxes in my profile when I register, and if I’ve filled out that section, offer me a personalized search. Then the store can also target its email marketing to me, meaning I’ll enjoy receiving useful emails (branding) and will buy some of the “five Nine West items on sale in our shoe department!” (direct response). Is anyone out there doing this? Am I just not registered at the right online stores?

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?

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