In the US the Federal Trade Commission is proposing the introduction of a “Do Not Track” law which would allow users to opt out from having their browsing history tracked by sites.

The implications of this could be quite wide spread, and could have a huge impact on companies like Google and advertising networks who rely on browser information to turn blind advertising into targeted advertising. For sure, Google would still be able to use key word targeting, and geo targeting, but what happens when you want to get more sophisticated than that. What are the implications for frequency capping and sequencing of creative if you can’t track the browser, and it could be bye bye to demographic data for a certain percentage of your audience.

So who might the winners be if something like this were introduced? Email marketers using opt in lists would certainly become more attractive to advertisers, and one would assume that content sites with large audiences would find favour over blind networks.

There is no doubt that the introduction of a “Do Not Track” law could have big ramifications for the interactive advertising industry. For some interesting perspectives on this check out this article in the New York Times “In Online Privacy Plan, the Opt-Out Question Looms“

And then there is internet TV.

For years people have been hankering to be able to access the internet using their TV, and in the last six months this has started to become a reality with offering from Apple and now Google.

However with Apple you get the feeling that, yes you can access the internet and vidoes and apps, just so long as you do it in an Apple compliant manner.

And so it was this article (Google TV: Remember the Browser) that really got me thinking that the launch of Google TV might just mark the beginning of a real change to the way we consume entertainment and information.

The concept I find really compelling is being able to display TV as TV, having a proper web browser(Chrome), and an application (web app) capability – having a keyboard helps too.

The beauty of this is that there is no requirement for web publishers to repurpose content for the new devices, but it provides an environment where users will start do demand integration and functionality. It is this user demand aspect that I believe will propel web TV so that it evolves to provide users with a much richer experience.

From an interactive advertising perspective it is a little mindblowing, but potentially creates greater opportunities for integration of brand and direct repsonse advertising, and a whole lot more.

About the author:
John Stewart is the CEO and Founder of www.SiteManagerNow.com an online advertising booking management solution for online publishers and advertising networks.

There were also the browser wars, with the key players battling it out to be number one.  At the same time there was an authoring platform that was growing in popularity – Macromedia Flash, and third party ad serving was evolving to enable media agencies to be more sophisticated in the way they managed and reported on their client campaigns.

Ten years on, and I get a feeling of deja vu.

The launch of the iPad has muddied the water between pc/laptop and mobile internet access. Along with its newness comes a new layer of complexity in terms of media buying, ad development, and ad operations.

And while the iPad has a web browser, this is obviously not Apples preferred internet access method as Apple can’t control the content and advertising. The fact that the iPad browser doesn’t support Flash supports this belief to some extent. See related article at cultofmac.com

And with the launch of the iPad came the launch of Apple iAds http://advertising.apple.com/ – a proprietary ad serving network based on Apple iOS4.

The significance of this should not be lost on digital agencies and media buyers. Your viral ads on Youtube can’t be seen on an iPad, and neither can your interactive ads authored in Flash. You are going to have to gear up to author ads on new platforms, and your third party ad serving may not be usable on all devices. And most likely the bulk of these additional costs will be borne by you the agency who will find it hard to grow client budgets just because the technology has become more fragmented.

And let’s not get distracted by the smallness of the mobile advertising market. The goal posts have been shifted and new mobile tablet offerings with larger displays than a normal mobile phone are already on their way from players like Dell and Samsung.

Now is not the time for digital agencies and media buyers to sit back and watch. It is the time to have an opinion on things like third party ad serving and support for multimedia platforms such as Flash.

It is time to start lobbying industry bodies such as the IAB www.iab.net for the sake of your own survival and in the interest of your clients.

About the author:
John Stewart is the CEO and Founder of www.SiteManagerNow.com an online advertising booking management solution for online publishers and advertising networks.

The hope of many of these newspaper owners is that by publishing their content in the form of an iPad application that it will provide them with an opportunity to charge for the content.

The problem is that there seem to be quite a few flies in the ointment. What I mean by this is that having an iPad application is not withou it’s issues, and some of them are pretty big.

The first issue is that the iPad apps only work on iPads, therefore the publisher has to develop and support two content platforms instead of one – or three if they have a mobile solution (oops, make that four if they have an iPhone app as well). With this comes all the added costs for programming and support staff. This problem won’t go away unless Apple achieves 100% market penetration – which it won’t.

Secondly their existing web site(s) will work on the iPad browser, sort of – as long as it doesn’t have any Adobe Flash in it. Which leads to a third point which is that the bulk of rich media advertising that is currently being developed is in Adobe Flash. For this advertising to work on the iPad it needs to be re-authored – which is not as insignificant as it seems as for a typical online advertising campaign there are often multiple creative sizes, and multiple creative messages to start with.

In saying that, because the iPad apps are usually so different from the web versions of the same online publications, the ad units may be a different size to the web version, so new creative will have to be made anyway – this maybe ok in the USA where you have hundreds of thousands of iPad users, but is not so marvellous in a small country like New Zealand where you may only have hundreds.

And then there is the reason that people find newspaper content looks more compelling on an iPad than in a web browser – the portrait orientation makes it look like a magazine, and I m not too sure how comfortable newspapers are about morphing into magazines.

Which leads me to think that Apple’s perfectly formed new baby is going to create a few dilemnas for newspapers and online publishers.

A recent article I read pointed to consolidation in the display advertising market.

Advertising Age: Get Ready for the Coming Land War in Online Display Ads

The premise for the need for consolidation was linked to a chart depicting the value chain for display advertising, which showed that not only are online publishers facing competition from their peers, but that they are incurring addtional layers of cost as buyers seek more targeted advertising and as they outsource more of their sales operations.

So the consolidation referred to was more about vertical / platform consolidation than publisher consolidation.

A big part of the problem appears to be that the publishers/media owners are getting pushed down the value chain by outsourcing the sales process to Ad Networks who are then able to create a value added offering by selling ads targeted by user demographic or geography rather than by site.

The chart in the article came from an IAB presentation prepared by the Jordan Edminston Group.
Brand Advertising Online and The Next Wave of M&A

The presentation provides some interesting insights into some of the drivers for online publishers including growing demand for more targeted advertising, and video ads.

Coming back to the original article, it ends by saying that consolidation has the potential to lead to better pricing for publishers. I am not sure if it seems that clear to me.

What I do think is clearer though is that online publishers need to find ways to move further up the value chain.

About the Author
AdTeamBlog is by John Stewart the Founder and CEO of www.sitemanagernow an online advertising booking management solution for online media owners and advertising networks.

One feature that seems to have got a lot of people excited is that it can display content in portrait mode as opposed to the typical landscape mode of a desktop or notebook computer.

The irony of this is that existing computers could easily have their screens vertical instead of horizontal, however for the likes of publishers and media companies the change could be significant.

Why is that so? Well the primary reason is that a vertical format lends itself to presenting information in a similar way to a book or a magazine – and hence the excitement from media companies.

As Warren Buffet noted in his letter to shareholders in 2006

“For most of the 20th Century, newspapers were the primary source of information for the American public. Whether the subject was sports, finance, or politics, newspapers reigned supreme. Just as important, their ads were the easiest way to find job opportunities or to learn the price of groceries at your town’s supermarkets.”

The internet changed this in two significant ways – firstly with the increased accessibility to information and secondly in the way we consume information.

With print publications one typically starts on page one and sequentially goes through the publication page by page, with the internet we can go straight to an article.

And herein lies the attraction of the iPad to media companies. By moving away from a web style publication to a digital magazine style publication media companies can potentially integrate premium large format (e.g. full page) ads into content and force readers to view the ads if they want to read the content. Not only that, but one would assume that this format lends it self better to a pay per view/subscription model.

In Australia Fairfax appear well advanced with an iPad offering and Sensis who have the Yellow Pages directory say that they too have been working on developing iPad apps.

One feels that there is a certain amount of clutching at straws. Even with the strong initial demand for the iPad it will take some time before this hardware device has significant market penetration, especially when you consider the number of existing desktop and notebook computers out there. And one should also consider that the way the iPad receives it’s information is via the internet.

However one can’t help but think that the iPad could be a catalyst for the next round of changes in the world of publishing and interactive advertising.

A couple of things moved the goal posts on this – one being the increased frequency af ads that users see – which in turn reduces clickthrough rate as a percentage, and the other being the introduction of Cost per Click advertising by the likes of Google.

So why hasn’t Cost per Click(CPC) become the standard pricing model?

The primary reason is that a click is a measurable activity that doesn’t necessarily show buyer intent – someting that many will be familiar with when they look at their advertising reports and see lots of clicks, but limited follow through.

So why don’t advertisers push harder to get pricing for their media buys that is results based e.g. cost per transaction/activity? In the online auction environment it is quite straight forward, but then one could argue that this is not a typical media buy.

As technology evolves it is becoming easier to track users/consumers from when they see an online or mobile ad to  the completion of a transaction. In the mobile space it is only a matter of time before geo targeted advertising becomes more prevalent and sophisticated to a point where it can trigger an ad when you are within a certain distance of a retail outlet, and then tell if you went to the point of sale.

So why isn’t cost per transaction/activity adverting more popular?

Possibly one of the key reasons that cost per transaction/activity isn’t more widely used is because it is actually quite difficult for the advertiser/media buyer and the media owner to agree on a price.

From the media company’s perspective they don’t want to take on the risk of the advertising failing due to poor offer, creative or pricing, and will typically look to offset this risk by insisting on a minimum spend regardless of results – effectively negotiating a bonus for overachieving.

In reality it is probably the advertiser that is more hesitant to pursue media buys priced on a cost per transaction/activity basis because it opens up an ugly can of worms for the marketing department and their advertising agency by asking the question “How much should we pay for each new sale?”.

As they say – those who live by the sword, die by the sword.

However, as part of the announcement they included some information on a new mobile advertising platform that they call iAds. Here is part of the blurb from http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2010/04/08iphoneos.html

“iAd, Apple’s new mobile advertising platform, combines the emotion of TV ads with the interactivity of web ads. Today, when users click on mobile ads they are almost always taken out of their app to a web browser, which loads the advertiser’s webpage. Users must then navigate back to their app, and it is often difficult or impossible to return to exactly where they left. iAd solves this problem by displaying full-screen video and interactive ad content without ever leaving the app, and letting users return to their app anytime they choose.”

Reading between the lines it s easy to see that Apple aren’t just talking about a new ad format, but that they also want to be part of the ad sales process through the creation of an advertising network – like the ITunes store but for mobile ads.

A further indication of this came when they announced to iPhone App Store developers that they could not use location based triggering of advertisements in their applications – which probably means that they want to own this functionality themselves. http://gizmodo.com/5464403/a-hint-at-apples-mobile-advertising-plans-location-location-location

By shifting the goal posts away from the web browser I am sure that Apple is hoping it can find a way to generate advertising revenue without having to go head to head with the likes of Google.

Is this good news for advertisers and media buyers though?

There is no doubt that mobile advertising is currently the poor cousin to web advertising – mainly due to the limitations presented by small screens on mobile phones. The iPhone with its larger screen certainly opens up opportunities both on the browser, and when launched by an application. However the iAds platform could potentially create greater complexity for advertisers if it means that they have to have ads created in another proprietry Apple format, and one has to wonder what the implications are if viewers cannot click through to a web site for more information.

No doubt it wall all come clear in time.

Getting back to my opening sentence about the new iPhone OS. There is a bit of a twist to this story. Supposedly an Apple employee left one of the yet to be released iPhones in a bar, and someone pocketed it. News of the loss has spread around the world, fuelled by photos and snippets of information about what features the new phone may have when it is released in June this year.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/gadgets/3604744/Apple-wants-next-gen-iPhone-back
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/technology/news/article.cfm?c_id=5&objectid=10639559

The cynical person inside me thinks that it was all a very well executed viral marketing campaign. It certainly makes more engaging reading that a feature list for a new OS.

The big thing going for TV advertising is that it can convey emotion, tell a story, and engage the viewer.

However when there is an endless stream of advertising compelling us to not smoke, not drive too fast with kids in the car, not drink and drive, skin cancer prevention, breast cancer detection, cervical cancer awareness, charities trying to guilt us into supporting their causes… 

It is enough to drive a grown person to the internet.

As an example Jetstar in Australia recently announced that they would shift 40% of their marketing budget into social media
http://mumbrella.com.au/jetstar-to-switch-40-of-marketing-budget-into-social-media-21152

You can’t deny that making this claim got them plenty of media coverage – which is a good start, but what the heck are they going to spend their money on? Are they going to have a room full of people blogging, tweeting, and facebooking all day? And if so what are they going to be saying?

One thing that does seem to be a prominent feature of “Social Networking” by companies is Freebies – Jetstar offered free seats on a new Sydney to Melbourne route, and 1,000 seats for 2 cents each (would have to be 10 cents in NZ unless you used EFTPOS).

Hang on a second, did I hear a direct marketer mumble something in the corner?

The real attraction of “Social Networking” is that it offers a cost effective way to create and publish content that can be found by people searching for information in near real time using tools like Twitter Search and Tweetdeck, and then passed along to their firends/associates.

This on its own is not enough. A tweet can only hold 140 characters, so a promotional tweet will typically include a link to a web site with more information / a way to complete a transaction. The smart marketers will at this point realise that it is critical to get the clickers to sign up to an email list as this offers the key ingredient to remarketing to these people.

So why do I say that Social Media is hype? The reasonI say this is because I believe that not all marketers will have the same success using social media, and that there will be such a flood of companies trying to leverage social media that the consumer will look for ways to actively filter the information that is poured in their direction.