Favoriting Ads

I run ads on this blog from two ad networks; Federated Media and FeedBurner. They sell the ads and serve them on this blog. I get the opportunity to approve the ads and occasionally I do decline ads but not very often.

Last month there were ads running on this blog from Compete and Hitwise, two companies that compete with my portfolio company comScore. I thought for a while before approving those ads but I eventually did because I feel that my readers are very interested in web traffic reporting services and that the Compete and Hitwise ads are way more relevant to them than most of the ads that appear on this blog. That caused a bit of consternation among some of the employees at comScore. I heard questions like "is Fred actually promoting the services of companies that compete with us?". I am going to think even harder before approving ads for companies that compete with my portfolio going forward because now I am sensitized to the conflicting messages that ads on this blog can send.

As a "publisher" I'd like even more control over the ads that run on this blog. Today it's pretty binary. Either they run or they don't. Nothing in between.

Frankly I'd like to be able to "favorite"certain ads. Like this one running on my blog via FeedBurner right now.

This is a great looking ad and a great looking product. Frankly I want that product and I'd bet that more than a few of you all do too.

So I should be able to click on the ad and favorite it and make it run more often than it would normally run on this blog.

comScore should buy some ads from FeedBurner and Federated Media to run on my blog and if possible, I'd favorite them. Compete and Hitwise should be able to get their message out on this blog, but I'd favor comScore ads for sure because it's the superior service.

But we can take this idea even further - to the audience side of the equation. Advertisers want to measure engagement without relying on clickthrough rates which aren't always the best measure of advertising effectiveness.

Then why not offer the audience the opportunity to favorite the ads? And make it mean something. If you favorite an ad, you'll see it twice the rate of all other ads for example. I am not going to click on this Blackberry Curve ad. I don't want to disrupt my workflow right now. But believe me, this ad has made an impact on me. At some point, I am going to go out and get me one of these curve phones. Let me favorite the ad and reinforce that decision without impacting my workflow.

The advertising industry needs to take some lessons from social media. Clicking isn't the only engagement with media that matters on the web. Commenting, favoriting, tagging, sharing, and many more engagement actions are important.

We need to bring these actions into the hands of the publisher and the audience. It will make for a much better advertising experience for all of us.

Comments

[Charlie]

Rather than complain about the ads that are running on your blog, if they see that as valuable placement, they should be running ads in that same network...nothing stopping them.

[hhoward lindzon]

Really a good idea, especially since seeing this ad last week made me ping you and talk about how cool the phone is and cant wait to get one.

[Jesse Chenard]

I am not sure I agree with the concept. Missing from your equation is the advertisers wants and needs. All sorts of thought, planning and targeting go into an ad campaign and giving the publisher the ability to modify delivery could greatly impact the advertiser goals. This is especially true in the case of a network where we have to meter delivery across hundreds or thousands of sites.

Also it is important to remember that many advertisers have vastly different goals. Some want eyeballs, some want clicks, some want conversions, etc. How often and where ads are displayed to achieve these goals is usually best controlled at a network level.

As for consumers favoriting ads I would think that once a consumer has shown interest in that ad the creative has done its job (again depending on the advertisers goals). What would be interesting would be to feedback to the network or ad provider category interest (at least at the end user level). This would allow for some more granular targeting and hopefully a better end user experience.

I think Charlie has the right idea, ComScore should pay to run on Federated and Feedburner. If this blog is that valuable a space for them they can pre-empt whatever competitors may be trying to run here.

It would be interesting to see what the conversion numbers actually look like though. Who knows, maybe your blog isnt a good spot for Hitwise and Compete to be running and it is benefiting ComScore after all by wasting their ad spend ;-)

[Tom W.]

Fred, you've touched on a bigger point here - most small publishers have so little control over what advertising appears on their sites. The relationship is unbalanced in the extreme; you're a rare case really - your blog makes decent money that you donate, so it's not a living or part of a living (like for a freelancer for example). Small online publishers who really care about revenue have so little power over the content - they're stuck in the "take what you can get" mode.

It's hilarious to call this "new media" and "web 2.0" and "social media" when it's still the old hardball, drink-cart at 5 pm in the hallway, ad salesmanship. The whole thin cries out for an open marketplace, but what's developing is in fact, a closed marketplace (named Google?) that has publishers feeling like illegal aliens in the very landscape they've pioneered.

Not much has changed since the empty "content is king" days of the 90s, frankly.

[Tom W.]

To clarify in brief - a truly open ad network for bid/ask placements (perhaps run by a semi-nonprofit like NYSE or Wiki) - would be a huge boon to the future of man. Or at least ... publising!

[Gerald Buckley]

Recently deployed an ad network at the day job. LEARNED SO MUCH! IF you're in a position to both sell and post the ads there's a GREAT open source ad platform. I'm with Tom... an open bid/ask system for publishers run out of the "Switzerland" of ads would be killer. I don't WANT to sell the ad space. I'm happy to provide the realestate and lease it out to RELEVANT, vetted creative. If it exists let me know. Meanwhile, I found a cheap, high performance solution that works mighty well.

I want to be careful about pimping someone else's stuff here... So, Mr. W if you say it's OK I'll post back lower down the line with the name of the outfit.

It allows for weighting, grouping, geo-targeting, flash and all the analytics your buyers could want under their own logins... a hellacious lot of goodness in that free, little open-source package. Lemme know.

[jim parker]

To take it just a little further - now that I hear from you that you like the ad above - I couldn't resist clicking it. I believe that I would be more inclined to click an ad if I knew a blog author that I respected had "favorited" the ad.
But of course, "favoriting" ads would change the economics of network advertising such as FM or FB. Whether it be the author or the audience doing it, favoriting ads means that the value of those ads would change - and possibly not in a way that the advertisers want (as Howard points out above), but yet possibly in a way that advertisers/authors do like - meaning who benefits from the added value (how do they get paid?). Is it just the audience, the consumer of the ads? The Author? THe networks? or the Business doing the advertising? Sounds like a pretty cool problem to figure out.
I like the idea.

[soxiam]

Nice post. Every time someone tries another user-controlled-advertising model, I watch with great interest. On paper, it's logical, user-friendly, fair and certainly sounds like it could be a smart, profitable model. Even for the advertisers who don't do well in this type of model, it has the potential to provide them with valuable insights on why their ads don't do well --- demographics, targeting, context relevance, etc. In practice however, I see this model failing again and again and it frustrates me a great deal. The latest to un-impress was CondeNet's teen socialnetworking service, Flip. And I just don't get why.

[Darren Herman]

Jesse touched upon a good subject up top which is about the advertisers needs and wants. The current model of purchasing media (which is essentially what is happening with these networks you are in) is on the cost-per model, or sometimes, sponsorship. In order for this model to function efficiently, the advertiser and/or their respective agency has done a lot of thought and research about touch points and deliver (frequency cap, etc).

I believe that publishers should be able to request certain brands/ads and possibly favorite them, but an advertiser will not want to pay for ads for a product that isn't in flight dates (the time of which the campaign is running) and for an old product. Heck, I'd love to run the Apple 1984 campaign on my blog - but should Apple Inc. be paying for that today? Lets think about that point.

[Noah Robinson]

I love this idea. Jason Calacanis suggested something like this a few years ago when he started WIN.

[David Henderson]

Blogged this here.

Fred, you have hit upon the essence of Marketing 2.0!

Who's in control? Today it's the Client. Tomorrow it will be the user.

As the user/consumer do I care what the advertiser or publisher wants from an advertising perspective?

Hello people.... absolutely not?

The only thing I care about is what I want.

I have scarce attention.
I have abundant choice options.
I have implicit and explicit intentions.

What I don't have time for, patience for, tolerance for is wasting my scarce Attention! Please STOP NOW!

Marketers, advertisers, publishers are implicitly tagged "attention wasters" in consumer's minds with regards to ads. Paying attention to those ad placements in any medium is a low ROA (return on attention) proposition to the consumer. The consumer's only retaliation for such relentless constant abuse is to erect attention firewalls - I choose to ignore you 99.9% of the time.

Think about... $300B of marketing goes out every year, exposing US consumers to 3000 marketing messages a day, at 10 sec/ marketing message that's 8 hours of marketing messages/ day/ US consumer. How much of that really gets through?

If you let consumers rate or favorite ads that they have zero influence over guess what they are going to do? Tell you they hate advertising, rate them as bad most of the time or completely ignore you 99.9% of the time.

The answer of course is to get the consumer involved in the process. And that's not with research methodologies like comscore, hitwise or compete or even the current crop of consumer "out of control" behavioral strategies.

This is the great promise of the Attention Economy which offers up concepts like the principles of Attentiontrust.org.

This offers us an opportunity to potentially solve the challenges of marketing 1.0 for all stakeholders:

Marketers would get efficiency versus the ridiculous 1.0 inefficiencies.
Publishers would get higher eCPMs versus less than "beer money" eCPMs of today
Consumers would get ROA versus the constant barrage of intrusive irrelevance they get today.
Privacy becomes irrelevant - user in control makes privacy go away.

Call me a dreamer but this is the world I want to build and live in. I want advertising as a service! Right now it's just an annoyance.

[ashkan karbasfrooshan]

Fred, Fred, Fred...

as a VC/blogger, your case is truly unique... but:

- the concept of favoriting an ad technically is available as we speak: by either frequency capping or weighting down or up an ad...

- your suggestion of favoriting would not solve your problem of random comscore employees seeing ads for hitwise and compete and freaking out.

- lastly, this made me think: this makes the argument for sponsorships and fixed fee placements stronger, which oddly has been a receding category amongst ad buys online.

i'll spare everyone the lennthy comment but there's more here if you are interested:
http://www.watchmojo.com/web/blog/?p=1643

[dan]

Personally, I like the idea of users choosing ads for my site, I would so buy into that in a heart beat, give the customer the choice of what they want to see on the site, and odds are I would do so much better than pennies a day relying on content oriented ads, some sometimes are not so content oriented. Nice idea, where can I get one?

[CoryS]

Google's proposed acquisition of DoubleClick has embedded in it a little technology that meets your thoughts of a user based voting system for ad responses, which we covered here...
http://www.patentmonkey.com/PM/Default.aspx?tabid=63&EntryID=71

In short DoubleClick describes a couple ways to cast ads out in test for a community of users to rate and also deliver better tuned ads to user communities as a result. Only took 12 years, but the technology may finally be catching up with DoubleClick's vision and could be executed in some cool ways (e.g. staying on a web page where you can see others' rating in aggregate/by user and provide your own). Yahoo Ad Network + MyBlogLog, hmmm.

Only if the world didn't think that these interactive user voting methods weren't considered an invasion of privacy.

Agree with the idea that CTRs aren't the only way to measure ad effectiveness.

[Joe]

I think you should run the ad for the competitor, then change your blog to include a custom message above it saying "hitwise is the suXX0r... use comScore... it's pretty sweet."

Or you could do that whole fancy thing you described.

[rick]

There should be a way for you to choose your ads.

[P-Air]

...and now we interrupt the seriousness for some real important comments...

Fred, The Curve rocks!!! Bought it the day after it came out and still had to go to 3 Cingular stores in San Francisco before finding one that hadn't sold out. The form factor, the Pearl-style rolling ball cursor, and how RIM facilitated access to menus and added quick menus, is great. The Cingular EDGE network is still slow, but the device overcomes some of that let down. I'm not even uncomfortable holding the device to my ear for phone usage (versus using a bluetooth headset), as I was at times with the 8700.

Having kept up with your past trials and tribulations over devices, and seeing you end up where I did with the 8700 tells me that you'll really dig this new device.

...OK, now back to your regularly schedule insights...

[Marco Hansell]

I agree, this is a pretty cool concept. I see the issue everyone is saying that advertisers all have different goals, and that this model may somewhat ignore the goals of the consumer.

Maybe what we're really talking about is having an ad-network create something like a tag on their ads based on certain feedback. Say Fred likes an ad, you could tag it as a "site-owner's favorite". This tag is shown to all visitors of the site.

From the advertisers perspective it almost becomes like a "featured item" which will get more traction on your site, and perhaps you get a higher payout for those one's that you "favorite".

From the consumer perspective a lot of ad networks already adjust their showings based on the CTR in a certain environment...I'm not sure I would be very much interested in "favoriting" an ad as a consumer in any other way.

[Shannon Clark]

Fred as an entrepreneur building among other current projects an ad network, I'm reading this post and the comments on it with great interest. We're building an ad network for ads within applications - web apps, mobile apps, even desktop apps - and we could certainly implement ome aspects of your ideas here - in fact to the extent that our model is based on a publisher interactively working with our network (via essentially an api) the application should be selecting ads which will be relevant and valuable in the context of that app.

We plan on working with a variety of other networks.

(I'm based in San Francisco but spend 1 week or so most months in NYC, my business partner is based in Long Island - I'm actually in town thru Tues if you want to meet up, happy to talk about our plans further)

[Erik Peterson]

Fred, I'm planning to test a similar idea with the startup / Facebook application I'm launching in the next couple of weeks.

Users will be able to favorite ads. The system will display their friends' favorite ads, along with some simple stats (# of friends who like that ad, list of friends).

I expect the CTR to be significantly higher when the ads are tied to a social recommendation system.

I'll let you know how it goes.

[John Miller]

It's nice to have a way to choose your own ads! For example I want one related to converting avi to mp4 http://freeavitomp4converter.com/
What should I do?