Found this little guide I wrote for sales staff when talking with customers about what they want in their digital advertising. I would feel most of this still applies for simple digital display adverts so thought I’d share it.
Attention grabber:-
Tag / Catch Line
Eye catching animation
Strong relevant image
Key is simple and to the point.
It is commonly said that you have 3 seconds to catch the users attention, so the first slide is key to the banner’s success.
Who, What, Where:-
Company name / logo
More details relating to first slide
List of other services
Keep it simple, people are lazy and will not read lots of text.
Call to action:-
Click here to…
Come visit us at…
Find the best bargains at…
Banners with a message telling users to click here or similar generally have higher click through rates than ones without.
Goal of the banner should be to encourage a click of the banner!
This is gaugeable and clicks are counted, if you can show the customer that they had a lot of clicks they will be more likely to re-book!
Telephone numbers and full addresses are secondary, as if the user is interested they will click the advert and be taken to the website, which should have these details on.
Keep the banner copy short and to the point!
The news industry is thinking too much about news, which is a product that has declined in interest since other forms of entertainment have arrived.
People didn’t start listening to the radio for the news instead of reading the paper. They started listening to radio for the music instead. The same goes for VHS, DVDs and the Internet.
There is of course still an audience for news but not one big enough to maintain the huge businesses built around the daily consumption of it.
And these businesses at still stuck trying to think of new ways of selling news.
For instance when the iPad came out many flocked to it as a saviour and spat their existing news products on to it, with the kitch page turning effects and sound effects replicating not innovating.
However few have shouted about the huge profits, despite plenty of people paying for content on the device, just not news.
So what next for these companies, wait for the profits to dry up in the news on dead trees business, whilst scaling their teams ever smaller to meet the lower profits of digital news products?
Well what else have these businesses got?
Often huge banks of creative people, and more than just journalists, they have vast numbers of advertising and editorial designers.
Why not re focus their production departments into production houses that other sectors can outsource to?
Perhaps one production business will emerge to service all news businesses. Allowing the news agencies to become leaner and centre themselves around just the content. Their words and photos sent off for somewhere else to design, print and distribute.
With other production centres producing print and digital marketing for all products and other people such as Google and Facebook.
Which brings us to the print facilities, what if instead of a newspaper being printed in one place and sent by trucks around the country. They used the vast network of local presses to print papers close to the areas of high demand. Similar to idea of printing UK papers in Spain.
Midnight brain dump finished.
When posting a YouTube video on a website of mine, I wanted to illustrate it with a thumbnail of the video without loading the video itself. This had for a while meant screen grabbing, cropping and uploading the image, which is rather time consuming.
I came across the URLs to the YouTube automatically generated thumbnails:-
http://img.youtube.com/vi/XXXXX/hq2.jpg
http://img.youtube.com/vi/XXXXX/2.jpg
Where XXXXX is the video id, which you can find in most of the YouTube URLs. The number at the end can be changed to 0, 1, 2 or 3 to choose a different image.
This speeded things up a bit (although sometimes the generated thumbnails aren’t great) as I bookmarked the link then would paste the video ID in.
However I have finally pulled my finger out and created a slightly more elegant solution which I can paste the full URL in and hit go. Then it displays all the available thumbnails and I can right click and copy the image URL.
Here is my YouTube Thumbnail Generator.
Whilst looking through referring domain and traffic source reports for a couple of websites, I was intrigued by the amount of traffic coming from ISP homepage portals such as:-
orange.co.uk
sky.com
bt.yahoo.com
talktalk.co.uk
aol.co.uk
These pages are often set as homepages when installing your ISP’s broadband software, or commonly used by home users who have their e-mail with their ISP and access it via web mail.
Initially I thought that the amount of traffic was coming from feed readers embedded on the home, sport or news pages on the portal site. Although in reality most portals don’t link out too much, instead pushing you to their content pages (although a lot of this is supplied not original content). They tend to make some of their revenue through ad networks, so more page impression, more money.
On closer inspection of the full referring URLs nearly all of the traffic was coming from the portals search engines. When you look at the sites, most have a very prominent search box with the “enhanced by Google” badge next to it (image above). The presence of the search box might be why a lot of people leave the site as their homepage.
All of this referring traffic is often reported by analytics software as other sites or links not search engines (except AOL which most recognise as search), which has the potential to be mis-leading if you don’t dig deep enough into your stats.
The odd thing is that most of these portals tuck their search results pages under the sub-domain “search” which should make it easy for analytics software to notice.
A slight side note is that most are using Google not Bing for their search too.
I picked up a can of Pepsi today and noticed they are running yet another ring-pull code based competition, nothing new there. However when I looked at the entry methods, alongside the ubiquitous ”text to enter”, the online entry method has been replaced by an address for their Facebook page.
Visiting the page they have a Facebook app which requires to “like” the page before you can access the entry form, which is rather cunning. So Pepsi’s on can promotions are now, not only potentially driving sales of the drink, but also getting people to market the brand for them on Facebook.
After the first stage of the entry form (entering the code from the ring-pull) there is a standard data capture form and terms and conditions etc. After submitting this you are offered the opportunity to give your friends a free chance to enter. By picking them from a list and posting a link to the entry form on their wall.
The only thing that annoyed me through the process was the fact that the competition sends people to the Pepsi Max page even on Regular (which I bought) and Diet cans. Forcing users to like Pepsi Max even if they don’t buy that product. My cynical mind says this is probably deliberate and maybe Pepsi Max doesn’t sell as well as the other varieties, so needs marketing more.
PS: I un-liked Pepsi Max after entering the competition.
Spotify announced today that they will be reducing the amount of music free or open account holders can access. The free account which was most early adopters had, had been unlimited but with adverts. Open accounts were the newer version of the free account and were ad supported but also had a limit of 20 hours per month listening time.
From 1st May 2011 Free and Open accounts will effectively be the same, with ads, a lower 10 hours per month limit and also a limit of 5 plays per track.
This morning I’ve seen several tweets and comments announcing that people will go back to piracy or pay for a subscription. Also a whole host of less intelligent rude responses about Spotify and Music label conspiracies.
I’m beginning to wonder if this new limit is actually a good thing, users of the system will probably react in three ways:-
1. Move to another source of free music (Piracy, myspace, soundcloud maybe)
2. Step up and get a paid subscription (It’s not really that expensive when you think about it)
3. Continue to use the service to discover music they haven’t listened to before
The first option will be good for other services across the web, create a bit of competition between where you listen again.
Number 2 will be good for artists as part of your subscription will eventually make its way to the artist, even if it is a few pence per play.
The final will be good for smaller artists, as it will push demand further down the tail (Read the long tail if you haven’t already) and give potentially some lesser know artists to shine.
Personally I use Spotify to listen to music a few times before deciding to buy the CD or digital download. I probably won’t spend anymore on music though, just make me decide a little bit quicker whether or not to buy.
There has been a huge buzz around daily deals and group buying websites recently with the lion’s share of press attention going to Groupon and Living Social. They have spawned a thousand and one “me too” websites across the globe, have seen huge amounts of investment and are taking on staff left, right and centre.
Lets strip this back to the fact that these websites are a new hurdle* for consumers to jump through in order to get something at a lower price. These hurdles are nothing new and have had various guises over the years from the simple cut-out coupon in a magazine to signing up to a mailing list to get 10% off your next order.
These hurdles have been around for ages however still only a small portion of consumers use them on a regular basis, this has probably been as the mechanic has never been easy enough. Let’s face it how many times have you received a voucher and forgotten to take it, let it expire or found that the terms don’t allow you to use it? When that happens most people will simply decide to pay the full price instead.
So if there was a perfect mechanic that suddenly meant every single consumer could save on something with no effort to jump the hurdle first, what would happen?
Businesses would stop accepting it surely, as a voucher normally lowers price which normally results in less profit for the business. So can these businesses centred around a pricing hurdle really sustain all this growth?
*There’s a big chunk about pricing hurdles and price sensitivity in the Economic Naturalist by Robert H Frank, which explains it all in English rather than economic theory terms.
I’m proud to say that last week I collected the Website of the Year award for EDP24, at the EDF Energy East of England Media Awards 2010. EDP24 is the website for the Norfolk daily newspaper the Eastern Daily Press, which also picked up Daily Newspaper of the Year too, I work as Digital Developer on the website as my day job.
Ego boost over, back to work now.
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