TechnoCloud

Regular readers will know that I admire a well executed viral marketing campaign. It’s a pity that I heard about it before I saw it denying the neat twist at the end as the brand was revealed, although it doesn’t really detract from the entertainment.

So, if you don’t want to know what it’s marketing (there might be a little clue further up though…), then watch the embedded video below, then read the rest of the post.

The viral stands out on several counts: although personally I hate musicals I have to admire the quality of the acting and singing; the hidden cameras capture the surprise of the unsuspecting public perfectly; it plays on the lack of human interaction in large public spaces like airports; and it’s a great fit for promoting a theatre booking service and doesn’t damage the brand by trying to stand out by being too edgy.

Best of all it works, it’s had me thinking I should go to the theatre more often, just not to any musicals…

A recent post seems to have struck a chord with Google with ‘Lies, damn lies and social networking statistics‘ currently among the top few positions on Google in a number of markets for the search term social networking statistics.

As an update, Wired claimed in March 2008 that MySpace had an average growth rate of 513%, moving from 20m users (2005) to 225m (2008), with Facebook’s equivalent figure 550%.

For me though, the interesting question is less the size of the overall market - we already know it’s big - but the next challenge of monetising those audiences. It’s somewhat ironic that in a sector where there is such richness of personal data, that ad targeting remains in its infancy and the low value network ad dominates.

So why is that and what’s holding back the full potential of the social networking ad market? Let’s summarise some of the key reasons:

• Concerns from advertisers about associating themselves with the uncertainties of user generated content.
• The shear size of the inventory available.
• Lack of relevancy of ads. It’s partly a technical challenge, but rightly, there are legal and privacy issues with processing user data as Facebook Beacon found out to their cost in having to scale back their ambitions.
• Mindset - are those surfing social networks in the right mindset to respond to advertising? Google Adsense works because it’s contextual and the better ads help task-orientated users solve a problem.
• Lack of innovative creative tailored to those environments.
• Leave your thoughts in the comments section.

These challenges can be at least partially addressed through ad targeting technology, informed consent from users and better data about what users respond to and what they don’t. Also the emergence of niche social networks offers more potential to provide advertisers with a targeted audience focused on a particular activity and in theory more receptive to relevant ads within that niche.

Get close to solving these problems and the really interesting statistics will be the financial ones…

Although TechnoCloud doesn’t normally carry advertising, I’m going to make an exception to test out a new service, Pubmatic, for consideration on some higher profile sites. The service claims to optimise between ad networks you are a member of as well as ad colour to calculate the highest return.

I’ve selected a small ad unit in the sidebar in a prominent enough place to notice, but small enough hopefully not to be too obtrusive.

I’m signed up with Google Adsense to get underway, but will try to add another ad network or two to make it a more effective test. Update: AdBrite now also included.

So far, so good. It’s working and is showing some particularly garish colours which I certainly wouldn’t have chosen as part of my design, but do at least stand out.

As payback for seeing the ads, I’ll update you with the results.

The likes of Commission Junction and TradeDoubler should be stirring their tea nervously, with news that Google is moving into the world of affiliate marketing. The AdSense blog reveals that they are now ‘accepting applications for new referrals beta’, leading to a flood of chatter in the blogosphere .

Cost-per-click advertising has been one of the great success stories of online advertising and has fueled the Google Advertising juggernaut. It’s strikes a satisfactory balance between the advertiser’s desire to pay for actions only and the publisher’s desire to get paid for branding. It has its critics with regards to ongoing problems with click fraud, but it continues to thrive because it works.

While the move into cost-per-action won’t threaten the cost-per-click cash cow anytime soon, it’s an interesting play to control yet more of the world’s online ad inventory.

It does make it harder to conduct click fraud (although the fraudsters will try), but will the returns be big enough for publishers to gain sufficient take-up? The beta is US only at present, so I will have to read about other’s findings to see if the numbers look likely to add up. I’m not so sure they will.

MTV parent Viacom is allowing web users to embed videos from a number of MTV sites, including Pimp My Ride, into their web spaces. This comes at a time when Viacom requested the removal of 100k+ clips from YouTube.

While this move shows Viacom’s desire to control the source of their content on the web, they are prepared to let users consume it at least partly on their own terms, whether embedded on a blog or in their social networking space. With the content contained in their player, they can potentially place advertising around the player or within the content to monetise their content in this space.

Check out our example below to see it in action.

Interesting post from Micropersuasion adding to the growing questioning of page views as a meaningful metric.

Given the growth in technologies, such as Ajax and even humble old Flash, which allow users to interact with page content without refreshing the page, the page view was already on questionnable ground - not that the industry could agree on how best to measure them in the first place…

Add to this the network effects of influencers that take an idea or brand and discuss it outside of the source site on their blog or social space and it challenges the traditional ad standard of ‘reach’ with an alternative measure ‘depth’ - although you should still look to measure the wider reach of a campaign from the wider network effects of ‘depth’.

I can see how the ‘depth’ argument works well for brands using online advertising and PR as ways to raise awareness, stimulate conversations and drive sales of their products.

It’s less clear for content publishers trying to monetise their content through advertising - how to charge and for what? Are unique users the metric, or are channel or site sponsorships the right model or are other models better suited to this space? Time will tell. It’s debatable how important page views were anyway in the wider world of stats and cost-per-click and cost-per-action advertising.

For content publishers non-intrusive ad-supported widgets may be a tool to monetise some of the depth and for wider network effects to be the PR that drives users back to the source content and widgets. 2007 is going to be an interesting year.