Tag: google

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Context matters with online B-to-B ads

Testing in the online world has never become easier or more affordable. It’s therefore no surprise that many assumptions about online ads are being reconsidered. Today, Enquirio and Google announced the validation of one such tenet. It had been assumed, through common sense and improved response rates, that an ad displayed in the context of similar subject matter will do better than one with no relationship to content.

What do we mean by contextual ad placement? The premise is that if I’m an executive who influences a decision to purchase construction equipment, and I see an ad as I review a construction industry portal site, I am more likely to recall the message — and the brand — than if I saw the same ad on an unrelated site.

In research by Enquirio and commissioned by Google, this assumption was validated. The research methodology included randomized test subjects, given tasks related to the content of the sites they were reviewing. Some sites contained ads that were relevant, others contained the same ads but had no connection to those ads’ subject matter.

Results were gathered in the form of questionnaire answers and aggregate eye scan heat maps of the sites being reviewed.

Two key take-aways:

  • Through contextually relevant business-to-business (B-to-B) ads, purchasers are 52% more likely to associate your message with your brand
  • With contextually relevant B-to-B ads, it is 28% more likely that your brand “will make the cut” and be shortlisted.

The Enquirio site has the whitepaper available for download.

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Google and Radiohead: Two great tastes that taste great together

Google, it appears, has gotten into the music video business. They recently worked with Radiohead to create a video in support of the, HO USE OF_C ARDS. Watch the video, featuring the scanned face of Thom York:

What is so impressive is no cameras or lights were used. They instead collected information about the shapes and relative distances of objects (mostly York’s face) using laser scanning technology. The video was then created entirely through visualizations of this data.

Now explore that vast amounts of data that this laser face-scanning scanning technology yields. It’s amazing.

HOU SE OF_C ARDS video - data exploration

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Boomers are not bloggers, but they still participate in social media

This morning a colleague passed along this MediaPost research brief, with the sexy but deceptive title: Boomers Are Not Bloggers. It stated what most will find obvious, that Baby Boomers have not “embraced social networking or blogs, despite being heavy users of other online services.”

Does this mean you should not focus on a social network strategy to reach this group? The answer is you definitely should have a strategy for them. But to echo the advice in Groundswell, you need to look at this group as observers and “passers-along” of social content — not active participants.

I humbly present a fairly strong case for targeting this group through social media accessed via search engines (i.e., open site such as TripAdvisor, as opposed to closed ones like Facebook. It’s called Boomers Aren’t Immune to the Branding Power of User-generated Content.

Can you provide other examples?

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Today Google does a cannonball into the social networking pool

Three weeks ago, on a lark, I registered the domain name RumSocko.com. But until just now, I wasn’t entirely sure what I was going to do with it.

Then, just moments ago, I learned that Google has entered the social network arena in a way that only a market behemoth can. Friend Connect will allow any site to have social network functionality. This tells me two things:

  1. Google sees an opportunity in social media marketing (SMM)
  2. It’s time for me to invite my friends and relatives to submit their favorite rum drinks

Of course, only point #1 is of real relevance to my fellow marketing technologists. There has been plenty of talk lately about how social networks are still groping for a viable revenue model. I suspect Google will lead the way to the banquet.

An example

The only question will then be: Must other social networks resign themselves to the crumbs that Google leaves behind?

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Google Reader replaces that stack of half-read books

Thank you, Google. I think. Today for the first time, I clicked a mysterious link in my Google Reader (which reads RSS feeds — click on the “Subscribe”button above if you don’t know what those three letters stand for). The link is labeled “Trends.” Below is what I found when I clicked it.

My so-called reading habits. Click if you’re the nosey type and want my top-read blogs

Oh, I see. That’s why I have over 1,000 unread items in my Google Reader.

So which is worse: Having to look at a stack of half-read books and looming New Yorker and Economist magazines (more on taming them later this week), or visiting Google Reader and being greeted with a chart of my crap reading habits?