emerging technologies
While we have become used to the Internet as a free medium, where we can read and interact with any content we want, it is the fact that it is an advertiser’s medium that keeps it free. And that means that as the way we interact with content changes as technologies evolve, so advertising follows.
It used to be that the level of interaction a web user has with a web site could be measured by the number of pages of that web site the user viewed. Now, technology such as AJAX and rich media such as video mean that the time spent on a web page can be more meaningful than the number of pages viewed. The key word here is “engagement”, and technology and data analysis is working towards being able to determine how web sites can quantify the level of engagement with a viewer.
VideoEgg (www.videoegg.com), which specialises in adverts that appear in video clips and Facebook applications, introduced a Pay Per Engagement pricing model on its advertising network in February 2008. With time spent on site increasing, advertisers are able to utilise that to build more interactive, more time intensive adverts. VideoEgg defines the engagement here as “a user-initiated rollover action that results in a sustained ad expansion. Once expanded, an ad may contain a video, game, or other of rich content” (Rodgers, 2008). Part of VideoEgg’s offering is to optimise the placement of so-called “invitation ads” to guarantee the requested number of engagements in an advertiser’s target demographic.
But isn’t banner advertising dead?
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| VideoEgg offers in video advertising. The banner will show a video within the video. |
A little research online will reveal plenty of commentary declaring the decline of display advertising. Increasingly, consumers are becoming both weary and wary of advertising. Click through rates on banners are dropping, so the effectiveness of display advertising is being questioned by some. With the focus in eMarketing on tracking and measuring response and engagement, should a company spend money on less measurable activities such as “brand building”, where they are paying on a CPM basis?
Consider this: anecdotal evidence shows that banner advertising can increase click through rates on contextual adverts by 249% (Godin, 2006).
What does this tell us? Measurement should take place across all channels, and no channel should be utilised in isolation. The best results will be gained through an integrated and holistic approach to eMarketing.
