NEWS: IAB hopes to help marketers cut down on buying errors

BizReport : Advertising : June 02, 2008

IAB hopes to help marketers cut down on buying errors

Buying ads anywhere can be confusing; buying ads on the Internet is perhaps the most confusing ad space, however. Why? Because many marketers don't understand what the different sites and ad networks are really offering.

by Kristina Knight

The Interactive Advertising Bureau has released a set of best practices to help marketers with the online media buying process and - hopefully - cut down on mistakes made and misunderstandings between marketers and networks.

“The research that we’ve conducted with publishers and third-party ad servers has led us to conclude that strong internal controls related to campaign setup and an early review of counts will significantly reduce occurrences of large counting discrepancies,” said George Ivie, Executive Director of the Media Rating Council (MRC).

Here are the key results from the joint study between the IAB and several advertising agencies.

First, they recommend that advertising agencies and networks clear up the ambiguous language in contracts. Rather that explaining in obtuse language, the council recommends using simple language that advertisers and publishers can understand and that can be placed in an ad server.

Next, set up billing information that is clear and concise. Tell marketers and businesses exactly when they can expect to be billed for search ads, for display ads and how those bills will be sent.

Finally, don't skimp on the explanations. The survey indicated that many businesses don't understand what they are getting from a media buy because they don't understand the differences between a simple display ad purchase and a rich media ad purchase.

By offering more information to businesses interested in online advertising, ad networks and agencies can better ensure a top ROI on the campaign and can build loyal working relationship between agencies and advertisers.

NEWS: Ad network strives to make coupons more meaningful

By MICHAEL LIEDTKE 
AP Business Writer

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- While most forms of advertising are getting better at targeting likely customers, coupons rarely hit the mark. To wit: U.S. consumers redeemed less than 1 percent of the estimated 285 billion coupons issued last year for groceries and various packaged goods.

But a small Silicon Valley company is striving to improve coupons' aim with a new online distribution network based on a contextual concept that helped turn Google Inc. into the Internet's most popular - and profitable - advertising vehicle.

After several weeks of tests, Mountain View-based Coupons Inc. plans to unveil its "Brandcaster" system Monday.

Finding online coupons now typically requires consumers to make a special trip to Coupons Inc.'s site, coupons.com, or similar destinations like smartsouce.com, ppgazette.com and coolsavings.com.

If Brandcaster works, Web surfers should start seeing more offers to print out coupons for products that have a contextual connection to a topic that piqued a reader's interest in the first place. For instance, someone looking at a Web page about healthy food might be offered a coupon for organic milk.

It's the same idea behind the text-based ad links that Google displays alongside search results and other information at hundreds of thousands of Web sites.

Coupons Inc. even recruited one of Google's advertising masterminds to become an adviser for the Brandcaster system.

Gokul Rajaram, who left Google late last year, said he wanted to help out because he views Brandcaster as a logical extension of Google's "AdSense" - a system he helped launch in 2003 to distribute relevant advertising links to other Web sites.

Since then, AdSense has attracted more than $15 billion in advertising revenue.

Coupons are "one of the big bastions" of advertising that still hasn't made a significant move to the Internet, Rajaram said. "I think this is can drive large amounts (of coupons) online."

If Rajaram's right, Brandcaster could drain even more revenue away from the beleaguered newspaper industry, which has been cutting staff and other expenses to cope with advertising's accelerating shift to the Internet.

Advertisers paid newspapers to distribute nearly 90 percent of the coupons issued last year for packaged goods, according to NCH Marketing Services, which helps retailers turn in redeemed coupons to manufacturers.

Just 0.4 percent of the packaged goods coupons were printed out on the Internet last year, NCH estimated.

Steven Boal, who started Brandcaster a decade ago, doesn't have any delusions about approaching Google's ad volume.

But he believes Brandcaster will play a pivotal role in achieving his goal of generating $400 million to $500 million in annual revenue, paving the way for a possible initial public offering of stock. He declined to reveal privately held Coupon Inc.'s annual revenue.

To start, Brandcaster will distribute coupons from about 200 brands to about 3,000 Web sites. The advertisers sending their coupons through Brandcaster include General Mills Inc., Kimberly-Clark Corp., Kraft Foods Inc. and Clorox Co. Within a year, Boal hopes to have 35,000 Web sites showing coupons through Brandcaster.

Like Google's advertising system, Coupons will share revenue with the Web sites participating in Brandcaster. Advertisers will only have to pay when a consumer prints out a coupon...

IDC: US Internet Ad Spending to Boom

Juan Carlos Perez, IDG News Service

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Friday, May 30, 2008 9:50 AM PDT

Online advertising will balloon in the coming years, becoming bigger than all advertising media except direct marketing by 2012, according to IDC.

Spending in U.S. online advertising will double from US$25.5 billion in 2007 to $51.1 billion in 2012, along the way climbing up from the fifth-largest to the second-largest ad medium and dwarfing newspapers, cable and broadcast TV, IDC said Friday.

The growth will come despite the economic turmoil roiling the U.S., as marketers shift advertising dollars to the Internet to take advantage of emerging formats like online video, which will see its ad spending shoot up sevenfold from $500 million in 2007 to $3.8 billion in 2012, a compound annual growth rate of almost 50 percent for that time period.

Factors that will boost online video advertising include an increase in broadband access, faster connections, the availability of more "premium" content and viewers' embrace of the medium's flexibility to pick what they watch and when, according to IDC.

Meanwhile, search advertising will continue as the single largest format for online advertising. Search advertising is currently dominated by Google with about 70 percent of the U.S. spending, IDC said.

Earlier this month, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) reported that U.S. online ad spending increased 26 percent in 2007 over 2006, and that the Google-dominated search format not only remained the market's largest, but also increased its share of the overall pie.