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AdAge has released a new study looking at all of the primetime TV shows this fall season along with the prices for a 30-second spot on each. As one might expect, American Idol tops the list at just over $460,000 for a 30-second spot on the main show and $400,000 for a spot on the results show. Fox holds 5 of the top 10 most expensive shows which includes Glee, Family Guy, Simpsons and House.

The top 10 most expensive TV ad spots this season also includes Sunday Night Football, Grey’s Anatomy, The Office, Desperate Housewives and Two and a Half Men.

Popular tech shows Big Bang Theory and Outsources grab $195,000 and $122,900 respectively per 30-second spot.

And here we thought $1/click on Google was high! Have a look at the full report and see where your favorite shows rank.

Last year, top 100 tech blog Techcrunch added a “meta refresh” to their homepage which allowed your Internet browser to refresh the homepage at specific intervals of time without your instruction. This refresh serves two purposes:

• it allows readers who leave their browser open to the Techcrunch.com site to always view the latest stories when they return to the page
• it allows Techcrunch to add monetizable pageviews to their ad base

After what appears to be a bad hacking event last night (I feel for their staff as I know all too well about hacking over the past year), Techcrunch appears to have added an “interstitial” advertisement. Interstitial ads are basically ads that are placed on pages between the content. In this case, the ad displayed below is presented to a user upon the first load of techcrunch.com, but doesn’t appear again.

Technically, code on the techcrunch.com home page pushes users to the interstitial ad if they don’t have the cookie which tells the server that they have already seen the ad. Also, it appears the ad is running through Google Ad Manager and appears to be a custom campaign with Blackberry (congrats to their team on the ad sale).

With all the traffic from discussions about the hack, to the big Steve Jobs iTablet/slate/whatever event tomorrow, that Blackberry interstitial ad should provide for some very nice income for CEO Heather Harde and team.

Continue reading “Everything Old Is New Again…Techcrunch Adds Interstitials” »

Most of us seem to agree that while the traditional online banner ad is still very popular, the ability for it to truly convert is lessening each day. Today everyone is trying to figure out what comes next after the text unit and banner ad. With the current economic downturn, ad dollars are shrinking and what each dollar must produce is growing.

We’ve seen more news and talk shows starting to introduce products and services directly into the shows. My guess is that the ads inside the shows convert better and are higher priced compared with a 30-second TV spot. It’s also way cheaper to produce the “live ads” than a produced ad spot.

The Mike and Juliet show runs Yahoo Buzz spots each week as regular show segments. Oprah is pimping Skype for cash.

Today I noticed Ellen is now running “live ads” for one of her sponsors – Advil. I’ve embedded the clip below. Is this type of ad more effective than a regular commercial? The audience seems to be eating it up even if they are forced to clap and applaud. Do they realize that it’s a commercial? The best part about these live ads is that they beat the DVR or Tivo.

We are currently seeing a variety of new advertising concepts tested on blogs, social networks and websites. Some are on the level, some ride the line and some are way over the “ethical” line. Whether its paid reviews, “sponsored conversations” or the “give product to a blogger”, we will see more new ideas in the market over the next 12-18 months. I do believe we will see WAY more campaigns which “rent” people who have high follower counts on the various networks (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc.).

Will we see ads like the one below on blogs? We are already seeing the spots in video, will it enter the text world as well?

Back in December I provided results from advertising on Facebook. While the results weren’t great and the company billed me just over $1 last month, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg says the company, “…could not be doing better financially”.

Over the past week companies including Seesmic have launched desktop applications which allow you to access your Facebook “stream” on your desktop without ever visiting the facebook.com website. Steven Hodson has a good overview of the new Seesmic application.

These new applications are similar to the crop of Twitter applications that allow you to interact with the service “off-site”. Most power users appear to use an off-site service when interacting with Twitter. I can only assume we will see the same pattern with Facebook and off-site interaction. I am not sold that these desktop applications have a chance to actually be solid revenue generators but we will leave that discussion for another day.

My question to Facebook is…where are my ads within these new desktop applications? Are they sent as a package with the feed to the desktop applications? If advertising is the model that Facebook intends to use going forward, I would have thought ads would be included in the desktop stream from day 1. I will admit that I haven’t downloaded the Seesmic desktop application but in all of the reviews I have read, there has been no mention of advertising within the stream.

Assuming ads are not currently part of the desktop applications, when they add them, will we see the same sort of backlash that Facebook has experienced with Beacon and more recently with the terms of service changes? The numbers of Facebook users using the desktop applications is low today and will be for the short-term but as that number grows (especially with power users), Facebook will be forced to push out more ads into the stream – or they risk losing the $1 that I paid them last month since users will never have the chance to engage with my ad unit.

Ad optimization firm Pubmatic will announce the public launch of their API tomorrow. The API was in closed beta for the past few months with a select group of ad networks. PubMatic notes that the API will allow for instant connections between ad networks and publishers for single or multiple ad campaigns on demand.

PubMatic says that the benefits to publishers include increased reach, targeting and better control over campaigns. On the publisher side, the benefits include increased monetization, increased visibility, and zero integration.

I like what Pubmatic and competitors Rubicon and YieldBuild are offering. They are all trying to help publishers squeeze out every penny from their advertising inventory. My guess is that just like career sites are doing well in the current economic environment, these new ad optimization startups will also do well this year.

I assume the API documentation will be available tomorrow. Check out all of our Pubmatic coverage including our video interview with President Rajeev Goel.

Online advertising marketplace BuySellAds has announced a variety of new features and enhancements to their service. They have also posted some details on their plan for 2009.

They have updated the site architecture and design. I like the split between advertisers and publishers in the new design. The search has been revamped which they believe is the biggest update in the overall list of revisions. Here I like the sliders which help narrow down the search without making it overly complicated.

They have reduced the amount for wire transfers and are keeping the no minimum for a cashout via Paypal. I like that they take care of the Paypal fees – I’d say about half of the companies I deal with take care of the fees and I think it’s the way to go.

The updated stats interface looks like a cross between Clicky and Google Analytics. For advertisers, each individual blog is listed with the logo or icon of the site. This makes it easy to quickly locate the sites an advertiser wants to verify data on.

You can now use money in your BuySellAds account to buy other ads — keeping the money in the system is a good thing for BSA.

All of the features will be launched this quarter we are told and that they are very close to completion. BuySellAds looks a lot like what Performancing’s ad network could have been. I look forward to testing out the updated platform once it goes live both as an advertiser and as a publisher.

AT&T (NYSE: T) has made a couple of big announcements today: Free nationwide directory assistance if you listen to some ads and the results of a survey of small businesses.

Let’s start with the free directory assistance. It works pretty well from my three tests this morning. The ads were short and meaningless; one was for a law firm and the other two were for some other company I can’t even recall their name. The ads appear to be geographically targeted but there is NO call-to-action. I’ve already forgot the names of the companies and its been only a few hours. I am sure that AT&T will get a good sell-in on these ads as "new" or "revolutionary" but without a call-to-action, I can only imagine that there will be low rates of continued advertisers. Also, the ad appears immediately when you connect to the service. Why not wait until they figure out what I am calling for first? It would certainly be a stronger ad if they targeted it to what I am asking about, right?

The second piece of news out of AT&T are the results of a survey of small businesses. While they note the cities that the survey ran in, they don’t note that these are all traditional businesses — not online.

"Consumers are still going to the book as their primary choice for local business information, but they’re also searching online before they buy," said Frank Jules, president and CEO of AT&T Advertising & Publishing, which publishes the AT&T Real Yellow Pages. Yea, right. When my mother moved online for local business information earlier this year, that should tell you that the Yellow Pages are dead.

Some additional stats from the survey related to online spend:

• Thirty-eight percent expect to spend more on Internet banner ads.
• Forty-three percent said they spent more on keyword-search traffic this year compared with last year, and 34 percent expect to keep increasing that spending next year.

It’s important for AT&T to run these type of surveys so that they can sell-in the yellow page subscriptions to businesses. What they should be asking is people on the street how they are searching…. perhaps I should head over to Times Square and run some informal video surveys?