advertising Archive

I don’t know about you but there are many times when I wonder what’s next after online advertising. “Where do we go from here?”

The answer is here and it’s from Moon Publicity — you can now advertise on the moon. When you buy an image on the moon, it’s available for a few days each month and apparently will last thousands of years.

Today is also the 40th anniversary of the first man on the moon.

Here’s an overview of the “shadow shaping” robot technology which is used to create the ads. “New Shadow Shaping technology creates images on the moon that can be seen from Earth.  Robots are used to create several small ridges in the lunar dust over large areas that capture shadows and shape them to form logos, domains names or memorials.”

Bids are being accepted for the ad slots starting at $46,000.

From the release, “Finally dependency on government to travel beyond Earth is over,” says inventor David Kent Jones. “This new commercial incentive will turbo charge space technology development. Shadows are just the beginning; eventually robots will be planting crops on other planets.” 

Here’s a short overview video of how the Moon Publicity robot works:
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One of the toughest parts about blogging for money is trying to figure out how much to charge for advertising. Charge to little and you lose valuable income…charge too much and you may never get any takers. In the space that CN is in, I believe most of the “majors” are charging too little which helps them to sell out but reduces their total income and puts huge downward pressure on the 2nd and 3rd tier sites.

Online advertising marketplace BuySellAds has put together their “3 Golden Rules to Selling More Ads”. They discussing pricing models including eCPM pricing.

Ad placement is the second rule — different locations can mean placement premiums.

The last rule is content – as we know the better your content, the more you can charge.

If you are new to selling your own ads, you might try reducing the price a pinch below what you think is a fair price to check interest levels. Then as you get advertisers buying ads, increase the price little by little until you meet resistance. Also remember that many advertisers will want to negotiate so if you start low, you will wind up going even lower.

Share your pricing tips in the comments and I will add them to the post.

Amazon has announced that they want you for their upcoming new television campaign. The ad is part of the “Your Amazon Ad Contest,”  contest where you can win $20k in Amazon gift cards.

An Amazon judging panel will review all contest submissions and select five finalists based on:

• Creativity
• Overall appeal
• Likelihood of inspiring viewers to shop with Amazon

Amazon notes “suitable to air to a family audience on a national network.” Apparently they will pick finalists and let viewers pick a winner. One winner the Amazon judges picks will win $10k and the user winner will win $10k as well.

This type of “crowdsourced” ad creation seems to be pretty popular these days. For a small prize, Amazon gets press and interested customers – it’s a smart move. The customers who create videos will also pimp them around providing for even more awareness of the contest and Amazon.

CBS’ outdoor division has announced a new option for their billboard advertisers today. The program is called txt2go and allows advertisers to place a sms code on their advertisements that viewers can enter into their mobile device to gain access to something from the advertiser.

Jodi Senese, Executive Vice President, Marketing, CBS Outdoor said, “…if someone is interested in a product or service advertised they can receive a coupon, free merchandise or another offer simply by texting in a short code, giving the company ongoing communication with an interested consumer.”

Mobile technology provider Rip Road will serve the text messaging portion of the advertisement. Campaigns start at $225 for 500 SMS interactions. I’ve always pushed for every offline ad to have some way to get users and/or viewers online. It’s a mistake to run a campaign in a magazine, newspaper or on a billboard without some online call to action.

It will be interesting to see if the CBS billboards in Times Square and around NYC start to feature SMS codes as part of this program.

Ad management application server OpenX has announced a new Series C round of funding in the amount of $10 million. The total amount that OpenX has raised is $30.8 million to-date. OpenX notes that the funding will be used, “to further expand its market-leading advertising technology products and services and to rapidly accelerate the growth of the recently launched OpenX Market, the company’s unique new monetization platform.”

DAG Ventures led the new Series C round and existing investors Accel Partners, Index Ventures, Mangrove Capital, First Round Capital and Jonathan Miller, the company’s board chairman, all participated.

For the OpenX hosted program, the company reports growth of 500% to 7.5 billion monthly impressions. They also note that 10,000 web publishers are using the hosted program.

Interestingly, OpenX shares some bits about their revenue model which is broken up into four parts:

• professional services for publishers
• premium support packages
• premium Hosted packages
• OpenX Market

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?

Video advertising company YuMe has announced a new ad unit launch today. The new ad unit is called “Insynch” and the company calls it a takeover unit. Basically how it works is that it combines video ads and traditional online ads together on a page. If a video ad is on the left and a traditional ad on the right, YuMe can sync the two together and pass bits back and forth. In their demo, YuMe combines a video ad, a layer ad and a traditional banner ad together.

From the launch announcement, “How does the InSynch Video Takeover work?  While the in–stream video ad is playing, the entire page where the player resides turns into an advertising canvas where anything is possible.  For example, marketers can have objects jump out of the video ad and into a companion banner placement or have these elements fly across the web page, temporarily taking over the page and captivating the viewer’s attention. ”

It looks like a pretty interesting advertising unit as long as the actual synch always works perfectly. Check out the demo of the InSynch ad unit on YuMe’s site.