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Subject: Can a dinosaur dig bring buzz to online advertising?
From binarybit
PostID 116572 On Friday, July 20, 2001 (EST) at 2:12:46 PM
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msnbc.com
July 19 — Can a dinosaur dig bring buzz to online advertising? The Internet may be stuck in a bruising downturn in ad spending, but that hasn’t stopped marketers as varied as AT&T and State Farm from experimenting with ground-breaking online campaigns.
VIEWERS OF THE Discovery Channel’s dinosaur festival last Sunday — back-to-back airings of the computer-generated shows “When Dinosaurs Roamed America” and “Walking with Dinosaurs” — were prompted to visit Discovery.com during commercial breaks. At the site, an interactive program called “Dino Trek,” sponsored by AT&T, allowed people who were both logged onto the Web and tuned into the tube to pretend to be a paleontologist on a fossil dig by clicking on an interactive map. At the end of the break, viewers were then returned to the TV show, although they could follow along with the shows on the Web as well.
What was striking about the Web program — beyond the technological achievement of synching what was happening on TV to the site — was that the sponsor, AT&T, wasn’t pushing click-throughs in its ads. The long-distance and wireless giant was using its online association with Discovery purely for branding, something critics have charged the Web can’t do very well.
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“We liked the idea of participation, not just how many eyeballs saw your banner on the top of a page and didn’t click,” says Steve Block, AT&T’s corporate vice president, brand advertising, media. “This is not about a banner on a page — it’s about creating experiences for customers.”
In another example, in an online campaign for State Farm that’s launching in August, a young, pink-haired woman looks out from the Web screen.
Designed in bold pink, the animated ad is a big departure from the typical, more somber insurance company advertisement and is meant to raise young automobile owners’ awareness of State Farm, the company’s first marketing effort to reach the 18-24 year old demographic. The Web ads are part of a larger image-building campaign that’s also appearing in magazines, radio and TV.
“All of it is really branding,” says Karen Noel, State Farm’s interactive marketing director of the three-month campaign that’s appearing at Rollingstone.com, E! Online, Sony.com and WB.com. “This audience is online, and it makes enormous sense to reach these consumers at the right aperture.”
Although State Farm wouldn’t disclose how much was being spent, the three-month campaign is new creative territory for the insurance company. Not only are the bold, large-sized ads eye-catching and colorful, but they’re not centered on click-throughs, the measurement of how many people click through the ad to the State Farm site.
“As the Web becomes more mainstream and more mass market, we really believe you can build brands online,” says Anuradha Hebbar, account director for State Farm’s ad agency, Tribal DDB in Chicago.
Since new larger ad formats were introduced earlier this year — including big, rectangular boxes and horizontal graphics called “skyscrapers” — traditional marketers such as State Farm who would not have considered investing in online campaigns are looking to the Web to build awareness of their brands.
This brand-building boom comes at a tumultuous time for Internet media, with Wall Street analysts expecting ad spending to be flat at roughly $6 billion this year. Yet while many sites are facing a severe financial crisis, there’s real excitement bubbling in the online ad creative community.
Much has been written about the Yahoo! ad in which birds flew across the Web page and a Ford Explorer burst through the screen. BMW has gotten even more press for its Web-based mini-films directed by heavy-hitter Hollywood directors.
“We’re definitely in a period of rapid experimentation,” says Bill McCloskey, chief executive of Emerging Interest, an ad technology consulting firm. “A lot of people who have ignored the Web are just now getting interested because the canvas is now bigger.”
Not only is the canvas bigger, but a study released Wednesday found that the new online ad units are three to six times more likely to deliver a brand message than a standard Web banner. The study, conducted by the Interactive Advertising Bureau, MSN and DoubleClick, also found that when combined with so-called “rich media” — audio, video, Flash technologies and the like — the larger ads “deliver greater impact and conclusively increase branding effectiveness.”
What it means is the Internet could finally come up with its own version of the buzz-building “Whassup?” commercial from Budweiser.
“Larger formats, rich media and good old-fashioned humor will make it such that the Internet will soon be able to generate water-cooler conversation on advertising like the ‘Whassup?’ campaign,” says Nick Nyhan, chief executive of Dynamic Logia, a New York research firm that tracks online campaigns for traditional marketers. “But it will require advertisers designing creative that entertains as opposed to getting an instant conversion.”
AT&T hopes it can create a “higher level” of buzz with its Discovery TV-to-Web ads.
“If they’re talking about you at cocktail parties, then you’ve done something,” says AT&T’s Block.
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Subject: Can a dinosaur dig bring buzz to online advertising?
From binarybit
PostID 116572 On Friday, July 20, 2001 (EST) at 2:12:46 PM
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
msnbc.com
July 19 — Can a dinosaur dig bring buzz to online advertising? The Internet may be stuck in a bruising downturn in ad spending, but that hasn’t stopped marketers as varied as AT&T and State Farm from experimenting with ground-breaking online campaigns.
VIEWERS OF THE Discovery Channel’s dinosaur festival last Sunday — back-to-back airings of the computer-generated shows “When Dinosaurs Roamed America” and “Walking with Dinosaurs” — were prompted to visit Discovery.com during commercial breaks. At the site, an interactive program called “Dino Trek,” sponsored by AT&T, allowed people who were both logged onto the Web and tuned into the tube to pretend to be a paleontologist on a fossil dig by clicking on an interactive map. At the end of the break, viewers were then returned to the TV show, although they could follow along with the shows on the Web as well.
What was striking about the Web program — beyond the technological achievement of synching what was happening on TV to the site — was that the sponsor, AT&T, wasn’t pushing click-throughs in its ads. The long-distance and wireless giant was using its online association with Discovery purely for branding, something critics have charged the Web can’t do very well.
Advertisement
“We liked the idea of participation, not just how many eyeballs saw your banner on the top of a page and didn’t click,” says Steve Block, AT&T’s corporate vice president, brand advertising, media. “This is not about a banner on a page — it’s about creating experiences for customers.”
In another example, in an online campaign for State Farm that’s launching in August, a young, pink-haired woman looks out from the Web screen.
Designed in bold pink, the animated ad is a big departure from the typical, more somber insurance company advertisement and is meant to raise young automobile owners’ awareness of State Farm, the company’s first marketing effort to reach the 18-24 year old demographic. The Web ads are part of a larger image-building campaign that’s also appearing in magazines, radio and TV.
“All of it is really branding,” says Karen Noel, State Farm’s interactive marketing director of the three-month campaign that’s appearing at Rollingstone.com, E! Online, Sony.com and WB.com. “This audience is online, and it makes enormous sense to reach these consumers at the right aperture.”
Although State Farm wouldn’t disclose how much was being spent, the three-month campaign is new creative territory for the insurance company. Not only are the bold, large-sized ads eye-catching and colorful, but they’re not centered on click-throughs, the measurement of how many people click through the ad to the State Farm site.
“As the Web becomes more mainstream and more mass market, we really believe you can build brands online,” says Anuradha Hebbar, account director for State Farm’s ad agency, Tribal DDB in Chicago.
Since new larger ad formats were introduced earlier this year — including big, rectangular boxes and horizontal graphics called “skyscrapers” — traditional marketers such as State Farm who would not have considered investing in online campaigns are looking to the Web to build awareness of their brands.
This brand-building boom comes at a tumultuous time for Internet media, with Wall Street analysts expecting ad spending to be flat at roughly $6 billion this year. Yet while many sites are facing a severe financial crisis, there’s real excitement bubbling in the online ad creative community.
Much has been written about the Yahoo! ad in which birds flew across the Web page and a Ford Explorer burst through the screen. BMW has gotten even more press for its Web-based mini-films directed by heavy-hitter Hollywood directors.
“We’re definitely in a period of rapid experimentation,” says Bill McCloskey, chief executive of Emerging Interest, an ad technology consulting firm. “A lot of people who have ignored the Web are just now getting interested because the canvas is now bigger.”
Not only is the canvas bigger, but a study released Wednesday found that the new online ad units are three to six times more likely to deliver a brand message than a standard Web banner. The study, conducted by the Interactive Advertising Bureau, MSN and DoubleClick, also found that when combined with so-called “rich media” — audio, video, Flash technologies and the like — the larger ads “deliver greater impact and conclusively increase branding effectiveness.”
What it means is the Internet could finally come up with its own version of the buzz-building “Whassup?” commercial from Budweiser.
“Larger formats, rich media and good old-fashioned humor will make it such that the Internet will soon be able to generate water-cooler conversation on advertising like the ‘Whassup?’ campaign,” says Nick Nyhan, chief executive of Dynamic Logia, a New York research firm that tracks online campaigns for traditional marketers. “But it will require advertisers designing creative that entertains as opposed to getting an instant conversion.”
AT&T hopes it can create a “higher level” of buzz with its Discovery TV-to-Web ads.
“If they’re talking about you at cocktail parties, then you’ve done something,” says AT&T’s Block.
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