ComScore 2009 U.S. Digital Year in Review
via docstoc.com
My name is Conrad Lisco, and this is where I keep odds and ends, things and thoughts.
I work at R/GA in the Mobile & Emerging Platforms group. I'm most interested in the intersection of technology and culture. Addicted to location-based services. Live in Chinatown and love sneakers and street art.
Opinions are my own.
Here are my 10 favorite presentations from the last year.
Skål is Norwegian for bowl and is pronounced [sko:l]. This [wooden] bowl sits on the table and a range of physical objects can be placed in it. When an object is placed in the bowl related media is played back on the TV. Skål lets you control all kinds of digital media; movie-clips, YouTube channels, Flickr photo streams, home videos, online radio and more.
I can see Nintendo jumping on technology like this...think about the Wii...
Live on 11.14.09, Apple uses the various banner units very well. It's simple. Fun. Check it out: http://www.youtube.com
Turducken consists of a partially de-boned turkey stuffed with a de-boned duck, which itself is stuffed with a small de-boned chicken. Crazy.
Turducken reminds me of some digital marketing I've seen lately, where different and unlikely combinations of technologies and tactics merge to create one experience. Some have been interesting and usable, others not at all.
Love this. And not just because he used my tweet...
Why is the CPM such a problem?
- You always get what you pay for. I believe in basic economics. If you pay for impressions, you get impressions. Is that, in the end, what marketers really want? How about engagement? How about impact? How about actually selling product? A glut of impressions has helped no one.
- All impressions are not created equally. There’s a big difference between seeing an ad on a page of content that contains one uninteresting paragraph and twelve ads, and seeing a single ad on a page that is relevant to the ad and covers a topic for which the user is highly passionate and engaged. The differences between social network and content inventory is another example–how do you put those items on the same spreadsheet?
- There is no natural constraint . TV, print, and radio can only put so many ads within their product. But on the Internet, that is not the case. We can continually increase the number of ads per page or manipulate users’ behavior to goose our impression numbers. Can’t you see some publisher saying “if they just want impressions, why don’t we go from four ads on a page to eight” or “couldn’t we turn a new ad every time someone loaded up a new e-mail?”
- It doesn’t mean anything anymore. With such a glut of impressions from all media and the number of impressions with which people are bombarded with every day, it just doesn’t matter anymore. It’s an arcane notion that’s a holdover from a time when there wasn’t as much media. As I said, TV, radio, and print had natural constraints and there was a lot less of it. So just seeing an ad was, by definition, unique and impactful. Those days are no longer.
- Senior marketers get it, but there is a whole infrastructure built around the CPM. The process is built up around how ads are bought and sold, based around a media plan, and asked for in RFPs. All the good, creative thoughts get boiled down into spreadsheets, that are for the most part owned by folks that are not that far removed from their last college class. Even senior folks have to try to fight their own system to keep the ideas that they like.
- This is not a win for marketers. In a world of over-produced impressions, even great work by marketers is ignored at best and more commonly not even seen.
- The ultimate losers are the users. They get a lot of bad content and bad ads. They are literally overrun by ads all day.
Brilliant post by Shelbie Bonnie, co-founder of CNET, on the death of the CPM. What I take away from this post is that numbers alone don't mean much anymore. Engagement is the new metric.
