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Tracy Tuten

How USA Today's Ad Meter Broke Super Bowl Advertising | Special: Super Bowl - Advertisi... - 0 views

  • The commercial also ushered in an era in Super Bowl advertising that we still inhabit: the ad as entertainment.
  • That we expect ads during the Super Bowl to be as entertaining as the game itself can largely be traced back to "1984."
  • In 1989, just a few years after "1984," the national newspaper introduced a revolutionary concept -- and a marketing masterstroke. Take a small panel of people, isolate them in a room with a meter and tell them to constantly turn a dial rating what they're seeing on a scale from one to 10.
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  • With so much at stake, to please the clients and bolster their own resumes, directors started creating ads for the panel -- the media equivalent of teaching for the test. How do you get people to have an immediate, positive reaction to something they're seeing? Certainly don't show them a narrative. Make them laugh.
  • "It better be something that rings some bells or gets measured on the USA Today Richter Scale," said TBWA/MediaArts Chairman Lee Clow. But the creator of "1984" also believes it means fewer ads like that one have been made. "It's a big challenge to spend $3 million on the time and then a million on the spot. It's kinda difficult to then come in 19th on the USA Today 'How'd you like our spot?' scale."
  • Even so, the poll's influence is waning. Today, most marketers combine immediate feedback with sophisticated research from Nielsen, GFK, Zeta Interactive, Kantar or Ace Metrix to understand the long-term impact of spots. Now that the real-time web has gone mass in the form of Facebook and Twitter, marketers and agencies have dozens of new services and dashboards to monitor, as well as the means to influence the discussion as it happens, not to mention giving the commentariat something else to write about.
  • Second, YouTube views and blog posts allow an ad to succeed or fail outside traditional media structures. VW's "The Force" has been viewed more than 90 million times since Super Bowl 2011.
  • "If you go back 10 years, it was the only thing," said CMO Scott Keogh. "You didn't have social, YouTube views, you didn't have the blogs and all the running commentary. Basically, the press would report on the Ad Meter.
  • Even USA Today has lost faith in the ability of the panel alone to pick a winner. This year, in addition to selecting two panels of 150 in cities that USA Today won't reveal, the paper is opening up the voting to the public on Facebook. As a result, for the first time since 1989, USA Today won't declare a "winner" in Monday morning's paper. The true winner won't be declared until after the polls close Wednesday.
  • Why not dump the panel entirely? In social media, consumers will rate only the ads they love and hate, a spokesperson said. The panel is the only way USA Today sees to be sure every ad gets a vote.
  • "I'll have four screens going during the game in front of me, showing me charts and graphs," Mr. Ewanick said. "We have five or six other groups monitoring, then we'll have next-day research, copy testing, focus groups. There's a lot of money involved here. You have to really understand your ROI to make sure you learn from this, so you can apply that the next year."
  • When will we once again get more Super Bowl ads like "1984"? When creatives stop making spots to incite an instant reaction, sort of like Chrysler's two-minute "Imported From Detroit," a high-concept, big-idea spot that put Detroit before the car and even before the celebrity (Eminem). It was great creative, by most measures, and probably the closest thing to "1984" in its ambition since, well, "1984."
  • Predictably, "Imported From Detroit" bombed on the Ad Meter, coming in at No. 43.
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    Social media are changing the way we will measure the success of Super Bowl advertising!
Tracy Tuten

Google Runs Offense on Bad Ads - 0 views

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    "SAN FRANCISCO - Google yanked 59% more "bad" advertisements from its online systems last year as the world's largest Internet search provider stepped up a battle against a barrage of counterfeiters, suspect downloads and other malicious activity on the Web. Google removed more than 350 million bad ads in 2013, up from about 220 million the year before. That's almost 1 million suspect ads a day. The increase was partly driven by the overall surge in online advertising, most of which is legitimate. But as Google introduces new products, scammers adapt and develop new ways to game the system. "It's a challenge," says Mike Hochberg, ads engineering director who oversees hundreds of engineers and policy experts focused on this at the company. "Google continues to add new types of ads and formats all the time, and that creates new work to track down new ways of creating bad ads." Google's online ad business has become so lucrative, generating billions of dollars a year in profit for itself and its partners, that the company's platforms, such as AdWords and AdSense, are a huge draw for what it calls "bad actors" looking to grab some of this money. In 2011, Google agreed to pay $500 million to settle allegations by the U.S. Department of Justice that ads for Canadian online pharmacies contributed to the illegal importation of prescription drugs. Last year, Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood said Google was still allowing ads for illegal online pharmacies that sell dangerous or counterfeit drugs without a prescription. Google published a scorecard on its constant battle against such activity for the first time in early 2013, and the company is releasing the second report now. Hochberg says the reports and Google's increased efforts to limit bad ads and online scams were not related to the counterfeiting settlement. "Ensuring that we are serving good ads for users has been part of our ad programs from day one," he says. "Last year, we decided to put out a pseudo
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