Brand Central Station

(from Content Marketing News)

When: June 30, 2010
Time:  1:00 pm EDT  (30 minutes)
Where:  Online
Cost:   Free

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Online banner ads have been taking a beating.  Not just recently, but over the past few years.  Click-through rates on banner ads stink in the metrics-heavy world of online advertising.  The experts will tell you that search advertising is the place to be.

Then comes a new study, released on Friday afternoon, that draws a connection between click-through rates on paid and organic searches and the presence of display ads for those brands.  According to the study conducted by Specific Media, the results showed a 155% performance improvement by search ads when display ads promoting those brands were running.  The greatest impact on search was in travel and tourism, where exposure to display ads boosted click-throughs by nearly 300%.

Here’s a link to the story that ran on the BtoB Magazine website.

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Just received word today that VeohTV is going away.  Of course, this may be old news to some, but not for me.  Maybe my antenna is up on services like Veoh, Hulu and others (including, of course, YouTube).  The online, digital video content stream seems to be more vital than ever before, and Veoh now looks like they’re jumping into it with both feet in a way that will allow viewers to take their online content with them.

Even when they’re not online.

Veoh took the opportunity today (via e-mail) to explain about their switch from VeohTV to a downloadable application that connects to Veoh.com.  By concentrating on the user experience, the team at Veoh came to the conclusion that re-booting their service as a stand alone application was a better choice:

The Veoh Web Player enables you to watch videos of any length right in your browser without launching a separate application. You can download videos for later viewing, even when you’re not connected to the Internet. The Web Player also consumes fewer system resources than VeohTV.

This is all interesting news when you consider that by separating the player from the site, Veoh can now distribute its player on other portable media.  Last week, the company announced it was releasing a version of its player to be included on SanDisk flash drives.

For advertisers and marketers what this means is that ad insertions into streaming content are now portable, as well.  How this plays into possible promotions or creative executions remains to be seen.  But we can no longer assume that if someone sees an ad on a streaming broadcast that they’re sitting in front of a computer screen on a desk in a living room, bedroom, kitchen, office, etc.

Jameson Hsu reports about in-game advertising online on the Adotas blog.  It’s an excellent report on the popularity of online gaming and how to leverage their advertising value.  Web-based games are extremely popular, visted by over 30% of all online users around the world.  As Jameson points out:

“(Online) games appeal to teens, moms and seniors alike who fuel the enormous demand throughout the world to play them. In parallel with this trend, game advertising technology has emerged enabling advertisers to reach the engaged gaming audience with rich, targeted ads that allow independent game developers to make money.”

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For the past fifteen years, Wizards of the Coast has been entertaining gamers around the world. A leader in online gaming, the Wizards have attracted quite a following.  They’ve now appointed online ad rep firm Integri to head up their ad sales efforts.

According to the release from Wizards …

“Wizards has been growing our online community for 15 years, so our name has a lot of equity with our gamers,” said Ilja Rotelli, Director of Online Media at Wizards of the Coast. “Intergi brings to us the ability to connect our gamers to their network of relevant advertisers.”

As gaming continues to grow as a viable media, we’re seeing more ad rep networks and firms spring up to help generate significant ad revenues.