Turn Ads Into Content & They Work Better
In late September, several marketers — including Symantec — rolled out ad units that pulled content into ad banners straight from RSS feeds of those advertisers’ corporate blogs. I just reviewed click-through data for Symantec’s first twenty days, and the early data suggest that RSS-powered deliver better performance, both in terms of click-through rates and engagement.
Normal ads (whether they’re video ads on TV, banner ads on the web or billboards along the freeway) experience “creative fatigue” over time. Creative fatigue means, in essence, our eyes get bored with the same creative after we’ve seen it too often, and we stop noticing it altogether. If you plot the performance of a single creative execution over time, with time passing left to right along the x-axis, it’s a sad, downward slope almost every time (blue line below). This is why advertisers “refresh” their creative frequently.
The data chart plotting Symantec’s RSS ad over the past three weeks looks like a roller coaster (red line below). On October 9, for example, news that hackers posted fake information on the Google blog by way of the Host Overflow Application eXception sparked major interest among readers at Digg and Techdirt. This post — the headline of which became the “ad copy” for Symantec’s banner ad for about a day — drove click-through rates about three times the rates on the ad in the first two days of the campaign. No other graphical elements on the ad unit changed.
What this means: Despite the fact that Symantec’s ad was clearly marked as a Symantec sponsorship unit, and despite the fact that it ran in areas of both sites that are reserved for advertising, readers didn’t let their eyes experience the “fatigue” that makes them blind to ads over time. They viewed it as a content feature, albeit content from a paid sponsor, but content that was worth perusing. If I’m wrong, how else to explain that 300% more readers interacted with the ad, all of a sudden, two weeks into the campaign?
And this doesn’t just mean that RSS-powered ads (or content-rich ads in general) drive better click-through rates; it also means they are doing more work building brand awareness. Readers are paying attention to the Symantec ad every day, otherwise they wouldn’t behave differently on a big news day versus all the other days.
[...] Chas Edwards says not only will they perform better, but they will perform 300% better. [...]
Chas, I believe this illustrates a concept you and your crew at FM often talk about – Relevancy.
[...] From the post: Turn Ads Into Content & They Work Better: "In late September, several marketers — including Symantec — rolled out ad units that pulled content into ad banners straight from RSS feeds of those advertisers’ corporate blogs. I just reviewed click-through data for Symantec’s first twenty days, and the early data suggest that RSS-powered deliver better performance, both in terms of click-through rates and engagement. [...]
VML (a digital agency) was the first to employ RSS feeds directly in an advertising unit for client, Vanguard. The ad units featured live feeds (qoutes) on ETF’s. It was pretty cool — and, worked very well for the client.
Mike–Thanks for adding historical perspective! Do you know when that ad launched? I’d like to add to the post above as an UPDATE. Are you the man responsible? I’d also like to give some props!
[...] “I just received word from the Webby’s that the Symantec Security Response Weblog RSS Ad Unit has been selected as an Official Honoree for the Banner/Display Advertising: Business-to-Business category in The 11th Annual Webby Awards. The Official Honoree distinction is awarded to work that scores in the top 15% of all work entered into the Webby Awards.†[...]
[...] in real-time, each time a new article is posted to the Fall Shopping Guide site — like that Symantec ad that pulled content from their security analyst’s [...]
[...] We saw that effect last fall, the first time we created an ad that refreshed with news headlines from the vendor’s site: see Symantec’s RSS-powered content ad. [...]
[...] no scientist, but this suggests to me that ads built around content (like JCPenney’s or Symantec’s) will do a better job engaging consumers than ads that simply offer up a discounted [...]