ChasNote

That’s the prediction at PaidContent, anyway.

“The self-serve ads option has been all the rage for search ads the last few years. Increasingly, now, do-it-yourself is becoming similarly popular for the display ad space.”

I don’t think ad-sales extinction is quite as imminent as reported. “Display ads” in print magazines refer to the glossy ads purchased by brand advertisers to accomplish brand-building goals. When pundits use the term online, they mean graphical banner ads, as opposed to paid-search text ads. Most advertisers, however, are using graphical banners and text ads for the same purpose — direct-response marketing with the singular goal of driving clicks at the lowest CPC. Only a very small percentage of online ad dollars today are designed to build awareness and affinity for brands. I’m a big believer in the promise of DIY ad-buying platforms, but it’s a mistake to assume these services — just because their customers can upload animated banners — are changing the rules, the expectations or the metrics for brand marketing.

ABC’s Nightline profiles Heather, her site, her dog Chuck, her new book and her sidekick Jon.

In an interview with Justin Smith at InsideFacebook we got talking about advertising formats that are best suited to social media environments, and I proposed that previous media revolutions — like radio and TV — offer instructive analogies:

“[If you take] a look at radio (the internet of our grandparents’ day), people listened to news clips and radio plays. If you go back and listen to advertising during radio plays, the ad is a mini version of a radio play. You didn’t get a blinking light on your radio or something that created cognitive dissonance. And when things moved onto television, the ad didn’t contain two guys sitting around microphones doing radio plays — commercials changed as well. They got beautiful people, got a good soundtrack, and took advantage of all the visuals.

“If you bring that forward to social network environments, it’s largely about the conversation. As a Facebook user, I have a relationship with a couple hundred people, and my News Feed is where the conversations between my friends and me are happening. Marketers can’t just come in there and insert a radio play and hope that you will pay attention. The format that we’re engaging in is an online conversation, and the advertiser that wants to be a part of that needs to mimic what users are doing: join the conversation, not throw in a banner ad that disrupts that experience.”

Thanks for the ink, Justin!

Graffiti, the popular Facebook drawing app, adds a new feature today with help from Intel’s sponsorship dollars. When you see a Graffiti you like, you can embed the animated version — the artist’s virtual brush strokes as he or she draws the image — into your own site, just like you’d embed a YouTube video.

Here’s one I like from the recent Haagen-Dazs sponsored bee drawing contest by Priya S Patel:

Yikes. According to the New Yorker (story here at Ad Age), the photos of the “real women” in their underwear were doctored — made more model-like — by airbrush artist Pascal Dangin.

At Regeneration.org Dell announces the winners to its “What Does Green Mean to You” Graffiti contest in Facebook. Here’s “best overall.”

Hey, thanks, ValleyWag!

If it makes you uncomfortable to read mention of FM on ValleyWag without middle-fingers raised in the Battelle Salute, here you go.

FM’s Bill Brazell demonstrating Battelle Salute.

More on the BMW 1-Series Graffiti contest in Facebook here.

Patricia Hursh at SearchEngineLand reminds marketers that neglecting or attempting to avoid prospects early in the buying cycle — those kicking tires but not yet ready for the salesperson’s pitch — are “short-sighted and [this approach] ultimately leaves a lot of money on the table.” Amen.

(Thanks, Pete!)

From the New Yorker:

“I felt that in the name of individuality I should find my own brand, something separate. Something me. Carltons, Kents, Alpines: it was like choosing a religion, for weren’t Vantage people fundamentally different from those who’d taken to Larks or Newports? What I didn’t realize was that you could convert, that you were allowed to. The Kent person could, with very little effort, become a Vantage person, though it was harder to go from menthol to regular, or from regular-sized to ultra-long. All rules had their exceptions, but the way I came to see things they generally went like this: Kools and Newports were for black people and lower-class whites. Camels were for procrastinators, those who wrote bad poetry, and those who put off writing bad poetry. Merits were for sex addicts, Salems for alcoholics, and Mores for people who considered themselves to be outrageous but really weren’t. One should never lend money to a Marlboro-menthol smoker, though you could usually count on a regular-Marlboro person to pay you back. The eventual subclasses of milds, lights, and ultra-lights not only threw a wrench in the works but made it nearly impossible for anyone to keep your brand straight. All that, however, came later, along with warning labels and American Spirits.

“The cigarettes I bought that day in Vancouver were Viceroys. I’d often noticed them in the shirt pockets of gas-station attendants and, no doubt, thought that they’d make me appear masculine, or at least as masculine as one could look in a beret and a pair of gabardine pants that buttoned at the ankle. Throw in Ronnie’s white silk scarf and I needed all the Viceroy I could get, especially in the neighborhood where this residence hotel was.”

I took a look at interaction rates and other early data on Dell’s embed-able, subscribe-able, share-able video ad (it launched about two weeks ago), and saw something obvious, but something our industry too often forgets. It’s inevitably a teeny tiny fraction of people exposed to your ad who will click on it — we are thrilled with 0.2% — yet that’s the group we spend most of our energy thinking about, optimizing for, zooming in on.

In this campaign Dell opened the aperture; it built a creative unit — a brand asset — intended to provide value to more than that tenth or two-tenths of one percent of an audience inclined to click on banner. The ad pushed content to Dell’s audience (and let audience members interact with the content right there), rather than attempting to pull that audience back to Dell’s site for some kind of pay-off.

I can’t give away trade secrets or actual performance data. But I will say that some average and tiny percentage of people clicked on the ad. Eighteen TIMES more people took advantage of the opportunity to interact with Dell’s brand and content right there in the ad itself. Imagine the lost opportunity had Dell built an ad that only worked for that tiny click-happy group.