ChasNote

The former president of Digitas will head up WPP’s Project Da Vinci, Dell’s new agency. More at Ad Age.

Congrats, Torrence and congrats, Dell!

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

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.

Dell’s embed-able, subscribe-able, share-able video ad has added itself to the list of great commercials — ones that engage people enough that they are inspired to tell their friends about it. For example, here’s Maxwei’s blog:

Marc Farley, a Dell blogger at Inside IT blog, shows the rest of us how it’s done. Dell is tapping the Techdirt Insight Community to foster a conversation among IT pros on storage, and what storage vendors like Dell need to be developing. (Here’s the site, The Future of Storage.)

EMC’s Chuck Hollis blogs his discontent about the project, namely that Dell’s role in the project isn’t disclosed clearly enough. That’s good feedback and always worth listening to. It’s Dell’s intention to be transparent; if certain visitors are confused, fix it.

Farley, a storage expert and Dell employee, admitted that he could relate:

“I didn’t understand myself for several days, including the whole posting process and was wondering what the %$#% was going on. In fact, I put up a completely wayward, post — wondered why it wasn’t being posted, then found out it was way off base. FWIW, there is a blog post that is pretty critical of Techdirt for the way the initial entries (insights) are handled. Mike Masnick’s reply to that review is good enough for me that they are working on improving things. But I don’t want to throw out the baby here, I think Mike is really onto something that is very, very good and that could fundamentally change the analyst business — something that Chuck would probably be very interested in also.”

That alone is refreshing — a representative of the brand (Dell) who publicly voices criticism of the brand or marketing practices. Then he goes on to articulate the project’s intent:

“So here’s how it’s working: Dell opened an Insight (request for blog entries) with Techdirt and they invited members of their community to contribute. These entries were screened by Techdirt editors for suitability (no Dell influence in this process) and then published on a Dell sponsored site called the Future of Storage, as a way to expand the discussion. We now have some of that going on and people can contribute there. Just keep in mind that the entries are moderated by Techdirt and it takes a little time for them to be published. I think if you look for the usual wolf in sheep’s clothing ads here, you won’t find any (at least that’s the goal). The point is not to pimp our stuff but to establish dialogue –- and this differs in a very major way from most blogs, including Chuck’s and mine.”

Techdirt’s Mike Masnick adds a comment to Farley’s post:

“On the issue of independent analysis, we actually think the Insight Community model works even *better* because you’re getting multiple viewpoints from multiple independent parties — and given how we recruit people, you can rest assured that there are always a varied set of opinions. The folks in the community are *passionate* and don’t back down. That’s what we like, and that’s why the Community generates such interesting output. As I’ve said before, the Insight Community model is designed to make you find out what you *need* to hear, rather than what you *want* to hear.”

An unusual conversation is underway: Editors, sponsors and their business partners are engaged in an open and professional argument over the important issues in digital media, and learning from each other. My hat is off to Dell, Farley, Hollis and Masnick.

The new ads for Dell’s ReGeneration.org are in-page videos formatted to fit inside a 300×250-pixel ad zone.

Sure, I know, you’ve seen that before. But if you look closer, there’s more.

The text overlay at the top of the video player is content that continually refreshes via ReGeneration.org’s RSS feed. You can read it there on the video player or, by clicking on the orange RSS button, subscribe to it as a new channel in your RSS reader. And you can click on “More” if you want to share it, download it, or embed it.

Super cool.

Credits: Andrew Bowins and the Dell crew; James Gross, Jonathan Schreiber, Ben Roodman and Matt Jessell at FM; and the Synapse Group.

Dell taps Techdirt’s Insight Community on a project that’s somewhere between a virtual focus group and a sponsored forum. As Techdirt’s Mike Masnick puts it:

“we’ve put together a site, sponsored by Dell, on The Future of Storage, which is powered by the Techdirt Insight Community. We’re building an ongoing conversation around the future direction of the storage market. You can join in the conversation itself just by heading straight to the site and commenting on the posts, but if you have experience with storage area network technology, you should join the community itself and submit your insight on where you think the market is heading. The best insights not only get published to the site, but can earn you quite a bit of money. Basically, you can be smart, earn a bunch of money and get recognition for being smart all in one shot. Tough to beat that. “

At the same time Dell has partnered with Ars Technica to sponsor the roll out of Ars Technica’s first-ever enterprise IT forum, The Server Room — “a dedicated place where discussion could take place around IT matters of interest to business and enterprise gurus”. Full transparency provided by Ars’s Ken Fisher:

“Effective immediately, we are opening The Server Room to the public (registration is required for posting access). We are proud to announce that Dell is sponsoring the launch of this new resource, and I encourage you to visit our sponsor, Dell’s The Future of Storage: ‘Insights into the rapidly evolving storage area network market.’”

Jeremiah Owyang, at his site, writes up a case study of Dell’s Facebook Graffiti Contest, part of its ReGeneration campaign. His “what could have been better” section — that conversational campaigns should be given longer life spans, and that the content they produce should be given more exposure too — is worth a full read at his site. His summary of the campaign overall:

“Unlike most marketing campaigns that deploy heavy ads, fake viral videos, or message bombardment, this campaign let go to gain more. Overall, this is a successful campaign as they turned the action over to the community, let them take charge, decide on the winners, all under the context of the regeneration campaign. The campaign moved the active community from Facebook closer to the branded Microsite, closer to the corporate website, migrating users in an opt-in manner that lead to hundreds of comments was clever. Well done.”

And MediaPost’s Social Media Insider blog says:

“There are a lot of impressive stats here: 1.1 million people voted on their favorite illustration, 7,300 people entered a submission, the contest has almost 1,300 friends, and there are currently 209 comments to the post at ReGeneration.org announcing the winners. Clearly, Dell’s ReGeneration effort supports [FM CEO John] Battelle’s contention that social media may finally make online advertising much more interesting to users than the ongoing crop of forgettable banner campaigns.”

Well, not entirely. If you search for “regeneration” at Google, the #1 result is a Wikipedia entry for the biological process that starfish, for example, go through when they grow back arms that were torn off. But the second entry, among nearly 18,000,000 pages identified by Google, is Dell’s site ReGeneration.org, a site (and brand concept) that was kicked off, in part, with a Graffiti drawing contest inside Facebook.

My colleague James Gross, who led the Dell-Graffiti-Contest idea from the FM side, points out on his site:

“the campaign [was] a win for not only Dell, but also the Application Developer, Graffiti. In a time when not a lot of applications are creating compelling campaigns for marketers, instead, many of them are being forced to rely on remnant inventory from ad networks.”

Ad networks are great at 100-percent fill rates with low-CPM, low-value-to-advertisers banners (the two factors are linked quite directly!), but they aren’t well positioned to conceptualize or execute campaigns that add value to a unique conversation. A 34-year-old man with a household income of $95,000 may visit Yahoo Finance to view his stocks, Boing Boing for his fix of quirky digital-cultural happenings, and stay in touch with his college friends by trading sketches using Facebook Graffiti Wall. Advertising works better — both for the advertiser and the recipient — if it understands two things. One, Mr 34-Year-Old is unlikely to be lured away from what he’s doing (click-through rates are considered great if they approach a third of one percent), so you need to bring your brand proposition into those environments. Two, Mr 34-Year-Old is a person, not a demographic; recognize the diverse moods and mindsets he passes through in the course of an hour online (each site he visits provides a guide), and cater your messaging to address that person in the context he’s chosen to join.