ChasNote

That’s the headline for a post by Darren Herman, author of marketing blog Herman’s Head, on Dell’s recent RSS ad campaign promoting the IT Room. To my knowledge, this campaign is the first time readers have been given the option to play an advertiser’s video clip from within their readers. Horrifying to some old-school RSS-ers who loved the format for its uncluttered text-only orgins, perhaps, but I welcome it as a step in the direction of getting advertiser support for publishers who provide their content available as an RSS feed.

My colleagues James Gross, Jonathan Schreiber and Ivan Kanevski figured out how to make this happen.

We’re just a few weeks into JCPenney’s sponsorship of FM’s Fall Shopping Guide (see ChasNote 9/17/07), but today I came across an interesting stat: Among the top 5 URLs driving traffic to the Guide is Google’s RSS reader. In other words, visitors to the site like what they see, and they’re subscribing to RSS updates to the site.

Here’s JCPenney’s new ad creative. The 300×250 unit is running on FM’s parenting and craft sites to drive readers to the Fall Shopping Guide they’re sponsoring (see ChasNote 9/17/07). The ad updates with new headlines 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 blog.

The rumors are swirling, and ValleyWag puts the acquisition prices at $100 million for the leading RSS ad-serving company, about 10x Feedburner’s 2007 revenue. Yet:

“Text ads in feeds receive so little attention from readers that Google, which pursued its own trial, abandoned the experiment. Feed readers, the applications and sites on which geeky internet users scan news items, often do not support the graphical ads which brands prefer, closing off that avenue for a broker such as Feedburner.”

Related: ChasNote on The Case Against Full-Text RSS Feeds.

Amid rumors that one of my colleagues (John Battelle) is considering the switch* to a partial-text RSS feed (for Searchblog), another colleague (James Gross) makes the case against full-text feeds, here at JG Etc:

“I hate to say this and it goes against everything that I have written and wanted to think for the past few years, but full text feeds can REALLY hurt publishers.”

“The most important thing to a publisher is their content, and their content generally is what supports them in making their living. The problem with feeds and syndication is that advertisers, value not only the content, but also the brand behind that content. There is no brand behind a feed. Weird to say but oh so true. (The trenches of ad sales and trying to make a living for large independent publishers can really take the internet purist out of you.)”

“….The problem with the average publisher that makes their money based on [advertising] impressions and the brands that support these impressions, is that some very valuable readers are no longer stopping in [at the website, where those ad impressions are served] for a visit.”

Perhaps RSS ad models will mature to the point that marketers pay publishers a similar rate for reaching RSS readers as they do website readers, but that’s not yet the case.

Meanwhile, a third FM colleague (Neil Chase, who joined us last month from the New York Times) gave me this data point: In the newspaper world, only 15% of readers read “past the jump.” Meaning 85% of newspaper readers get what they need (and keep in mind, these are folks who PAY for those newspapers!) without turning past the front page — the original partial-text experience. Seems to me there’s a partial-text solution for RSS that’s more like the newspaper model (ie, giving readers some substance before the jump) and less like most email newsletters or current partial-text RSS feeds, which today provide subscribers a promotional tease to the story rather than a meaningful top-line summary.

* Update: Here’s Battelle’s post in response to reader comments that they don’t want him to make the move to partial text RSS.

From FM’s newly-promoted marketing manager, Sam Kahn:

“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.”

Here’s the complete list of Webby nominees, including our pals at Digg, Techdirt, COULORlovers and We Make Money Not Art.

Microsoft’s Mich Mathews says most of her company’s $1 billion US ad budget will be spent on digital media by 2010 (Mediapost). I like the sounds of that! I also like to see that Microsoft is investing heavily against research and experimentation to determine how best to execute that enormous migration of dollars:

“in preparation for what would be a mass repositioning of ad dollars, Microsoft has allocated 3% of its current ad budget for a multi-continent experiment to test a series of emerging media, Mathews said. Mobile and IPTV are being gauged in Europe, interactive and out-of-home in Asia, and the effectiveness of satellite radio and RSS feeds in the U.S.“

From MarketingVOX: A MarketingSherpa and AdTech survey of online marketers found that paid search and SEO were, by far, the most popular online ad tactics in 2006. The biggest-growth areas for 2007 are advertising on blogs, social networks and RSS feeds. Pop-unders seem to be losing their affectiveness.

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.

ClickZ picked up on last week’s roll-out of new RSS-powered ad units, including Symantec’s ads on FM sites: “John Battelle’s advertising and publishing network [Federated Media] is experimenting with a unique concept of displaying RSS content as display ads. Anti-virus vendor Symantec is serving up content generated from its Security Response blog as display ads now appearing on comment pages of Digg and on the home page of Techdirt.”