ChasNote

From a Lee Gomes piece in the Wall Street Journal (I saw it at Boing Boing):

“What is it about a Web site that might make it literally irresistible? Clues are offered by research conducted by Irving Biederman, a neuroscientist at the University of Southern California, who is interested in the evolutionary and biological basis of the human need for information…..

“When he hooked up volunteers to a brain-scanning machine, the preferred pictures [ones that “presented new information that somehow needed to be interpreted”] were shown to generate much more brain activity than the unpreferred shots. While researchers don’t yet know what exactly these brain scans signify, a likely possibility involves increased production of the brain’s pleasure-enhancing neurotransmitters called opioids.”

I’m 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 rate.

From WSJ:

“Advertising wear-out has fascinated researchers since the 1970s. Studies, generally focusing on television commercials, have suggested ads can be viewed anywhere from three to 25 times before losing effectiveness. After that, says Brian Sternthal, a marketing professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, people ‘dismiss the information as old news.’”

“New digital technology also makes it easier to customize ads slightly without having to incur the time and expense of recreating them from scratch. Rajeev Batra, a marketing professor at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, says such modest alterations can slow down the process of ad fatigue.”

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.

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.

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.

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.