ChasNote

I spotted this in illustrator Wendy MacNaughton’s Instagram feed.

MacNaughton painted the cover art for a recent issue of Print Magazine: A big fish being held by a somewhat smaller fisherman. The cover includes the standard utilitarian elements of a newsstand magazine — the magazine’s title, the issue date, cover lines that tell you about articles inside — but most of the cover’s real estate is given over to MacNaughton’s artwork. It’s the art (or photography), after all, that draws our attention to a particular issue of a magazine. You might say art (or photography) is the native language of magazine covers.

If you’re an advertiser that pays a premium to place your ad on the back cover, then, you would be well advised to do whatever you can make your ad’s creative design as awesome as the artwork on the front cover.

Or, in the case Shutterstock, the back-cover advertiser for this issue of Print, you might just let the artwork from the front cover spill right into your ad. Then, anyone who wants to enjoy the full Wendy MacNaughton fish illustration needs to open the magazine, turn it face down, and view at the front and back covers — including the Shutterstock message behind the fish’s tail — at the same time.

As the artist herself puts it, “bonus: we got the advertising to support the art. high five, print mag.”

This ad is awesome, right?

I mean, it’s a viral sensation that’s been viewed millions of times. And in a world where people skip 30-second TV spots and click on YouTube’s “Skip Ad” after 3 interminable seconds, it’s impressive to find yourself watching a 3-minute commercial to the end. But I find myself asking, was it a good commercial?

In a post on product design, Andrew Chen talks about the tradeoff between virality and alignment with your value proposition.

It might be useful to plot ad creatives on a similar chart, but with the horizontal axis renamed “brand alignment.” So I had my infographics guy whip this up:

The Advertising Effectiveness Matrix

Every now and then a brand creates a commercial that tells its story and everyone is talking about it: Awesome. Examples might be Coke’s Mean Joe Green commercial from my youth (and I’m still talking about it, thirstily), or anything from Apple. They create emotional experiences we want to share with others, and they make us desire a product at the same time.

Most commercials fall short of that magic but they’re good enough to watch, and with some frequency they can do their job of luring us into the mouth of the purchase funnel. Car and cosmetics commercials generally land here; nothing much to talk about, but we’d all like to look like those handsome happy people on TV. It’s been working for decades, and it still works.

Of course, there’s no such thing as a 2-by-2 matrix that doesn’t have a lower left quadrant. To steal from Andrew Chen, it’s the land of WTF. When I see a commercial that I don’t want to talk about and I can’t remember who made it, I sort of feel bad. All that money and marketing-department optimism gone to waste. Look, it’s hard to make a great film, let alone a great one that can be told in half a minute and also highlights a product. Perhaps we should admire the brands that depart from the traditional promotional formula and flap their waxy wings toward a higher ambition, even if the heat of the sun sends them crashing down in the end.

But back to the Thai cellphone commercial above. The vertical axis is hardly tall enough to capture its viral success. But does the story make you want to switch your cellphone service to True Move H? Did you know it was a commercial from a cellphone company called True Move H? In my case, I was dabbing tears from my eyes for the few seconds during which their logo appeared on screen. No doubt True Move made a great short film, but if I consider it a marketing tool, I’d place in the upper left quadrant: (Un)Branded Entertainment that fails as an advertisement.

According to new data from Kantar Media, US advertising spending for Q2 2013 is up 3.5% over the same period in 2012, to $35.8 billion. Cable TV made the greatest gains, up 14.9%, and Spanish-language TV was up 6.1%. On the other side of roster, newspaper advertising is down 4.3%.

The most interesting news to me, though, is the section on print magazines. Ad revenues for consumer magazines are up 1.9%, although (if you want to quibble over the details) they sold fewer ad pages than last year, each one at a higher average rate. And Sunday magazines, the magazines inside newspapers, grew ad revenues by 4.1% — the same rate by which Internet display ad revenue grew.

Digging into individual titles shows more signs of vitality. The September issue of Vogue is the fattest since 2008 — 665 pages of ads — and the September Elle just broke the record for highest page count ever for a Hearst publication. W, Bon Appetit, Allure, Teen Vogue and Glamour all had their best Septembers since the 2008 financial crisis. The Atlantic, with its diversified approach across print, digital and events, is on a tear.

Who’d a thunk it?

My friend Alex was surprised to learn that a buddy’s Yom Kippur Break Fast this year is apparently “sponsored by Pork.” At least that’s what it says on the banner ad Evite placed on the RSVP page. As my mother-in-law always says, you have to keep an eye on those reformed Jews.

Yesterday Facebook announced on its blog a new deal with Shutterstock that will give its advertisers access to millions of stock photos for use in Facebook ads. If that means I’ll never see Larry Ellison’s mug on my wall again, that would be fantastic.

The real issue Facebook wants to solve is advertiser performance. As Lauren Hockenson puts it in her GigaOM post:

We all dislike ads on (the right hand side of) our Facebook pages. Some of that dislike comes from them being just plain ugly and poorly retargeted. It is hardly a surprise that the click-through rates on these low-cost ads are abysmal. A study by AdRoll last year showed that traditional ad-retargeting nabs 40% more clicks than a Facebook ad.

If the Shutterstock deal leads to more visually inviting ads and Facebook users look at them and click on them more frequently, advertisers (and Facebook shareholders) will be thrilled.

Such a smart idea that you could almost call it obvious. Back in March, Facebook redesigned its News Feed to present larger photos, because, according to Facebook executives, 50% of News Feed posts are photos (March 2013), up from 20% a year earlier (November 2011). An acknowledgement, in other words, that photos are the universal language of Facebook. Maybe I’m asking too much to expect Facebook to give a photo-facelift to their ad products simultaneously with a similar upgrade other user features on the site. Maybe they need to stagger changes of this magnitude, and improving the ad products only a half a year after upgrading the News Feed is pretty good.

But I can’t help reading something larger into this. Part of the reason online ads stink — annoying consumers and disappointing advertisers — is that digital media companies treat advertising as an after-thought. The prevailing wisdom is: Launch the product, iterated until it’s awesome, and then build a giant audience. If all of that goes as planned, you can tack on some ads later. How do ads stand a chance of working (for consumers or for brands) if, on they day they launch, we already hate them simply because they’ve stolen pixels that yesterday were used to delight us with content or service that made the product awesome?

In conversation with Digiday, Monocle editor in chief Tyler Brule expressed his distaste for the term native advertising. It’s a “bizarre, North American piece of marketingism,” he said. Meanwhile, Monocle does some kick-ass native advertising. (The above screenshot is a display ad that links out to Bottega Veneta, running on the homepage between a scroll of hero photos for editorial features; it’s not clear whether or not Monocle’s creative team was involved in the ad’s creation.)

If the company’s infrastructure blurs the church-and-state divide between editorial and sales, it’s by design. Editors accompany ad directors on sales calls. “I’m of the opinion that all good journalists are good salespeople too,” Brule said. While the ad team discusses pricing and tries to close the business, editors give Monocle’s potential clients insight into the publication’s editorial calendar and explain the reasoning behind certain editorial decisions.

Once the client buys in, Monocle’s team then works with them on the concept, produces illustrations, and executes the final ads with their input. The result is an advertisement that meshes with the magazine’s look and feel and aspires to be appealing to readers. All the ads are labeled vaguely — with the brand’s name, followed by “X Monocle” — but leave it to the readers to figure out what that means.

I think the “X Monocle” attribution is perhaps overly subtle, but otherwise I’m a supporter. Monocle is a culture magazine, not an investigative reporting shop, so I’m not worried about powerful interests buying its silence. And while I’m not sure all good journalists are good salespeople (plenty are!), I am certain that all good journalists know the difference between a reported story and an advertiser’s photo shoot. Ads that are less sucky and a solution that’s convincing more advertisers to support premium publishing projects?! What’s not to like?

The CW is working with in-image ad network Gum Gum to place ads for the TV network’s upcoming series, “Reign,” at the bottom of mom-and-royal-baby photos of Kate Middleton. Very well targeted, yes. Some would argue, too well targeted.

From The CW’s VP-media strategies Caty Burgess.:

“We knew the royal baby was just around the corner. As we’re giving birth to our own royal baby in ‘Reign,’ we wanted to figure out ways that we can align our messaging about the [premiere] of our new show with what we were sure and I think even underestimated what kind of media circus the royal birth would be.”

From Tim Peterson at Ad Age:

Appropriating baby photos for advertising purposes — essentially turning the potential future King of England into a Nascar driver — is risky to say the least…. Won’t The CW receive the same flak as other brands that tried to pile on the royal birth? Couldn’t commercializing the child incite even more aggressive vitriol?

I just wonder who will have more fun with all of this, the media pundits or the lawyers?!

(Disclosure: I used to work at Luminate, where I’m still an advisor, a competitor to Gum Gum.)

The driving motivation, according to Lewis DVorkin in his latest Inside Forbes post, for the explosive growth in native advertising:

The $10 billion digital display advertising business is clearly in for disruption. Banners and rectangles, more than a trillion are served up quarterly, are increasingly wallpaper to consumers (clickthrough rates hover at a negligible 0.05%). They can also be sold and bought through computers much more efficiently than through human sales staffs. Those two facts combine to put relentless downward pressure on CPMs, the price marketers are willing to pay for 1,000 ad impressions. Falling ad rates have hit journalism where it hurts. The American Society of News Editors says that nearly 20,000 newsroom professionals have lost their jobs since 2000 (part of that is recession related).

Last year McDonalds Canada launched Our Food, Your Questions (more here), a site that invites questions from consumers, and answers even the tough ones like “Why does your food look different in the advertising than what’s in the store?” Turns out the ingredients are the same in both places, one just benefits from the Dove Evolution treatment.

When a former staff writer for Adweek (Charlie Warzel) shares your latest commercial with his Twitter followers and tells them, “I don’t even know if this is an ad, but it’s just wonderful,” it’s time to buy chocolates for your creative team.