ChasNote

What happens when a publisher fails to create quality advertising products designed for its unique content experience (native advertising, broadly defined)?

It concludes, correctly, that it won’t get much of a premium by having human beings sell its not-very-well targeted 300×250 banners. So it offloads its inventory to ad exchanges and networks. Since the exchanges and networks don’t deliver a great CPM for most impressions, the publisher is forced to add more banner placements just to maintain revenue-per-thousand-pageviews levels it achieved two years earlier. Not a pretty picture, no matter how you look at it. The money still isn’t great, and the user experience is horrifying.

Here’s a screenshot from the San Jose Merc website on February 7 snapped by John Battelle. From his post on Searchblog:

Six or more of [ads] in this screenshot, and three more below the fold. There’s a Verizon site wrapper (on either side of the page), an expandable top banner, and three medium rectangle units crammed in there. Not one of them is what you might call a ‘quality’ ad — at least by most standards. (Do you think Verizon is happy that their site takeover is overrun by social media buttons and competing with belly flab, diabetes, Frys’ Electronics and travel pitches?) If you bother to scroll down (who would?) there are three more pitches waiting for you there.

And check out the number of beacons and trackers on the right, in purple. That’s Ghostery, which I run on my browser to see who’s laying down data traps. Man, Merc, that’s a lot o’ data. Are you doing anything with it?

Look, I’ve built my career around ad-supported media, and I continue to believe that advertising (in some shape or form) will support digital publishing. But if there’s one thing you learn early — somewhere around your very first day in the business — advertising does not work if there aren’t consumers on the other end to look at the ads. So if you ad strategy erodes your audience, or merely burns out their eyeballs by way of toxic design, you’ll soon be left without a business at all.

1972 Eames promo video for the Polaroid SX-70 via 37 Signals.

My favorite clip is just before the 2-minute mark, when a mom takes advantage of an early generation of “continuous shooting mode” to capture her kid hopping down a hopscotch course. The camera spits out Polaroid prints like a high-speed printer with its paper tray missing. But don’t stop there, the video also provides instruction on how to open the case and take a picture.

(Thanks, Sarah!)

(Graphic by Shaw Nielsen, Adweek.)

Let’s officially call 2012 the Year of the Imagesphere. To review: Facebook says its users upload more than 300 million photos per day (up from 31 million in 2009). To support this massive interest in photo sharing, the company acquired Instagram in April for $1 billion.

Meanwhile, Pinterest leapt out of the shadows to become the third largest social network (valued at $1.5 billion by investors in May) because of its unique and popular spin on photo curation. Almost exactly a year ago, Twitter launched its own photo sharing, and earlier this month it rolled out photo filters in a bid to steal usage from Instagram. Within days, Instagram responded by disabling integration with Twitter cards and erecting a wall between the two networks that makes it harder for consumers to share Instagram photos via Twitter. And a few weeks ago, the original photo-sharing giant, Flickr, jumped back into the battle with its own sharing app.

The Internet titans are placing big bets on the future businesses that will be built on the 3 trillion (and growing) online images. The unanswered questions: How will publishers, image repositories (such as Flickr or Facebook) and brands capitalize on the imagesphere opportunity? How will content creators turn the act of flipping through galleries and photo feeds into deep engagement? How will advertisers adjust from a marketing rhythm where they produced one beautiful photo every 13 weeks for a print campaign to one where they need 13 photos a day to feed a Tumblr?

And what’s in all of this for consumers? After a decade and a half of presenting consumers with online photos that they can look at — kind of like we look at photo albums at our grandmother’s house — will the Internet finally bring some interactivity to image content and turn photos into a stepping-off point for a richer experience?
It’s clear that consumers are itching for more. They want more depth, interactivity and the opportunity to explore more images beyond those the editor picked to populate a particular gallery. Publishers who want their attention will need to upgrade the photo experience, and advertisers will need to figure out how to tell their stories inside these photo experiences. This means one thing for sure: Brands and publishers need to figure ouhow to extract precise, granular metadata from the Web’s 3 trillion pictures.

Only when publishers know what’s inside images in their archives can they serve readers with additional relevant content from inside each gallery. Every image, then, will launch dozens more galleries — more Angelina Jolie images here, more pictures of fabulous shoes there. They can also monetize photos with precisely targeted ads, just like they do around other content on their sites.

Without image metadata, photos are the dark matter of the ad-server galaxy. Unlock this metadata, and brands will step into the imagesphere as sponsors. Turn those rectangular clusters of pixels into keywords, and ad budgets will support photo content as enthusiastically as they support keywords found in text. Hiring agencies and art directors to produce hundreds of new photo assets each month would break the bank. But attaching a brand’s message to thousands of photos snapped by fans could deliver the same results at a fraction of the cost.

Clearly, this is an emerging trend that Facebook, in particular, is betting on. It ignited consumer hostility by changing Instagram’s terms of service, raising concerns that the new rules would allow the company to license member photos (your personal photos!) to brands or other corporate entities. Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom responded on the company’s blog that it merely plans “to experiment with innovative advertising,” but will not license user photos to outside parties. It’s not our images Instagram wants — it’s the metadata.

The explosion in the image-based Web isn’t just an issue for brands. Publishers are experimenting with photocentric, responsive-design-oriented tablet sites. They’re also tinkering with images loaded with interactivity, whether as part of editorial or within ad units.

But it’s still early for applications and for ad products associated with images. The big headline in 2013 will be the evolution from photo creation and sharing to getting inside those images. Will you be camera-ready?

(Originally published as a guest column at Adweek.)

You know advertising has an identity problem when even actors in Coke commercials view a Coke billboard with distain.

Yesterday Luminate (my employer) and Getty announced a partnership in which the companies will share image metadata. From NY Times:

Just viewing images of celebrities like Kim Kardashian might satisfy some Web surfers, but a new partnership between Getty Images and Luminate, a company that specializes in making digital images interactive, is bringing a new experience to more inquisitive viewers.

Digital photographs from Getty are typically tagged with basic descriptors of who or what is in the photograph — small bits of information known as metadata. Luminate will take those photos and append additional metadata, including, for example, Ms. Kardashian’s Web site, Twitter feed or related articles about her. When a user hovers over an image, the information will appear on the screen.

Luminate’s Related Tweets app running on Entertainment Tonight:

Dish Network ran a full page ad in the A Section of today’s New York Times to announce the commendation they almost received at this year’s CES. Here’s what went down, according to The Verge:

On Friday [January 11], news broke that CNET had been forced by its parent company CBS to remove the Dish Network’s Hopper set-top box from its “Best of CES” awards due to ongoing litigation between the two companies. CBS has been battling the Dish Network in court over the Hopper’s ability to skip past commercials automatically (NBC, ABC, and Fox are also taking action).

The bottom half of Dish’s ad explains the asterisk:

Now there’s an ad that’s doing double duty.

(Image credit: Honey Nut Cheerios site.)

Since the beginning of time (or at least since 1934) cereal makers have put athletes on their boxes to move more product, and they’ve worked those boxes onto the set of movies and TV shows to create implied endorsement. More recently we’ve seen all manner of stunts to seed social media with branded conversations — from Twitter gimmicks to racy campaigns in other countries in hopes that social media will bring a campaign to US shores, along with a paper trail that points the blame at some maverick local agency.

Now Honey Nut Cheerios has us all asking if they’ve grafted product placement, celebrity endorsement and social-media wizardry into one miraculous marketing ploy: Did they hatch a “branded appearance” scheme to insert their cereal inside some NBA trash talk?!

According to Ad Age:

We may never know for sure what Kevin Garnett said to Carmelo Anthony in a bout of trash talking during the Knicks-Celtics matchup last week at Madison Square Garden. But we do know what the internet thinks he said: “Your wife tastes like Honey Nut Cheerios,” referring to Mr. Anthony’s wife, La La Anthony. Mr. Garnett and Celtics coach Doc Rivers have denied this, but regardless of whether it’s true or false, it drove a lot of Twitter mentions for Cheerios last week, which was up 122,000 comments over its average, good for No. 1 on this week’s Brand Chatter Chart.

And while Carmelo Anthony is now on record as a fan of Honey Nut Cheerios, I can’t imagine General Mills, the make of Cheerios, could have staged this stunt. Your wife tastes like Honey Nut Cheerios?! If, in fact, that’s what Kevin Garnett said, it’s intended as a crass insult of some kind. Even if I don’t have a precise understanding of how exactly the insult works, it does suggest there’s trouble — or at least some unconventional arrangements — in the Anthony household. Not exactly the kind of stuff Honey Nut Cheerios generally aligns itself with.

Next week Coke will air several new commercials that address rising obesity and the perception that sugary soft drinks contribute to the problem. The ads will suggest ways to burn off 140 calories and recommend a beverage diet that includes more of the sugar-free alternatives. But it doesn’t sound like Coke will be taking any direct responsibility for the fact that people drink too much of their liquid goodness. From Salon:

Coca-Cola said its ads aren’t a reaction to negative public sentiment. Instead, the idea was to raise awareness about what the company has done and the work it plans to do in coming months regarding obesity, said Stuart Kronauge, general manager of sparkling beverages for Coca-Cola North America….

In the ad, a narrator notes that obesity is an issue that ‘concerns all of us’ but that people can make a difference when they ‘come together.’ The spot was produced by Brighthouse and Citizen2 and is intended to reflect Coca-Cola’s corporate responsibility among cable news viewers.

There’s nothing untrue about that — it’s not like Coke is forcing us to drink its soda. But that sounds a little evasive, no? A bit like the argument my gun-enthusiast friend once gave me when I blamed gun deaths on guns: Guns don’t kill people, he told me, bullets do — guns just make them go really fast.

New sunglasses from Parabellum reveal their logo only when the lenses are steamed up. What a fun idea. As NOTCOT puts it, “Much like leaving messages in the bathroom to appear when things get steamy…. playing with these sunglasses will have you breathing on glass everywhere in hopes of a secret message. And of course, you can see through them perfectly when wearing them normally.”

(Note: A quick survey among the editorial team here at ChasNote concluded that none of them have ever left a message on a bathroom mirror for “when things get steamy.” But then again they all deny using SnapChat too.)

Last year my daughter’s 4th grade science project involved splashing cherry juice on scraps from a white cotton t-shirt, and testing the cleaning power of various laundry detergents. She emerged from the lab unable to perceive a difference among the contestants — the popular brand (Tide), the eco-friendly brand and the generic alternative from Safeway. They all performed about as well as the control wash, nothing but cold water.

Tide meanwhile is 50% more expensive than other similar liquid detergents, and shoppers still buy twice as much of it as its nearest competitor. And it’s not just winning the mindshare game among the coveted Chief Household Officers, either. Jugs of Tide — not just any brand of liquid laundry detergent, mind you, the National Retail Federation’s report calls out Tide specifically — are disappearing from store shelves and ending up in the hands of drug dealers.

From New York Magazine:

As the cases piled up after his team’s first Tide-theft bust, [Organized Retail Crime Unit sergeant] Thompson sought an answer to the riddle at the center of the crimes: What did thieves want with so much laundry soap? To find out, he and his unit pored over security recordings to identify prolific perpetrators, whom officers then tracked down and detained for questioning…. It turned out the detergent wasn’t ­being used as an ingredient in some new recipe for getting high, but instead to buy drugs themselves. Tide bottles have become ad hoc street currency, with a 150-ounce bottle going for either $5 cash or $10 worth of weed or crack cocaine. On certain corners, the detergent has earned a new nickname: ‘Liquid gold.’ The Tide people would never sanction that tag line, of course. But this unlikely black market would not have formed if they weren’t so good at pushing their product.

I’m going to ask my daughter to re-run her experiment. I mean, how can anyone say Tide isn’t the most bad-ass of laundry soaps?!