Inside the Marketers Studio - David Berkowitz's Marketing Blog

Self-Help with Facebook's Self Service Ads

Here's today's latest Social Media Insider from MediaPost. You can see more discussion of these ads in the previous post.

The self-service ad model may not be the secret to Facebook's future fortunes, but it presents marketers with some largely untapped opportunities for reaching the most precisely targeted audiences online.

If you talk to Facebook's users about advertising, you'll hear a number of criticisms. Some say it's brash or irrelevant. Many others don't notice it at all. I'd expect many consumers wouldn't even think of the best ads as advertising, such as those ads for TV show or movie premieres on the homepage where you RSVP if you're going. Some of the worst problems with the site's advertising have been minimized, such as those in my musings last summer on Facebook's 'Jewhavioral' targeting and overly personal weight loss ads.

Forrester's Marketing Forum last month provided me with an excuse to run another ad trial, as I demoed the platform to an attendee during a break and wound up creating a live campaign. I was covering the event as a blogger (read the roundup), so I had something to offer. Here are a few things I learned in the process. You can view screen shots from the campaign on Flickr or SlideShare.

• Facebook self-service ads remain as easy as ever to create. While I can't say my ad copy was perfectly written, putting up something passable took all of a few minutes. There have been few changes since the service launched.

• The targeting options such as Keywords and Workplaces allow precise ways to reach consumers volunteering this information. I had the campaign target people working at Forrester Research, which brought up about 400 people in the United States. Most advertisers won't want to cast such narrow nets, but the option's there.

• Creating similar ads is also a cinch. I used this feature to create five versions, all of which are shown on Flickr and SlideShare. These include ads targeting Forrester's competitors, and one targeting Forrester employees in the Netherlands.

• Expect low CPMs. Recommended bids ranged from 30 cents to 46 cents. I set my bids significantly higher since I was targeting fewer than 1,500 people through the various versions of the ads. I tried entering various other keywords and targeting options and couldn't find anything higher than 50 cents. More precise targeting does not lead to higher recommended bids.

• The actual CPM after a week was 60 cents across the campaign. If Facebook is able to reach its $5 billion valuation, it's not coming from advertisers like me.

• The performance was underwhelming, with a 0.25% click-through rate. That could be the fault of the ads. One ad targeted to Forrester employees where I used a better image reached a 0.60% CTR. I also know at least one of the clicks came from the analyst Jeremiah Owyang, who was featured in that ad. Moral: people will click ads with their own picture in it. But do that too much and you're probably going to creep out everyone who sees it. Fortunately that targeting's not offered by Facebook directly, though some application ad networks can pull in profile pictures.

After going through the process as an advertiser, I'm reminded of how relevant the advertising can be for consumers. Advertisers know a lot about me from the site, and they can infer a lot more. Fans of "30 Rock," Christopher Guest movies, and Jonathan Safran Foer books living in New York probably would welcome hearing about restaurants in the city's theater district. The cost of testing these ads is negligible; for around $15, I amassed over 25,000 impressions, which is plenty of information should I choose to use it for another campaign.

Self-service ads won't be the best option for running a major branding campaign on Facebook. The engagement ads on the homepage serve that purpose. With this kind of targeting, though, I'll fork over that quarter per click when there's a reason to reach a segment of Facebook's audience.

Case Study: Advertising Forrester Marketing Forum Coverage on Facebook

During Forrester’s Marketing Forum 2009 (read the full roundup), I spent a networking break demonstrating Facebook’s Page analytics and advertising. What better way to demonstrate it than create an ad on the fly?

>>See below for screen shots of the ads, the targeting, and the campaign overview.<<

As I was blogging the event, I created a simple ad with the subject “Forrester Mktg Forum Blog,” using the abbreviation for marketing due to character limits. I added a photo I took of the event, so there were no rights issues, and then had the copy read, “Want to read coverage of your own event? Visit MarketersStudio.com.”

The more interesting angle comes with the ad targeting. I was able to reach 400 U.S. residents who listed Forrester Research as an employer. It’s hard to get more precise than that. I then created another ad group targeting several Forrester competitors and changed the copy from “coverage of your own event” to “coverage of your rival’s event,” opening up another 1,000 people. And for fun, since I met a Forrester staffer from Amsterdam, I ran one more campaign targeting the 40 Forrester people in the Netherlands.

The campaign was cheap. Recommended CPM (cost per thousand impression) bids ranged from about $0.25 to $0.50, so I overbid considerably to max out my reach among the very limited target audience. I bid anywhere from $1 to $3, gradually upping several along the way. Over the course of a week, I spent under $16, garnering 26,000 impressions, 64 clicks, a 0.24% click-through rate, a $0.25 average cost per click, and a $0.60 CPM.

More importantly, I attracted attention from my target audience, including a comment on the blog from Jeremiah Owyang when he came directly from an ad. Is $0.25 a good price for an influential analyst’s/blogger’s attention? Is $16? Jeremiah’s a friend of mine, so I won’t imply in the slightest that we’re friends on a cost per click basis, but as a general rule I’d say it’s a good deal all around.

Oh, and Jeremiah also was featured in some ads. I ran three ads initially with analyst Shar VanBoskirk, and then I added a couple with Jeremiah. The Jeremiah ads attracted more than double the click-through rate, but that can at least partially if not mostly be attributed to the better photo of him compared with Shar.

 

 

 

Technorati Tags: forrester marketing forum,fmf09,forrester research,advertising,facebook,jeremiah owyang,shar vanboskirk

Facebook's Jewdar Strikes Again

I can't avoid it. Facebook's Jewdar is too damn strong. Maybe I should give up and put my religion on my profile already, and then drape my profile in an Israeli flag. Once again, I'm getting pinned as Jewish there.

See the ad below. I already reached out to them to find out more.

Update: I sent a lengthy note asking the proprietors of NYCHighHolidays.com about their ad targeting, and they sent me this one-word response: "random." I'm assuming that refers to their ad targeting, and not the nature of my question. They probably get a lot of random questions, like if you can bring Pomeranians to services, and where to get good deals on lox for break-the-fast dinner.

I really would like to see someone try a little bit harder to ferret out the Jews. Maybe soon you'll be able to target fans of The Great Schlep - but then again, all my black friends who've mentioned it to me like it as much as any Jews I know (and a couple of the racist Jews I know don't find it funny at all).

Related posts:

• How Does Facebook Know I'm Jewish?
• The Chutzpah of Facebook's Jewdar
• Facebook's Jewdar Blackout

Performance Performance

A little while back, Tony Winders of ValueClick interviewed a number of people in the interactive marketing agency to ask them about what performance means to them. I didn't realize what an amazing roster of talent Tony and his colleagues assembled, and it's a thrill to be included.

This was all one take, without the actual questions given in advance (I just knew it had something to do with performance), so the Q&A spans search engine marketing to Alfred Molina to my grandparents. My interview's here, and you can check out the whole site including interviews with Amy Auerbach, Kevin Ryan, Sean Cheyney, Taddy Hall, Jim Meskauskas, Joe Mandese, and way too many others to name.

Where Could You Rate Super Bowl Ads?

First of all, yes, it feels good to be a Giants fan today. The best part was all the screaming out on E 86th Street, people dancing spontaneously in the streets and neighbors who I never knew existed coming to their windows to either join in or watch.

More importantly for these purposes, where could you watch and rate the ads. Last year, you could on YouTube, but this year, they had nothing set up to do that (of course commercials will make their way there, but there was no official organization from the site). This year, with the game broadcast on Fox, MySpace hosts the ads, but you can't rate them. Hey Nielsen set up a forum for it, but even though I was a member, I didn't want to feel like I had to actively engage as part of that community; I just wanted to passively contribute a few ratings (and I don't know if I know anyone else on that site anyway). Jeremiah Owyang set something up on Twitter, but that was more of a fly by night community experience, not a place to watch the videos and see the most popular spots. I also checked digg, but they don't have anything special there.

So... where could you go to rate them?

One other thought: were there any great ads this year? I liked the Tide stain ad, but it's Tide, and a talking stain. Charles Barkley was good in T-Mobile's and Justin Timberlake was okay in Pepsi's, but both ads felt like they've been done before, and both went on too long. Some ads were offensive, like Bud Light and Sales Genie both making fun of Indians and others, while Life Water or whatever it is used reptiles in what felt like a ripoff of Filipino prison videos. The ones that struck the biggest chord for me were Tide and Victoria's Secret, which both demonstrated the value of why you should use their products in memorable ways (and, for that matter, you could use their products together), and then Budweiser's latest Clydesdale spot, which was the best ad hands down but was still a sequel.

So no, there were no great ads, and there was nowhere to rate them. If the GIants comeback wasn't that incredible, the biggest upset this year would have been with the advertising.

Dark Spot for Brightspot (Sheep Shed Their Wool)

BrightSpot.TV, a site covered here before, has shut down. I wrote back in August, "...You'd think the one thing we need a break from is advertising. Yet sheep that we are, we can't get enough of it." I guess we can get enough of it after all.

Yesterday, BrightSpot sent members this message: "BrightSpot Media would like to thank       all of our valued members for participating on BrightSpot.TV and taking       advantage of the partnerships that we had established. We regret to       inform you that as of Monday November 19th, 2007 the BrightSpot.TV site       will no longer be available."

We'll see if some other ad-focused sites can avoid BrightSpot's fate, including Didja, VeryFunnyAds, and Firebrand. The major difference is that BrightSpot was trying to reward people to watch ads that, for the most part, weren't very good, and the functionality itself was pretty poor, as the ads weren't designed to go viral. These other sites provide the reward of entertaining advertising rather than anything monetary, and they focus on providing a good experience to watch, interact with, and share the ads, with each site offering its own twist. That sounds both less complicated and more promising as a model - as long as the ads are really that good.

Watching Ads: Job and Pastime

Given how we're all cramming as much ad-supported media through our skulls as we possibly can these days, you'd think the one thing we need a break from is advertising. Yet sheep that we are, we can't get enough of it. Consider this first story from ABC7.com:

When signing up for Brightspot, users fill out a personal profile and receive ads targeted to their interests. Brightspot co-founder Aaron Martins calls it a whole new way for people to interact with commercials... Brightspot pays users from 25-to-50-cents for watching and evaluating ads. The money can be applied for subscriptions to companies like Napster or Gamefly.

I've been on Brightspot for awhile now, and while the publishing partners haven't hooked me in yet, it's easy to see how people will get sucked in. You have to answer a few survey questions after each ad, which then disappear if you wait too long, so you can't click the ads and take a leisurely bathroom break.

Then there's this story from The New York Times:

For example, veryfunnyads.com, a broadband Web site operated by the TBS cable network, has delivered more than 63 million video clip views since its introduction last August...

The USA Network unit of NBC Universal, part of General Electric, also intends to climb aboard the pitch wagon celebrating advertising as entertainment with an online effort centered on brand-centric content.

Plans call for a Web site next year that would include commercials and movie trailers as well as features like social networking and tools that would let visitors make ads of their own. The site is tentatively named didja.com, as in “Didja see that?”

“It’s all about relevance,” said Chris McCumber, senior vice president for marketing and brand strategy at USA Network. “Consumers want to be entertained on their own time, on their own terms.”

The Times gets into the irony of these sites blossoming just as digital video recorders give us more power to skip the ads. Yet now you have these sites that are all about viewing ads, either for rewards or entertainment.

I'm just waiting for the brilliant minds that convince us to pay to watch ads.

Oh wait - from our attention spans to the money the ads help make us spend, we already do in full.