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Web Ads Work Better Than TV Ads
Fohootville, We Hate You writes "According to a new study, Internet advertisements work better than television advertisements. Internet video watchers were reported to be 47 percent more "engaged" by the advertising they watched than were traditional TV viewers. The report does not mention whether pornographic internet advertisements were included in the study."
It is actually true that the human brain is more active while sleeping than when watching TV. The other thing is that TV commercials are rarely of any interest to the people watching TV. Usually they are for products or services which don't appeal to a particular viewer. Ads on videos like that are far easier to target to the viewer than the ones on TV, radio or in newspapers.
Additionally, if I can click on an ad and actually find out more information, I'm much more likely to pay attention to it than the same tired Mastercard commercial. For the most part, even the most amusing commercials cease to be interesting after 3 or 4 views.
I'm referring specifically to video podcasts that I can download for free through iTunes, Miro, etc. First of all, most of the videos are in plain, standard MP4/H.264 that I can stream to my Xbox 360 or Apple TV...that means I can fast-forward if I choose. Second, a lot of the ads are voiced by the hosts of the shows I watch (Diggnation, Web Drifter, just about anything from Revision3), so they feel a little more personal.
Overall, the ads are for something you might actually be interested in since a lot of the shows are very tightly focused. The fact that the hosts voice the ads helps you draw the connection that these ads are paying for the shows.
That said, I would never touch any of the flash-based web videos offered by ABC, NBC, etc. Too "corporate" and impersonal. If I can't stream it to my TV, it does not get watched.
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Obviously, the one defining difference between normal TV and web-based TV is the remote control, and the ease with which you can change the channel. Commercial comes on? Flip flip flip flip flip. You get to ignore commercials, zone out, and satisfy your OCD all at once. Eventually, your show comes back on, and you flip back.
There's no channel to change with web-based TV shows. Sure, you can alt-tab to another browser window, but once the ad is done, you'd have to task-switch your brain back away from whatever it was you were doing to distract yourself from the ad. It just doesn't have the same feel-good feeling of repeatedly pounding a dinky little worn-down button on the remote.
On a side note, could overlay ads on TV possibly get more annoying? Sometimes they take up 50% of the screen and include loud obtrusive noises. Fox and TBS are especially annoying in this respect. What happened to the good old days, before Spike became Spike, when they'd just take a tiny strip of the screen at the bottom and tell you what was going to be on next? Do people really watch more Sex and the City just because they plaster Sarah Jessica Parker's old and tired face on top of whatever it is you're actually trying to watch?
Yes. I bought a car last month based on a banner ad. A Honda Fit. I had never heard of one before, rarely watch TV, and the ad caught my eye. I looked at the page, then dug further and further into the site researching it, then went hunting for reviews and opinions online. After a few days of this I was convinced and went and purchased the car.
Once I saw an ad for a Burger King BBQ sauce burger and I went out and bought one on a whim. It sounded good, and I guess I was hungry. The irony is that I didn't actually click the ad, I just closed the window.
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"Engagement" was in quotes in the summary, and rightly so - it's an advertising metric. Think of it this way:
Nielsen numbers ideally measure how many people are watching a given television show based on a percentage of a demographically relevant sample, but they don't measure how much attention people are paying, so TV on in the background when a person is preparing dinner is weighted the same as someone who's involved in the show.
Engagement, usually through things like questionaires based on show content, measures how much attention people are actually paying.
Engagement is a Big Deal, big enough so that many TV networks have started factoring Engagement numbers into their formula for determining how much blocks of advertising are worth in any given show.
--Triv
I've been stunned by how often I'll be leading an older person around,trying to teach them how to find answers for themselves, and they can't tell the difference between the adsense ads and the normal results. I can't for the life of me figure out why, but it seems like they're so afraid of computers that they just don't bother applying common sense.
It's like they've been so acclimated to computers speaking tech babble ("Illegal operation at 0x00ff0e9a") that they don't realize that some things (like web pages) are written in plain English (or whatever your native language is).
Slightly OT rant, but of all the places I would have thought would have better sense not to run obnoxious advertising, it'd be Slashdot. But recently, we've had ads on Slashdot with sound (it took me a while to figure out which computer was making the sound of a door slamming), and now an HP/AMD ad that rolls out a large graphic on top of whatever you're trying to read. Normal banner ads on Slashdot are fine, and if it's for something interesting I'll click on it. Obnoxious ads are not - they push me to want to install ad-blocking software, and then everyone loses: I don't find out about potentially useful products, and Slashdot doesn't get any ad revenue from me.
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If you ever start your own business, I hope for your sake that your potential customers don't all share the same view!
The simple reason for risking a new merchant is that their price and/or service may be better.
Of course, the more you're going to spend the more care you should be taking, and then a bit of research about the company may help. A new merchant may not have a lot of glowing reviews scattered around the web, but if they're ripping people off you can be fairly sure people will be writing about it.