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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."
Has anyone here ever intentionally clicked on a banner ad? A text ad? Any ad?
The ads they are talking about are ads run inline in the video, not the crap surrounding the video frame.
That's because TV isn't interactive, I remember a study done once that measured the brain activity of a TV viewer and it actually declined, the internet *at a minimum* requires that you be involved.
Your brain is in an awake state (well most of us) unlike a TV viewer.
And no, constantly pushing the channel buttons is not interaction.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
I know with most of the people I associate with, commercials are just a time to go get something done during a show, or talk about things while there's no content playing. No one's really paying attention to the ads.
On the reverse angle, internet ads are streamlined into the content more often than not. Plus, with systems like AdSense at work, the ads are related to the page you're looking at (which is most likely something you're interested in), whereas while the ads on TV have a targeted audience, they aren't exactly 'user specific'.
maybe I don't quite get marketing, but I would prefer not to measure the success of advertising in terms of 'feeling engaged', but rather in terms of 'units sold'.
Web ad videos are more "engaging," because video player controls are usually disabled for the ad before the actual content you want to see is delivered. Naturally, with TV, the advertiser doesn't can't disable your remote.
As a consequence, there's almost no video I'll click anymore unless I know for certain it's ad-free. Still, I'm sure most folks just gut it out and let the ad play so they can see the content that follows (maybe open a new browser tab, etc.). So in a way, it's "engaging," but I'd be curious to see what percentage of folks abort and move on without seeing the content.
If I had video content online that I'd want people to see, I'd be leary of prepending a ad video that folks couldn't skip.
The only times I ever click on them is by mistake.
Yeah, I hate when they make the last thumbnail a link to the pay site.
Regardless, the TV ads these days are rubbish, bad ads and too many of them. From the family gathering this year, I can see that everyone has finally made it over to my side of the argument which is slightly more radical than Bill Hicks. Even my mom is sick of it and this is someone who likes advertising, who responds positively to "cute" commercials. When they lost her support, they lost everyone.
I download everything I want to watch. When I am exposed to commercials, I feel zero sense of persuasion, just a growing, burning anger that can only be quenched by dick-stomping the next advertising exec I meet. They are ruining our culture and our lives.
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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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Are you trying to say that there is porn on the Internet?
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?
"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).
... shouldn't that be 47% more enraged by the advertising?
:)
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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