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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."
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."
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.
Yes, several times when they offered exactly what I was looking for at exactly the right time. I clicked on a Google text ad this morning looking for custom rubber stamps. The fact that the merchant uses Google's checkout system, designated by the Google Checkout icon...*another ad*....sealed the deal for me.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
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?
Goatse link in the parent. Don't click.
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.
From what I've read, google is the master of targeted ads. I frequently click on the ads when they come up during google searches - they're usually pretty good. They easily have the best rate going.
As a result, they have far better results than less targeted but more disruptive ads - as a result of TV, people already have a massive resistance to ads they're not really interested in. Add that to the fact that most television ads today are mostly brand awareness - can we really answer how much difference Coke/Pepsi ads make today?
New products make more sense to advertise - awareness hasn't built up yet. Still, I've been deluged with so many ads that I've stopped watching television most of the time, and I've certainly built up resistance to advertising.
Every so often the media companies go too far with advertising - resulting early on in people taping TV shows in order to be able to fast forward through them. Then they came up with auto-forwarding players, and players that would automatically pause recording during commercials.
Then DVRs came and the same features popped up.
On the internet, advertising just kept getting more and more intrusive until a backlash occurred - Firefox, pop-up blockers, various ad-removal services, etc...
Meanwhile google tools along generating ad revenue by concentrating on providing useful, directed, but not intrusive ads.
I don't read AC A human right
"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).