Facebook Ads: All about the "Peer Influencing"

"It's called peer influencing," said Chad Stoller, director-emerging platforms at Organic. MediaContacts' Mr. Nyatsambo gives an example of what he said would be an incredibly valuable tool: Facebook could decipher data such as a group get-together its members have planned and serve advertising related to things the group might need -- pizza, for example. "If [Facebook] can figure out how to anticipate what someone might be looking for, they would be an enormous value," he said in a story from this week's Advertising Age.

This level of sophistication obviously isn't in place yet, or I wouldn't receive ads encouraging me to join the army at 45 years of age.

A DVR That Makes You Watch the Ads

And at the price of $0.00, it just might freaking work. The service called Look Back will be limited in at least two ways: 1.) the fast forward feature will be turned off (can a mod be far off?) and 2.)it sounds a lot more like an on-demand service than a recording service, with the limitation that you can timeshift, but only before midnight on the day the show originally aired.

This potentially dramatically increases the installed base of DVR viewers and is pleasing as punch to the advertisers. Everybody is happy? I doubt it because of its limitations (it's not really a DVR!) but you can't argue with the price.

Current Events Weekly Magazines are a Dying Breed

I'd proclaim it dead already, but the publishers aren't giving up the ghost just yet. I saw this blurb in MediaWeek that indicates we've pretty much achieved the 80-20 rule where 80% read online and won't read the print magazines. If you're an advertising buyer who buys space in weeklies like Time, People, Newsweek, Sports Illustrated, etc., I'd love to hear your thoughts on price/value.

Viacom Looks for MORE Data

Viacom wants MORE information and they are looking to get second-by-second information from TNS Media Research. I fear they aren’t going to like what they find and it will be interesting to see how they communicate with the advertising community.

Nielsen Media Research recently began measuring how many people watch commercials and this led to such wacky commentary as “Almost Everyone With a DVR DOES watch commercials!”

It’s true, but it’s spin. To undo the spin would be to say: “Yes, ALL DVR viewers eventually watch a commercial but most DVR viewers don’t watch most of the ads most of the time and this is ESPECIALLY true for the middle pods, so if you’re in the middle pod you should NEVER PAY for the +7 (DVR) viewers.”

As ever, “truth” in advertising can be hard to come by.

Advertisers Lament: Smarter Kids

"To corral them to a commercial message is difficult," Coleman said of teens. "They will swear they will not look at any advertising online. It's a market allergic to the commercial message. We have to do a better job."

From: 4A's: Teens Elude Digital Marketers

Perhaps they are just immune. Some might see that as progress...

Leverage Shifts to the Advertisers

...and Nielsen will try to make both the advertisers AND the networks happy. They will not succeed. Why? Because it's obvious: the Networks had the upper hand and now they don't.

Check out this story from Advertising Age, in the face of the actual viewership data for the commercials themselves, what did the Networks focus on? Getting every sliver of a dollar for the DVR audience that might still watch the advertisements. This seems to imply that the networks didn't like the actual data at all and are searching for a way to stick with the old model.
I don't see them (the networks) getting away with that for long, if at all and I see this as a sign that Mark Cuban was more right than he knew. The leverage isn't moving in favor of the advertisers, I think it must have already moved. The advertisers have the upper hand now.

I note that Nielsen has shared still ZERO data with the general public on the ad ratings themselves (Nielsen too only focused on DVR viewership in their press release, which seems to indicate Nielsen sides with the Networks...Nielsen shouldn't have a side here).

All this noise without any data in the public...strikes me that the commercial ratings themselves may be worse than anyone wants to talk about. The DVR thing is merely a distraction until we see the real data for the commercials themselves. I can't help but feeling if it was "OH MY, PEOPLE LOVE COMMERCIALS! LOVE THEM!" we would have seen some data already. We didn't. That's bad news for the networks and good news for the advertisers.

Nielsen to Begin Ratings for Ads

Later this month Nielsen plans to release viewership data for advertising spots. Advertisers are concerned and not just that people are using DVRs and fast-forwarding through commercials, but that they are getting up during the ads and not watching them. We've always done that of course, but the concern is we're doing it a lot more lately.

The article references tactics that advertisers are toying with to win back viewers to ads.

I have a simple plan: somehow turn every commercial into some kind of lottery. The prizes don't need to be that big if you're keeping millions of extra eyeballs tuned in. The problem is that you'd have to be creative in integrating the lottery into the ads, otherwise nobody is paying any attention to the product being advertised.

I've been watching a lot more TV than normal this year. I've even done something I almost never do: watch live broadcast TV for things other than sports. I watched the last few episodes of Heroes live, without any timeshifting on the big screen, in high definition. Everything looked great and even many of the commercials were in HD.

But the commercial breaks are simply too long.

During this year's finale of Grey's Anatomy, in addition to the actual show not being that good, the commercial breaks were unterminably long. So long that even though I was watching the recording of it off my DVR and was pressing down the 30 second skip button, I was having to press it more times than I'd ever had to in my life

There were commercial breaks that were nearly 5 minutes in length. In 5 minutes, I can get up, use the bathroom, wash my hands, get a drink of water, go send a couple of e-mails...

I understand the point with a successful show is to capture as much ad revenue as you can in the finale, but to that end, it was already an extended finale (it ran 1 hour in 20 minutes in real time, with commercials) extending spots themselves was just encouraging people to tune out.

Ultimately with the Nielsen data on ad viewership what I'd love to see is how many people watched the first ad of the break and at least part of the last ad, compared to the ads in the middle.

I think those advertising in the middle probably saw a significant drop off of viewers, while the last spot before the show came back on probably did very well. What I'd like to see from the Nielsen data is what the dropoffs are, by each spot running in the break. There's probably a bigger delta between the viewership of the middle spots and the last spot than there is between the pricing of those two spots.

Or I'm just plain wrong, but we'll know soon enough when the study is released.