The first in a two part blog piece on the changes in Display Advertising Measurement. As the industry moves from “served”to “viewable” impression measurement, let’s review the basics.

Back in the early days of Digital Advertising, on October 27 1994 to be exact, when Wired.com (known then as “Hot Wired”)  invented and displayed the first banner ad. On launch, Hot Wired featured Ads 468 pixels wide by 60 deep in size, from 14 different companies including including MCI, Volvo, Club Med, 1-800-Collect and Zima, but legend has it that the first HotWired banner ad was from AT&T, prophetically asking (see below) “Have you ever clicked your mouse right here? You will.”

Once these banners were presented online, those companies began to ask “Who has seen my ad?”, the same question advertisers have asked for two centuries in relation to all types of advertising. Display Advertising terminology was introduced, terms like “banner”, “tile”, “served”, “impression” and “click-through” started to be used and adopted through the Advertising Industry.  To brush up on the Jargon take a look at IAB Ireland’s Display Council’s Jargon Buster. 

After the adoption of terms, came the need for effective measurement and guidelines. As Click-throughs became the norm, these developed to CTR (Click-through rate); the frequency of click-throughs as a percentage of impressions served. This became used as a measure of advertising effectiveness.

Fundamentally however the quandary still remained – just because an ad had been “served” online, did not mean that it had been “seen”. If we jump forward (way forward!) to 2014, catching up with the work of IAB Ireland’s Display Council, we can begin to track the progress towards the measurement of viewable rather than served impressions. A recent piece by Mark Gilleran of Yahoo, Chair of the Display Council published in our July Newsletter, Digital Direction – discussed the finer detail of this development, including to reach a global standard and agreement on KPIs and which digital measurements should be prioritised.  Considerations like what proportion of the ad is deemed “viewable” and what length of time the ad is presented for to be classed as “viewed”.

As IAB (US, UK and Europe) have started to clarify standardisation in this area. IAB US launched Making Measurement Make Sense (3MS),  a cross-industry initiative which is focused on five areas: defining impressions; establishing audience currency; creating a standard classification of ad units; defining ad performance metrics, and establishing brand attitudinal measures. JICWEBS  (The Joint Industry Committee for Web Standards in the UK and Ireland) have created “Viewability Product Principles“, a set of principles for testing whether a product is capable of counting “viewable impressions”.  Whilst IAB Europe released a statement on Brand Advertising Metrics including Viewable Impressions in April, to clarify their position. Web commentators have begun to take notice of this and some are even claiming that these efforts in measuring Viewability could “save the display advertising” industry.

IAB Ireland is committed to ensuring best in class consistency is applied in the Irish market, in relation to any global developments.  Working through the Display Council a survey is going to be issued in the coming weeks to better understand what the Irish market really needs and also to assess the knowledge levels among the industry in this area. In the next blog piece on this, I will focus on the survey and it’s efforts to agree what is really the “right” impression in relation to Display Advertising.

Author: Rowena Hennigan is the Communications Executive at IAB Ireland, email: rowena@iabireland.ie

An update on the IAB Ireland Social Media Council workings and some tips for Social Media success

In my last blog post, I marveled at the increase in Social Media usage during the world’s biggest sporting event – World Cup 2014 in Brazil. Many records were broken during the world cup final, Facebook recorded 280 million interactions during the match, with more than 88 million people getting involved in the conversation. This made the game the biggest sporting event in the platform’s history. Meanwhile, Twitter was also reporting new records, with a peak of 618,725 tweets per minute being sent at the final whistle – surpassing the previous record of 580,166 set just a few days ago while Germany thrashed Brazil 7-1 in the semi-final.  

IAB Ireland’s Social Media Council’s objective is to further educate the Irish Marketing Community about the potential and effectiveness of social media and its role in a full channel online marketing mix. The Council is a made up of practitioners from leading social media networks, agencies, suppliers and brands. Recently, the Council conducted a survey among Brand Marketing Managers to understand the extent of use of Social Media by Brands and also the challenges they are facing. Feedback on measuring the impact and ROI of Social Media activity was common, when asked the question: What are the greatest challenges within your organization with regards to Social Media? The most common response was “Measuring the effect of social in general – reporting to my board”

Also, in the new and challenging world of Social Media what are the benchmarks for success for marketers, is a common deliberation. When respondents were asked what could the Council do to support their Social Media activities, the answer with the highest response was: “Guidelines on Benchmarks for success – what should you be measuring?”, emphasizing the lack of clarity to many in the industry.

In the early days after the introduction of the Social Media platforms (remember, Facebook is only ten years young!) there would have been an element of protection and secrecy in relation to what was effective, increasingly there are signs of sharing on best practice. Case-studies and success stories are now common – Twitter and Instagram have examples within their business sections. Moreover, there are now even Irish based examples of good practice available, thanks to Facebook for Business – Success Stories (where you can search by region, business size, industry etc.), enabling Irish businesses to search and read about relevant and comparable examples which should inspire.

I particularly like the Bunsen Burger example (picture from their marketing campaign above), which championed “strong content, led by thoughtful, high-quality visuals, has been Bunsen’s magic ingredient”. Good news for us all, as there are more and more examples of the recipes for success in Social Media.

Author: Rowena Hennigan is the Communications Executive at IAB Ireland, email: rowena@iabireland.ie

The second part of a blog on why this sporting event offers a huge opportunity to brands. Read the first blog post on the World Cup of Mobile. 

There is no doubt, it was a fabulous tournament with the culmination happening in dramatic style in extra time when Mario Götze scoring the winning goal in the 113^th minute. Not only did Google present a summary match card whenever a user searched any terms connected to the competition they also produced a daily World Cup Trends site.

I particularly liked the image above, “Keeping the faith. During the World Cup final, searches in Argentina for the Lord’s Prayer were 66x higher than those for the World Cup song”.

According to Twitter data, the World Cup championship final between Germany and Argentina set a new Twitter record with 618,725 tweets per minute. As the dust settles on the tournament, some fantastic analysis and reports have been published around the web. My favourite is, the geo-tagged tweets analysis, which created a heat map of activity (courtesy CartoDB) during the nail-biting match Brazil 1- Germany 7 semi-final, with users in Western Europe, the US and – unsurprisingly – Brazil, being most active.

Many reviews support the “World Cup of Mobile” report by IAB (read more in the first blog post).  Not surprisingly, content was king and as the football tournament progressed the volume, quality and creativity of related content was fascinating. There were some clear “Winners” and “Losers”in the frenzy that ensued by the major global brands. Read more about the power of live content in this review of various campaigns.

If you fancy a giggle, check out the Nike #askzlatan you tube channel video’s.

Brands utilised the personalities associated with the tournament to great effect and an opportunity for Irish brands could have been the retirement of our legendary anchor of the RTÉ panel, Bill O’Herlihy. As the world reacted to Germany’s win, he said “okey doke” for the last time. As the minutes of the post-match analysis of Germany’s 1-0 win over Argentina counted down to the end of the programme, people began to wonder how Bill was going to sign off 36 years-worth of presenting the panel. After a touching montage was put together by RTÉ, it was obvious how he was going to end it; “We’ll leave it there so.”

Shortly after there were three trending hashtags, including #wellleaveitthereso. Another example of the opportunity presented to brands by the biggest sporting event in the world. There is no rest however, everything needs to be well oiled as we move onto #tourdefrance……

Author: Rowena Hennigan is the Communications Executive at IAB Ireland, email: rowena@iabireland.ie