Education, education, education (part two)

A few weeks ago I wrote about the importance of informing and educating consumers about the internet. This followed a revamp of the IAB’s website – www.youronlinechoices.co.uk – aimed at helping internet users understand online behavioural advertising, how it works and how to switch it off if they want to. Today the IAB, in partnership with business law firm Olswang, has published new research confirming that consumers need (and want) more information and education about online privacy and the practice of behavioural advertising.

The research confirms that consumers today are far more trusting of the internet as a medium, compared with more than five years ago. People – particularly young people – are more comfortable with sharing their personal information with shopping websites, banks and social networking sites. But there’s no room for complacency: consumers may be more acclimatised to the internet and the role it now plays in our everyday lives but they also want to have it on their owns terms and wish to know more about new digital marketing techniques, such as behavioural advertising.

72% of internet users are – unsurprisingly – unaware about behavioural advertising, how it works and what information is collected and used. However, the research results are particularly enlightening when consumers are provided with the relevant information. For example:

• 81% of internet users do not know the level of control they actually have over behavioural advertising, such as their right  to switch it off.
• 74% of internet users are actually more comfortable with behavioural advertising when they are provided with information about what data is collected and used and how it can be controlled.

Behavioural advertising remains a relatively new online practice. As the Government’s Digital Britain report acknowledged it is an important business model to help web publishers convert “creativity into value”. Industry needs to find a balance between making advertising more measurable and effective whilst protecting consumer privacy. It’s a balance that the IAB, its members and the rest of the advertising industry is working to get right and education – as this research very clearly shows – needs to be at the heart of it.

Follow the IAB on Twitter.

Digital creativity dead?

Of course it’s not, but the digital creative industry can be as quiet as a corpse sometimes. This year I’ve seen absolutely blinding digital creativity in web design, interactive rich media, even in the copy used for search ads. Actual creative genius resides in digital – but sometimes, digital creatives can be so polite amidst the marketing rabble!

The IAB has Creative Showcase, which highlights the best of the best and there’s Creative Review, which is ace. Plus I’m sure creative agencies highlight their best creative to clients and internally, but if we’re to continue proving this medium I honestly believe digital creatives need to become collective uber show-offs of the highest order. And there doesn’t always need to be an award at the end of it.

Print, outdoor and TV ads sometimes end up in art galleries. Why not digital? Some digital creativity is beautiful! A stunning, interactive work of art. There are barely any digital creative blogs/sites either, yet campaigns are going live daily. Digital’s very nature makes it mass broadcast but on a personal level – so while it’s hitting the mark with its target consumers, it needs that extra push in the marketing industry to get it noticed. Here’s my push of a simple, but beautiful and clearly messaged pre-roll ad for the RAF edited specifically for online and run across WebTVEnterprise’s network. Click on the image to watch it:



Another ad I’ve seen recently that I think is brilliant is for the band Alphabeat’s new single, created by Silence Media. What I love about it is the way it grabs attention through a simple, yet inventive piece of video made specifically for online. Also, the usability is second-to-none with an expandable panel that waits 3 seconds to make sure the user really wants to see it. Please don't try to click the links within the ad because it's been taken from another site and they won't work in this example.



The IAB always recommends that online creative should be planned right at the very beginning and not pushed to one side in favour of other mediums. This has clearly been the case for this campaign, as Paul Barnard of Silence Media explains:

“The idea for the ad was discussed and planned between ourselves and the client when the campaign was first commissioned. Once the creative strategy was agreed on, the band filmed the footage. The campaign went live two weeks before the single release with the main focus being the gay market. On the week of release we broadened the campaign out to focus on a 13-34 female audience. The ad featured across key music sites and blogs along with gay, celeb and gossip sites.”

You can view more of Silence Media’s ads in their gallery and if you’ve seen some other particularly good creative, please send it to me!

iPhone – so should you

In Saturday’s Guardian, Alan Rusbridger listed the 10 ways in which his life has changed since the last century. It was no great surprise that Google took the top spot. Neither was it a massive surprise that Wikipedia came second – although there is evidence to suggest that this online super power is on the wane. Twitter coming in third place raised a few more eyebrows while Rusbridger was forced to admit that putting Comment Is Free in fourth position was “a plug for the home team”. Perhaps the biggest surprise in the list though was the iPhone coming in a paltry 6th position.

“Can you remember the moment when you first held one?” asked Rusbridger. “The involuntary gasp as you saw what it could do?” While he acknowledges that as a result of the iPhone, “the only limit to what a mobile phone could become is human imagination itself”, it’s something of a surprise that the editor of The Guardian shouldn’t rate the technology higher, given its potential for growing his brand’s digital audience.

As well as offering a serious boost to Apple’s bottom line, the iPhone has revolutionised the way we consume media. IAB research shows that 40 per cent of iPhone users already use the internet on their phones more than on a PC, helping to fuel a spectacular surge in mobile internet usage. What’s more, over one billion iPhone apps have been downloaded worldwide with the average UK user downloading 37 each. According to Comscore, 11.3 million people in the UK use the mobile internet per month, representing a rise of 28 per cent year on year, while some 597,112 people in the UK use applications per month, a 1,724 per cent rise year on year.

This has helped to feed improvements across the board in the mobile market with rapid improvements to handsets and high speed networks, affordable data plans and mass consumer browsing now the norm. As Tim Hussain, head of mobile and video advertising at BSkyB, said at the IAB mobile forum last month, "the world did change with the iPhone".

On Monday, Rusbridger’s paper wrote: “Have you noticed how it’s impossible to read a newspaper these days without coming across a story about an iPhone? It’s as if the very word confers instant coolness and connectedness”. The Guardian concluded that the word “iPhone” had occurred “a whopping” 143 times in national newspapers over the last week. Two things are interesting about this. Firstly, 143 mentions of the word “iPhone” doesn’t actually sound like a lot, and secondly, “coolness” is not the most important reason for talking about the iPhone.

We at the IAB believe that the iPhone – and other smart phones like it – go beyond cool and instead open up hugely useful services for people looking to consume media on the move.  It’s as a result of these changes that we’ve decided to revamp our mobile offering in partnership with Incentivated. Our new mobile site is now up and running – why not check it out.

Follow the IAB on Twitter

By removing anonymity social media has found its voice

Online communities and sites with user generated content (UGC) have been an obsession of mine since the late 90’s ever since I discovered chat rooms, instant messenger and forums. My single greatest passion is being involved in and running online communities for people to chat and share ideas and information. UGC has since been morphed by marketers into ‘social media’, which, when you look beyond the jargon, is just a more advanced platform for UGC with one significant difference: the removal of anonymity behind usernames. In my youth mine was the wildly inappropriate “FatXena”.

FatXena was a trigger happy opinionated so and so, whereas Jack Wallington was far tamer in reality. This created a split in personality between my online and offline life. I wasn’t alone either, it was always well documented how vocal people felt they could be behind a username online even when the person tapping away was a timid little mouse.

Thanks to social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn and even UGC like BBC’s Have Your Say, this e-bipolar disorder is gradually being wiped out, although it still exists on forums which make up the vast majority of social media. I have many theories about the effects this is having, but for advertisers my point here is that removing anonymity means users are a more accurate portrayal of their genuine personality. One thing I’ve observed in my own group of friends is that the most social offline are also the most social online – in the past, during FatXena’s time, it was generally the absolute opposite.

There’s always been much talk among online community managers about finding the ‘opinion formers’ when in the past, the ones they found online were probably not the kind of people to drive opinion offline. Therefore, the real reason for marketers to be excited about ‘social media’ is not only because it is mainstream, but because there is a very real crossover in personalities. I’ll leave it up to you to decide what this means for your business, but to me, it’s one of the most exciting developments of our era.

Follow the IAB on Twitter

No one's an expert

Other advertising platforms like outdoor, print and radio have been around for decades and significant changes to each medium have been few and far between, allowing people ample time to learn their intricacies and perfect their skills. The problem with the internet is that it’s only been around for two decades, mainstream for far less and everything keeps changing. How can people possibly keep up?

I've met hundreds of marketers from across the industry in my daily work here at the IAB and while many are expert specialists and we have lots of excellent digital leaders, no one is an expert in everything because it is impossible to be. This is a huge challenge because quite often people will need to work with technology or a technique from an area they’ve never used before. It befuddles them, delays them, and before they know it everything’s moved on.

Bill Gates once said that the leaders of the future will be those that can adapt to change the fastest, which I can’t disagree with at the moment given the current speed of technological change. But do we really want a world built on change experts? Sometimes the best results come from time and experience learning something’s intricacies.

As I’ve mentioned, internet advertising does have strong expertise in silos like display, search and affiliate. Here the technology evolves and improves and the specialists can keep up with this if it’s their primary focus. Bringing it all together and delivering a fully integrated, expert marketing solution is the difficulty.

“Lack of communication” is the phrase I hear the most in digital, so communicating more, sharing knowledge and ideas is obviously key – but does anyone really do it? And if they do, is it enough? Well, I obviously see knowledge sharing on a daily basis in meetings and events. However, I think we as a marketing industry can and must share a lot more information. While they exist, asking for simple things like great creative and successful case studies can be like drawing blood from a stone. Too much of internet advertising is perceived to be built on ‘knowledge’ and people are too protective of it.

Sharing is a vital step for internet advertising to continue to mature, but fundamentally I believe the biggest fault lies with technology providers and software engineers: they make things far too complicated. Even the most user friendly technology isn’t user friendly enough if you look at the big picture. No, you will never need a single person to login to your display ad network interface, search interface, enewsletter admin, booking systems, planning systems, reports etc etc. It makes sense to have specific teams, but we do need people that understand to a significant degree what they all do to allow them to become the ‘internet advertising overlords’ we need.

This has turned into a two sided rant, so I’ll bring it to a close with this:

Share more + make things easier = more experts

Celebrity

A while ago I questioned where all of the celebrities were in online advertising, the question still stands – where are they? Using celebrities is a number one tool in your marketing tool box for brand endorsement and attracting attention. If print, outdoor, radio and TV gets Cheryl Cole, why can’t we in display ads? Over to you L’Oreal.

A race online for 2012

The government’s Digital Inclusion Champion, Martha Lane Fox, made a strong case about the importance of inclusion at yesterday’s Digital Engagement conference.

Explaining that she was drawn to her job (which carries with it what she called “an insane title”) because it offered an “irresistible challenge”, Lane Fox argued that there are two main reasons why we should care about the large portion of society who are socially and economically excluded from the digital world.

Topping the list for Lane Fox was social cohesion. “I believe in an equal society”, stated Lane Fox. As a result the Lastminute.com founder is keen to use digital technology in an effort to avoid creating an excluded “needy sub class”.

As a case study, she pointed to the example of Knowle West Media Centre, a project that is empowering a generation through digital media (for those of you unfamiliar with Knowle West, it’s where Tricky was brought up – this video gives a good idea of what it’s like).

Such projects, argued Lane Fox, “increase education, employment opportunities and give people a voice.”

However, social factors are not the only issues at play for Lane Fox. The “brutal economic reasons” are equally crucial.

Outlining some headline figures from PwC research due out next week, Lane Fox argued that if all children were given online skills and access to online tools, this would result in a £25bn saving to the UK through increased employment. What’s more, if five per cent of those currently unemployed got online and got a job that would result in a saving of £675 million. Lane Fox then pointed out that it cost £44,000 per person to deal with the “bottom 20%” of the UK’s socio-demographic make up and argued that getting this group online, “I’m sure would cut that cost”.

This may sound like wishful thinking on the part of Lane Fox, but with the meat and veg of the research due out next week, we shall have to wait and see how much evidence there is for her arguments.

Lane Fox concluded her speech by outlining her concept for “a race online for 2012.” As part of her vision she aims to halve the number of people who don’t have online access by 2012. “It would be a disaster to allow a digital sub class to develop”, argued Lane Fox. It’s a bold plan, but Lane Fox believes it will help to make Britain a “digital leader”. Surely this can only be a good thing.

Follow the IAB on Twitter

Education, education, education (part one)

It's official: us Brits love shopping online. According to research by price comparison service, Uswitch, 93% of the UK population now shop on the internet (I think that’s 93% of the 2,500 adults they surveyed!). And, as consumers continue to ‘connect’ so advertisers increasingly look to the internet as a platform to get their messages across and sell their wares. The two are mutually beneficial. Some of us just can’t get enough of all this (it’s empowering and addictive). For others the tide of change is uncomfortable and some need help getting connected in the first place (and there’s no one better than digital entrepreneur and Government Digital Inclusion Champion, Martha Lane Fox, to make this happen).

So, it’s important to inform and educate people about the internet. This is not a new message: government, Ofcom and others, including industry, have spearheaded campaigns to help people – particularly parents and children - better understand online and its significant benefits but also the challenges it throws up in our everyday lives. Understanding how to keep safe and secure is lesson number one and many schools build this into their curricula activities as they integrate the use of the internet into children’s learning.

This week the IAB has revamped its consumer website dedicated to explaining behavioural advertising: www.youronlinechoices.co.uk. We launched this site when we published our Good Practice Principles earlier this year to govern the practice. One of the three key commitments is education and many of the businesses involved continually go to great lengths to provide consumers with helpful information. Our website builds on these: providing easy-to-understand information on behavioural advertising, how it works and the role it plays in helping make online content, services and applications available at little or no cost. This is backed up by the other commitments: transparency about what information is collected and used to deliver more relevant advertising as well as the opportunity to opt out or switch it off. So the new website includes a centralised page for consumers to visit to opt out of behavioural advertising by the businesses that are complying with the IAB’s Good Practice Principles. Our future aim is to make this even more user friendly.

The launch of the website marks the point that those businesses that have signed up to the Good Practice Principles and have live commercial UK operations are complying with the commitments. To complement this, each of these businesses’ compliance will be independently verified by auditor ABCe to provide greater assurance in this practice. This is key but its only by explaining clearly what this is all about and how it all works that we can really expect consumers – heavy or light internet users – to accept and understand why we’re taking this approach.

Follow the IAB on Twitter.

5 Killer Online Video Stats

Over the last two years I’ve been lucky to head up the IAB Video Council and while there’s always been a buzz around online video it’s never been greater than now. There may be some teething problems to overcome in this new channel - such as increasing research - but every single senior marketer I’ve spoken to about it (and there have been hundreds) see its huge potential and want to use it. I predict - and I checked that it’s therefore ok to say that the IAB is predicting - that 2010 will be the year that online video makes its mark on the advertising world. Here are five stats to help convince you:

1. 82% of people in the US watched an average of 9.7 hours of online video in August 2009 with consumption in the UK equally high - both markets growing for the past few years now (ComScore).
   
   
2. People are more accepting of online video ads than many other forms of advertising because they are seen as more relevant and therefore less intrusive. 70% of people in a survey of 5,000 Europeans found it acceptable for a video ad to be shown before an online video (Tremor Media).
   
   
3. Online video advertising spend for pre/mid/post-roll has grown in the UK to almost £11.7 million for the first half of 2009, close to 200% growth in 12 months (PwC/IAB AdSpend Study, members only).
   
   
   
   
4. 97% of UK media buyers in a survey of over 100 expect this growth to continue over the next 12 months too, with over half (54%) of the media buyers expecting this growth to be over 50% (Web TV Enterprises).
   
   
5. 92% of broadband users have connections of 2MB or far higher, which is almost every internet user in the UK, making video bigger and better quality, the same with your adverts (BMRB Internet Monitor).