You can imagine the conversation. In 1836, when the French newspaper La Presse became the first paper to include paid advertising in its pages, there were no standards for ad size or placement, no agreed-upon metrics for measurement, and no industry-wide pricing mechanism. La Presse executives must have negotiated each of these details (and an abondance of other terms) for each advertising placement they made for a local business, creating a custom deal for each one.
In the decades that followed, the print advertising industry created standard buying units (the concept of buying consumer "ad views" in bundles of 1,000 is still commonplace today). Details of what counted as readership followed, along with well-understood pricing (cost per thousand readers, or CPM).
These standards remain the foundation of display advertising in print, broadcast, and online today. They enable advertising buyers and sellers to transact business much more easily and, as a result, frequently bring higher value to both sides.
In social media, the same kind of display advertising can be bought and sold using the same display advertising standards. But we also offer something completely different to marketers: engagement campaigns. Social networks have the ability to engage hundreds or thousands of interested consumers in a conversation about a product or brand. We can provide targeted product sampling. We can encourage product reviews.
When we do these things in a social network and create good experiences, they cascade broadly through the social connections on the site.
Consider a recent experience we had with a partner on Gather. We invited 20 people to sample a product. Each one wrote a review. Forty-two other members also wrote reviews of the product to join in the conversation. We notified the friends of these 62 people that they had started a conversation about this product.
Six hundred of those friends responded and engaged in conversation about those reviews. Over several days, they exchanged thousands of thoughts. Each time they did, we notified their friends, leading to more than 720,000 notifications. These weren’t just brand advertisements, they were statements made by trusted friends and family about a product.
We know this type of activity creates value for advertisers, but we don’t have a way to measure that value. We couldn’t offer our partner a comparison of their success with industry metrics. And like La Press, we had to negotiate custom terms for this engagement campaign.
This week, a group of industry leaders announced the Social Media Advertising Council (SMAC) to create standards for quantifying the value that social networks bring to online marketing. Our goals are simple: SMAC seeks to create a common vocabulary for discussing engagement; standard buying units that allow agencies and brands to transact in the space more easily; and universal metrics for measuring engagement and quantifying success across campaigns and networks.
We believe that by creating these standards, we will enable more business -- and better business -- to be done in the social engagement space.
Well put! We did see the world through the ads that reached us. How else could we know our world? And, there was so much money and control in it that old media finally became advertising, if not for financial than for social or political reasons.
Product advertising was the worst though. I remember hearing a while back about a Saturday morning cartoon where the 30-minute show had been reduced to less than 10 minutes of programming and the announcer deliberately said, "We'll break from our commercials to show you some cartoons." Of course, those ads were targeting a future consumer base, but in the later years of broadcast TV I felt very 'pitched' by and forced to agree with the multiple agendas in the shows I chose to watch, not just the product advertising agenda that would appear between segments.
I'm hyper-sensitive to 'in your face' ads now. I can almost hit Mute as fast as Enter. The only ads I follow are in response to my blog/forum posts, things like, 'Maybe this will help, check it out(linked).' Beyond that I feel 'pitched. The ads that block the entire screen have got me for about 3 seconds until I can find the 'Skip' link. I've timed it.
When someone responds to my blog/forum posts, I'll go check the link, read its blog, do some objective research and maybe buy it. I don't think those in Big Advertising trying to market online are considering my autonomy. And, because my media inputs can no longer be controlled by those aiming at my demographic, I'm going to remain a very tough target for them to hit.
I wish SMAC luck, but I bet they'll find that advertising becomes a utility when I, and all of us, are free to convince ourselves what to buy or not to buy.
Interesting point you raise there, Mashka. We have gotten used to seeing through advertisements, looking only at what matters to us. What I notice has changed (or is changing) is people's interest in advertisement.
I'm confident that people will "bite" if marketeers use the correct "bait". Up until now, that bait rarely worked as most advertisements weren't targeted at anyone in specific.
Thanks Tom for your informitive piece. Having taken a number of maketing and media courses in graduate school, you touched on some aspects never covered. I truly enjoyed the read.
Hello, Thomas! I personally , think, this may be the most desirable way of advertising. People are getting involved with a conversation with their friends and people they know much easier, because it is information from reliable sources.
However, I have a question.How ethical do you think that kind of advertisment? Social network profile is a personal space.And when it is overloaded not only with banners or other online advertising, but also with a lot of invitation to talk about that or this brand, don't you think a person would have a feeling of a strong interference in his/her life?Moreover, we learned to ignore most of advertising, we can learn to ignore that kind of campaigns as well
Well, it would definitely make it easier to reach some sort of standard but they can't cut the cake and eat it too.
I agree that CPM isn't going to be the predominant metric of the future, as with new technologies, we will be able to have a better measure of the interaction the user had with the advertisement.
Today we can see spinoffs of those metrics but I still think that they will evolve into something even more representative.
Well, this seems to be a very plausible idea. The lack of standards had definitely make it hard to make authentic projections on the value of Ad Dollars in social networks. I went through the listy of founding members of SMAC and i was stun at the conspicuous absence of Myspace and Facebook.I'm with the belief that forming a standard should at least involve these social network giants. It will be utterly ridiculous to have standards that pertain to social network without having the ensigna of these guys.
Can you please throw further light on their absence?
Something has to give here in the wacky world of online advertising... aren't you really saying the CPM model is really not a useful measure for Internet advertising, especially when you throw in the intangibles associated with the social element?
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M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
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