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Advertising in Context
I've written a fair amount about contextual advertising (adsense, yahoo publisher network, etc) and behavioral advertising (tacoda).
Contextual advertising is when the ads are targeted against specific content.
Behavioral advertising is when the ads are targeted against a specific person who has exhibited a certain behavior.
Contextual advertising is content-based advertising.
Behavioral advertising is people-based advertising.
They are both effective and I believe they result in more relevant advertising which benefits the consumer.
I also believe that we are just seeing the beginning of how powerful these targeting techniques can be.
One of the things that needs to be considered with both techniques is where the ads are placed.
If an ad is being targeted against specific content/context, it should be placed near/in the content that is providing the targeting and it should stay connected to the content as it gets mashed up, syndicated, etc.
If the ad is being targeted against specific behavior, it should not be placed near/in specific content, it should be associated more closely with the environment in which the person is consuming the content.
Which leads me to blog posts. I have been running adsense and yahoo publisher network on this blog for a while. These ads are in the right sidebar. I've had them near the top, above the fold, and currently below the fold. They are in a tower that usually has three or four ads in it. And its never clear which ads are being targeted against which blog posts. I think that is very sub-optimal.
I much prefer the way the ads are displayed in my feed at the end of the post. The ads in my feed are not particularly targeted at this time, but they can be and they should be. If I write a post about the new Flaming Lips record, then there should be an ad for that record at the end of my post. If I write a post about Adsense, there should be an ad for Adsense at the end of my post.
And if my posts end up somewhere else as a result of being resyndicated, then the ads should stay with them and remain in context. The ads should be as much a part of the post as the permalink, the comment link, and the date.
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Posted April 18, 2006 in Venture Capital and TechnologyComments
Totally agree - that's what microchunking's all about, right? The ad should be an intrinsic part of the post within the feed. The question is: how do you prevent the sploggers from stripping out the ads? Because if you can do that, sploggers are really promoters, no?
Posted by: Pete Cashmore | Apr 18, 2006 5:53:06 PM
Just wanted to follow-up regarding behavioral, based on my experience it doesn't matter nearly as much if it's in irrelevant content versus near the content - the most important thing is having a good clean behavior.
Having it within content a person wants to consume increases the chance the ad is consumed, and since it's matched to the right behavior it's actually clicked on.
Posted by: Rob Deichert | Apr 18, 2006 7:45:03 PM
Contextual matching in feeds works for some feeds. Yours, for example, commonly contains lots of different types of information. It's unlikely that everyone reading your feed already has a Sonos system, so advertising them when you talked about Sonos would work.
But if your entire blog was about Sonos or digital audio, the chances that your readers already have such a system increases and advertising them isn't going to get you very good results.
In this case, you need to advertise complimentary products, and that's where I think behavioral advertising is going to win big.
Your digital audio blog will likely have a bunch of drive-by traffic on the web (One time visitors from search engine referrals, inbound links, etc) and that traffic will be best monetized with contextual ads. That traffic is doing product research most likely and will find the contextual ads compelling. But the subscribers to the feed will be regular readers and won't be turned on by ads for products they already own.
Posted by: Adam Kalsey | Apr 19, 2006 2:42:10 PM
I agree with everyone. We (audibletype.com) have been working really hard to provide such abilities to have granular control that is needed. we hope that with our system, content generators (er.. bloggers) have some tools and flexibility with what to do with that content. though, i must confess - that it is a challenge., not only in the implementation of the proper technology but in usability architecture as well.
www.audibletype.com is a web based voice recognition system. The system allows for transcription of audio and video files to search engine friendly text! The system will transcribe your audio or video file for you and provide time indexing so that you can quickly navigate trough the relevant data., and even insert relevant ads.
Posted by: edbot2000 | Apr 20, 2006 2:06:19 AM
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