For us to win our own podium in the advertising world, here’s some Monday morning digest for you.

Once upon a time, we heard the doom’s day of online advertising was coming:

“Users rarely look at display advertisements on websites. Of the four design elements that do attract a few ad fixations, one is unethical and reduces the value of advertising networks.” - Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox, August 20, 2007

So was online advertising near it’s end? Far from it! Years later, Internet advertising is a multi-billion business (according to IAB report, internet advertising generated $5.5 Billion in Q1 ’09 alone).

So what is saving online advertising from user’s “selective blindness”? And how can we do better?

Here are some quick tips to creating successful online advertising:

1) Avoid the BAD. Below are some worst online advertising crimes:

• Pops-up in front of your window
• Loads slowly
• Tries to trick you into clicking on it
• Does not have a “Close” button
• Covers what you are trying to see
• Doesn’t say what it is for
• Moves content around
• Occupies most of the page
• Blinks on and off
• Floats across the screen
• Automatically plays sound

2) Embrace the GOOD. Here are some tips for good advertising usability:

* indicate what will happen if people click on them,
* relate to what people are doing online,
* identify themselves as advertisements,
* present information about what they are advertising, and
* provide additional information without having to leave the page.

3) Make ads SMART! With the popularity of social media and folksonomy, we have have better tools to make ads more intelligent:

• Targeting User Goals
• Making ads more contextual and relevant
• Creating a consistent user experience across the site content to the ads (Google ads as a good example).

Conclusion:

Avoid the bad, embrace the good and make the ads more intelligent. Making ads relevant, playful and less intrusive.
Want ads to work? Accept that online advertising design is user experience design. Understand web usability. And, most importantly, understand the psychology of the viewer.

Well those days are dead. Supplying information is now social.

2010 Super Bowl spots are on a Youtube featured channel by Ad Blitz. They have asked all the advertisers to join and the winning commercial will be selected based on votes (thumbs up or thumbs down) on Feb 15. So you can watch all the ads, share any on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc. and embed them on your blog or site.

And, as @TheRobHayes points out, the commercials were posted on here within seconds after they aired. So if you got the message that the Olympics were coming to Canada and they’re going to be on CTV, somewhere mid-first quarter you could have started followed along with the US commercials.

Check it out at http://www.youtube.com/adblitz.

I came across a couple of interesting lists regarding viral videos. The first is Mashable.com’s list of the top 10 most innovative viral video ads of 2009. This includes agency-created videos, as well as ways that brands leveraged popular user generated videos correctly, and in some cases, incorrectly. Interesting to watch either way.

http://mashable.com/2009/12/07/viral-video-ads/

The second is Youtube’s top 31 most popular videos of 2009 presented in an advent calendar format. We’re currently on day 17.

http://www.youtube.com/newyears

The power in advertising has shifted from the brands to the consumer; if you build it, they won’t necessarily come. Now we are forced to provide value to the consumer, giving them something they want, not just what we think they need.

Because of this, we now need to start building content for the consumer’s wants and needs, not just for the brand’s needs. In short, we need to “understand human behaviour on the web and build sites and applications that work with those behaviours, not against them.”

This presentation by the guys at Jet Cooper goes a long way in helping to understand that there is in fact a human at the other end of everything digital we do. That human can make or break a brand’s success, so we need to everything we can to make their experience an engaging and pleasant one.

The consumer is now driving the ship, we need to do everything we can to get on board.

From its inception, twitter has been based around the idea of ‘what are you doing?’. This was the prompt given to solicit 140 character responses from twitterers. This has also been the biggest barrier preventing most people from joining the service as well; they think it is just a bunch of people tweeting about what they’re doing at that moment.

In the words of Oregon football coach, Chip Kelly, on why he won’t twitter… “who cares what I had for breakfast?”

Well Chip, that’s because it’s about more than what you had for breakfast; it’s about an exchange of ideas, joining worldwide conversations on any subject you want to talk about, and staying connected with whats going on in the world in real-time.

And that’s why the ‘what are you doing?’ prompt was so detrimental to twitter’s cause, it gave a very misleading idea of the content that would be found on their service. Thankfully, as of yesterday, they have rectified this. Now users are asked, simply, ‘what’s happening?’

I bet they’re going to find a lot more people willing to answer this question.

These days argument goes that kids are getting dumber and dumber because of the internet. Kids are losing the ability to spell and come up with coherent ideas because of MSN and spell checkers.

I don’t buy that…there have always been stupid kids, this is just our generation’s version of dumb. As the internet evolves, its going to develop the tools to allow the smart kids to have a mastery of language never seen before.

Case in point, the New York Times website.

Highlight a word and the little question mark balloon pops. Click that and it opens up the word in a dictionary for you.

If I had this kind of functionality in all the reading I did as a child, my vocabulary would be at least three times…what’s the word for it…more big than it is right now.

(Any spelling or grammatical mistakes you find upon giving this a close read-through, I meant to make them. I’m being ironic…)

(via therobhayes.com)

While conventional wisdom in the PR world dictates that it’s dangerous to declare anything a first, this may very well be the first time Gary Coleman has been seen in augmented reality. And perhaps, the first augmented reality Facebook app out of Canada? Hmm…who knows?

New York Fries, the ubiquitous Canadian French fry chain, is celebrating its 25th Anniversary this month, and to mark this accomplishment we enlisted the help of Gary Coleman. Yes, Arnold, from Diff’rent Strokes. Coleman was selected as a fun and iconic image from the era of New York Fries’ founding. He’s featured in special print, OOH and POP advertising celebrating the landmark anniversary with a line that reads, “After 25 years, some things are still fresh.” The highlight of the campaign is an augmented reality Facebook application that brings a 3-D Coleman to life on users’ computer screens, where he predicts their future freshness and provides a coupon for a cup of fries at the original 1984 price of $1.25.

Check it out at www.frycupfortune.com.

I’ve been seeing a lot about this new YouTube campaign created for the Metropolitan Police in England. Apparently, stabbings are on the rise there, so this is part of an effort to show the impact of simple choices that may lead up to violence. Naturally, I had to live on the edge and choose a murderous path, just to see what would happen. And it would seem that the vast majority of people on YouTube share my violent tendencies. The difference in numbers between those like myself, and viewers who opt not to bring the knife, not to follow friends to the fight, and not to join in the fight (I couldn’t help myself!) are pretty significant. For shame! Still, I think it’s a cool idea. 

Remember all the talk of expanding internet domains and opening them up to marketers? According to our poll, most of you thought it was a crazy proposal. Well, it’s still slated to go into effect at the end of the year…yet there doesn’t seem to be much awareness of it amongst marketers, according to this article from Reuters. In fact, a whopping two thirds of the businesses polled were unaware that they would be able to use their own name in place of domain extensions such as .com, .org and .net when Internet domains are liberalized next year. Another interesting tidbit in the article? The price tag for purchasing a domain name is $185,000. Guess that’s one way to weed out the cyber squatters.

Recently a Swiss worker made headlines by being fired when colleagues noticed her online on Facebook when she had called in sick. It is not the first time Facebook has been involved in a workplace controversy. Many companies have banned social networking applications altogether, while others have fired employees over statements they make about work while online. I would say to these employers that they are missing out on a huge opportunity to use social media to their advantage.

I recognize that as an ad agency we are in a unique position. We create and place ads in social media. We create social media applications and we monitor mentions of our clients, their brands, and trends in the social media space. Of course, we need access.

But what of other companies? Well, let me cite a few ways I have used social media for business in the last year. It has become my number one recruitment tool. I was having great difficulty filling a key position in the traditional manner - emailing or calling contacts for referrals, placing ads in trade enewsletters and on trade web sites. (As an aside: note how social media has made emailing, e-newsletters, and the web “traditional”.) I contacted all my Facebook friends with a description of the position. A ski friend I never would have thought of asking ended up referring a friend of his whom I hired and has been doing great work for us since. I also found a freelancer I needed on incredibly short notice by sending a query to one of my Facebook friends I knew from previous agency work but never would have thought of had she not been my friend on Facebook. It turned out she had just started to think about returning to freelance work herself the day I contacted her. She helped us through a really tough time.

Finally, I have used social networking just as often to decide not to hire someone. In one case a candidate we were pursuing had posted on her site that she had just accepted a job elsewhere. While I support her right to interview at more than one place at a time, I questioned her poor judgment at posting something publicly while she was still interviewing elsewhere. I heard later from the company she did end up going to that she wasn’t a great worker as she spent all of her time on Facebook!

Not being as great with faces as I’d like to be, I’ll often check a business contact out on Facebook before meeting with them to ensure I will recognize them. It’s also handy to see which of your friends may know them.

OK, so maybe you are thinking that you can understand giving access to a business social application like Linked-In but not Facebook. While I am active on both sites, all of the examples I used above were using Facebook. People need to decide themselves which site(s) they wish to use. I do caution that if you are using Facebook for business applications, be very careful of what you post. Otherwise, limit access to your friends and only friend someone on a business social network.

For companies that claim social networking limits their employees’ productivity, do they also restrict their employees’ ability to use email, make phone calls, and chat with each other? Do they not feel they employ people mature enough to know where to draw the line? I warn them that Gen Y-ers will not be as easy to retain with that mentality as previous generations. Plus people are smart. Limit them from the main social networking sites and they will find other fringe sites to use.

The 21^st century is all about connectivity – the power of the group being greater than the power of one. Empower your employees to take advantage of social networking and you never know where it will end up taking you!