NONE: Re: ONLINE-ADS>> Tying banners to location and time
Re: ONLINE-ADS>> Tying banners to location and time
Mark J. Welch, Esq. (markwelch_at_ca-probate.com)
Wed, 30 Jul 1997 08:38:16 -0700
At 05:06 PM 7/29/97 -0500, Richard Hoy wrote:
> "...having the same ads at any time of day is absurd--and would mean that
> beer ads would appear during children's morning hours if television were
> run the same way."
> This seems asinine to me. In television, content is tied to a timetable.
> This isn't the case on the web, however.
> The only situation where timed ads make sense on the web would be if you
> were promoting time-sensitive content, like an event or a breaking news
> story.
I agree and disagree. As noted by others, we have different moods that
change with the time of day. The average web surfer on a Saturday night
is probably doing some very different surfing than the average web surfer
on a Tuesday at 11:00 a.m. (Okay, you and I and a lot of online-ads
participants are different -- we do everything at all hours, including being
on-line at 2:00 a.m. to reply to business email and maybe even looking
at game or sports or dirty-picture web sites at noon on a weekday.)
Take a look at the click-through ratios for your ad campaigns: for my
own campaigns, I get a lower CTR (e.g. ratio of click-throughs to
impressions) on the weekend and in the wee hours of the morning
MY TIME. Of course, this is probably because surfers from other
countries are making up a lot of the traffic, and they will be less
interested in my attorney-list banner and site (which target only US
audiences). If and when I am able to target my impressions only to
appropriate audiences, time of day might matter less. But once again,
on the phone I get surges of phone calls on certain days and times,
because people tend to think about 'estate planning' more often at
certain times of the day or week.
If I were designing an ad campaign aimed at adults, I might well
try to target my campaign to run before 2:30 p.m. on school
days, to avoid wasting traffic on those zillions of teen male web
surfers. And especially if I'm doing a whimsical campaign, I might
select different messages for the morning, afternoon, and evening.
Heck, I might even design ads that target those Friday-late-night
web surfers whom I believe are spending time on "chat" lines or
even looking at dirty pictures. (Heck, I have always wondered
how effective a "mainstream" ad campaign might work if run
across an "adult" ad network -- but I doubt most of us will dare
to try, out of fear.)
Clearly, there are certain campaigns that WILL be highly focused
on certain days and times. I keep coming back to my favorite
example of "perfect reactive behavior" to an ad: last summer, I
sat down and my computer, loaded a web page, and saw an ad
for the NBC Olympics coverage. I did NOT click on the ad: I
actually turned off the computer and went home and watched the
NBC Olympic coverage. If NBC decides to run an ad campaign
for "Seinfeld," it will get a lot more mileage from running that
ad at 5:30 p.m. on Thursday than from running the same ad
at 9:32 p.m. (assuming that Seinfeld is shown at 9:00 p.m. on
Thursday). If I am ESPN or SportsZone, I may want to change
my ads to focus on the sporting events TODAY.
Time-of-day advertising certainly has one major obstacle: it does
require an ad delivery mechanism that can detect and serve ads
based on LOCAL time of day for the web surfer. The vast
majority of sites and ad networks cannot do this.
Time-of-day DOES make a difference for some ad campaigns,
and certainly advertisers do design different ads based not only
on content (Saturday morning cartoons vs. Saturday night live
vs. Murder She Wrote), but based on time of day. Indeed, try
taping the local TV news that is broadcast at 11:00 p.m. and
then re-broadcast at 2:00 a.m. -- you will see that some of the
ads are different, and hopefully some of the changes will make
sense.
For other ad campaigns, content is king and time of day is
not really a factor. Certainly, my "web advertising" and
"counters and trackers" pages draw the same audience with
the same tasks at hand at any time of day -- but if someone
were running an ad for Maxwell House coffee at my site
(for reasons I can't imagine), that ad probably ought to change
based on the visitor's time of day.
-- Mark J. Welch (510) 462-8483 http://www.ca-probate.com/
-- Web Site Banner Ads (Networks, Brokers, Exchanges, Software, PSAs):
-- http://www.markwelch.com/bannerad.htm
-- Web Counters: http://www.markwelch.com/counter.htm
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