The Chanel No5 homepage takeover by FEED & Hi-ReS! (creative) and MEC Global (media) recently won Eyeblaster’s International People’s Choice Award. This post is part of a series of interviews with award nominees for a behind-the-scenes look at some of the best campaigns from 2009. Thanks to FEED Managing Director Rob Armstrong for sharing his insights on the campaign.

A lot has been written about the making of the Chanel No5 campaign with Audrey Tautou. What was FEED’s role in the campaign?

We worked on the online element of the campaign and that meant getting creative live on 18 MSN country home pages in 11 different languages and simultaneously on the MSN TODAY channel over the course of a day. To achieve that we worked closely with Hi Res! who supplied the beautiful graphics, MEC the French agency and brand guardians of Chanel, the team from MSN who flew over from Redmond to work with us, and the Eyeblaster London team.

What was the overall response to the campaign? Was it different than you expected?
I think we always knew that, if executed well, it was going to be a campaign that generated a lot of interest. Chanel is an iconic brand with an artistically rich heritage, so we felt all along that the sheer scale of the camapign and the quality of the assets and animation meant that it was going to turn heads. The numbers were great: 651,640,641 impressions over a 24 hour period; the interaction rate was 58.54%

Why do you think the campaign generated so much interest?
For a start it was Chanel’s first foray into digital advertising and as a brand when they do something people stand up and take notice. When your starting point involves such beautiful assets your job is made much easier; the public are immediately curious and want to interact with them.

What were the challenges in putting together the launch of a online global campaign of this nature?
The technical structure of the ad itself itself was complex, involving seven flash panels in total. Each of these panels required several pieces of custom coding. When you factor in the page pushdown it was an intricate piece of work and we had to work closely with MSN’s team in Redmond to ensure that however complex it got the cpu load was never too high and there was no danger of anything crashing their homepages globally.

A campaign of this size always involves lots of brand stakeholders in different timezones so sign off becomes a long and tiring process, but I guess the largest challenge was putting live so many different campaigns. The home pages all went live at midnight local country time so we literally had waves of countries within the same timezones going live and then feeding back to us over a 24 hour period. Add to that the fact it was a public holiday in the UK and it’s fair to describe that day as challenging!

What’s the next big thing for FEED?
Well, we’ve had an exciting year working with lot of interesting people on all sorts of things, while continuing to expand. Another year like this would be very welcome – a mix of different projects, amazing clients and opportunities to do more and more challenging work within the medium!

Congratulations to the FEED team

Eyeblaster Research is pleased to invite you to view two slidecasts based on the recently published Analytics Bulletin: Online Video Advertising: Doubles Engagement, Boosts ROI.

This first slidecast explores the link between online video length and performance.

Video ads tend to be shorter on average, as compared to 30-second TV spots. Nevertheless, ads lasting for 30 seconds are still the most popular kind, accounting for over 20% of total video ad impressions; they are closely followed by the 15-second ads that were featured in 17% of video ad impressions. Ads lasting longer than 30 seconds are rare and may contain several sequenced videos.
There is a clear incentive for advertisers to opt for the shorter option. Unlike on TV and In-Stream video where users have to watch the full ad to resume watching the content, in In-Banner and Floating ads, users can choose to stop the video or just surf away before the video was completed. Therefore, a higher proportion of videos lasting less than 30 seconds is watched all the way through.

The second slidecast reviews where and when online advertising is most (and least) effective.

Users are more likely to engage with an ad and to watch video for longer in some online environments/sections rather than others. Sites with editorial content such as news, sports, music and finance and sites providing email services tend to have superior video performance. The superior performance is tied to people’s tendency to spend a longer amount of time in these environments, browsing content and writing and reading emails. In social networking and games sites, users tend to engage with video ads less frequently, and also have a lower proportion of videos are played to their full duration. In social network environments, users tend to spend a short time on each webpage, despite spending a long time in the environment overall.
Video ads played reach their peak during business hours, between 9am to 5pm, unlike TV spots that reach their peak in the evening. During the night, users tend to have less patience for video ads, as less of them are played in full.

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Ariel Geifman | Research Analyst

A big thanks to readers of Streaming Media who chose Eyeblaster as the top Video Advertising Management Platform. Over 5,000 votes were cast in 22 different categories for the top performing vendors.

Is there one trick that is likely to boost your campaign’s performance? Yes there is—video! The recently published Analytics Bulletin by Eyeblaster Research clearly shows that video boosts the performance of ads, compared to creatives without video. Particularly, for In-Banner and Floating ads, video doubles Dwell Time and significantly increases Dwell Rate.

In the last four years, Eyeblaster has seen a tenfold growth in video impressions. In addition, at the same period, video impressions have climbed 60% faster than Rich Media Impressions. This growth is facilitated by the higher effectiveness of ads containing video. Campaigns based on video not only have higher Dwell Rate and Dwell Time at any level of exposure, but also require fewer exposures to reach the same Dwell Rate and Dwell Time as campaigns without video.

Online video is also a smart financial choice. Slightly higher cost and a dramatic increase in Dwell yields 200% incremental return on investment on video, as compared to non-video Rich Media.
This bulletin shows not only that video delivers higher value, but also measures the impact of creative choices on video performance and provides guidance on improving video campaigns’ performance. An analysis of billions of impressions served by Eyeblaster shows that:
• Video outperforms in email and editorial content environments such as news, sports, music and finance but lags in social networks and games environments.
• Rollover user-initiated video performs best, followed by auto-initiated video; click user-initiated performs worst.
• Weekdays from 9am to 5pm is users’ preferred time to watch In-Banner and Floating video ads.
• An increase in video length of five second reduces Video Fully Played rate by 2.8%, on average.
• Relatively few users un-mute video ads; auto-initiated video has the highest un-mute rate.

These insights and many others are outlined in this comprehensive analysis. In addition, Eyeblaster compiled a comprehensive list of best practices on how to boost campaign performance across ad formats.

To download the full 22 page report, click here.

Ariel Geifman | Research Analyst

The O2 Joggler campaign by Agency Republic (creative) and Zed Media was recently nominated for an Eyeblaster Award. This post is part of a series of interviews with nominees for a behind-the-scenes look at some of the best campaigns from 2009.
Thanks to Creative Director Anders Gustavsson from Agency Republic (left) for sharing his insights on the campaign.

What was the client brief for this campaign?
The O2 Joggler is part of bigger O2 initiative to offer more products and services designed for families. The Joggler is a wireless touchscreen device that offers a range of useful services for the whole family. A shared family calendar, view your family photos, listen to music, catch up on the latest news and live traffic updates.

For the launch of the Joggler we were asked to focus on the calendar feature and communicate how the Joggler can help organise family life.

How did you come up with the idea for the campaign?
We asked ourselves some key questions: Can we encourage people to think about how they organise their own family? Can we capture the feeling of hectic family life? Can we create an interactive challenge that ends in a seamless introduction to the Joggler.

The solution was a playful interactive challenge. Set in the familiar environment of a fridge door filled with post it notes, it’s your job to keep track of the escaping notes. How good are you at organising?

The Joggler offers you a convenient new way to organise your family.

What was the client response?
On brand and very well aligned with the tv ad. The execution really reinforces the core launch message: now there is an easier way to keep your family organised – The Joggler.

How did you integrate the campaign across channels?
The online execution makes use of the same visual treatment and uses the same core message as the TV ad (created by VCCP).

What’s the ‘next big idea’ from Agency Republic?
We are creating the worldwide launch campaign for an upcoming EA games title. As lead agency we will be working across the full gamut of media channels to create a truly integrated campaign, but our focus will still be on digital, highlights of which include some exciting social media ideas and a fully interactive version of the tv ad.