Eyeblaster recently spoke with Felix Middleton, Operations Director at Feref about their cutting-edge creative using a webcam-in-banner to raise the bar of user engagement for the New Moon campaign featured as the Spotlight Campaign in The Blast.

What was the client brief for the New Moon campaign?

• - Create a high level of excitement.
• - Drive box-office admissions.
• - Communicate Team Edward and Team Jacob Strategy.
• - Raise awareness of release date.
• - Encourage interaction with the franchise.

How did you decide to use the webcam integration?
These ads were going to be served to a highly engaged audience on sites that have heavy coverage of the movie and its stars. The audience has already seen everything there is to see about this movie. This was an opportunity to co-create something with the Movie brand where the engaged user could make and save a keepsake starring themselves, and their chosen male lead. They could then post the image wherever they wished.

We have worked with Eyeblaster for many years in creating media firsts for our clients. They have assisted us in realising our creative and technical vision on many occasions, so naturally we trusted them to help us with this joint development of this webcam creative.

How did you come up with the concept of linking to the Facebook pages?
Once saved out, it seemed logical to capitalize on the choice the user made on their male lead, to give them the opportunity to connect with the individual Facebook profile, and support the campaign. E1′s strategy was to create tribes around the male leads of Team Edward and Team Jacob on Facebook.

Congratulations to Feref for another breakthrough campaign!

Editor’s Note: This article by Dean Donaldson, Director of Digital Experience at Eyeblaster, originally appeared in AdvertisingAge.

The recent surge of research around creative variables like ad shape, format and video puts online creative into the hot seat, and size, it seems, doesn’t necessarily matter. We’ve been groomed to judge online display ads based on aesthetics alone as opposed to trying to match the physical elements with performance to see patterns. This has shown certain assets can positively impact campaign results, but it often overlooks one critical factor — the online environment.

Historically, we create ads in an assortment of shapes and sizes and stick them everywhere, only to find ourselves surprised when the same creative generates a range of results across many environments. It’s relatively obvious, actually: Surely the impact of a piece of creative that works effectively in one in environment will differ — sometimes radically — when placed in another.

That’s largely due to the consumer experience and level of activity found in each location. It may seem obvious that a portal homepage would differ to a social media site, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. As consumers spend more and more time online, the environment in which they find themselves matters more and more to them — and not matching the right creative against the right environment can be toxic. As they say, looks will only get you so far; for advertising, it’s location, location, location.

Since the first display ad 15 years ago, a variety of environments have become amenable to online advertising. Take the mega sports homepage portal ESPN, or the opening to news sites like New York Times and Forbes where users skim headlines for few seconds before clicking on various links. Then, contrast destination pages found within these homepages, where the user explores athlete stats or reads specific news articles. Although homepages have mass reach, they also have short attention spans compared to destination pages, which are more likely to retain re users for extended periods of time as the absorb information and content.
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VAST 2.0 was finally released last month after few months of hard team work by the Digital Video Committee (DVC) at the IAB.

Although VAST 1.0 provided a solid ground for the industry to run in-stream ads in a consistent and scalable manner it wasn’t comprehensive enough to support the different business needs and possible campaign scenarios. In addition, VAST 1.0 wasn’t always clear from technical perspective as developers were sometimes confused regarding the proper implementation of the VAST.

Realizing the business needs and technical ambiguity, the DVC decided to release a new version of the VAST. Initially planned to be a short list of enhancements, VAST 2.0 ended up as a major upgrade with some significant (non backwards compatible) changes. It is always better to avoid significant, let alone non backwards compatible, changes when it comes to industry technology standards, however in this case it was inevitable. Had they not been handled, the issues with VAST 1.0 would have blocked further adoption of the VAST by publishers and technology vendors which would mean the end of the show for the IAB’s in-stream advertising standardization efforts.

Without getting into too many details – the main benefit with the VAST 2.0 is its ability to provide enough flexibility to support the future and current business needs of the industry while still providing a clear framework from a technical perspective. With the VAST 2.0 everyone should benefit – publishers that sell in-stream inventory, agencies that buy media and technology vendors that facilitate the business between publishers and agencies.

Here are two examples of the improvements in VAST 2.0:
1. Support for complex placements that go beyond the simple pre-roll. As the in-stream advertising space evolves, we should expect a growth in the demand for placements which consist of a combination of linear units (e.g. pre-rolls), non linear units (e.g. overlays) and companions units. These types of placements can be priced in multiple ways and the VAST 2.0 will be able to support the different pricing models.

2. Tracking specific creative elements – one of the most important things for agencies are tracking capabilities and these are especially crucial when it comes to complex in-stream placements. VAST 2.0 will allow tracking below the ad level and verify that each creative element (e.g. linear unit, non-linear unit) is properly served.

Serving as a member of the VAST work group, it was impressive to see a group of competitors coming together (again) and working hard hand in hand to solve mutual key problems. I witnessed the strong commitment of all the leading industry players to both the VAST and the in-stream advertising technology standardization in general. The industry definitely has lots of faith in the VAST (and VPAID) and there is good reason to believe that we are on the right (and fast) track to scale the in-stream advertising space.

Now that we have VAST 2.0 there are no more excuses. The industry must step forward and adopt the VAST (and VPAID) if we want to see more ad dollars spent by advertisers. I, for one, have already adopted it.

Ronnie Lavi | Senior Manager, Product Planning

The Blast, Eyeblaster’s monthly Newsletter, features a very hot Spotlight Campaign and six other standout brands in its New & Notable section.

Spotlight Campaign: Twilight New Moon
Format: Polite banner

Media: Zed Media

Creative: Feref

Interactive features: Webcam, Upload/Download

Vertical: Entertainment

“These ads were going to be served to a highly engaged audience on sites that have heavy coverage of the movie and its stars.   Using the webcam was an opportunity to co-create something with the Movie brand where the engaged user could make and save a keepsake starring themselves, and their chosen male lead. They could then post the image wherever they wished…”  Felix Midleton, Feref

New & Notable Campaigns

Media: Starcom

Creative: Saatchi & Saatchi Fallon

Format: Sidekick

Vertical: Travel

This homepage takeover on MySpace in Italy includes highlights from the Michael Jackson tribute This is It.

 Media : OMD

Creative: SPQR Network

Format: Expandable Banner

Vertical: Entertainment

Modern Warfare 2 has broken UK sales records on its first day of release. Robert Kotick, CEO of Activision, described it as ‘one of the largest entertainment launches of any media of all time.’  This sync ad showcases the game’s captivating graphics.

Media: MEC Interaction

Creative: Five by Five

Format: Sync Banner, Full Screen Video

Vertical: Gaming

The Mario wallpaper brightens up the home page and users are treated to a sneak preview of the new Super Mario Bros. Wii game.

Media: MEC Interaction

Creative: BD Network

Format: Skin

Vertical: Gaming

Media: Carat
Creative: Endero Oy

Format: Expandable Banner

Interactive Feature: 3D, Papervision

Vertical: Finance

 Re­_ is ACCIONA’s re_positioning strategy, a resounding declaration of principles that encapsulates and conceptualizes the company’s vision, its way of doing things and the way it plans to meet the many challenges that the future holds. Through a multi-channel online campaign, breaking actions, ACCIONA expects to reach more than 15 million web surfers, generating more than 117 million contacts, more than half a million visits to the re-ACCIONA.com micro-site and more than a million hits on the audiovsual, thanks to the extensive use and the widespread repercussion of the numerous platforms and channels used.

Media: Universal McCann
Creative: Universal McCann

Format: Skin
Vertical: Service

Click here to subscribe to future monthly editions of The Blast.

More and more marketers today are shifting from the “pull” to the “push” strategy where engagement with users is offered on the publisher site, within the banner. For 2009, it is evident that social has become an element applied to almost all brands and campaign strategies, but is it better for a brand to mix social elements directly into display ads to drive performance?

Here is a look at some recent campaigns that pushed social integration with display ads to a new level.

Talkback: Real Engagement in Real Time

Talkback is an ad format that features real-time two-way conversation between the consumer and the brand. A great example of this is the real-time social and display campaign featuring Talkback Ads launched by Intel last month. In its fourth Talkback Ad execution since October 2008, Intel expanded its campaign globally and aimed to connect the IT community with Intel experts. Through the Talkback Ad format, Intel technology experts participated in real-time dialogue with consumers, product reps and decision makers to establish an additional connection to the brand and its products.

Kelly Kernaghan, SVP and group account director at MRM, explained that this was also a way for Intel to reach an audience that depends on peer advice. “For IT managers, trust comes from dialogue with peers. Technical pros like to speak with people who speak the same language.”
Using Talkback, brands can build relationships by engaging users where they are, without the need to click-thru to a separate site. Talkback ads are ideal for brands interested in building or maintaining a community, product launches and can help push users down the purchase cycle.

Twitter Integration
VW pushed the social element to a whole new level when it launched a Twitter-integrated campaign where users typed in their Twitter account ID and watched as their twitter results were analyzed to determine the VW that best fits their personality, all within the banner.

Sharing with Messenger

Another ‘social’ ad format is the ‘ad sharing’ feature now available for messenger ad units. Both BMW and Universal Pictures (for the Bruno campaign) recently tapped into the ad sharing feature on MSN messenger, allowing users within seconds, to share and discuss the ad or movie trailer with buddies and contacts all without having to leave the banner.

In late August, eMarketer reported that consumers who chat with friends using AOL, MSN, or Yahoo messenger services spend more time looking at instant messenger ads than almost any other Web display spot (aside from the email category). The average messenger user spends almost 74 seconds on every advertisement rolled over while talking to friends.

Webcam-in-Banner + Social = Ultimate Brand Engagement
In light of the January 2009 Presidential Inauguration, Pepsi launched its Dear Mr. President campaign where users uploaded live video messages to Barack Obama without leaving the banner. Results from the Pepsi Refresh Everything campaign, where a direct line between the users and the Oval Office was created, confirms how integrating social media within the banner increased campaign performance and interaction. By harnessing video content with social, this campaign showed impressive results. More than 6 million people visited the brand’s Facebook page called “Refresh Everything” and nearly 85% were from the target audience of Millennials. Additionally, more than 175,000 became fans of “Refresh Everything” on Facebook and the webcam in Banner unit helped garner over 700 total video submissions that generated 4 million views and 100,000 text submissions to YouTube. More than that, the Pepsi campaign became the #1 sponsored YouTube page. For the full case study click here

So, to answer the question, is it better for a brand to mix social elements directly into display ads to drive performance? Yes, absolutely.

Hava Kelman Eisenstein | Director of Product Planning