Tom Buchok - Interactive Producer at Preston Kelly

My muse best comes when:  Listening to music.  When I’m jamming out to Rhapsody with my Sennheiser HD-280 headphones ,  I’m able to get my best work done. Lately, I’ve been listening to Delta Spirit and Pela .  I’m always looking for new tunes; if you have any recommendations, leave a note in the comments section.

Your idea about the perfect working day: We’ve got this great coffee shop, Taraccino, near the agency.  Good days start with a large coffee from there.
As an interactive producer, the perfect work day includes any of the following:
- Helping scope out a brand new online strategy
- Working with my developers to solve a tough problem
- Seeing fresh, innovative designs that accomplish all of the campaign objectives
- Getting everything done early

I’d say that’d be a pretty good day!

Your favorite interactive campaign : 

 Lean Mean Fighting Machine’s “Non-Stop Fernando” for Emirates.  The concept was brilliant - Fernando talks for 14:40:00 about his home town of Sao Paolo, the amount of time of the new direct flights from Dubai to Sao Paolo.  The rich media banners did a fantastic job of delivering the idea - and tied-in perfectly to the campaign website.  Social media was used to connected to Fernando, as well.

And the attempt to get a Guinness World Record was a smart add-on.  In terms of design, there is a nice continuity between the overall campaign concept and the continuous  hand-written-looking motif.  It is no surprise such a great campaign came from Lean Mean Fighting Machine - they are rockstars in the digital space.



Other sites I visit for inspiration:  By far, the most inspirational site for me is Bannerblog .  The founders and site moderators are dedicated to finding the absolute best online ads and posting them to Bannerblog.  I visit Bannerblog often because they keep it fresh, interesting and current.  It’s a great site.  (And also where I saw Non-Stop Fernando for the first time.)

Some other sites that I find helpful are: A List Apart,- Gary Vaynerchuk’s site,  37Signals’ blog - Signal vs. Noise ..and all of the wonderful people I follow on Twitter give me inspiration daily

Changes that need to take place in the industry: Dean Donaldson wrote a post on this blog about moving away from click-through rates - I think that’s an important aspect to the evolution of the online ad industry.

I think the industry is doing a good job working towards online-specific content, and I want to see that continue.  It’s no secret that content meant for a :30 spot or full-page magazine insertion doesn’t necessarily translate into online advertising. Recently, I’ve been thinking about the publishers’ role and I’d love to see some comments about it:

Publisher websites need to do more to improve display advertising.  There are just too many websites out there selling low-impact, derelict placements.  How can advertisers feel confident about their media buys if many sites aren’t optimized for ad visibility and engagement?

Over time, we’ve seen major players improve their sites: CNN.com is a good example.  They’ve added that 336×280 placement to their homepage over the past 18 months or so.  That’s smart.  Silicon Alley Insider has similar, high-impact 300×250 placements on its site.

The smaller sites need to follow this lead. I see too many sites selling placements that are 728×90s in the footer, or 160×600’s below-the-fold, etc.  While these smaller sites may offer nice targeting - especially geographic - the media they’re selling isn’t as powerful as it could be.

What do you think?

David Carr

Head of Interactive

Chemistry Communications Group Plc

 Your inspiration best comes when:  When you’ve got a really rich problem to solve that will let you explore interactive media’s real potential - when you can move away from advertising into storytelling. When you’re challenged to create something useful, usable and delightful that engages people and helps them connect, either functionally or to show-off across real and digital spaces. When it’s about creating a useful embodiment of the brand that affects the real world, not a metaphor or a distraction, not a tool with a logo. Then you’ve got to turn-off the screens and get out in the real world with real people and the inspiration will hit you. Play more and this is the best job in the world.

• Your idea about the perfect working day:  When we have the space to break out of role silos and work together. When we can start forgetting who is a designer and who is a developer, who is a creative and who is a planner, and start nurturing a really rich idea that needs everyone’s help. When despite the last minute hiccups, amends, blue-screens of death and races against crazy deadlines you can go home at the end of the day and say “WE made that, and it’s bloody brilliant.” Oh and a lie-in would be nice.

Your favorite interactive campaign and why:  My favorite interactive campaign changes almost daily generally accompanied by the feeling of “I wish we’d done that” or “damn it, we were doing that, let’s start again”. But the campaign that is currently very much in the “I wish we’d done that” box is Barbarian Group’s CNN T-Shirt Headlines campaign.

CNN.com’s T-Shirt Headlines Project used small T-Shirt icons next to headlines to draw peoples’ attention to their improved video offer. Clicking on the icon would lead them to a custom t-shirt shop where they could purchase a t-shirt with the headline on it. The shirts were emblazoned with the “I just saw it on CNN.com” tagline, along with the date and time of the headline. People could choose shirts with headlines they liked, were appalled about, found surreal, or just whimsical by actually interacting with the videos. It also spread the wider word as people wore the shirts, gifted them to their friends or broadcasted their purchase on their Facebook News Feed.

Brand Reality Creative like this is organic not viral, it has more usage loops and can be used by people for self-representation. It nurtures and incentivises invites and it cares about the retention rate rather than chasing installs through brute force. It is not the archetypal one hit widget - the type that cluttered up your old Facebook Profile page, the Viral App that is essentially spam.

David also recently worked on the innovative Emirates campaign:  Emirates is the only long haul airline to fly from 6 UK airports. Despite this most people still associate mid and long haul flights for business or pleasure with Heathrow or Gatwick. Miles Better used geographic and behavioural targeting coupled with in-advertising mapping to encourage people to fly from their local airport. It demonstrated the ease of getting there by plotting a route and showed how quick the trip would be. The campaign was part of the 6 UK Airports strategy that combined brand led comms, direct response offers, and even brand utility applications to increase passenger numbers for Emirates flights at Newcastle, Birmingham, Glasgow and Manchester.

With the holiday season looming upon us and in the midst of all this talk of credit-crunch and cutting budgets, the pressure seems to be on the digital industry right now to find answers to help assure confidence. Fortunately, Eyeblaster’s latest Analytics Bulletin seems to be helping do just that.

Bringing the perspective that with the average household being a bit strapped for cash at the moment, the need to hunt for a bargain is ensuring more and more people take to the web to uncover the last minute find to be had.

With a shift of emphasis from mere clicks as a way of justifying success, the report takes its perspective of this bargain hunt and helps show how online activity is a key part of a consumer’s experience in information gathering post-exposure to a marketing message, be that on or offline.

What I found interesting is, when looking at the key dates in the run up to the New Year we see a couple of spikes, one around the last-posting days for sending presents as people spend huge amounts of time online, and then in the traditional last holiday week of the year – when sales are rife. Consumers are spending up to 3 minutes per page looking for information and that means from a marketers perspective, the ability for high-impact brand exposure can be 6x the traditional 30 second TV spot, and within an environment where consumers are already in a consideration-to-purchase mode. The evidence is also seen in the number of videos started, interactions and clicks rising sharply as a result of this extra time spent on page, with no extra media cost.

With inquiry being a natural next step in the consumer life cycle following brand/product exposure, I personally find the move to merge display and search data into a seamless report the most exciting turning point for the online industry and convinced 2008 will go down as a key moment of maturity for digital advertising. Armed with ability to now see consumer paths-to-conversion, Eyeblaster has not been shy in releasing its first research into this area. The preliminary results have found staggeringly that up to 30% of clicks on paid searches happen as a result of being exposed to an online display advert first. When we consider no other media channel expects to measure an immediate result in situation, such as a click, but operate as a stop-and-think sign-post which pushes a consumer into a research/inquiry phase from another source, finding results for a display campaign success within search are for me the most logical and holistic way forward in campaign measurement.

In a media-whipped world of doom and gloom, one thing is for sure, people are looking forward to a Happy Holiday armed with bargains they have found online. In the meantime, for the rest of us who need to instil confidence in the market-place to maintain media budgets, we have been crying out for this kind of research, and I am confident those who are mature in digital advertising will equally take such a view.

Download your copy of the Eyeblaster Analytics Bulletin: Branding the Holidays now.

Lucy Weldon, Digital Strategy Director, Burrows

My muse best comes when:  Watching how my friends, family and I behave as consumers.  It’s often something we don’t see or apply to our thinking, but it’s such a simple and important point.  Studying Psychology has certainly helped to bring human interaction and behavior to the forefront of my thinking, but putting that into real life contexts certainly leads to some clear strategic direction.  The creative geniuses at Burrows are also brilliant muses - when we start a new project our ideas can range from the sublime to the ridiculous and amongst all of those thoughts is generally a brilliant idea!  Bringing that to life is then a natural progression, whatever the media channel.

Your idea about the perfect working day:  Well, waking up at 9am would be a good start!  Followed by a brilliant brief to get sucked into (on the beach obviously) with a budget as big as the idea can be.  Lots of open minded, great thinkers from our team and a client who is really switched on to the potential that digital channels holds for them.

Your favorite interactive campaign and why:  It has to be the recent Volvo XC90 campaign we ran.  We’ve seen some good click-through rates, and importantly, high interaction rates and durations.  We realize that the online audience are often time scarce and as such don’t particularly want to click through to another website at that time.  Producing highly interactive ads allows us to immerse the user in the brand, give them the information they want and that will help them on to the next stage of the purchase process, and leave them with a positive impression.  It’s far more important to do that, than play a TV ad to someone who has probably already seen it.  Luckily Volvo is a great client who always encourages fantastic ideas and is really focused on exploiting digital channels. Again, simple interaction with a simple idea allows the power of the product to show through, rather than being lost in technology.

Changes that need to take place in the industry:  I think industry leaders need to realise that the idea is king, and not always the channel.  I hate to see a piece of digital work which wastes the technology, or lets the technology rule the idea.  Good digital strategy should not sit in isolation, but should be part of the communications planning from the start.  We are certainly starting to see that more, with FMCG brands in particular not leaving their online creative to the end of the process, but it needs to be a shift in the advertising industry as a whole.  Digital is really the front line, the place where consumers can actually interact with the brand and start a relationship with it.

Le’Nise Brothers, head of interactive, PHD Rocket has just posted a great article on iMedia UK.

Offering a rallying cry for sensibilities, she argues that the key is:

“…understanding of the role of digital in the wider comms mix. Digital isn’t a channel or medium - digital complements and enhances other part of the communications plan, which means that a silo approach where the digital agency / department receives briefs long after the comms planners / comms agency have crafted a solution will never work. Consumers don’t consume media in channels, so why should media be planned in channels?”

She is a woman after my own heart!

Lets face it, clicks DO NOT equal response and are unnatural behaviour towards advertising. They are neither a branding metric nor a derivative Direct Response metric. They only time it can be argued if the latter has clear call to action saying click here to buy, and even then we see appalling fall-off rates.

You simply cannot and will not measure “animated” advertising on TV, Outdoor, Print and dare-say Mobile via a click to prove effectiveness, and neither do I believe it is the most effective way of measuring online display advertising. It is floored and based on historic user experience from Search and we simply would not measure any other media channel by such an immediate trigger-happy response. Every other channel takes a message to the people, not the people to the message (on a landing page).

0.5% clicks is suggesting that 99.5% of people exposed have had no effect. We now know through studies that most of the clickers are not the target audience anyway (reducing actual CPC to your CPM) and have ZERO recollection of the brand - so what is the point of the click? Most people exposed to an ad campaign (wherever) make an emotional connection with a brand that leads them into exploration and inquiry later on - this could be measured within the ad itself, or via search for further info or possibly (but relatively small numbers) on a client direct site. I would argue we trust reviews on places like Amazon more than client site information these days in terms of consumers moving through a conversion funnel.

With this in mind we must measure effectiveness in terms of exposure in situation such as Dwell Time (i.e. the number of seconds user interacts with a creative of their own volition) and then any resulting effect seen along a path-to-conversion - doubtfully clicked and more likely searched. From data I have I can tell you that 10-20% of impressions are touched and played with for 1 minute on average (twice as long as TV spot) and up to 30% of people searching have been “exposed” to an online display ad first. These are lot more exciting and interesting numbers to demonstrate digital advertising effectiveness then the measly few who bothered to click…