Monthly Archives: March 2007
Pay per action
Pay-per-click has been made popular by Google. Although it is still a major focus of their services and while MSN and Yahoo! are busy perfecting their pay per click models, Google has started testing pay per action.
The ads are placed on publisher’s sites and the advertiser pays every time an action has taken place as a result of the ad.
It may be a page view, a registration for a service, a completed lead form or a sale.
Google will set-up the mechanics and manage the process, for a fee of course.
This is just what every advertiser would like to see: paying on results only. Those just after branding will still use PPC and traditional banner ads.
Others have been offering this service for a while: Advertising.com, ValueClick and Snap.com.
What the success will be for Google, how much money they will make with it and how they will control click (or action) fraud, remains to be seen. At this stage it is just in test phase.
If this takes off, it will most certainly put more pressure on the TV ad and billboard guys.
For more details read the BusinessWeek’s version of the story.
Video Advertising
As online marketing and advertising is increasingly getting a bigger slice of total adspend, so the advertisers are looking at new and more innovative mediums to get their message accross. This makes video advertising the ideal tool to do what banners and emails can’t.
According to NYTimes.com Video advertising, while less than 5 percent of online spending, is the fastest-growing advertising category online, generating $410 million last year, an increase of 82 percent from 2005, according to eMarketer, an online advertising research firm.
Advertisers like Internet commercials linked to online video because it allows them to communicate their brand messages with sight, sound and motion. And Web sites like video ads because they are paid more for each viewer than they typically would be with simple text or banner ads.
A quick look at the web sites of some of SA’s online agencies to see who offers or mentions online video advertising revealed the following:
Acceleration: mentions only rich media
Stonewall+: no mention at all
Apurimac Media: only mention is of rich media, no further explanation
Quirk: mentions online promotion and advertising, nothing on video
34: no mention at all
I am sure that at least some (if not all ) of these agencies and some others do offer video advertising. I just find it surprising that they don’t explicitly mention it or have any references or case studies about it.
Surely we are not that behind when it comes to this application…?
