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Opinion
The keyboard warrior of Twitter
In this guest post, NBN staffer Scott Rhodie writes an unofficial, personal view on his experience with a hostile Twitter critic.Last night I had a strange incident. While on Twitter I noticed someone saying that Australia’s NBN is already outdated. I wrote a small note back explaining they were incorrect.
And their response? The lovely gentleman (whose Twitter profile says: ‘Father of 5 kids, Loving Grandfather of 10 Grandchildren,and 2 Great Granddaughters. love to give heaps to Pollies and Poofters’) said to me: “Go and lick Gillards C*** out U commie Prick”
What's in a name?
In this guest post, Moensie Rossier wonders about the power of names for brands and marketers.
Brands have been having a bit of fun with names lately, not to mention a fair bit of success. Interbrand just named a headhunting firm Cloak & Dagger. And ‘Share a Coke’ showed how much power there is in a name.
The Coke campaign effectively short-circuited the usual mechanics of communication. It undoubtedly stroked people’s egos. But, I believe, its success stems from the fact that it directly and automatically affected people’s behaviour, rather than doing so indirectly by shaping attitudes.
Best ads from Super Bowl 2012
The Super Bowl is all done and a team from North America won. But as well as some sort of sporting event, it’s the world’s biggest advertising showcase. See the best of them right here… and please tell us what you think.
How to debunk media myths
In this post, UWS’s Ullrich Ecker, John Cook and Stephen Lewandowsky argue that cognitive science can help PRs form strategies in managing media misreporting.
A growing cohort of commentators has bemoaned the descent of contemporary political “debate” into a largely fact-free zone.
How about simply focusing on what consumers want?
In this guest post, Peter Mountford argues that brands should think more about what is really going on for consumers
Who here is hoping their favourite brand of toilet paper is going to be organizing a flash mob on their way home from work today?
What the Optus web copyright victory means
In this analysis first published on The Conversation, RMIT’s Marita Shelly examines the implications of Telstra’s defeat over the online rights to the AFL broadcast deal
This week’s Federal Court ruling that Optus customers are able to view sporting matches minutes after they are streamed live without breaching copyright is a landmark decision that alters our understanding of copyright law, and has significant implications for the AFL’s broadcasting rights deal.
Does Gina Rinehart’s bite of a chunk of Fairfax make her an oligarch?
In an article that first appeared in The Conversation, Mark Rolfe wonders whether the mining magnate’s move could turn Fairfax into something resembling America’s Fox network.
Australia’s richest person Gina Rinehart has moved to increase her stake in Fairfax Media, owner of The Age, Sydney Morning Herald and a number of radio stations. Rinehart has already shown her desire to play a role in public life, campaigning against former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s aborted mining tax. She has also demonstrated a willingness to make media investments to ensure her pro-business worldview is promulgated.
What does this latest move by Rinehart mean?
Gillard's Australia Day crisis
PM Julia Gillard’s media adviser Tony Hodges has been forced to resign over the Australia Day tent embassy debacle.
It came after it emerged he had revealed opposition leader Tony Abbott’s whereabouts, leading to both politicians being rescued by police in ugly scenes.
Mumbrella editor Tim Burrowes and advertising practitioner Jane Caro debate the topic on Weekend Sunrise’s masters of Spin segment:
The biggest cock-up I made in business
In this guest post, Chris Savage urges agency staff to live the brand.I still shudder when I think about how incredibly stupid I was when I made the biggest stuff up of my career. And then, 18 years later, I did it again. Do not make this mistake with your clients. Ever.
Hey Groupon. Thanks for fucking up email
In this guest post, Daniel Monheit warns that group deal overload is devaluing email marketingEmail marketing used to be fabulous. Back in the heady days of 2010, brands would work hard to build up well qualified databases, upon which they’d bestow carefully crafted correspondence filled with information, offers and incentives. The recipients, of course would be delighted: “Oh look! An email! From one of my favourite brands! And it’s 40 cents off at Woolies this week!”.
The staggering sway of Harold Mitchell
The Power Index today names Aegis Media chairman Harold Mitchell as the most powerful person in Melbourne. Andrew Crook profiles him.
Harold Mitchell takes pride in dispensing with the niceties. When The Power Index visited his South Melbourne private office before Christmas, fresh remains were scattered all over the boardroom table.
Share a Coke with… the moronic masses
The most-read story on Mumbrella last year, with not far off 100,000 page views, was a fairly humdrum yarn about the launch of Coca-Cola’s name-on-a-bottle campaign.The headline, “Coca-Cola puts people’s names on bottles in ‘Share a Coke’ campaign”, though hated by any self-respecting sub-editor, was loved by Google. And in rushed what can be politely described as the public.
Assumptions kill creativity
In this guest post, Gual Barwell disagrees that the sales success of the Old Spice social media campaign was overstated.Yesterday’s post from Cathie McGinn suggested the Old Spice campaign failed to connect with consumers. Based on the facts and figures, I disagree.
What Old Spice and Wieden + Kennedy has done and done phenomenally well is to create a franchise.
The SMH's readers (are wrong) editor
We are now about five months into the reign of Australia’s first readers’ editor. And I don’t think it is working.
It struck me at the time of Judy Prisk’s appointment to the Sydney Morning Herald that the fact that her boss was editor-in-chief Peter Fray was not going to be ideal if she was going to be the independent voice of the reader.
The emperor's new fragrance: Old Spice’s campaign failure
In this guest post, Cathie McGinn slays a sacred cow of 21st century marketing – the highly awarded Old Spice campaign.One of the biggest myths of recent times (by which I mean a story of great heroism and triumph we’d all like to believe but deep down know to be untrue) is the Old Spice social media campaign. It’s been much lauded and awarded as an example of outstanding content, a creative and collaborative way of connecting with consumers and driving a record increase in sales.
SMH shows how to make a home page takeover work
When you’re a commercial organisation, balancing the needs of consumers with the need to make money through ads is tricky.
Among the organisations that sometimes goes the wrong way in my view is Fairfax, with its autostart video ads, for instance.
But today, a bit of unreserved praise for the home page takeover currently running on smh.com.au for American Express.
It appears to be frequency capped at one impression so it’s not going to be too intrusive for readers, and I suspect that the cut-through will be big.
Tim Burrowes
August 25th, 2010 at 11:38 am
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Comments
25 Aug 10
11:43 am
why would a user would be happy with this? they come to read the news and get a big annoying irrelevant ad ruining the page as soon as they enter.
not sure it’s a fair trade off.
25 Aug 10
11:52 am
I’ve got some fairly curmudgeonly views about page takeovers, but I suspect that the point is not to make a user happy. It’s to command a few seconds of the user’s attention without pissing them off. And in that respect, people’s browsing habits aren’t going to be shifted by one intrusive takeover ad. I can’t think of a reason why Fairfax would turn this one down… I hated it, but I’ll still be back at their site at least once before the end of work today.
25 Aug 10
11:55 am
It certainly made me unhappy and I won’t be back today (although I will be hitting up the mobile site). I don’t even know what the ad was for.
25 Aug 10
11:59 am
Traveller,
Given the choice between experiencing high impact advertising for ten seconds or a pay wall, which would you choose?
Cheers,
Tim – Mumbrella
25 Aug 10
12:18 pm
All the homepage takeover haters would obviously be happier to hit the SMH page and enter their credit card details instead .
25 Aug 10
12:42 pm
Pay walls vs takeovers?? What a cop out argument.
Are you homepage takeover fanboys saying you cant acheive big impact without pissing the user off, and starting some annoying animation just before I’m about to click on a story?
I didn’t even hang around long enough to look at what the ad was about- just looked straight for the X.
Yeah… What cut through!
25 Aug 10
12:55 pm
Hey Tim. I would choose neither. The Internet (still) has a rich source of free news sites and I’d take my business elsewhere.
25 Aug 10
1:00 pm
Hi Traveller,
But what are your thoughts on how those “free news sites” will afford to bring you that news in the long term? Either somebody pays for it or in the end, it goes away.
Cheers,
Tim – Mumbrella
25 Aug 10
1:05 pm
Tim – if paywalls hit you can bet your house Fairfax will still be serving up these over the page executions to users, regardless of whether they’re opening their wallets.
Never have I heard anyone talking paywalls talk about less advertisements. If anything they will want to charge MORE CPM as there will be a flimsy argument around improved user quality.
And I bet the way the ad is tracked someone will be claiming x/close button clicks as legitimate click through.
25 Aug 10
1:32 pm
Hey Tim
It will be interesting to see what happens to ABC/BBC if the whole online news world goes pay. They are currently my preferred source of online news (with SMH as I am from Sydney).
General news has been shown to not work on a pay to view model as there are too many other alternatives. Pending Murdoch convincing all the news outlets to charge, of course.
Niche news site like AFR and WSJ work well because they are the only source.
25 Aug 10
2:07 pm
From a digital creative perspective I feel it fails, simply because the takeover doesn’t allow the current news areas to fall over. Therefore the idea fails. Seeing the switch to some old/alternative content before the wall falls feels awkward.
This is why you don’t see many concepts doing anything with the news areas that is this specific or tied to the current content. It’s too hard to achieve plus make the execution look 100% quality.
25 Aug 10
2:37 pm
It got my attention. I was facinated enough to sit through it without hitting the close button.
The downside is I cannot remember the advert and would seriously consider clicking the close button second time around.
It would add to cost, but an advert that evolved and offered something new to capture and hold one’s attention each day might be worth the investment in the longer term.
One could definitely do some cool things with the space.
25 Aug 10
2:56 pm
i agree with Tim – it got my attention and was short enough to withstand viewing. Amex have also done well with their creative SMH DBS print ads.
Those born before 1980 are well aware that nothing in the world comes for free, including news. While the payment model for news is taking a while to sort itself out, Tim’s right – someone has to pay for real news to be gathered as opposed to scraped, linked or stolen. In the end this will be the user – one way or another.
25 Aug 10
3:02 pm
I like it, but I can’t help but think a bit of better branding would’ve helped – I’m in the industry and it took me a while to realise Amex where the client.
And this is surely better than those “please look at this advert for 5 seconds until your page loads” kind of things. And plus points for the frequency capping – so those people who are saying “they won’t go back today”, well what’s the point in that? You’ve already done your single view of the ad.
8/10
25 Aug 10
3:07 pm
Found it a clever idea, but too intrusive for my taste.
25 Aug 10
3:10 pm
Have you ever known Fairfax to frequency cap? Not only is it poor creative execution, it keeps on giving, every time I go back to the home page…..all part of the race to the bottom. The term “creative” should be licenced, and granted only when its true meaning is fulfilled.
25 Aug 10
3:17 pm
Very much agree with OzDean – if the concept can’t be executed perfectly, don’t do it.
Apart from that, IMO takeovers are not a positive way to get users to consider your brand. Web browsing is a fast-paced exercise and the last thing you want to do is interrupt a user’s activities by taking away control of the browser, then show them a big shiny logo of the company that just pissed them off and wasted their time.
The element of ‘surprise’ is why users don’t remember what the ad was about. The ad is over before they have had a chance to consider the message. But I wonder if, after being so rudely interrupted, they have a subconscious negative emotion toward that brand?
There are far more positive ways of using animation and flash to create ads that people want to view and indeed interact with. Give users a positive, unobtrusive experience and I guarantee you, while your CTR might not be as “impressive”, the quality of your leads certainly will – and you won’t have a negative impact on perception of the brand. Your message will also be absorbed better because you have gained the users voluntary attention and they are therefore prepared for, and receptive of, your offer.
25 Aug 10
3:48 pm
check back in 3 days with everyone who visited the SMH site today and lets see the unaided/aided recall for this ad
25 Aug 10
3:48 pm
Don’t even bother looking at pop up ads like this so I agree that the cut-through is poor. Understand that money needs to be made from online advertising but this is a really poor way to do it…all is does is piss me off and send me to a site like the ABC for the news…
25 Aug 10
7:45 pm
From a publisher POV I’d take an intrusive OTP over a production-heavy integration any day
26 Aug 10
8:11 am
Sweet advertorial.
26 Aug 10
1:38 pm
Yeah, I clicked the x, and then left. No idea what the ad was for until I read this. Now I now to avoid Amex. Cheers!
28 Aug 10
10:42 pm
This was a good one ? really ?? The fold down news was old, and i’m not sure what the tents had to do with signing up for an Amex Card. I asked a room of 26 people today if they’d seen it and could remember the brand, almost all had been annoyed by it, but only 1 person remembered the brand. SMH annoyed everyone, and the advertiser didn’t seem likely to sign up many additional members.
If publishers are looking for interruption style advertising combined with the paywalls to be their silver bullet, they’d better hope that news outlets like the ABC and the BBC get shut down pretty soon. Since the SMH started auto-starting their 30 second bits of video that are preceded by 30 second ads, i’ve moved most of my news consumption to either the ABC or blogs (for sport). Interruption models, forced pre-roll videos and auto-refresh aren’t the answer for revenue – unfortunately i don’t know what is, maybe it is the paywall – but if newspapers don’t get smart soon, they’re going to have few customers to convert, and fewer advertisers to pay for the ads.
29 Aug 10
12:45 pm
Hi Mike Zed,
Actually, I must admit that I missed the fact that it was old news on the fold down.
Cheers,
Tim – Mumbrella
1 Sep 10
8:45 pm
Sorry I missed this discussion at the time, especially the opinions of ANON333, Traveller, MikeZed and Amy. I am always hungry for news but recently found myself actually picking up a newspaper rather than facing another website like SMH.com.au. (Then I remembered I live in WA and flung the horrible thing down before it scarred me.) After reading these opinions, however, I am now wondering if news sites are using tactics like page takeovers to annoy customers back to printed copy?
8 Sep 10
1:43 pm
If the creative agency had used Page Morph technology (from Eyewonder, but with a similar product offering from Eyeblaster), which takes a screenshot live and then interacts with it, this would have been much more effective. Lazy creative/technology used.
8 Sep 10
2:16 pm
I like Morph too, Jeff
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSMRPKM1evk