Spooky Gmail

I've been mailing back and forth on Gmail this morning, discussing bids on a house that my girlfriend and I are looking at.

Google sent me a calendar invite for this afternoon, suggesting we up our bid and meet them "in the middle." My girlfriend didn't send me that. Google did. It's taken us a little while to work that out.

It's very, very clever (and not a little spooky) but I think it might have got the wrong end of the stick on this one.

Here's the email that sparked off the Google machine

"Or we say we'll meet them in the middle at 210, but we cannot go any higher. If they say no to that then we just leave it with them (and dare I say it, walk away if we need to.)"

And what Google did!



Google just passed the Turing Test. Even if it didn't realise it was joking.

There are ads on the web? Really?

Edit: I've updated the guesstimates in this post here.

Google has announced that it is to start serving ads to its users based on their browsing habits.

My first reaction? Surely nobody sees ads on the web any more. This is probably not the right place to admit that my work and home PCs both run Firefox with Adblock Plus installed. Internet Explorer is strictly for websites that won't work in Firefox, like DDS's dreadful BrandOcean.*

The original web ad-blockers left pages looking nasty. They didn't load the ads (sometimes) but left big spaces where they were supposed to be. Adblock Plus is cleverer, it removes the ad completely and your browser rearranges the page around it.

Adblock's not perfect. It's amazing to use Firefox for a while and wonder why a site is only bothering to use half the screen. My personal favourite is the Football365 Mailbox, about which I genuinely wondered for some time why it only put the content in a half screen column, before loading the same site in Explorer and seeing - and waiting for - tons of clutter on the right side of the screen.

The Google story set me wondering how many other people in the UK are using this tool. Are you?

Adblock Plus is running at 6.6m daily active users.



There are approximately 50m daily active users for Firefox worldwide, which gives a penetration for Adblock of 13%.

Lets make another jump and translate it to the UK (I do enjoy back of the envelope analytics.)

Indolent reports a UK Firefox penetration of 17.2% - lagging behind the rest of Europe.



(Warning: penetration figs are about a year out of date. This is marketing analysis after all.)


So let's assume the UK penetration of Adblock is about 2.2% (17.2% x 13%. Keep up at the back.)

That's low enough for advertisers to safely ignore for now. Turns out I'm a bit of a technology geek for having it installed. Definitely worth keeping an eye on that penetration figure though.

Mozilla could, if they wanted to, market a 'no ads on the web - ever!' version of Firefox with Adblock pre-installed, but I'm guessing they know how popular that would make them with the people who fund a large slice of their business.

As for me, I'm quite enjoying a web with no ads, free-riding off everybody else who is funding the websites I read. If you've just learned that Adblock Plus exists, please, for the sake of we 2.2%, don't tell anyone.


* Obviously my personal opinion and yes that's an out of context cheap shot, but if you work in an agency unfortunate enough to have bought this piece of software, I sympathise...

Apparently, TV isn't dead after all

Saw a good article today on TV effectiveness from Advertising Age, which brings together a few different studies showing that the demise of TV might have been overstated.

Lets have a look at the central claim that TV is as 'Effective as Ever'.

MMA has run a meta-analysis across marketing mix models dating from the early 1990s and concluded that the effectiveness of TV per Rating Point (GRP) is not dropping. They also found that 1/3 of brand-name Google search queries are actually being driven by off-line media spend - so some of that online ROI is actually (partly at least) offline ROI.

Interesting study, but should we be surprised by the result? I don't know about you, but I'm not.

I was asked by a media planner not long ago to show that TV was still right for their 'youth' brand as the client was pushing hard to swap TV budget for online (the question is always asked this way round, rather than 'could my client be right?')

Two things jumped out straight away. One, it wasn't really a youth brand - the client had put far too much emphasis on a segmentation - and two, the best way to reach a young audience quickly is still TV. Young people have embraced new technologies faster than older demographics, but in the UK at least, the single media consumption activity that they do the most is to watch TV. A quick TGI run confirms it, but I won't post the chart up here as its not my company's blog.

The second reason why it's not surprising that TV is holding up, is the key part of the effectiveness statement. Effective at what? Selling product. Measured how? Per GRP.

So if you put the same amount of TV in the top, you get the same sales out the bottom. This could change if the reach of TV had dropped dramatically, so a lot fewer people were watching a lot more TV. It hasn't. Alternatively, you'd get less sales per GRP if TV ads were being watched, but had somehow mysteriously stopped working. These studies say not.

Before you get excited, do TV GRPs for your target audience cost more or less than they did in 1990?

What the MMA study hints at, and where analysts are starting to find new questions, is how you can best use new media to amplify TV, not to replace it.


Footnote:
Another study mentioned in the article states that

"more than half the advertisers (16 of 29) in the study still lost money by running their TV ads"

Including a long term effect? It would be good to know.

Google taking its eye off the long-term

Everybody knows that Google isn't evil. Well at least that they definitely say they're not.

They do seem to be bowing to the demands of capitalism recently though and have ruffled a few feathers in the process.

For anyone who missed it, Google has been playing about with its adwords mechanism.

Automatic matching now means that you bid against keywords that you didn't actually mean to buy (if you don't turn it off after Google turn it on.) That might be a good thing for your ROI and it might not, but would you be happy if you bought a spot in Coronation Street and ITV ran one in Emmerdale too because it has the same audience, then billed you for both? Thought not.


Adgooroo are also reporting that Google upped the number of ads per search by 57% in the last quarter of last year. Turning on the taps = more revenue for Google, but it's a very different strategy to Larry Page's statement that:

"we'd be better off showing just one ad [per page] - the perfect ad."

All of this, on its own, probably won't do any harm. It's not like I'm foretelling the downfall of Google but it could be likened to the brand manager who runs 'one more promotion' to boost sales before the year ends. Do it enough times and you start to devalue your brand.

Why you might not love highly targeted advertising

All this internet ad targeting is brilliant. You can make products pop up on gmail depending on what an email was about, and Facebook keeps trying to sell me motorbike insurance because it knows I need it. Probably something else for you, but that's exactly the point.

The better you target, the higher your conversion to clicks and sales. It's win-win.

Except that it isn't. Not if you sell something low-priced, in a market with several competitors - i.e. everybody who makes supermarket goods.

Imagine a world where ad targeting is perfect. On TV, on the radio, everywhere. It's possible to put your product in front of consumers exactly when they're thinking about buying and persuade them to buy you.

We're not all that far away*, as TV viewing moves online through services like iplayer and kangaroo, why would you show everyone the same copy in each ad break? Come to that, why would you even show the same number of ads?
For advertisers, it will be like buying Google searches - you outbid your competitors, win the slot and win the customer.

In a world like that, some brands would pay an awful lot for an advertising slot. We can already see this on Google searches; bids for high margin items like credit cards and mortgages are way higher than for other categories.

This leaves FMCG marketers with something of a problem. The products they advertise are low-margin and their market is everybody. At the moment, these types of brands that have very wide target audiences can dominate the broadcast media, because broadcast media don't target very well. You hit everybody with your ad, like it or not, and that means a lot of wastage if you sell to a minority of people.

Back to the motorbike insurance example, you never see bike insurance ads on the TV outside of advertising during MotoGP races and even then it's more likely to be sponsorship than in-break spots.
But if motorbike insurance companies could target just the bikers with TV spots, or even better just the bikers whose insurance is coming up for renewal, then they'd pay a lot more than somebody who is trying to sell those bikers baked beans, or frozen ready meals.

In that world, could FMCG brands even afford to advertise on the broadcast media? Wouldn't somebody else always be willing to pay more for the slot?


* OK, so we're really quite far away, but it's fun to speculate about what would happen.