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(Warning: penetration figs are about a year out of date.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...

One for the analysts

With thanks to xkcd.

Here's a fun game

There's a mischievous response to the question "Can you measure the effectiveness of my advertising?", which will sometimes lead to a very straight answer and occasionally cause a client or planner to tie themselves completely in knots.

It's "Sure, what was it supposed to change?"

It's most fun to ask a room full of people and find out that they all think the campaign was supposed to do different things. The finance guy is talking about selling product, the head of marketing is talking about building the brand and somebody else chips in with 'making a noise' or possibly 'maintaining share of voice'.

Building the brand is a difficult one to define because it means so many things to different people. Do we mean awareness? Consideration? Preference? If you can't define the word brand, then setting it as a campaign objective - even implicitly - is fraught with problems.

In the Era of Marketing Accountability^TM, shouldn't everybody be clear on what their marketing budget is designed to achieve?

A positive post about a positive campaign

I was travelling through Waterloo underground station yesterday and saw an eye catching campaign for the Carbon Trust. Really like this use of posters. Three of us were having a conversation, which turned to wondering what the campaign was about. You only find out at the end of the moving walkway.



These posters are aimed at businesses, and it's a bit of a shame that some of the consumer focussed ads aren't up to the same standard. Surely this car salesman isn't the best actor they could find?



It would have been nice to find the picture on the Carbon Trust website, instead of just the CBS outdoor news page, but it's definitely a strong campaign.

Econometrician is not a sexy word

Hal Varian - Google's Chief Economist - has been talking to McKinsey about the Web (naturally), advertising and sexy statistics.

He says that:

"I keep saying the sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians. People think I’m joking, but who would’ve guessed that computer engineers would’ve been the sexy job of the 1990s?"

So he's not a statistician then. Does anybody really think computer engineer was the 'sexy job of the 1990s'? Excluding Keanu Reeves in The Matrix? Still, we analysts can dream...
An ex-colleague once tried introducing himself as an econometrician to girls in bars. It didn't go well.

Back onto more serious matters, Varian also says that:

"On the Internet, we’ve learned to measure advertising effectiveness"

This is a common misconception and it doesn't seem to be going away. We can measure Web advertising effectiveness in the same way that Direct Mail has been able to measure effectiveness for ages. You send out a million direct mail envelopes (impressions) and get back ten thousand application forms (clicks.) Valuable, but not the whole picture.

Simple direct response measures like this say nothing about whether response rates are better when an above the line campaign is on air. They also can't help with whether the people responding are good prospects who would have responded anyway and you just gave them a convenient way to do it, or genuinely additional acquisitions.

These final two points are important and advertising agencies and Google (among others) are starting to recognise that web advertising response measures can't exist in a bubble. Web-based channels are going to have to get involved in statistical analyses of sales and borrow some of the techniques used to justify investment in TV. It's not just TV that can learn from Adwords, but vice-versa too.

You're not welcome here. Oh, er, hang on...

The British National Party has fronted its 2009 European Election campaign with a poster of a Spitfire. All very British. Give the Hun a bloody nose and then back to blighty for tea and medals.

And of course, as it's the BNP, no foreigners.



Except that the RF designation on this Spitfire means it came from 303 Squadron. Which was Polish. Genius.

Bl**dy Poles, they come over here, defending our freedoms...

I don't get it. Maybe I'm not web 2.0 enough?

Skittles has launched a kind of aggregator site for its brand.

If you visit www.skittles.com, you're greeted with an ever-present hovering menu thing that leads to feeds from Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, Flickr... all the usual web 2.0 favourites.

I don't get it. For several reasons.

The site sits behind an age verification check, because its content is uncontrollable. Surely most Skittles buyers are young? We'll let that one go though, because any interested ten year old will just lie on the check.

The menu isn't well executed and it gets in the way. It even obscures part of the 'Contact Us' page, which belongs to Skittles. That's just lazy.

The major problem with it seems to be that in a web full of aggregator sites, why would anybody be interested in this Skittles effort? Maybe there's an army of Skittles fans, incapable of using Flickr to satisfy their craving for Skittley pictures, who will form the user base.

There's one very good reason why people will be interested. In the best traditions of the web, the Skittles Twitter feed is now carrying messages like 'Skittles made me piss a rainbow. Is that normal?'. Sorry, but that was one of the cleaner ones. I don't think I want to know what Skittlefisting is.


The site is generating loads of chatter, but it's not exactly positive and I've got serious doubts about whether it will be allowed to stay up for long enough to look for any increase in sales.
Thankfully, the pictures and videos links point to corporate spaces on Flickr and Youtube, otherwise I think we can all imagine what could have been achieved with some creative image tagging.

If skittles.com does stay up, then as soon as the people abusing the Twitter feed get bored and move on, it's going to have no traffic at all.