Budget Online

Can someone please sort out Budget's online advertising.

Yesterday I was on Trade Me where I saw a Budget ad and thought 'spin the wheel - cool, sure, this will be interesting. Wonder if they are going to do this within the ad or take me to a landing page?'

Now, I understand that there is a button on this ad which says 'Spin Now' but I wasn't paying that much attention so I just clicked on the actual wheel in the ad. Took me straight to a new tab which told me that it was "bad request - invalid verb". At this point, I took a screen shot of the landing page and emailed my Trade Me rep and suggested they work out what is going on.

No idea what they did with this information, but they thanked me for it.

So, today on TV3 page, I see the Budget ad again:

And again I click on the wheel instead of the spin now button and yet again, I get this:
Now, this could be a Chrome issue (I can't be bothered finding the ad again in Firefox and playing with it) but I do wonder, who is building this creative for them? I am pretty sure it is possible to make sure that the rest of the ad doesn't click through at all, if that was what they were going for, or more to the point, make it so that everything but the button clicks through to their site.

What is going on?

What did Trade Me do with this information? Did they pass it onto the agency/client? Let them know what was happening? And if so, how come new creative which doesn't go to an error landing page hasn't been supplied to all publishers running this ad?

This is one of the reasons why it is so hard to get clients into online. They start with a sample of 1 (themselves) and decide that no one clicks on online advertising, so what's the point? Then, once you convince them to consider online, they start playing a little more and clicking on ads and this sort of thing happens.

Someone is letting the side down here. I'm not sure who, but you're not helping the rest of us by not caring about your advertising.

This is not news

Dear stuff.co.nz,

Trade Me falling down is not news. It is a bit of a glitch (which let's be fair, you're not exactly immune to yourself) which they jumped onto and fixed. NOT NEWS.

I find it a bit of a joke that this came through my reader today. Not news. It's not even interesting.

If the site had crashed because someone hacked it, then yes - totally news. A site going down? Not so much.

What's more, freaking Fairfax owns Trade Me. Where's the solidarity kids? Not all happy families around the Fairfax kitchen table? I mean, I'd kinda understand if Herald went down, competitor and all, but one of your own?

Tell you what - when Stuff starts pulling the kind of traffic that Trade Me does and it is all smooth sailing, then pick holes all you want, till then, work out what's news and what's not.

Kind regards,

Monica

Please don't make me click more than I need to

Isn't there research somewhere that says you lose 30% of your audience each time you make them click? Or is that one of those random stats that people who are trying to sound like they know what they're talking about fling out there in the hopes no one questions them? Maybe it's proven, I don't know. At any rate, I honestly thought that the last advertiser that would make me click more times than I need to would be Trade Me. Yet:
Here's a close up for you:I click on Boyfriend and I get taken to:
Which makes me click again on 'Gifts for your husband or boyfriend' and then I get taken to this:
Why not take me to this page directly? You're not advertising on these pages, so all that you're doing is hiking impressions and annoying me. Doesn't make sense to me, maybe there is a perfectly valid reason for it though?

Using Online for Brand

Sometimes I see an ad online and wonder what the point of having a click through on that ad is. If you have nothing to offer once a user clicks through, what kind of experience are you leaving that user with? Potentially not a good one. However, I don’t think that this should discourage companies from advertising online, even if they don’t have anything to offer specifically online.

Where has this come from? See image below, Trade Me homepage today:

The Instant Kiwi showcase, does not have a click through. I say good on them. You can’t buy instant kiwi’s online – all you can do is find out what other kinds of tickets you can purchase, and any recent big winners. Why would you send anyone through to the site? There is no point.

This would be the joy of brand advertising, which I do believe can work just as hard online, as in other mediums. Sometimes, you just want some phenomenal reach for your brand, and what better way to get mass eyeballs on your brand than advertising on the homepage of Trade Me? An estimated 1.1M page impressions in one day, approx. 375k unique browsers (yes – I have my little black Trade Me ratecard now, thank you!) for less than a ratecard spend 30 second spot on Shortland St… Add in some of the other big publishers over the week, and you could have a pretty far reaching brand campaign, with my smaller production costs than television, and placement also at a fraction of the cost.

I know that one of the main selling points of online is the measurable nature of the medium. x number of people clicked, therefore it costs y to get x number of people to your site. Well, that is all well and good, but what if there is nothing for a user to do once they get there?

While Instant Kiwi can afford to place media on both television and online, I think it shows some serious recognition of what online can do for brand. Perhaps other companies, who may know their audience is online, but do not have an online (per se) offering, will start using this medium for brand campaigns. That’d be nice to see, and who knows what else might fall out of it.

New Trade Me

Right, well it was always going to happen and like the Stuff site, I was always going to have an opinion on it. New site is clean and the layout mostly works for me. I'm not so keen about about the 'Buying/Selling' watchlist menu under the search, just because I am not used to it, but that's fine, just a readjustment.

So, colour me not surprised that the top 468x60 (is that the size of the top banner?? Don't know, don't have a ratecard... oh - that's harsh, sorry) has not

been sold on the homepage. Sorry, still think that this format is SO redundant. I know that we used to specifically make tab & tower, but we didn't have a choice. We do now, show and skys, that do not need to be purchased together. Yes!

I note that throughout the rest of the site the majority of the top banner ads have been purchased in conjunction with the sky. It looks (quick check - don't hold me to it) that Westpac has purchased a Sky only, and an in house ad is running in the top banner position. I will be interested to see how this progresses, and whether, like the homepage, they will leave this placement empty if unsold.

Now, I am seriously hoping that agencies are not putting the sky/banner combo

through to their clients as an all in one package. I recall having to talk clients into making tab/tower formats specifically for Trade Me, because TM is TM and if you want to be there, you have to make those formats, but you don't have to anymore... if you don't want to make the redundant format, you don't have to. I hope this message is being passed on to clients.

As per any new site there are a few glitches. This one is a bit of a pity though:

Check out the chicken in the showcase... on the homepage. Now, happy to be corrected on this one, but pretty sure that XT don't have a chicken in their campaign - unless it's Richard Hammond in that chicken suit?? Showcase should look like this:I saw the chicken, thought "Huh?" clicked on the link, went through to XT, went "huh?" again. Like any good Internet geek I emptied my cache, refreshed a few times, got the right ad, and then the chicken turned up again, and it was at this point I screen grabbed (let's be fair, when I got the right ad the second time I was kicking myself for not screen grabbing the first screen!!)

Other nasty little glitches like the drop menus not returning properly are a little frustrating, but I have no doubt that these will be fixed relatively quickly.

Overall, I do like the site. I think it is clean and it is a nice evolution from the previous site. It is fresh but not a complete departure from what it's users know. For me, I am not a fan of the top banner as an advertising space, but in saying that the sky/banner combos that are on the site today do look good, I'm just not sure if the price tag is justified. So there you go. Like I said, was always going to have an opinion on this.

UPDATE: I get it now. Opened Trade Me in IE and the chicken was dancing (it wasn't dancing in Chrome, just static). Interestingly, when someone else opened up TM in IE there was a showcase sitting in the top banner. That was odd. Isn't happening for me, I would have included a screenshot of it. Ah, the joy of new sites!

Trade Me loves Mothers

Nice to see that at least one publisher loves their mum. Trade Me seems to be the only publisher (yeah - I didn't look very hard) who have done a bit of an 'ode to mothers day' with their logo.Or, at least I'm guessing that is why the kiwi is pink??

In other news, there is 4 hours left until our film has to be in for the 48hour furious film-making competition. Our editor and I finished partying at 5.30 this morning, so today hasn't been a huge amount of fun.
It is certainly easier to produce something when you know the subject from the get go, have weeks of planning, and a budget of a few hundred $k. I kinda miss being on Suit side... sometimes.
If we get it in on time and manage to do ok in the heats, keep an eye out for us. Team B Cool with "Cold Calling".


Updated: Google loves mum too. Of course Google loves mum. How could I have missed that. Damn 3 hours sleep!
Updated again: 48 Hours FAIL! Sucks. We finished editing at 5-5.30ish, but for some reason couldn't print to tape, so had to transfer movie to another laptop to burn to DVD. DVD wouldn't eject. Handed it in at 7.02pm. So tired. So unfair. At least we didn't kill each other.

The Trade Me ... Tour

So I was invited to the The Trade Me Revolution Tour which hit Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch last week. I would have blogged about this earlier, but have been too busy to put proper thought into it. Quick rundown: John from Trade Me, Bernard from Interest.co.nz, Trent from Optimal Useability, Mike from Ad Protocol and Geoff from taxrefunds.co.nz all talked. MG from Trade Me kind of chaired the whole thing.

As MG quite rightly pointed out, this wasn't revolutionary. Their angle was that we can't let the recession stop us from advertising... basically.

At any rate, I'm sorry, but I thought it was a little lacking. What it was lacking the most was an overarching theme. Everyone was very focused on what their field is/how they could sell themselves. I do understand why they were pushing themselves, but I thought it could have been more cohesive. To put all of this in context, I remember talking to MG about this months ago; his original concept was to try to talk to agencies about the reliability, measure-ability and cost efficiency of online advertising. Basically, he wanted to help agencies understand how easy it is to plan and book online, and how they didn't necessarily need to use the IB to do so.

There were definitely points which were interesting however. John talked us through where Trade Me had been (mostly design-wise) and where it will possibly go in 2010. I did find it interesting that on the day that video went live on the TM homepage John was talking about simplicity and respect for customers and the community they create within TM. It wasn't that long ago that you wouldn't find flash on TM, because apparently the consumers didn't like it. I know that people are probably more used to flash and accept it now, but I do wonder whether there has been compromise in the quest for the advertising dollar.

Bernard was up next, and while the information about how many people in NZ have mortgages etc. was interesting, I wasn't sure how it all fit into the equation. It wasn't particularly relevant to me.

Trent was very interesting, talking about how people use the internet, how they read it. I think the main points I got from him were:

• You don't have time to capture peoples attention when advertising online
• People are drawn to text over graphics
  
• Avoid using all caps
• Underlining reduces legibility
• Italics reduce reading speed

And much more, that was what I noted down. I did find a lot of Trent's messages very relevant and I will be downloading the full report... when I have a chance.

Mike's presentation was nothing really new to me, simply because he taught me heaps when I worked with him back in the days that I worked on Sorted. Online ads that work, all made sense. Would have been interesting to get some really meaty data on the ads which were shown.

Geoff's presentation was good in the way he was the only person to recognise traditional media and its role to play in the support of online advertising. It was a shame that someone had not taught him how to read analytics, or at least the difference between visits and unique visitors. Also, I would imagine that site traffic trending up towards the end of March (and the cut off date) would have been something they would have expected.

I guess I had hoped that the over-riding theme for the whole thing would have been more than 'online'. Yet again I hear the usual '20% of media use is online, yet only 8% of the budget...' I think I have covered this already. Possibly when the online industry start playing the same game the rest of us are in, they'll start getting more budget.

Perhaps MG had the right idea when he first started planning this, maybe it's about educating the people that plan and buy media? Surely finding some nice willing clients who can produce case studies about CPA and ROI isn't that hard. We (agencies) have the research tools that tell us where and how our target audiences are consuming their media. We're capable of selling our recommendations, based on this research, to our clients. But everyone is cautious of things they don't know, if they can't give their clients real world examples of how a medium can work, its possible they are going to revert back to a more traditional schedule. Maybe publishers do need to step back and ask themselves, 'why am I not getting my share? How can I change this?' I'm don't have the answer, but complaining that their slice of the pie isn't big enough, isn't going to help.

Still waiting for Stuff

We were told ages ago that Stuff was getting a makeover. That was exciting.

Then nothing happened.

Then more nothing happened.

Then I asked early next week when the new site was going to come. I was told it was going to be a matter of days.

Then nothing happened.

Then it was Valentines day and they put hearts in the masthead. That was pretty.

But we still have no new site.

I was getting a little excited when I saw that their top level menu kept dropping out:
That's been happening for a while now, I thought they were ignoring it because the new site was going to be up momentarily. Or not.

Awesome also that us agencies have gotten a heads up on what's happening and what the advertising possibilities are going to be. Choice. Makes planning very easy.

On Fairfax... are they selling Trade Me or not? Gossip gossip, rumours rumours.