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For a long time now, the utopia for online dis­play adver­tis­ing has been to be as tar­geted and as cost-effective as search adver­tis­ing in order to claw back adver­tis­ing dol­lars. The jour­ney has been slow, ad net­works ini­tially helped scale online dis­play adver­tis­ing and pro­vided lay­ers of tar­get­ing tech­nolo­gies to make the cam­paigns more effec­tive. How­ever, pric­ing was based on arti­fi­cial flat fees and seg­ments that had been pre-set within the lim­its of indi­vid­ual ad net­works.

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It’s amaz­ing how often I hear some­thing to the effect of “No one reads copy these days.” Now, of course, being a pro­fes­sional B2B copy­writer by trade, you might expect me to have a hang up about copy. I also encounter the related belief that we are all writ­ers. I write. You write. It’s stuff we all learnt at school. How hard can it be?

Today, it’s all about the pictures

We are a more visual cul­ture than ever before. Each of us spends seri­ous qual­ity time in front of one screen or another every sin­gle day. Over the years, adver­tis­ing has become more visual and less wordy. Online video is still grow­ing expo­nen­tially. And mil­lions of peo­ple restrict their thoughts to bursts of 140 char­ac­ters or less.

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Per­sonas – the fic­tional char­ac­ters cre­ated to help bring tar­get cus­tomers to life – are now pretty much ubiq­ui­tous in mar­ket­ing depart­ments and their agen­cies. They are used to more accu­rately depict var­i­ous cus­tomer seg­ments, giv­ing a firmer foun­da­tion on which to address customers.

You can see why. Where at one time our tar­get might be described as:

• IT direc­tor in an enterprise-sized business
• Located in EMEA with mul­ti­ple offices
• Cur­rently using tra­di­tional tele­phony across all sites
• Their cur­rent con­tract is due to expire in the next 12 months
• Etc

Now we have:

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“The cus­tomer is in charge. If you think you own your brand, you’re wrong – the cus­tomer does. In fact, for­get brand­ing. No one buys that stuff anymore.”

Sound famil­iar?

Cer­tainly, if you read many of today’s mar­ket­ing blogs, you’ll be left with the impres­sion that these days there’s vir­tu­ally noth­ing you can do to cre­ate, improve or sus­tain a com­pelling brand. The growth of social media and other peer-to-peer com­mu­ni­ca­tions has meant that cus­tomers don’t need to lis­ten to com­pa­nies to get their infor­ma­tion any more. They are more than happy to form their own opin­ions thank you very much. As the Clue­train Man­i­festo says:

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We held another suc­cess­ful Hud­dle over at the Ban­ner offices yes­ter­day. The sub­ject was all things mobile. And, over the course of the next few blog posts, I’ll be tak­ing you through some of the insights from the var­i­ous speak­ers who gen­er­ously gave their time to make the after­noon such a suc­cess:

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• Simon Sil­vester – EVP Head of Plan­ning, Y&R EMEA
• Christina Carstensen – Direc­tor of Mobile Strat­egy, IDG
• Matt Findel-Hawkins – Sales Direc­tor, Nikkei BP Europe
• Mark Challi­nor – Direc­tor of Mobile, Tele­graph Media Group

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There is a head­long stam­pede at moment for pub­lish­ers to do an app. All we hear is ‘must do an app’, ‘can we show you our app?’ Even my daugh­ter says she wants an app!

But whilst this appears to be a symp­tom of an all-consuming desire to go ‘dig­i­tal’, in most sec­tors print still has a major part to play.

There is no way that even a rich-media app can replace the “Tatler” expe­ri­ence, or really be read in the bath (or on the toi­let) with any form of dig­nity.

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It’s speak­ing sea­son at the Ban­ner search team, and over the next cou­ple of months we’ll be speak­ing at con­fer­ences in Lon­don, Stock­holm and Oslo.

First out is SEM Kon­fer­ansen in Oslo (14–16 Sep­tem­ber). Here we’ll run a cou­ple of ses­sions with a main one-hour event ded­i­cated to share our insights on B2B search marketing.

Fol­low­ing this we’ll con­tinue our Nordic jour­ney and ven­ture across the bor­der to Stock­holm and the world-renowned SMX (28–29 Sep­tem­ber). With no-less than three speak­ing ses­sions penned in it’ll be a busy cou­ple of days.  We’ll be dig­ging into the Google qual­ity score and how to inte­grate search and dis­play adver­tis­ing.

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Google has announced that it is chang­ing its ad poli­cies to allow adver­tis­ers to use third party trade­marks in their ad copies, even with­out approval from the trade­mark owner. The change is aimed at allow­ing reseller and com­po­nent seller etc, to clearly com­mu­ni­cate the brands they sell or support.

The pol­icy is already in place in the US, and will soon extend to the UK, Ire­land and Canada.

Fur­ther­more, as a con­se­quence of Google’s recent win over Louis Vuit­ton in the Euro­pean Court of Jus­tice and also French High Court that allowed com­pet­i­tive trade­mark key­word bid­ding, this will now be opened up across the EU. This is already the case in most other mar­kets such as the UK.

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Even if search has matured incred­i­bly over the last few years, both from a tech­ni­cal point of view and as a chan­nel that gains board room level atten­tion, a lot of the basic issues remain the same. I’m not talk­ing about cross-channel click attri­bu­tion and life­time value, but cam­paign coor­di­na­tion and achiev­ing the appro­pri­ate buy-in at all lev­els of the organisation.

Ear­lier this year Ban­ner organ­ised a Search Hud­dle. This was an inti­mate ses­sion for B2B mar­keters with speak­ers from Autodesk, Avaya, and Microsoft.

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With search engines charg­ing for clicks and not impres­sions and typ­i­cally being con­sid­ered a direct response chan­nel, you may be for­given to think that there’s lit­tle need to opti­mise for click-through rate (CTR). How­ever, since CTR is the major­ity fac­tor to deter­mine the so-called qual­ity score, which impacts the cost-per-click (CPC), this will affect the suc­cess of the cam­paign; regard­less of if objec­tives are sales, leads or traffic.

Why are search engines doing this? The adverts CTR is an impor­tant sig­nal of “qual­ity” for search engines. The logic is that if the advert matches the users query, they will click it. There­fore the higher the CTR, the more rel­e­vant the advert is assumed to be. And of course, since the search engines charge adver­tis­ers per click, their rev­enue increases.

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