Stephen Tompkins’ Ideas

Random Ideas, thoughts and more

The Great Creative Divide

Online design was once a land of rich creative concepts overflowing with ingenuity and thoughtful attention to design elements. Astute online surfers needed to look no further than nearest website to see great creative in action. Now you have to surf far and wide to find terrific creative because mostly what you find is utilitarian ads built by machines trying to predict patterns based off a cookie.

This machine-driven creative that permeates every corner of the web is a major contributor and in direct relation to the downward pressure on click-through rates. Here are a couple of reasons why:

  • As the lines between Search and Display increasingly blur it comes at the cost of great creative. Why do I say this? Search ads are utilitarian in look. A certain number of lines, characters and colors are the ad. There is not much room to deviate. But most people forget that display ads sit in the beginning of the sales cycle. The exploratory phase where folks are weighing options and making decisions about what they desire so you see why creative execution becomes an essential component. Search sits at the other spectrum its much less used for decision driving than executing on a well researched idea. What does this mean? It means that creative concepts are much less removed than they should be for display ads because the look is uniform. Making creative decisions based on data can only get you so far.
  • In the race to become more relevant we have actually become less relevant. I know that sounds confusing but think about it for a second. We respond to things that are emotional and stir up a certain emotion inside of us. (Funny ads make us laugh) Machine driven creative is just that, driven by a machine and devoid of emotion. Have you ever felt any compassion for your alarm clock when its batteries die? No, because its devoid of feeling just like these types of ads.
  • The main purpose of pure creative is to catch the eye. Much of this dynamic stuff is made to be versatile and fit many formats and languages. Often this tends to be at the expense of truly great eye-catching creative. (You can't fit a square peg in a round hole unless you make the hole big enough to catch all) This catch-all creative is often overlooked as too utilitarian and not enough of a differentiator.

Of course, I realize that decisions based on data are the wave of the future and I believe in them. I just think that a uniform application of data as driving force to various mediums will only lead to more confusion. A confusion that could eventually stunt the growth of online ads as marketers scramble to undue the past.

Changing Emails

Lately, I have put quite a bit of thought into changing my email. I have used my old email for quite sometime now and it performs sufficiently. I have my filters and folders set just like I want them to properly sort my email. But the actual email name reminds me of a different time and place. You see its tied to my old blog and houses a brand I associated with that blog and thus Stephen 1.0. As myopic as this seems, I really have felt that I would like to change to a more "grown up" email that is representative of my new blog and self. And with all maturation processes there are significant growing pains along the way.

First and foremost is getting everyone of my subscriptions/friends/logins linked to my new email. Subscriptions and logins are relatively easy as I can migrate them as they are received. Then they are set for life or until I change them again.

Friends are a different story. They will use the old email and complain about changing their address books. I must admit its quite the dilemma and I continue to waver back and forth about what I should do. I did realize that with GMail that I can set my filters to forward all the emails from my old email to my new account and therefore not miss any emails sent in error from an old friend or company. This seems to be a pretty decent solution but I was curious if anyone else had any other ideas on migrating accounts. 

I would love to hear anyone else's thoughts on this particularly messy situation.  

Twitter Ads

Everyone seems to be talking about Twitter's new ad model this week. The newly unveiled promoted tweets in search results ad model was shown by Twitter's CFO this week and clearly is a big step forward for the company. While, I have looked at it and I have not formulated a set in stone opinion on whether it will work or not but I do think it is only a small step towards fully monetizing the website.

Why do I say this?

First, the ads are only going to be displayed on a tiny fraction of the site, being seen by users who search via the web interface only. Twitter has not disclosed numbers on how many folks search but I have to figure its a tiny fraction and when you ad that small number by the number of users who generally click on ads you get an even smaller number. Do you see where I am headed with this? 

Second, Google was successful by matching desire with satisfaction. Meaning that people desired to find stuff on the web and Google provided satisfactory results to those queries. 

Folks don't go on Twitter to search. Their main intent is for quick snippets of information without searching or spending alot of time finding it. I would venture to say that the average Twitter user finds his connections through friends and via other means than searching on the UI. 

Let's hope these ads are relevant when landing in the results page and its not at the expense of the experience that these ads take precedence over other more relevant results. In any event, its nice to see Twitter has started to monetize the site and we can only hope that it will not interrupt the experience too much.

3 Common Implementation Errors

Digital marketing has ushered in a new wave of analytical marketing where everything can be measured right down to the click. But unfortunately its is not without its faults and the issues come in all different shapes and sizes. Everything from complex coding to simple human error is common place. And in my role at Microsoft Advertising, I see a wide variety of these issues ranging from the mundane to the utterly complex.

One of the most common errors I see that leads to more client headaches than any is publisher implementation. These varied errors cause more wasted time than any other type of error when investigating differences between publisher and client. The good news is they almost always can be prevented by a little thought and preparation before hand.

Here are a few simple and easy rules to make sure your tag is implemented correctly.

  1. First make sure the tag is placed on the page. Its quite common for publisher to implement the tags on the wrong page or just not at all. So look to see if the ad is running and on the right page. It seems like a no-brainer but you would be surprised how often this is the case.
  2. Second, make sure the entire tag is implemented from beginning to end on the page and not broken. The method for QA-ing in this manner depends on the type of tag but generally you want to spot the opening tag which will look something like this: < iframe > or <script type=”text/javascript”>. Then you will want to follow the tag until you see the closing command. It will look similar to this: </iframe > or </script>
  3. Finally,  make sure cache busters are implemented. Many times its the case that browsers are caching an older version of the tag and not counting all the impressions. To QA this simply look for the cache buster in the string. Different systems have different versions of cache buster so make sure the tag you look at has the appropriate buster on it.

This is certainly not all the possible implementation issues I have come across in my time. However, I would say it accounts for the bulk of them. Not to mention, its always a terrific idea to QA these first and foremost as you can almost always save yourself some time on the back-end when your reporting shows up with gaps. Hopefully this provides a good starting point for publishers and advertisers alike and happy implementing!

 

 

*** This is a repost from stemato.com my original blog. 

 

 

Rebirth

For the past 3 years, I have been blogging at stemato.com and I have increasingly begun to feel like blogging in the old fashioned format was antiquated and too long form. Apparently, I was not alone because as I did some research and found that Steve Rubel came to this conclusion some time ago and blogged about it here.

This lead me to set up this new blog at posterous which gives me flexibility and the chance to start fresh. It will be my main source of thoughts moving forward and will probably be much less digital marketing focused than stemato.com. This time around I am going to try and keep very short and sweet. Probably falling somewhere between a long form tweet and a short form blog with videos and pictures added into it.

But before I started I wanted to give a little background on me and make a few promises to you the reader.

First a short paragraph about me or the newbies.

I trained as a graphic designer but quickly changed after spending 3 years working in advertising. For the last couple of years I have been at Microsoft working on the Atlas product. I love online technologies and strategy. I also enjoy taking classes at night in whatever I can find at that moment and drawing. Anything else you might want to know please feel free to ask.

Now my promises to you on this blog.

  1. I will always strive to be as clear and honest as possible.
  2. I will keep this blog as concise as possible (2 or 3 paragraphs maximum).
  3. Feedback is always welcome and I hope to hear from everyone.
  4. I will attempt to stay on topic (more about this later).

That is it for now and I hope you enjoy reading!

Stephen