I’ve frequently taken the keynote stage or space in this blog to claim that banner ads are not the savior of digital marketing and marketing in general. I believe that too many traditional marketers have embraced banners as the easy way to “go digital” and fail to understand how this new media can allow for much deeper brand connections. That said, sometimes business goals require us to drive Awareness, and banner advertising can be a solution if it is done well. And my team at Bridge Worldwide is always pushing the creative/technical boundaries to deliver banners with meaning—which brings me to today’s post on some entertaining banners we recently launched for the Healthy Choice brand at ConAgra Foods.

Providing real entertainment is often a great way to make the banner ad meaningful to people who encounter such advertising on any given website visit. One of our best examples was the banner we did for Pringles last summer that resulted in 300,000 people choosing to visit our staging server and play with the banner over the course of a weekend. Oh, yeah, and we won a Cannes Gold Cyber Lion for this ad, too.

In the case of Healthy Choice, our advertising in recent years has revolved around convincing consumers to re-evaluate a brand that had come to be mainly focused on 50-year-old and older people who were told by their doctors to eat better. The brand has made significant improvements on the quality and appeal of its food, and our marketing has used humor and entertainment to get a 30-something consumer to notice what’s new with the brand. This is what drove our Working Lunch online improv show last year, and the recent campaign with Julia Louis-Dreyfus. Both campaigns successfully launched new products for the brand.

We were recently brought in to work on a new campaign, alongside Nitro/Sapient, which handles the brand’s television and print creative. The agency developed a print-focused campaign in which characters from a fake print ad on one page of a magazine look longingly at a Healthy Choice ad on the opposite page. It is a clever campaign, and our team was eager to figure out how to make it work online. In fact, we were excited that the digital space would allow us to bring it to life in a very fun way.

Go ahead and click this link to see what our team came up with. It’s a live URL that we’ll keep up, so feel free to forward it to your friends, too.

Our Healthy Choice team recently shared some of its keys to success in developing this banner at an all-company meeting—lessons that others might benefit from as well. First, they first shared the concept with our media planning and buying partner agency months in advance so that we could secure this type of rich media placement. Second, they did prototype filming of the ad to figure out how to actually make it work. Stand-ins from our office helped our production team understand what would need to happen in the actual shoot, thus saving us and the client time and money. Finally, the team worked with Eyeblaster to ensure that we could get the two ads to appear on the exact right timing. This is actually a type of sync that the folks at Eyeblaster said no one had tried before.

Unfortunately I cannot share results of the program because it just started, however I hope you agree that it brings some levity and fun to a medium that has brought mainly annoyance and irrelevance since the first banner was displayed 15 years ago. If you must make a banner—make it meaningful (please!).

One of the promises of digital marketing that has kept our industry excited and optimistic for the past 10-plus years has been the opportunity to learn about individual consumers and serve them relevant advertisements. The hypothesis is that more relevant interruptions will be more engaging, incite positive action, and reduce waste. Aside from behavioral targeting, which uses cookies to help websites personalize banner ads for individual site visitors, social-media services such as Facebook have promised to open up further opportunities by reading into what people are posting about themselves. Even cable companies are experimenting with personally addressable TV commercials.

But despite all of the hope and hype, targeted ads have not become the revolution that we digital marketers have longed for. Not only are people ignoring highly targeted ads just as much as they do all other banners, but new research suggests that many consumers are outright rejecting the idea of personalized marketing.

I’m a few weeks late in catching the results of a new survey by professors at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California, Berkeley in which represents one of the first pieces of research not done by digital marketers (who have an understandable bias). In their telephone survey of 1,000 adults nationwide, they asked: Do you want websites you visit to show you ads, discounts, or news tailored to your interests? Before getting to the results, let me first say that this is an excellent way to word the question. It does not introduce the idea of cookies or other privacy third-rails. If anything, this question format seems to emphasize the positive aspects of advertising and content targeting.

Even as a hardened digital marketer I was surprised at the results: 67% of Americans do not want advertisements that are tailored to their interests. A further 51% reject personalized discounts and 58% don’t even want tailored news. Again, this is without seeding survey respondents with doubt and questions about how their personal information is captured and turned into tailored ads. This is a very, very bad sign for the digital advertising industry and website content creators.

What’s worse, when the researchers started describing how their information was tracked, even more people rejected the idea of personalization. From The New York Times:

“The respondents’ aversion to tailored ads increased once they learned about targeting methods. In addition to the original 66 percent that said tailored ads were ‘not O.K.,’ an additional 7 percent said such ads were not O.K. when they were tracked on the site. An additional 18 percent said it was not O.K. when they were tracked via other Web sites, and an additional 20 percent said it was not O.K. when they were tracked offline.”

Some believe that this data has little impact on the industry; sure, people will always say that they hate advertising, they say. Others add that people will protest ads until they learn that it’s the only way they will get free content. The problem is that the government is getting very close to stepping in and regulating targeted advertising. David Vladeck, the new head of the Bureau of Consumer Protection at the Federal Trade Commission, has promised to look closely at such online ad targeting, and has already publicly called some tactics “Orwellian.”

Here’s the problem for marketers: No one is going to stand up and tell the FTC to back off us. We advertisers as an industry have punished consumers for years with meaningless messages pressed against their eyeballs by the thousands each day. Because we can, we have hit them with ads everywhere from their email inboxes to elevators and gas pumps. Our level of society respect lies with used-car salesmen. Who is going to protest in favor of more advertising, even when we threaten that we’ll take away our free content?

With data like this study, Vladeck and the FTC essentially have a mandate to act against personalized targeting. It gives them impartial proof that the people don’t value personalized offers, and their job is to, well, do what the people want. Lawmakers and the FTC can also recall how the National Do Not Call Registry unanimously sailed through Congress and home phone numbers have been registered by more than 70% of Americans. The Direct Marketing PACs could do nothing to stop that legislation and there is little hope that we can stop this, either.

Look, I’m an executive at a digital marketing agency and I will feel the pain like anyone else in this business if this legislation goes through. But I also realize that you can’t force people to view or accept your advertising. This is why I am so passionate about the concept of Marketing with Meaning. I fundamentally believe that the only thing we can do to survive in this business is to create marketing that people choose to engage with and advertising that adds value to people’s lives.

So, people don’t like and genuinely fear personalized advertising. I take that as a sign that we’ve got move on to something that they do value. That is why I believe in creating content that people choose to view, read, or listen to. That is why I believe the future of digital, and marketing overall, lies much more in creating services and positive social movements. So while my company and I still make a lot of banner ads, we are also driving ourselves and our clients to create more meaningful marketing.

Isn’t it time we as an industry stop trying to fight against public opinion and do everything we can to make the public embrace our brands?

Last Friday, I wrote a post about a banner ad from AccuQuote, a service that can be used to compare insurance offerings. I complained that the banner was offensive because it showed a dead body, covered with a sheet and with a toe tag attached, under the headline “Everybody Dies.” The purpose of this post is to highlight the response I got from Sean Cheyney, Vice President of Marketing and Business Development for AccuQuote, which shows that this company is listening to the feedback and getting on a more meaningful track.

On Tuesday, Sean made the following comment on my post, which bears highlighting here:

Bob,

Thanks for sharing your views about this ad. You are correct in your assessment that we feel our service, and more importantly life insurance in general, is extremely important. It’s our passion as an organization.

The fact that we’re dealing with a product that involves death makes marketing a sticky situation. You can’t really sidestep the nature of the product without producing lousy non-impactful ads. That said, sometimes the always moving line is crossed. Sometimes we have to go out on a limb and test when we’re in this gray area. It turns out that the positive response rate on this ad was very high. Regardless, we’ve taken your criticism as well as a few others constructively and pulled the ad.”

I really respect Sean’s comment and his company’s decision. The reality is that in these tough economic times, it is even harder to make a call like this with a banner ad that is working well. What if a job is lost or a bonus is cut because of this decision to take a higher road? Anyone who has worked at a small business knows that little things like this can count for a lot.

But great business leadership and long-term success depends on doing the right thing. So kudos to Sean and his team. I’m excited that I will have the chance to spend more time with him personally at the iMedia Brand Summit in September, and hope to offer him some meaningful marketing ideas for his next campaign.

Here’s some Friday “fun” for you…

My lovely wife opened her Yahoo! Mail account this week to be surprised with the banner ad above for AccuQuote. A corpse with a toe tag? Really, AccuQuote? When I first saw it I thought it was some kind of joke from The Onion, but it’s real. AccuQuote is a company that provides multiple insurance pricing quotes from its website. It might provide a good service, but this ad does a disservice to the company and to the marketing profession.

And it’s not the first or only banner that attempts to scare the hell out of people. I found a post from 2007 by copyranter that shares the banner below:

I’ve met a few of the people from AccuQuote at digital marketing conferences and I found them to be good folks. I believe that they feel their service is important and beneficial to many consumers. They might rationalize this by saying that some percentage of clickers are happy to be reminded of this issue. However the other 99.99% of us who are interrupted while checking our email are unwillingly disgusted. It also sets a new low for other banner advertisers; after the “toe-tag corpse” visual no longer gets attention, what do you show next? A good service and desire to help people prepare for life’s realities is no excuse to delve into this kind of tasteless tactic, even if the click rate is .02% instead of .01%.

Further, I also hold Yahoo! to blame for allowing this kind of nonsense on its ad network. These and many other questionable ads by Yahoo! deteriorate any equity and trust that it has earned with consumers. People form their closest bonds with content providers that exhibit some restraint on the ads they run, such as NBC (which demands claim support on commercials submitted) and The New York Times. The people who run these brands realize that the advertising inside is also a reflection on them. Here, Yahoo! looks like just another Web property desperate for ad dollars. And Gmail is just a click away.

Using (or, in Yahoo’s case, benefitting from) cheap tricks to capture an audience’s eyeballs is one of the many reasons that our advertising profession is looked down upon. I hope that shining some light on the worst offenders—and offering a positive solution in the concept of Marketing with Meaning—will help turn that around over time.

As most marketing readers likely know, last week was the annual Cannes Advertising Festival in France—unarguably the world’s most prominent advertising industry get-together, where the brightest creative minds in our business gather to compare the best work over the past 12 months. Last year I got to attend for the first time (with blog posts here if you’re interested), but this year I was on vacation in Italy with my family instead of Cannes.

I missed one of the biggest moments of the history of my company, Bridge Worldwide, when our team won a Gold Cyber Lions award for the Pringles banner ad above. While “only” a banner, this remarkable little ad unit offers a great case study in meaningful marketing for both B2C and B2B.

The Consumer Story: Once You Click, You Can’t Stop

Before reading any further, go ahead and click on the banner above. A new window will open to our staging server where you can see our banner in context, just like the judges at Cannes did. Spend as much or as little time interacting with it and return here to keep reading…

…Welcome back. If you’re anything like the Cannes award judges or the thousands of other people who have viewed this ad online in the past few days, you enjoyed, too. Our team created a banner ad that makes people laugh for a few minutes, and then share it with their friends online. This happens to be a perfect fit with what the Pringles brand itself is all about: a few minutes of fun, and sharing with friends.

What I love about this ad is that it takes banner space that most people ignore or find annoying, and turns it into a fun, engaging moment of play with the brand. That five minutes of fun is rewarding for the viewer who chooses to engage with it, falling under a category of meaningful marketing that we call “Entertaining Connections.”

Aside from great data on clicks and time spent with the ad, we measure its success in the word of mouth that it is drawing. Since winning the award and posting the ad on our staging server we are seeing a steady, growing number of people discovering the ad and sharing it with their social networks. Twitter in particular is becoming the barometer of the buzz, and I’m seeing about one person per minute Twittering about the ad with 100% positive comments. Here’s a sample of some of my favorite recent comments from search.twitter.com:

• @steveklabnik: Best. Ad. Ever.  Pringles are amazing.
• @MegLG: A banner ad that is actually engaging…Can hands: Pringles. I probably just made someone a million $ for clicking so much.
• @lisahattery: Bored? Go here…Click on the banner ad. Keep clicking. It’s not spam or porn, I swear. I want Pringles.
• @floatnsink: This is probably the best & only advertisement that I want to click.
• @stuartwitts: Award winning banner ad from Pringles. Great work. Can’t remember last time a banner ad made me laugh.
• @adamcoomes: Best banner ad I’ve ever seen. This is hilarious! Props to Pringles.
• @hunterupton: please please PLEASE! check out this banner ad. Hilarious Pringles! it’s the best i’ve ever seen!

The Cannes judges agreed completely. In a video that was shown during the Cyber Lions event Wednesday night, they said they each spent 5 minutes on the banner, laughing out loud at their desks. Our Pringles banner was one of only 19 Gold Lions that were awarded in the entire digital category, and only six of these went to U.S.-based agencies. But what are awards for, anyway…?

It’s Starting to Go Viral

Over the weekend we started to notice comments and traffic to our staging server spike. We worked to post links on Fark, Digg, Reddit, BuzzFeed, and other places. I checked in with our Tech team Saturday afternoon and learned that more than 100,000 people had visited the page in the past day! If this was a number of views on YouTube, we would consider it a viral video success with that number alone. It will be fun to watch the traffic this week and see the other places it gets picked up.

Building the Bridge Worldwide Brand

Advertising awards are a big deal in our industry. Thousands of entries are made every year to awards shows like Cannes, with each agency hoping to get credit for the work they have done. The purpose of awards is mainly for agency marketing, a business-to-business approach. Awards allow agencies to brag about the quality of their creative work in new business pitches. But are they meaningful marketing in a B2B environment?

Many, many advertising industry pundits cry that we are too obsessed with awards. But I actually do believe that they can be meaningful to the companies that are searching for an agency partner. Here’s the rationale: First, the creative work is really the number-one thing that brands need in their advertising agencies. It’s the job they cannot do themselves. Second, it’s very, very difficult to judge the quality of an agency’s creative product through the pitching process. Case studies show work for other clients, but it is difficult to judge it because beauty is in the mind of the brief holder—i.e., clients can’t judge whether work for a different business than their own was successful or not. As a result, clients look for other ways to get comfortable with the creative potential of prospective partners.

Here’s where awards can come in—they give clients an impartial measure of the quality of creative work. Agencies that have won awards have “proof” that the work was good, as measured by very experienced judges, and as measured against many other agencies that are putting their best work up against it. While creative quality is only one piece of what clients need to see in an agency, and awards are only one of several ways to judge this, winning a big award such as a Cannes Lion shows that our agency can do some of the best work in the world.

A Cannes Lions award can also be very meaningful to an agency’s current clients. Our Pringles brand team and the senior management at P&G were ecstatic about this recognition. Within minutes of the announcement we were cheered by email from clients at all levels. A handful of top leaders got to see the show in person and they enjoyed a toast together in Cannes, immediately talking excitedly about what else we could do in this space. For P&G as a whole, it was the company’s first-ever Gold Lion in the digital category. This award is another step in the world’s largest marketer’s shift to winning in the still-developing digital space.

This win renews current clients’ confidence in us as an agency partner, shows them that we can help them compete with the best in the world, and challenges them to buy “bigger” work that we bring to them.

Impact on Our Company Culture

As an agency we only first visited the show in person last year. Our three-person delegation of Jay Woffington (President), Peter Schwartz (Chief Creative Officer), and me talked often during that week about the work we saw and wondered what it would take for us to bring home a Gold Lion. We decided that we wanted one and that our company was up to the challenge. We thought it would be a three- to five-year journey, and as Jay said, “I knew we had the ability, the talented people, and the desire… but an award such as this is not easy.”

By setting this goal and sharing our experiences with the company upon our return last year, it got our teams fired up and determined. I believe our work across the board was better in the past 12 months, and we felt confident enough to submit four pieces for Cannes. We were excited just to be short-listed for one, and the Pringles Gold win blew everyone away.

What I love is that this is truly “the agency’s award.” Our Creative Director on Pringles, Jason Bender, accepted the award on behalf of many who made it a success. As people were congratulating him late into Wednesday night and early Thursday morning, he continually deferred credit to the team behind it. And to paraphrase Bender, we all woke up Thursday morning as employees of a Cannes Gold-winning agency. I couldn’t be more proud of the team and of the agency I work for.

Conclusion

I hope this story illustrates how meaningful marketing can be a multilayered win for your brand or agency. Marketing with meaning breaks through the clutter to deliver quality work and business-building results, it gets your clients and new business prospects excited, and it can help make your company a great place to work.

As for Cannes, the statue wasn’t even back in the U.S. before Peter came to me talking about how we have a chance to win the “agency of the year” Cyber Lion next year—and I think our other creative teams are anxious to get in the spotlight next year. It will be fun to see the impact of this award on our agency in the year to come, and I’m so excited to be a part of it.

A few weeks ago I shared in a post here that I was working with a small group at Bridge Worldwide to develop a business model for Twitter. Quite a challenge, of course, but we came up with a very compelling idea that fits with our belief in meaningful marketing. At worst, it is giving us a nice strategy-plus-technology learning exercise. Since we started this R&D project a few weeks ago, I’ve been paying more attention to other developers’ attempts to wring cash out of the mighty growth of Twitter. Over the weekend I discovered a service called “Featured Users” and wanted to share my experience here. Overall, it looks compelling at first glance, but my results suggest this is not a big idea for marketers or investors.

Featured Users is an advertising network for Twitter application developers. The home pages of services such as Friend or Follow and Twibes.com agree to place a Featured Users ad unit prominently in their pages. The general idea and hope is that users of these free and valuable services feel compelled to repay them by visiting their sponsors. I decided to test the service because of the lost cost of trial ($10) and the chance to learn something for our work and this blog.

Setting up an account and program takes just minutes. For $10 on PayPal, I was able to buy 1,000 impressions. In the screenshot above you can see what that unit looks like. It is automatically generated by your current Twitter account, and thus includes your regular icon, Twitter address, account description, and the three most recent tweets. The results-tracking interface is basic but effective, showing the number of impressions, which sites they appeared on, and information on clicks (who clicked, when, and from which site).

My going-in assumption was that I would get something like a 2% click rate, or 20 clicks. This is far higher than the industry average for banners, which is about .1% and falling, and the rate on Facebook ads, which I have found to be as low as .02%. My rationale for believing in better results was that: (1) the ad placement is front and center; (2) Twitter users tend to be very interested in finding new people to follow (and getting followers in return); (3) this type of ad unit is novel, which means people haven’t learned to fully tune it out of their visual fields yet; and (4) I felt that there would be some “karma power” as people felt compelled to pay attention to sponsors for this free service. I believed that my Twitter account description, above, was fairly interesting. While my guess was higher than most ad units, I also went in believing that the results could be a lot worse. As a marketing investment, $10 for 20 new followers, or $.50 each, “felt” like a pretty good result.

The Results

My 1,000 ad impressions were exhausted within about 24 hours. This is the first lesson: It takes a while to burn through a very modest media buy. This suggests that the traffic on these affiliate app sites is fairly low. According to Featured Users, I received 6 total clicks on my ad. That’s a click rate of .60%, which falls below the service’s total average of .87%. That means the cost to me is $1.67 per click. That’s far less than my gut opinion.

Now, what I don’t know for sure is how many of these clicks resulted in followers. But if I look at my email account for messages about new followers, and compare them to the time on the clock that people clicked on my ad, then it looks as though I recorded zero new followers among my 6 clicks. Again, I might be wrong, but the evidence I have does not look good.

There are many reasons why results are so poor. First and foremost is the fact that people are just not interested in clicking ads—period. They are on the sites for a very direct purpose, and cruising off to a sponsor’s page is not on the agenda. Second, the ad units are completely untargeted. My marketing-related Twitter ad goes out to every single user, and I am guessing that click results would be better if I could, say, choose to show it only to people who have “marketing” or “social media” in their profiles. This would actually be simple for Featured Users to do, but it would mean far fewer opportunities to show my ad. This, in a nutshell, is the main reason we don’t see much hyper-targeting on the Web.

Now, there are probably a few things I could have done to improve my results slightly, of course. Featured Users suggested a few things such as ”include the words ‘if you follow me, I’ll follow you’” and “original and odd bios tend to fare better.” Yes, yes—this might help a little bit, but these “tips” are fairly gimmicky, and a slight improvement in the click rate would not have helped my total results much.

My Take

Featured Users is difficult to justify as a marketing investment. I love the fact that I can see clearly the cost of each new click at $1.67, but I likely gained zero new followers for my money. And even if I picked up a few followers, it is difficult to put a dollar value on the type of person Featured Users sent my way. We all still have a difficult time estimating the benefit of a subscriber. For me, the goal is to attract people who may be interested in buying the services of my company (Fortune 500 marketing employees), or those who buy my book when it comes out in October. It is certainly possible that new followers will somehow drive revenue, but it’s not clear enough to keep investing confidently.

The best way to attract Twitter followers is to create great content and work with your social network to spread the word, and this is a microcosmic example of what’s going on in the marketing world today. I attract dozens of followers on Twitter, for free, when I share a thought-provoking comment that my existing followers choose to “re-tweet” to their own networks. I received 18 new followers yesterday alone because people discovered my blog (more content) or found me through other search and recommendation services. People don’t see, want, or trust traditional “telling and selling” ads, but they will heap attention on those that provide valuable content—in other words, Marketing with Meaning.

Finally, I believe Featured Users is not a big idea as a business model for Twitter, either. On paper it’s a great way to bring a service to marketers and a business model to many app developers. Like Google AdWords or Amazon affiliate programs, it attracts some money for sites that have zero today, but the traffic isn’t high enough and results are not strong enough to attract a critical mass of opportunity.

So we’ll keep our Skunk Works R&D project on a meaningful business model for Twitter going—and I’ll keep creating content here and on Twitter to earn your attention and word of mouth.

A couple of weeks ago on my other blog, The Challenge Dividend, I wrote about my experience testing Facebook ads for a 24-hour Guitar Hero/Rock Band fund-raiser that we ran at our office. The short story is that, I got only a .02% click-through rate on the ad despite targeting the 40,000 people who say they are fans of Guitar Hero. These results were no different from another test leg against the completely un-targeted 24 million Facebook users. The conclusion: People are not looking at ads despite great targeting.

This post attracted a ton of attention. It got picked up by Wired editor and The Long Tail author Chris Anderson, and was featured in the weekly email by user experience guru Jakob Nielsen. I’m still getting about 40 people a day reading this post and a ton of comments, must of which overwhelmingly agree that Facebook ads are not the solution to marketers’ needs, despite its 24 million pairs of eyeballs.

Well, now I have to give Facebook a little credit for a baby step toward meaningful marketing. I learned last week that the company is testing a new feature that allows its users to provide ratings on the advertising that they see. As described by Rob Webb and seen in the photo above, some users see a pair of up/down thumbs below display ads. By clicking one, a box pops up asking users to describe why they liked or disliked the ad. Webb makes some interesting points:

“The fact that Facebook is implementing these kinds of features before they launch an Ads API shows that they are approaching mass advertising very carefully. They know that they need users to make ads have value, and the better the ads are, the more valuable their ad space will be. Also, it’s quite possible that having some interaction with ads beyond just clicking them will incentivize users to click more ads.”

Clearly Facebook has learned that building an advertising-based business model around its vast legion of users is not going to be easy. I like the direction of its ad-rating test, as its gives users some control. And it might lead to better, more relevant advertising. I could see all manner of advertisers doing something similar. TiVo already has a thumbs up/down button – why not send this data along to advertisers as feedback worth paying for?

That said, at the end of the day I don’t believe this will do much to improve the results for Facebook or its advertisers. As I learned in my Facebook ad test, people have simply learned to tune out the visual clutter of these interruptive ads. Relevancy is not defined solely by demographics and interests; instead, it is defined by what is relevant to the consumer in the moment. In visiting Facebook, the relevancy is around checking messages, seeing what friends are up to, and maybe playing a game. Viewing and rating ads is simply not on the agenda.

Facebook continues to be an amazing case study on the future of marketing… and meaning.