Online Ad Revenue Continues to Rise. Internet advertising revenue continues to rise, according to a report released Wednesday by the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers. Advertising revenue for the full year reached a record high of $26 billion, a 15 percent increase over 2009. Revenue for the fourth quarter increased 16 percent to $7.45 billion from the same period last year and was the fifth consecutive quarter exhibiting growth. “We are probably out of the woods when it comes to the impact of the great recession,” said Sherrill Mane, the senior vice president of industry services at the IAB. Despite a slight decrease in overall revenue share, search advertising was still the most popular ad format with $12 billion ad dollars spent in 2010, representing nearly half of the overall ad revenue. For the first time, the report estimated the revenue for mobile advertising — including search and display ads delivered through tablets and smart phones — at between $550 million and $650 million.
The Future of Advertising Will Be Integrated. Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Mark Suster (@msuster) a VC at GRP Partners. He blogs at BothSidesoftheTable. Banner Ads. They first started in 1994 and are therefore almost as old as the Web itself. They were very effective back then, with the original ad garnering a 78% click-through rate (CTR)! I guess from there we had nowhere to go but down.
Nowadays banner ads get on average 0.2% CTR meaning for every 1,000 ads that are served up only 2 people click on them. Holy Shiitake! Despite its creation more than 15 years ago, banner ads have been surprisingly resilient despite their lack of efficacy. The fundamental problem with banner ads is a condition called “banner blindness” meaning that our eyes are really quickly trained to look at what is most relevant on the page – the content we want to see. I’m sure it probably resonants with how most of you read the web.
So I’ve spent the last few years checking out companies that are trying to solve for this problem. Integrated Advertising. How advertising cookies let observers follow you across the web. Back in December, documents revealed the NSA had been using Google's ad-tracking cookies to follow browsers across the web, effectively coopting ad networks into surveillance networks. A new paper from computer scientists at Princeton breaks down exactly how easy it is, even without the resources and access of the NSA. The researchers were able to reconstuct as much as 90% of a user's web activity just from monitoring traffic to ad-trackers like Google's DoubleClick. Crucially, the researchers didn't need any special access to the ad data.
They just sat back and watched public traffic across the network. Tor was the only tool that escaped the researchers' dragnet As it turns out, trackers are displaying a surprising amount of information in public. Each ad system gives a user a unique ID number, but by following the same browser session from system to system, the researchers were able to tie together the vast majority of a given user's web requests. David Halberstam's The Fifties: "Selling The American Way"
The World's 23 Best Commercials of 2014-2015 | Adweek. Now that the 2015 Cannes Lions festival is over, we're going to spend a few days recapping some of the winners. We'll start with everyone's favorite—the Film and Film Craft winners. Check out all 23 spots below, and tell us your favorite. • Client: Leica Gallery São Paulo "100" Entrant: F/Nazca Saatchi & Saatchi São Paulo Production Company: Stink Sao Paulo Grand Prix in Film, two gold Lions in Film Craft • Client: John Lewis "Monty's Christmas" Entrant: adam&eveDDB London Production Company: Blink Productions London Grand Prix and gold Lion in Film Craft • Client: Geico "Unskippable: Family Long Form 01" Entrant: The Martin Agency, Richmond, Va.
Production Company: Park Pictures New York Grand Prix in Film • Client: Atlantic Group "37 Days" Entrant: Leo Burnett France Paris Production Company: Quad Productions Clichy/La Cavalerie Montreal 2 Gold Lions in Film Craft • Client: Gatorade "Made In NY" Entrant: TBWA\Chiat\Day Los Angeles Production Company: Smuggler Los Angeles Gold Lion in Film.