sylleptic - mark hopwood’s blog

A group of companies (including Agency.com) that calls itself the Click Quality Council has been giving the subject of click fraud some serious thought, and has issued some guidelines, which I first read about here.

The recommendations look very sensible. The main principles are:

• Advertisers should not be expected to pay for double clicks or repeat clicks from the same session.
• Advertisers should never pay for traffic from bots.
• Advertisers should have control over where, when and to whom ads are distributed.
• Domain and IP exclusion lists from search providers should be easy to use and maintain.
• Search providers should give advertisers detailed referrer information on all traffic that is billed.
• Advertisers should never pay for traffic originating outside the specific geo-targeted settings.
• Search engines should adopt third-party validation for click quality as other media companies have done for their audience validation.
• Search providers should offer an easy mechanism to reconcile paid clicks on a monthly basis.

There are a number of problems with implementing them practically today, but there are things a smart advertiser (and his/her agency) can do to address these problems.

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Agency.com is sponsoring the Internet World London exhibition May 1st to 3rd, and we have 3 speaking events at the conference, all on Wednesday:

• Claudio Struzzo, our client at Ikea, is speaking on digital brands in the 21st century, at 11:45
• Alex Wright, our UK MD, is on a panel discussion titled Client 2.0 – “best practice strategies for running an agency focused on a new generation of clients – the millenniums”, at 2:25
• Andy Hobsbawm, our European Chairman, is speaking about his new book “Small is the new big” and his thoughts on engaging consumers in the interactive world at 3:10

All of these sessions will be interesting, and the whole event looks to be a whole lot better than last year’s, which I found amazingly dull.

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I received an email today inviting me to help save the tiger by contributing a photo to an online tiger mosaic that WWF are building. When I got to the site and had uploaded my photo (which was of an actual tiger, by the way), I had a look around and it’s amazing how much they have been doing.

They have:

• RSS feeds
• A creative commons licence
• A page explaining how to use their content on your site
• A Digg this link
• An add to del.icio.us link
• Browser toolbars
• A search plug-in for Firefox or IE7
• The tiger mosaic, of course, at http://www.panda.org/how_you_can_help/campaign/endtigertrade/viewer.cfm

They’re also doing some very interesting CRM work, based on participants accumulating points for involving themselves in aggregated actions like emailing a government minister.

I have no idea who’s doing this work for them, but it’s impressive how much they’ve embraced interactivity.

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We all use websites that employ advanced recommendation software today. Amazon has its “people who like this also like that”, Apple’s iTunes Music Service recommends music based on past purchases, and Lovefilm uses your ratings to find people with similar tastes, to recommend movies that those other people liked.

The software that does this can be complex and expensive. We’re working with Autonomy for one client, which is very powerful and clever, and products like IBM’s Websphere Commerce Suite and ATG Commerce offer this as a standard feature for the top-end e-commerce site. Amazon devotes masses of its engineering effort to getting recommendations right. Last year, Netflix offered a million dollar prize to the person who could most improve their recommendation software.

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I just checked my Google Analytics for the blog and it’s fascinating. Who are you all? I’ve got visitors from New Zealand, Israel, India, and several places in the USA.

For other people with blogs, the biggest thing I’ve done to increase traffic is to sign up with Feedburner and to add their link to my email signature.

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Google bought Doubleclick last week for $3.1bn. There’s a lot of commentary on why they did this. It’s a great deal of money, Doubleclick has had its ups and downs over the years, and it’s an interesting topic for discussion, so I thought I’d kick off the discussion here.

My thoughts today are:
- Doubleclick have lots of really good agency, advertiser and publisher relationships. Google don’t get on too well with some agencies (at least in the UK - is it the same elsewhere?) and may want to disintermediate (i.e. cut out of the loop) agencies by building more direct advertiser relationships. Google bought Doubleclick’s relationships.
- Google do direct response, pay-per-click, text ads on their own sites really well, but some of their experiments with other advertising strategies are far less successful. Doubleclick has great technology for delivering rich, branded advertising units across a huge range of publisher websites. They complement each other.
- Building on the previous point, Google wanted to diversify. It’s revenue all comes from one source at the moment. Now it has another one, which minimises risk, in the eyes of investors, should there be a downturn in PPC linked to search.

One thing that’s important to remember is that Doubleclick doesn’t really have any ad inventory of its own: it’s a channel (technology and account teams, contracts and relationships) for lots of advertising, but it sold its own ad network a long time ago, so Google wasn’t buying that.

Thoughts?

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From http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/the_way_we_live/article1654456.ece

… a recent survey in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that while 90% of people who receive e-mails think they’ve interpreted their tone correctly only 50% actually have …

The moral seems to be, speak more, email less. And never use emoticons.

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“This book then is an account of how large-scale systems are powered by ever-smaller, more
independent, component parts linked together by the internet. And how these institutions
are being fundamentally re-modelled and re-made in the process.”

The draft introduction is now online and can be downloaded for free at http://www.small-big.com/2007/04/positive_feedba.html

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I was on a panel at the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising last night, discussing mobile advertising and ad-funded mobile content with an audience. There were definite moments of deja vu: over the years I’ve worked on WAP activation projects, MMS activation projects, mobile content viral projects and one of the questions that came up a few times was whether we were at a turning point for mobile advertising.

It seems to me that there are some strong grounds for optimism, but these need to be qualified, because different people think differently about what mobile advertising will be. I think some expect banner and PPC advertising to take off on mobile, and that this ad revenue will fund development of sites, services and content somewhat as it has for so many web 2.0 start-ups. I doubt this is true, but other aspects of the web 2.0 thing will cross over, and these are important.

If we compare the web today with the web 5 years ago, it’s gone all interactive. People have blogs, Myspace pages, Flickr and Youtube accounts. My family is collaborating on a Geni family tree, and it’s impressive how many of them are chipping in. Why is this good news for mobile? Because the mobile is already a primary device for interacting: it has advanced messaging and multi-media capabilities, it has a high speed web connection, Java and masses of storage. It’s the perfect extension for people who are interacting online already. Adding Youtube, Myspace and who knows what else to the mobile is obvious, and Vodafone (for example) are already putting deals in place. This development will lead to a substantial uplift in mobile web usage over the next few years, led not by technical feasibility or a business need to recoup investment in 3G licenses, but by a significant change in user behaviour. People are collaborating and creating, and they’ll do that with their mobiles.

There are financial reasons to be optimistic: flat fee mobile data will be normal for most contract mobile users in the UK by the Autumn. Three and T-mobile have it, Vodafone intends to launch it in the Summer. So monthly contract users won’t have to worry about data charges any more. For the pay as you go, ad-funded usage is evolving: customers will soon be able to sign up to receive marketing SMS, or streamed content with ads in the stream. The mobile portals are getting their act together for serving, measuring and billing for mobile advertising. Put these together, and you see a context where mobile data isn’t going to cost anything like as much, which means something users are becoming interested in will also become affordable to the mass market.

What does this mobile landscape look like? I don’t think anyone at the meeting had the answers, and that’s not surprising. What struck me was the size of the eco-system that is developing. Several people approached me after the panel session to expound on their mobile social networking products. People are working on ad-serving, gaming, location based services, all sorts of things. I was told there’s a mobile social networking conference coming up in Rome. All sorts of innovative and interesting things are happening, but it’s hard to say what the killer apps will be.

Clients are definitely interested in mobile, where most thought it over-hyped 18 months ago. They want to know how mobile can be integrated with the rest of our work, they’re looking for clever ways to introduce interaction with their brands into the mobile space. Research I was looking at last week showed (again) that pass-along, word of mouth content is highly trusted, and this has to be one of the biggest opportunities on a mobile. If kids are uploading photos of their schoolteachers to Youtube already, the propensity, technology and knowledge are there already, for sure.

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Andy Hobsbawm’s article about progress and change, good and bad, reminded me of some conversations I’ve had recently that have left me speechless. Some very intelligent people whose opinions I respect, have been telling me that there isn’t really any proof that humans are causing global warming.

As I understand it (from this article which Andy linked to) there really isn’t any doubt about this now. Every week we see further evidence of something really, really bad happening in our environment, and I can’t understand why some very smart people are taking such a head in the sands attitude.

Perhaps they hold shares in oil companies, like GWB.

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