It was recently revealed that General Motors pulled its $10 million advertising budget from Facebook because they wanted to run page takeovers instead of the more typical sponsored posts and display ads. Page takeovers and display advertising achieve different results, as do interactive rich media ads, or integrated options like advertorials and social media activity. The creative execution that is right for your advertising really depends on your campaign goals. Each method of advertising has its pros and cons that work with or against your goals. Understanding the results each type of advertising achieves is important.

DISPLAY BANNERS

How display banners work well: - Display banners can be a cost effective way to buy reach, and design costs can be low. - They can work well for specific brand messages out to a large number of people. - Depending on the campaign, display banners may click better on certain websites, but this can be an ineffective measure for branding purposes. - There are a variety of ad sizes available, allowing the advertiser more choice. - Smaller international creative can often be used in larger sizes (eg, a 728X90 ads can run in a 760X120 placement), which can cut reduce deisign costs. . Things to consider: - Make sure you’re buying placements based on the audience you want to reach (following clicks may not always get you the right audience) - For performance campaigns, it is important to have a clear call to action, otherwise the display banner tends to work better for branding. - Remember, banners influence people well beyond the click. Make sure you’re monitoring post-click activity in the form of sites visits and direct google searches for your brand - Because of their limited space, keeping to the essential elements in your banner design is important.

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A bit of crystal ball speculation and debate took place on OMD NZ’s blog a while back about advertising exchanges. Ad-exchanges provide a platform for advertisers, networks and publishers to buy and sell their inventory via real-time bidding through technology. In taking the ‘human’ portion (largely price negotiation and customisation) out of the equation greater efficiencies (mainly cost savings on paper) are achieved.

I think exchanges will have their place just as performance networks have before them. I seriously doubt they will have the ability to increase CPMs for publishers, so the old conundrum of cost / benefit still raises it’s head for any publishers wanting to fund their sites via advertising. As for additional (pay-wall, T-Shirts, Mugs, Ipads & Android apps?) funding options – they haven’t yet proven themselves a viable proposition for many publishers or users for that matter.

In the interests of full disclosure, we don’t sell cost per click advertising and don’t farm impressions out to third party networks. We specialise in delivering targeted audiences and placements for our advertisers on behalf of our publishers. We do also sell Behavioural Targeting in conjunction with contextual targeting. I don’t see us or our publishers tipping inventory into exchanges unless they can seriously improve our effective CPM across individual sites. Does it cost us more to send real people out to agencies and advertisers as apposed to Google or Microsoft’s (assuming they own or buy the biggest exchange platforms in market) cut? I actually doubt it. Especially coupled with the other selling opportunities those people have beyond standard broad-reach banner campaigns.

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We’re building our mobile offerings across adhub sites, with FLICKS, BBC.com & Sella leading the way in iphone apps. Sella recently launched what is certainly the most useful trading application in New Zealand today and we’ve run some very successful campaigns for major brands on both FLICKS and BBC.com’s .mobile sites.

The following are Adam Cahill’s (of ClickZ) top 10 points for creating value and relevance with your customer

s from a keynote he attended with Emily Nagle Green, president and CEO of Yankee Group:

1. Mobile increases consumer expectations of connectedness. We tend to evaluate new opportunities with a tipping point mentality, asking ourselves “when is the opportunity big enough to take seriously?” The statistics already tell us that mobile has reached that point, but I loved how Emily reframed the issue away from hard facts and toward a very clear picture of the way behavior has changed as a result of the powerful computers we carry with us in our pockets and purses. Simply put, we expect more, all the time. Instead of thinking about whether mobile is big enough, we should be thinking about what expectations we’d actually be failing to meet without a thoughtful approach to mobile in place. Read the rest of this article.