Trendwatch

There are some interesting market dynamics and trends in online advertising to keep an eye on in 2009. Traditional online display advertising needs a boost and some are calling for a creative renaissance, the behavioral targeting debate continues, and emerging media shows promise with some interesting applications.

Average click-through-rates (CTR) for online display ads are not strong - dismal really - which is causing some industry professionals to call for a creative renaissance. Some are pointing to TBWA/Chiat/Day, with their recent rich media ads for the iPod Touch, as bringing big idea thinking to a medium that has long suffered from a lack of it. Although only 5% of all online ads today are rich media, this could be the technology that gives way to real break-through thinking and turns the numbers around. According to Catherine Spurway, VP-Strategy and Marketing at PointRoll (one of the leading rich-media ad serving companies), about 6% of users who see PointRoll-served ads interact with them. That’s quite a boost from 0.1% average CTR for traditional display banners.

There is a lot of talk about behavioral targeting with online advertising. There is some debate over whether or not it’s a good thing, but some experts suggest that Gen Y may actually prefer it, figuring there’s no getting away from advertising so they may as well be served messages that align with their interests. Kind of makes sense.

Facebook underwent some interesting changes in March. Brand pages have been redesigned to appear and behave more like user’s profile pages. Brand pages have been segregated in the past, but have now been moved inside subscribers’ “social graph.” A new publishing feature allows brands to broadcast messages that appear in their fans’ main news stream on their home page. We’ll have to see how subscribers embrace this change, and whether they find this increased presence of their favorite brands welcome or intrusive.

In April, US Weekly sold a sponsorship of their brand page on Facebook to State Farm, a first for a media company on a social network and a first for a brand page on Facebook.

Paid Twitters are coming on the scene, with super twitter account holders accepting cash payment to recommend products and services by simply saying, “hey check this out”. This is another potentially dicey strategy that could lead to backlash from the “crowd” if they figure out the payola scheme. We’ll have to see.

Less subtly, Google has recently started offering marketers ad units that stream their five most recent “tweets” across the Google AdSense network. Intuit is the first marketer to test this new offering to promote its TurboTax brand in an attempt to increase its Twitter followers. Intuit’s strategy was to use this channel to start conversations rather than trying to acquire new customers directly. When users click on one of these TurboTax Google ads, it takes them to the TurboTax Twitter group page, instead of TurboTax.com, as one may expect. There, they can see what the TurboTax team has posted and join in the conversation to get their questions answered by the experts.

An English Bakery is using Twitter to promote its brand by broadcasting when fresh items are coming out of the oven. They even had a proprietary, “bakery proof” device designed and built to allow the bakery workers to easily send the messages.

Re-skinnng of sites to integrate the brand more with the site content is an interesting approach that has been around for a while and reported to be on the rise again.

Some trends are emerging in clear response to a down economy:

• Co-branded ads, where two companies share costs, are becoming more popular as marketing budgets are shrinking due to the worsening economic climate.
• Some publications are accommodating non-standard sized ad units to help brands get noticed.
• As economic conditions are forcing down cost-per-thousand (CPM) media models, it is expected that more publishers in 2009 will be offering flat monthly rates.