Interesting discussions lately in ReelSEO and IndustryPace on an issue we can call ‘Play Fraud’. Think of click fraud, but with video plays instead of clicks.
It shouldn’t surprise any of us that this issue has come up. Many video platforms are paid by the play, regardless of whether the viewer watches for any period of time and despite declining CDN costs to deliver content. Ad networks delivering video are paid by the play, so they have a vested interested in defining ‘play’ as liberally as possible to increase plays and revenue. It’s increasingly common to see video ads that auto-play below the fold on a page, communicating nothing to the audience and creating no value for the advertiser…while counting as a video view.
My unscientific, hard-to-quantify definition of a video view is:
A user engages with the content. Someone clicks ‘Play’ on purpose, not accidentally. They normally do so in order to see a given piece of content. Do pre-roll ads count? Maybe. But they have to be relevant and targeted to meet the ‘engages’ criterion. Students sit through lectures. They’re engaged by great instructors. Pre-roll can be either. Do I simply tolerate the Marriot pre-roll ad as if it were a lecture, do I cut class by clicking away, or do I take away the desired message?
A user stays engaged with the content for a period of time long enough to have a reasonable probability of affecting their post-viewing behavior. With eCommerce video, that means watching a video on a product or category page long enough to have the video assist in the buying decision. Other advertising may work higher up in the funnel and hence may have different goals, but the user still has to watch for long enough to affect those goals. Do I watch the Marriot ad long enough to consider staying there on my next business trip?
Yeah…I know you can’t quantify that as easily as initiation of a play. But that’s what a view is from a publisher’s perspective. And the further a billing definition of ‘view’ is from a publisher’s definition, the more friction there will be in the ad-supported and view-driven areas of the industry. Which is why non-view-based monetization models may have a very bright future.
Thursday, September 30, 2010
Friday, September 24, 2010
A Browser Cookie That Won't Go Away?
"Evercookie" is the browser cookie that just won't go away. If you're concerned about having your Web browsing history tracked, you, like most people, will probably delete your cookies and clear your browsers' caches. However, evercookie, written in JavaScript, produces "extremely persistent cookies" that can identify a client even after you've removed standard or Flash cookies.
By Alessondra Springmann
By Alessondra Springmann
Thursday, September 23, 2010
Legal update: What email marketers need to know
By now, every email marketer should be very familiar with the CAN-SPAM Act, using it to create guidelines and best practices for marketing emails. In the coming 12 to 36 months, however, there will be several more regulations coming into effect that could necessitate some tweaks to your program, said Dennis Dayman, chief privacy and deliverability officer at Eloqua, a provider of marketing automation solutions.
“The U.S. is looking at some draft bills that will change the use of personal data and opt-in mechanisms,” Dayman said. “There are also other things going on in the European Union and Canada that will potentially create fundamental changes.” Because of the global nature of business today, these changes should have just as much impact on U.S. marketers, he said. “Transactions move across the world. There’s a very good chance that at some point during your day you’re touching data from someone that lives in the E.U.,” Dayman said.
The draft bill in the U.S.—H.R. 5777 also known as the Best Practices Act, sponsored by Rick Boucher (D-Va.) and Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.)—could change the way email marketers use behavioral data because the bill calls for opt-out consent for “collection and use of covered information by a covered entity.” The bill would require websites to tell visitors how their information is being collected, how it will be used, how long it will be kept and whether or not it will be shared with others.
Additionally, the bill allows prospects to opt not to allow their personal data and behaviors to be tracked and stored by websites and ad networks. That would make it impossible for marketers, for example, to send people who have opted in to an email program any additional materials based on where they went on a site after they left the original email.
By next summer, it will be illegal in the E.U. to put a cookie on someone’s computer without explicit permission, Dayman said. That will affect email marketers that send someone to a landing page containing a cookie. “It doesn’t ban cookies outright,” he said. “Marketers don’t realize that, if they are doing cross-border marketing, now they will need a check box for email and Web pages that says, ‘Can I send you something? Can I put a cookie on your PC?’ Those are the types of changes we’re going to have to make to stay compliant.”
The bottom line, Dayman said, is that marketers will need to start doing what they should have been doing all along. “Marketers are going to have to get hypertransparent about telling people how you are collecting their data and what you are going to do with their information once you have it,” he said.
To that end, companies should update their privacy policies, using plain language and bulleted lists to make them easy to read and understand. “There’s no more room for small print or legalese,” he said. “People are more likely to give you their data and keep receiving emails and other marketing messages when you are upfront with them from the start and don’t change things once you’ve gotten them to sign up.”
By Karen J. Bannan
“The U.S. is looking at some draft bills that will change the use of personal data and opt-in mechanisms,” Dayman said. “There are also other things going on in the European Union and Canada that will potentially create fundamental changes.” Because of the global nature of business today, these changes should have just as much impact on U.S. marketers, he said. “Transactions move across the world. There’s a very good chance that at some point during your day you’re touching data from someone that lives in the E.U.,” Dayman said.
The draft bill in the U.S.—H.R. 5777 also known as the Best Practices Act, sponsored by Rick Boucher (D-Va.) and Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.)—could change the way email marketers use behavioral data because the bill calls for opt-out consent for “collection and use of covered information by a covered entity.” The bill would require websites to tell visitors how their information is being collected, how it will be used, how long it will be kept and whether or not it will be shared with others.
Additionally, the bill allows prospects to opt not to allow their personal data and behaviors to be tracked and stored by websites and ad networks. That would make it impossible for marketers, for example, to send people who have opted in to an email program any additional materials based on where they went on a site after they left the original email.
By next summer, it will be illegal in the E.U. to put a cookie on someone’s computer without explicit permission, Dayman said. That will affect email marketers that send someone to a landing page containing a cookie. “It doesn’t ban cookies outright,” he said. “Marketers don’t realize that, if they are doing cross-border marketing, now they will need a check box for email and Web pages that says, ‘Can I send you something? Can I put a cookie on your PC?’ Those are the types of changes we’re going to have to make to stay compliant.”
The bottom line, Dayman said, is that marketers will need to start doing what they should have been doing all along. “Marketers are going to have to get hypertransparent about telling people how you are collecting their data and what you are going to do with their information once you have it,” he said.
To that end, companies should update their privacy policies, using plain language and bulleted lists to make them easy to read and understand. “There’s no more room for small print or legalese,” he said. “People are more likely to give you their data and keep receiving emails and other marketing messages when you are upfront with them from the start and don’t change things once you’ve gotten them to sign up.”
By Karen J. Bannan
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