http://www.digiday.com/stories/the-grp-is-winning/

The call by marketers, agencies and media companies alike to move beyond the banner ad is not new but essentially gone unanswered.   Social Media has evolved not as a solution to the above challenge but an alternative.  As such if media companies want to sell beyond the banner they need to offer something other than banner ad placements.

While social media has been embraced by all integration with paid display usually lives on the landing page or the occasional “like” button built into the ad.  The opportunity for integrating social into display media however should not live within the banner ad but in the design and layout offered by the media companies in the form of a Social Brand Channel.

The reason the banner ad lives primarily in the form of 728x90 and 300x250 ad slots is due to efficiency of deployment.   The complex delivery system of ad servers working across networks, publisher sites and agencies has settled into a necessary system of scale but resulted in significant commoditization of the space.

Ad servers are actually content servers and as such can deliver virtually any form of media from YouTube videos, Flick’r photo galleries, Twitter conversation feeds, blog RSS feeds and Facebook conversation streams.  Any number of these assets can easily be formatted into a social media brand channel of assets on a media publisher’s website and synchronized with the primary branding elements of a banner ad.  Most social media feeds can easily be modified to fit a 300x250 width without any sort of creative expense or development.

The standard 300x250 wide column on most websites creates a clear opportunity to blend branding and social media based content into a Social Brand Channel offering consumers greater opportunities of engagement and entertainment with the brand.  For marketers, this allows their deployments to push social media content into branded environment creating greater opportunities for engagement with consumers.

Media companies in particular benefit as they can now sell the full column length at a higher CPM reducing reliance on low CPM ad networks.  This move allows everyone to focus on the page view vs. the ad impression to measure delivery and while offering a greater number of engagement points that can be measured through social media tools in conjunction with standard media and web analytics.

From where I stand, if media companies moved towards offering Social Brand Channels as their primary media offering, it would create a #Winning scenario for all.

For starters media companies have been hammered by shrinking media budgets and fragmented audiences whose undivided attention has spread across a number of screens and portable devices.  The evolution of online media space has been commoditized below any level to support operational revenue needs and for many the very future of their existence is questionable at best. 

As your campaign launches the Facebook system automatically begins to auto-optimize out sub-segments, which are non-performing from a CTR perspective quickly whittling away delivery

Along the way I have stumbled across an unfortunate conclusions: active and engaged audiences are great for publishers in terms of generating ad space but not so good for advertisers looking for direct response or engagement with their ads. 

The campaign actually did encourage me to pick up a stick of Old Spice underarm deodorant unfortunately after one or two times of use it was rotated to the backup position of desirable deodorants.

Online marketing and digital support services provided by local agencies for local business are often extremely difficult to scale at a profitable level.  The demands of digital require a wide range of resources and knowledge to effectively implement which exceed both what a local business can pay for or a small local agency can staff. 

As your campaign launches the Facebook system automatically begins to auto-optimize out sub-segments, which are non-performing from a CTR perspective quickly whittling away delivery and reach of the broader audience.  Conversely the frequency can greatly increase on a daily level well beyond the desired level you might be looking to achieve for the remaining target audience.