In part two of our four-part primer on getting started in online display, we look at some of the latest trends and innovations in display advertising. View part one, “Planning and Strategy.”

A few years ago, Oregon residents logged onto the web to find an animated crab crawling across their browser window before making a home for himself inside the four walls of a display ad.

It was a clever use of rich media at the time, recalls Andy Askren, but he isn’t sure it would play today. The ad was created by Askren, creative director of Portland-based advertising agency Grady Britton, for the coastal town of Newport. “At the time it was really successful,” he says, “but I wonder if it would be seen as cheesy today, whereas once it was innovative. The content in online ads has to constantly keep one-upping itself.”

When it comes to creating engaging content for online campaigns, advertising agencies have more tools to work with than ever before. They also have the pressure of trying to innovate in a field where innovation itself is humdrum. 

The catch-22 of innovation
The more innovative display ads get, the more accustomed users get to innovation—and the more quickly they get bored with things they’ve seen before (like those annoying dancing figures used to sell auto insurance, for example). “It seems like we’re headed toward an event horizon where there’s nothing we can do to make display ads more visible,” says Dayn Wilberding, Grady Britton’s director of digital culture. “People know how to tune out those boxes, so there has to be something in there that’s intriguing, interesting and shareable.”

Make your display ads sharable
Yes, you read that right: shareable display ads. Viral and social networking are now influencing the content of display advertising. “Social media is having a huge effect on the behavior of people and advertising, and how they react or don’t react to ads,” says Wilberding. “The sharability and viral effect is very top of mind in terms of how we’re creating ads these days.”

This means that today’s display ads are increasingly just one part of a much larger digital marketing campaign. “If there’s a trend for us,” explains Askren, “it’s that we’re finding more ways than ever to find that what’s in that box is connected to something else. No single box or message is going to deliver the client’s whole message, but will be part of another message to be continued elsewhere.”

Today’s interactive display ads may invite users to a Facebook page “or some other social application that forges a relationship with us, and that eventually leads to a sale,” says Wilberding.

Display is getting smarter
Display ads are also smarter than ever before. They notice the kinds of websites that users are browsing, and ad networks serve them a related suite of ads carefully targeted to the types of products and services in which they’re interested. 

Finally, ad agencies have finally realized that if users are reluctant to click on an ad, it may be because they don’t want to stop what they’re in the middle of doing. Online display ads are increasingly providing an experience that happens in the here and now, not somewhere else. “They now provide you with an experience that happens on the site you’re visiting,” says Askren, “because if you click the ad, you’re deciding not to do what you were doing before. We’re getting more intelligent about not taking users elsewhere, but offering them some sort of value that enhances what they’re already doing.”

Not just clicks, but memorable experiences—that’s what today’s most innovative ads are doing. “I don’t think anyone is thinking of the click-through as the ultimate conversion anymore,” says Askren.

A few memorable experiences from Yahoo! Advertising:

• Paramount’s Transformers
• In-game advertising
• Macy’s Yahoo! Smart Ads campaign

— Christian Chensvold

Christian Chensvold is a New York-based writer covering business, lifestyle and culture. Visit his blog, Ivy-Style.com.

Cannes, France — The first day of Cannes Lions was a bit of culture shock—not just because everyone was speaking French and I could barely order a sandwich, but also because of the degree to which everyone had gone beach-y. For example, there was the head of JWT’s Continental Europe operations, wearing shorts—and a jacket—on stage, looking like a 12-year-old prep school student.

But even with the laid-back vibe of the crowd, the ideas kept pace with the buttoned-down—or at least, shoe-wearing—world of advertising outside of Cannes. Here are four ideas you should know about, even if you weren’t here:

1. Where does creativity come from? David Harris, Executive Director of British agency Wunderman, spent months trying to figure out where inspiration comes from. He turned to neuroscience, religion, even mind-enhancing rugs, and somehow brought inspiration into a sense of order. All inspiration has six parts:
   ~ Discovering the problem
   ~ Thinking time
   ~ Dispersal – In other words, walking away from the problem and letting inspiration strike. The problem is, “It’s looked down on as laziness. Investing time and money in something with no output is a hard sell.”
   ~ The trigger – something that puts the pieces together.
   ~ Epiphany – Sometimes this involves overcoming our cultural programming to see the answers.
   ~ Communication
2. Time is currency: Every advertiser needs to find a way to get consumers to part with the one thing they can’t spare: time. So, said JWT chairman Bob Jeffrey, you have to create ideas that people want to spend time with.
3. Sales lives: Ogilvy Worldwide held a competition on stage to name the world’s best salesperson; each of the three finalists had to sell a Motorola Smartphone. The winner was Todd Herman of Edmonton, Alberta. But advertising agencies need to stop thinking of sales as an awkward foot-in-the-door kind of thing, says Ogilvy Group UK’s Rory Sutherland. “I’d plea for this to be fully part of advertising and marketing—and not be someone else’s job,” he said.
4. The world is going mobile: As mobile phones replace PCs in some homes and become a true “second screen,” says Eric Bader, Chief Strategy Officer Worldwide of Initiative, mobile marketers have four wins facing them: Higher media ROI, in-store marketing, loyalty and customer relationship management, and more engagement with the brand.

I’ll be back tomorrow, dressed more casually but just as ready to talk marketing. Au revoir!

— Jeff Sweat, Blog Editor

After attempting to take in Internet Week all week, I’ve come to one clear conclusion: it’s too much for one person. And with so many wildly different events competing for attention, you’d excuse me if that’s the only conclusion I was able to reach.

But… a few points seemed clear:

• Lines are blurring—between online and offline campaigns, between creative and technology. Campaigns have to be integrated. Agencies are hiring creatives who get tech and techs who can tell a story.
• Social is everywhere. It’s not something separate from marketing. It is marketing.
• Paying for your own drink is crazy—at least when there are seemingly dozens of parties willing to pick up the tab.
• Content matters. There was lots of cool tech on display, but speakers kept on coming back to the content, to the story, to the authenticity of your brand. I liked IAB president and CEO Randall Rothenberg’s take on it in the video below.

There. I just saved you a week.

—Jeff Sweat, Blog Editor

Editors Note: Shiver me timbers, matey! “X” marks the spot, and that spot is your blog. In this guest post by Jonathan Poston of FastPivot.com, we show how to keep potential customers on board by making your blog the centerpiece of your social media efforts.

Every day brings the ecommerce world closer to using social media as a serious form of marketing. But one of the ongoing challenges for many businesses is how to implement a sustainable action plan. In the social media marketing chart below, it’s plain to see that most, if not all, of your social media marketing information should stem from your blog—and drive traffic back to it.
 

In the chart above we define social media as an extension and sharing of a well thought-out, timely and newsworthy blog. The blog is the anchor point to which all social media conversation will refer back.

How the social media map works
Produce a well written and properly referenced blog. Make this blog as high-quality as possible, as it will be archived and visited for years by all of your various social media-generated customers.

Press it—Take that blog, re-format it into a press release, and send it off to your press list. Make sure to include the original blog link that includes hyper-linked text references.

Tweet it—Take creative 140-character-long bytes from the blog and tweet them, but don’t forget to include a shrunken bit.ly link version of your long blog URL into the post.

Partner it—Now that you have some valuable, copyrighted information on your blog in the form of educational articles, updates, etc., make proposals to partner store sites to share that blog content.

Link it—Post to relevant LinkedIn groups to reach many thousands of potential customers. The blog link alone can be posted as “news” or “discussion” depending on the level of social media interaction that you want.

Fan it—Every time a new blog is posted, make sure to post it on your Facebook fan page, along with a catchy description that encourages fan interaction.

Newscast it—Instead of writing a completely new client newsletter, include your blog content in as many sections as possible, and make sure to hyperlink clients back to your blog and website whenever the opportunity arises.

Bundle it—If your blog truly contains fresh information that the public would consider valuable, submit proposals to local and national news aggregates asking them to include a RSS feed of your blog on their social media or citizen journalists’ news reels.

Video it—Videos can be knitted snugly into your blog accompanied by a well-written, SEO-sensitive, search indexable text wrap to bring customers back to your site for their viewing pleasure.

Although the blog is the social media anchor—or to use another analogy, thehand holding all of the many social media balloons that would otherwise escape into cyber-space—all of the social media applications in the world can’t increase conversions if there is no place for customers to convert. WordPress—a preferred blogging platform—will allow your developers to completely integrate your blog into any website. But it’s also important to include website links within your site-integrated blog to maximize social media conversion.

In addition to activating this social media map model to maximize conversion, be consistent in your communications. Don’t be shy about re-posting older blog posts in a new way, and make as many friends as you can.

— Jonathan Poston

Jonathan Poston is a  Social Media-eBiz Consultant at FastPivot.com. Based in Asheville NC, FastPivot.com develops custom Yahoo! Stores. Look for more helpful how-to’s from Jonathan in the coming weeks, and be sure to check out the FastPivot blog. Follow Jonathan on Twitter: @Jonathan_Poston.

In the first part of “Lessons for Social Media Stakeholders,” we reviewed ways in which Customer Care, Sales, Product and Editorial teams can actively and passively utilize social media data and networks.

Social networks can include Twitter and Facebook accounts, blogs and blog comments, forums, groups or any site where there is social interaction. In many cases, social networking can also include offline events.

In this article we’ll continue this exploration with four more types of stakeholders within a company:

• Marketers
• Market Research
• Brand
• Corporate Communications and PR

As mentioned in the previous article, one person in a company may wear several hats, taking on more than one responsibility listed in this series. For example, a marketing person may also be doing the research, brand work, and writing editorial pieces. In that case, a combination of listening and engagement activities listed under each one of those stakeholders in these documents would apply.

Listening herein refers to gathering data from social networks, and tapping into conversations our communities are having on and (sometimes) offline.

1. Marketing
Listening to conversations about product sentiment, competitor sentiment, and industry needs and wants online allows marketers to define targeted messages and shape consumer sentiment. 

Marketers can also leverage key influencers (people who are brand- or topic-advocates with a large following or readership) to help spread the word about news, a product release, an article or a campaign to their audience, creating more brand visibility and, ideally, more advocates.

Additionally, social networks can be used to promote products, services and features, driving links and traffic back to the site. An increase in the quality of relevant links can boost search engine rankings, driving even more traffic.

Passive listening:

• Listen to what consumers are saying they want or need from your industry.
• Determine consumer sentiment about your current assets (brands, people, products, services and news).
• Compare consumer sentiment about competitive assets.
• Listen to what industry influencers are saying about your industry, your brand or your competitors’ brand

Active engagement:

• Define marketing messaging and campaign strategies based on consumer sentiment, needs and wants.
•  Determine online marketing channels to target based on where conversation is happening.
• Reach out to influencers in target markets to create evangelists for the brand/product.
• Reward influencers who are already brand advocates to generate brand evangelists.
• Embed links in social networks to drive traffic to your site and influence SEO.

Related Resources

• Social Media Marketing Kit
• The Social Technographics Ladder (social networking audience types)
• Role of Social Networking in SEO

2. Market Research
Gathering research data online by skimming for particular topics or company asset mentions in social networking conversations differs from traditional survey-based research. Comprehensive research would include both methods, rather than one in place of the other.

Here are some of the features that social listening platforms can provide for research:

• Collect real time data, anytime.
• Gather data based on online (and sometimes offline) conversations.
• Measurement is definable by any topic (brand names, products, features and people).
• Determine topic sentiment/satisfaction over time.
• Determine topic popularity over time.

Add this to traditional research reports that give you metrics like retention, engagement, conversion, time spent and likelihood, and you’ve got some very well rounded research.

Passive listening:

• Asset (brand, products, people, services and news) or topic sentiment
• Asset or topic awareness/popularity
• Brand advocacy
• The same measurements for competitors

Active engagement:

• No direct engagement with online community

Related Resources

• Market Research via Social Media
• Social Media Market Research: A Study of the Tropicana Repackaging

3. Brand
Much of your brand work is based on research defined in the previous Research section. Brand and/or Marketing teams can then use this research to shape a brand and its messaging.

Passive listening:

• Asset (brand, products, people, services and news) or topic sentiment
• Asset or topic awareness/popularity
• Brand advocacy
• The same measurements for competitors

Active engagement:

• Shape brand look and feel based on community or target market sentiment.
• Guide marketing strategies and ad campaigns based on brand health and consumer sentiments.
• Prioritize marketing investment in various markets.
• Usually no direct engagement with online community (unless Brand team is also actively marketing).

Related Resources

• As Media Brands Build Their Own Communities, They Must Evolve Their Business Model
• Social Media Brand Engagement Report

4. Corporate Communications/PR
PR teams can leverage consumer sentiment to provide a targeted message to influence sentiment to the company’s advantage. PR can also determine who the most influential and valuable people and products are at the company, based on volume and sentiment, and promote those people and products more.

Passive listening:

• Listen for overall sentiment toward the company’s assets (people, products, services, brands and news).
• Listen closely to what industry influencers are saying about your company’s assets.

Active engagement:

• Uncover company assets that have strong positive consumer sentiment but aren’t currently promoted as well as they could be.
• Prioritize company assets to promote more or less based on sentiment and popularity.
• Formulate PR messaging based on sentiment.

Related Resources

• Resources for New Media and Social Media PR
• 10 of the Best Social Media Tools for PR Professionals and Journalists

Looking for ways that Customer Care, Sales, Product and Editorial teams can utilize social media data and networks? See the first part of this article: Social Media Stakeholders Part 1: Customer Care, Sales, Product, and Editorial.

Do you use additional listening metrics or ways to engage in social networks with your communities? Please share!

— Laura Lippay

Visit Laura at Lip Service. See also her previous posts, “12 Stellar SEO Tools” and “Upcoming SEO and Media Events.”

(Image courtesy Intersection Consulting via Flickr, CC 2.0)

Many of you have both Display and Sponsored Search campaigns. For our Sponsored Search customers, we’re offering a free webinar that explores two important features of Sponsored Search: Network Distribution, which allows you to target marketing campaigns to the entire Yahoo! Network, and Import Campaigns, which lets you import your Google AdWords campaign data into your Yahoo! Search Marketing account. For more detail on both these features, visit the Yahoo! Search Marketing blog. Or, to register, click on the link below.

When: Thursday, Feb. 4, 2009, 11 A.M., Pacific Time
Where: The Internet—go here to register. Note that  you will need the password you created when you registered for Sponsored Search. Don’t already have a Sponsored Search account? Click here.
Why: Because it’s great stuff to know for improving your campaigns and results through Sponsored Search

Well, it’s not quite like “Dear Abby,” but last year’s how-to posts from the Yahoo! Search Marketing blog and the Yahoo! Advertising blog are the next best thing. In the last year of the “aughts,” we tried to help show you the way to more effective Sponsored Search, and more effective Web advertising in general, with a bevy of posts that answered your most pressing questions—everything from how to develop strong keywords to how to keep those keywords and descriptions from facing rejection, to how to use social networks like Twitter and Facebook to get your messages out.

For the complete list of tips, switch over to the Yahoo! Search Marketing blog.

(Image by awezmaz, CC, 2.0)

Is your company struggling in these tough times? We asked some of the “masters of marketing” at the ANA Annual Conference their advice, and here it is, in tasty little sound bites:

Time spent on Yahoo! front page up 20 percent since redesign
Eric Schonfeld over at TechCrunch reports from Yahoo! Analyst Day on the success of our new front page. Writes Schonfeld: “Senior vice president Tapan Bhat gave an overview of how the redesigned homepage is performing. In the past three months, pageviews are up 9 percent, and time spent on the homepage is up 20 percent… Some of the big drivers of user engagement come from the ability to customize the homepage by adding applications and feeds from anywhere on the Web into the My Favorites column on the left-hand side. According to Yahoo consumer surveys, 75 percent of users love the applications area and 40 percent are using between 6 to 11 apps. Usage of that feature is up 8 percent over the past three months.” Not bad, if you did say so ourselves.

“Yahoo! Hearts Creatives” video a hit
We do indeed speak your language, agency creatives. A few weeks ago we unleashed the Yahoo! Hearts Creatives video—originally created as an in-house marketing vehicle—on the general agency public. Since then, it’s gotten rave reviews and is appearing embedded on sites all over. Check out some of the comments, and feel free to leave one of your own. Meanwhile, a Leo Burnett exec asks, “is strategy the new creative?.”

Holiday sales success secrets
Sometimes, you don’t realize the truth of an obvious bit of advice until it’s put in front of you—you know, one of those “I should have thought of that” moments. Last week we posted five tips and tricks for making your holiday season successful in a tough economy based on Yahoo! research. Nothing groundbreaking here, just common sense you don’t realize is common until someone mentions it.

Tips for using Yahoo! Site Explorer
ClickZ’s Erik Dafforn, offers several tips on Yahoo! Site Explorer, a comprehensive set of tools that help you, for starters, explore all the Web pages indexed by Yahoo! Search. You might want to put your propeller beanie on for this one. To explore Explorer, explore here.

Five ways to optimize your Facebook marketing
While everyone’s whining about the new Facebook look and feel, marketers should take a second to look at Daniel Flamberg’s post over at iMedia Connection. For marketers, says Flamberg, “Facebook isn’t a cakewalk.” He then offers five solid tips on how to make the best of it.

Improving your search performance
Thinking ahead to 2010, Search Engine Land’s Michelle Stern says that you, the B2B marketer, can improve your search results next year by following three relatively simple rules.

Project management 101
What creative hasn’t suffered under poor project management? BNET’s Lindsay Blakely takes on the topic and talks to some of the best project managers in the business to get their secrets. If you feel your project’s management is suffering, you might want to send your manager this as a little hint-hint.

How do you translate successful online programming for a Spanish-speaking audience? Here’s a hint: it takes a lot more than just translation.

Yahoo! this month launched “De Moda,” the Spanish-language version of our online celebrity and fashion video show on Shine, “The Thread.” And no, that’s not a literal translation, just as De Moda isn’t a direct translation of the English version.  Procter & Gamble sponsors The Thread, which just ran its 100th episode, and when it renewed its sponsorship it decided to expand it for U.S. Hispanic audiences. An article in AdAge talks about the steps  Yahoo! and our partner, Starcom MediaVest Group, took to make De Moda relevant to its intended viewers.

De Moda has its own Spanish-speaking host, NY1 Noticias anchor Carleth Keys, as well as a Spanish-speaking producer. It will also not focus as much on Hollywood celebrities but will include more Latino celebrities and telenovela stars. The separate identity is necessary, says the article, “not just for for cultural relevance, but also because Hispanics consume English-language media, too, and some viewers may be watching both versions of the program.”

For more about De Moda, read the AdAge article.