Leeflang conducted an eyeball tracking study together with a questionaire to understand the interaction between our readers and advertisers.

The findings were:

1. use the attention from headlines of articles. Headline text works as a magnets for adverts. More attention on headings leads to 15% higher brand recall.
2. Big advertisement is much better than small
3. Best position for adverts is at right bottom corner
4. join the company of odther ads – it will increase the readership of the ad. There is a positive correlation between number of ads and reading time.

Suggestions.
To newspapers: open up editorial pages for advertisements and use clever layout positions.
To advertisers: big is better, and gives more exposure time
To all: know the power of the medium, therein lies the real return of investment

Fabrice Dekerf

The main question to should be: are all the players in the media business speaking the same language?

What do publishers think agencies want? Take a look:

What do agencies really want? They want media neutral campaigns on an interactive platforms which should be:

• Real time
• useful
• engaging
• personalised
• social

What do advertisers really want apart from spending less and demanding more?

Advertisers truly want high impact campaigns with clear and instant return of investement, with:

• massive reach
• right people
• instant conversion into sales
• traceability
• consumer (inter)action

What do consumers want (apart from not paying for content and being entertained)?
They want an iPad application!

• Over 1/3 of consumers planning to purchase an iPad state this will be their first Apple product
• The iPad skews younger groups (according to Nielsen, 63% of people planning to buy an iPad are in the age of <18-34) and males (65% of surveyed planning to buy an iPad were males)
• iPad users are most receiptive to advertising
• iPad owners are also the most likely to make a purchase as a result of an ad
• iPad is the highest scoring product that a leading consumer satisfaction has ever tracked

What do publishers want? (apart from not losing on revenue, audience and advertisers)

Knowing that content is marketing in the iPad era, good idea for publishers are targetted applications with a clear use and clear target (like for example the monday sports analysis app, or cultural calendar app with reviews and based on location). Such app should offer:

• real added value for the customer
• open environment for learning and working together
• selective reach
• traceability and conversion
• repeated use

Reach in that case is not most important. Focusing on customer, quality journalism and reach all together are a perfect match.

The future of display advertising according to Google may sound too futuristic for some advertisers today. Still, Google has not made many mistakes so far, and in their opinion, in 2015 the display advertising will look like this:
1) 50% to include cost-per-video-view
2) 50% of audience buying will be in real time
3) Mobile will be the number one screen
4) At least 5 new metrics will be more important than click
5) 75% of ads will be socially enabled
6) Rich media will be present in 50% of brand campaigns
7) Display will be a $50 billion industry

Publishers thinking about the future, should take these predictions very seriously.

Jakub Krzych

AdTaily is a startup founded 1,5 year ago. It allows people who are used to advertise in traditional newspapers to move online in a very simple way.
Thanks to that, anyone can turn visitors to the site into advertisers.

AdTaily is based on one format of the ad, paid per day. Users can impulsively buy the ad. Readers who also have websites should know that if they are readers of a specific site, some other readers could be interested in reading the advertisers’ site. That way, the readers become the advertisers.

Some AdTaily statistics:
16.000 publishers installed the tool
They generate 1 billion monthly impressions
1,5 million clicks each month
5200 paying customers
30000 ad unit sold each month

About a year ago it was only 2500 publishers engaged who generated 13 million impressions.

In the AdTaily model, readers can buy an ad, which can be interesting to the readers of any site. At the same time the tool is so simple, that when it is used by a publisher – publishers’ salesperson can easily sale such an ad as well.

The main discovery from this system was that there are advertisers among visitors. Important for the ad sales persons is the fact, that in that case the efficiency is not that important (most advertisers are not as impatient as regular advertisers counting clicks and looking at other statistics). If the efficiency is not that important, the advertisers are willing to pay more!

Make sure you check the AdTaily.com system, as Poland’s Agora does on its webpages.
simplicity does matter

Fabrice Dekerf

Forum4Editors: What is the future of advertising in print and online?

Fabrice Dekerf: It’s my conviction that the object of all communication should be a social object: something to interact with and/or something to facebook, twitter, (water cooler) talk about. The future of advertising (in print and online) lies thus inevitably in telling the same story through different channels by optimising the message and the interaction with the customer. All communication must serve one purpose in order to get the target group into some kind of action.
Print advertising that doesn’t have a clear action outcome is wasted money. Interaction between the message in print and online is for me a no-brainer: focus on the target group and give them via different channels the opportunity to interact. Print as an old fashioned way of doing image-campaigns may still be working to a certain degree (retail brands, luxury goods, older audience target) but only when you build in an interactive platform, you stay relevant to the customer (see the example of Axa, I will show in Krakow).

Is the drop in newspaper circulations a real threat to advertising? There is still online, which cannot exist without print?

Fabrice Dekerf: The main challenge for editors is to focus on being selective on a certain qualitative target group: it’s not only the numbers (reach) that counts, but also the ability to reach a certain volume of people that have a common, interesting profile.
The newspaper multimedia brand should focus on servicing these readers on the different platforms with a part of their total information chain. So online is important, but only if it’s unique, and a logical part of the ‘brand & content promise’ that the print-brand has. The print just as iPad or magazine ‘editions’ should focus on providing an extra and unique content, in order to build the total connection with the newspaper brand. At that moment, readers have a strong relation with the newspaper brand, and therefore it will stay relevant to advertisers, or become even more relevant, because of its ability to interact with the reader through the different channels. The big challenge is to have a clear and attractive crossmedia advertising offer.

Print and online are not all – there are new platforms arising, such as iPads or the coming soon tablet from Google. How are those platforms going to change the advertising game?

Fabrice Dekerf: There are two contrary answers to that question:
A. drastically: advertisers are looking to engage customers and see that integrated platforms offer opportunities to directly interact with customers and to get profile data on which they can really convert into sales.
This also means that a lot of advertisers are developing applications or that are really useful to their (potential) clients, because the best way to convince them is through acts, not talks.
So a lot of advertisers are considering their own apps / iPad-applications, instead of building it into advertising.
B. not so fast: the main objective for advertisers is to reach as many of the target group through effective media: the well established media brands will always stay relevant (see the answer to your second question), certainly if they are open to share profile data, and offer a complimentary package based on qualitative reach.

Do you believe in Wired’s Chris Anderson recent statement, claiming the traditional World Wide Web is dead – long live the apps? What is your view on that thesis?

Fabrice Dekerf: I follow that, because the main point is that the only real commercial breakthrough off the internet (paying through the internet, using tools etc) is when users/consumers don’t feel a barrier of technology while using computers or applications. It is true that people still refrain from the (perceived) technical complexity of computers. Tablets, mobiles etc., like magazines, interact on a focussed ‘half a meter’ perimeter, so customers are really absorbed in to the content. Usablility and guidance are crucial in the success of commercial applications, and it is true that you are much more able to guide the users of apps and interact with them. Also very important: you can learn from the user feedback (explicit) and the actual (implicit) use of the apps, which is the best way to improve the ease of use and thus the repeated use of those apps.

My only remark is that consumers (others than the ‘geeks’) are very single minded, so they only use one application for one thing. The openness and interaction (API) between different applications is a big challenge, recently proven by the awkward reactions of users on the Ping application within iTunes.

Thank you very much and see you in Kraków!

Fabrice Dekerf is managing partner of advertising agency GERMAINE, graduated as a consumer psychologist and is a newspaper / media freak.