Posts tagged advertising
Spider.io has discovered a new botnet made up of over 120,000 computers. Chameleon, as they’ve dubbed it, targets online display advertising:
The Chameleon botnet is notable for the size of its financial impact: at a cost to advertisers of over 6 million dollars per month, it is at least 70 times more costly than the Bamital botnet. However, the Chameleon botnet is arguably even more notable for the fact that it is the first botnet found to be impacting display advertisers at scale (as opposed to text-link advertisers).
Each bot takes steps to appear ‘human’, to avoid click fraud detection:
Chameleon is a sophisticated botnet. Individual bots run Flash and execute JavaScript. Bots generate click traces indicative of normal users. Bots also generate client-side events indicative of normal user engagement. They click on ad impressions with an average click-through rate of 0.02%; and they surprisingly generate mouse traces across 11% of ad impressions.
But these mouse traces betrayed their origin.
The figures above are heat maps of both move movements and clicks as they occur within a standard rectangular banner ad. Humans hover and click organically, centering around common places for advertisers to position click target imagery. The bot net, unable to react to the ad’s design, distributes its mouse movements and clicks evenly over the entire ad.
(Via Spider.io)
Fortune is Now Selling Content to Brands
Fortune is launching “Trusted Original Content”, Fortune-brended editorial content for marketers to purchase for $250,000 to $1 million. Certainly, this raises some questions:
Yet creating content expressly for an advertiser creates other questions for editorial, particularly at a prestige title. That’s why Fortune insists TOC would keep church-and-state separation—clients would agree on the topic and how the material is distributed but wouldn’t see the content until it’s ready to run. Like any piece of editorial, TOC content goes through the normal Fortune editing process, and editors have the final say over it. And Fortune TOC is likely to rely on trusted freelancers, which will keep its staff writers far away from the process. “Nothing we’re doing is compromising editorial integrity,” Caine said.
Now I’m all for advertising innovation and believe the wall between business and editorial can’t stay standing for long, but this seems pretty questionable. If nothing is “compromising editorial integrity” why limit this to freelancers?
Further, brands won’t have editorial power, but Fortune staff certainly has incentive to not write something that will encourage additional clients! The editorial power isn’t explicit, but present in the implicit form of future cash.
(Via AdWeek)
Every brand should take a lesson from Red Bull today: shift a good chunk of your TV ad budget to massive human achievements.
“ Mentos is out to celebrate Singapore’s National Day in the freshest way possible. By celebrating in a way that is also going to help tackle the country’s unbelievably low birthrate. This august 9th, Mentos calls on Singaporeans to show their love for their country by celebrating not just National Day, but National Night - a window of time in which to give the country the population spurt it so desperately needs.”
Mentos National Night. Click through for the video.
Though they add a footnote: “*Only financially secure adults in stable, committed, long-term relationships should participate.”
“ Localizing does not simply mean making specific allusions to a culture. Nor does globalizing mean having a faceless homogenizing front for a corporation. Obvious cultural taboos aside, overthinking about “the right balance” may not always be helpful. Even terms such as “glocalization” may still be implying a false dichotomy. The emotional appeal comes from your advertising being honest and authentic, not containing overt cultural references. That is what makes a brand human, and humans are not always so different.”
Jonathan Mak Long , interviewed in Evan Osnos’ New Yorker blog.
Jonathan is a 20 year old Hong Konger designer, whose first ad is this:
Apparently some browser plug ins are inserting ads into the dashboard.
The Verge weighs in, sans self-awareness.
Free Modern Branding Advice: A really smart brand should run one or two less primetime TV ads and throw a few hundred thousand into Penny Arcade’s ad-free Kickstarter. Think of the “social media buzz” they’re always coveting…
Petagram redesigned Nuts.com. Here’s the new logo(s).
This aesthetic cycle values unpolished malleability as a marker of authenticity – an antidote to PowerPoint, stock photo culture.
So how should we interpret the pre-planned, structured messiness above? Has the raw aesthetic reached its nadir? Has it been subsumed by the forces it stood against? Or has technology evolved to allow those with corporate requirements to easily manage messiness?
(Image via Logo Design Love)
