This week, we speak to Jonathon Betts, Joint Head of Implementation Planning and Investment at MediaCom.


How long have you been with MediaCom?

I joined MediaCom Australia in May 2008, so just over 2 years. 

What is your idea of a perfect work day?

 
Having made it through emails by 10:00, sitting down with the team to see the ideas they’re working on with suppliers for client campaigns. Grabbing a bite to eat and then speaking to clients about their digital objectives. Seeing some great comms planning work from the teams here at MediaCom and getting excited about how we could deliver these in digtial.

 
   
How do you seek inspiration, or when does inspiration find you?

 I have always been a problem solver, so any new challenge sucks me in. When you get a great brief to work on it’s fantastic to start looking for insights and crafting ideas. When your solution involves doing something genuinely new you don’t want to stop working on it.

 
 What was/is your favourite brand experience that has been served by Eyeblaster? Why? (We will feature an image of your creative with a link)

 
I like advertising where we’re delivering a fantastic creative experience or delivering something relevant to people looking at a website.   

For Fast & Furious we had a great synchronised video ad, each different placement on the page was coordinated and the story was told across all formats.

For Justin Bieber we had live updates from various social networks feeding in to deliver an up to the minute message.

  






 How did you get started in digital advertising?
 
 I started at a specialist digital agency in the UK, i-level. I started working on campaigns for Yell and British Telecom. I think we managed to run the first ever “overlay” campaign in the UK for Yell.

 
 Who is/was your mentor? Whose work do you admire, or what campaigns have inspired you lately?

 
At i-level there were two people I learned the most from: Faith Carthy and Ed Ling. They were both inspiring in the different ways they approached the media business and the work they did for clients. They always insisted on the best from people and made it fun too.

 
I like campaigns that don’t see a boundary between media and creative and offline and online. Some of the most successful draw people in and make people want to spend time with campaign. The online hype campaign for the Dark Knight was immensely successful at getting people excited about the movie, involved in the campaign and building buzz before it launched.

Entertainment is the fastest growing activity on the Internet. In addition, 99.6% of online users in the U.S use the Internet for entertainment. Advertisers in the entertainment industry should seize this opportunity to create more entertaining and engaging online display ads. A report from MediaMind and comScore releases new data on entertainment advertising and analyzes how to use display advertising to boost box-office revenues.

The Internet is now inextricably entwined with our daily lives. With this ubiquity comes an opportunity for the entertainment industry, as well as an expectation from the discerning consumer. Entertainment websites now reach 99.6% of the U.S. online population every month, who spend an average of 227 minutes per user on entertainment-related content.

An analysis of billions of impressions shows that the click has become irrelevant as a measure of online marketing success, especially for entertainment. Users are more likely to engage and interact with entertainment campaigns compared to other verticals, but they are less likely to click. Furthermore, 95% of users who interact with entertainment ads never click, which makes it imperative to deliver and measure the total brand experience wherever the consumer engages.

To measure the branding success of display, MediaMind offers its Dwell metric. New research by comScore, MediaMind and Microsoft Advertising shows that Dwell has a direct effect on brand metrics.

The research shows that consumers who saw campaigns with high dwell were three times more likely to search for brand-related keywords and showed stronger brand survey lift than those exposed to campaigns with low dwell. Furthermore, campaigns with high dwell increased advertisers’ site traffic by 69% and increased brand engagement—increasing page views and time spent on the brand’s site.

The success of display advertising is linked to box office revenues. comScore AdEffx Action Lift directly measures the effect that entertainment marketers’ online advertising has on consumers’ interest in a film by passively measuring their Internet activity. Mathematical analysis of this activity can be used to predict box-office results.

To download the full 20-page report, including exclusive data and insights from comScore and MediaMind, click here.

As we dip our toes into the new financial year, we reflect on how digital land fared in the first six months of the calendar year and what lies ahead.

The Good

The online ad market grew by 17 per cent. Online expenditure for the financial year for 2010 reached nearly $1.5 billion, with the finance sector the biggest spender. As Paul Fisher, CEO of IAB Australia, puts it: “Less than two years ago, many advertisers were asking ‘why should I advertise online?’ Today, the question we hear most is ‘how or where should I advertise online?’”

Hitwise revealed that 49 of the top 50 search terms entered by Australian users into search giant Google were brand names. If you missed Eyeblaster’s research on the effectiveness of a search and display combination for your campaign, click here.

Newspaper circulation went down again – not good news for the print industry, but think of all those users heading online for news content…

The Bad

Political commentary website ‘New Matilda’ is to close its doors in June 25^th, with its editor Marni Cordell citing ‘difficulties in the Australian ad market’. It’s always sad to see the demise of a publication; however New Matilda arrived in an already saturated market (competing with established political titles such as The Punch, The Drum, and The National Times). New Matilda was muscled out due to tough competition – not because of a ‘tight ad market’ (which actually grew by 17 per cent).

App Attack: At the start of the year there were more than 134,000 applications available and every 2.5 minutes another app is born. Unfortunately, according to a study by Pinch Media just 30 per cent of people who buy an iPhone application actually use it the day after it was purchased. Furthermore, after 20 days, less than 5 per cent of those who downloaded an application are actively using it. My advice? Choose mobile websites over apps – they’re cheaper to create, accessible from any phone with an internet browser, and the mobile search engine index, separate from PC search, is basically empty (think of coming up first for all of your keywords in every search).

The Curious

Steve Jobs believes that PC’s are “like trucks”. Well, only in the sense that in the future “they are still going to be around…but only one in x people will need them.” Jobs was speaking about the rise of the portable devices (like the tablet iPad, and mobiles) at the recent D: All Things Digital conference in California.

The Future

Online advertising expenditure is tipped to surpass $2 billion by the end of June.

At the risk of banging the ‘social media’ drum yet again, Facebook topped Google’s Ad Planner list of ‘The 1,000 most-visited sites on the web’. With a phenomenal reach of 35.2 per cent and 540,000,000 unique users, the future of creative on Facebook – and all social media for that matter – is quite exciting.

The National Broadband Network – Faster download speeds? Yes, please. The NBN will begin rolling out from July 2010, with a view to have speeds of 100 megabits per second available to 90 per cent of Australians. For online advertisers, this will mean the scope of interactive and data rich features will widen considerably. This is a very positive thing for the industry at large; many creative ideas can now be translated onto the Australian advertising landscape, and conversion maximising techniques (that are often data heavy, like video) will be easy to deliver to a wider net of consumers.