New Florence. New Renaissance.

It's an ad, ad, ad, ad world

For all the talk about digital advertising, it is only now catching up to global spending on traditional TV, radio, newspaper, billboard and other advertising as the chart below shows.

However,  as Fortune reports:

It’s boom times for YouTube and its creators. The Google-owned service, bought for just $1.65 billion in 2005, reported ad revenue of $20 billion last year (plus what analysts say are billions of dollars more from subscriptions to products like YouTube Premium, the financial details of which the company doesn’t disclose). Some context: If YouTube were a stand-alone entity, that would make it the world’s fourth-largest seller of digital ads, after its parent company, Alphabet, Facebook, and Amazon. But what really has Wall Street salivating is the question of just how big it might get. YouTube’s 2020 revenue was up 31% from 2019, compared with a 12.8% increase for its parent, Alphabet.

More on YouTube's impact

Product placement in the streaming era

Hiram Lodge, the manipulative crime lord who targets the fictional town of Riverdale, sits back in his office chair. After plotting his latest scheme with a cohort over submarine sandwiches, he takes a bite of a Doritos chip, holding the bag in clear view of the camera while looking away pensively.

Frito-Lay, which got the snack on the CW Network's teen drama Riverdale with the help of the No.1 product placement company BEN, hopes audiences noticed enough to crave their own bag of Doritos, but not so much that they became annoyed. That's the delicate balance companies strike when using product placement, which is becoming an even more popular form of advertising thanks to factors including increasingly sophisticated data collection and the rise of streaming and mobile video.

BusinessWeek (sub required)

 

Super Bowl Commercials Preview

Let's face it - commercials are often the most enjoyable part of the Big Game.

AdAge has been keeping updated all the commercials released ahead of this year's game.

There is plenty of nostalgia - Wayne's World, John Travolta, Michael Jordan, Jason Alexander, Shaggy and many others come back to life

Too bad, missing this year are the Anheuser-Busch Clydesdales.

Hey, at $5.5 million for every 30 second spot, it is impressive that more aren't missing it - the national ad inventory "virtually sold out" given we are in the middle of a pandemic and a recession.

BTW - here is a montage of teasers from the commercials

The Clydesdales - not just for the Super Bowl

The Budweiser Clydesdales commercials are usually a hit even in the line up which wows every Super Bowl. MarketingDive is keeping track of all the ads likely to be on the game on Sunday and not sure if the Clydesdales will feature this year.

 

However, my town has no reason to whine. Last week, in the run up to our annual Gasparilla Pirate invasion, the horses graced several events courtesy of https://pepindistributing.com/world-famous-budweiser-clydesdales-to-appear-in-tampa-for-gasparilla-pirate-fest/ which also provided some fun facts about the horses

 

“Canadians of Scottish descent brought the first Clydesdales to America in the mid-1800’s. Today, the giant draft horses are used primarily for breeding and show.

Horses chosen for the Budweiser Clydesdale hitch must be at least three years of age, stand approximately 18 hands – or six feet – at the shoulder, weigh an average of 2,000 pounds, must be bay in color, have four white legs, and a blaze of white on the face and black mane and tail.  A gentle temperament is very important as hitch horses meet millions of people each year.

A single Clydesdale hitch horse will consume as much as 20-25 quarts of feed, 40-50 pounds of hay and 30 gallons of water per day. Each hitch travels with a Dalmatian.  In the early days of brewing, Dalmatians were bred and trained to protect the horses and guard the wagon when the driver went inside to make deliveries.”

BTW, this Budweiser Clydesdale commercial was one of the highest rated ever

 

 

 

 

 

Sent from my iPad

NBCUniversal's One advertising platform

In its biggest step yet to streamline advertising buys across all of its various platforms, NBCUniversal will soon unite its linear and digital inventory via a single tool.

The new offering, One Platform, will enable NBCUniversal to sell its ad inventory across all screens, the company said Tuesday at CES. Previously, it used separate tools to transact linear and digital advertising.

It will take NBCU three years to complete the new platform, but the company said an iteration of One Platform will be up and running in time for this year’s upfront.

Adweek

 

Ikea and Noto typeface

Noto is considered the most universal typeface in existence. That’s because computers don’t necessarily recognize all glyphs, particularly in less common languages that have their own scripts. If your computer doesn’t recognize a letter, it will render the glyph as a box, which is called a Tofu in the typeface biz. Noto is short for “No Tofu,” providing visual representations of every letter of all of the 800 languages. It’s part of Google’s goal to make a font available for every language that is considered a script by Unicode, the consortium that creates standards for computers.

Given that in the last year Ikea opened its first store in India, where there are 22 national recognized regional languages, to go along with stores across Asia where conventional Western typefaces don’t work as well, it makes sense that the company wants to use a font that will support a broader range of languages.

Fast Company

 

 

 

BA "Look Up" Magic

I am headed to UK next and hope to see one of these billboards in London (they are not that new, but I have not been to London in a few years).

"The charming execution, which featured adorable children on the digital boards pointing at overhead planes, masked a technologically complex backend. It involved mounting an antennae on the roof of a building near each board. The antennae picked up data from the transponders of British Airways aircrafts within 200 kilometers and fed that information into to an application that identified the flights. The application then sent the information to a server that served the messages about the plane's destination or origination. A "trigger zone" acted as a trip wire to determine when a plane should instigate a message and cloud altitude data determined if the plane could actually be seen."

 

 

Digital Marketing Data Nuggets

Spending on digital media surpassed television ads in 2017, and now global digital spend is anticipated to top $333 billion this year.

Thanks to Tamas Hevizi for pointer to the infographic from Visual Capitalist. Here are some nuggets

 

• Search:
  The top five search results for a keyword on Google get 70% of the clicks.
• Social media:
  80% of B2B leads come in through LinkedIn vs. 13% on Twitter and 7% on Facebook.
• Video marketing:
  Video will represent 82% of all internet traffic by 2021.
• Cold email marketing:
  Emails sent between 10-11am have the highest open rates. Tuesday is the best day to send cold emails.
• Paid advertising:
  The mobile ad blocking rate has increased 90% year-over-year.
• Lead generation:
  61% of marketers say generating traffic and leads is their top challenge.
• Content marketing:
  47% of buyers viewed 3-5 pieces of content before engaging with a sales rep.

 

 

 

 

Orbital Ads

Oh no, you may say, but they are headed our way. From Slate

"Since Sputnik 1 was launched in 1957, satellites have been a mostly invisible part of our daily lives, allowing us to make phone calls, monitor the weather, and map our locations. We can sometimes catch them in the night sky, but they’re hard to spot, even if you’re looking for them. Satellites like StartRocket’s Orbital Display are meant to be watched, and as satellites are becoming easier to launch, our skies could become the biggest screen of all.

StartRocket isn’t alone in the for-profit entertainment satellite game. ALE is the Japanese startup behind Sky Canvas, a project to launch a series of satellites that release shooting stars on demand—“a whole new level of entertainment,” its website boasts. Its first show will take place over Hiroshima in spring 2020."

 

The new subliminal ad?

ASMR or "autonomous sensory meridian response,” is a meditative phenomenon that's surging in popularity, It describes a tingling sensation some people experience in the scalp and spine when hearing certain everyday tactile sounds recorded in a quiet repetitive, scratchy and often lightly percussive manner.

Crinkling a newspaper. Spraying a water bottle. Typing on a keyboard. Stirring macaroni and cheese. Whispering into a microphone. Tapping literally anything.

Millions of people these days watch or listen to videos of strangers performing these mundane actions. They say they’re mesmerized. They say it relaxes them and even helps them doze off during restless times.

WSJ (sub required)

you probably saw this Michelob ad during the Super Bowl

and this Pepsi one shows it can distract as much as help concentrate