Ad Contrarian Bails Out Facebook

As you probably know, Facebook announced their earnings yesterday and the men in the grey suits on Wall Street were not happy. Shares in Facebook dropped 10% in after-hours trading after falling 8.5% earlier in the day. Facebook shares were already selling for less than a toasted raisin bagel with light cream cheese, so this was not a good thing.

One thing we don't want is for the men in grey suits to get angry at us again. Remember when they did that in 2008 and took away all our money and give it to General Motors? So here at The Ad Contrarian Global Headquarters we knew we had to do something.

We called an emergency meeting of the executive board of The Ad Contrarian Foundation and the board voted to donate $250 to Facebook.

Here's what we're doing. We have produced an ad to appear on Facebook. It's about our semi-brilliant, not-quite-best-seller 101 Contrarian Ideas About Advertising. The ad is guaranteed to have a negative ROI because the cost-per-click I brilliantly negotiated is higher than the profit I make on each sale. So even if every click results in a sale, I still lose my ass. Pretty slick, huh?

But you know what? That creepy Zuckerberg kid needs the money more than I do.

Now here's the fun part. As you read here earlier this week, banner ads with nothing in them -- blank ads -- outperformed Facebook ads in a research experiment. So I got together with the president of my agency (the lovely and annoying Sharon Krinsky) and we decided to do another experiment. What if we produced ads that were less than nothing. What if we insulted and ridiculed our target audience? How would those ads perform?

We decided the target audience for the ads should be people who bought Facebook stock --  if they are stupid enough to buy that, they'll buy anything.

Then we needed a headline that would be nice and insulting. But here's the hard part. In a Facebook headline you're not allowed more than 25 characters. We struggled over this one for almost 15 minutes (twice as long as the average creative team spends on a Facebook ad.) Finally it came to us. The headline is Click Here Sucker! We felt that the exclamation mark added that certain amateur quality that makes online advertising so appealing.

Then we needed to write some body copy that in 90 characters appeared momentarily earnest but ended in ridicule. Here's what we came up with: "101 Contrarian Ideas About Advertising" A must read for anyone in marketing or jail.

We are not looking forward to pissing away $250 dollars, but we are proud to have helped our friends at Facebook. They have provided us with mountains of fun-packed material. It's the least we can do.

Remember, every time you click on this ad, it costs me money.

We'll report back with results.

Social Media And The Olympic Games

The great Dave Trott turned me on to a truly wonderful social media video about the London Olympics. First take a look at it, then we'll talk.



You watch this and you say to yourself, is she serious? Then a question creeps into your mind. Is she really a social media person or is it a spoof?

One of the characteristics of great satire is that it straddles the line between reality and comedy.

One of the characteristics of social media "experts" is that they, too, straddle the line between reality and comedy.

Is this satire or social media?

The correct answer is, it's a spoof. But what a convincing one.

Dead Air More Effective Than Facebook Ads

The broadcast industry has a term called "dead air." It occurs when there's a mistake or a technical glitch that results in no audio on radio, or no picture on a TV screen. A blank TV screen is "dead air."

In an absolutely astounding experiment, the banner advertising equivalent of dead air -- a blank display ad -- performed better than the average Facebook ad; twice as good as the average "branding" display ad; and only one click in ten thousand worse than the average of all display ads.

Here are the details.

AdAge this week has a piece called How Blank Display Ads Managed to Tot Up Some Impressive Numbers. The article was written by Ted McConnell, exec VP-digital for the Advertising Research Foundation.

Ted and a few friends (an astrophysicist from an online analytics firm, a measurement expert from the Advertising Research Foundation, and an ad-platform wizard from a buying and optimization company) decided to do an experiment. The experiment was designed to discover how much clicking of banner advertising was actual engagement with the ad, and how much was just noise -- people clicking for no reason.

To do this they created a unique ad -- an ad with no message. A blank. According to McConnell...

"We created six blank ads in three IAB standard sizes, and two colors, white and orange. We trafficked the ads via a demand-side platform (DSP) with a low bid. We started with run of exchange, and in another phase trafficked to "named publishers" that would accept unaudited copy." 

Here are the results:

• The click-through rate on the blank ads was .08%. According to published reports, the click-through rate on the average Facebook ad is about .05%. The blank ad performed 60% better.

• The click through rate for the blank ad was about double the average click-through rate for a "branding" display ad (an ad without an offer.)

• The click-through rate on the average banner ad is .09%. This means the blank ad drew one click in ten thousand fewer than an average banner ad.

• About .04% of the clicks were mistakes. Since the average click-through rate for display ads is .09%, this indicates that it is possible that as much as 44% of banner ad clicks are mistakes.

The astounding thing is that with all the data Facebook is collecting, all the geniuses we have analyzing display ad results, all the space-age targeting we are constantly being beaten over the head with, and all the young creative prodigies lecturing us on the magic of online advertising, empty ads outperformed our online geniuses.

You simply cannot make this shit up.


Thanks to Tom Donald for alerting me to this story.