Contextual Advertising and The Long Tail Web Publisher
by Jim Hood
ContextWeb Publisher Advisor
Contextual advertising means different things to different people. In the context of Google AdWords, ContextWeb, Yahoo Publishers Network and so forth, context is a simple as couple of keywords — e.g., mortgage, refinance, interest rate.
The ability to reach consumers who are researching big-buck purchases has put some savvy advertisers on the map. Many of them are small businesses who would never have been able to launch the kind of multi-million-dollar brand-building campaigns that are the lifeblood of the “traditional” advertising agencies.
These agencies and, to a large extent, their clients have trod gingerly in exploring the Internet, at least partly because they are fearful of the kind of sites where their ads will be displayed.
By so doing, they’ve left the field open to enterprising smaller players and missed the opportunity to communicate with consumers at the exact moment when they are trying to buy a car, get a credit card, take a trip, refinance their home or, more recently, find a way out of the “creative” mortgage they fell for the last time they refinanced.
Now, Bank of America might like to think that consumers will be drawn to its site by its flashy animated ads on a few big-name sites, not to mention its print, broadcast and outdoor campaigns. And perhaps they’re right. But I’d wager nearly as many will go first to Bankrate.com, CardRatings.com or ConsumerAffairs.com to read up on the benefits and, yes, pitfalls of various cards.
There’s no question that some of the content on such sites could be perceived as “negative” — balanced, in other words — but is it logical to jump to the conclusion that this means consumers will automatically be turned off to a certain flavor of Visa or MasterCard? Or will they scan both the bad and the good, then click on whichever ad looks like the quickest and easiest way to get the card of their choice?
Our site, ConsumerAffairs.Com, is one of those imagined renegades that strikes immediate terror into the hearts of most time buyers and account executives at the “traditional” ad networks. After all, we may be a child of the Internet but we have no pedigree to speak of. Not quite ten years old, we have no sister print publications, we don’t own television or radio stations and we don’t buy time on “American Idol” or Howard Stern’s morning rants.
But wait, it gets worse. Besides hard-nosed consumer news, our site runs consumer complaints — tens of thousands of them, categorized by company and product type. Why would anyone want to advertise on such a site?
Because it’s a consumer magnet, that’s why. Consumers don’t come to us to find a date for the weekend or to post videos of their dog riding a skateboard. They find us because they’re trying to make a buying decision. No question some of them are angry; they bought something that didn’t work as they expected and they want to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
Does Maytag think consumers who got stuck with a bum dishwasher will just forget about it and fall for whatever clever creative Maytag’s agency cranks out the next time they’re headed for the appliance store?
Time to get real. The Internet’s not going away and neither is consumer empowerment. Ignore it at your peril. Just because consumers like to speak their mind and read what others have to say doesn’t mean they’re going to go back to washing their clothes in a tub or keeping their cash in a shoebox.
Sites that tell both the bad and the good have something called credibility. Our experience is that this presents a prime environment for advertisers.
The exact numbers are confidential, of course, but the click-through rate for contextual-network ads in our credit card section often well exceeds ten percent. The display advertisers in that section tell us the click-through rate from the ads on our site is among the highest they’ve experienced.
This really shouldn’t be surprising. Advertisers in newspapers, magazines and broadcast outlets have long been aware that their ads may appear near editorial content that is just plain unpleasant. Don Imus was the darling of big-name advertisers who apparently had no problem with bathroom jokes and crude racist, sexist innuendo as long as they thought no one was paying attention.
Of course, I might be wrong about all this. My outlook is shaped by a misspent youth in the newspaper and broadcasting business.
I had spent only a few weeks on my first “real” newspaper job, a small Midwestern weekly, when one of our biggest advertisers — a car dealer — came storming in, irate about a I story had written. It said the district attorney was suing him for violating consumer protection laws.
He demanded that the story, even though it was accurate, be “retracted” — as though that would erase it from readers’ minds. My new boss, the publisher, was a woman of substance, intellectual as well as physical. She stomped over to the filing cabinet where advertising contracts were kept, pulled his out, ripped it in half and handed it to him without a word, while pointing towards the door.
You know the rest of this story, of course. The dealer returned a few weeks later, literally with hat in hand. He still wasn’t happy but he didn’t balk at the considerably bulked-up rate the publisher wrote into his new contract.
The district attorney eventually dropped the charges, the car dealer continued selling cars and, as far as I know, is still advertising in the paper.
I think of this every time our advertising director tells me another media buyer blew him off, calling us a “complaint site,” even though we have a staff of award-winning journalists, the only full-time Congressional correspondent exclusively devoted to consumer news and lots of other strong talking points. The other day, one of the larger display networks told me we would be getting only “junk” ads from them because their salesmen were afraid to include us in their line-up.
My answer, of course, was that we would most certainly not be getting junk ads from them. We would not be getting any ads at all from them.
There might not be all that many scrappy Internet publishers out here just yet but our numbers are growing. And guess what? We’re not going away. Consumers are turning to the Internet for news and information and, as the Internet grows up, serious publishers are setting up shop there as well. We’ll provide what good journalism always provides — fair and balanced information that serves our readers. Like it or not, that’s prime territory for smart advertisers.
ConsumerAffairs.Com’s Jim Hood has been a media innovator since he built his first amateur radio transmitter more than 40 years ago. A former broadcast newsman and free lance journalist, Hood directed broadcast operations for The Associated Press and UPI before founding Zapnews, an innovative fax-delivered news service in 1990. After selling Zapnews to the Tribune Company, he worked as a consultant with several Washington public interest groups before founding ConsumerAffairs.Com in 1998. Besides consumer reviews, complaints and compliments, the site’s fast-growing news operation features a bare-knuckles approach to consumer news that is winning it a fair number of friends and enemies.
-- From The ContextWeb Advisors
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