The economy may have come back from the brink, but demand for digital coupons appears to be picking up steam, according to new data released by Coupons.com. The company said savings from coupons printed out or loaded to a loyalty card from its online properties doubled to more than $1 billion from $529 million a year ago. The value of savings in June alone hit $110 million, the highest total to date for any single month via Coupons.com. That increase has come despite traffic to the site actually dropping in the last year from 18.2 million monthly visitors to 14.5 million. Read more at www.mediapost.com

Apparently, in-text advertisements, those seemingly annoying little ads that pop up when someone moves a cursor over a hot-linked piece of text in an article, can create impactful campaigns. According to a comScore study, Kontera’s in-text targeted ads delivered five times greater brand awareness than traditional display ads, and twice as much lift in brand purchase intent.

The study suggests 34% of consumers strongly felt Kontera in-text ads “clutter the page,” compared with 61% for interstitials, 52% for video ads, 45% for rectangle ads, and 36% for banners.

Twenty-one percent of consumers strongly agreed the in-text ads are “related to content,” compared with 14% for rectangle ads, 14% for interstitials, 10% for video, 15% for Google text ads, and 11% for banners.

Thirty three percent say in-text ads a less intrusive ad format, compared with 40% for rectangle ads, 53% for video ads, 63% for interstitial ads, and 29% for banners. Read more at www.mediapost.com

CHART OF THE DAY: Microsoft’s Head Of Sales Blames Facebook For Low Online Ad Prices

Social networks, with their massive inventory of page views, have much lower ad rates on a cost per thousand impressions (CPM) basis than the Internet at large. ComScore reports that Facebook and MySpace only get a $0.56 CPM on average, while the Internet at large gets $2.43.

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Top Display Advertising Site Categories (April 2010 Total U.S. Home & Work Locations) Publisher Total Display Ad Impressions (MM) Share of Impressions Estimated Spending ($ 000) Cost per Thousand Impressions (CPM) Total Internet Audience 354,636 100.0% 893,681 $2.52 Social Networking 98,176 27.7% 54,684 $0.56 Portals 69,664 19.6% 181,266 $2.60 Entertainment 38,104 10.7% 181,147 $4.75 e-mail 34,327 9.7% 32,370 $0.94 Community 15,884 4.5% 33,435 $2.10 General News 12,542 3.5% 77,055 $6.14 Sports 10,850 3.1% 68,214 $6.29 Newspapers 8,506 2.4% 59,441 $6.99 Online Gaming 7,929 2.2% 21,234 $2.68 Photos 7,391 2.1% 7,953 $1.08 Source: comScore Ad Metrix, June 2010 Read more at www.mediapost.com

Many social media marketers are eager to tie a hard number to the value of their efforts. To that end, firms have attempted to analyze the worth of fans and followers on social networking sites like Facebook.

Digital consulting firm Syncapse and research company Hotspex have come up with an empirical formula that puts an average value of $136.38 on the Facebook fans of the site’s 20 biggest corporate brands. Most of that value comes from how much the fans will spend on the brand’s products, with additional dollars coming from customer loyalty, recommendations and earned media.

The study found that people spent significantly more on products they were fans of, compared with consumers who were not fans. In the case of many of Facebook’s most popular food and beverage marketers, fan spending was more than double that of non-fans.

The pattern of increased fan spending held across all of the top 20 brands on Facebook, with differences ranging from 51% for Oreo fans to 168% for fans of Nokia. Read more at www.emarketer.com

Data released by MediaMind show that for every 1,000 ads, users engage in 70 rich media impressions — but only click on three. That means nearly 95 percent of impressions that users engage with are never clicked. This confirms that advertisers must bring the experience to the user, rather than have the users seek it out on their own. Read more at www.imediaconnection.com

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Facebook served 16% of all display ads in Q1 of this year, according to comScore, making it the largest online display ad publisher in the US—handily beating #2 Yahoo, reports ClickZ.

Facebook’s growth is impressive whether compared to its Q4 numbers or Yahoo’s numbers. In Q1, Yahoo’s properties saw 132B impressions (12.1% of all online display ad impressions). In Q4, Facebook served about 115B impressions. In Q1 of this year, Facebook served a whopping 176B impressions: a 53% increase over its previous quarter. (Yahoo saw a slight decrease from Q4: down from 140B impressions, or 6%, and all other major ad players also saw declines.)

Last year in Q1, Facebook served 70B ad impressions, which means they increased their ad impressions by over 150% YOY. Read more at www.marketingpilgrim.com

While ad networks and other collective buying channels continue to attract media buyers, the majority still prefer buying by the site, according to a new report from research firm Advertiser Perceptions, which was commissioned by ad network and technology provider Collective Media.

A full 52% of respondents indicated they would increase spending on content sites — such as ESPN and WebMD — this year.

What’s more, nearly half — 46% — of respondents reported a site-centric focus, with spending increases limited to vertical content and video sites.

Overall, 34% of respondents indicated that they would increase online ad spending in 2010, with 35% of respondents indicating they would increase spending on ad networks. Large online spenders — those spending $10 million or more — were slightly more likely — 40% — to use ad networks, according to the study. Meanwhile, 46% of respondents indicated they would increase spending on video sites in 2010, while 67% of large spenders would increase spending on video sites. By contrast, just 23% of survey takers said they planned to increase spending on portals this year. Read more at www.mediapost.com

Criticism of behaviorally targeted ads by consumers, privacy advocates and the government has led to uncertainty in the market, which eMarketer expects to reach nearly $1.13 billion this year. Research from the Network Advertising Initiative (NAI) indicates the high value of those ads, for both marketers and publishers.

The study, which looked at ads run on member networks during 2009, showed that among users who clicked on a behaviorally targeted ad, 6.8% converted. That compared with only 2.8% of those who clicked on a run-of-network ad. Clickers found behavioral ads more relevant, but the NAI did not study how likely they were to click in the first place, a key component of effectiveness.

CPM rates were likewise significantly higher for behaviorally targeted ads, with the average price of a behaviorally targeted ad 2.68 times greater than that of a run-of-network ad. Retargeting also provided higher CPMs.

See more at www.emarketer.com

See more at www.emarketer.com

Google Sites accounted for 13.2 billion videos, or almost 40% of total online videos viewed in December 2009.

The top video ad networks in terms of their actual reach delivered were: Tremor Media Video Network with 30.5% penetration of online video viewers, BrightRoll Video Network with 21.7%, and BBE with 21.2%. Read more at www.marketingcharts.com

The preeminent video advertising format — pre-roll — still irritates some consumers, so much so, in fact, that nearly 16 percent of consumers click away from a pre-roll ad rather than sit through it to watch their desired video.

The trend is worse for news media; nearly 25 percent of consumers click away from pre-roll ads on newspaper and magazine websites, according to analytics firm TubeMogul.

What this means, of course, is that 16 percent of consumers would rather not watch a video simply because it contains an advertisement, which isn’t great news for video publishers. Read more at www.imediaconnection.com

ADOTAS – The future of ad networks remains murky, but those who believe they’re about to die in numbers should hold off on digging the mass grave and read Adify’s new survey showing that ad network adoption is up 24% in the last 18 months.

With 216 media planners, interactive marketing directors and agency executives responding to its queries, Adify reports that 69% of media planners and agencies are using ad networks as part of their digital buys, compared to 48% recorded in 2008. In addition, vertical ad networks are increasing in notoriety, with 72% of respondents now familiar with the niche services compared to 56% in 2008. Read more at www.adotas.com

Dotomi announced results from the use of its attribution technology which reiterates the impact strong attribution models can have in driving display or any digital media’s future growth. From the release: “Dotomi found display increased performance by an average of 20 percent in paid search, 26 percent in natural search, 25 percent in affiliate marketing, 16 percent in CRM email and 26 percent in direct load, where the consumer goes directly to the retailer’s website.” Pour on the attribution for display, and it’s full steam ahead! Read the release. Read more at www.adexchanger.com

Nearly half of mobile industry executives and analysts in a new survey expect mobile ad spending to double this year, while almost one-third expect it to grow by 200%. That’s quite a bullish outlook. The survey by mobile consulting and research firm Chetan Sharma on 2010 predictions also covered topics including app stores, tiered pricing and mobile payments. Read more at www.mediapost.com

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In the comScore panel, we are able to see cookies passing between Web sites and panelists’ computers; and we are able to see and identify the different persons using those computers at those points in time. We recently conducted a study across some major online ad sales entities to determine how often the identifying cookie is associated with the behavior of a single user. Across 17 major entities — publishers, ad networks, and third-party services — we found an average of 44% of cookies were associated with a single user. Among the 56% of cookies that point to multiple users, if we assume that the wrong user is identified 50% of the time (which strikes as a conservative assumption), then on average, 28% of the time (half of 56%) the cookie involved in direct audience guarantees is pointing to the wrong person. Read more at www.mediapost.com

According to findings from Alloy Media + Marketing’s 9th annual College Explorer Survey, projected annual technology spending among college students (ages 18-30) has reached an all time high at $6.5 billion, ranking 3rd in overall discretionary spending for college students, just below food and auto. When all platforms were totaled, the study found that students are spending an average of 12 hours daily engaged with some type of media. Nine and a half of those hours are spent with their “tech” gadgets, including computers, mobile devices, MP3 players, and gaming devices. Comparing platforms, the study found: Students are spending twice as much time on their computers as compared to television viewing  33% of 18-24 year old students have increased their consumption of webisodes or user-generated videos since last year, and 30% of 18-30 year olds report frequent video viewing on social networking sites 61% of students are watching movies on computers vs. 76% on their television Read more at www.mediapost.com

SUMMARY: Email has not only been spared the ax that fell heavily on most marketing budget line items, it seems to have actually benefited from the down economy. This boon wasn’t skewed by a few email-reliant sectors, it occurred in every industry participating in our benchmark survey.

See more at www.marketingsherpa.com