According to new data from The Nielsen Company, airing an ad both on TV and online greatly increases its effectiveness. In a Nielsen study of direct-to-consumer drug advertising, exposure on TV and online was more than twice as likely to prompt patients to ask their physician about the drug than on TV or internet alone. Compared to consumers who had only seen a TV ad for a specific drug, consumers who had seen both a TV and online ad were 100% more likely to ask their doctor about it.

Consumers who had been exposed to the ad both online and on TV in the last seven days were 157% more likely to ask their doctor about the drug than consumers who had only been exposed online in the last seven days.

Ad Exposure on TV Plus Online (Index vs. 100)   Internet & TV vs. Internet Only (Past 24 Hours) Internet & TV (Past 7 Days) TV & Internet Exposure vs. TV Only Memorability 89 87 100 Brand communication 88 91 103 Intent to ask doctor 212 157 100 Source: The Nielsen Company, July 2010 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.

See more at www.businessinsider.com

CHART OF THE DAY: Time Spent On Yahoo Hits An All-Time Low

Time spent on Yahoo sites hit a new U.S. low in June, according to traffic data released by comScore today. Citi analyst Mark Mahaney compiled the data in a report today and produced the chart below.

Time spent on Google sites (38.9 billion minutes) was greater than Yahoo (38.8 billion minutes) for the first time. As a percentage of total internet time for Q2, Yahoo hit an all-time low, says Mahaney.

Yahoo’s share of time spent was 9.7%. More worrisome than Google passing Yahoo is that Facebook is coming on strong. Facebook’s share of time spent was 8.6% for Q2, which is up from 7.8% in Q1.

See more at www.businessinsider.com

CHART OF THE DAY: Craigslist’s Traffic Crashes Into eBay

Citi analyst Mark Mahaney put out a massive report on Internet stocks today, and this chart showing eBay’s tanking traffic jumped out at us. Mahaney says, “these long-term very negative traffic trends point to the possibility of sustained eBay U.S. Marketplace underperformance going forward.”

See more at www.businessinsider.com

Digital Migration Hurts Traditional Media Revenues More than Expected

Digital Migration Slams Publishing, Radio The annual decline in 2009 revenues in several traditional media categories was more severe than originally forecast, according to PriceWaterhouseCoopers research. Most striking was the decline in out-of-home revenues, which fell approximately 13% in 2009, compared to a forecast of about 7%. In addition, radio revenues declined about 9%, compared to an approximately 7% forecast.

See more at www.marketingcharts.com

Interaction time translates to real-world branding impacts

Online marketers recognize the inadequacy of the clickthrough as an ad performance metric but still rely on it for its simplicity and ease of use. A joint study from comScore and MediaMind (formerly Eyeblaster) gives marketers in the entertainment industry reason to look further, to measures of interaction and dwell time, for a more accurate indication of performance.

See more at www.emarketer.com

CHART OF THE DAY: Only 40% Of Web Ads Use Adobe Flash

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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

The proportion of online retailers with mobile-tailored sites has tripled in the last year but still remains small, according to a new study. In its second annual mobile commerce audit, digital strategy firm Acquity Group found that 12% of the top 500 Internet retailers had sites optimized for mobile phones, up from 4% a year ago. And despite all the buzz around mobile apps, the share of companies with downloadable mobile apps is only 7%, up from 2% last year. Only 5% had both a mobilized site and an app and only 2% had an e-commerce-enabled app. In terms of specific devices, 11% had apps for the iPhone — up from 1% last year — but few had ones geared to other smartphone platforms such as Android, Palm or the BlackBerry. Only 12% of retailers had mobile sites that allowed customers to complete a transaction through checkout on at least one type of smartphone, and only 2% offered apps with check-out capability. Read more at www.mediapost.com

‘Power Eye’ Lets Consumers Know Why That Web Ad Was Sent to Them

First Trial of What Some Hope Will Become Online Ad Industry’s Long-Promised Self-Policing System

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Starting this week, AT&T, American Express, Microsoft and dozens of other major marketers will pull the veil off their web ads and show consumers what’s inside.

It’s the first trial of what some hope will become the online ad industry’s long-promised self-policing system designed to stave off the growing forces for regulation in Washington, as well as give consumers more control over how they are targeted by advertisers.

The system, deployed by a start-up called Better Advertising, will place an icon in the upper right-hand corner of the ads that looks like a cross between an eye and power button called the ”power eye.” Consumers who mouse over the icon will get a view of all the data that was used to target the ad, as well as the option to opt-out of future targeting by those companies. Read more at adage.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

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

The “2010 Digital Marketing Outlook” report found that 81% of the brand executives surveyed expected an increase in digital projects in 2010, and one-half will be moving dollars from traditional to digital budgets. Further, more than three-quarters think the current economy will push more allocations to digital.

Senior marketers reported that social networks and applications were their biggest priority for 2010, followed closely by digital infrastructure. While social media marketing looks set to stay top of mind, a majority of respondents considered a range of digital activities at least “important,” with only games failing to inspire widespread interest.

See more at www.emarketer.com

See more at www.marketingcharts.com

Search engines played a bigger role in online viewing than social media, as did TV ads and stories and reviews on both the Internet and TV. Internet reviews had about twice as much influence on online video viewing versus television viewing.

Knowledge Networks also found that 56% of online streamers of full-length TV programs or movies are viewing “purposefully”—that is, heading to the computer with the intent to watch something specific. That’s somewhat higher than the proportion of TV watchers, at 44%. Just 22% of online amateur-content streamers are purposeful viewers. Read more at www.emarketer.com

ccording to an August 2009 survey by Mzinga and Babson Executive Education, 86% of professionals in a variety fields said that they have adopted social media in some way. While the survey results are great in that they indicate an enhanced role social media in many industries, it also indicated that some professionals or companies are adopting social technologies without having a way to actually measure how effective or useful the measures actually are. In fact, 84% of respondents said they don’t currently measure the ROI (return on investment) of their social media programs.

Even less encouraging, more than 40% of respondents said they didn’t even know whether they could track ROI from their social tools. This is worrisome because it indicates that industries and professionals are adopting technology without actually taking into account how it will impact their business and what value it will add. Read more at mashable.com