For every online display campaign, advertisers must decide what ad formats to use for best results. To help, DoubleClick teamed up with Dynamic Logic to study the impact of ad format selection on branding goals. In the joint report titled "The Brand Value of Rich Media and Video Ads," we compare the branding strengths of four common display advertising formats:

• Image - GIF or JPG ads
• Simple Flash - Ads with a short animation and single click-through link
• Rich Media with Video - Ads capable of responding to user interaction, such as mouseovers, keyboard inputs, or clicks without a click-through, that also contain video
• Rich Media without Video - Ads capable of responding to user interaction, such as mouseovers, keyboard inputs, or clicks without a click-through, that do not contain video

The report provides detailed information on how each of these formats impacts aided brand awareness, online ad awareness, message association, brand favorability and purchase intent. For example, study findings show that, on average:

• Rich Media formats are the most successful at driving purchase intent
• Rich Media without Video is unique among the formats in its ability to positively impact all five brand metrics
• Simple Flash is the least effective of the ad formats studied
• For brand favorability, aided brand awareness and purchase intent metrics, Rich Media with Video provides a statistically significant improvement over Simple Flash at a 90% confidence level

The report concludes with a cheat sheet to help guide your ad format decisions and suggests best practices for achieving branding goals.

Download the PDF report here for free, no registration required.

Advertisers and agencies who work on display ad campaigns often wonder "How do I know if my display ad campaigns are doing well?" and "What credible benchmarks can I use to compare the results on my current campaign?"

Some might rely on past campaign performance metrics while others might compare across multiple campaigns and advertisers within their client roster. All are fine means in the absence of larger, more comprehensive industry benchmarks.

This is why we're particularly pleased to make available DoubleClick benchmarks so that marketers, agencies, and publishers have a reference by which to evaluate the performance of online display advertising campaigns in the U.S., relative to industry norms.

These benchmarks are derived from a robust data set across DART for Advertisers, based on rigorous methodology with input from the Advertising Research Foundation. Benchmarks in this report cover those for 2008 and transect ad format, ad size, and industry vertical. The benchmarks are normalized across hundreds of advertisers, thousands of campaigns, and tens of billions of ad impressions.

You can download the report here. More in-depth benchmarks by industry are available exclusively to DoubleClick clients so contact your account manager to discuss further.

If you're interested in learning more you can attend our webinar, "Benchmarking Ahead: IAB Reveals the DoubleClick Benchmarks Report," co-hosted with the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) on June 24th at 12pm EST. Register here for the webinar.

Today, Tessa Wegert contributed an article to The ClickZ Network that perfectly sums up our new "Creative Insights on Rich Media" report. Check out her article here, then download the report.

Among the report's main takeaways:

• Consider using video within rich media units when performance goals include click-through rate, expansion rate or expanding time
• More specifically, consider using in-page video when performance goals include interaction rate or video complete rate
• Additionally, consider larger creative sizes when performance goals include click-through rate or interaction rate

Thanks for the mention, Tessa!

On January 23rd, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), along with the Media Ratings Council (MRC), will be hosting a webinar that will take you through the recently released Rich Media Measurement Guidelines. DoubleClick has been heavily involved in this project from its outset and are big supporters of the IAB and their leadership role on measurement. In the webinar, George Ivie of the IAB and MRC will present learnings on the point at which rich media advertising impressions should be counted. Attendance is free, simply register in advance here.

Webinar: IAB Rich Media Measurement Guidelines Webinar
Date: January 23rd, 2008
Time: 4:00 - 5:00 EST

This webinar is for anyone whose company hosts, sells or serves internet advertising and is especially relevant to clients of DoubleClick Rich Media, as our metrics our both IAB-compliant and MRC certified. In related new, read about our most recent accreditation.

So, yesterday was Cyber Monday. Next Monday will also be Cyber Monday and so will the Monday after that and the one after that. The big story about Cyber Monday this year seems to be how not big Cyber Monday is when considered with the entire holiday shopping season. At DoubleClick Performics, we've been emphasizing that every Monday between Thanksgiving and Christmas is, in fact, a Cyber Monday.

We recently issued a news release highlighting what we consider to be the holiday shopping seasonal arc. DoubleClick Performics has found that, although weekend online sales might be slow, they pick up on Mondays when people return to work and research the items they didn’t purchase over the weekend. As the week progresses, consumers turn back to search and arm themselves with product information for weekend shopping.

Retailers however, have certainly gotten on board with this first Cyber Monday of the season and looking around it appears as though "Free Shipping" is the incentive of the day or a "Cyber Monday Sale" on specific products. It's fantastic to see retailers using Cyber Monday as online promotional fodder, but what can be done in the next few weeks as we approach Christmas?

While reviewing some of the press coverage on Cyber Monday this year, I stumbled upon a non-scientific CNN Money poll that stated 39% of respondents (at the time of this writing) plan to do most of their holiday shopping online. Add the 7% who plan to do all their shopping online and we've got almost half looking to do most or all their shopping online.

Most of these people probably did not complete their holiday shopping yesterday. If they are anything like me, they are waiting till the (almost) last minute. We encourage our retail clients to manage their budgets accordingly and prepare for the weekly and overall arc that takes place during the holiday season: allocate a larger budget in early December, don't set your caps too low, and adapt copy for to each phase of the season; early in the season focus on research, price and selection and late in the season focus on closing the sale as well as shipping/delivery issues.

Sales, so far, appear to be steady in spite of greater economic concerns. The jury is still out but search certainly remains a dynamic marketing vehicle that consumers continue to turn towards.
Alright, anyone for Cyber Tuesday? Wait! I mean, get back to work!

In the last month-plus, I’ve been lucky to participate in two conferences that are worth commenting on – and shortlisting for your potential attendance next year.

In early October, I participated in Forrester Research’s 2007 Consumer Forum. The agenda focused heavily on social media and potential applications for marketers and advertisers. I was particularly intrigued and inspired by Josh Bernoff’s call for a strategic approach to social media, Richard Edelman’s perspective on the role of corporate communications in the Web 2.0 world, and Henry Jenkins’s comments on convergence culture. Luckily, Forrester is offering online video segments from the event, so you can explore some of the ideas yourself.

More recently, I spoke at the 2007 Word of Mouth Research Symposium, which was hosted by the Word of Mouth Marketing Association. While there, I presented our report Influencing the Influencers, and I sat in on most of the other sessions over the course of the day.

Of special interest was “Measuring the Ripple: Creating the G2X Relay Rate and an Industry Standard Methodology to Measure the Spread of WOM Coversations and Marketing," which was presented by Matt McGlinn of BzzAgent and Dr. Walter Carl of ChatThreads. They’ve gone far to calculate the iterative effect of word-of-mouth marketing campaigns. I was also impressed by “The Effects of Word of Mouth: An Agent-Based Simulation of Interpersonal Influence in Social Networks,” which was presented by Dejan Duzevik, a complexity scientist at Icosystem. By modeling various marketing activities, you can gauge the potential impact of word of mouth.

While I wasn’t able to stay in Las Vegas for the following WOMMA Summit, I got several ideas while at the research symposium and spent quality time with peers in the industry – some of whom I’ve known for years but never met. If you’re interested in word-of-mouth marketing, the state of the research backing it up improves every year.

If you're heading to Vegas next week for the Word of Mouth Marketing Association's Word of Mouth Marketing Summit, be sure to check out Heath Row, DoubleClick's research manager speaking at the Research Symposium on Tuesday about Influencing the Influencer: How Online Advertising and Media Impact Word of Mouth. It's based on a popular research paper of ours by the same name.

Heath's one of DoubleClick's best public speakers. He's also fun to schmooze with, if you get a chance, a former journalist of many years for Fast Company magazine and an avid blogger in his own right. We'll make sure he gives a quick write-up of the event when he gets back.