The ‘Net: Soon to Be the UK’s Most Complained-About Ad Medium

It’s generally a point of pride to be the best at something, unless you’re the best at being the most annoying ad medium — a crown the Internet is set to seize off the trite curlicued head of television.

The UK’s Advertising Standards Authority, which is responsible for investigating and acting on complaints about ad content, notes a 25% year-over-year increase on the total number of complaints about UK advertising overall in 2011. But complaints about digital campaigns that same year grew 282% alone, totaling over 10,000 out of what was already a record of 31,458 gripes. The number of consumers also leaped dramatically, to 300% year-over-year (totaling 9,295).

TV — traditionally the most complained-about medium — enjoyed a 20% decline in complaints last year, totaling 11,245 for 5,556 commercials.

The ASA attributes the internet ad complaint surge with its decision to include marketing messages on media owners’ own websites as fair game for investigation. Soft drink makers and food brands were evidently big offenders.

Reasons for complaint are generally the perceived misleading nature of the ad. In non-broadcast media (including the Internet) this category of complaints doubled to 14,833, compared with a drop of 9% in the total number of complaints about misleading TV and radio ads.

The most offensive sectors included holidays and travel (double the complaint figures), retail (rising 98% and becoming the second most complained-about sector), computers and telecoms (a 70% rise) and health and beauty (87%).

But a more significant area of concern for the ASA is the doubling of complaints for ads perceived as “harmful”. Numbers in non-broadcast advertising rose to 984, and doubled to 2,154 in broadcast media.

Bringing Up Baby … via iPad

Courtesy of: Schools.com

A powerful broadcast tool that we don’t even consider “media” is our educational system. You know, that place you go to that’s a lot like TV, except you’re just watching one person (or several) quote things to you out of a book. Then you read that book, then you take tests.

Most of us will agree that this procedure is neither stimulating nor nurturing. It’s actually just cheap baby-sitting, coupled with maths and a few useful dates.

Technology to the rescue! A survey conducted in Maine, quoted to us by Schools.com, finds that kindergartners who used iPads in the classroom scored better on a literacy test than those who didn’t.

Well and good, you say, but what does that actually prove?

Studies have also shown that the ‘net has been great for literacy in general, and that iPads especially have been useful in breaking educational barriers with autistic children.

But look at this less as evidence than as promise. The iPad is one of those powerful tools that children pick up and can almost instantly just use. They watch films, interact with stories and play games with them, mainly.

It’s this tactile quality we care about: they’re actually interacting in a physical way with content. The act of doing versus just listening is actually better for learning everything from the simple rules of grammar to reasoning skills to decision-making to complex systems — one reason why interactive educational games are so powerful. 

If you happen to be poking around for good iPad apps for kids, they’re easy to find (and many are free). Best Apps for Kids has great ones for preschoolers; and The Guardian’s Apps Rush (run by our own Stuart Dredge!) provides a weekly recap of brand-new apps, including fun ones for children.

I remain a big fan of Draw Something, which enables me to engage with my nieces and nephews from afar while we exercise our spacial logic and artistic savvy. (They’re usually stronger at both.)

Three Years of Kickstarter Projects

Since its birth on April 28, 2009, over 50,000 projects have appeared on Kickstarter for financing across nearly all creative sectors. Around half have successfully reached their fundraising goals.

The New York Times has published a beautiful series of charts divided by sector: Film/Video, Music, Design, Games, Publishing, Art, Technology, Theater, Food, and Comics. The charts are headed by the total amount of money each sector has raised. Film/Video has raised the most, with $60 million. Music follows with $38 million.

For your skimming pleasure we’ve attached charts of epic, fully-funded Kickstarter projects for the following sectors: Fashion, Film/Video, Games, Music, Publishing and Tech. Also read the accompanying NYT article about crowdfunded startups, as well as an article about our own favourite Kickstarter project, the Pebble smartwatch.

From a sought-after $100,000, the Pebble founders have raised over $7 million — the fruit of a great video, a well-designed product worth covering, and an exceptionally well-structured Pledge Backing rewards system, several of which are already sold out.

The ‘Net: Tough on Publishing, Great for Literacy

“Remember the good old days when everyone read really good books, like, maybe in the post-war years when everyone appreciated a good use of the semi-colon? Everyone’s favorite book was by Faulkner or Woolf or Roth. We were a civilized civilization. This was before the Internet and cable television, and so people had these, like, wholly different desires and attention spans. They just craved, craved, craved the erudition and cultivation of our literary kings and queens.”

It turns out this is a total misconception. Gallup surveys find that despite — or because of — insta-publishing and our now endless media options, people are actually reading more, not fewer, books. (That Amazon’s now punting more Kindle books than real ones is great evidence-in-action.)

3/4 of Online Video Buyers are Planning TV + Online Video Pushes Together

Digiday’s just held its semi-annual poll of digital agencies, brands, publishers and ad networks or intermediaries that comprise the marketplace for online advertising. 48% of advertisers and agencies are already planning TV and video in tandem; 25% will do so in the next 12 months.

In short, nearly 3/4 of all online video buyers are planning unified TV and interactive video pushes for this time next year.

Asked what medium online video should be most aligned with, TV was the overwhelming response. And fewer and fewer people think of online video as a replacement for TV: 2/3rds of respondents (62%) said their use of online video will be a complement to TV, rather than a replacement.

However, only 20% of advertisers expect to buy video ads “at an upfront” this year. For 54% of them, upfront video ad buys will compose less than 5% of their total 2012 buys, down 10% from 2011.

Finally, 2/3rds of buyers say that unified measurement is the key factor needed to link TV and online video. An illustration of how complicated this could be: Brands are increasingly united in calling “brand engagement” their primary campaign engagement (73% of respondents). And while both advertisers and agencies agree that the best metric of success is “brand lift”, the two remain divided about the importance of click-throughs.

8.3B Video Ads Viewed in March; Machinima Scores Highest Engagement Among YouTube Partners

comScore’s released its latest online video rankings report, which appears to bode well for major media players pushing content online. Over 83.5% of the US internet audience saw online video of some kind, the average duration of which was 6.4 minutes. Online video ads averaged about 0.4 minutes.

Video ads made up 18.5 percent of all videos viewed and 1.5 percent of all minutes spent viewing video online.

Note that in the chart above, VEVO — which pushes mostly music videos in selected countries — ranks fourth, while Viacom comes up sixth.

The average viewer watched about 21.7 hours of online video content in March, with Google Sites (7.1 hours) and Hulu (4.6 hours) posting the highest average engagement of the top ten properties.

People also watched over 8.3 billion video ads, an all-time high. Hulu delivered record views: 1.7 billion, followed by Google Sites (1.2 billion) and BrightRoll (953 million).

Video ads hit about 51% of the total US population. Hulu delivered the highest frequency of video ads to viewers, averaging 51 per person, while ESPN managed to push 26 ads on average to each viewer.

Of partner channels, VEVO (49.1 million viewers) and Warner Music (30.3 million viewers) remained in the top two. Gaming channel Machinima came in third with 22.9 million viewers, followed by Makers Studios and FullScreen, which scored 14.6 million and 12 million, respectively.

Of the top 10 YouTube partners, however, Machinima showed the highest engagement (69 minutes per viewer), followed by VEVO (62.5 minutes). 

A November 2011 study by the e-tailing group and Invodo finds that US consumers who see product videos on websites watch them 60% of the time. 36% of respondents also say they’ve watched five or more product videos on brand/retail sites over the last three months.

Fully 85% of those polled said they’d watch a video that educated them about a product of interest for at least a minute; 87% would spend the same amount of time watching a video that included a demo. But the percentage of users willing to watch a video that lacked a demo dropped to 65%.

Overall findings of the survey: Useful content = repeat viewings.