Given the number of users who deploy ad-blocking software in their browsers, and the complete blindness to banner ads exhibited by most website users who haven’t bothered to deploy ad blockers, it isn’t surprising that the industry continues to seek a replacement (or at least a supplement) for the standard banner ad.
Sociable Ads, a joint project of @Mashable and @DanZarrella, is aimed at improving online advertising by increasing its sociality:
We wanted to make ads more engaging, more compelling and more, well, sociable — our solution is Sociable Ads.
Their first product is Twitter Brand Sponsorships, an ad vehicle in which the sponsors’ most recent tweet is dynamically pulled from twitter and displayed in a sidebar. The sidebar nicely looks less like a banner ad and more like the kinds of “recent tweets” sidebars many sites use to display their own tweets. Each brand’s twitter username is a link through to their twitter profile, enabling users to quickly follow those of interest:
In the announcement posted on Mashable when they launched, Pete Cashmore argues that this kind of ad vehicle is the first step in the direction of making ads part of the conversation enabled by social media:
Social media is opening up a dialogue between brands and the web community. This is better for brands: it creates passionate, engaged customers who share their good experiences with the world. It’s better for the community, too: we get the opportunity to speak directly to the companies that create the products and services we use.
What about ads? Could they be more sociable as well?
The concept is intriguing, because it substitutes a live, dynamic connection to the brand sponsor in place of the static ad – and helps move brand sponsors closer to the “provide valuable relevant content” model and further away from interruption marketing.
(For more on the concept of syndicating not just contnt but interactions – full dynamic applications that are exposed through third party sites – see our OView solution).
I’d worry, though, about a couple key issues:
- Relevance: How relevant are the brand sponsors buying placement to the content alongside of which the widget gets placed? Initial sponsors at Mashable include @jetblue, @mailchimp, and @redcross. One could argue @jetblue (and now @virginamerica) are reaching frequent travelers and influencers who are likely to be on twitter AND likely to be reading Mashable. But does accepting the format mean accepting that all brands have significant audiences on Twitter?
- Relevance: How relevant is the particular tweet displayed in any given impression against the widget? I know I’d hate to have my own Twitter worth measured by a single tweet, which might be a snippet of conversation out of context, an @ reply, or something that is just completely off topic, depending on which topic the tweet gets put next to. Of course logo twitter accounts are more likely to be focused on a smaller number of topics, but the conversational nature of twitter still gets lost in the view of a single tweet. (A river is not best understood by looking at a glass of water).
- Relevance (like “Location” in Real Estate, relevance is so important it appears multiple times): The sidebar, at least in it’s current incarnation on Mashable, gets lost in a right nav full of other sidebar widgets – doesn’t seem to me that it stands out enough to look relevant to the specific post for the reader.
- Go Away (Often): There’s a great travel agency in Harvard Square whose sign has long proclaimed “Go Away – Often.” Clicking on one of the twitter usernames in the widget takes me off site, to the twitter profile for that user. Why not enable me to follow directly from that page? (Popping a twitter authentication dialogue box, or maybe using OAuth? might be in the works).
- UI nitpicks – why isn’t the brand logo / twitter avatar itself a link? Maybe that should be a link to the profile, with a “follow” button under it?
Is this the future of social advertising, or at least a step in the right direction, or will it become part of the noise of the banner ad space and get tuned out?
