The Advertising Standards Authority is given the power to regulate ads and marketing claims on websites and services like Facebook.
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Advert watchdog gets online power
A BT advert is banned for misleading customers over the speed of the company’s broadband, the advertising watchdog says.
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BT ad banned over broadband claim
Half-year pre-tax profits at WPP, the advertising giant whose clients include Virgin Atlantic, rise 36% as markets improve.
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Ad firm WPP profits rise to £244m
An advert for an animal charity working in Afghanistan has been banned by the advertising watchdog for being “likely to mislead”.
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Animal charity’s Afghan ad banned
Advertising revenue at Facebook is expected to pass the £1bn mark next year for the first time, as rival MySpace is expected to see ad revenues shrink 14%, according to a new report.
Facebook, which has more than 500 million global users, leaving one-time social networking darling MySpace in the shade, is expected to bring in .285bn (£824m) in ad revenue this year.
About 65% of ad revenue is derived from the US market, according to a report from research firm eMarketer. This compares with MySpace, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, which is estimated to be on target to make 7m this year.
Next year Facebook is forecast to hit .76bn (£1.13bn), with a slightly lower 60% coming from the US market, which means Mark Zuckerberg’s brainchild will have seen ad revenues grow by 165% between 2009 and 2011.
MySpace on the other hand is expected to see ad revenues fall 14% between 2010 and 2011 to 7m.
“Brand advertisers are making Facebook a core buy,” said Debra Aho Williamson, a senior analyst at eMarketer. “Ad spending is building quickly and the mass audience is one that marketers cannot ignore any longer.”
Zuckerberg told the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival in June that “it is almost a guarantee” that Facebook will eventually top 1 billion users, with significant room for further growth in countries including Russia, Japan and China.
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Coca-Cola is considering cutting ties with the agency that created a Facebook campaign that parents accused of targeting children by using references to a notorious pornographic movie.
The soft-drinks giant, which has come in for heavy criticism after running a racy Facebook campaign for the Dr Pepper brand, has told the agency that it must stop all advertising work on Coca-Cola brands until a decision is reached on whether to terminate the relationship.
“We have stopped all our ongoing work with [digital agency] Lean Mean Fighting Machine and are currently reviewing our relationship with the agency,” said a spokeswoman for Coca-Cola GB.
The company was forced to pull a Facebook campaign for its Dr Pepper brand, in which users allowed their Facebook status box to be taken over by the company. Users could choose from three levels of “embarrassingness”, and the contract with Facebook stipulated that all content had to be moderated by Coke before going live.
However, the promotion backfired when a Mumsnet user saw her 14-year-old daughter’s Facebook page – or rather the Dr Pepper campaign she had joined – had been updated with a message that made direct reference to a hardcore pornographic film.
Coca-Cola apologised and announced an investigation into its promotion procedures.
It said the offending line had been approved by them, without them realising its true meaning.
Other examples of embarrassing statuses used as part of the promotion included: “Lost my special blankie. How will I go sleepies?”, “What’s wrong with peeing in the shower?” and “Never heard of it described as cute before.”
Coca-Cola is now reviewing its relationship with the agency behind the campaign, Lean Mean Fighting Machine. The move could result in the agency losing one of advertising’s juiciest accounts – a bitter blow, especially as it had just won the digital ad account for Coca-Cola’s Coke Zero brand.
Dr Pepper is no stranger to flirting with social media controversy in its marketing activity, which uses the strapline “What’s the worst that can happen?”. For April Fool’s Day the brand launched a push on Chatroulette featuring a cheerleader.
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A radio advert urging listeners to report suspected terrorists is banned by the advertising watchdog for potentially offending law-abiding people.
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‘Offensive’ anti-terror ad banned
Though they are often cast as distinct business models, advertising and paid content are not necessarily mutually exclusive – or are they?
Observations from Times Newspapers’ digital properties point to two different answers…
In one, The Times is now selling full-page display campaigns in to its iPad app, for which readers pay £9.99 per month. Campaigns spotted by paidContent:UK are for IBM and Lloyds TSB, occupying four pages each in Monday’s third edition. Each includes a video overlay containing the companies’ existing TV ads.
The Financial Times had made its iPad edition free for two initial months thanks to a big headline sponsorship from watchmaker Hublot, but The Times is using iPad to combine both payments and ads, as newspapers do.
Photo by mac morrison on Flickr. Some rights reserved.
Times Newspapers had gone in to its new paid website strategy saying it would continue running ads on the Times and Sunday Times websites despite introducing reader charging. Indeed, its commercial team has promised advertisers “large impactful formats”…
But, in fact, what’s happened is the number of ads has reduced dramatically from when Times Online was freely available. Apart from spots for Virgin Media (NSDQ: VMED) in Sport and Tavarnello wine in Style, display slots in key website sections are so far mostly occupied by promotions for Times services themselves.
In their place, one thing that is clicking increasingly is a new spin on an old kind of sponsorship – paid editorial…
The Times and Sunday Times sites are running a series of sponsored features and site-lets for Accenture, Courvoisier, Alfa Romeo, Chevrolet and ICIS, each apparently the online extension of a recent paid supplement…
But (and this is interesting) these advertorials are not behind the paywall. The Chevrolet campaign, for an outdoorsy new 4×4, even exists on an external domain name from the main Times site altogether, CoolGlamping.co.uk. Meanwhile, the Accenture campaign is actually for a Business news section called Need To Know, which, despite being presented in navigation as content, is also outside the wall.
One theory about The Times’ recent strategic shift is that the whittling down of its audience to a handful of paying customers would default advertisers’ addressable market to a self-selected group of wealthier readers, with a higher inclination to buy stuff. A contrary theory had been that, actually, advertisers just want scale and would hate losing mass appeal…
Whatever; why would advertisers want to restrict viewing of their ads only to paying readers?
The reduction of conventional web display ads from the Times Online days may suggest advertiser concern at the smaller audience – but it may also be possible for The Times to make some of it up with big-hitting sponsorships from premium brands, and by jumping aboard the nascent iPad advertising rush.
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The New York Times Company has returned to growth, reporting a 1.2% year-on-year increase in revenue to 9m in the second quarter.
The publisher’s 21% year-on-year surge in digital advertising revenue helped offset a 6% fall in print ads. It said that after a 3.2% revenue decline in the first quarter, total ad revenue “ended the quarter roughly flat” year on year at 5m.
It added that, based on early third-quarter trading, print advertising revenue is expected to improve further, while digital ads will see growth “in the mid to high teens”. The company said that online ads now account for 26% of total advertising revenues.
However, the 3.2% growth in circulation revenue in the second quarter, which brought in m, will not be maintained in the second half of the year because “we will be cycling past the June 2009 price increases at the New York Times and the Boston Globe and thus expect 3% to 5% declines in circulation revenues in the third quarter”.
“These positive results continued to build on the momentum of the past few quarters as the company was able to increase revenues and decrease operating costs,” said the New York Times Company chief executive, Janet Robinson. “The company is well positioned to thrive in the evolving media marketplace, thanks to the significant progress we are making in reinventing our enterprise.”
Operating profit, excluding factors such as depreciation, severance pay and amortisation, grew 39% year on year to m. However, net income fell by 18% to m for the period.
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Coca-Cola considers dropping agency behind Facebook ‘porn’ campaign
Saturday, August 14th, 2010Times puts some ads outside the wall and on iPad as web display reduces
Tuesday, August 10th, 2010
This article titled “Ad revenue at Facebook expected to pass £1bn next year” was written by Mark Sweney, for guardian.co.uk on Friday 13th August 2010 14.31 UTC