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Throw Out Everything You Know About Ads

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Re: Throw Out Everything You Know About Ads

#31

Post by shawabawa »

RegEx wrote: post #21
jcampbell1 wrote: post #7

Is it just me or did anyone else find the first ad terrible and the second one quite good? I think I have been in the game too long. One of my favorite ads of all time was the stick drawn fat girl with the secret to losing weight. I am sure the person behind that ad has a serious bank account.

> Is it just me or did anyone else find the first ad terrible and the second one quite good? I think I have been in the game too long. Is there some sarcasm I'm missing? Calling the first ad terrible is one thing, calling the second one "quite good" seems a bit of a stretch %-)

The second one isn't artistically good, but I think as an ad it is quite good.

It's funny, and it makes me want to see what the game's like. I haven't clicked an ad (intentionally) in about 4 years. I might have clicked that one.

Re: Throw Out Everything You Know About Ads

#32

Post by ender7 »

Besides the novelty factor (which others have mentioned), his 'paint' version is also much simpler, and therefor much easier to understand at a quick glance.

  - Large text
  - Not very much text
  - A single image
  - A single visual flow (top to bottom)
  - A concise color palette (greens and black)
Compare to the 'standard' ad, where:

  - Text is too small
  - Too much text
  - Too many images competing for attention
  - Muddled visual flow

Re: Throw Out Everything You Know About Ads

#33

Post by div »

ender7 wrote: post #32

Besides the novelty factor (which others have mentioned), his 'paint' version is also much simpler, and therefor much easier to understand at a quick glance. - Large text - Not very much text - A single image - A single visual flow (top to bottom) - A concise color palette (greens and black) Compare to the 'standard' ad, where: - Text is too small - Too much text - Too many images competing for attention - Muddled vi…

Ad-blindness is another factor.

At first glance, his simple ad looks like part of the content, the fancy ad just looks like an ad and is filtered out subconsciously.

Definitely a factor to take into account when you're targeting gamers I'd think.

Re: Throw Out Everything You Know About Ads

#34

Post by stephengillie »

jonnathanson wrote: post #6

Good lesson on the value of in-market testing. That said, would love to see some theory and analysis about why the MS Paint ad outperformed the standard ad. My hunch is that the first ad -- while it obviously looks a lot more professional -- looks like every other banner ad on the internet. It reeks of ad-ness, and it may set off some psychological barrier to receptivity amongst viewers precisely because their brains…

The novelness lies in the lack of polish. People who work in advertising like ads, and well-polished ads are more pleasing to their eyes.

To the rest of us, advertisements are used as something we don't want to see, but are willing to see, in order to see something we DO want to see. Many of us can pick out the disparity between the polished, targeted ads and the less-focused content it intersperses.

Re: Throw Out Everything You Know About Ads

#35

Post by abeppu »

The "test everything" mantra sounds good, but in practice, you generally have only so much data you can afford (in impressions per day, or whatever), and when your CTRs are often 0.1% or lower, you need quite a lot of data to get narrow confidence intervals around your CTRs. Using the basic binomial model, if you have two test conditions, one of which actually does 20-25% better than the other, (say, 0.11% versus 0.09%), your confidence intervals will keep overlapping until you have OOM 1M impressions. This is all just to say that running a whole lot of tests can quickly become expensive an impractical.

While testing some radical, weird treatments can give you valuable perspective, or shed light on the assumptions you've been making, testing every idea is rarely feasible. I would not, for instance, guess that that the author should test different versions of the second ad with colors or number of exclamation points changed.

Re: Throw Out Everything You Know About Ads

#36

Post by michaelbarton »

abeppu wrote: post #35

The "test everything" mantra sounds good, but in practice, you generally have only so much data you can afford (in impressions per day, or whatever), and when your CTRs are often 0.1% or lower, you need quite a lot of data to get narrow confidence intervals around your CTRs. Using the basic binomial model, if you have two test conditions, one of which actually does 20-25% better than the other, (say, 0.11% versus 0.0…

I agree with your point, however I would like to highlight your use of confidence intervals:

"If two statistics have non-overlapping confidence intervals, they are necessarily significantly different but if they have overlapping confidence intervals, it is not necessarily true that they are not significantly different."

http://www.cscu.cornell.edu/news/statnews/stnews73.pdf

Re: Throw Out Everything You Know About Ads

#38

Post by Alex3917 »

NameNickHN wrote: post #10
jonnathanson wrote: post #6

Good lesson on the value of in-market testing. That said, would love to see some theory and analysis about why the MS Paint ad outperformed the standard ad. My hunch is that the first ad -- while it obviously looks a lot more professional -- looks like every other banner ad on the internet. It reeks of ad-ness, and it may set off some psychological barrier to receptivity amongst viewers precisely because their brains…

Yep, it's the same as when Google came out with their text ads. They were different, so people clicked them.

Actually, it's more likely because 80+% of Google users couldn't (and probably still can't) tell the difference between the advertisements and the results:

http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2005/Search-Engine-Users....

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