Laura Chaibi talks through Yahoo!'s ad format research
"Advertising online is like a Mr Potato Head for the web," said Laura Chaibi, Yahoo! EMEA Research Director, during her Yahoo! Academy session on Yahoo!'s Ad Format Research programme at Internet Week Europe 2011. Why? "You need to mix and match," she said.
Yahoo!
To demonstrate how important this is, Laura began with some audience participation, and asked, "how many people are there in a queue before you lose patience?" Most people in the audience wouldn't wait in a queue of more than five people.
But when Laura put this question to a German audience, the majority would join a queue with 20 people in it. This relativity, says Laura, needs to be applied to ad formats — they have to be matched to the brand, the creative and the market.
Laura explained how Yahoo!'s extensive testing of ad placements, which has gathered opinions from over 50,000 consumers, is helping advertisers with the matchmaking process. But, this doesn't mean infringing on creative itself, Laura noted, "we're just trying to understand the online ad spaces."
To do this, Yahoo! used demos with neutral "blue bubbles" in place of an ad's creative and asked consumers for their feedback. They then compared how intrusive the ad was with how impactful a consumer found it.
Laura showed a series of graphs that mapped these two metrics against each other and it was striking how different attitudes to advertising are in different markets. In Germany, for example, consumers were much less tolerant of intrusive advertising than southern European countries. Hence why a lot of Yahoo!'s testing is carried out in Germany — "If you can win over the Germans, hopefully everyone else will follow,' said Laura.
"It's the ad behaviour that's going to make or break the ad," Laura continued. High impact/high intrusion ad formats that might bounce across your page or prevent you from doing something until you've watched it are best used for time-limited offers or new product launches. Whereas low impact/low intrusion campaigns that stay in their box are perfect for sponsorship activities.
However, Laura concluded by emphasising that agencies need to make use of the format that they choose: "it's the responsibility of the creative to maximise that space."
-- Fiona McKenzie
Fiona McKenzie is a freelance writer in London and a contributor to Contagious magazine.
