Ypulse Guest Post: Repairing The Conundrum Of The Click
Posted by anastasia on 07-08-2008
Our first guest post today is from Amy Gibby, president, eCRUSH.com / eSPIN.com, which is a subsidiary of Hearst Communications. Amy is a veteran of the online space having joined eCRUSH shortly after its launch in 1999. She also delivered a case study at last year's Ypulse Mashup conference. If you work in youth media or marketing and have an idea for a Ypulse Guest Post, just email me with your idea.
Repairing The Conundrum Of The Click
"Clique" was something of a dirty word in my John Hughes era high school years. For those of us mired in the modern teen business, the new enemy is the click.
Publishers and marketers alike both know that 99% of users don't click on ads. As a publisher, it's frustrating to be up against that lowest common denominator of success metrics. But as an advertiser, it's the universal language of performance. Outside of the most progressive marketers, the ultimate ROI is the measurable number of bodies who actually went somewhere to do something. So the click lives on.
In all the discussion on how to repair the conundrum of the click, we may have overlooked something pretty basic: When users click, they take the reputation of that host site with them. Maybe not literally, but certainly the place an ad sends a site's users is not separate island unto itself. If we want the publisher, the advertiser and the teen consumer to live together in three-part harmony, we have to better resolve the toxic conflict over the click.
I run a hybrid PG-13 site, eSPIN.com - part controlled social network, part quality content. To the users, our promise is something fun to do when you're bored, a way to connect virtually with other teens and basically kill some time. We run IAB standard units much the same as everyone else. And we struggle with clicks like everyone else. When the advertising resonates, we all win. When it doesn't, that IAB inventory might as well be blank space.
In trying to move beyond the click, we started experimenting.
We now also run a model where we let teens choose the advertising based on what interests them. Rather than putting our content into competition with an advertiser's ad, we created a path where the teens choose the advertiser as an overt extension of our site experience.
It looks a bit like Facebook's application directory, a short list of descriptions of various advertisers' offerings — vetted to match the age/gender of the user. It's deep inside the site — you're not likely to hit it unless you go looking for it.
- The business premise is it lets teens use their attention as a form of currency to upgrade to premium services. That's why they follow the path in the first place.
- The consumer side of it makes a big leap from the current "click" model by marrying the publisher's content with the advertiser's. The teens aren't just being asked to "click," they're being invited to participate. And they will only jump in if something genuinely interests them, because what's on the other side is more of eSPIN.com (not a free iPod).
The teens understand they need to leave eSPIN.com to engage with their advertiser of choice — and then come back to eSPIN.com to get their premium upgrade.
If an advertiser puts up something that doesn't resonate with teens, their program won't get chosen. For the advertiser, this is a no-risk proposition because they only pay if their activity was completed. If they get no play, they'll be forced to improve their offerings until they're competitive.
And for teens, it embraces the idea that advertising is simply an extension of a site's brand promise. The more control publishers give their users, and specific to eSPIN.com, the better we feed this model with quality advertising experiences, the more they will trust our brand and find their way to compatible advertisers. And the less we will all be battling the click.
