Posted By
Eric Anderson on 05/12/2010
Consumers hate display advertising, right? And consumers love Twitter, right? So what happens when display advertising and Twitter are combined?
It’s a question we set out to answer with Mountain Hardwear’s “Packed with Purpose” campaign, which featured an industry first: the ability for consumers to log on and tweet directly in the ad. The results affirm White Horse’s core belief that some of the most powerful uses of social media marketing are in combination with paid advertising.
Let me start by complicating the conventional wisdom about attitudes toward display advertising and Twitter. It’s true that consumers distrust display advertising; according to a Nielsen, it ranks near the bottom of ad formats in trustworthiness at 33%, compared to TV advertising, for instance, at 62%. But there’s more to the story. Marketers are coming to terms with display advertising’s true impact as a brand vehicle, rather than as a mere direct response vehicle (I’ve had a few things to say on display advertising myself). When viewed in that light, display advertising shines. A Comscore report on online ad performance showed that 29% of consumers exposed to a display ad visited the brand site within a month, and 18% searched for the brand.
And as bullish as we are on Twitter marketing (check out the White Horse Twitter and advertising webinar on the subject), we can’t pretend it’s a panacea for all of advertising’s trustworthiness woes. For starters, it’s in no danger of overtaking advertising for reach. A recently released Twitter usage study by Edison Research shows that only 7% of the US population is currently on Twitter. The study did not reveal the size of the population that wishes Twitter would go away, but it’s a safe bet that the number tops 7%.
The same study showed, however, that brands on Twitter get a disproportional amount of love. Fifty-one percent of Twitter users follow at least one brand, compared to only 16% for social media in general. And brand mentions on Twitter are influential: 42% of consumers use the platform to learn about products and services.
So the bottom line is this: display advertising has a credibility problem, but huge reach; Twitter marketing has a reach problem, but huge credibility. Dare I use the word “synergy?” No, actually, I die inside a little every time I use it, so let me say instead that when you get some chocolate into that peanut butter, you get two great tastes that taste great together. And that’s exactly what we found with the Mountain Hardwear campaign.
The purpose of the Mountain Hardwear campaign was simple: to drive interest in its spring line-up of new backpacks. A display campaign driving to pack giveaway would seem to be a natural course of action, but that would mean relying on ad clicks, which typically deliver one out of every 1,000 impressions to the site. We felt we could do better.
We are passionate believers in what we affectionately refer to as “hard-working” rich media ads, in which we load up expandable ads with features that are normally relegated to the landing page—videos, product details, email sign-ups, you name it. If display ads underperform because they wrench the user away from what they’re doing, why not meet the user halfway instead? For us, adding a Twitter stream to a display ad is part of the same philosophy—it’s a way of adding the dimension and context that consumers increasingly demand in their interactions with advertisers.
While at least one past display campaign has integrated Twitter streams, our campaign went a step further to allow the user to log on and tweet directly in the ad. Users could tweet a simple hashtag to enter a pack giveaway, read other tweets, watch product videos, and research the full pack line-up—all within the ad itself.
A campaign like this requires a shift in mindset away from traditional goals. We’re less interested in delivering users to a landing page, because the content we want them to see is in the ad. We’re less interested in driving email sign-ups, because interacting with consumers on Twitter is just as valuable. And a sweepstakes that takes place entirely on Twitter saves our clients considerable development cost, in addition to its built-in pass-along features.
In making this shift, we sacrifice nothing in measurability. We get quantifiable results in sweeps entries, Twitter participation, and interaction with every component of the ad. The results speak for themselves: while click-through rates were slightly above industry average at .11%, interactions with the ad were 58 times higher at 6.4%.
The breakdown in user interactions with the ads is illuminating:
- 36% clicked on different packs to learn more
- 29% played a video
- 19% signed into Twitter
- 12% tweeted from the ad
Are we disappointed that tweeting from the ad was the least frequent action? No. We think the primary benefit of Twitter-ad integration is the content of the stream, as a way of providing that user-generated perspective on products that Twitter users say they crave. Plus, good content marketing is about providing lots of options, and most users preferred the option to go to their Twitter account and tweet from there. More power to them.
These results are also a reminder of something that consumer brands often lose sight of: no matter how many shiny objects we dangle in front of consumers, at the end of the day, they want to hear about the product and what makes it good. They really do want all that wonky product content and detailed specs; in fact, they demand it—they just want to consume the content in the way that suits them best.
While we didn’t conduct a brand survey as part of this campaign, there is outside evidence that integration of social streams in advertising also improves brand lift. Nielsen found in its study on social media ad impressions that ads incorporating Facebook’s “Become a Fan” feature also had 10% higher brand recall than control versions.
So if adding social streams to advertising is such a no-brainer, why isn’t everyone doing it? Mostly because they lack case studies like this one, I suspect. So here you go—no more excuses.
Tags: Social Networks, Display Advertising
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