Digital Ad Lab UK (DAL UK)

August 2007

Meeting Notes – 23rd August, Apple Executive Briefing Centre

Media Convergence – Apple

Apple talked about a megatrend they have identified in cross media pollination. However, brand experience is vital, no matter what medium you deliver your message via.

Success of an advertising campaign used to be assessed by volume of impressions, eg adverts, television appearances and so on. Now the industry is much more focused on quality not quantity. You must be clever about what you deliver and the customer experience should be consistent and effective whether it be print on demand or a podcast.

Strong asset management will allow agencies to deliver the right content to the right audience at the right time and must not be underestimated.

The Digital Ad Lab is about the delivery of digital advertising and this presentation shows how much the industry is changing. It’s no longer just about delivering to the publisher. We need to look forward and outside of PDF to encompass all aspects of digital advertising. Everyone in this industry is used to delivering content to multiple supply chains and this is the same process as encompassing media convergence.

From the print perspective, campaigns need to become interactive as the results aren’t as tangible as click throughs and printed advertising will begin to suffer. Printers need to offer numbers to the brand advertisers. However people do still want to hold a piece of printed paper, so it is not expected the industry will change dramatically within the next 10 years.

However, content is still king – not just clever media!

Online Magazines – Monkey

As the only fully online magazine, Monkey delivers a different proposition to advertisers. Weekly magazines offer results back to advertisers far more quickly and are more appealing to the time poor world. In fact, when was a successful monthly magazine last launched?

There are ¼ million reading the magazine each week and it is outperforming the market by 24%. It took less than £1 million to launch and run for the first year, which is pretty impressive compared to the average of £17 million to launch a new printed mag.

In terms of advertising, this is proving successful and outperforming other ad experiences by 275%. However, approximately 10% of ads come in ready made, the rest get put together by the in-house production team and are generally a combination of that brand’s printed ad with a link to a website.

The problem is that most agencies don’t have any guidelines for the provision of a purely digital interactive campaign. It is also hard to justify the costs associated with creating a piece of artwork in a market of one. It has to be made easier in order for more people to benefit from the proposition the online magazine offers.

Monkey uses Ceros software, but as this is proprietary, it is difficult to create a generic set of guidelines. However, it is clear that we need some common ground and a set of interactive digital guidelines. We don’t want to get back into the interoperability debate, so DAL will be looking at how it can help.

Proofing Initiative

Chris Bunnett gave an update on behalf of Marcus. DAL supplied a suggested 12 fields to tag onto a file to Ghent, who then wanted to add a significant number of mandatory fields. It has been requested this doesn’t happen and there is currently agreement. IdeAlliance are also getting involved with the initiative, so the aim is for this to become something international rather than just UK based. There are also possible discussions with Adobe about encoding.

Paul from Missing Horse Consultancy mentioned the Smart Proof project being undertaken by BBC magazines. There is an 18month timescale but they are aiming to remove hard copy proofs from the entire workflow, as Time Inc has done in the US. Paul welcomes any comments and ideas at paul@missinghorsecons.co.uk.

Sponsor Update – Turning Point Innovation

Please click here for a copy of Steve Emerson’s presentation.

AOB
- BRIGs Production Section - this is now available in the Download section of the DAL site.
- Specle – this is a newly launched global publication database. DAL will be talking to them with a view to having a presentation at the next meeting.