Active versus passive advertising

Posted by stuart as , , , ,

The three month orgy of treachery and malice which is known as Big Brother renewed its acquaintance with Australian teenagers here last night.

Now this is something that would usually pass someone like me by with little need for comment, except for the fact that, for some unknown reason, Mrs. Pimpmypagerank seems to forget that she is a professional mother of two at this time of year, and revert into some sort of teeny-bopper sponge for all that is revolting in the house.

So, once the rugrats were safely tucked in to bed, the TV was switched to the appropriate channel, and I wandered off to the back of the loungeroom to write some content for a website I had been meaning to get to for ages.

Listening in to the background noise from the TV, I realised that during every ad break, the ads seemed to be for the same companies. Now this should not be surprising, as a show as popular as Big Brother is going to attract advertisers based on two criteria:

1) They can afford to advertise on a show that rates so highly (God only knows why); and
2) They think that they can take advantage of the impressionable minds watching the show.

This got me thinking about the way that these advertisers deal with the shows producers, versus the way that Adwords advertisers deal with Adsense publishers.

To draw an analogy, the Advertisers are the Adwords ad buyers, the production company (Endemol) is Google, and the TV station is the Adsense publisher.

Now there is one main difference between the TV advertising model, and the Adwords/Adsense model - the Advertisers on the TV show do not require their audience to actually do anything, and they’ll still pay. They can be considered as “pay per view” customers, rather than “pay per action” as is the case with Adsense

The advertisers are assuming that if they have to pay, (at a wild guess), $50,000 each time their ad is seen by 3 million people, they’re paying around 1.7 cents for each person viewing the ad. To equate this into Adsense terms, with a CTR of 2.5%, on 3 million page views, that’s 75,000 ad clicks, divided by the $50,000 that the advertiser has paid, is $0.66 a click. assuming a 50-50 split between Google and the Adsense site publisher, the publisher is getting $0.33 a click, over 3 million page views - an eCPM of $8.33, which is an acceptible result for an adsense publisher, especially with such a low CTR.

I wouldn’t mind a piece of that action!