Tuesday, August 4, 2009

Dwelling on the Future

During our (colder than ever?) winter months I've found myself on the couch turning to 'that other' entertainment medium of TV. I’ve seen one TVC doing the rounds of late, for none other than TVNZ, promoting advertising on TV. For those of you who are not familiar with it, they label Radio listeners as distracted, uninterested zombies (that might be a little bit of an exaggeration.)


For us in digital, we could argue, we have the most active and engaged medium out there. Television audiences are regarded VIEWERS, Radio has its LISTENERS, and online has USERS. Surely by definition, online users are more engaged? How do we show this, and better yet, how do we know this?


Click Through Rates have long been the benchmark of success for digital campaigns. As we have seen CTRs fall, our friends at Eyeblaster have been doing some excellent research in new metrics, Dwell Time and Dwell Rate.


Dwell Time measures any interaction with a Rich Media Ad, whether it be in the form of a user initiated video, expanding media, data capture or any other custom interactions built into the ads. Dwell rate is similar to CTR, action divided by impressions. In a sample of 42 Billion rich media impressions (that’s 42,000,000,000), 8.71% of users actively engaged with the brands for an average 53.08 seconds. That’s the equivalent of two TVCs, back to back, not changing the channel, and actually paying attention to what is happening. Better yet, its within your desired content.


People are willing to be actively engaged with brands online, can do more and be entertained by your brand. Let’s get inventive with what we're putting online. I'm looking forward to seeing dwell time and dwell rates from some of our own clients campaigns.


The full 'Eyeblaster Analytics Bulletin: Trends in Time and Attention' report can be downloaded free from here

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