As advertising permeates into more parts of our lives, people learn how to block out advertising, develop blind spots, which prompts advertisers to find yet more ways of cutting through the clutter, leading to a self-propagating cycle of more advertising and less ad-free non-commercial space.
Italian agency MTN Company recently used zebra crossing advertising to promote an architecture and design event called “Settimane dell’Architettura e del Design” (via I Believe in Advertising).
See the pictures on Flickr (they are not shared under a Creative Commons license, so do think twice before you put them up at your blogs) —
– or watched the making of the zebra crossing ads on YouTube –
The ads are done really tastefully and add to, rather than take away from, the public space they use as a platform. The Sentieri Urbani project, for instance, uses a similar street art approach to to beautify public space. My experience, however, is that it doesn’t take long for an innovative new medium like this to devolve into lowest common denominator space. It’s one thing to have black and white flowers and hearts on the zebra crossing, it’s another to have loud multi-colored “Buy Now!” price and promotion ads.
Quick Summary: Facebook serves desi social ad on my News Feed without cluttering it, but still needs to perfect the targeting.
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I wonder what prompted this ‘Love Bollywood’ social ad to show up in my Facebook News Feed, except that I’m part of the India network. Clearly, Facebook is still perfecting the targeting for these ads. What Facebook has perfected already is the ability to serve up to two ads on the same page without compromising on the user interaction.
Facebook Social Ads allow your businesses to become part of people’s daily conversations. Ads can be displayed in the left hand Ad Space — visible to users as they browse Facebook to connect with their friends — as well as in the context of News Feed — attached to relevant social stories. (Facebook Social Ads)
I clicked on the ad out of curiosity — the ad points to a Bollywood focused website and not to a Facebook Page. I even signed up on the website to check if they have enabled Facebook Beacon.
Quick Summary: Find out if Digital Inspiration’s Facebook Flyer experiment worked.
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Digital Inspiration is now advertising on Facebook. Amit’s Facebook flyer just showed up on my Facebook profile page and for a moment, I thought Amit had created a Facebook Page. However, it turned out the the flyer linked directly to Amit’s website.
It will be great to chat with Amit on what kind of traffic he is getting from the flyers. Amit?
Though the above advertising campaigns on Facebook were run for a very short period, they do indicate that the click through rates for ads appearing on Facebook can be extremely low.
