If you’ve been paying attention to the blogs over the past month, you’ve probably started noticing an increasing focus on (and maybe even an obsession with?) Chatroulette. For those who don’t already know, it’s a new video chat service that randomly assigns users video chat partners anywhere around the globe, an experience that can, in theory, be educational, enlightening and eye-opening. But users should be warned that what might at first glance be eye-opening can on second glance become – shall we say -- blinding (as in, burn-a-hole-in-your-eyes blinding). Sometimes you just don’t know who or what will be waiting for you on the opposite end of that camera and it’s probably not advised for the faint of heart. I suppose this unpredictability is also part of what makes the experience intriguing and even addictive for some participants. It’s a spin of the digital roulette wheel and there’s a natural curiosity to see what will happen next – even if it can leave you cringing.

All value judgments aside for the moment, Chatroulette has clearly tapped into some sort of primal digital instinct that has piqued the curiosity of droves of Internet users right now. The trend is beginning to catch on like wildfire with a recent growth trajectory far surpassing what we usually see with hot new sites. Chatroulette actually first registered on our radar in the month of January with 109,000 U.S. unique visitors, so this is a very recent phenomenon. When we released our February data last week, I was somewhat taken aback to see that the number of U.S. visitors to Chatroulette had exploded to 960,000 in a single month.

After witnessing this jump in activity, I began to wonder who exactly are the people visiting Chatroulette? So I took a look at their demographic profile, which revealed some interesting characteristics. (The user skews I’m going to reference are indexed to the average Internet user, with an index of 100 indicating average representation of a particular user segment and an index over 100 indicating above average representation.) To begin, there is an overwhelming skew towards people between the ages of 18-24, i.e. the college crowd. In fact, this narrow age segment accounts for 45% of the entire Chatroulette audience. There is also a very strong skew towards males, who comprised 72% of the audience. Put those two demographic segments together and you get 18-24 year old males, who by far showed the strongest propensity to visit Chatroulette. They account for three out of every ten users and are four times more likely than the average Internet user to visit. Males 25-34 and females 18-24 were also significantly more likely than average to frequent the site.

I also took a look at the site categories with which visitors to Chatroulette have the highest index relative to the average Internet user. The profile was pretty consistent with the demographic trends. Chatroulette users were nearly four times as likely to use Instant Messengers and nearly three times as likely to use discussion/chat sites, which is not surprising given that Chatroulette is similar in medium. Users are also significantly more likely to visit Career Training & Education sites, suggesting perhaps they are also more likely to be unemployed, at an early stage of their careers or that they are students. They also had a high affinity for music, humor, gaming and tickets sites, which is also very typical among college-aged Internet users.

It will be interesting to see how this user profile shifts as the site gains in popularity. While much of the content currently on this site can be objectionable, if Chatroulette begins to implement tighter security and terms of service policies, it could potentially gain more mainstream acceptance and we might see the user dynamics change very quickly. Only time will tell and it’s something we’ll keep an eye on …but not too closely, lest we get blinded.

Last week I spoke at the annual ARF Re:Think Conference on the topic of how to improve the monetization of display ads. It’s a common refrain in our industry that, despite the many virtues of the Internet, on a relative basis digital ad spending continues to lag other media. While consumers spend more than 20% of their media consumption time online, less than 10% of ad dollars are currently being allocated to the medium. If these numbers are ever to reach equilibrium, it will require continued diligence on the part of our industry to improve the strategy, creative, execution and evaluation of digital advertising so as to increase campaign performance and ROI.

To understand how the digital advertising industry can attract more dollars, it’s important to take a look at its history and evolution. Despite the many innovations that have occurred over the past decade, we are still experiencing the negative repercussions of some missteps from the early days. The following are four key issues that have inhibited the development of the medium to date, and why there’s reason to be quite optimistic about its future

#1 Ad Clutter

The Problem: Since the early days of the Internet as an advertising medium, banner ads have been emblazoned all over web pages wherever the site could squeeze them in. The conventional wisdom for publishers was simply that more ads equaled more dollars. Over time, the industry has learned that very often more ads per page equaled significantly less impact. Good advertising is about telling a story and by cluttering a web page with several competing messages, there is simply no way to effectively engage with the average consumer. Can you imagine if TV ads featured 4 or 5 different advertisers on the screen at the same time? That would never fly…

Reason for Hope: We’ve been observing the long term trends in ad clutter and we’re beginning to see these numbers decline, which suggests that advertisers and publishers may be beginning to realize that less can be more.

#2 Poor Creative Quality

The Problem: Historically, online creative has been the stepchild of its TV and print counterparts. With more condensed space and a lack of “site, sound and motion,” online ads have traditionally aimed to cram a lot of information into a few square inches of real estate. With such a limited palette, it’s no wonder that the best creative minds in advertising may have been reluctant to conquer this medium.

Reason for Hope: We are seeing a rapid evolution in the quality of online creative today, much of which can be attributed to technical advancements and better integration of the online and offline advertising teams. As broadband penetration continues to increase, sites are more willing to accept bandwidth-hungry, rich media units. We have also seen progress in the form of new creative formats developed by the Online Publishers Assocation, which provide significantly larger real estate for the message, as well as creative ways to deliver it (e.g. the fixed panel unit which remains constant as the user scrolls up or down). For anyone who caught last year’s iPhone takeover ad by Apple on The New York Times Web site homepage, you saw this creative revolution first-hand and it will only get more interesting and compelling with time. And, finally, we are seeing an explosion in the use of video ads, which deliver an ad message with all the richness of TV and which allow full creative expression.

#3 Poor Targeting

The Problem: Another issue that has inhibited effective digital advertising efforts is poor delivery against target consumer segments and inability to reach these consumers with the desired frequency. We’ve conducted numerous post-buy analyses of online ad campaign over the years and frequently find that less than a quarter of campaigns even reach their intended target. Below are several examples of actual campaigns we’ve evaluated illustrating how poorly many campaigns are at actually reaching their targets.

Reason for Hope: comScore research has shown that better controls for in-country delivery can positively impact the reach and efficiency of a campaign. I suspect that simply raising awareness of the need for this level of control will give us improved performance. And, new techniques for identifying target audiences continue to debut from a variety of players, including comScore’s Audience Advantage offering. The actual means of targeting an audience can vary dramatically, ranging from search behavior to cookies that reflect offline purchase activity, but the end remains the same. Media buyers and sellers are increasingly being equipped with the ability to improve delivery against their desired audiences.

#4 Wrong Metrics Used for Measuring Campaign Success

The Problem: Even though the pitfalls of using the click as a means of evaluating campaign success (especially branding campaigns) have been well-documented, many in the industry are still having a tough time breaking this addiction. Clicks are easy to measure, which of course makes it tempting to use them for evaluation of a campaign, even if clicks bear little relationship to the actual impact of the campaign on consumers. With click-through rates now averaging around 0.1%, any marketer who focuses on the click is essentially allowing one clicker to represent the branding impact made on the other 999 exposed consumers.

Reason for Hope: We here at comScore have had the opportunity to directly measure the effectiveness of online advertising on behalf of leading advertisers across a variety of industries with differing goals, ranging from branding lift to online behavior lift (keyword search, site visitation) to offline sales impact. These efforts have proved without a shadow of doubt that online advertising can help advertisers to extend the reach and efficiency of their marketing efforts, so as long as we measure what truly matters.

The good news is that the digital advertising industry has grown despite some of these early missteps. There is significant reason to believe that our industry is moving in the right direction in many ways. By focusing on effective strategy, creative, execution and evaluation, we are ready for digital advertising to fulfill its original promise. As we better demonstrate the value of digital campaigns, we can combat commoditization and boost demand, resulting in an increase in CPMs and a greater share of the overall advertising pie.

This post was originally published at SearchEngineWatch on March 22, 2010.

How do you define a "brand?" Traditionally when you think of a brand, you might envision a logo, a sponsorship, perhaps even an ad campaign. The American Marketing Association defines a brand as a "name, term, sign, symbol or design, or a combination of them intended to identify the goods and services of one seller or group of sellers and to differentiate them from those of other sellers."

That definition is a good start. But a brand is really more than that, isn't it? It's the long-term equity and associations that help formulate an identity. So what happens when you want to change your identity?

Last year, cable television channel the Sci-Fi Channel announced plans to shed its genre specific name to create a more brand specific name: Syfy. Opinions on this change ranged from "great idea" to "are they serious?" It was a decision loaded with risk.

A colleague recently mentioned that this brand relaunch decision was partially driven by its search strategy. Given the increasingly important role that search plays in the way we discover and interact with brands, the decision begins to makes more sense.

Would you rather own a brand, or are you content to just take a piece of "genre pie"? Syfy decided it wanted to own its brand, and maybe help itself to some leftover genre pie at the same time.

To determine whether this re-branding strategy was a success from a search perspective, let's dig into the data and evaluate exactly what happened.

On July 6, 2009, Syfy officially relaunched its brand.

As the chart shows, there hasn't been a noticeable attrition in the number of searches on the genre-specific term "SciFi" subsequent to the launch, which suggests that the genre itself was driving much of the searching behavior. The number of monthly searches on this term has generally varied between 600,000 and 800,000 a month, both before and after the Syfy launch.

Now if we look at the number of searches on the term "Syfy" post-launch, we can see that it went from virtually non-existent to between 300,000 and 500,000 a month.

If we combine the two terms, the total search volume has effectively increased demand by about 40 percent per month. Even more importantly, there has been a significant net increase in clicks of more than 20 percent. Clearly, the rebrand is consistently paying dividends from the standpoint of search engagement and reach.

Syfy created demand in the marketplace for its new brand and became more relevant to its search audience, while also increasing its consumer reach substantially via search.

To bring us back to the original AMA definition: a brand is an identity, and an identity can easily get lost in the clutter of search. The reality of branding today is that search is now a fundamental component of brand identity. If you can't differentiate your brand in the search environment, you don't have much of an identity.

Syfy's risky brand relaunch makes a lot more sense and it has clearly been successful in helping differentiate its identity from the genre, enabling it to cut through the clutter and reach more people. And isn't that really what a brand is all about?

Now, if you'll excuse me, it's time to go watch some "Battlestar Galactica" reruns.

Last week at the annual ARF Re:Think conference in New York, Hernan Lopez, President of .Fox Networks, and I presented an analysis of four ad campaigns run on the .Fox Network in the U.K that were evaluated using the comScore AdEffx™ platform. One of the campaigns used only video ads, one used a combination of video and display, while two campaigns featured display ads only. The four campaigns delivered a total of 300 million impressions. We used the comScore panel of about 80,000 U.K. Internet users to understand how display ads and video ads increased visitation to the advertised brands’ Web sites and how they increased search queries that used trademark terms or related generic terms. For each campaign, our analytical approach compared the behavior of panelists who were exposed to at least one ad with the behavior of a balanced “control” group of panelists who were not exposed to the ad campaign.

Despite a minimal number of clicks on the ads, we found that each of the campaigns successfully lifted site visitation and search queries, revealing both the latent branding impact of online ads as well as the inability of clicks to accurately reflect campaign effectiveness:

For the one campaign that used both video and display, we were able to directly compare the relative effectiveness of the two formats, which showed that, while both video and display successfully lifted site visitation and search, video was more effective:

We were also interested in understanding the way in which response to frequency of exposure differed between display and video ads. To do this, we compared the behavioral response across groups of panelists who were exposed to varying numbers of video and display ad impressions. Below are the results when we examined the lift in site visitation:

What’s very interesting is that the lift in site visitation following exposure to display ads climbs steadily with increased number of exposures, while the lift following the video ad exposure occurs relatively quickly (within 1 to 5 exposures) but then increases only slightly with additional exposures beyond 10 or more.

This frequency response pattern is illustrated even more vividly when looking at the lift in search queries:

We can see that the lift in search queries following exposure to a video ad occurs strongly within the first five exposures but does not increase with additional exposures. In contrast, the impact of display ads continues to climb markedly with exposures beyond the first five.

What are we to make of these results? One implication is that display ads are easier for consumers to miss than video ads. As a result, more frequency is needed to gain consumers’ attention and engagement with display ads than with video. Hence, the steadily growing behavioral response with additional exposures of display ads.

If this supposition is correct, then there is a potentially positive implication for advertisers and publishers. Since cookie deletion renders an ad server incapable of distinguishing between a true unexposed browser and a browser that has already received an ad but has had its cookies deleted, ad servers will repeatedly deliver ads to already-exposed browsers. As a result, many display ad campaigns actually end up delivering a higher-than-planned frequency (i.e. a higher-than-planned number of display ad exposures per browser). While the conventional wisdom says that such over-delivery results in wasted impressions, the results of our study suggest they may not be wasted at all since it appears that a high number of repeated exposures are needed to gain consumers’ attention and engagement and to elicit the desired change in behavior.

I do want to stress that the conclusions I’ve drawn here are obviously based on a limited number of U.K. studies and as such may not be broadly representative of all display ad campaigns running in the U.S. or the U.K. Nonetheless, they do suggest a potentially valuable avenue for future research, namely identifying the sales lift obtained from varying ad frequency levels. To that end, we would welcome hearing from advertisers, publishers, ad networks and agencies that would like to participate in a broad study of U.S. online ad campaigns aimed at measuring sales response (both online and offline) as a function of frequency of ad exposure.

Looking forward to hearing from you.