Don’t Get Stung by Advertising Offers!

Before we start, here are a few jargon terms explained:

• Impression: 1 view of a page. A person doesn’t have to click or even scroll to count as an impression.
• Remnant inventory: Unsold advertising space.
• Banner Ad: An image based advert that is placed onto a webpage.

Have you ever received an email like this one?

Hi,

Let’s be honest — most of us are no strangers to pulling something together right at the last-minute, and I hope this will be one of those occasions.

For the rest of October, the Daily Telegraph website is off loading unsold banner ads at some incredibly low rates.

Check out our 4-week Telegraph campaign for £745.

If this idea gets an initial ‘thumbs up’, let me know, and I’ll discuss the matter with you further.

If it helps, we can create some artwork at no extra cost.

Kind regards,

Tom Anderson
www.latespace.co.uk
​01733 697097

 

Click the link and the offer promises 45,000 impressions on your advert. That’s 45,000 people viewing your ad, on the Telegraph – sounds great right?

Well, not really. It’s important to know your facts when entering into deals like this one – so here they are:

What is Tom Anderson actually selling?

He’s selling what’s called remnant (unsold) inventory. This is advertising space that an advertiser (like the Telegraph) has been unable to sell, and so rather than filling it with a house ad or public service announcement, they sell it at a knock down rate. This very cheap advertising space is bought by people like Tom Anderson, who then bundle it up and sell it on at a steeply marked up price.

• He will have purchased this inventory for about 50p per 1000 impressions.
• That’s £22.50 in total!
• He’s selling it on to you at £16.50 per 1000 impressions.
• That’s a 3300% mark up, or £722.50!

Not a bad money maker for him right? £722.50? Even with the free artwork!

But so what right? If 45,000 people are going to see your advert, that’s fantastic!

Well, yeah, it would be. If you’re promoting a new soft drink, and 45,000 people who drink a lot of soft drinks were sitting in a cinema, and your advert played, then that would be fantastic. But that’s not what Tom Anderson is promising. He’s promising that your advert will appear on a page or pages on the Telegraph’s website, and that 45,000 people will visit those pages. Not quite the same thing is it?

With this kind of advertising, you have no control over where your advert appears. Remember this is unsold inventory, it’s not going to be front and centre of the homepage. It could be a footer advert at the bottom of an obscure article, and even if someone doesn’t scroll all the way down, they count as one of those 45,000 impressions.

Not only do you have zero control over where on the page it appears, but you have no control over the kind of people who will see it. This unsold inventory will be on random, often quite niche articles. Your soft drink advert could nestle alongside an article about cutting out sugar. Not quite the audience you’re aiming for right?

So where could you better spend your advertising budget?

The phrase ‘quality over quantity’ has never been more relevant than when we’re talking about impressions. 100 impressions with 5 clicks through to your website is worth more to you than 1000 impressions with 2 clicks. And who clicks on an ad? People to whom it’s relevant. Who is looking at your advert matters, and so it’s much more cost effective to use channels where you can target to a specific audience that are likely to engage with it. For example, Google Ads or Facebook.

With Facebook advertising, you can target your advert to people who belong to a certain demographic, have certain interests, are friends with people who like your page or who have visited your site before. You can set a daily spend which you are in total control of, and use analytics tools to see exactly how your advert is performing. When you work with an agency like us, you are in total control of your campaign at all times. You don’t simply hand over £745 and let the chips fall where they may.

To talk about how we can help with your campaign, drop us a line at sayhello@theresponsibleagency.wales.