Advertising Placements
Glenn's Ramblings 1 Comment »To be fair I am not sure if this idea is a business idea or a masters project for a university student - but rather leave it in my head….
As someone who purchased print advertising in national magazines in the past to promote a previous business interest, I have always wondered if the place I was getting was the best for me. You clearly shouldn’t listen to the sales reps at the magazine as they will say anything to fill that last space in the magazine before they go to print. So how do you choose? Getting the wrong position can cost you dearly, resulting in little or worse no return on investment. In my opinion, if there is no point in doing it, don’t spend the money. If you’re intend in spending the money, use what you would have spent on taking your staff out for a meal or few beers - it’s probably a better return.
My idea therefore would be to do research with one of those funky eye tracking things, that tracks where you’re eye goes when scanning a page. Something similar was done a few years ago on where people look in the google search results. You would see with enough people hot spots in magazines that were key places to put advertisements.
From this research some rules could be drawn up to allow the best placement in a publication to be achieved for the best return on your investment. Not good for the magazines, but good for the advertisers.
To make money from this, you could do a whole host of things including:
- Write a book about it.
- Run seminars.
- License the information to advertising agencies that book space for clients.
- Sell the information to magazines to allow them to charge real premiums on the best spaces.
- Consultancy work.
Once you’ve got magazines and newspapers sorted, you could do the same for web sites. There are probably only a dozen master layout styles out there. Profile them, do the head-cam thing and again make up rules on where you wish to put adverts or buy them.
Looking at the web would be interesting as if you were doing a content site (forum, blog, community etc), you’d know the best locations to put your google Adwords.
Some great articles on eye tracking:
http://www.useit.com/eyetracking/
http://www.useit.com/papers/webwriting
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