The BigDoor Blog | Advertising

Last week Bryan Estes, Director of Business Development here at BigDoor headed to Ad:Tech NY. Ad:Tech is a digital marketing event held in 10 locations all over the world. The conference focuses on the digitization of media, and its redefinition of business marketing. The event took place November 8^th-10th in NYC’s Javits Convention Center. We asked him to share some thoughts on the conference below.

Typically, I attend these events as a booth guy, so it was nice to be on the other side of the coin, walking the floor, making connections, and getting a chance to check out all of the different vendors and pitches. I also got a great deal on a 20oz bottle of water, for $3.90 (note the sarcasm) and had a great time overall.

This year, the conference focused heavily on two trends, social and mobile. It’s clear that these two trends are continuing to dominate marketing and advertising, with more and more companies looking to social and mobile platforms as advertising solutions. Businesses need to go far beyond the standard banner and video advertising to attract new customers and keep current customers engaged and loyal to their brand.

A number of companies were focused on in-game advertisements or advergames (games that are built specifically as a viral marketing message for a product or service). BigDoor provides a similar type of viral marketing approach but also rewards users beyond an in-game experience. This way, users are being acknowledged and rewarded no matter how they are interacting with your brand and site. I for one was excited by these trends and was eager to talk to people about BigDoor’s offerings. Overall Ad:Tech was a great event with lots of information. and I’m looking forward to next year!

Today our Co-Founder and CEO Keith Smith and our Director of Monetization and Implementation Tommy Lee are attending Ad:Tech San Francisco. We’re really excited to announce the launch of the BigDoor Engagement Economy with Cost Per Quest! The BigDoor Engagement Economy is a new way for sites to engage their users while monetizing their content. One of the initial pieces is Cost Per Quest, an entirely new, performance based, ad format meant to reward end users for their time and attention while engaging deeply with online brands. Quests are a critical component of BigDoor’s Engagement Economy and are sold to advertisers on a Cost Per Quest (CPQ) basis.

The BigDoor Engagement Economy is currently in private beta mode. Last week, in partnership with SpectrumDNA Quests launched with UGO Entertainment. The incredible team at SpectrumDNA worked their magic and has truly created a gamified experience that’s intrinsically a social loyalty program incorporating interaction with news and information, as well as a rewards system that is original, native and meaningful.

We talk to websites all the time and get the question about our rumored “hidden fees.” We truly believe gamification should be a profit-center for web publishers and app developers, not a cost-center so we offer our technology for free. However, in order to provide publishers a free platform as well as enable them to make money by using gamification, we realize we need a solution that works not only for publishers and end-users, but also for advertisers as well. We think that any solution that gives advertisers traffic, can make publishers money, and reward users can be an Epic Win! The BigDoor Engagement Economy will roll out to a broader network of publishers by Summer 2011.

Online website owners interested in learning more about our Engagement Economy and Cost Per Quest advertising pilot program can contact us. Additionally, those attending San Francisco’s ad:tech 2011 are encouraged to meet with Keith Smith (keith@bigdoor.com; @ChiefDoorman) and Tommy Lee (tommy@bigdoor.com; @pikopoki) during the event, April 11-13, 2011.

see more Epic Fails

So often in highly competitive marketplaces competitors find themselves in a race to the bottom.

This is certainly true on the Internet for both publishers and advertising networks. For publishers the name of the game is getting as many eyeballs looking at your site at the lowest cost. For advertising networks it’s about creating a profitable margin between the publishers who are constantly getting pitched better rates and advertiser’s who are always looking to cut their payouts.

With some notable exceptions, the eyeball, the actual user of the site, gets lost in the equation. We think the publishers who create the best and most interactive user experiences should be rewarded. Aligning advertising rates with the interactivity of a publisher’s user experience is the challenge that we, here at BigDoor, are working on right now.  We like to call this the Loyalty Economy.

Rather than racing to the bottom, we want to be involved in helping our publisher’s race to the top. Racing to the top is about creating win-win-win monetization strategies that reward user loyalty and participation, rewarding interaction between publishers and users and building on that relationship to create value for trusted advertisers.

Recent events have amply demonstrated that when values are improperly aligned online advertising can become a vicious cycle of manipulative and deceptive advertising begetting poor user experiences begetting cynical and manipulative users.

If values are properly aligned then trusted advertising should beget better user experience which begets engaged and happy users in a virtuous cycle – a mutuality of value for everyone involved in the process.

–Patrick Murck