While looking at screenshots of the Windows Live Messenger Beta on Google Blogoscoped yesterday I noticed some text ads for mortgage leads along the bottom edge of the chat window – direct links to the pictures here and here. A home equity loan offer from Bank of America and a standard invite to refinance from an unidentified advertiser (although the copy reads like something LendingTree would use for their GetSmart website.) Perhaps I’m being naive – people will click on the strangest things – but I can’t imagine how low the conversion rate must be for these poorly-targeted, dark-grey-on-light-grey, inappropriately-timed text links. A classic advertising carpet-bomb to try and generate a bit more volume. Anyone have any idea what the advertiser is paying for these?
While the ads in the screenshot look nasty, I’m a bit curious about this ad product’s future potential – when MSN AdCenter finally launches its contextual advertising product that could be some valuable real estate. Combine the ability to pick up on the content of the conversation with MSN Messenger’s reach of 27+ million users and an ability to target creative to age, gender, and designated market area and you’ve got some interesting possibilities – if users are willing to interrupt their conversation to click on an ad. That’s really the million-dollar question, isn’t it? We can target ads as closely as we like – see Robert Cringley’s must read “A Commercial Runs Through It” for a compelling vision of Google’s future – but by doing so will we really be able to get people in a buying mood 24-7? Or will we just shove our audience into a complete state of ad burnout?
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“but by doing so will we really be able to get people in a buying mood 24-7?”
We’re already there dude…
Look around. The brain filters the ads all around you and the question is what tactics can you invent and re-invent (every 6mos) so the public sees your ads?
I for one can’t stand adverts in my messenging software – I use alternate clients specifically to get away from that.
Found your site via technorati – I’m just surfing around finding people who are talking about different IM because I just wrote a post on my site about the differente IM networks and figured I’d share the link:
http://blog.monkeywork.net/?p=142
I was talking to a group of programmers that had built an ajax web based IM that used adsense. They fed words from the conversation to adsense and adsense refreshed the ads every so often. It was pretty damn smart. I was going to help them turn it into a business, but then they dropped off.
Let me know if you are interested in that.
We actually capture mortgage leads through our multiple websites and distribute to three top lenders in our network like a Lending Tree service. We have used banners and PPC marketing but the MSN messenger ad is not a bad idea what is the cost on such a service.
Has anyone inquired as to what the costs of IM contextual advertising is? This sounds interesting, however I’m just not sure a quantifiable ROI would exist.
You could track the ROI with special tracking urls that have query string.