Qube Media.

Nobody's looking at your banner ads

'Internet users tend to avoid fixing their eyes on anything that looks like advertising', New Scientist reported last week – and the phenomenon has been dubbed "banner blindness" by Nidhi Mathur of Hewlett Packard's research lab in Bangalore, India.

Obviously, this poses a massive problem to advertisers – especially if the stats New Scientist quotes are correct: only 3 people click through for every 1,000 ad impressions.

How are online advertisers combating 'banner blindness' – by putting ads onto the pared down 'print this page' versions of their clients' websites. Sounds like a good idea at first – and initial studies show web users do remember ads they've seen on their printouts more than those online.

But many, like psychologist Joanna Bawa, believe this effect will be ephemeral: 'people are increasingly resistant to ads generally, and will soon figure out what's going on.'

Here at Qube, we're seeing a growing trend: clients are starting to realise that a smarter way to spend their online advertising budget is to take an approach that doesn't interrupt the attention of their potential clients.

By assigning quite a small percentage of their overall advertising budget to search engine optimisation, social media marketing and online PR, they are generating more engagement and click-throughs from people who are already showing an interest in their goods and services. And that means more sales.

Best of all, all this activity is fully trackable – just a thought for those of you deciding where you can most effectively allocate your budget.

Check out the article on the New Scientist website >

Client win: drink drive awareness campaign

We're over the moon at Qube that we've been chosen to develop the online marketing side of West Sussex County Council's year long drive safety campaign.

Alongside Zero Fifty One, who are providing the offline advertising and creative, Qube will help West Sussex to communicate to the hard to reach 17-24 age group with a number of online and social media marketing campaigns throughout the year, focusing on drink driving, using a mobile while driving and seatbelt use, amongst other things.

Social Media and the US elections

The online world was a very different place back in 2004 when the last US election was underway. The word blogging was only recently starting to slip into society's vocabulary, YouTube had yet to delight us with its thousands of online video's on demand and twitter was not even a twinkle in Jack Dorseys' eye.

This time round everything has changed. my.barackobama.com has the democratic candidate using every social media tool in the book. Read his well-tended blog, sign up to get live news and events near you, follow him on twitter as he tours the country and even make friends with other Obama supporters.

But it's not just the candidates and their campaign teams engaging our attention using these tools. This year anybody that has an opinion and an internet connection is sharing their opinions and even hitting the headlines.

Issues which may have been downplayed, or even wilfully ignored in the past, are now dragged into the spotlight in all their gory detail by amateur bloggers. The controversial remarks made by Obama at one of his fundraisers would probably never have been mentioned again if it hadn't been for 61-year-old 'citizen journalist' Mayhill Fowler whose report rocked the delegates campaign.

Effectively Social Media has created a decentralised press in which our reporter's perspective is not influenced by the threat of losing a wage. It’s a distributed medium that can't be manipulated by even the most powerful of individuals.

Success cannot be measured in a click

Recently we've been thinking about the increasingly complex issue of accurately measuring the returns of your online marketing investment.

If you're embarking on an online pr or social media campaign it's no longer realistic to measure success simply by totting up clicks.

NMA' s Michael Nutley has some interesting things to say about the waning importance of the hallowed 'click through' and how we might measure our marketing success in an increasingly diverse online world.

Friend Connect: Social Networking for all?

Google's upcoming Friend Connect service aims to give anyone the opportunity to add social networking features to their website, without the exorbitant development costs.

Site owners just cut and paste bits of code to add functions like  user registration, invitations, members galleries, message posting and reviews.

Visitors to these sites can also sign in using their existing social network registrations from FaceBook, Hi5 and others, sharing content with their groups of friends elsewhere.

It's a great move that offers small independent websites some of the reach of social media marketing, even if they'd previously dismissed it as being outside budget.

However, it won't meet the grade for businesses and brands – the slightly clunky look and feel combined with the fact many important networks are yet to be integrated means that, at least for a while, Friend Connect may well be limited to artists and interest groups.

See the previews of Friend Connect

Apollo's Pad starting to buzz

Our social media activity for Apollo's Pad is starting to create a buzz in the trade press... check out this news story on Brand Republic.

Win an Eee PC

If you've got a Facebook account you can win an Eee PC with a campaign we're running for a client website.

Check out the competition here.

Apollo's Pad party has started!

The first 5 episodes of the new puppet comedy show Apollo's Pad are now live.

Watch the episodes

Comedy puppets for grown ups

The world's number one puppet-run nightclub is about to open its doors. Think the muppets on drugs and you get the idea.

Qube is responsible for the web-based show's online marketing - you can catch the first 5 webisodes of Apollo's Pad at www.apollospad.com on Wednesday 5 March 2008.

There's a number of trailers already on the site and you can catch other promotions on the Apollo's Pad channel on YouTube.

We're hiring again: web marketing consultants, producers and assistants

We're looking for talented and experienced web marketing consultants and web producers. We're also hunting for intelligent, capable marketing assistants - we'll be posting the full job specs for all three positions on the Qube website shortly.

If you think you've got skills that would make you a good addition to our Brighton-based web marketing team, get in contact. But you must have relevant web marketing experience and a knowledge of search and social media marketing.

Email us to tell us more about you and your experience: jobs@qubes.co.uk

No agencies please. Really. Not maybe, not we'll think about it. Just no agencies.