Advertising on Local Government web sites - Abacus e-Media

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Advertising on Local Government web sites

In the paper we explore The resistance to carry advertising on Local Government websites and how this can be overcome. What sort of adverts to use on Local Government websites and how to place them. How Abacus' expertise of carrying adverts on sites they designed for publishing clients can be used to guide Councils through the maze of advertising. The process of placing adverts on Local Government websites.

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The battle to carry advertising on local government web sites was fought and won in 2008. What were the difficulties? How did it change local government websites? And was it worth it?

Drivers

Local government websites cost a lot of money. And whilst they can generate huge savings for the councils who build them (see savings calculator) there is still a cost to carry. Mitigation of costs is the primary aim of carrying advertising. Not only is there an opportunity to off-set costs by carrying advertising on local government websites, there is also an opportunity to demonstrate that local government is alive to the possibility of commerce and to considering all aspects of cost reduction. It is a demonstration of a change in direction showing the council to be more commercial.

Resistance

the argument. Now, councils are being forced to re-evaluate their attitudes towards income generation.

The view that `we are not carrying advertising on OUR website' and the argument that by carrying advertising councils are `recommending' the product needs more scrutiny.

Many local authorities have some form of newsletter going out to the public. Those newsletters carry advertising. Is there any difference? Advertising on vehicles. advertising on traffic islands, etc, etc; this has been in place and accepted for many years. Web sites are no different. It is simply a different landscape; a virtual landscape on which to place a message.

Discussions about carrying advertising on your council's web site will no doubt have swung this way and that; sometimes the decision would have changed many times in the same meetings. Usually, because of this uncertainty, the decision to go ahead is shelved.

Some local government officers appear to feel "above" what they see as the base commercialism of advertising. Or at least they did over 3 years ago when these discussions first took place. The cold wind of budget cuts may ruddy the face of

those views, placing a different complexion on

"What about those in our client base who use screen readers? The effect will be catastrophic on them." This argument is specious. Usability Exchange, a company specializing in looking at the usability of sites, was asked to carry out some tests on council websites. A selected group of their testers, each with vision issues, were asked to look at a number of sites all of which carried advertising. They were asked to measure the impact of advertising on their user experience. The results showed little or no effect on how well they managed to either navigate or draw information from these sites.

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Controls

Legal, decent, honest and truthful are the headline requirements that any advert must comply with on a local government site. However the devil is in the detail.

Clearly you aren't going to take `any' sort of advertisement no matter how big the company or how glossy the advert is. You have to construct an exclusion list for the digital media company to use as a yardstick to measure their intended advertising against. Councils have a moral and political responsibility to follow and obviously don't want to be seen endorsing something that they would rather not.

"Somehow local government officers appear to feel "above" what they see as the base commercialism of advertising. Or at least they did over 3 years ago when these discussions first took place. The cold wind of budget cuts may ruddy the face of those views."

between web officers, deputy leaders, head of trading standards and comms to make the final decision and provide a set of rules - the exclusion list.

Part of any agreement with a digital media company should be the ability to pull any advertisement you consider inappropriate; and to do this without any argument, discussion or even a reason. It's your site and you decide what appears on it.

Some companies have a system which asks you to agree with an advert before it goes live providing, an additional safeguard.

Despite all your efforts there may still be the possibility of an advertisement being inappropriate because of where it's placed e.g. a Happy Fathers Day gift company appearing on pages for the registrar of death. Watch what you put where.

How is the concept sold internally?

The intention is to prevent the wrong sort of copy appearing on your site in the first place. Prevention is easier than cure.

It's helpful if you can show what a page might look like when carrying an advert. The realism of an image often expunges the falsely imagined horror.

This can be done by drawing up a list of the types of advertising to consider. This doesn't need to be exhaustive, just those which may prove uncomfortable or at least need a discussion.

The list can then be circulated to about 35 people asking them to rate it from 0 to 5. 0 being NO and 5 being YES to advertise.

If any of the results come back inconclusive it will usually then go to a round table discussion

An ideal opportunity to consider this is when you come to a re-design, inserting advertising into a new set of templates.

Our website designers and developers have had many years' experience of designing websites around advertising because of our work for publishing clients. This experience has allowed us to guide and advise councils through the maze of the advertising world's cryptic language of `MPUs', `Banners', `Skyscrapers', `CPM', and so on.

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"Clearly you aren't going to take `any' sort of advertisement no matter how big the company or how glossy the advert is. You have to construct an exclusion list for the digital media company to use as a yardstick."

Digital media companies

Three years ago there were not many digital media companies who would consider small players such as local governments in the advertising world, despite the potential of local government advertising being huge ? reportedly the size of Tesco when combined together. As an example Lincolnshire County Council with its page views of around 1.4 million per month was considered tiny by the big players. Now advertising on local government sites is not unthinkable, and is becoming widely accepted by users and agencies alike.

conclusion that it allowed them to create a revenue stream without any additional resource.

What's the deal?

The deal between owners of websites and digital media companies varies. However as a guide a 65%-35% split of the gross sales, with the larger part going to the council, would be a rule of thumb to adopt. There may be additional costs to pay for use of software. In general it is unlikely that revenue to the council would fall below 55%-60%.

Adsense and DoubleClick, both run by Google, are popular options. Website owners can enroll in these programmes to enable text, image and video advertisements on their websites. These advertisements then generate revenue on either a per-click or per-impression basis.

Flyde Borough Council have released a case study about their use of Adsense, with the

How are the adverts placed?

Stephen Cave at Abacus e-Media explains how advertising gets from the advertiser to your website: "This is a complex 3 stage process where the advertiser employs an advertising agent who designs the adverts as part of an overall campaign. The agent then employs a digital media

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agency who places the adverts onto your site with a piece of software. Rarely does the advertising media (you and your website) ever talk to the advertiser direct. There is simply no need.

"Our website designers and developers have had many years experience of designing websites around advertising because of our work for publishing clients. This experience has allowed us to guide and advise councils through the maze of the advertising"

The process is automatic. In fact this is one of the benefits of any such system. You simply open up your pages (termed `Inventory' in the digital media world) using a piece of inserted code, and the adverts are placed. The system also counts the impressions, `click throughs' etc and generates reports from which payments are made to you.

When the user views your pages the software used to serve advertising (the adverts are usually held on the servers of the digital media companies), loads the adverts last, after the page has loaded, so as not to disrupt the user's experience of the site.

It really is simple and requires little or no effort from the web teams."

What size adverts can they carry?

There are number of different standard advertisement sizes used on web sites (called in page media)

MPU Most common is the MPU (Message plus unit). Typically these are 300px wide by 250px deep. These tend to be more valuable. It is possible to have smaller MPU's at 180x150 Banners are 468px X 60px Leaderboards are typically 728px X 90px Skyscrapers are typically 120px X 600px but some are 160px wide.

Can advertisements be animated?

Some site owners only allow ads to move if and when the customer clicks them and they also set a time limit on movement, typically 30 seconds.

What sort of advertising should we carry?

High quality adverts from large companies such as Sony and UPS can add to the glossy look of the site, provided the digital media companies can provide those sort of adverts.

What about carrying advertising from small organisations such as the local double glazing company? Typically the effort in providing sales and support to get local advertisers onto your site will preclude you from doing so. The process will require back office staff at your end to facilitate the service which will more than eat up anything you would have made. Unless you already have one for an in-house magazine, the cost of setting up a sales and design office is just out of the question.

Unless the small business can provide you with the correct sized, web ready, advertisement and you are able to get it into your site using the

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