It’s been just about one year of live beta, and I’m excited to announce some key changes to our business that are informed by learnings from 2011:

• Enhancements to the user experience
• Simplification of the KeepButton implementation process
• Commitment to establishing the value of the Keep, and of ad Keepers, and how this data can inform your marketing plans

User Experience Enhancement

The next generation of KeepButton will deliver an image of the ad’s landing page and the landing page URL into the consumer’s email inbox.  This experience is preferred by consumers, and achieves your goal of deeper engagement with your brand through more immediate, direct link to the landing page.

• 60% of consumers surveyed said they’d like the Keep to go to their inbox vs. 30% who preferred a repository like AdKeeper.
• Early performance show 48% open-rates on KeptAd emails, and enhanced CTRs from these pages than from users’ Keepers.
• It’s just a first step towards Keeping-to-anywhere, as we aim to API user Keeps into all the various places they frequent: Evernote, Amazon Wishlist, Facebook, MyYahoo!, and more.

KeepButton Implementation Enhancement

Introducing: the KeepButton Generator!  This self-serve web interface for traffickers or creative agencies will greatly reduce the effort required to Keep-enable your campaigns. Simple drop-down menu selections will let you choose which corner the KeepButton should appear in, which ad server you’re using, and what the landing page URL should be, if different than the one in your ad server macros.  Daily reports will auto-generate and will be more robust with useful data, including site-of-Keep information.

Value of Keeps and of ad Keepers

Additional impressions and clicks from opted-in consumers is a good thing.  Being able to leverage that high-interest consumer into campaign optimization or the next media buy is even better.  We’re on it, with discussions with best-in-class partners in data management and modeling and will get back to you soon with these opportunities for you.

These improvements will make AdKeeper a better experience for consumers, a simpler tool for agencies and a more valuable data set for advertisers, and we look forward to working with you to put these enhancements to work for your digital campaigns.

Scott Kurnit

We’re passionate at AdKeeper about giving consumers the greatest possible control when engaging with advertising and brands. Some on our team took this passion, ran with it and cooked up a unique offering that serves the AdKeeper mission in new and exciting ways.

Since launching AdKeeper earlier this year we’ve researched, displayed, used, digested, reviewed, sorted, organized and shared thousands of ads. We realized that ads are just the tip of the iceberg. Much like marketers put ads at the top of the purchase funnel, consumers agree that ads are truly just the start of a lasting relationship with the brands in their lives.

This team went off-grid to take our learnings and re-imagine consumer interaction with brands, products, services, offers and commerce. It’s coming soon, but a hint of what we’re up to is that it allows you to Follow Brands, Save Money, Have Fun. This joins the current view of AdKeeper as we extend Keeping across the ad landscape. Sign up at Keep.com to be among the first to see what we’ve been up to.

And thanks to the huge ecosystem of Advertisers, Agencies, Publishers and Ad Tech companies who have joined up to flip advertising from interruptive to invitational. These are exciting times.

- Scott Kurnit

Harry Gold’s interview with AdKeeper’s President, MaryAnn Bekkedahl

While attending the Association of National Advertisers Conference in Phoenix a few weeks ago, I met the good folks from AdKeeper. This company, which went into beta in February 2011, has raised a ton of money. It is bringing a new dimension to online media by giving consumers the ability to save ads they are interested in so they can click on or engage with them later.

So while there I interviewed MaryAnn Bekkedahl, president of AdKeeper and checked out a demo. She said her technology gives consumers more control of their entire Internet experience, helping them engage with advertising and brands of interest on their own time and terms. So I asked MaryAnn a few questions and here’s what she said:

Harry Gold: What is AdKeeper?

MaryAnn Bekkedahl: Quite simply, AdKeeper brings the offline behavior of tearing an ad out of a magazine or newspaper online. With the simple click of the KeepButton overlaid onto digital ads, the consumer can save – or Keep – the ad for later without interrupting their content experience. Once Kept, consumers can view, click, share, shop, compare, and buy, using the ads they’d “bookmarked” earlier.

HG: Why do you think consumers will want to keep ads?

MB: As you know most ads have pretty low click and engagement rates. Why? Because they’re engaged with the content they came online to view. AdKeeper and 24/7 Real Media co-commissioned a Nielsen study earlier this year that asked consumers why they don’t click on online ads. The number one reason was because they want to stay on the page they’re on. So AdKeeper appeals to the non-clickers (or, everyone) by letting them capture ads and offers of interest without disrupting their content experience. Consumers have told us they love the idea. We’re here to make it happen.

HG: What kinds of advertisers embrace the idea of making their ads ”Keepable?”

MB: Innovative ones. What we’re doing here is a game-changer that will create an entirely new consumer behavior online. Imagine a web where consumers have the ability to Keep every ad of interest for later – a true consumer-first utility that allows for time-shifting and deeper engagement on the users’ own time and terms! Innovative marketers who strive to make the Internet a great place for consumer engagement love AdKeeper and they’ve already seen improvements in engagement rates with their ads that have been kept.

HG: Can you list some brands that have tried AdKeeper or are using it?

MB: Sure, we have run AdKeeper-enabled campaigns for over 60 brands including AT&T, American Express, Best Buy, Bigpoint, Campbell’s, Chrysler, Clorox, Dannon, Ford, GAP, Groupon, Home Depot, jetBlue, Kia Motors, Kmart, Kohl’s, Kraft Foods, Lenovo, Lowe’s, Macy’s, New York Times, Nextag, Papa John’s, Pepsi Beverages, Pfizer, Progressive, Publishers Clearing House, Sara Lee, Sears, Unilever, Verizon, Volvo, Warner Bros, Wendy’s – the list goes on and on.

HG: What kind of advertisers don’t like the idea?

MB: We have yet to meet a marketer who doesn’t like the idea of a web where consumers can Keep ads for later. The only objection we face is from a minority of people who have skepticism around consumer demand for Keeping ads. There will always be those who wait and see. Our early partners will benefit from pricing advantages and preferential services that our later partners will not. Our partners are all top-tier marketers with significant online media.

HG: I know you are still in beta but can you share some results?

MB: Once kept, ads are getting an average of a 5 percent click rate. Also, once a consumer puts an ad in their keeper, the average time spend with an ad is 23 seconds. In that 23 seconds, they are viewing, clicking, sharing, liking, printing, and all things you might do with a standard banner or rich media ad unit. Also, according to an MTV study from last year, the average time spent on an ad is 1.3 seconds and we all know what click rates are these days. So a 5 percent click rate and 23 second average time spent on even a few ads, never find a moderate percentage of them, can really increase campaign performance. AdKeeper gives ads that would normally be forgotten after their initial first impressions a second life of sharing, clicking, and engagement that can literally live on for weeks, months, and even years.

HG: So what does it cost to use AdKeeper?

MB: Well, right now we are building our audience of AdKeepers (people who store their ads) and a stable of beta clients – so believe it or not it’s free!

HG: How can we see AdKeeper in action?

MB: You can just visit our site to see a demo.

Final Word

It will be interesting to see if AdKeeper hits critical mass with consumers to really add a significant and secondary lift to an online ad campaign. Given that it is free to try for advertisers, AdKeeper has the potential to get billions of impressions to sign up millions of users. I am sure its goal is to make the AdKeeper “K” button as ubiquitous in advertising as the Facebook and Twitter share buttons are in the web’s content. Certainly if this happens it will be a valuable enhancement to any ad campaign. A whole new additional action can be encouraged and measured along with clicks, engagements, and shares – essentially we could be adding “saves” to our list of metrics and goals.

With the conclusion of Advertising Week and ANA’s Annual Conference this week comes the inevitable question: ‘Is our industry moving in the right direction?’ The answer from Advertising Week is yes, and I’m confident based on the amazing job Bob Liodice does with the ANA, that this will be amplified at the event in Phoenix.

We’re seeing major movement around social marketing and enhancing consumer engagement with advertising. Consumers are in control, and many marketers are now benefitting from their decision to embrace that control and allow consumers to share, engage and interact with ads as they wish.

Here are some of my top takeaways from Advertising Week and looking forward to the ANA:

Creative–TED announced its second annual Ads Worth Spreading initiative to encourage creative work that expresses a “clever, compelling or infectious idea.” With so many ad-tech companies launching by the day, innovation in exhibition and delivery is bound to surprise and delight us.

Sharing—It’s becoming the norm for many aspects of our lives: tweets amplifying our thoughts, location with Foursquare and music with Spotify and Facebook teaming up. People are becoming brands themselves and when these “brands” share brands we’re embarking on a whole new kind of marketing. With recommendations from friends and influencers, it’s a brave new world with serious implications for all commerce.

Choice–With the announcement of Hulu’s Ad Swap, marketers and publishers are giving consumers more chances than ever to interact with content in meaningful ways and giving advertisers the chance to serve more relevant ads.

Participation–Brand narratives have changed because of social media: we can now give consumers the opportunity to contribute instead of just standing by. We have two-way communication with our customers like never before—now we have to make sure we’re listening. As Facebook’s vice president of advertising David Fisher pointed out, we must stop putting so much energy behind telling brand stories to consumers and instead focus on listening to consumers’ stories.

Metrics–This is beating a dead horse, but we all know CTR is not the best metric out there for online advertising and a “Like”, as awesome as it is, is only one measure of the impact of social marketing. Obviously I’m a big fan of the Keep, not only for the consumer control it represents, but also as the ultimate measure of hand raisers. But, we’re all just at the beginning of these efforts and better metrics to measure brand lift that unites all digital marketing initiatives is still over the horizon.

Experience–Nike Basketball proved with their Black Mamba / Kobe Bryant case study that the brands who will succeed in social marketing will create not just valuable experiences for consumers, but also drive sales for their brand.

According to panelists at the Bloomberg Roundtable, 20% of employee time at many New York City agencies is spent experimenting with new technologies. So whether it’s about new social metrics, new ad formats or new data tactics, agencies are starting to experiment more and more, meaning that excitement should be brewing for the new innovations we should all see at the ANA and Advertising Week in 2012.

In an effort to highlight and amplify the creative spirit that encapsulated the eighth annual Advertising Week Conference, we wanted to reflect upon takeaways from a panel of leading digital advertising executives, including our very own Scott Kurnit. In a thoughtful discussion around “The Online Creative Revolution,” panelists from AdKeeper, Yahoo!, JetBlue, R/GA and PointRoll agreed that marketers must shift to place equal weighting between audience capture and creative.

“Is there a creative revolution? It’s kind of a quiet revolution,” said Michael Lowenstern, managing director of digital advertising at R/GA. “The time is right for data, technology and creative to come together in a way that’s relevant to people who are looking at advertising online. It’s an easy sell to people when you get them excited about it.”

Kurnit added, “This renewed focus on creative will allow brands to serve consumers advertisements that are interesting enough to engage with or save for later.”

PointRoll CEO Rob Gatto pointed out that, “historically speaking, we have not always taken advantage of data from a creative perspective. Instead, we’ve tried to serve bigger ads that just continue disrupting the user experience with unwanted, irrelevant content.” Gatto went on to say that this is where the opportunity for the online creative revolution lies–it’s about coming up with great creative and then matching that creative content to the data in real-time to create engagement and conversations between consumer and brand.

The most successful advertising meets at a perfect intersection of creative and contextual relevance, according to Yahoo’s head of North American sales, Wayne Powers. Publishers like Yahoo! are already well on their way to using the combined power of data and creative to their advantage. Powers noted that 13 million unique versions of the Yahoo! home page are served each day based on consumer interest data. Individualized creative makes advertising a personal experience.

JetBlue’s senior vice president of marketing and commercial strategy, Martin St. George, emphasized that as standard display advertising effectiveness rates continue to drop, online brands like JetBlue must focus more dollars on rich media and interactive ads in order to create consumer engagement. It will be a change of pace, but a needed one.

With this creative revolution will come challenges. One such challenge will be a new focus on multi-platform distribution of tailored creative content to PCs, mobile devices, tablets, out-of-home and social media. Yahoo! is doing this, according to Powers, who mentioned that the publisher launched its first four-screen campaign just last week.

The future of online advertising without doubt will be about leveraging creative content to more deeply engage consumers regardless of how they were targeted or where they were reached. Referencing the ad mantra of “right message/right place/right time,” Kurnit concludes,  “The industry’s gotten “right place” fairly under control. The creative revolution will be led by “right message,” and the recognition that there may never be a “right time,” which AdKeeper aims to solve for by letting consumers choose when they engage with the ads that are relevant and meaningful to them.

To watch the panel discussion in full, please visit: The Online Creative Revolution.

MaryAnn Bekkedahl is the president of AdKeeper, the company giving consumers the power to Keep advertising for later. Prior to joining AdKeeper, Bekkedahl was the executive vice president and group publisher at Rodale.

In honor of Advertising Week here in New York City we decided to create a collection of the Greatest Ads Ever. Please check it out and vote for your favorites by Keeping the ads you like best. Each month we will post a recap of the voting and over time perhaps we can settle debates about the definitive Greatest Ad Ever. We have also included a commenting box which we hope people will use to tell us what’s missing from the 75 ads we have curated thus far. We will try to add suggestions to the collection as we go.

The collection was a challenge to create because, well, ads are difficult to find. Online ads and print proved quite elusive, in particular, and if it wasn’t for YouTube this collection would not have been possible. Of course, one of the things we are doing here at AdKeeper is making ads collectable, er, Keepable, so that you can use them and enjoy them whenever you want. So in the not too distant future, when all ads are Keepable, anyone will be able to make their own personal collections of ads, from My Favorite Jingles to Stuff for Timmy’s Birthday. Check out some of the other Collections we have already made.

Sixteen weeks ago, we launched the beta version of AdKeeper.com. Everyone says that if you’re perfectly happy with your first product launch, then you launched too late. With our beta launch, there were a lot of things we loved, but there were also some things we learned we needed to work on. And we did. We heard you and we’re excited to announce we’ve launched a significant upgrade at AdKeeper.com.

For the last few months our team has spent many late nights and weekends, asking our customers what they want and working through new ideas. We’ve done lots of technical testing and user research and had many lively brainstorming sessions. And, we’ve challenged ourselves to think differently—working from the inside out—but most of all, to listen and to learn.

After hundreds of “I have an idea” and “what if we did this” and “why would people care” moments, we’re happy that today, we’re launching a brand new version of AdKeeper.com and I want to share with you some key elements of the new site that I hope you will like!

First, there’s My Keeper. When you Keep ads, My Keeper is where we store them for you. We changed how My Keeper looks and we’re working on adding features that will give you much more control and help you organize, share and quickly filter to find the specific ads you’ve Kept. Imagine you’re planning a vacation; wouldn’t it be helpful to have a specific list or folder where all those airline, hotel and tour deals could go? Look for those features to show up soon, making it easier for you to organize all the ads you Keep.

Then, there’s the AdGallery. We created the AdGallery to help you easily find ads for whatever you’re interested in. So, if you’re looking for a great summer movie or researching new stuff for the house, or just want to see if any of your favorite brands have any funny new ads, you can find and Keep them all in the AdGallery. Be sure to visit the AdGallery often to see what’s new as more advertisers partner with us each week.

Stay with us! We’re working on many more features to help you organize the ads you Keep and discover new ads for whatever you’re interested in.

If you have any feedback, questions or ideas, please send a message to info@adkeeper.com. We’d love to hear from you and we promise to read every one of your messages.

Also, don’t forget to follow us on Twitter and like us on Facebook. Thanks and Happy Keeping!

Sarah is the Director of User Experience at AdKeeper. She tweets a lot and you can follow her @sarahdoody.

Everyone in advertising has seen the stats:

• 8% of online users account for 85% of all clicks
• Current average of all CTRs is 0.09%

When we looked around for studies that asked consumers WHY they don’t click on ads, we found none.  We did find loads of reports on how to increase CTR through creative optimization and search/display media mix.  Lots of articles on varying formats’ engagement rates, hover rates, CTRs and more, but quite surprisingly, no one has ever asked consumers, “Hey, why don’t you click on ads that you see online?”

So we did.  Here at AdKeeper, we love advertising, and it bothers us (a lot) that this highly interactive medium has such trouble generating the key engagement action that it seeks from its audience.

What do YOU think the reasons are that online audiences don’t click on ads?

• Is it because they think the ads are irrelevant to them?
• Annoying?
• Distracting?
• Or are they worried that interaction with an ad will lead to a lifetime of spam, viruses and re-targeting?

Yes, actually, to all of the above.

But… the foremost reason that consumers don’t click on ads is none of these.

The #1 reason people don’t click on ads is because they don’t want to leave the page they’re on.

Logical, of course.  They came online for content, not ads.  Clicking away from the content I came to view is antithetical in every way.

But, ads have value, as we all know.  They can save us money, give us ideas for what to see, do, or buy.  They help us make decisions and inform us of new products and services that may be of interest.

With the AdKeeper technology, consumers now have a tool they can use to control the when and where of their engagement with ads – the KeepButton™.  Yes, I’m interested.  No, not right now.  Let’s talk later.  AdKeeper lets me clip the ads of interest as I come across them, AND stay on the page I came to view.

AdKeeper is a solution to the #1 reason consumers don’t click on ads.  Want to talk about how Keeping can work for you?

In all the years that I have been doing research with consumers regarding their online behavior – across many different concepts – one thing always holds true: The most successful online companies are the ones that let people do online that which they used to do offline – but do those things faster, with greater ease, and more conveniently.

Examples? Think about researching a new car (with the Internet replacing going to numerous dealerships and picking up brochures). Or looking for an inexpensive flight (which replaced calling a travel agent or worse, many airlines).  Or even checking the value of your stock portfolio, which overnight became a hobby for millions of ‘regular’ people (vs. getting out the Wall Street Journal and a calculator). Banking, job-searching, listening to music, watching TV… need more examples?

That’s why my very first consumer focus groups for AdKeeper dove deep into the idea behind the overall concept:  Would you be interested in saving online ads? I asked participants if they ever ripped ads out of their magazines or their newspaper, whether they saved weekly ad circulars or the coupons that they get in the mail at home.

Overwhelmingly, participants said that they saved advertisements. But when I asked what they did with them or where they saved them, most everyone just smiled. They smiled because they knew in their hearts that their “saving systems” really don’t work. They said:

• I stack them up in a big pile on my desk.

• I have a special drawer for them.

• I stuff them into an old manila envelope.

• They are all over the place.

• I don’t know, I seem to rip them out and then lose track of them.

So, clearly consumers save lots of ads for things they are interested in and don’t want to forget about — offline.

But when I asked participants to think about their online behavior — do they save the ads they see when they are online? – not one said that they did.

When we probed into why this is, most told us that the only way to really save an online ad would be to take a screen shot, print it to their printer, and then put that printed ad into the drawer/pile/folder…. not exactly an online solution to an offline behavior.

With their enthusiasm for AdKeeper, (concept research resulted in “intent to use” unlike any company I’ve been involved with) consumers are telling us, “Let me be in control like I am when I spontaneously rip an ad out of a magazine.  And then give me a place that keeps my kept ads organized and easy to look at, find and use.”

Keeping ads in this new online way is far superior to the old way – and like every successful digital business, it’s easier, faster, and more convenient than doing it offline.

And that’s what makes it so appealing to consumers.

Marshall Cohen founded Marshall Cohen Associates, a research and strategic marketing firm, in 1993. Cohen has worked with a multitude of successful online brands, including CNET, Prodigy, About.com, America Online, AIM, Compuserve, DailyCandy, Thrillist and iheartradio.

In 2004 and 2005, he created and taught an MBA seminar in Entertainment Marketing at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.