In the current economic environment advertisers are clawing back budgets and shouting from the rooftops about increased efficiencies & effectiveness.
The original buzzword is back with avengence: ROI.
So having exhausted all the DR channels i can find for a certain client my attention is now focusing on time targeting.
A recent study from the IAB UK claimed that advertisers are failing to target users at the time of day when they're most receptive to ad messages.
Despite day-part targeting being common practice in the planning of above-the-line advertising, with Outdoor & Radio especially, online advertisers and agencies haven't traditionally embraced the idea to its fullest extent.
A survey by the IAB and Lightspeed Research in the UK found more than half (51%) of people are more receptive to advertising after 6pm. The findings suggest advertisers that take advantage of this prime evening period to target consumers could increase campaign penetration and reduce wastage.
Obviously this is a UK survey so i did a little bit of digging around the main networks in Australia and asked them how regularly they are approached to do time targeted activity.
The answer was, suprisingly, not very often at all.
So that suggests to me that we, like the UK, could be missing a trick here....
I used to work on a big pizza brand in the UK and time targeting was their biggest strategy.
We targeted them when they were hungry (ground breaking stuff!) during lunchtimes & evenings only - getting the bang for our buck.
The food analogy is a clear standout for the utilisation of time targeting but why can't the same policy be applied to every product or service?
We can't assume that people are just as receptive to ads from financial institutions, FMCG retailers and technology companies at every second of every day even if we are in contextually relevant environments.
We think we really understand the consumer mindset when planning hence the environments we place our advertising in are so carefully thought out, but has anyone really done any research into click through rates & conversion by time of day and day of week and then actively applied those learnings?
I agree that we could be in danger of micro-planning when we start throwing in contextual placements, behavioural targeting, re-messaging & demographics as well as time targeting but i still believe that it should be a model we take a serious look at especially when it comes to increasing efficiencies for our clients during this time of lowered spending & consumption.
Tick-tock-tick-tock.....time to increase efficiency.
Why 'last click wins' is utter b*****ks
Advertising Age published a fantastic article entitled 'Why the click is the wrong metric for online ads'.
I have outlined some of the key paragraphs below:
"Publishers have a lot to gain," said Steve Kerho, VP-analytics, media and marketing optimization at Organic. Mr. Kerho has been doing lots of analysis on how online-display ads affect search and conversions and found that in some cases, a display ad can increase a search ad's click-through rate 25% to 30%. If he had simply measured the clicks from search, he would have missed the display ads' influence.
John Squire, chief strategy officer of web-analytics firm Coremetrics, which today is launching a service that helps marketers give proper credit to their many online ads, likens it to an offline example: You're headed to the supermarket and on your way in you see the big sign in the window advertising ground round for $3.99 a pound. You need some anyway, so you buy it. In the online world, which measures the last ad seen, that sign alone would be given credit for your purchases in the store. But it's quite likely that you were going shopping in the first place because you saw something in the weekend circular that you wanted to buy or maybe you heard a radio ad. Under the last-ad-attribution model, the circular is worth, at worst, nothing, and at best far less than the ad for ground chuck in the storefront.
A ComScore research study called 'Wither the click', which studied 139 online ad campaigns by marrying data from its panel of U.S. internet users with shopper data, found online ads, even when they didn't result in a click, increased a consumer's likelihood of making a purchase at an advertiser's retail store by 17% and increased visits to a marketer's website by an average of 40%.
"Virtually any seller that's not a search engine or affiliate [network] is not getting the proper credit for their ads," said Esco Strong, market research manager at the Atlas Institute. "There's a disconnect in terms of the actual work that's delivering people through that [sales] funnel and the sale and there's a disconnect in how advertisers are measuring their ads and planning their campaigns."
Read the full article here: http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=134787
Social Media For Internal Communications
We spend day after day planning social media strategies for our clients but outside of personal usage do many of you actually use social media to communicate internally with your co-workers?
•informal knowledge sharing for teams and groups
•networked innovation using social tools
•distributed learning communities
•re-inventing the intranet
•generating human-scale communication, rather management jargon
•integrating and developing corporate culture
•cross-silo networking building
•replacing newsletters with two-way conversational blogs
•better peripheral awareness
Sun Microsystems Facebook Fridays (Educational Sessions)
IBM Internal Blog
Best Buy: Blueshirt Nation (Internal Social Network)
Twitter users under the magnifying glass.....
- The median age of a Twitter user is 31. That compares to a median age of 27 for MySpace users, 26 for Facebook users, and 40 for LinkedIn users.
- Twitter users are slightly more racially and ethnically diverse than the U.S. population. "Most likely because they are younger -- and younger Americans are a more ethnically and racially diverse group than is the full population," the study found.
- 35% of Twitter users live in urban areas compared to 29% of all Internet users.
*Pew's study is based on a survey of 2,253 adults, 18 and older, including 502 phone interviews
Free E-Condoms!
Facebook members can now send each other e-condoms and information about safe sex courtesy of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, which launched a page and application on the social network just in time for Valentine's Day.
Google closes radio advertising arm
Google is to shut its radio ads business as attempts to take its online dominance into the offline market continue to falter.
Google said 40 jobs are at risk as it looks to sell its Radio Automation business and close the AdSense for Audio and Audio Ads services at the end of May, after conceding they had underperformed.
Google VP of product management Susan Wojcicki said despite investing heavily in the two-year-old service, it hadn't generated adequate returns.
"While we've devoted substantial resources to developing these products and learned a lot along the way, we haven't had the impact we hoped for," she said. "So, we've decided to exit the broadcast radio business and focus our efforts in streaming audio."
Wojcicki's comments echo those made by Google director Spencer Spinnell last month when he announced the closure of its print ads business, another attempt to increase its offline footprint.
Google launched its radio ads programme in 2007 following a $102m cash acquisition of DMarc Broadcasting a year earlier. The deal could have risen to more than $1bn dependant on its ongoing success.
Twitter gets more funding
Twitter received £24.5m ($5.21m) in VC funding this weekend, bringing its total funding figure to over £35m ($77.47m).
The funding, which is the third round of investment in the site, came from venture capital firms Benchmark and Institutional Venture Partners.
Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said in a blog post the site's strong growth - it has seen active user numbers jump 900% in a year - attracted the money.
It will be invested to grow the site further and to investigate revenue generation products.
The 3rd Place
I attended the Media 09' conference last Friday and was pleasantly surprised at the high caliber of speakers & the content of their presentations.
Meet Ray (Oldenburg). Ray is an urban sociologist from Florida.
Sounds cheesy but it's actually very accurate.
Youth audiences expect more from TV
The makers of hugely successful online dramas KateModern and Lonely Girl 15 have called on production companies to wake up to cross-platform content in order to keep young people watching.
Miles Beckett, co-founder and CEO of Eqal, the content company formed by the team behind the web dramas, urged traditional production firms to integrate online with TV during the commissioning process.
Beckett added, "If you look at the most popular shows around today, they all have an interactive element, even if it's as limited as texting in to vote for who you want to win a singing or dancing show. They're about encouraging the watcher to participate and get involved."
I completely agree, the youth audience are constantly on the go and are experts when it comes to multi tasking & interacting with multiple platforms - so how do we engage them? Fewer and fewer are going to sit and watch TV shows that don't offer engagement, especially when they have so much control over online content.
Social TV
MySpace, Intel and Yahoo are partnering to let users interact with Myspace via their TV sets.
Access to MySpace will be available through a new Widget Channel, co-developed by Intel and Yahoo.
The aim of the Widget Channel is to develop mini-applications that can complement TV viewing with information from the Internet.
MySpace users will be able to communicate with friends, read and reply to messages, receive friend requests, publish status and mood updates, see updates from friends and browse profiles and photos on their TVs while watching shows.
The MySpace Widget is being introduced in conjunction with Toshiba, which is promoting a new line of TVs powered by Intel chips that are designed to connect to the Internet.
TV 2.0, or social TV, is the next step on the road to full convergence, where the oft-quoted vision is for content to be accessed from every screen, whether fixed or mobile.
Social networks have been quick to incorporate video into their communities. Now the TV industry is now keen to see if it can build community around its content - so what does this mean for the future of TV viewing? Can it revive lagging numbers by encouraging TV 'participation'?
The other point to consider is that coupling social network profile data with TV content delivers personalised media access which should prove a boon to advertisers, who can tap into defined niche communities and deliver tailored brand experiences......
It's exciting stuff!
Social ROI
US - The goal of many Super Bowl advertisers in recent years has been not only to make a splash during TV ad time, but to generate online discussions but determining the ad winners and losers from an online buzz perspective isn't always clear cut.
Social media research company Networked Insights argues that advertisers should be able to determine ROI when it comes to their presence in Web conversations.
"Popularity is one thing...but that's a one trick pony," said Networked Insights CEO Dan Neely, who thinks advertisers should be asking, "Can I actually convert that into some form of revenue for my company?"
As advertisers reduce ad budgets and aim for efficiency, such questions will become more important.
The firm looked at online interactions mentioning Super Bowl advertiser brands to determine what it calls Social ROI.
The metric gauges the increase in social interactions online for every $1 million the advertisers spent on Super Bowl ads. In the end, the research firm concluded that Teleflora, Cash4Gold, CareerBuilder.com, and H&R Block topped the list of big game advertisers according to Social ROI department.
Teleflora's rose 488 percent, Cash4Gold's was up 246 percent, CareerBuilder.com's increased 99 percent, and the social media return on Universal's investment for its upcoming "Land of the Lost" film was up 48 percent.
The company measured 3.5 million conversations each day on 17,000 social sites; in addition to large social sites like Facebook or MySpace, they measure niche sites where online conversations occur, such as Fan Forum, RapMusic.com, and The Knot.
The top social ROI gainers, however, barely made a blip on the screen as far as TNS Cymfony's social discussion volume index is concerned.
Teleflora, Cash4Gold, and CareerBuilder.com didn't even make it in its top 10 rankings, measuring the volume of social media discussions mentioning Super Bowl ad brands. During the first 36 hours following the Super Bowl, Cymfony found that Anheuser-Busch, Dreamworks's "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen," and Paramount's "Star Trek" and "GI Joe: Rise of Cobra" garnered the highest volume of discussion around their brands online.
The difference in the two firms' findings, said Neely, in part stems from what is measured. Networked Insights measures Web content and social media interaction beyond postings -- looking at links, invites, and other instances of online sharing. "Those are the things that are high value and make social media social," suggested Neely. "We measure the vocal minority and the silent majority," he said, arguing that other systems only look at initial postings, what he'd call the "vocal minority."
Cymfony's Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer Jim Nail argued that measuring volume of postings matters. If no one is actually creating posts about an advertiser, then there won't be anyone sharing that information, either, he said. "Any [increase in social interactions] they get, even if it's small is going to result in a huge percentage jump," he said.
Arguments over methodology will persist as long as research firms are around. However, in the case of measuring buzz around the Super Bowl ads, social media consultant Dave Evans contended such reports offer limited value to advertisers.
"When you apply these social measures to an awareness platform, which is the Super Bowl spot, you're going to get measures that vary widely depending on what [methodology] you're using," said Evans. He argues that metrics like those from Networked Insights or Cymfony can be "extremely valuable" when applied to gauge conversations that take place regarding brand attributes, or when consumers are considering product purchases.
However, because many of the post-game conversations tend to be about the ad creative and entertainment value of the advertising, as opposed to the brands themselves, applying metrics for measuring conversations about brands is inappropriate. "Yes the Super Bowl spots generate huge conversations. But they're about the spots; they're not about the brand," said Evans.
One outlier may be in the case of films such as "Transformers" and "Land," both of which showed up on Cymfony's "most talked about advertisers" list, and Networked Insights' list of social ROI gainers. In such cases, conversations were predominately about the brands -- or the movies --themselves.
Woolworths: battered & bruised but not done yet...
So imagine my delight when today i found out that Woolworths was coming back and even more delighted that it was to return as an online only brand!
Woolworths will officially relaunch online middle of this year after being rescued by the owners of Littlewoods Direct.
The high street chain, which went into administration in November, has been bought by Speke-based Shop Direct Group for an undisclosed sum, with a view to reopening its website within the next six months
Bebo launches tools to build mobile social networks
Bebo has launched a global mobile initiative to enable operators to use its platform to roll out their own social networks.
Bebo Open Mobile aims to extend the site’s reach by giving operators, handset manufacturers and software developers a set of tools to help them build, distribute and promote a tailored version of the social network.
It launched an online Open Media platform last year and is now looking to replicate this on the mobile platform.
Partners can develop a Bebo mobile site with customised navigation, mobile advertising support and reporting data. They can also use a mobile development API to build applications and widgets to plug into the site.
Sean Kane, global head of mobile for Bebo, said the move was a way to grow the reach of the social network. “The suite of tools is designed to move mobile communication and user relationships forward by delivering a simple and ubiquitous experience to users,” he said.
Bebo’s Open Media platform launched online in November 2007 with a series of partners including Channel 4, MTV and Turner in the UK.
The social network now claims to reach 50m memebers.
Google launches Social Mapping
Google has launched a mobile social mapping service that allows people to share their location with friends.
Google Latitude users are able to find friends on Google Maps mobile applications and through an iGoogle gadget.
Users can send friends text messages and photos directly and update their own status.
Google said users have a variety of privacy settings to ensure they have full control of who has access to their location and details.
On the official Google blog, Vic Gundotra, VP engineering on the Google mobile team, said, "Everything about Latitude is opt-in. You not only control exactly who gets to see your location, but you also decide the location that they see.
"For instance, let's say you are in Rome. Instead of having your approximate location detected and shared automatically, you can manually set your location for elsewhere - perhaps a visit to Niagara Falls," added Gundotra.
It's the first major social layer Google has applied to its mobile mapping service and is currently available in 27 countries.
Google said versions for the iPhone and Android are to launch soon.
Quote of the day
"That's $20 million bucks for a banner you cannot click on."--24/7 Real Media Chairman David J. Moore, at OnMedia NYC, referring to Citicorp's $400 million, 20-year marketing deal with the New York Mets that includes naming the new stadium.