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.