Facebook has a problem that sounds good in theory, but not so much in practice: Too many customers.
There’s no question that the top advertisers want to be on Facebook and inventory isn’t a problem, either. But at the moment, Facebook lacks the infrastructure to stay on top of demand. That’s created a huge opportunity for about two dozen agencies that act as middlemen for Facebook’s ad business.
The firms, listed here, are presented as an alternative or a supplement to the automated Facebook Ads Manager tool. Since the tool was developed with small advertisers in mind, marketers with multi-million dollar budgets usually go straight to the middlemen. Why? In part it’s because Facebook offers so many variables — there are thousands of ways to slice and dice ads by size and composition, but also by demographic and psychographic.
“The reason people come to Clickable is that we’re giving advertisers and agencies the ability to maximize their buys across a great scale,” says Max Kalehoff, vice president of marketing for Clickable. “Our experience with Facebook is that one thing they’ve expressed is they don’t have all the answers.” A Facebook rep agrees and compares the API partners to the SEO industry that grew up around search. “It’s proof of a shift in how marketers think of social in marketing,” the rep says. “The ecoystem is good for everyone.”
Clickable’s specialty is small- to medium-size businesses. Clients include Heatwave Interactive, a gaming company, and Hachette Book Group. When such companies buy a Facebook campaign, Clickable takes advantage of Facebook’s scale to experiment with different types of ads and targeting to see which work best.
There are other factors. For instance, “ad blindness” can develop after a user has been exposed to a single ad multiple times. Marin Software offers a means to automate ads to avoid ad blindness, says Matt Lawson, the company’s vice president of marketing and alliances.
Another service the firms provide is tracking analytics. Facebook provides some tracking, but advertisers will likely want more. For instance, Facebook used to offer a tool that logs pageviews, purchases and other activities that happened after a consumer was exposed to a Facebook ad, but the company ended that program last September. So, if a marketer wants to get a good idea of a Facebook ad’s ultimate efficacy, they have to go elsewhere.
Facebook first opened its Ads API to outside firms in 2009, when the company got serious about leveraging its huge user base with advertising. The strategy isn’t unusual. Google and Yahoo also support a range of ad agencies that simplify buying across their networks. In fact, Google’s recent $400 million purchase of Admeld was designed to simplify a process Google described as “mind-numbingly complicated and inefficient” on its official blog.
What’s different in Facebook’s case is the company launched its ad program in earnest at the moment it became the hottest property on the web. It’s no wonder then that the now 22 companies with access to Facebook’s API hold a coveted position and must adhere strictly to Facebook’s standards. Those that don’t get taken off the list, at least for a short time. Dave Williams, CEO of Blinq Media, one of the first API partners, says some of the firms eliminated from the list were search ad firms that didn’t adapt to Facebook’s model. “They were looking at click-throughs and ROI,” says Williams. “But on Facebook, it’s all about engagement.”
While that ensures a high level of quality, large marketers are no doubt frustrated by the fact that part of their ad spend goes to two middlemen — the Facebook API companies often deal with ad agencies rather than with the clients directly. Like Google, Facebook might also see the value in solving the ad-buying process for clients. The Facebook rep, however, says that such seeming inefficiencies level out because the API firms are so good at maximizing the ad buys. While she wouldn’t rule out Facebook taking more control of the process at some point in the future, at the moment at least, the arrangement seems to be working. Says the rep: “We’re focusing on the core functionality.”
The Modern Media Agency Series is supported by IDG. Mobile and video advertising spend is small compared to search and display. The promise of mobile and video has not been realized for the past few years. But, IDC analyst Karsten Weide says the slow growth in mobile and video ads is beginning to change. Click here to learn more.
- How Agencies Are Spending Online Media Budgets [INFOGRAPHIC]
– 5 Ways Social Media Has Changed Marketing Campaigns
– The Pros & Cons of Working at Niche Marketing & PR Agencies
– The Impact of the Social Web on Media Agencies
– What Makes the Modern Media Agency [INFOGRAPHIC]
More About: advertising, Agency, api, facebook, facebook ads, Modern Media Agency Series
For more Business & Marketing coverage:
In journalism, there’s a saying that “three is a trend,” but I’m impatient, so I’m going to say two examples is enough. This month, that trend is social media IRL. First, T-Mobile adapts Angry Birds to real-world 3D and hilarity ensues. Then, a British guy shows us all how stupid we’d look if we went around trying to friend, follow, like and poke people.
Other than that, there are no common themes or lessons to be learned from June’s Mashable Global Ads Chart — just the usual agglomeration of racing car porn, videogame teases and the occasional oddball video that somehow made its way to viral glory.
To enjoy the list in its motley glory, click on the gallery below.
Note: The list below does not include music videos, user-generated content or movie trailers. Unruly Media’s Viral Video Chart tracks 18 million shares a day through third-party APIs.
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to play Angry Birds IRL? Well, apparently you’re not alone. This video, from T-Mobile, shows what happens when people use a simple smartphone to play a life-size version Angry Birds game, replete with real shooting birds and exploding pigs.
E-Trade’s 2008′s Super Bowl ad resurfaces with a vengeance. There’s something timeless about a spit-take.
Dear David Cornfield Melanoma Fund: You’re ruining my summer with this effective and heart-rending public service announcement about melanoma.
For the launch of the Galaxy SII in France, Samsung enlisted Jay Funk, whom you may know as the the “Internet Finger Tutting phenomenon,” or, if you’re like me, don’t know at all. JayFunk can make cubes and butterflies and other stuff come out of hands with a little CGI help.
Racing car videos are the macho equivalent of LOLCats. Here, a BMW 1 Series M Coupe makes its way through cartoon-style car-shaped holes in concrete walls. Professional driver. Do not attempt.
Can your tot wield an axe like this kid? Maybe if he’s got some CGI people on the payroll.
Remember when I said race car videos are the macho equivalent of LOLCats? Same goes for previews of videogames.
A harmless looking guy asks people to be his friend, posts “like” notes on objects and literally follows people to show how social media behavior looks IRL. Appropriately enough, it’s to promote an opera from Nico Muhly that “lifts the lid on (or “off” maybe?) living our lives online.”
Darth Vader goes to Disneyland and has a great time. ‘Nuff said.
Volkswagen’s “The Force” ad gets parodied once again, this time to take VW to task for opposing cuts in CO2 emissions. The video was officially taken down from YouTube because of copyright concerns by LucasFilm, but is still in wide circulation.
After getting up close and personal with Lady Gaga, Google profiles another young singer. Maybe you’ve heard of him?
Are you confused about what all this Google+ stuff is about? This should help.
Are you confused about what all this Wii U stuff is about? This should help.
Most brands spotlight their biggest advocates, but Austin’s legendary Draft House theater got a lot of mileage by “giving its brand over” to a detractor. Let’s see Apple or Coke try this.
Halo 4, slated to hit shelves during the holiday season of next year, gets the cinematic treatment from Microsoft.
More racing porn on behalf of DC Shoes. Pretty impressive, but can Block drive the car through car-size holes in cement walls?
Volkswagen’s oft-parodied Lil’ Vader Super Bowl spot still has legs. It appears to be a good idea to put a young child in your Super Bowl ad.
You thought this was a real viral video? Sucker. Nice try, GoPro. And that video featuring the putative owner was a nice touch.
In another long-term hit, Danny MacAskill does some crazy stunts on his bike on a trip from Edinburgh back to his hometown, Dunvegan, in the Isle of Skye in Scotland.
Those lovable Roller Babies are back, or never left I suppose.
More About: advertising, Evian Babies, Halo 4, Super Bowl ads, viral videos, volkswagen, youtube
For more Business & Marketing coverage:
Twitter’s valuation has almost doubled in the last seven months, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.
The Journal says Twitter is busy raising hundreds of millions of dollars, at a valuation as high as $7 billion. In December, the same company was valued at just $3.7 billion in a $200 million round of funding led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.
Why the increase in valuation? Twitter, once a site without much of a business plan, is now a social media staple with a growing number of revenue streams.
Twitter introduced promoted tweets and trends last year, which proved to be the company’s first notable revenue source. Recently, eMarketer predicted that Twitter would triple its advertising revenue to $150 million in 2011. Last month we learned that Twitter plans to introduce promoted tweets into users’ timelines by the fall.
In October, it announced that it would develop a self-serve tool that would also allow small businesses to get in on the Twitter advertising game.
As its peers in the social world — like LinkedIn — go public, Twitter is instead focusing on strengthening its executive team and building a solid advertising business.
The upcoming platform will function a bit like Google AdWords for Twitter. If the WSJ‘s report is accurate (the paper sites an unnamed “person familiar with the matter”), it looks like investors consider the platform to have more in common with Google’s product — earning potential.
More About: advertising, funding, twitter
For more Social Media coverage:
Twitter’s valuation has almost doubled in the last seven months, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.
The Journal says Twitter is busy raising hundreds of millions of dollars, at a valuation as high as $7 billion. In December, the same company was valued at just $3.7 billion in a $200 million round of funding led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.
Why the increase in valuation? Twitter, once a site without much of a business plan, is now a social media staple with a growing number of revenue streams.
Twitter introduced promoted tweets and trends last year, which proved to be the company’s first notable revenue source. Recently, eMarketer predicted that Twitter would triple its advertising revenue to $150 million in 2011. Last month we learned that Twitter plans to introduce promoted tweets into users’ timelines by the fall.
In October, it announced that it would develop a self-serve tool that would also allow small businesses to get in on the Twitter advertising game.
As its peers in the social world — like LinkedIn — go public, Twitter is instead focusing on strengthening its executive team and building a solid advertising business.
The upcoming platform will function a bit like Google AdWords for Twitter. If the WSJ‘s report is accurate (the paper sites an unnamed “person familiar with the matter”), it looks like investors consider the platform to have more in common with Google’s product — earning potential.
More About: advertising, funding, twitter
For more Social Media coverage:
Shane Snow is co-founder of Contently.com, an “agile publishing” platform for brands-turned-publishers and freelance journalists.
Most people quit blogging — and most companies do too, for that matter.
Like healthy diet, frequent exercise, proper posture or any other New Year’s resolution, blogging results take time. A 2008 Technorati survey put the abandonment rate of blogs at about 95%.
Part of the reason for low blog success rate is that most of us have a hard time predicting what kind of return blogging will achieve. “If I blog every day for a month, will I get more leads?” Probably. But it may take six months, not one.
That doesn’t mean it’s not worth the fight.
Before the Internet put publishing and distribution tools in everyone’s hands for free, companies that wanted brand exposure paid for time and/or placement on a third party media property (radio ads, TV commercials, banners). Many still do, but a general shift is occurring online – away from outbound marketing and paid media, toward creating one’s own branded content and spreading that media across the social web.
According to the Content Marketing Institute, 68% of CMOs say they are shifting budget from traditional advertising to this type of content marketing.
But measuring the return on investment (ROI) on content is difficult, especially if you’re not judging success by ad revenue.
Nine out of ten organizations market with content, according to a recent B2B content marketing survey. Companies like Mint, American Express and Hubspot are now competing with “traditional” media companies for eyeballs with their own content. They’re seeing results -– not necessarily in the form of advertising, but rather, through leads, subscribers and brand awareness.
A recent study by Hubspot indicates that Hubspot customers who practice inbound marketing (of which content is a core element) increase leads an average of 4.2 times within a few months. Other studies have shown similar results, that consistent content output increases conversions.
Content costs money, and measuring the results of your content effort is important. But an effective content strategy is like planting a garden: it takes consistent work that eventually pays off in large quantities. However, failure to water or plow that garden will result in weeds, in other words, a blog post every three months whose only comments are spam.
So how do you convince your boss, your partners or even yourself that content is a good investment? Here are three steps to effectively measure your content strategy:
Traditionally media companies use readership and ad revenue as the yardstick for content’s success. In content marketing, however, the goal is typically to achieve some sort of conversion or to build “brand awareness,” a rather ambiguous metric.
A conversion can consist of a mailing list or an RSS subscriber, a user signup, a phone call, a sale or any number of user interactions. The first step to measuring ROI on your content strategy is to set a goal.
If your content goal is to increase user signups, you first need to know your baseline: how many signups are you getting now, and from what sources? Once you start your content efforts, you want to be able to measure the results against that baseline.
Unless you’re already starting with a large audience (huge mailing list, captive user base, etc), it’s going to take a while to build momentum, and even longer to start seeing conversions. However, several proxies can help you chart your progress.
These proxies present immediate signs of encouragement, more so than, say, search engine ranking, which can take a while to manifest. Here’s a quick list of proxies for measuring a blog’s ROI:
These proxies will monitor how well your content is resonating, how you’re building trust in your brand. That trust will eventually turn into loyalty, advocacy and continued conversion.
It’s important to note that absolute measurements are rarely useful. What you’re looking for is a trend line. The number of retweets relative to previous content on your site or peer sites is a more useful yardstick than the total number of retweets.
Though it may not seem like much, an average of five tweets on a post today versus an average of one tweet three weeks ago is a great sign of progress.
Also, because some pieces of content will be outliers (whether spikes or duds), it’s important to pay attention to aggregate trend data rather than isolated post data. For example, the average number of retweets in June compared to April is a better measure of progress than the number of retweets on today’s blog post versus yesterday’s.
From a practical standpoint, measuring conversions can be as simple as installing Google Analytics, or keeping a spreadsheet of leads or even tick marks on a whiteboard.
While keeping track of the raw conversion numbers (How many leads are we getting this month versus five months ago when we weren’t blogging?) is important, it’s also crucial to measure secondary indicators. If you’re measuring leads, these might include the following:
“One way we try to quantify ROI is to track content users very closely,” says Sam Slaughter, a producer at Comcast.net. “That way we can tell if they went from consuming content to buying a product, or to bookmarking the page, or to digging deeper into the publisher site or any number of actions that the publisher might be able to monetize. From there, we can often come up with an actual dollar value from that piece of content.”
Content strategy for most businesses isn’t about instant advertising metrics anymore; therefore, clear ROI data can take a while to manifest. Once it does, however, returns will generally increase as you continue to consistently publish.
“When we talk about ROI for content we often use terms like ‘adoption,’ ‘time on site,’ ‘page views per unique’ and things like that,” says Slaughter. “The idea [is] that while you might not be monetizing the content on your site directly, you are using that content to attract new and better users who you can monetize down the road.”
In the end, planning, tracking and consistency will help you succeed. As Problogger founder Darren Rowse recently tweeted, “Building blogs is like building muscles.” Great content properties, like muscles, take patience.
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, pearleye
More About: advertising, blogging, business, content, MARKETING, online marketing, ROI, social media, twitter, web
For more Business & Marketing coverage:
David Staas is senior vice president of marketing at JiWire, overseeing the marketing and product management of JiWire’s location-based media channel that reaches the on-the-go mobile audience. He has more than 13 years of marketing and product management experience in the mobile and advertising industries.
Location isn’t new to advertising. Take the billboard on the highway — there because that brand knows its target audience will see it. Merchants have been placing signs in places where their target audience will see them since the beginning of commerce. Today more than $130 billion is spent in the U.S. each year on locally targeted advertising. Most of that spending isn’t digital, but rather, more traditional formats like billboards and newspapers — places where marketers are accustomed to advertising. So while location advertising may not be new, marketers can now digitally localize their ads. The question is, how do brands win in this new world of location media?
One of the most exciting aspects of location is the explosion of new content and services. There are now tens of thousands of location-based mobile apps, and even more that have made location a key feature. Many of these apps provide great platforms to test location ideas. However, they don’t provide the audience size to roll out an impactful campaign or concept on a regional or national scale.
The key is finding balance. Advertisers must first develop campaign concepts that allow flexibility. Ask these questions: Can I scale this concept easily to all of my locations? Can I incorporate locations other than my own? Can I expand my target zone? Am I able to go beyond the immediate vicinity to engage consumers one mile, five miles, even ten miles away? If you can meet these qualifications, and reach an audience in the tens of millions, your location scale is justified.
Advertisers are used to evolving. They’ve “digitized” their brands using the Internet, “socialized” their brands with social media and now are learning how to “locationize” with the mass market adoption of location media. I use the term “locationize” because success requires more than just using location as a targeting attribute. Sure, you can deliver a standard, national ad to a variety of targeted zip codes or DMAs, but you’ll be missing out on the full opportunity. Add location relevancy to the creative and to the messaging itself.
There are three ways brands have experimented with this concept:
Not surprisingly, most consumers don’t spend all of their time in the immediate vicinity of your brand. Sometimes they may be in your store, and other times within the neighborhood or even miles away. Each distance presents an opportunity.
In recent research of more than 5,000 mobile consumers, 31% said that they most typically research something on their mobile device before purchasing it physically in the store. Mobile and location drive real world revenues. In a similar study done by my company, consumers shared how far they were willing to travel to get a good deal. When posed with discounts off of a $100 item, 55% said they would travel up to 15 minutes for a 10% discount. However, 45% said they would travel 30 minutes for a 25% discount, and another 40% were willing to travel an hour for a 50% discount.
This fascinating demand curve shows how consumers react via a distance-to-discount ratio. In practical terms, this means marketers can engage customers miles away with great results. By considering proximity, marketers can develop strategies beyond the checkin to generate new customers and to engage existing customers well beyond the neighborhood.
Every new form of media creates its own unique metrics, like the click-through rate created by digital advertising. Location gives us entirely new ways to measure advertising and thereby gain new insights around a brand’s business. Consider evolving the click-through rate. If we apply location and proximity, we can begin to look at click-through rates based on proximity to a brand’s location. How many people check in when they are in a store? What is the engagement rate of a campaign when people are within a mile of a store? Five miles? This insight helps brands understand how far people are willing to travel for their service or products.
Better yet, these metrics can surface potential insights around a brand’s distribution channel. What retail partners generate the most engagement? Are there pockets of high engagement where a brand doesn’t currently have a store? Considering the consumer data on distance-to-discount ratios, these metrics begin to inform the marketing mix.
For example, a consumer around the corner from a store can easily stop in as a result of a location-based ad. If the product is unavailable, it’s not a major imposition on the consumer’s time. However, the person willing to drive an hour for that 50% discount is another story — that customer’s ability to check on product availability beforehand takes on greater value. Different information has value at different proximities.
The combination of mobile and location advertising is already transforming media, content, services and commerce. Location media is achieving mass market adoption, and raising consumer awareness around the value of location services and advertising. There will be a lot of experimentation and innovation along the way, but these best practices will help advertisers achieve success earlier and more often as they explore how to “locationize their brand,” and ultimately have a scalable impact on their business.
Image courtesy of Flickr, william couch.
More About: advertising, business, foursquare, location-based, MARKETING, media
For more Business & Marketing coverage:
Jamie Beckland is a Digital and Social Media Strategist at Janrain where he helps Fortune 1000 companies integrate social media technologies into their websites to improve user acquisition and engagement. He has built online communities since 2004. He tweets as @Beckland.
Marketers have built a temple that needs to be torn down. Demographics have defined the target consumer for more than half a century — poorly. Now, with emerging interest graphs from social networks, behavioral data from search outlets and lifecycle forecasting, we have much better ways of targeting potential customers.
The rise of mass-produced consumer goods also brought the rise of mass-market advertising. In the 1950s and 1960s, the goal of television was to aggregate the most possible eyeballs for advertisers. In order to convince consumers that an advertising message was relevant to them, consumers had to buy the idea that they were just like everyone else.
Marketers created that buy-in by bucketing people into generations. When you lump 78 million people into one group called “Baby Boomers,” it’s much easier to sell them stuff, especially when consumers accepted their generational classification.
But now, that entire system has broken down. The year that someone was born will not tell you how likely he is to buy your product.
Fragmentation is now the norm because the pace of change is accelerating. Generations have been getting smaller because there are fewer unifying characteristics of young people today than ever before:
With the recent rise of the social web, people self-select into groups so small, so fragmented, and so temporal, that no overarching top-down approach could be successful at driving marketing performance.
Marketers have responded by adding more demographic information to the mix, but even that is a losing battle. I worked with one client who was introducing a technology product, and had identified a target market of “connected consumers.” Connected consumers were 34-55, had a household income over $120k, and read technology publications regularly. This target market represented 14 million consumers.
They were targeting 14 million consumers to sell 50,000 units — that means they were hoping for 3.5 sales for every 1,000 people with whom they connected through their marketing.
What if, instead, you could get 500 sales from every 1,000 people you marketed to?
It’s possible through psychographic profiling. Psychographics look at the mental model of the consumer in the context of a customer lifecycle. Amazon.com has long been a leader in this space, through innovations like “recommended products” and “users like me also bought.” Its algorithms have learned to predict its users, and what they are interested in. And now, there are a number of tools that any business can use to leverage psychographics.
Here’s how a psychographic profile might look different from a traditional marketing profile target for a childcare provider:
Psychographics provide much more useful information about users. There are multiple data sources making this possible today. Social profile data, behavioral data and customer lifecycle data can now finally be leveraged to contact people who are ready to buy.
Profile data from social networks consist of all the fields users grant permission for brands to use on their behalf. Most things that users track on social networks can be leveraged to create a closer relationship with a customer. Fields like relationship status, alma mater, interests and occupation can all be managed through social profile data management tools.
Social profile data is the critical cornerstone of psychographic insights. The level of nuance and insight provided by social data, when compared to standard demographics, is the difference between performing surgery with a scalpel or a butter knife. Previously unimaginable questions are now routine:
In addition, companies such as GraphEffect are measuring purchase intent by doing semantic analysis on Facebook status updates. This type of qualitative analysis can move users into specific marketing funnels from their very first online experience with your brand.
Retargeting advertising messages is gaining popularity among marketers, but its very success has jeopardized its effectiveness. Ads that follow users around the web have been implemented — usually poorly. Every ad network quickly incorporated the ability to place cookies in users’ browsers, and display specific ads to them any time they visit a site that’s part of their networks.
The next generation of ad targeting will focus more on telling the customer a story over time, based on specific behavior triggers. That means ad networks and clickstream data aggregators will work together to trigger when a customer moves forward in a mental model toward a purchase event.
Site content and product recommendations will also be informed by clickstream analysis. Companies such as RichRelevance, Certona, Baynote and Monetate all offer the ability to personalize information to specific visitors based on their behavior. Leveraging those alongside a payload of social profile data can turbocharge those services from the first moment a new user visits a site.
Social profile data can also be used to predict customer lifecycle. Imagine knowing not only if a customer has children, but the exact ages of those children. In addition, key indicator purchases, like buying diapers for the first time, indicate a customer entering a new lifecycle. Other key indicators, like shipping address changes, first purchases of furniture, or first purchases of substantially higher-value goods can all indicate the start of a new customer mentality and behavior pattern.
These patterns are predictable, so you know the future behavior of high school seniors by looking at the current behavior of college freshmen. By using demographics alone, all high school graduates would be marketed to identically. Using psychographics, we know who is likely to be interested in specific product or content recommendations at a specific time — such as when they actually start their first day of college.
This vision is starting to gain traction among serious marketers. At the 2009 Internet Strategy Forum, Xerox’s VP of Interactive Marketing, Duane Schulz, said that a 1% clickthrough rate was a huge failure — even though it is 10 times the industry average. In his mind, a successful campaign would never waste 99% of its impressions. Using psychographic data, you don’t have to waste any impressions.
We have seen a similar upheaval in marketing before. In the 1960s, marketers who embraced the power of television, broad-based insights into psychology and demographic data created world-class brands and billions of dollars in value. At that time, if you didn’t advertise on TV, you lost. Today’s new tools offer a similar choice: Build a deep understanding of your customer, or risk irrelevance.
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, porcorex
More About: advertising, business, data, demographics, MARKETING, social media
For more Business & Marketing coverage:
Chris Schreiber is director of marketing at social video advertising company Sharethrough. A leading expert on social content strategy, Chris recently presented a two-hour workshop on viral video at the Cannes Lions festival, entitled “Making Videos Go Viral: Creative, Social, and Technological Techniques.”
Last week, the world’s top brands and agencies descended on the Cannes Lions festival to discuss creativity in modern advertising and to anoint the campaigns that most effectively captured our imaginations. While the conference was renamed this year to the “International Festival of Creativity” (previously the “International Advertising Festival”), it featured an unprecedented amount of participation from blockbuster technology companies such as Google, Facebook and Microsoft.
Over the course of the week, the significant relationship between the powerful new forces in technology and the creative output from the advertising industry became quite clear. As the web increasingly empowers us to choose and share the media we care about, brands genuinely commit to creating content and experiences that thrive in our on-demand culture.
Here are five key themes from the conference that point to major changes in the world of advertising.
In one of the opening sessions, brand futurist Martin Lindstrom noted,”It’s more effective to feel the brand, not to see it.” Experiential marketing was prominent at the conference. A number of brands discussed the ways we will use technologies, such as augmented reality apps and near-field communication (data exchanges with touch), to connect with consumers.
Few brands have committed to experiential marketing more than Nike, which has had a 55% drop in television advertising spending over the past 10 years. They filled the void by sponsoring over 200 club teams, offering revolutionary mobile technology for runners and creating over 10,000 pieces of original content.
If this conference is any indication, we are about to see an absolute explosion of new types of content from brands. While this process has already begun (especially with online video), we may just be scratching the surface.
No session was more memorable than Coca Cola’s, which delivered a compelling presentation on its “Liquid and Linked” content creation strategy. It emphasizes dynamic storytelling to establish multiple connections with people. Coke is vastly increasing its investment in many varieties of content production to help drive conversation and increase its popular culture relevance.
AOL president Tim Armstrong and Huffington Post founder Ariana Huffington also spoke at length about the vital importance of ad content. Former Googler Tim Armstrong addressed the advertiser audience: “Stop taking orders from Silicon Valley.” He referenced the importance of creating unique content rather than simply optimizing traditional ads to perform better against technology algorithms. Throughout the conference, it was consistently noted that today’s on-demand media consumption habits require brands to create content that people choose to watch (and share), rather than pushing unwanted commercials on its audience.
The “collective” has now begun to replace the “community.” The term refers to the new generation of passionate online groups initiated by brands. This year’s most buzzworthy collective was Sneakerpedia, a Wikipedia-style site powered by Foot Locker, intended to galvanize “sneakerheads” worldwide to document the history of sneakers. The site has built a ton of buzz, a great example of how a brand can create new collectives around topics people are truly passionate about. Additional collectives included Nokia Push Snowboarding and Lady Gaga’s fan group “Little Monsters,” created by Interscope Records.
Advertisers are ready to build. As advertising becomes increasingly digital, agencies are looking to bring in more developer talent to help them create new, original products. Jeff Benjamin, VP Interactive Creative Director at Crispin Porter + Bogusky, spoke about this transition, calling for “invention” in advertising and noting that “inventors are modern storytellers.” The same day, Toronto holding company MDC Partners announced a new $1 million competition for investment in technology-driven projects. Mark Holden, Global Strategy and Planning Director of PHD, noted his future predictions for the advertising industry, that new product development will be essential for the survival of media agencies as media buying becomes increasingly commoditized.
The Domino’s Pizza Tracker, a Crispin website for Domino’s, tracks the progress of a pizza delivery — from dough-rolling to delivery.
The award for the most overall positive mentions goes to Lady Gaga. The Gaga brand has quickly taken hold globally thanks to the previously listed tactics.
Gaga brand-building tools include the creation of her own collective (dubbed “The Little Monsters,” her fans on Twitter number over 11 million), original content (Gagavision video series leading up to her new album release), gaming experiences (Gagaville allowed users to win song tracks by beating game levels) and product development (working with Polaroid on a new product line). In many ways, Gaga is the epitome of the modern brand, deftly leveraging digital tools to distribute her content and broaden her fan base… and other brands are taking note.
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, alengo
More About: advertising, business, List, Lists, MARKETING, online marketing, social media
For more Business & Marketing coverage:
As Facebook has grown from a collegiate social network to a site that gets action from 7.3% of the world’s population, it has also evolved into a marketing tool. One report estimated that advertisers will spend $4 billion on Facebook advertising this year.
Facebook didn’t come out of the gate as a marketing-friendly product in 2004, and it has conducted a fair share of failed experiments in its efforts to become one. We’ve chronicled its evolution in the infographic below.
Infographic design by Emily Caufield.
This series is supported by LoopFuse. Loopfuse provides of forever-free marketing automation software that closes the loop between sales and marketing with smarter lead capture, scoring, and nurturing — plus Salesforce.com integration. LoopFuse helps marketers build better pipelines, run more efficient marketing operations, and support more effective sales teams leading to increased revenue and reduced costs. Learn more about lead nurturing with LoopFuse.
More About: advertising, facebook, infographics, Mashable Infographics, Social Ad Series, social advertising
For more Business & Marketing coverage:
As Facebook has grown from a collegiate social network to a site that gets action from 7.3% of the world’s population, it has also evolved into a marketing tool. One report estimated that advertisers will spend $4 billion on Facebook advertising this year.
Facebook didn’t come out of the gate as a marketing-friendly product in 2004, and it has conducted a fair share of failed experiments in its efforts to become one. We’ve chronicled its evolution in the infographic below.
Infographic design by Emily Caufield.
This series is supported by LoopFuse. Loopfuse provides of forever-free marketing automation software that closes the loop between sales and marketing with smarter lead capture, scoring, and nurturing — plus Salesforce.com integration. LoopFuse helps marketers build better pipelines, run more efficient marketing operations, and support more effective sales teams leading to increased revenue and reduced costs. Learn more about lead nurturing with LoopFuse.
More About: advertising, facebook, infographics, Mashable Infographics, Social Ad Series, social advertising
For more Business & Marketing coverage:
