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Interactive TV Ads: Real-Life ExamplesMy last column, "When TV and the Internet Converge," examined four points that marketers must understand about what's now happening with interactive television. In this column, let's review real-life examples of interactive television ads and explore where advertising will go from there. Interactive Television Ads: Real-Life Examples OK, let's look at some things that have been done that start to combine video and interactive TV with advertising, games, and even e-commerce. Budweiser: Branding Game and Contest  Budweiser ran an interactive TV ad that rewarded "interactors" with a game and chance to win a trip to the World Cup. According to a case study examining this campaign, around 890,000 people interacted with the ad by "pressing red" or select and 90 percent of the interactors played the "Heads Up" game to win World Cup tickets. Interactors reportedly spent an average of just over seven minutes interacting, but 38 percent thought they'd spent 10 minutes or more interacting! See a video of the Budweiser interactive TV ad here on YouTube. Axe Body Spray: Interactive Branding Game  For this interactive TV commercial, Axe created games where viewers controlled bikes and did a stunt using the arrow keys. Other options also brought up a slow-motion version of the stunt and information about Axe body spray. The ad was shown to 60 million homes that have either DirecTV or Dish Network. In just a few weeks, 3.5 million people watched the video and spent an average of five minutes playing with the ad. Charmin: Coupon Distribution  This Charmin toilet paper interactive ad was delivered to TiVo users. When the ad appears, a green thumb appears in the right corner of the screen that reads, "Apply now for a valuable coupon from Charmin." When viewers click the thumb using their remote control, the program they are watching pauses and they are taken to a coupon request screen. Using the remote, they can choose that option and the coupons are sent by mail. The program resumes once the viewer completes the interactive ad. Although this ad was done via TiVo, it could be done with any cable system. Domino's Pizza: Ordering Goods  OK, this was one of the first interactive TV promotions to really get some buzz. As described from the press release dated Nov. 17, 2008: "TiVo subscribers can seamlessly access their Domino's Pizza order from various advertising entry points on the TiVo user interface...by clicking on "Order Your Pizza"...they can log-in with a simple account number...build their pizza order right from the television set by selecting type of crust, toppings, and sauces, and get the pizza delivered by their local Domino's Pizza." This particular promotion was not e-commerce enabled, so you paid for your pizza when it arrived. But how hard would it be to add a pay feature now? Not too hard. Clickable Video: Imagine Where This Can Go Let's start to imagine where this can go. First, take a look at the images and videos below. They're examples of Web-based clickable video. Now, imagine that this Internet technology moves to television and the mouse-like remote control evolved to be a Wii-like remote control mouse where you can move a curser around a screen to play games and click on items in actual TV shows. Now, imagine watching your favorite shows and movies in catalog mode. Product placement will be huge and shows will generate click and commerce revenue from the highest bidders. It will be "The Truman Show" meets Google AdWords meets Amazon! There is no reason why this technology can't be applied to television now that the remote control, the Internet, and television video are fully merged and we can pause shows while people perform transactions. At the very least, we can tell people to click "OK" to see more info on a particular item. Then the DVR can pause the show and a consumer can view a pop-up Web page and make a transaction if she wants to. This could be done in millions of homes right now! To see the below videos live, visit VideoClix, choose a category, and choose a video. When watching these videos, roll your curser over the products and click on them. Vogue, 60 Seconds to Chic This video includes links for consumers to obtain additional information and to make a purchase.  Progresso: Start Cooking This is an example of a brand's informational video that could link to coupons.  Nike: Zappos Clickable Video Catalog I couldn't find this on Zappos, but you can see it on YouTube here. I like this example because it integrates everything and shows where you could end up making a transaction at the end.  Bring It All Together, Mash It Up, Make a Wish List So, here are a bunch of things I can imagine being done -- or are already being done -- with interactive TV. For the real-life examples, the items include links. What can you add to this list knowing what you know now?
In conclusion, the way to think about interactive TV is this: anything you can do on a Web site you will be able to do with interactive TV. Ads will become much more action oriented to encourage viewer/user behavior and shows will have new revenue opportunities with product placement and embedded calls to action (really saving them). Finally, tracking will be extended to television in a whole new way and will really raise the bar on marketing and advertising performance and accountability. So, what is the good news for online professionals? Online marketers already work under this kind of atmosphere! Labels: Advertising, ClickZ, Marketing, Social Media, Social Media Marketing When TV and the Internet ConvergeOK, so 2009 was the year of social media and there's no reason to suspect that interest in social networks will slow down anytime soon. But what will be the next big thing that changes the way we, as consumers, consume media and how will marketers leverage that consumption? My prediction: the convergence of Web-based content, targeting, and functionality with cable television. Call it enhanced TV or interactive TV. Either way, cable, satellite, and fiber-based broadband penetration combined with targeting, interactivity, DVRs, and the cable company's and TiVo's knowledge of our e-mail addresses, physical addresses, phone numbers, and even our credit card numbers will launch a new era in advertising and marketing. Old-school video creative, television networks, DRTV, and new-economy interactivity will come together. While this has been talked about for a long time -- kind of like the days when we would hear about the "information highway" -- the promise of this technology is now here. Comcast's planned acquisition of NBC Universal validates the value and potential of interactive television. The folks driving that deal understand where interactive television is headed and I'm sure they have an arsenal of advertising goodies that will rival, and even surpass, the targeting, interactivity, and tracking of anything the Web can deliver. Interactive television will save the medium we know as television and replenish budgets that pay for the star power, creativity, and shows we've all grown to love and expect from the networks. I'm looking forward to seeing some amazing things. If you're not 100 percent up on this stuff, let's first look at some of the interactive functionality offered by video, TiVo, satellite TV, and cable boxes. These features just scratch the surface of where things will go. In my next column, I'll look at real-life examples of interactive television ads and offer some predictions on where interactive television advertising is headed. Step 1: Understand the Term "Addressability" Wikipedia defines it as: "Addressability is the ability of a digital device to individually respond to a message sent to many similar devices. Examples include pagers, mobile phones, and set-top boxes for pay TV." So, how does addressability affect interactive TV? We can take the targeting and tracking we do online (the thing that marketers love) and combine it with a cable company's customer records and data about customer's viewing habits. Television ads will be able to be targeted and tracked with unrivaled accuracy. Here's the reality: cookies can be erased but a consumer's ID can't be erased from a set-top box. As Variety points out, some advertising executives consider addressable TV marketing a "holy grail." Step 2: Understand the Remote In the column, "Remote Control as Mouse: TV and Web Integration," I discussed how today's TV remote is becoming the mouse of the future. You can move a curser up and down and side to side, click "ok" or "select," access menus, guides, widgets, and enter numbers and/or characters like a cell phone keypad. Just look at the image of the Comcast remote below.  Kind of like a game mouse, joystick, and game controller all in one, right? Imagine the day when you are watching an Applebee's commercial and it will say, "To get an e-mail Buy-One-Meal-Get-One-Free coupon for your next visit to Applebee's, just hit OK now on your remote." Then, armed with your e-mail address, Comcast or Verizon will fulfill your request instantaneously. Or, to take it a step further, how about, "Order your Snuggie now by hitting OK on your remote and entering your PIN number." The cable company would then transmit your order to the vendor, process your payment, and even take a cut. Now one more thing, imagine crossing the remote with a Nintendo Wii joystick. Step 3: Understand the Guide When it comes to TV/Internet integration, the feature we use the most is the "guide." (See the red "guide" button on the left-hand side of the remote in the photo, above, and the screen capture of the FiOS guide, below.) The guide content, typically delivered via the Internet, is essentially a Web site accessed through a TiVo or cable box combined with functionality that enables a consumer to jump to channels, set shows to be recorded, and order on-demand content that may end up on the cable bill. Now, while millions of people use this functionality everyday, most people don't really understand the power of all these technologies combined at their fingertips. This guide is the Google of your televised world! How many hits a day does your guide get?  The guide can essentially be a portal into a whole universe of Web-based content, applications, and commerce. If you can do it online, you can do it via the guide. Now that we have the PC screen and the mobile screen, get ready to create Web pages and interfaces for the living room screen. Note: while there are no ads in the guide now, I have a feeling that will soon change. Step 4: Understand TV Widgets These are applications that draw content and functionality from the Internet right into your television, where consumers can access via a remote control mouse. A consumer can get the weather, sports scores, and even Facebook and Twitter. (See a screen capture of the Verizon FiOS Widget Bazaar and a video tour, below.) Just think of it as iPhone apps for your TV. Now, imagine brands advertising their widgets on television and letting people acquire them by hitting "select" on their remote control. Something like, "To get Domino's Pizza widget now, hit OK on your remote."  See a Verizon Widget Video Tour here on YouTube by one of Verizon's product managers. In my next column, we'll look at real-life examples of interactive television ads and I'll offer predictions on where things will go. Labels: Advertising, Application Development, ClickZ, Industry, Integration, TV Great Free Media Planning ToolsMedia planners have many tools at their disposal to research and select sites that will help clients reach their target audiences. Very often we're targeting large audiences by demographic or region, and we can use standard syndicated data tools such as @Plan, comScore, or the SRDS, a provider of media rates and data, to help us identify sites that index high with our target audiences. This is fine for clients who want to reach very large groups of people such as females 18 to 24 in the northeastern United States. But what about when you're going after a niche audience such as users of a particular technology or collectors of classic cars? In these cases, those data sources are not as helpful because many niche sites do not show up on their radar screens. Instead, you have to start prospecting online to find sites that cater to those audiences. However, a slew of available tools and tactics can help you find and research those sites. So here is a list of free resources that planners can use when trying to find hard-to-find sites: Compete.com: A Web analytics tool that gathers information about consumers' online behavior from over 2 million U.S. Internet users. Its site profile section provides site traffic history for most every site on the Internet. Register with Compete, and you can compare traffic for up to five sites at one time. Alexa: This technology crawls publicly available sites to collect traffic rankings, snapshots of sites, and links that point to sites and related sites. Type in a Web site URL where you know your target audience resides, click on "related links," and you will find a list of similar sites. Also, you can search for sites by country, language, or category. Quantcast: This site uses data from audience insights to rank and sort sites. Quantcast has a free tool that allows planners to search for sites based on determined criteria, such as content category, audience demographics, geographic locations, and ad acceptance. Or just simply type in the site URL that you want to include in the media plan, and the results produce a list of sites the audience would also visit. Google Ad Planner: With this tool, media planners can identify audiences by a series of criteria, such as demographics, geography, language, specific keywords, and category. You can even search by domain suffix, a feature that is helpful when trying to find international sites. If your client is running a display campaign through the Google Content Network, you can select to see sites that only accept advertising in the network. Search: Natural search is one of the quickest and easiest ways to find sites. Search for Web sites using your target audience plus keywords that would identify the target audience's interest. Sites that appear on the first or second pages of Google search engine results page are more likely to have relevant content. For more obscure target audiences, you may have to dig a little deeper for sites that may not be optimized for SEO (define). Once you find a relevant site, click on "similar" to find other relevant sites. Online newspaper resources: Sites such as OnlineNewspapers.com and Newspapers.com are another way to find online news sites by state and country. OnlineNewspapers.com indicates the newspaper language and city, and Newspapers.com gives a brief description of the newspaper. Open Directory Project (ODP): This is a user-generated and classified directory of sites in multiple languages. ODP uses hundreds of portals and search engines to list and categorize Web sites. Type in "owners of classic cars," and you will find a list of sites from all over the world and description of each site that relates to classic cars. Wikipedia: Wikipedia is a user-generated reference site with more than 75,000 active contributors who have posted information in over 260 languages. If your client is looking to advertise on online newspaper sites in Ghana, type in "Ghana newspapers," and you will get a list of Ghana-based newspapers and links to their Wikipedia listings. Blog search: Narrow down the blogosphere by using search tools on sites such as Technorati.com or Google Blog Search. Technorati.com was founded as a blog search engine and has since grown into a social media network. Type in your target audience in the search field, and results reveal a list of relevant blogs, a graph depicting blog post mentions by day, and videos about the target audience. Google Blog Search will also list relevant blogs, but you can also sign up for blog alerts to keep up-to-date on newly posted blog content. As with all my columns, I am sure this is not a complete list, so if I left anything out, please let me know. Also, I must give a special thanks to Barbara for helping me to research and compile this list. Labels: Blog Outreach, ClickZ, Online Media, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Strategy Hypertargeting Registered UsersHypertargeting, a term coined by MySpace, describes the social network's ability, as it puts it, to, "tap into self-expressed user information" and "reach the consumers most likely to be receptive to your brand." Basically, MySpace is saying that you can target consumers by the information they post in their registration information and profiles. The team at MySpace adds, "Thanks to the unsurpassed reach of MySpace, you can target highly specific user interests while still reaching a significant audience." This is basically saying that even though you are getting super specific about the consumers you are trying to target, there are so many people on MySpace who have registered and populated their profiles that you can still reach tons of people. While MySpace hasn't been the top dog for some time, let's give credit where credit is due. Its term, hypertargeting, perfectly describes what social networking, dating sites, and other sites that require registration can offer to marketers. They can enable marketers to target consumers with unbelievable accuracy and efficiency. As consumers we get a great deal as well. We get a huge variety of free and low cost Web services for simply letting companies advertise to us in a more relevant and targeted way. Typically, there are three main buckets of information that enable the "hypertargeting" of consumers, based on registration information a person reveals when joining a site or making a purchase. The buckets include:
"We allow advertisers to choose the characteristics of users who will see their advertisements and we may use any of the non-personally identifiable attributes we have collected (including information you may have decided not to show to other users, such as your birth year or other sensitive personal information or preferences) to select the appropriate audience for those advertisements. For example, we might use your interest in soccer to show you ads for soccer equipment, but we do not tell the soccer equipment company who you are." So if I wanted to, I could reach males ages 18 to 26 in New England who are interested in soccer. And because Facebook has 350 million registered users, chances are that even with that narrowly defined selects I will still reach a pretty good size audience. Note that this technology is typically used in a very ethical way. All of this stuff is no more intrusive or dangerous than credit card companies targeting people with offers from partners and vendors via direct mail. As Facebook puts it in its privacy policy: "We don't share your information with advertisers without your consent...For example, we might use your interest in soccer to show you ads for soccer equipment, but we do not tell the soccer equipment company who you are." Now, the ability to target consumers based on registration information is nothing new. Sites and services like Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, Gmail, and gated publications like the Wall Street Journal have been able to do it for a long time. But now that you have behemoth social networking and user-generated content sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, YouTube, and even Match.com with hundreds of millions of users, the universe of hypertargeting opportunities is bigger than ever and promises to continue to grow. And, the addition of "self expressed" information that people post to their profiles combined with behavioral data makes for an even richer spectrum of targeting options. In many ways, this type of targeting is the future of advertising. Furthermore, companies like IAC own an entire network of sites including Match.com, Ask, Evite, Citysearch, and Shoebuy. Reading excerpts from Match.com's privacy policy is very revealing. (See below.) Basically, it shows that IAC is combining registration information from different sites to formulate some pretty amazing targeting options for marketers -- all on an anonymous basis of course. "We may collect information that can identify you ("personal information"), such as your name and email address, (i) when you (or other users) provide it to us when using our website or in some other manner, or (ii) from other IAC businesses, from our business partners, and from other third parties. We may combine the personal information that we receive from different sources." It goes on to explain how this combined information may be used: "We may use information to:
The purpose of this column is not to whip up a whole needless privacy debate. All people need to do is not use these primarily free sites, clear their cookies, or opt out of ad targeting by all member companies at the Network Advertising Initiative. Instead, my goal is to share the huge opportunity that we, as online marketers, have to hypertarget consumers more efficiently than ever dreamed possible in numbers that will soon make for viable advertising campaigns using exclusively hypertargeted media. This is huge and represents the future of advertising! Labels: ClickZ, Facebook, online marketing, Social Media, Social Media Marketing Four Dimensions of Online MediaUnlike print, television, outdoor, and any other form of media, online is hopeless, complicated, and ever growing in its complexity. Every day it brings a new list of ad units, serving options, compensation models, targeting options, and, of course, KPIs (define). To try and enter the industry now, without the benefit of gradually building up a knowledge base to get you up to speed, is difficult for many people. For clients who aren't seasoned online marketers but find their advertising increasingly channeled into the digital space, the task can be daunting. To help agencies help their clients make sense of all the dimensions and options that can go into an online media plan, I have outlined the four dimensions of online media in this column. They include targeting, compensation, ad units, and metrics. Even with all the options and opportunities we have to maximize value and customer impact, I still see agencies planning buys based on pre-determined ad units or creative concepts. The best plans take elements from all over the spectrum to create all-encompassing campaigns that deliver branding (impressions, reach, and frequency) as well as good old fashioned measurable return on investment (conversion, leads, sales, etc.). Also, any seasoned media planner should be able to give examples of each one of the items listed under the four dimensions. Read more... Labels: ClickZ, online marketing, Online Media, Strategy Predictive Modeling and Display AdsOften times we're approached by direct marketing clients who want to scale up their online sales, but have exhausted or saturated their successful channels. They're bidding on all the keywords that perform, they hit their e-mail list as much as they can, and they're applying all the focus in their power to SEO (define). The one channel they haven't successfully cracked open is display advertising. Unlike search, where you're limited to the volume of consumer queries around your performing terms, display ads, particularly banners, have a lot more scalability if done right. The amount of inventory and opportunities in some cases (if your target audience is broad enough) is unlimited. The challenge is to crack the formula of what sites, placements, rates, creative (offers, images, messages, etc.), and conversion environments (landing pages, conversion paths, etc.) will ultimately form a scalable and reliable channel that grows your business. The problem is that many companies have tried to use display advertising with sporadic bursts of banners, often in high CPM (define) and premium placements, without a foresight of predictive modeling and a sustained effort that applies an ROI (define) optimization process and methodology. They then fail and condemn the whole category of online display. Read more... Labels: Advertising, ClickZ, online marketing, Online Media, Strategy Turning One Ad Impression Into TenNot long ago, I had a client say something really interesting. He said, "We need to make sure everything we can in our campaign to turn every one impression we buy into 10 actually being delivered -- that is my challenge to you." Of course, we're always doing that anyway. Added-value no cost or super low cost impressions generally improve the metrics of what we actually optimize against -- things like cost per action (define), cost per sale, etc. So, I decided to list some tactics we employ to beef up the impressions we were able to generate without having to actually buy them (or at least list them as having a cost, i.e., value-added placements.) Some are easy, some are hard, and some may require an awful lot of client side buy-in, implementation, or participation. But these days, clients are much more open to difficult ideas and logistics if they have a chance to improve the success of a campaign. Value-added placements: First and foremost, when doing a buy, ask for value-added placements. (I know this is obvious, but I still see plans from clients' past agencies that don't list any.) Go beyond just getting more run-of-site (ROS) banners. There are high-volume placements like text links, text-based e-mail newsletter ads, buttons, and advertorials that complement premium placements very nicely. They not only add impression volume, but boost click volume and the top-line performance of a property, often saving it from cancellation. Offline to online value-added placements: This is another often overlooked nugget. Make a list of the offline deals being cut in print, broadcast, and radio. Nine times out of 10, those buys come with a ton of online value-added placements that you would have never really considered paying for in your online plan. Many organizations offer bundled deals, but for the most part, there's a lot of online juice to be had here for zero cost -- and zero cost impressions and resulting clicks and actions help the top line metrics of any report quite nicely. Tweet this: Put a call to action based on a chiclet (define) in your banner that gets people to tweet the deal you're promoting. If even a tiny fraction of the people who see it, tweet it, that could equate into thousands or even millions of added impressions and clicks. You can track the tweets by monitoring Twitter search, and track clicks and actions from this by using a bit.ly tracking URL in your tweet that jumps through your ad server tracking URL. If you have Radian6, or write a quick little script, you can also add up the additional impressions/tweets you got by totaling the followers of the people who tweeted your message. Read more... Labels: Advertising, ClickZ, Online Media, Social Media, Social Media Marketing, Strategy Clients: Tell Us What Your Budget Is!Why are some companies scared to disclose their budget to potential media buyers? What bad things could we do with that information? We will know eventually, right? Let me state here and now: It's okay to let media buyers know what your budget is! In fact, there are not many valuable things we can do without knowing that information. If it's a test, decide what you can risk on a test. Don't ask us what you should test if you cannot tell us what you can afford. Consider this: What if you went to an architect with no specific idea of what you wanted and said, "Design me a house." What would the architect say? Most likely the architect would ask, "How much do you want to spend on your house?" You wouldn't say, "Well, do some research, draw me up some plans, give me some ideas first, and then tell me what I should spend." A serious builder knows what his budget is, has an idea of what he wants, and shares that with architects he deems worthy of interviewing and requesting detailed information from. What inspired me to write about this issue? I recently participated in a pitch conference call with a prospect who wanted us to do media planning and buying but refused to reveal their budget. Of course we gave a presentation describing our full capabilities. The prospect said they were looking for a good partner and we seemed like a good fit but still didn't want to reveal their budget at this point in the process. Now that is fine, except when they wanted more details on what we would do and sought advice on what they should spend. Labels: ClickZ, Industry, Online Media, Strategy Eight Ways Twitter Could Make Big MoneyThe big news: Twitter is raising another $100 million on a valuation of $1 billion! Well I guess that seals it. Twitter is in it for the long haul, declaring its intention to remain a freestanding media company. But as Bloomberg News reported, "Twitter has yet to report any significant revenue." So how can it justify that kind of valuation? Let's put it this way -- remember when Google had yet to report any significant revenue? Twitter attracted 25 million users in August, compared with 2.2 million a year earlier, according to Nielsen. With that kind of groundswell and large database of registered users, the opportunities for highly targeted contextual, demographic, geographic, and behavioral advertising is huge. Twitter could monetize in ways that would be non-intrusive. Twitter has reached a point where there aren't many alternatives to the micro-blogging platform. While it's not impossible for one to emerge, it's unlikely. People are pretty much wedded to Twitter, plus there are so many complementary applications in use on desktops and mobile devices around the globe. It would be difficult to topple Twitter off the top of the heap anytime soon. Then there are fears about injecting advertising into a media environment that people enjoy. I always hear, "Well, people don't like advertising," or "We did a poll and people said they did not want to see ads." If you asked television viewers if they wanted to see ads during their favorite show, close to 100 percent would probably say "no." Now conversely if you asked people if they preferred to have their favorite show with ads or not having their show at all because there was no funding, close to 100 percent would probably take the show with the ads. The same goes for Twitter. Of course, no one wants it cluttered with ads. But if there were only two choices -- Twitter with a way to stay in business or no Twitter -- the vast majority of us would choose Twitter with a way for it to stay in business. The same thing happened with Google, YouTube, and Facebook. Even YouTube has pre-rolls running on certain premium partner channels and I haven't heard of any huge consumer backlash. So, I started to think of the different ways I'd monetize Twitter if it were my site. And that includes programs that I'd find valuable as a media buyer. Labels: ClickZ, Social Media Marketing, Strategy, Twitter Planning The Buy: Seven Value-Add Ad Placements to ConsiderWhen developing an online media plan, don't overlook value-added ad placements, such as text-based newsletter ads and advertorials. These placements aren't always popular ideas, but they represent an opportunity to add performance octane to a proposal full of expensive premium ad placements. For example, I have run campaigns that included the purchase of a large amount of premium placements with high CPMs (define). If we used average click and conversion rates in the mathematical models, many of the sites wouldn't have been included in the media plan or would have been canceled after the first optimization round. However, when the average CPC (define) and CPA (define) from the huge amount of value-added text links, buttons, and run-of-site (ROS) impressions were factored into the results of the overall buy, those sites came into line with the campaign's optimization requirements. In this case, value-added placements saved the day for the agency, publisher, and client. The agency fulfilled its mission to drive a certain level of performance. The publisher sold its pricey CPM inventory and avoided losing the advertiser by tapping unsold remnant inventory. And the client got the brand impact and visibility of the premium placements with the ROI (define) performance of low-cost placements. So when negotiating a media buy, check out these seven value-added placements I always advocate: Read more... Labels: ClickZ, online marketing, Online Media, Paid Search Great Free Media Planning ToolsMedia planners have many tools at their disposal to research and select sites that will help clients reach their target audiences. Very often we're targeting large audiences by demographic or region, and we can use standard syndicated data tools such as @Plan, comScore, or the SRDS, a provider of media rates and data, to help us identify sites that index high with our target audiences. This is fine for clients who want to reach very large groups of people such as females 18 to 24 in the northeastern United States. But what about when you're going after a niche audience such as users of a particular technology or collectors of classic cars? In these cases, those data sources are not as helpful because many niche sites do not show up on their radar screens. Instead, you have to start prospecting online to find sites that cater to those audiences. However, a slew of available tools and tactics can help you find and research those sites. So here is a list of free resources that planners can use when trying to find hard-to-find sites: Read more... Labels: ClickZ, online marketing, Online Media 11 Things to Measure Besides Clicks and ConversionsHere we are in the midst of a true digital revolution. Dollars are being slashed from traditional ad budgets, and anemic online ad budgets are growing in proportion with the total spend. The new media economy is turning the old on its head, and marketers are looking for new ways to measure the impact of their investments. As a result, many online marketers are still enjoying days in the sun despite all the doom and gloom. The prospects get better if you look down the road to when overall media budgets start to grow again. Even better is that branding dollars are moving online at an unprecedented rate. And why not? Online branding doesn't just drive impressions. If done properly, it encourages high-value brand engagements. And these engagement open the door to a new world of measurement possibilities that go way beyond clicks and conversions. These new metrics also have far more immediacy than awareness studies and traditional brand measurement methodologies. Today I'll share a list of high-value brand interactions that can be measured and reported. These items are often overlooked metrics that can be shared with your clients, who are more anxious than ever to show value and ROI (define) from their advertising investments. Read more... Labels: ClickZ, online marketing Create a Media Plan and an Engagement PlanWhile working with clients, have you observed this? Clients will call a marketing initiative a branding campaign until they take a look at their reports. Like any rational person, their eyes head to the far right-hand side of report, looking past impressions, clicks, and cost per click to evaluate how many actions they are getting. And they should. Today, marketers must focus on engagement, high-value brand interactions, and of course, actual leads and sales. Think of it this way: there are banner impressions and then there are lasting impressions. Engagement helps brands make lasting impressions with target audiences. So in parallel to a great Media Plan, one should have a great Engagement Plan. An accompanying document should map not just where your creative will be placed, but what people will be encouraged to do when they see and click on your ads. Especially today, when properties offer an assortment of rich media units and engagement ads, how people respond can vary as much as what people see. Let's say you are advertising on LinkedIn. You can enable people participate in a poll and then be redirected to your landing page. Facebook's Engagement Ads let people become a fan of your company right from the ad. And on all media you place, your clicks go to landing pages that should be help trigger chains of events and engagements. So as a media planner your plan should show the whole picture: the Media Plan and the Engagement Plan. The Media Plan tells clicks where they are going to "be," an Engagement Plan tells the client what you are trying to get people to "do" and what you are going to "measure" from an action standpoint. Read more... Labels: ClickZ, Online Media 25 Ways to Make Friends, Fans, and FollowersSo your client or company has set up its social profiles and channels. The big question now is how to build up large communities of friends, fans, and followers. I did a little survey in our office and got a lot of great suggestions -- here are 25 of them. Of course there are more, but this checklist is a good start. Place a personal ad. Use online media (display banners, Flash ads, widget/gadget ads, etc.) to drive traffic to your social media channels. Facebook pages can make great landing pages. They also let you present very high-value brand interactions that spark viral distribution through existing social technologies. Start with people who know your company. Add Facebook or Twitter addresses to the bottom of your company's e-mail signature. Pepper your site. Add calls to action to your site inviting people to become your company's friend, fan, or follower. Put the icons and links on the bottom of every page and in your "contact us" section. Create a social hub. Make sure your site has a social hub page in the "about us" section that includes calls to action to friend, fan, or follow you and links to your profiles and channels. Weave your social Web. Make sure your company's Facebook page has links to your Twitter page. Also, periodically tweet the benefits of becoming a fan of your Facebook page. Read more... Labels: ClickZ, Facebook, Social Media, Twitter Research Tips for Landing a First Online Media JobRecently I had a job candidate come in for an entry-level position, and she was very interested in working in the online media planning and buying department. She was clearly a very bright candidate who was fresh out of school, but unfortunately she wasn't conversant in the standard terms and technologies associated with the trade. Now, we don't expect entry-level people to come in knowing everything. But candidates have come in who know the fundamentals of online media and marketing, either through school or independent research, and can at carry on a conversation about it. I gave the candidate a list of things to research on her own and invited her to contact us once she had become more familiar with the field. I realized this is a great list for entry-level candidates. Media planning and buying is all about independent research and being able to grasp complex advertising concepts and technologies. Between the vendor sites; media sites like ClickZ, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), SlideShare, YouTube, and Wikipedia; and search engines, there is more than enough info out there for candidates to get at least partially up to speed on this stuff. Frankly, this is the stuff colleges and universities should be teaching to their advertising and marketing students. Read more... Labels: ClickZ, Online Media Socially Enabled Ads: An UpdateMore online ads are becoming less about impressions and clicks and more about engagement, interaction, and sharing. All the ad units integrating social sharing functionality and content are taking this trend to the next level. Here's a quick list of just a few I compiled with the help of Bianca Garcia, one of our social media planners. Facebook's Engagement Ads By now, we all should know that Facebook's engagement ads are the socially engaging/interactive home page ads. But some people may not have noticed that Facebook now combines certain ad functionalities to give the user (and advertiser) more opportunities to engage and connect. For instance, these ads used to be just plain graphic plus text copy, or a single-focus ad: Give a Gift ad, Watch a Video, or Become a Fan. Now there are so many things we can do, all in one ad unit. For example, you can Watch a Video, RSVP to an Event, Take a Poll, and Become a Fan. Of course, the two best things about these ads remain: the viral component and the ability to custom target. Any of these social actions taken by the user shows up in his/her news feed, and is then seen by their friends, spawning basically free publicity and viral spread. Custom targeting still lets advertisers target their Facebook ads by demographics (age, gender, geographic location), keywords found in the user's profile, education, workplaces, relationships, and even languages. An example of this is the engagement ad for "Grey's Anatomy" season finale. Users can watch the video within the ad unit (it expands once the play button is hit) and RSVP to the event, virtually keeping the brand ("Grey's Anatomy") and the event (season ender episode) in their personal calendars. Read more... Labels: Advertising, ClickZ, Social Media Marketing Ten Ways to Strengthen Relations With Your Media RepsEvery once in a while I like to remind myself, our industry, and of course my team how important it is to maintain strong relationships between media buyers and reps. Don't get me wrong, reps know my team drives a hard bargain. They understand that we, like all other agencies, represent the client and their interests. Yet they also know that my team appreciates the hard work they put into formulating programs that will work for our clients. When it comes down to it, reps will fight harder for deals for the buyers they like and respect. You need to acknowledge the work that a lot of people do to make your agency more successful. So this column is about things you can do to show gratitude to your reps for all the hard work they do for you. These tips are based on things I've heard reps talk about, things we try to do, and things we've discussed doing. Remember, you can attract more flies with honey. (If you are a rep and feel we aren't doing at least the basic things here for you, my apologies. Please let me know.) •Be polite. Return calls and e-mail, even if you aren't in buy mode. It only takes a couple moments. It will help reps do their job to connect with media buyers, acknowledge their effort to reach out to you, and give you both the opportunity to get into each other's contact list. •Acknowledge their value as educators. Sales reps are the continuing education professors for media buyers. They keep us in the know about all the new placements and technologies in the pipeline. Admit it, media buyers: How did we learn about all this stuff that we recommend to our clients? How did we amass much of the information that makes us experts in online media? We got it by letting the media reps give us their dog-and-pony shows. We got the information from the source, which is exactly where we should get it from. Read more... Labels: ClickZ, Online Media A New Pricing System for OnlineThere are a few pricing models for online advertising and we all know them well: CPM (define), CPC (define), and CPA (define) being the major ones. But recently, Ari Rosenberg brought me a very novel and intriguing pricing model. It's so unique that he patented it and has some pretty major advertisers and publishers using it. It's called IPC, or impressions per connections pricing. Maybe we'll all be buying media with this new pricing structure some day. Here's what Ari had to say about it. Harry Gold: Ari, please tell me a bit about your background and how you came up with IPC pricing. Ari Rosenberg: I used to be sales manager at Snowball.com (we changed our name to IGN in 2001). We had three "hub sites" at the time, including IGN.com, Chickclick.com, and Powerstudents.com. While on our sites, I had noticed how often we were running ads that didn't seem to fit. Our sales folks were great at pumping in ads that made very little sense for the audience our brands attracted (Ameritrade running on Chickclick.com, for example). At the same time, I also learned firsthand what it was like to have a campaign I sold get canceled because the ads did not perform well. This was a strange feeling coming from traditional media sales and I was resentful that revenue I booked would cancel because "their" creative didn't work on my site. I knew there had to be a better way to formulate a deal structure where everyone could benefit and performance on all sides was incentives. Read more... Labels: Advertising, ClickZ, Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Eight Things You Need to Manage Social Media"Who Owns Social Media Campaigns? written last week by ClickZ columnist Rebecca Lieb, explores who should manage social media for companies - public relations firms, search firms, or agencies. I'm grateful to Rebecca for getting me a gig at ClickZ as a columnist more than two years ago. This week, I'm appreciative because she gave me fodder for my column here. Below is a comment I posted last week in response to her column; I'd like to elaborate. Online Marketing firms who have search, online media, creative, development and tracking technology under one roof are the only entities really qualified to deploy and manage a robust social media channel alive with good content, creative and interactive applications. Agencies might be close but most PR firms are just not equipped to deploy creative and technology-infused online assets and blend them with high-octane online media programs. Certainly "search only" firms are not the right folks for this either - they don't have great creative or online media buyers. The one thing PR firms may have a leg up on is good blog-relations programs. Let me list skills and components that a company needs to manage a social media campaign in a comprehensive way and explain why online marketing firms are the right ones to make it happen. First, the lines between search, online media, online creative, and online technology are blurring and nowhere is that more true than with social media marketing. A social platform is a channel that will forever build your brand, encourage engagement, and drive site traffic, leads, and commerce. Only online marketing firms adept at maintaining, managing, tracking, and optimizing "always on" online channels and technologies should be in charge of managing these platforms. A robust social platform has tons of moving parts and technologies behind it. So in exploring what type of firm is best at managing a social platform consider the following. You wouldn't have your PR firm build and manage your Web site, right? You may have your branding agency do it but probably not. However, you would retain your pure-play online marketing firm that has all the creative, search engine optimization (SEO), and technical/Web development skills under one roof to build and manage your Web site right? Well a social media platform is like a huge Web site that not only integrates with your site but lives all over the Web. That's why a full-service online firm is they way to go. Read more... Labels: ClickZ, online marketing, Online Media, Social Media Six Tips to Get Prospects to ClickI have a saying that I often apply to many situations in life: "Don't go to China to get to California." How does that apply to online marketing? More often than not, we determine an online campaign's success through some high value action, like lead capture, video view, or something similar. But just as often, and even though these actions are at the heart of a campaign's success, those actions are hidden or put at the end of a process or banner. Critical messages and calls to action are obscured by creative, images, and messaging, and they're relegated to the back of the visual and click-path sequence. Yet those items' resulting metrics are the first thing people look at when evaluating a campaign's key performance indicators (define). This is done for a variety of reasons, such as simple ignorance of best practices, an aversion to asking people for what you want, extraneous pages and content, or an overly hard sell that focuses on selling a product rather than the escalating or high value action on a landing page. The result is always the same: users are forced to jump through more hoops to engage in the behavior we want and conversion rates go down. Users are being forced to go to China to get to California. Below are six tips to helping your users get to California by a more direct route:
Labels: ClickZ, online marketing, Online Media, Strategy Mind-Blowing Facebook Stats and What to Do With ThemBy now, you've probably heard that Facebook has exceeded 200 million users. Clearly social media is exploding and the stats aren't just unprecedented, they're mind-blowing! To demonstrate this, I did a some stat research this weekend to share with you here. How can you use this info and put it to practical use? As media planners and online marketers, we must look at media buying tactics that go way beyond the list of placements, sizes, and interaction options we have on the menu today. Media buying's future won't just be about buying clicks and impressions, it will also be about encouraging peer-to-peer impressions and getting people engaged with your content. It will be about doing Facebook Engagement Ads and using chiclets to generate clicks and to get people to become your friends or fans or to post or share your content. It will be about potentiating the power of your media dollars. Absorb these stats, share them, and realize the potential of what's happening. You can also incorporate them into presentations and e-mail you send to colleagues and clients, to show the power of social media marketing. Let's start with the big news. Last week on Facebook's blog, Mark Zuckerberg wrote, "We will welcome our 200 millionth active user to Facebook some time today." The post offers some Flash animation with some interesting facts and a heat map showing that in some areas, like the Northeast United States, Facebook has 900 users per every 10 square miles. Labels: ClickZ, Facebook, Social Media Social Media Integration Tips from SES NYAt Search Engine Strategies NY last week, I had the pleasure of speaking on ClickZ's social media panel and attending other conference sessions. This event reinforced the trend that the lines between search marketing and online media are blurring and the explosive popularity of social media puts that reality into super-high gear. Although this was a search marketing conference, social media (Twitter, in particular) was on the tip of everyone's tongue including keynote speaker Guy Kawasaki. What's clear: everything we do online is getting integrated and intermeshed into a unified platform that can drive traffic, generate leads and sales, and encourage high-value brand interactions. Of special interest to me: hearing about tips and best practices for integrating all the elements of search, social, online media, and Web site technology to create more value, connection, and engagement. That includes things that help turn media investments into long-term connections with consumers e.g., Facebook fan pages, Twitter followers, social-sharing chiclets -- get consumers to spread the word about your brand. Here are a few tips and tricks that have the potential to add a high level of social octane to any online campaign. Some are straight from me and some are from SES and other places. Please forgive me for not sourcing the ideas but to be honest they are all living in my head. Labels: ClickZ, Social Media Common Tracking Issues and How to Address ThemQuestions and issues over tracking and reporting online ads have persisted among agencies, media vendors, ad servers, Webmasters, and clients since I started my career. Terms and procedures around tracking have not been standardized, resulting in lots of confusion. Last time, I listed five common tracking and reporting issues and offered sensible approaches to deal with the first two. In this column, let's examine ways to address the latter three tracking issues. The five most common tracking and reporting issues are:
Read more... Labels: Advertising, ClickZ, Online Media View-Through Conversions Are Not ConversionsJust in the last couple of months, we have dealt with some tracking questions and issues. Throughout my career, these types of issues have persisted among agencies, media vendors, ad servers, Webmasters, and clients. One thing's clear: the terms and procedures around tracking have not been standardized. As a result, there's lots of confusion in the marketplace around tracking and analytics. This two-part column will examine five common tracking and reporting issues and offer sensible approaches and explanations to deal with them. The tracking issues are:
In this column, I will dig deep into the first two items and follow up next time with the other three. Labels: Advertising, ClickZ Online Advertising for B2BAt our agency, we do a lot of work for B2B (define) companies that look want to reach people by job title or function. Especially today, advertisers want to hone in their targeting as accurately as possible to reach the right people who can buy or influence the purchase of their products and services. So I worked with Bianca Garcia, one of our media planners who does a fair amount of B2B online advertising, to list a few options -- and she came up with these great ideas. Here are six approaches or places to target people online by job function or title. Labels: ClickZ, Online Media, Social Media Marketing Best Practices for Google Content TargetingThe lines between search marketing and online media have been blurring for some time. This is especially true with the Google AdSense network. It's basically a huge ad network where content sites run ads for Google. In a Google search program, this is also known as content targeting. Even though you manage these ads through the Google interface and they're often targeted by keywords that don't show up in search listings, they show up in Web sites, just like online media. A debate recently popped up in our agency about whether Google content ads, banners, and click-to-play videos managed by our search term could also be managed by our online media campaign managers as part of a media buy. Online media campaign managers should be able to manage these ads too, because -- to reiterate -- ads running in the Google content network aren't in search results. The ads are on regular Web sites and can be targeted on a site-by-site basis. Labels: ClickZ, Google, Strategy Socializing Your Banners With ChicletsWe all know the lines between social media and online media are blurring. One noticeable way social media marketing is creeping into traditional online display is by incorporating sharing, bookmarking, and syndication chiclets into banners. Do you know what chiclets are? They are those little Digg, Facebook, Delicious, and Twitter buttons you see nestled around blog posts and articles or consolidated in aggregators like ShareThis. The definition according to Word Spy is "a small image that links to a syndication file for a web site, particularly a blog." Read more... Labels: ClickZ, Online Media, Social Media Online Media Stats That Make Me Feel Great About '09!When driving to work just after Christmas, I was listening to an interview with an e-commerce company CEO who said something that made me laugh. She said, "In 09, flat is the new up." If you did the same in final three months of 2008 as you did during the same period in 2007, she said you were ok. Well, I say, let's not be content with flat just yet. Let's raise our cups to a new year that will defy expectations! With all the doom and gloom projected, it still does seem that budgets are still migrating online. Unlike the last burst bubble, this burst is aimed squarely at everything but online marketing. Wow, does that feel good. (I guess all that "pain in the you know what" measurement stuff we online marketers push all the time is paying off.) It also could be that our budgets are often still a pretty small percentage of overall budgets in the grand scheme of things and we have a long way to go. From where I sit, the outlook for '09 still looks pretty good and in some cases, better than '09. So I am not ready to be content with "flat" just yet. If you find yourself not feeling quite as chipper and enthusiastic about the future of online as I am, here are some stats that may help you get to the other side of this recession, depression, downturn -- whatever you want to call it. Labels: ClickZ, Industry, Online Media Branding or Connecting: How About Both?Big brands have woken up to the power of online and are now buying billions of impressions to build and reinforce their brands. So let me propose adding another level of interaction to the mix. Instead of brand impressions, clicks, and actions, let's encourage and measure "brand connections." Until recently, about the only way to make a lasting online connection with a target audience was to have them join your e-mail list. E-mail is all well and good. But the explosion and adoption of social media provides marketers and media professionals with opportunities to make genuine and lasting connections with customers and target audiences. We can now make lifelong connection because people's profiles and social accounts rarely change. We can embed our client's brands, content, and messages into the social environments where their target customers congregate. We can enable consumers to make our clients' brands part of their online identities and help them talk about our brands in a way that our clients want to be talked about. And here is the big part: our online media can add serious octane to this potential. Use online media to encourage brand interactions and connections in the social space and watch the lasting value of your impressions and campaigns go through the roof. Watch the benefit of your impressions turn to valuable lasting connections! Brand marketers should be super greedy about amassing brand connections. Labels: ClickZ, Facebook, Social Media An Interview With a Cost-Per-Lead ExpertPerformance media buying is one way to minimize risk associated with media dollars in these strange economic times. I've written plenty on this topic, so this time I decided to get the scoop from an expert in the space: Jonah Mytro, director of Mediaspike, based in Brookline, Massachusetts. Harry Gold: Please tell me about yourself and your company -- basically, what do you do and whom do you do it for? Jonah Mytro: We are an online marketing and business development firm focusing on the development, launch, and management of Web sites in a variety of different industries including online education, debt settlement and consolidation, travel, scholarships, and parking. We own and operate each of our Web sites and generate leads and inquiries for our clients on a performance model. Clients only pay per qualified lead or inquiry and are very ROI [return-on-investment] focused. HG: So you're not an agency then? JM: Mediaspike is not the traditional agency where we buy media on the client's behalf. Our goal is to deliver qualified leads and inquiries to our clients who pay us on a cost-per-lead basis. From the client perspective, they are reducing their risk and only paying for a qualified lead, which they can monetize. We are focused in certain areas so we can go very deep into certain verticals and develop mature lead channels. HG: So basically you sell media to certain industries on a cost-per-lead basis? JM: Correct. So my expertise is in both the buy side and sell side of performance or cost-per-lead media. Read more... Labels: ClickZ, Industry, Online Media Ten Tips for Negotiating With Media VendorsAs media planners, we must represent our client -- the buyer. We must earn our keep by getting our clients the best deal possible. In reality, we are matchmakers, trying to create success for our clients and make a sale on behalf of the media properties we believe are the right choices. In this process, we want to secure the best deal possible on the right sites for our clients while making friends with the media reps and establishing a partnership. This partnership has a common goal of creating a successful campaign and lasting relationship with the client. Today, some tips for doing just that.
Labels: ClickZ, Online Media Twitter Tweets from the Google/TechTarget B2B RoadshowI got to attend an invitation-only Google/TechTarget event at Google's office in Cambridge, MA, and tweeted some of the more interesting tidbits of knowledge I picked up. (In all truthfulness, I added a couple to this column.) The event, "The Google/TechTarget Research Project: How IT Pros Search Online During the Purchase Process," was billed as "TechTarget and Google partnered to research the search behaviors and online interests of business technology buyers, including the relationship between brand and search activity." The research was compiled from a sample of 2,200 participants from North America, Europe, and Asia. Topics covered included search terms used at the various stages of the IT buying process, buyer attitudes toward lead-generation efforts, and more. There were some very interesting data offered, and the food was actually pretty darn good. However, I wish they gave more examples of practical applications for the data and findings they revealed. I guess it's up to us to figure out how to apply the data to what we do in the future. Read more...Labels: ClickZ, Events, Google, Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Six Crucial Tips From the Media GuyI'm often vexed that online media professionals are typically 100 percent on the hook for a campaign's performance when the creative typically determines whether a well-planned and -targeted campaign succeeds or fails. People often forget that media will only put you in front of the right people, while the creative (banners and landing pages) make people react, interact, click, take action, and convert. This occurred when I was involved with a small campaign for a business-to-business (B2B) tech company. It had a product for bank IT staffers, and we placed ads on Bank Systems and Technology, BankInfoSecurity, "Banking Technology" magazine, and more. All the stars seemed aligned on this one, the media hit the target square on the head, and the offer in the banner was a valuable report from well-known analysts. The campaign tanked. The client quickly blamed the media plan. However, if we couldn't generate interest for a banking technology industry report on a site like Banking Technology, this company had a bigger problem than a bad media plan. The real problem was the creative was provided by another agency that didn't know what it was doing! First, the banner was a ultra-creative and so ethereal that people didn't get it. People had to think way too much to discover the product and offer relevance. Second, and this was the bigger problem, the offer didn't appear for 19 seconds. Who' s going to wait for 19 seconds in a looping banner to see an offer? Read more... Labels: ClickZ, Online Media, Strategy Getting Savvy With Appsavvy: Measuring SuccessLast time, Chris Cunningham, founder and CEO of appssavvy, the largest ad network of social applications, described how some brands use application advertising. Here he describes adoption rates, CPM rates, and his prognosis for MySpace, Bebo, and Friendster in their rivalry with Facebook. Harry Gold: Why should online advertisers take advantage of social media applications? Chris Cunningham: In a word: engagement. Internet consumers are spending more than three times the amount of time utilizing social media applications over their profile pages. They're engaging with their interests via applications, interests like games, music, books, travel, and more. Brands that interact with consumers via social media applications in a contextually relevant fashion are seeing tremendous success, and as more and more consumers interact with social networks and applications the opportunity grows exponentially. HG: Do you see any danger in crossing the line when making an application too commercial or branded? Where is that line and how do you make sure you don't cross it? CC: Again, if it's contextually relevant the user won't mind. On the flip side, if a brand wants to build its own application its needs to provide some, actually a lot, level of utility and content. Our work with Alberto-Culver's V05 is an excellent example. It is also important for brands to understand that the mission should not be about pushing a message but rather bringing something to the party. Building applications only works if done the right way. HG: Is there any demographic info on application users you can give me? CC: It is really dependent on the social network. It is really that simple. For example, if Facebook's core audience is 14 to 35, that's the same demo appssavvy sells against on behalf of brands and advertisers. It is this reason V05 is on Facebook. It is also why Kohl's back to school application promotion was on Facebook and why movie studios, such as Sony Pictures and MGM, are reaching Facebook consumers via relevant social media applications. Read more... Labels: Application Development, ClickZ, Social Media Marketing Getting Savvy With Appsavvy: Application AdvertisingLast time, we talked with Mike Kerns of Citizen Sports Network about application sponsorships on social networks. This time and next, we talk with the other top player in this space: Chris Cunningham, founder and CEO of appssavy, the largest ad network of social applications. Harry Gold: Can you tell me about you and your company? Chris Cunningham: I've got a passion for this space. I was exposed to the social media application space by spearheading freewebs's widget initiative a couple of years ago. At that time, I got my first taste of the opportunity here for brands to play an important role in the social media ecosystem. At freewebs, I had the opportunity to launch the highly successful WidgetCon conference in 2007 and haven't looked back since. Prior to the application space, I was involved with several companies in the digital music space, including Digital Music Network and Music Vision. Now I am CEO of appssavvy. We are a direct sales team representing many of the leading applications in the social media space. Currently appssavvy sells integration and media around 15 of the top 25 biggest applications on multiple platforms and reaches over 50 million users over another 500 applications. Appssavvy sells contextually relevant advertising on social and utility applications and drives premium CPMs [define]. HG: What are those 15 apps and their stats? CC: Appsavvy represents 15 of the top 25 application companies, including leaders such as Playfish, SGN [Social Gaming Network], Flixster, Bantr, and 42 Friends. Each company has leading applications, such as Bowling Buddies, Circle of Friends, and Entourage. Through these partners, appssavvy has access to a user base of more than 6 million daily and 50 million monthly users. Advertisers have the opportunity to integrate their branding messages through exciting mediums, such as the bowling lanes on Bowling Buddies, where the brand can spend an enormous amount of time with a user. Or campaigns can leverage the millions of users across the SGN Gaming Bar to drive response and engagement. Read more... Labels: Advertising, Application Development, ClickZ Social Networking With Citizens Sports In "Seven Ways to Advertise on Facebook," I broke down advertising opportunities on the social network. I actually got a lot of flack from a few readers for omitting application sponsorships. I had left them out because one doesn't actually buy application sponsorships directly from Facebook. Among those weighing in were two of the larger players in the Facebook application advertising space: Citizen Sports Network and Appssavvy. So I decided to interview their CEOs to learn more about application advertising on social networks. This week features my interview with Mike Kerns, CEO of Citizens Sports Network. The company has developed applications for social networks, including one initiative that makes it possible for sports fans to participate in fantasy football games with friends. Harry Gold: Can you tell me about you and your company? Mike Kerns: I began my career with the leading angel investment level firm in Silicon Valley during the late '90s, early 2000s. I was one of two associates with Ron Conway's Angel Investors. We were early in companies such as Google, Ask, PayPal, and Napster. We did over 200 investments in tech, broadly distributed across different areas of focus. I then went on to get a foot in the door in the sports industry as the chief of staff at Steinberg & Moorad sports agency. We were the leading football and baseball representatives in the country. My eyes opened to the lack of innovation in the digital sports media business in 2003 [or] 2004. So I set out to develop a new way to interact with commoditized sports information. Our first product/effort was Protrade.com, a virtual sports stock market, which is a next-generation fantasy sports game and community. It grew to what is most likely the largest standalone (not owned by major media conglomerate) fantasy product. However, it appeals to a very passionate niche audience, so when Facebook and other platforms started opening up a year ago, we decided to shift the business direction to become the leading social sports media provider...hence the rebrand to Citizen Sports Network. We are building a diversified set of sports experiences within social networks that are based on fostering social interactions around sports information and games. Read more... Labels: ClickZ, Social Media Ten Things to Do Besides BannersWe are familiar with great decline of banner click rates. It's funny how we now look at a 0.2 percent click rate and think that's good. There was a funny parody of "Adweek" called SadWeek that appeared when the dot-com bubble burst around 2001. One article was headlined, "Banner Click Rates Drop Below Zero Confounding Marketers and Mathematicians." The industry has combated it several ways including research to justify the branding power of banners (which I whole heartily believe in). However, branding clients always agree with a campaign being about the brand until they read their reports. Then, they start to look at things like clicks and action rates. At our agency, we try to get the client to focus on a campaign's top-line metrics. We have high CPM banners for branding and visibility and a wide variety of non-banner placements that tend to get more or cheaper clicks to balance things out. For example, one buy we do again and again is on a site that sells us all the banners and skyscrapers at mid-range CPMs. Then, as almost a value add, the site throws in millions of text link and button combination units as fixed placements at the bottom of their pages. Then we come in with Google Site Targeted Text Ads that we apply to our media buy from our media budget. As a result, we get the visibility we want from the site with the banners and tons of low cost clicks to bring the cost per click and cost per action from the site way down. Seven Ways to Advertise on FacebookOK, I've previously examined the different ways you could advertise on Google. To be fair I asked Bianca Garcia, one of our media planners who specializes in social media, to help me compile a list of the advertising opportunities on Facebook. What's interesting about Facebook: most of the units are non-traditional and are often incorporated in with the content that consumers are actively reading when they login -- mainly the social ads that show up in the Facebook feeds. Plus, the larger social network sites allow you to get super granular with targeting. They have enough users that you can still hit a large audience even with a bunch of selects. Targeting parameters include: country, state, city or town, age, gender, interests, activities, music, TV shows, education, high school, college, major, workplace, relationship status, profile keywords, and books. Now there are a many different things to do on Facebook and I may be inadvertently omitting some because new features are being added. The things we are focusing on here are paid advertising opportunities that media planners might take advantage of except for setting up a corporate profile. I'm also not going to get into talking here about applications. Using Facebook applications for advertising and branding is a pretty huge topic and certainly will be the subject of a future column. Read more... Labels: ClickZ, Social Media How to Optimize an Ad Campaign on the FlyAt many larger agencies, the role of running an online campaign is fragmented. Typically it's broken up between planners, buyers, traffickers, and analysts. The problem with this model is who is going super deep on the account? This model assumes that optimization is simply about moving media and turning banners on and off at the banner server. Which begs the question: How are real-time decisions made? Do all these people have to meet to get a high-level idea of what's going on in a campaign? How often do they meet or talk? Are they making real-time decisions? Candidly I have heard stories where optimization at some firms is more like run, track, report, meet, decide, and finally optimize. As opposed to real-time optimization, a more old-school see-what-happens approach is taken and many impressions and dollars are wasted in these protracted optimization cycles. OK, I know everyone is going to say to clients: "Of course, we optimize real-time." But do you really? If you have a fragmented team, is a lower level traffic manager with her fingers on the banner server keyboard authorized or able to kill a site, placement, or piece of creative? Or, does this person need to wait for the analyst to see that it's not working, report that to the team, and then ask the buyer to cancel the contract or renegotiate the deal? That's a lot of hops and meetings to do something as simple as cancel a site, placement, or piece of creative. The only way I have seen this work is when all of these people are working together in a tight little pod where meetings don't have to be scheduled to make decisions and inform clients of those decisions. One easy question to ask your agency if it has a fragmented media management team is, "Where do all these people sit in proximity to each other?" If the analysts are in another department, office space, or even floor away from the campaign managers, then it's unlikely your optimization is real-time. Anatomy of Great Online Media PlanMy inspiration for this column was an online media plan spreadsheet. Yup, a spreadsheet representing an online media plan. You know what I call that? A media plan summary. Many times I see agencies large and small presenting the days, and even weeks, of planning and negotiating that went into creating a plan as a simple table of site names, impression levels, flight dates, high-level placement details, and creative specs and costs. The problem with this way of presenting a plan: it minimizes the effort that goes into producing an online plan (which is always underappreciated) and cheapens a process that I hold sacred. Show your clients how much thought and research goes into an online campaign. The following, though not exhaustive, are important and add depth to a successful online media plan:Read more... Labels: ClickZ, Online Media Launching Multicultural Media CampaignsA specialty at our firm is helping companies target niche audiences. One of our more challenging accounts has charged us with running a multicultural campaign targeting dozens of individual ethnic groups within the United States with just the right message. This type of campaign presents a different set of challenges from huge buys on the Web's top sites. To help describe some of the challenges and tactics associated with running one of these campaigns I interviewed Barbara Wojslawowicz, one of our planners, who does a great job managing and optimizing these difficult multicultural campaigns. Barbara Wojslawowicz: I'm an online media planner in the media department at Overdrive Interactive. I'm responsible for online, and sometimes offline, media strategy, planning, buying, and management for direct-response clients, primarily focused on multicultural advertising. Prior to Overdrive, I held online marketing positions at Digitas and First Night Boston. HG: Why is multicultural advertising so important? BW: Since each ethnic group responds to messaging differently, it's important for advertisers to tailor products and subsequent advertising campaigns in culturally relevant media segments. The U.S. has always been referred to as a melting pot of ideas, religions, and cultures, and according to a recent Pew Research Center study entitled, "Immigration to Play Lead Role in Future U.S. Growth," the pot is going to get even bigger. According to the study, "the population of the United States will rise to 438 million in 2050, from 296 million in 2005, and 82% of the increase will be due to immigrants arriving from 2005 to 2050 and their U.S.-born descendants...The Latino population, already the nation's largest minority group, will triple in size." This population boom will inevitably lead to increased spending on consumer goods from ethnic Americans. This presents a huge opportunity for companies to expand their product offerings and target their ad campaigns by ethnic group. HG: In your experience, what channels have been the most successful in reaching your client's ethnic markets in the U.S.? Labels: ClickZ, Hispanic Marketing, Industry, Online Media A Primer on Social Media Marketing Components and TacticsWhen it comes to social media marketing, there's one three-letter abbreviation that I can't stand: SMO (social media optimization). Why don't I like that term? SMO implies that leveraging social media in your marketing efforts is a cousin of SEO or, even worse, an adjunct that is simply about getting more inbound links to build your search engine prominence. Marketing your site with social media is much more than optimization. Social media marketing (SMM) is an entire channel that allows marketers to build communities of "friends" and then socialize with those friends in their chosen online environments. It's about leveraging a whole new platform and environment to galvanize and communicate with your customers (and potential customers) and to let them communicate with you. Read more... Labels: ClickZ, Social Media How a Social Media Campaign Fits into a B2B Media PlanLet's explore a facet of social media that's often ignored -- B2B (define) social media. Last month, my agency ran a social media seminar at the New England Direct Marketing Association Conference. When an audience member asked about B2B social media, Bianca Garcia, one of our star media planners, jumped right in with a lot of good information. She has a special gift for navigating the social media landscape, so I interviewed her for more information. Harry Gold: Who are you and what do you do? Bianca Garcia: I'm a media planner for Overdrive Interactive, and my job includes planning, buying, implementing and optimizing online and social media campaigns. I first joined the search marketing team at Overdrive before moving to the media department. I have an MBA and prior to working for Overdrive, I worked for "Cosmopolitan" magazine, "Seventeen" magazine, and Leo Burnett. My background in search and traditional media has greatly contributed to a well-rounded understanding of online campaigns. HG: We all know that social media marketing is good for B2C (define), but are there any sites that are good for B2B? BG: LinkedIn would be an obvious choice, but there are also industry-specific networking sites like ITtoolbox (where you can tap into a huge professional IT community), the Minyanville Exchange (a financial social networking site), Designer Pages (for architecture and design), and lots of others. However, keep in mind that "traditional" social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, even Twitter have B2B profiles and profiles where people often list their professions. So you can do certain kinds of B2B targeting by profession. Read more... Labels: ClickZ, Social Media Listen to Your EnemyMy father always told me that everyone is worth listening to -- even if it's only to learn what not to say. As I grew older and more experienced, especially in the advertising field, I came to truly see the simple wisdom in that piece of advice. People whom you think are great can clearly show you the best way to do something. And those whom you think aren't as good as you, can show you how not to do something. (Of course, it could be the opposite: people you thought were great really don't know what they're doing, while those with a lesser reputation are the true luminaries.) What does this have to do with online media? This week, something happened that really blew my mind. We recently lost the online display portion of an account (c'mon, it happens to the best of us), and we learned the new firm isn't delivering the value to the client that we did. In fact, the firm is delivering exactly 66 percent less value. How do we know this? Because some media invoices were accidentally delivered to us. Turns out, the new agency is paying three times the rates we were paying for the same placements! Read more...Labels: ClickZ, Online Media |
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