Comments on the social graph

Beats by Dre | The Game Before The Game

2014-06-07T06:41:00.001-07:00

Here's the Ad Week write up:

"Good lord, Beats by Dre is getting great at sports commercials.

We wrote at length last month about how the music company and ad agency R/GA have teamed up to make some of the year's best sports ads—with Kevin Garnett, Colin Kaepernick, Richard Sherman and Cesc Fabregas. But nothing could prepare us for this five-minute World Cup extravaganza. It's about pregame rituals, yes, but Beats is proving to be surprisingly adept at all aspects of the sports ad game—which at times like these is supposed to be the purview of Nike and Adidas...."

Read full article at Ad Week here

New York Red Bulls Bring in R/GA to Boost Profile, Sales

2013-07-29T07:59:00.002-07:00

From AdWeek - Article here

When it comes to attracting the attention of sports fans, the New York Red Bulls play in the most competitive professional market in Major League Soccer. The Red Bulls are competing against more than 10 professional sports teams (Yankees, Mets, etc.,) for fans not just soccer teams. Adding to that challenge is next month’s debut of the relaunched Cosmos, and in 2015, the New York City Football Club, a new team funded by the deep pockets of the U.K.’s Manchester City franchise and the New York Yankees.

If those new entrants underscore the belief of soccer’s potential in America, the Red Bulls—who as the MetroStars was a founding member of the MLS—illustrate the difficulty in winning over adult fans of a sport better known on school fields. Earlier this year, the Red Bulls hired R/GA to boost recognition and ticket sales.

“Soccer is the third-most popular participation sport in America after basketball and baseball for kids,” said Tony Effik, managing director of R/GA media and connections. “But there’s a big difference between people who like soccer and people who go to games.”

Last year, the Red Bulls advertised on soccer-specific sites. The team had a little outside media help but developed a strategy internally with a focus on existing fans.

But preaching to the converted would only sell so many tickets. The Red Bulls would have to raise its profile.
“We have conducted a recent trial and awareness study, and it confirmed that we have work to do,” acknowledged Daniel Marrett, the team’s director of marketing.

R/GA broadened its target to adjacent audiences familiar with soccer but not attending games. To reach soccer moms, the agency promoted the Red Bulls’ camps for kids. Spectators are being wooed with wild postings—large numbers of ads posted in high-traffic areas—near soccer bars and playing fields. The Harrison, N.J., Red Bull Arena is near the PATH station, so R/GA used outdoor ads and train takeovers with the theme, “The beautiful game. Beautifully close.”

R/GA analyzed season-ticket data and found most of the sales were by people living within 30 miles of the stadium. After mapping out those tri-state fans, the agency found its marketing hot spots. “Soccer is a local game,” underscored Rory O’Flaherty, R/GA group media director. “Geography is very important in who we target and where we invest our money.”

The agency also sought to increase Red Bulls’ fan targeting through Facebook and Twitter content and ensure Facebook content is consistent with overall messaging. While search is still the best channel for ticket sales, Facebook now follows it.

Using real-time optimization, the Red Bulls have been able to learn from what isn’t working as well as seeing what generates results.

“We now have different styles of digital campaigns, both targeted and broad, and can make adjustments on the fly,” Marrett said.

R/GA And McCormick - AdWeek Article

2013-07-29T07:54:00.001-07:00

McCormick: A Dash of Data In the Media Mix - full article here

McCormick isn’t just in the seasonings business—it also offers meal inspirations by way of recipe suggestions on its website. With more consumers as budding chefs and Americans developing more of a taste for ethnic and gourmet flavors, that digital real estate has become even more important—and especially so considering that the company is going up against much larger rivals with fatter media budgets and with pure-play sites like that of Food Network thrown into the mix.

“Recipe views, in many respects, are a proxy for a sale,” explains Tony Effik, managing director, media and connections at the brand’s agency, R/GA, New York. “While McCormick is a significant business, it’s generally outspent by competitors, so we had to figure out a way to outsmart them by leveraging data to execute earned and paid media plans. We do media. But we also come up with creative, and data is the thing that holds all of that together.”

In 2012, McCormick spent $43.3 million in media, per Kantar. Compare that to $404 million at Campbell’s Soup. When the agency started working on the account in 2011, McCormick was getting 12 percent of the category’s total unique visitors, per comScore, and rivals outspent the brand four to one. Now, McCormick’s gets 25 percent of that traffic, and with only a minimal increase in the media spend. “What’s closing that gap is creating efficiencies through the use of data,” says Effik.

With its Responsive Media System, R/GA analyzed the online recipes market, seeking out anomalies and undervalued strategies. The agency studied media-spending patterns and set up a series of algorithmic rules across media channels including search, social, real-time media and promoted videos. R/GA then took what it unearthed and applied it to paid search for McCormick’s Lawry’s brand.

McCormick’s and R/GA decided to leverage Lawry’s West Coast heritage in a test using search and Mexican recipes. The agency split Lawry’s media budget between Western states like California (where Lawry’s originated) and the rest of the country. Two data points were key: the clickthrough rate and cost-per-recipe view. The national market did well for clickthroughs. But more interestingly for R/GA was data from the West Coast where the post-click action rate was 20 percent to 60 percent greater than in the rest of the country, prompting it to tailor the media plan geographically.

“That learning allows us to explore the same rule in other channels, so now we can run display advertising in a more focused way on the West Coast if we want to,” says Effik. “We’re thinking about how the budget responds to the market and how we make changes, sometimes in real time, against the dynamics of the marketing using data. Response for us is not whether something succeeded or failed—it’s an opportunity to learn. What we’re learning from search we can apply to other areas of marketing.”

R/GA’S FLEDGLING MEDIA SERVICES UNIT FINDS ITS STRIDE

2012-11-04T08:41:00.000-08:00

Here's a recent article from AdExchanger on the work I am doing at R/GA:

R/GA’s decision to launch a media division one year ago was an unusual step for an agency deeply associated with its creative product. The firm has always talked a good game about data, for instance using personal health data to support the award winning Nike+ and Fuel Band products. But that’s a far cry from executing media buys using first and third-party audience data and optimizing those campaigns on the fly.

Get the full story at AdExchanger

R/GA ADVERTISING WEEK TALK

2012-09-28T11:53:00.003-07:00

If you are free on Monday at 3PM please join us for our talk at The Times Center, where we will present "Moving At The Speed Of Markets - A New And Creative Media Ecosystem" Here is the link to registration on the Advertising Week site.

BUILDING INTERACTIVITY INTO VIDEO

2012-09-28T06:14:00.002-07:00

We know video is experiencing explosive growth across the web, which is good. But we don't want to ape the world of traditional media, and leave video as a purely passive medium.

Check out this very interesting, interactive YouTube video that is essential a tribute to London, my hometown. Very impressive. Hat tip to Lau Moyano. There is an interactive version and a non-interactive version. Click the buttons at the bottom of the video that says :Start Again" and then follow the instructions to select the track to add next (You will need to have annotations enabled.

ARE YOU SMARTER THAN AN ALGORITHM?

2012-08-15T17:57:00.001-07:00

It's SXSW Interactive talks selection time. And I'm looking for votes for my SXSW talk on algorithms. If you find the topic interesting (or you just want to help), clickthrough to vote and share.

Here's the description:

Watson won on Jeopardy. Deep Thought beat Garry Kasparov at chess. Algorithms are everywhere. Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm drives almost everything you see. Google's success is based on algorithms – its original PageRank algorithm is arguably the most valuable in the history of man. Amazon and Netflix’s recommendation engines fuel their profitability and growth. There are countless other algorithms, ranging from those that guide what we see on YouTube, through to what's trending on Twitter, to what online ads you see or don't see.

Algorithms now govern the market and define whether you have a successful or unsuccessful campaign. Brands must respond to this reality. For now, these systems still lack deep intelligence and creativity, so conceptual creativity can outsmart the computational brute force of algorithms. If you beat the algorithms, you beat the market. If you don't, then you are at their mercy

Questions Answered

How do algorithms rule the digital ecosystem?
How do algorithms work and how does this effect brands?
How will algorithms increase in influence in the future?
How is creativity an antidote to the raw power of algorithms?
How can brands outmaneuver the dominant algorithms?

Vote here

A TALE OF TWO AUDIENCES: SOCIAL MEDIA VS TV

2012-08-13T05:14:00.002-07:00

NBC achieved a 31.1 million average primetime viewership for its coverage of the Olympics. The best for non-U.S. Summer Olympics in 36 Years. This number tops Beijing by 12% and Athens by 25%.

If like me you were pissed off trying to watch live the most exciting parts of the Olympics in the US, you might be stunned at this number, but also perhaps grudgingly respectful at this media sleight of hand. The hashtag #NBCFail exploded across Twitter. Influencers across social media screamed out their disapproval to anyone listening. Check out some of the tweets here on #NBCFail.

NBC's TV strategy was simple, broadcast the 'tier 2' sports during the day live, and then rebroadcast during primetime the 'tier 1' events, when they could accumulate the most profitable advertising spend. If you really wanted to watch live events, and you had a cable subscription you could live stream it over the net. Few people were happy with this solution, including me. I got pissed off, others got even more pissed off.

You'll see below a timeline of the tweets, showing social media anger throughout the Olympics, topped and tailed by criticism of broadcasting of the opening and closing ceremony.

This starts to show two things for me:
- The social media audience is influential, but only amongst the social media audience. There are broken links in the social maps that connect society through social media. Not everybody can yet be reached and influenced through social media. And even when they are reached, it's not clear how influential that is.

- Winning in ratings isn't always winning. Their strategy was so transparently manipulative that it has damaged their brand. NBC rightly believed that if you have the content that people want, however pissed off they get, they'll still tune in and watch. Like me, people were pissed off with the time delay, and the fact you already knew the result before you watched, but you still just obediently tuned-in and watched NBC won, but it was a pyrrhic victory, that has left a lot of people very unhappy with them. But perhaps this is what it now takes to make money in these tough time for content owners.

NIKE: FIND YOUR GREATNESS SPOT - JOGGER

2012-08-04T07:24:00.002-07:00

Great Nike spot.

NIKE FOOTBALL: MY TIME IS NOW

2012-06-11T15:31:00.000-07:00

I like the idea idea of the 'tunnels' in this anthemic spot for Nike. This is how I see digital TV going in the next few years. Tunnels of content you can disappear down depending on what interests you at that moment. Watch the video all the way, and then you open on a new version with the tunnel interactivity.

Perrier: The Drop

2012-06-11T13:35:00.002-07:00

A beautifully shot, epic film - neatly wrapped into a long form 2 minutes or so. Lots of comments on their Facebook page, but they could have done so much more socially and digitally. Storytelling in the digital age should do and must do so much more. http://www.facebook.com/perrier

WORLD MAP OF SOCIAL NETWORKS

2012-06-10T18:10:00.000-07:00

Social media strategist Vincenzo Cosenza updates his world map of social networks, in which he shows what the most popular social network is in now 137 countries worldwide.

CONVERSE DOMAINATION - UNCONVENTIONAL SEARCH STRATEGY Domaination

2012-05-23T16:49:00.001-07:00

Converse uses paid search to connect their brand with consumers. The strategy isn't new, but having so much fun with the medium is fresh. Shows how versatile digital media is when you challenge orthodoxy. Clever.

GOOGLE KNOWLEDGE GRAPH

2012-05-19T05:09:00.001-07:00

Google is finally getting its game together on the semantic web, and has named it the knowledge graph. Linking data and embedding the relationships between data into its engine. They say they want to move from being an information engine to be a knowledge engine.

For some more reading on the topic - check out the W3C

R.I.P. HILLMAN CURTIS

2012-04-22T13:48:00.002-07:00

I didn't really know Hillman Curtis and his work before joining R/GA. But I do remember watching the video above, and being impressed with the sensitivity of the camera work and editing. He has passed away at the age of 51 on April 18. Some even called him the ‘Michael Jordan of web design’. See the tribute to Hillman below, and find out more at his site Hillman Curtis

STRANGERS IN A COMMUNITY OF THE LIKEMINDED. THE SOCIAL TV REVOLUTION

2012-02-26T21:09:00.011-08:00

In early 2008, I wrote a blog post on a concept I called "Strangers in a community of the likeminded". The concept at that time addressed the notion that for many sites there are only really conversations between the site and the individual visitor. There is no real community - the visitors are strangers in the dark, and often knew nothing about other people like them visiting the same website.

Since that time, we have seen a proliferation of social features added to sites that allow for community. We are now going to see a proliferation of social features added to TV, and a new revolution will explode across our screens.

Going forward the water-cooler TV conversation will take place whilst the show is on TV. Going forward you will know who else is watching TV with you, wherever they are. Going forward you can sit-back and be entertained, or lean-forward and participate, and share.

TV was the main medium that created 'strangers in a community of the likeminded', now its about to lose that tag in a big way.

Here are a few apps and technologies that are helping drive this revolution:

IntoNow from Yahoo

Miso

Introducing Miso Sideshows from Miso on Vimeo.

GetGlue

Google TV

FOURSQUARE AND AMEX SPECIAL OFFERS

2012-02-19T09:00:00.002-08:00

Foursquare announced not too long ago, it had reached 10M users. This starts to give it a critical mass, rather than it being a fringe platform for the digital cognoscenti. I'm late to this, so excuse me, but Foursquare's recent deal with American Express is what is really exciting for me - where Amex rewards users with loyalty card-like credits when they check in. For those outside of the business, checking-in always seemed really odd. Now many more people will have a reason to check-in - the Amex loyalty incentive.

According to Mashable:

"The New York startup won’t be receiving any revenue from the deal, but the partnership could give Foursquare a better shot at becoming a mainstream service.
“A big part of what we’re doing is building enhanced loyalty tools,” Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley told The Wall Street Journal when the company first announced the partnership in March. “We’re seeing that things like this can drive users.”
Foursquare recently announced that it had surpassed 10 million users, but it hasn’t clarified how many of them are actively using the service after registering. A 2010 Pew Survey found that just 4% of online Americans use any checkin service.

Many digital campaigns are constantly asked to prove two really key things that this partnership helps with:

Show that they can reach their audience of lean-forward-digital-types, at a rate that is competitive to the traditional sit-back-TV-watching audience (with regard to CPMs)
Show that all that lean-forward behavior- tweeting, posting, checking-in - produces sales at a comparative ROI

It is well worth watching to see where this partnership evolves.

BEST SUPERBOWL AD

2012-02-05T19:25:00.000-08:00

This ad really stood out. Clint makes the ad, but the real star was the ad's big ambition.

FIVE COMPANIES CONTROL 64% OF ALL ONLINE ADVERTISING SPEND

2011-11-01T13:31:00.000-07:00

An interesting chart, sourced from Silicon Alley Insider, using data from VC Darren Herman, showing that the combined forces of Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook, and AOL control about $40.1B of the world's digital ad spend, or about 64%. He took the ZenithOptimedia figure of worldwide digital advertising spend of $64.03B.

18TH CENTURY SOCIAL NETWORKS DATA VISUALIZATION

2011-10-28T13:06:00.000-07:00

I'm fascinated by mapping, and the role data visualization plays in bringing to life patterns that are essentially 'invisible' to the naked eye.

This smart project from Stanford takes 18th century correspondence between intellectuals in what they term the "Republic of Letters" and visualizes who is sending and receiving letters. Worth watching

FACEBOOK F8 KEYNOTE PRESENTATION

2011-10-22T20:05:00.000-07:00

Watch live streaming video from f8conference at livestream.com

Mark Zuckerberg knows that even Facebook's mighty ecosystem is not enough by itself, it needs partners. If developers combine their ecosystems with Facebook's ecosystem then Zuckerberg gets the complete map. Google wants that map, Microsoft wants that map. Who will get their first?

This video is long, but well worth watching if you want deep insights into Facebook's priorities within the developer community.

The first part of this video is just policy statements, and Facebook cheerleading, but at around time marker 06:55, Zuckerberg moves to the big stuff, as he says - which is the social graph.

It's interesting how Facebook is now starting to overlay semantics onto the social graph. This is powerful stuff. This semantic layer on top of the social graph comes in the form of the Open Graph Protocol

The Open Graph Protocol enables you to integrate your Web pages into the social graph. It is currently designed for Web pages representing profiles of real-world things — things like movies, sports teams, celebrities, and restaurants. Including Open Graph tags on your Web page, makes your page equivalent to a Facebook Page. This means when a user clicks a Like button on your page, a connection is made between your page and the user.

Your page will appear in the "Likes and Interests" section of the user's profile, and you have the ability to publish updates to the user. Your page will show up in the same places that Facebook pages show up around the site (e.g. search), and you can target ads to people who like your content. The structured data you provide via the Open Graph Protocol defines how your page will be represented on Facebook.

Just as interesting, was the launch of the Graph API:

At Facebook's core is the social graph; people and the connections they have to everything they care about. The Graph API presents a simple, consistent view of the Facebook social graph, uniformly representing objects in the graph (e.g. people,photos, events, and pages) and the connections between them (e.g., friend relationships, shared content, and photo tags).

Participating in the Graph API will help Facebook get one step closer to the map of connections of people and things. Remember this is not just a technical exercise, this map is a map of our culture. Being able to add and take from the map will be a very appealing prospect for brands and developers alike.

RETHINKING TV RATINGS AND SOCIAL MEDIA BUZZ ANALYSIS

2011-09-26T11:13:00.000-07:00

Strata Summit 2011: Jodee Rich, "Move Over Nielsen: Rethinking TV Ratings"

THE SECRET ELITIST WORLD OF SEARCH ENGINES

2011-09-26T10:28:00.000-07:00

"The limits of my language means the limits of my world." Ludwig Wittgenstein

Search is a language game, with an elite and an underclass. Some people simply know how to work these machines better than others. Not only do they have a deep understanding of computer based logic (Boolean logic), but they have wider vocabularies, and understandings of semantic relationships between search queries.

Today is Google's 13th anniversary, and that search box might appear to be one of the most democratic and egalitarian spaces possible, but don't let appearances deceive you. People using search engines are not harmlessly and positively divided by their interests, but are also divided by their aptitudes and knowledge.

In addition to Boolean operators like AND, and OR, there are other operators that power what users know such as:

Term Location: - inurl:, intitle:, intext:, or inanchor: to tell Google where it should look for the term your looking for.

Similar terms: ~ in front of a word tells Google to look for similar terms to that word, for example ~blog web 2.0

You'll find a full list here or here.

Knowing how to effectively use keywords and operators makes a huge difference in search effectiveness and thus content discovery. Keywords are still the dominant paradigm for navigating the digital space, and I hold to the phrase I created, which is that "keywords are doorways to content"

Many people out there would describe, Ludwig Wittgenstein, as the foremost philosopher of the twentieth century. Eccentric, even a little crazy, a genius, but no expert on search engines. But its strange how so much of his work around language is relevant for today's challenges around semantics, search engines, and tags. More to come on this topic in future posts.

KIVA PEER-TO-PEER LENDING INFOGRAPHIC

2011-09-10T06:00:00.000-07:00

This is a very cool infographic using data from Kiva, the peer-to-peer lending network. HAT TIP TO Jason Pearson

Kiva defines itself as "a non-profit organization with a mission to connect people through lending to alleviate poverty. Leveraging the internet and a worldwide network of microfinance institutions, Kiva lets individuals lend as little as $25 to help create opportunity around the world." Very cool.

Intercontinental Ballistic Microfinance from Kiva on Vimeo.

We often complain how charity money disappears into admin costs, but here we have no excuses - the intermediary is disintermediated, and we get to build a direct relationship with the beneficiary.

This is the type of cool stuff that reaffirms why we work with the Internet and how it's changing the world.

Here's a video that explains how it works.

How Kiva Works from Kiva on Vimeo.

ALGORITHMS AND THEIR POWER

2011-07-24T06:10:00.000-07:00

Two TED videos with very different views on algorithms. They both spotlight the tremendous power that algorithms now exert over our culture and business life. What do you think - force for good or bad?