ADOTAS

“Best Use of Analytics for Global SEO Programs” went to interior designer and builder Armstrong, for managing an international campaign across hundreds of websites and over 1,000 keywords.

“Search Remarketing Innovation and Performance” went to outdoor retailer Campmor, for a holiday-season remarketing effort that produced custom content to coordinate with online research its target customers were conducting.

“Best Global Integration of Analytics for Paid and Organic Search” went to IBM, for using both organic and paid search analytics to make decisions about media-mix strategies and for automating its international SEO audit process.

“Paid Social Innovation and Fan Growth” went to Intel, for snagging 4.4 million “likes” on its Facebook fan page over eight months, and seeing its CPA drop during the campaign.

“SEO Social Innovation” went to enterprise hosting and cloud computing company Rackspace, for a campaign that tied social media to organic search, benefiting both its search ranking and social spread.

“Most Innovative Landing Page Testing and Performance” went to solar energy provider SolarCity, after successfully optimizing its landing page.

“Best SEO/SEM Integration” went to tech testing and measurement equipment provider Tektronix, for an integrated campaign that led to a 50 percent increase in traffic and leads from 2010.

“Best Overall SEO Program” went to T-Mobile, for what a Covario release described as “ut-of-the-box thinking and a host of innovative SEO strategies.”

ADOTAS

• Google has released a small business-friendly version of AdWords (AdWords Express), created free telephone support in about 70 countries, launched a Mobile Site Builder to build simple sites, partnered with American Express on a “Get Your Business Online” campaign in 20 countries, and launched click-to-call phone extensions.

• Bing and Yahoo! Search offer “extensive programs to work with local partners.”

• Facebook continues to build out new ad units and placements that small businesses have started to take advantage of.

Having more SMB advertisers obviously improves Revenue per Search for web-based queries on the major search engines. SMB advertisers, however, are limited by their ability to geotarget their paid search campaigns. The query either needs to have a geographic location stated explicitly in the query — e.g., “shoes Des Moines” — or the advertiser needs to depend on imperfect geotargeting based on IP address. As such, it often doesn’t make sense for a local SMB to bid on a head term like “shoes.”

Mobile changes everything for SMB advertisers. Geography no longer needs to be queried explicitly — all queries issued from a mobile device that has location services turned on will have a precise geo associated with them. Geo then becomes an implicit intent instead of an explicit intent — someone searching for “shoes” in Des Moines is probably much more likely to respond to ad from a shoe store in the immediate vicinity.

Google recently announced that on Black Friday, 2011, 10 percent of queries came from mobile devices, as opposed to 3 percent from Black Friday, 2010. Consumers are clearly using their mobile devices for shopping assistance, not just for online purchases, but for in-store purchases as well. Local SMBs should be increasingly able to leverage geo-location to target their ads thru programs like Google’s hyperlocal extensions, which automatically shows distance to an advertiser’s store, and Google’s Bid by Distance (currently in beta), which allows advertisers to bid on ads only when a consumer is within a specified radius of any location.

The result is a win-win-win situation for everyone: the consumer benefits from a better online experience, SMBs have a much larger addressable market, and publishers who are able to infer implicit geographic intents will have more advertisers and higher Revenue per Search or Revenue per Impression.

Every day, more and more queries are issued from a mobile device. As a result, SMBs who are not actively marketing themselves via paid search marketing should start — otherwise, they’ll be missing out on consumers in their neighborhood who are looking for the exact products or services that they sell.

ADOTAS

In an email exchange, BlueKai senior vice president of strategic partnerships Wayne Thorsen acknowledged that a DMP might not be part of a publisher’s daily thought process, it can provide solutions to things publishers do think about often. “While publishers may not be thinking specifically about ‘data management,’” he said, “they are thinking every day about understanding who is coming to their website, what they are doing once they get there, and increasing engagement, ad revenues and yield from their audience.” He pointed out benefits of finding out what permitted third parties know about a publisher’s audience and the ability to use all this data to optimize an audience’s actions, whether the goal is customer conversion, registration or simply continuing to move from one article to the next. And while a publisher might be disinclined to work with one more type of company in a fragmented online arena, Thorsen underlined the idea with a DMP is “not about working with one more company, but having an agnostic platform that helps them make smarter business choices and improve the value exchange from any partnership that the publisher enters into.

“I think for publishers, the frustration of working with multiple companies comes with the fear of losing control, or that any of them have the publisher’s best interest in mind,” Thorsen said. “A DMP allows publishers to gain a better sense of the true value of their audience assets that is not dictated by someone else. ”

You can read the full BlueKai report here.

ADOTAS

Spongecell creates display ads with interactive functions, including video and social feeds, and like a lot of similar firms, it’s particularly gung-ho about video at the moment. Though it was reportedly struggling financially just a few years ago, CEO Ben Kartzman has cited revenue growth in 2011 of more than twice its 2010 revenue (which was $3.8 million, and Kartzman hasn’t given a specific figure to the 2011 total).

The funding will, according to Kartzman, go towards expanding existing product lines and adding new ones, while building up Spongecell’s staff

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection services company Prolexic Technologies announced it’s raised $8 million in funding. Camden Partners led this round. This comes after two funding rounds in 2011, both led by Kennet Partners, netted the company $15.9 million. Camden Partners principal Jason Tagler also joins Prolexic’s board.

DDoS protection ties into a business’ continuity and disaster recovery plan, and Prolexic is rising in that niche. In a statement, CEO Scott Hammack cited 55 percent growth in the last quarter alone, and he pointed out that since the company was profitable in 2011, it didn’t technically need the funding.

According to Prolexic, the new funding will go towards building up its staff, network and services.

ADOTAS

In the offline advertising world, the concept of branding pivots around the idea that the consumer is somehow affected every time he is in contact with an element of the brand message. From first contact in a 30-second TV spot, to the second contact via a billboard on his commute, and right up to the final contact when the consumer is ambushed by the in-store POS display, it is understood that all of these points of contact have contributed to his ultimate purchase. The end sale is attributed, at least in part, to each of these touch points. No one would ever suggest that because the sale did not happen while the viewer was driving on the freeway, the billboard had no effect on his desire to ultimately engage the brand. It is assumed that the billboard played a role and it is, therefore, attributed a percentage of value in the process.

The online world is different. For myriad reasons (none overly compelling), the measurement-centric focus of online advertising – and display advertising, specifically – has lead to a culture where attribution of a sale is given solely to the last marketing company to drop a cookie on the user’s browser. This “last cookie wins” culture perverts the ability of branding and performance to be seen as synergistic to each other. An online advertising partner is given the message that while their unique ability to create an impressive user/brand experience may be nice, the truth is that they will be judged simply by how many converted users saw their cookie last. In splitting the concept of brand exposure from the concept of measurable performance, the industry does itself a great disservice.

The attribution debate has long raged in the online advertising space and will no doubt continue on. But if the industry is to lure more of the all-important brand dollars, it will have to proffer a new culture where, just as in offline, every touch of a user that ultimately converts is credited in some part for the conversion. Only then will the floodgates of creativity truly open up — digital partners will then know that their out-of-the-box thinking stands a chance of being rewarded over (or at least alongside) the efforts of the display chop shop that has been serving cheap ads below the fold, but where the cookie is still served.

Fortunately, there is good news. At least one very prominent agency is implementing a cutting-edge attribution model with its digital partners related to a large-scale campaign for a high profile client. In this new model, attribution is split and assigned relative payout weights between the company that serves the user his first impression (this partner is called the “introducer’’), the partner serving the final impression prior to conversion (this partner is the “closer”), and all partners that served impression along the way (these are “influencers”). Interestingly, this method of campaign attribution pairs an older concept with a newer one unique to online. The consideration of these different stages is a traditional idea, but the ability to put specific touches into buckets is something that can only be done in an interactive environment. The concept is new and the results are not yet all in, but speaking of behalf of an ad network invited to be an early beta tester of the model, we see a lot of promise in the method.

Contrary to some common thinking, the idea that online advertising can mirror the most desirable elements of traditional media should not be seen as an admission of weakness. Illustrating these links to traditional strategies while integrating the added value of the new capabilities is the path to luring forward-leaning brand advertisers to more fully embrace the online realm. Rethinking how we process online attribution is a great starting place.

ADOTAS

The ICANN gTLDs global debate is only assisting the world in better understanding the landscape of global naming complexities and what critical roles names play in marketing domination of any idea. If ICANN to manage a billion domain names, plus several thousand GTLDs after multiple rounds in coming years, it must accept its full mandate as spelled out in its own name, “Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers.”

To clarify the element, a famous or not so famous trademark, or a big or not so big brand, in reality is a name and a name alone, and that name has to present itself stripped naked to be checked against other names in question. It must prove to have inherent qualities and worthiness for protection.

However, a local or regional layer of trademark protection that may have served the owners well in the past may not work in this global race of the future for name domination, with wide open jurisdictions and where the elasticity of a name must prove its worthiness for such protection. A gTLD naming is always a global naming issue that must face global naming complexities.

Applying the basic rules of corporate nomenclature

A “best name” will only prove to be a liability if it fails in its registration as a trademark, and therefore it will restrict global expansion.

Trademark professionals may differ on this, as they are proponents of aggressive trademark registration aimed for “crush and destroy” and buy out any opposition in far-flung jurisdictions. There are many success stories, but most of the time thousands end up with exhausted budgets and wasted years.

The big branding and global advertising agencies also take a similar approach. They will take any name and create a global brand with a lasting impression. There are many success stories, but tens of thousands are short-lived. Names only stay on top of the mind until the expensive fireworks come out.

As we approach the global borderless future of multi-billion online users, global trademark registrability is the basic test to discover the limitations of a name. Diluted names cost a fortune in maintenance to stay alive.

It may be proven that 95 percent of names in business have such problems — however, it seems that these disfunctionalities provide fertile ground for the trademark and global advertising agencies.

What’s so difficult for the boardrooms to figure out?

Neither the world’s best MBA programs nor the CMOs have any specialized understanding of these global naming complexities, despite that the global advertising expenditures pushing these name identities are over 500 billion yearly (more explained here).

Why, suddenly, has the entire advertising trade declared war on ICANN? Why are weak, diluted names only referred to as “big brands,” and not as helpless, injured names on life support? Why should ICANN have to bear the brunt of “bad-name management” in the name of big-brand-owners’ revolt, and why isn’t the truth about unspoken disfunctionalities of mega-brand identities being discussed in the open?

According to a study by my firm, ABC Namebank, there are “100 top diluted names” that are being widely used by some 100 million businesses around the world. The sheer number defies logic. Such issues are gradually being discussed in open forums.

Well-protected brands all over the world are protected because their name identity possess special qualities therefore worthy of such status. Panasonic, Rolex and Microsoft have little to worry about over names like UnitedThis and UnitedThat. The “do not sell list” suggested by CRIDO is still the best way to prove the extent of already-existing naming fiascoes.

However, ICANN should welcome any kind of defensive registration for a reasonable fee and, upon submission of the name in need of defensive registration, respond with a professional Name Evaluation Report (NER). Such custom reports will assess  marketing suitability and usability of the name, based on global implications, with authoritative analysis and recommendations.

The applicant will have three options: continue, start a procedure to partially or fully change the name, or abandon the idea altogether.

Such NERs should not be confused with the trademark lawyer’s letter of “registrability opinion,” always an important tool to start the process, but always confined to trademark law and never expanded into marketing or creative suitability issues. Similarly, advertising, re-branding or renaming graphic design-based exercises are locked in a campaign-based mentality.

The NER process addresses diverse aspects of global naming complexities, and if there’s consensus to modification or creative solutions, global naming complexities and trademark acceptability rules are readily incorporated. Historically, business naming was never meant to be a wildly creative exercise, but rather a somber and tactical maneuver of corporate nomenclature rules.

Here are the three top questions:

Is ICANN becoming the global trademark clearing house to gradually clear up this naming chaos? How will this all work out?

Will global advertising agencies stop defending diluted names or damaged brands as “mega-brands?” Who will take the name-game blame?

Will the global trademark profession accept traditional trademark procedures are in serious need of fixing? Who will accept any radical changes?

Here are three suggestions:

ICANN should take the lead in this global debate, because it’s already managing 220 million domain names and about to open a new gateway for super-name identities. Any global name clearance house will be a logical extension of these services and further support the gTLD-type programs. ICANN has to assume charge of one billion-plus domain names in the near future.

The globally accepted trademark classification system that allows the same name to be applied and protected in different types of businesses does not work on global cyber-branding platforms. Therefore, brand-new knowledge must be induced in corporate boardrooms to tackle global naming issues in a very different light.

Advertising and branding all over the world will have to face up to naming as a distinct, critical component of global cyber-branding, and not as a small component of a big ad campaign. There are amazing opportunities in this thinking at this critical junction.

The trademark profession must adjust to new changes and acquire deeper understanding of global naming issues and rules of corporate nomenclature. There are great opportunities in TM portfolio adjustments.

For the first time in last 50 years, global naming complexities are being addressed head-on in a wide-open global debate, where all relevant parties are engaged. This is all due to the technological progression of the internet and billions of online users proving to be natural catalysts. The world has changed, and some traditional thinking has to go.

ADOTAS

These changes put AdMob in a more competitive position among other ad marketplaces (TapJoy announced $0.10 minimum bid last week) and allows even more new advertisers to jump on board the platform.

Nothing is scheduled to change for campaigns that are not CPC.

ADOTAS

What does this mean for high-quality, independent, niche and professional publishers that make up the majority of the web? Why are those publishers, authors, creators and curators of some of the best authentic, informational and entertaining content struggling for their fair share of the economics? It’s one of those things that’s simple to understand conceptually, and yet difficult to solve both at the same time.

The way things work today: Publishers that can afford it have their own sales team who call on ad agencies and occasionally the marketers of brands themselves. They sell the “promise” of the publication – its quality, level of reader engagement, demographics and perhaps even psychographics of the audience. They offer the ability to run unique and custom ad placements that have high “sex appeal” to the buyers of these placements. The sales teams’ success rate remains relatively low, and they end up selling somewhere between 20 percent and 40 percent of the inventory on the site(s). Similarly, because site rep firms are really an extension or replacement for a captivesales team, their sell-through range is the same, and certainly not more.

So what does the publisher do? He or she makes a difficult decision to relinquish control over “the asset,” and leverages third parties to help monetize the rest – which ranges between 60 percent and 80 percent of inventory left unsold on the site (some refer to this as “remnant”).

Therein lies the rub. This unsold, or remnant, inventory is no longer being presented in a compelling way to a marketer. Instead, it’s sold to the performance advertiser, who cares more about clicks and conversions than they do the impact, engagement, informational or entertainment value of the site. They don’t care about the reader. They care about the consumer potential of the reader and whether or not this consumer takes some sort of performance-tracked action. The result: lower CPMs and potential for crappy creative in the ads trying to juice a reaction from the reader.

Over the past year or so, the level of sophistication of audience targeting has gotten much better. Teams of quant folks have developed unique ways to collect, segment and refine data on the audience to better target ads and track their efficacy. CPMs have risen modestly, but not because marketers are any more connected to the brand promise of the publishers’ content — they instead employ a more sophisticated way to target a performance ad.

This gap between the brand buyer and the performance buyer leaves a lot of slack in the market. Why is it that a publisher or their representatives can articulate the promise of the content and the engagement of the reader to lock in a high CPM from a willing advertiser? Marketers are happy to pay $10, $15, or even $20-plus CPMs for guaranteed placement in and around high quality content. Why then does this enormous bifurcation occur when it comes to unsold inventory? After all, it’s the same site, the same content, and even perhaps the same reader. Drastically lower CPMs for this unsold inventory make most publishers nuts. They’re lucky to get a buck, if not $0.50 CPMs, which isn’t sustainable, for so many reasons.

So what can be done about it? Brand marketers still love great content and value reader engagement. Performance advertisers love conversions. And publishers just want to do what they do best, which is to create and curate awesome and engaging content. All this can continue to happen with tools that help publishers regain control over the economics of their assets. Tools and services to help are fast coming to market.

Analysts, investors and entrepreneurs like to point out that the amount of attention and time spent online outstrips the amount of money marketers dedicate and spend on this medium. It’s the solutions that are lacking, not the intent or interest. The uniqueness of formats, brand safety, guarantees of placement, and contextual alignment are what’s missing from the audience buying promise. All of these are opportunities to be solved, and smart publishers are well on their way to figuring this out.

The use of sophisticated audience profiles to deliver more targeted advertising is not going back in the bottle. And the ability to sell the brand promise of the publisher still takes skill. It’s the connection of those two things that take this bifurcated economic pattern and convert it into a continuum ranging from high impact brand placements to direct-response conversion performance. With emerging controls coming to market, independent high-quality publishers can recapture their rightful share of the economic pie.

ADOTAS

Unruly’s survey was focused on the age 18 to 34 demographic, a key age range for social media usage. It looked at responses to video advertisements from Guinness, Coca-Cola, Cornetto (Unilever) and Energizer. These are, said Unruly EMEA managing director Phil Townend in a phone conversation yesterday, “not products you generally buy online, unless you do all your grocery shopping online.” Unruly asked viewers on video ads in social media how they’d gotten there, then asked further questions.

Townend said he was surprised by the way this demographic — especially people on the younger end of it — understood their social relationships online. “The next generation doesn’t differentiate the real and the virtual,” he said. “I’ve got my connections on Facebook in one bucket, and my real-life connections in another bucket,” he explained, while younger people tended to lump all their connections into one group. And he was surprised to discover what a large number of 18-to-24-year-old women preferred to hang out online than in person. “They’re thinking, ‘If I’m on a social platform, I can be with all of my friends — physically, I have to pick and choose two or three,’” Townend explained.

But nonetheless, “word of mouth is the most powerful tool,” Townend said. “Social video creates conversations. Our assumption was that these conversations would be digital, [but] two of four people struck up a real-life conversation.”

Here’s an excerpt of the case study, which you can download in its entirety here:

Social Ad Effectiveness: An Unruly White Paper

Do social video recommendations significantly impact traditional brand metrics? An independent study using survey data collected from July – November 2011 to determine the impact of social recommendations on traditional brand metrics. Recommendations are shown to directly increase brand recall and association, as well as video enjoyment. Viewers who enjoy video content are shown to have higher brand favourability and purchase intent.

Executive Summary

This Social Ad Effectiveness paper reports the results of a survey of online video viewers across Unruly’s social video platform for four social video campaigns from top FMCG brands Guinness, Coca-Cola, Cornetto and Energizer from July to November 2011. This research was commissioned and organised in conjunction with the brands’ agency partners Carat, Vizeum, Mindshare and MEC. The survey investigated the impact of recommendation on brand metrics amongst 18-34 year olds to determine social ad effectiveness, finding that social recommendations dramatically increased ad performance. In particular:

• Video enjoyment increased purchase intent by 97% and brand association by 139%
• Enjoyment of the video rose by 14% amongst viewers who had viewed following a recommendation
• Brand recall and brand association rose 7% amongst viewers who had been recommended the video versus viewers who found it by browsing

Research Overview

The explosion of social networking has opened up a massive opportunity for advertisers to open a dialogue with their audiences, particularly via video campaigns that make brand ambassadors of opinion leaders in social spaces. Social video advertising has grown rapidly, more than doubling in size every year since 2009, and direct engagement metrics are strong: Unruly has delivered over 1.34 billion social video views, with an average 1.95% of viewers clicking through for more information, and 0.94% sharing the video. However, there is little granularity around the extent to which social advertising impacts traditional brand metrics. This study sets out to understand the effect of recommendations in online video advertising, determining to what extent social recommendations affect brand metrics such as recall, favourability, message association and purchase intent. It finds that recommendations impact video enjoyment, and so also considers the effect of video enjoyment on the key brand metrics above.

Key Findings

Video Enjoyment

Viewers enjoy recommended videos more than non-recommended videos: there was a 14% increase in the number of people who enjoyed the video following a recommendation versus those who had discovered it by browsing. Moreover, a recommendation reduced the number of people who did not enjoy the video by 41%.

Viewer enjoyment of branded video is important because it has a direct impact on key brand metrics. Viewers who enjoyed the video they watched demonstrated 139% higher brand association, 97% higher purchase intent, 35% higher brand favourability, and 14% higher brand recall than their counterparts who did not enjoy the video.

Conclusion

This research demonstrates that social video significantly increases brand attention. The power of social video lies in the recommendation to view content. This recommendation comes not only from peers in social media environments, but also from authoritative blogs and news sources covering advertiser content editorially. The impact of the recommendation on consumers is considerable:
• Viewers are more likely to enjoy a video when it has been recommended than when encountered through browsing (14% higher enjoyment)
• Viewers are more likely to recall a brand name when the social video has been recommended than when encountered through browsing (7% higher recall)
• Viewers are more likely to engage with an ad’s messages when the social has been recommended than when encountered through browsing (10% higher brand association)

Ultimately enjoyment of the video correlated positively with all tested brand metrics in the sales funnel, including brand favourability and final purchase intent.

Click here for the full case study.