Matt Kapko

Burberry Delivers Letters Sealed With a Personal Kiss

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 09:39:56 -0700

If you can’t or haven’t been kissed by someone wearing Burberry lipstick, a new interactive ad from Google’s Art, Copy & Code project might just be the next best thing. The Burberry Kisses campaign brings the universal symbol of a red kiss into the digital era by giving people the chance to snap a photo of their own lips and then send a special someone a letter sealed with their personalized virtual kiss.

“What we’re really trying to do with the concept is reimagine how luxury marketing is done on the web for Millennials and do it from the lens of beauty products,” Aman Govil, project lead of the Art, Copy & Code project, tells ClickZ. “The creative emphasis was how do you look at luxury advertising differently on the web than on traditional channels…We really wanted to leverage some of the insights around Millennials and how they engage with content on the web.”

Burberry’s team began working side-by-side with Google on the project in January. Soon enough, the ideas were flowing.

“When we started looking at different ideas through this lens of lipstick products, the thing that kept standing out most often was this beautiful image of the red kiss in a lot of advertising and what it stands for a lot of people,” Govil says. “From a storytelling standpoint, it’s a very human, deeply personal, yet universally used way of communicating and connecting with other people…Nothing says something is sent with love and care like a kiss.”

When users visit the site on their desktop, smartphone, or tablet they are encouraged to use their camera on that device to capture an image of their own lips. Once they add color to their virtual kiss with one of five lipstick colors from Burberry, they can write a short note and send their kiss-sealed letter via email. The Burberry Kisses site also features a map of the world that visually represents the location where the letters are being sent and received in real time or in an overlay that shows where all the letters have landed.

“When you send your letter it flows beautifully and gives this emotive experience of ‘my letter’s actually going somewhere,’” Govil says. Street imagery of popular landmarks, intersections, and reflections off water puddles in the street are all dynamically inserted into the short film of sorts that plays when a letter is signed, sealed, and delivered.

“We really want to partner with the industry to show creative possibilities being enabled by the modern web…A lot of this is on the cutting edge of where the industry is going today, and what’s really possible with tools today,” he says.

“Burberry’s trying to get its brand loved and shared by more people on the web and that was really a lot of where the creative was trying to go,” adds Govil. “If you look at the creative, it’s not about like ‘hey, go buy a lipstick,’ it’s more about ‘here’s a beautiful experience that hopefully adds value to people’s lives and a little bit of fun.’”

Burberry plans to promote the new campaign through a series of ads that will appear on every screen under the sun using Google’s Lightbox ad units. “The big innovation on the advertising side is how do you deliver those experiences across the web on lots and lots of ads. It’s easy to do it on a website and guild a sandcastle in the middle of the forest, but you want to get it out to everybody…So the experience on the website and the ad is exactly the same,” says Govil.

“What we do in a lot of these projects is we actually do innovation and not invention. So we try and force ourselves to have access to the exact same products everyone else in the industry has access to,” he adds. “A lot of the work that you see here is really bringing these tools that are available to creatives and advertisers together in a cohesive experience.”

Facebook Faces the Music From Investors

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 10:03:21 -0700

Facebook’s investors got their first chance to take questions and complaints straight to the top yesterday. Barely a year after its disastrous IPO, the time finally came for Facebook’s executives and board of directors to face the music at an annual shareholder’s meeting. The range of questions and comments from stockholders bordered on the ridiculous, such as when their favorite Facebook game would be coming out of beta (an issue the company has no control over), to the more important matter of when the company will regain the value it has failed to achieve since the day of that ill-fated IPO.

“We understand that a lot of people are disappointed in the performance of the stock and we really are too,” says chief executive Mark Zuckerberg. “The real question is what are we going to do about it. We’ve always taken a pretty long-term view of this,” he says, adding that the company expects fluctuations in how the public and Wall Street perceives Facebook’s position in the market.

“We don’t think that we’re going to be the only company in this space, but we want to be the one pushing it forward,” Zuckerberg says. “This isn’t a zero-sum game. The market is expanding quite quickly.”

Facebook’s mission is to make the world more open and connected, he adds. Facebook wants to set itself apart by building great mobile apps, a platform that brings a social element to other apps, and a strong economic engine that can fuel its vision for a long-term business.

While Facebook’s stock price languished over the last year, the company undertook an all-too-familiar transition from desktop to mobile. It hasn’t been easy, but Zuckerberg says the company made a lot of progress on that front, particularly with its entirely rewritten apps for iOS and Android. “More people are coming to mobile apps on any given day than desktop, which was a really big shift for the company,” he says.

Zuckerberg adds that he’s especially excited about what Facebook can do with location and other attributes of mobile that it couldn’t do with desktop. “We’ve started to plant some seeds with products like Home that can really be future versions of how people use Facebook,” he says.

“Home is a product that we were working on for a while, for months. The idea is to create the mobile-first version of Facebook,” adds Zuckerberg. “Home is the first version of Facebook that was really designed from the ground up to be a mobile product.”

He chose to get in front of some of the criticism that’s been lobbed at Home as well. “There was no real way that we were going to get everything right the first time,” he says. “We haven’t really made our big push for it yet…Until we do that, we’re still kind of in tweaking mode.”

Zuckerberg says Home will see more improvements before Facebook begins to encourage about 100 million active users on Android to make the switch. The transition from desktop to mobile has also forced Facebook to rethink its advertising business, he adds.

“One of the big shifts that we’ve had to make is so that the ad formats that we have work on desktop as well as mobile,” he says. “Now, as of last quarter, 30 percent of the revenue of the company comes from mobile ads, up from roughly zero a year ago.”

COO Sheryl Sandberg says Facebook has also made important strides in answering the question of measurement and proving the value of the platform as a marketing vehicle. “We are a social ad spend and we have worked increasingly to help our advertisers increase their return on spend,” she adds.

In other news, Facebook took yet another play out of Twitter’s playbook and announced that it too will be a haven for hashtags. Facebook is making hashtags searchable and clickable to help marketers join and drive conversations about their business. And it will all be organized just as Twitter does it, via the omnipresent hash mark.

Apple Reveals Ad-Supported iTunes Radio, iOS 7, and OS X Mavericks

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 15:14:52 -0700

Apple is introducing a new vehicle for advertisers to reach iOS device users in a musical setting. ITunes Radio, a free music streaming service announced by Apple today, will be supported by ads delivered on the company’s mobile ad platform. Apple has been relatively quiet about the iAd platform that it launched three years ago, but now the company appears to be reorganizing its advertising business to sell and deliver audio ads on a service that’s been long anticipated by industry watchers.

ITunes Radio will be built into Apple’s latest mobile operating system, iOS 7, making the service available on the iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, Apple TV, and iTunes on PCs or Macs. ITunes Radio will also be available without ads to subscribers of iTunes Match, a service that makes users’ entire iTunes and other music libraries available via iCloud. The music streaming service, which strikes many similarities with Pandora, will launch in the U.S. this fall and Apple plans to add more countries over time.

Apple announced the new ad-supported service during the kickoff keynote at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference, where the company also revealed its latest operating systems for iOS and Mac devices, a new MacBook Air lineup, iCloud updates, and a sneak peek at the next Mac Pro.

Apple made the biggest splash today with the introduction of iOS 7, the latest operating system for Apple’s family of iOS devices. Apple CEO Tim Cook calls it “the biggest change to iOS since the introduction of the iPhone.” The refreshed operating system provides users with a more lively, simple, and coherent experience across the entire platform of apps and services. A new grid-system achieves a more “harmonious relationship” between different items and the use of translucency gives users a sense of context, depth, and vitality, says Jony Ive, SVP of industrial design, in a video Apple played to showcase the changes.

“I think there is a profound and enduring beauty in simplicity, in clarity, in efficiency. True simplicity is derived from so much more than just the absence of clutter and ornamentation. It’s about bringing order to complexity,” Ive continues in the video. With iOS 7, Apple wants to create an interface that is “unobtrusive and differential,” he says. “We see iOS 7 as defining an important new direction, and in many ways the beginning.”

Apple’s iOS 7 also brings a new “liveliness” to iOS devices, says Craig Federighi, SVP of software engineering. “As you move the device in your hand, it actually tracks your motion” and a new design feature called Parallax lets users see behind the icons on the display with improved scrolling, he adds. Twitter, Wikipedia, and Bing search results are also being integrated into the next version of Siri in iOS 7.

Taking some jabs at Google, Cook points out that iOS 6 is currently installed on 93 percent of active iOS devices. “More than a third of Android users are using an operating system that was released in 2010,” he adds. “If you do the math, you would find that iOS 6 is the world’s most popular operating system and in second place is a version of Android that was released in 2010.”

Apple’s latest numbers indicate no loss of momentum despite the struggles the company has had on Wall Street of late. The App Store, which celebrates its fifth birthday next month, has served more than 50 billion app downloads to date, says Cook. The store has more than 900,000 iOS apps (375,000 specifically made for the iPad) and Apple has paid out $10 billion to iOS developers to date with half of that money doled out in the last year alone. “That’s three times more than all other platforms combined,” says Cook.

“We have more accounts with credit cards than any store on the Internet that we’re aware of,” he adds, noting that Apple currently has 575 million active iTunes accounts and 300 million iCloud accounts. The infrastructure that powers Apple’s iCloud services has delivered more than 800 billion messages on iMessage and 7.4 trillion push notifications.

Calling upon the places that inspire Apple’s design and software teams here in California, the next version of OS X will be called “Mavericks.” The famed spot is home to some of the world’s biggest and most extremewaves, and it’s just a 45-minute drive northwest from Apple’s headquarters.

Mac OS X Mavericks will be released this fall, but fans of the MacBook Air won’t have to wait so long. A new lineup of 11- and 13-inch display MacBook Airs begin shipping today at a starting price of $999. Apple says it has improved the battery life of the iconic and thin notebooks by nearly double from the previous versions. Finally, the new Mac Pro that Apple plans to begin shipping later this year offers a complete redesign and fresh look for the power-user machine packed into one-eighth the volume of the previous generation. “Can’t innovate anymore, my ass,” beamed Phil Schiller, SVP of marketing, as he offered a sneak peek of the product that will be assembled in the U.S.

The Mac install base is now at 72 million, double from five years ago, and 35 percent of users are using the latest version of Mac OS X. “That compares to Windows 8, which is kind of struggling to reach 5 percent,” says Cook. Mac sales growth is up 100 percent, versus a “paltry 18 percent” for the PC over the last five years, he adds.

Twitter Lands Major Advertising Deal With WPP

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 09:23:46 -0700

Twitter has inked its second major deal with a global agency in as many months. WPP and Twitter have partnered to share data and analytics that will be used for marketing purposes across WPP subsidiaries GroupM, Kantar, Wunderman, and others. The deal comes just six weeks after Twitter signed the first deal of its kind with Publicis Groupe’s Starcom MediaVest Group.

Financial terms of the partnership were not disclosed, but Twitter’s deal with Publicis could reportedly involve up to $600 million in spending over the next fours. Those early forecasts would suggest that the deal with WPP could be even greater, considering it has now snagged a deal with the world’s largest ad agency group.

The new agreement between Twitter and WPP is even more remarkable for what’s been left unsaid. It is unclear what specific data or metadata WPP gains through this partnership, the depth of that data, and how exactly Twitter will help WPP connect the dots to reach the consumers that its brand clients covet most.

Moreover, Twitter has not outlined how the deals with WPP and Publicis will differ. Does one agency get an earlier look at data than the other? Is the access of one agency deeper or more exclusive?

The burgeoning field of social analytics and marketing is something WPP now calls “data investment management.” The agency plans to expand its “data-driven marketing” efforts through the partnership with Twitter as it extrapolates data on user behavior for media platforms, staff training, and new programs for its clients. The premium access to Twitter’s data will help the agency drive “more effective campaigns, enhanced targeting and more real-time insight to clients.”

“Twitter’s relevance continues to grow - not only as a social platform, but also as a window into consumer attitudes and behavior in real time,” says WPP CEO Sir Martin Sorrell in a prepared statement. “We are delighted to announce this very wide-ranging strategic partnership and to ensure that Twitter data is a key ingredient in many of our disciplines. We look forward to leveraging the platform in a variety of ways for our clients around the world.”

Twitter and WPP plan to introduce new applications stemming from their collaborative efforts this summer.

“As Twitter has grown, marketers are leveraging the platform for brand insights, relevant real-time messaging, and customer research,” notes Twitter CEO Dick Costolo. “This partnership will benefit clients by pairing Twitter with WPP’s world-class analytics, targeting, and creative capabilities.”

Facebook Kills Off Redundant Ad Products

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 14:22:00 -0700

MENLO PARK, Calif. – Facebook wants to do for advertisers what it has done for its users since the beginning - simplify the process of sharing, connecting, and engaging with everything and everyone online. For marketers, that means less guesswork in their social advertising campaigns and a stronger focus on business objectives.

Facebook’s ad product team gathered here at Facebook headquarters on Thursday to detail plans for aunified ad structure that will see the demise of redundant ad products - there are currently 27 separate ad products up for bid on the site - and the amplification of marketing objectives that focus on the bottom line. Online and in-store sales, app downloads, promotional offers and brand awareness, and other key marketing objectives will eventually rise to the surface of Facebook’s advertising stack over the next six months.

Numerous Facebook ad products will be killed off in an effort to give marketers a more consistent advertising platform that works across all placements and objectives. The proliferation of ad units on Facebook reflects the evolution the site has gone through as it introduces new features for users, says Fidji Simo, an advertising product manager at Facebook.

“All of the right pieces were there,” she says. “Even though every single product is very good on its own, the whole is less than the sum of its parts. It really should be simpler.”

As Facebook identifies redundancies in its platform, new combined ad units are being designed to meet a greater range of objectives and make it easier for ad managers to set up their campaigns, Simo adds. The ad product team doesn’t have a specific number in mind for how many ad formats will remain after the culling this summer and fall, but Simo says the simplification process is ongoing and that Facebook will continue to iterate its ad portfolio.

“There is really no reason why sponsored stories should be a completely separate product,” she says, for example. The same goes for online sale offers and question-based ads. “We’re trying to really unify all of these ad units,” adds Simo.

Consistency across ad formats will also drastically reduce the number of creative assets required to launch a full campaign across every channel and placement available on the platform, she continues.

Facebook has been “thinking about who we are as an advertising business,” says Brian Boland, director of product marketing at Facebook. “Advertisers at the end of the day, the reason they do marketing, is to drive business outcomes…It’s about improving their business’ bottom line and that’s been our focus.”

As Facebook incrementally built products for each step of the marketing loop, it was solving business objectives for advertisers, but the solutions occurred in silos, says Boland. “All size of advertisers, agencies, [preferred marketing developers] - all will benefit from these changes” that focus on “maximizing business outcomes,” he adds.

Brands will still be able to control which ad units or placements they desire, but by selecting objectives the revamped platform will also indicate the units or placements that perform best for that specific objective, he explains. Once advertisers identify what they’re trying to accomplish and create a message or ad for that goal, Facebook will suggest the right format and then lead them through options for targeting and customization.

“We’re going to help them make better decisions up front,” Boland says. “We continue to give advertisers control…This doesn’t reduce control, it reduces complexity.”

Brands are already experts at finding their audiences, building creative, and measuring performance that can be accurately pinned to results, he says, adding that Facebook wants to make that process easier and more impactful with the power of social. “This is marketing that marketers and advertisers understand,” says Boland.

Google Pushes Social Wildfire Into DoubleClick

Thu, 06 Jun 2013 12:12:04 -0700

Google gathered some of its biggest agency partners, global brands and publishers on Wednesday to reveal what it calls “the biggest upgrade to our core ad server in the 15 years since its inception.”

Later this summer advertisers will gain access to the DoubleClick Campaign Manager, part of Google’s unified DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform that aims to streamline digital marketing efforts for agencies and brands.

“At the core of digital media is its ability to build connections and we’ve seen that it can be incredibly valuable in helping our partners connect across their business, offering a holistic picture of how all their marketing efforts work together,” Neal Mohan, vice president of display advertising, notes in a blog post detailing improvements to the platform.

DoubleClick is also going social, Mohan says, by building upon last July’s Wildfire acquisition and integrating those social listening tools into the DoubleClick platform, which of course also came to Google via acquisition back in 2007.

“Now, marketers can address a critical part of the customer journey and do it alongside search, display, rich media, video and mobile as part of the broader DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform,” notes Mohan, adding that 80 percent of consumers’ purchase decisions are influenced by social interactions with brands.

“This is really the first time where you’ll be able to get an idea of how your social efforts are doing right alongside your digital marketing efforts,” Mohan says at the annual think DoubleClick event. Google’s ongoing improvements to the ad management and serving process paired with plans to further incorporate Wildfire’s technology “finally allows us to take these ideas of beauty and scale and ensure they’re no longer mutually exclusive,” comments Mohan.

Cross-Sell, a new feature that will be available in DoubleClick for Publishers this summer, gives publishers an easier way to manage joint sales across YouTube channels. Google is also jumping into the native ads bandwagon by testing new ad serving capabilities with select publishers. The company says it wants to give publishers more flexibility with native formats while also ensuring that the ads remain unique to each publisher and create value for users. Google is also building its viewability measurement system Active View into DoubleClick for Publishers, AdSense and the DoubleClick Ad Exchange.

Finally, to help brands connect with consumers as they jump from one device to another, Google is releasing a new HTML5 creative development tool called Google Web Designer. Google plans to release the design-centric platform in the coming months and further integrate the creative process into DoubleClick Studio and AdMob.

Mohan says Google will continue to invest in creative tools, measurement solutions and ad-buying platforms to help accelerate the ongoing shift in interest and resources from offline to online. After all, Google believes it can and will “accelerate and propel digital advertising into a $200 billion industry that funds and supports great content.”

Salesforce Acquires ExactTarget for $2.5B

Thu, 06 Jun 2013 12:11:03 -0700

Salesforce made its largest acquisition to date with a $2.5 billion deal to purchase ExactTarget.

The cross-channel interactive marketing platform began as an email-marketing provider in 2000 and went public for $161 million in late March last year. But ExactTarget only lasted as a publicly traded company for about 15 months before Salesforce came along with an offer that values the company more than 50 percent above its market cap on Monday’s close.

Salesforce says it will combine ExactTarget’s digital marketing capabilities with its existing strengths in sales, CRM and social marketing to expand its cloud marketing platform and allow brands to manage campaigns across email, social, mobile and online. The company also highlighted recent data from Gartner that concludes at least one-third of consumer technology companies’ marketing budgets will be moved to digital by 2015.

“The chief marketing officer is expected to spend more on technology than the chief information officer by 2017,” notes Marc Benioff, chairman and chief executive at Salesforce. “The addition of ExactTarget makes Salesforce the starting place for every company and puts Salesforce in the pole position to capture this opportunity.”

The 10-figure acquisition of ExactTarget is the latest in a series of major deals aimed at positioning Salesforce as a comprehensive sales, CRM and marketing solution for brands across all digital channels. Salesforce acquired the social media monitoring firm Radian6 for $326 million in March 2011 and followed up last year with its $689 million acquisition of Buddy Media. The social-listening technology and real-time bidding platforms are being integrated into social.com, Salesforce’s new social marketing platform that enables marketers to “buy into the moment.”

“ExactTarget’s mission is to revolutionize how businesses connect with their consumers using data-driven digital marketing across all channels,” Scott Dorsey, chairman, chief executive and co-founder of ExactTarget, says in a prepared statement. “Salesforce’s tremendous strength in social marketing, along with its leadership position in sales and service, not only will accelerate this vision, but also provide our customers with a powerful, integrated CRM platform to transform their end-to-end customer experience.”

More than 6,000 companies are using ExactTarget’s cloud marketing platform today. The all-cash transaction is expected to close by the end of July.

Social Signals Steer Volvo's Entire Marketing Strategy

Wed, 05 Jun 2013 12:09:00 -0700

Does your dog have its own wardrobe? Is your second private island named after your third ex-wife? Or maybe your butler’s butler has a butler? If you answered yes to any of these questions, Volvo isn’t going to try to talk you into buying an S60. Indeed, the carmaker comes right out and says that the “Volvo S60 probably isn’t for you” if you fall into these categories of ultra luxury (click on links to hear for yourself!).

While Volvo is trying to shake things up with a more edgy marketing strategy, the brand is using feedback on social media to gauge when and where it might be taking things a bit too far. Volvo’s social media team has also been holding monthly chats on Twitter to learn more about its customers. Though its most recent Twitter chat focused on the brand’s marketing strategy, specifically asking followers to react and send feedback on a series of early draft content and campaign elements for social, digital, TV and outside of home.

“The work that we’re doing on social is an early indicator of what messages will resonate and what doesn’t resonate,” Volvo’s North America chief marketing officer Tassos Panas tells ClickZ. “It really is a test bed for what we pursue further down the track in digital.”

Social media has become such a guide for Volvo’s other marketing efforts that virtually everything is tested in social before the brand green lights content for television or other heavy media rotation. The latest campaign for the Volvo S60 would not have become a full campaign if not for the reaction on social first, Panas adds.

“We love the response that we’re getting and it’s fun” but it has also helped the brand steer away from potential marketing disasters, he comments.

In one case, Volvo decided to pull back on a plan to make outdoor billboards with a Chihuahua on it after almost half of the 2,000 comments it received were negative. “For us it was just a little too much,” says Panas.

“Some of the pieces we thought people would love, we actually got some negative reactions to that,” he says. “It really did help us fine tune the campaign and adjust it a bit accordingly.”

Volvo has used humor and a “kind of wry humor cheekiness” in the past, so Panas saw this as an opportunity to “turn back the clock and talk about Volvo the brand and what it’s all about.”

“Over the years, Volvo has done advertising that was probably a bit too tactical” by emphasizing savings or Volvo’s stellar safety record, Panas says.

“No doubt we’re a safe vehicle, but it didn’t help us learn more about [consumers’] connection with the brand,” he adds.

Panas notes, “We are a niche brand in the US with less than 1 percent share in the market so we feel we can be polarizing to relate to the consumers we are targeting.”

Being an outsider in such a competitive market has its marketing advantages. “I think we’ve taken a decision that we’re OK to take risks. We don’t have to please everyone in the marketplace. We’re actually enjoying not doing that,” Panas says, adding that the brand doesn’t have to dilute its messaging to point where its pleasing to everybody.

“Volvo owners are a little less uptight about what people think about them,” he adds. “The people who are Volvo owners… love that humor and find it really funny.”

Mobile Advertising Check-Up Reveals Turbulence and Steep Growth

Mon, 03 Jun 2013 16:11:02 -0700

Mobile advertising looks like a spring seedling underneath the massive cloud that was $216 billion worth of all advertising in the U.S. last year. While it produced almost $4.75 billion, or 2 percent of all ad spend last year, mobile is riding a wave of growth that continues to outpace online by a large margin.

Online advertising grew at a compound annual growth rate of 47.2 percent from 1995 through 2012, while mobile grew 80.1 percent from 2007 through last year, according to John Fletcher, senior analyst at SNL Kagan. During a presentation at CTIA, a wireless industry trade conference in Las Vegas last week, Fletcher highlighted the shifts, trends, and new kids on the block that are increasingly mobile and impacting the bottom line for advertising overall.

Tablet use among the U.S. population is playing a profound role as the trajectory of mobile advertising steepens. About 22 percent of the U.S. market, or 69.5 million consumers, now use tablets, Fletcher says. Tablet usage grew 167.2 percent from 2010 through 2012, according to SNL Kagan’s latest data.

“I’ve heard that tablets are growing at a faster adoption rate than any technology in history,” says Fletcher, adding that tablets are enabling workforces with new capabilities in education, retail, and many other enterprise sectors. “The barriers to purchase these things are really low regardless of your household income,” he adds, mentioning the lower price points being introduced on Android tablets such as Amazon’s Kindle Fire.

Online advertising was still seven times larger than mobile last year, but the difference between the two channels in revenue by ad formats helps explain where mobile is complementing and augmenting marketing efforts online. Search comprised 50 percent of online ad revenue, while it commanded 56 percent in mobile, according to Fletcher. Non-video display ads and other media captured 43 percent of online ad revenue and 34 percent of mobile ad revenue.

Fletcher is particularly interested in video advertising, which is already commanding a greater share of mobile than online. Video ads generated 10 percent of all mobile revenue last year, while the online ad space carved out just 7 percent for video.

The mobile advertising space is crowded with startups, but the more familiar publishers and media companies are still dominating from the top down. “Publishers are growing much faster than the ad networks,” says Fletcher, adding that lower CPMs on mobile are impacting their slice of the action. He suggests that publishers are able to charge higher CPMs not only because of their reach, but also “because they have a Rolodex of direct relationships with these advertisers.”

Name recognition goes a long way in the advertising space too, Fletcher adds. Marketers and brands all know Twitter and Facebook, but they may not be familiar with Millennial Media, for example. Nonetheless, Millennial Media’s ad revenue grew 62 percent to $151.1 million last year, placing as the fifth largest mobile ad network or publisher. Millennial Media is running neck-and-neck with Apple, but the distance between the performance of those companies and Google is remarkable.

Sitting at the top of the mobile ad chain, Google generated $2.52 billion on mobile ads last year, according to SNL Kagan. Twitter came in a distant second with $315.6 million, followed by Facebook with $209.3 million, Pandora with $179.1 million, and Apple with $153.1 million.

The fastest growing mobile ad networks and publishers in 2012 run the full gamut. Shopkick clocked an astonishing year-over-year growth rate of 1,900 percent, followed by Shazam for TV at 425 percent, Twitter at 249 percent, Hulu at 162 percent, and Tapad at 150 percent, according to SNL Kagan.

Facebook Introduces Verified Badges Four Years After Twitter

Thu, 30 May 2013 16:08:00 -0700

Facebook is getting into the verification business, borrowing a feature that Twitter first introduced almost four years ago.

Facebook’s verification badges for pages and profiles will also mimic Twitter by leaving much of the process unknown and internal.

It’s unclear why Facebook is making the move to verify brands and well-known figures with large audiences on the site but it plans to begin the proactive process over the coming days. The company will “automatically verify the largest pages on Facebook that are at the greatest risk of duplication,” a spokeswoman tells ClickZ.

“Verified pages belong to a small group of prominent public figures (celebrities, journalists, government officials, popular brands and businesses) with large audiences,” the site notes in a blog post announcing the news.

“I think that it’s an issue for a lot of the luxury brands,” Raina Penchansky, chief strategy officer for Digital Brand Architects, tells ClickZ. “Social and digital is a difficult space for luxury brands,” she says, because luxury brands prefer to maintain an aura of exclusivity by limiting their exposure and access to larger untargeted audiences.

While verified pages and profiles will add some semblance of authenticity, brands aren’t exactly begging for the feature or avoiding Facebook because they don’t have a small blue badge and check mark next to their names throughout the site.

“I’ve never seen any pushback from a brand,” says Penchansky. “It doesn’t feel like something that’s been a huge barrier for entry for our brands.” Still, she says, some brands might be a little uneasy about the arbitrary verification process, particularly since Facebook hasn’t outlined the requirements for verification or the ability to request a profile or page be verified.

The blue check mark identifying verified pages and profiles will appear in timelines, stories, search results, news feed ads and while users hover over the name of a page elsewhere on the site. Brands that don’t automatically receive verification over the coming weeks are being referred to Facebook’s help center where common duplication issues can be resolved.

TBWA's Latest Work for Nissan and Wrangler Is 'Not Designed for the Masses'

Thu, 30 May 2013 10:01:01 -0700

A new iPhone app from Wrangler and an iPad ad created for Nissan showcases TBWA’s latest work aimed at generating short- and long-term brand affinity in the mobile environment. TBWA\G1 out of Paris created an iPad ad running in The Economist that somehow tricks readers into virtually scratching a Nissan 370Z; while TBWA’s Hong Kong office took on a much deeper effort with Wrangler Mileage, a mobile app that encourages users to discover the world around them as they create a personal map of their adventures.

The ad targeting affluent readers of The Economist on iPads introduces Nissan’s new self-healing paint in an ad that displays between articles. But when readers instinctively try to swipe the ad away and continue reading, a series of scratches appear on the car instead before disappearing in a matter of seconds. Nissan claims to be the “first in the auto industry to bring this unique invention to life,” and the ad is now running across Europe featuring Nissan’s more high-end vehicles.

“I expect people to be surprised and delighted with this. The nature of touch screen and browsing on an iPad is such that there’s no way you can be prepared for this, unless of course you’ve seen the ad before,” notes Rudi Anggono, Pan-European creative director at TBWA\G1. “We are trying to reach the affluent tech seekers,” Anggono continues, adding that the majority of Nissan’s target audience for this campaign owns and actively uses iPads. “It’s a simple matter of fish where the fish are,” he explains.

Branded as the “companion for the open road” by Wrangler Asia Pacific, the Wrangler Mileage app tries to reverse the effects social media has on self-discovery. The app runs in the background, filling in sections of a world map as users explore new areas and respond to encouraging suggestions from the app like going for a walk at night during a full moon.

“Wrangler believes in living life like an open road. Making instinctive decisions, constantly challenging one’s self to discover new opportunities, being adventurous, and always moving. Wrangler’s brand promise is to be your companion for the open road and to find your edge,” notes Luke Eid, head of TBWA’s Digital Arts Network (DAN). “The app is designed to extend this brand belief through the use of mobile and technology to recognize when people are being adventurous and to continually encourage people to keep moving and discovering new things and places as they journey through life.”

The app is primarily designed for Asian markets, where the concept of living life like an open road is less familiar, Eid explains. Because Wrangler and TBWA are positioning the app as a long-term brand platform instead of a one-hit campaign, the teams are working against an extensive roadmap for future updates and expansion to other platforms beginning with Android, Eid tells ClickZ.

“The ultimate objective for this app is to inspire people to go out and discover for themselves, and to feel the sense of reward when discovering new things,” he adds. “Our goal is to encourage people to uncover places on their map they have never been before.”

The app recognizes each user’s level of discovery with a personalized mileage score, badges, informative graphics, and each user’s own map of the world. The brand also plans to introduce physical rewards such as Wrangler products. In the meantime, users can unlock the Werewolf badge by moving through a certain number of grids at night during a full moon, the Nocturnal badge after exploring over a period of consecutive nights, the Big Blue badge when users are surrounded by water, and more self-explanatory badges like the Desert Wanderer and City Wrangler.

“The app is designed to educate and encourage adventure whilst at the same time positioning Wrangler as the more progressive and adventurous brand designed to attract people who love making their own decisions and are motivated by their own self-discovery and not following what is considered the mainstream cool,” Eid continues. “The app is not designed for the masses.”

A team of about a dozen creatives at TBWA and DAN spent almost six months taking the idea for Wrangler Mileage from conception to its first launch on iOS.

AT&T Readies Trove of Data for Cross-Channel Ad Targeting

Fri, 24 May 2013 12:49:02 -0700

AT&T AdWorks, a burgeoning advertising network that reaches across mobile, online, and television, is entering the next phase in cross-channel ad targeting. AT&T AdWorks Blueprint is essentially a new algorithm developed by the storied AT&T Labs to comb through the company’s troves of data to improve segmentation and provide marketers with greater ability to target specific audiences across its platforms.

Few companies can fully understand the unmet potential that these changes could bring to digital advertising like AT&T, says Maria Mandel Dunsche, VP of marketing and media innovation at AT&T AdWorks. “AT&T is one of the largest digital ad spenders in the world,” she tells ClickZ. “Over time, what that gives us is a very broad and deep sense of what users are doing.”

AT&T hopes to lure more ad spend its way by increasing the amount of data it holds on its customers and applying the Blueprint algorithm to gain deeper insights for the purpose of more relevant and efficient ads. The new platform can be overlaid with third-party data from other providers, and while Mandel Dunsche says “data privacy is paramount,” AT&T AdWorks also allows customers to opt out of receiving targeted advertising.

“Now we can get a much better sense of what the audiences are interested in. As such, we can create much smarter types of ads,” she tells ClickZ. “We have a lot of really rich types of data that allows us to get at much more accurate audience segments.”

AT&T’s efforts online spread out to more than four billion data signals including search activity, browsing patterns, Wi-Fi hotspot data, and viewing. “In online, we can pull data from anywhere an AT&T ad runs, search data through att.net and AT&T Wi-Fi hotspots,” explains Mandel Dunsche. “We are not tracking browsing behavior here. We are just profiling and segmenting audiences based on their interests depending on their behavior, then targeting them through our Online Audience Network, which reaches roughly 85 percent of all online users.”

On mobile, AT&T extrapolates data from at least 250 attributes including any device type and demographics. That data is used to target ads on AT&T’s Mobile Audience Network, which reaches more than 140 million unique users per month. Mandel Dunsche also clarifies that the platform only tracks mobile browsing and app behavior on AT&T-owned properties, but there is no limit to the types of AT&T devices that can be targeted and served ads. “As one of the major carriers here in the U.S., we have a significant advantage because we own that relationship with our customers,” she says.

On television, the third and shortest leg of AT&T AdWorks, the company is tracking behavior across 12.7 million households with active U-verse TV subscriptions. One financial services advertiser that recently used AT&T AdWorks TV Blueprint experienced a 27 percent increase in targeted impressions and a 21 percent decrease in CPM rates from their previous campaign, Mandel Dunsche tells ClickZ. “We were able to reach more of their audience at a lower cost and we are confident we can deliver these types of results on a consistent basis.”

Because of AT&T’s billing relationship with its customers, it also knows their credit history, score, and other data points of great interest to brands. “The quality of having that subscriber relationship” is part of what differentiates AT&T AdWorks from other ad networks, says Mandel Dunsche. “A lot of the ad networks are using inferred data or self-reported data,” she adds.

“There’s a lot of noise in the marketplace in terms of advertising, and consumers are seeing a lot of irrelevant ads,” she says. Indeed, AT&T AdWorks is banking on the hope that more consumers will pay attention to ads that are truly deemed relevant and placed more precisely across our mobile, online, and TV screens.

Walmart Taps Mobile to 'Reinvent Capabilities With Mass Appeal'

Fri, 24 May 2013 12:47:46 -0700

Walmart may not be sending its competitors into panic mode just yet with an outwardly inventive approach to serving its customers on mobile, but the big-box retailer’s head of mobile and digital makes a strong case for methodical and measured steps that can add up to big changes over time.

“You have to create solutions that appeal to the many, instead of the few,” says Gibu Thomas, SVP of mobile and digital for Walmart. “You have to be comfortable with incremental improvements that change behavior instead of going for the home run,” he tells attendees at CTIA’s annual wireless trade show in Las Vegas. “When we strike that right balance, the impact for our customers is significant,” he adds. “The technologies you need to have a massive impact on customers are already mainstream.”

Walmart is using mobile to transform the entire retail shopping experience from pre-trip planning and shopping lists to the eventual shopping trip and checkout process. More than half of Walmart’s customers own smartphones today, and those who have downloaded the company’s mobile app spend an average of 40 percent more time in stores, according to Thomas.

“Our mobile strategy is as simple as it is audacious,” he says, explaining that “the vast majority of our customers don’t shop this way” today. “The true power of mobile is in reinventing capabilities with mass appeal,” he adds. “Our goal is to create shopping tools that become second nature to the customer.”

Walmart wants to make these leaps with its customers as they grow into the behavioral changes brought on by mobile together. And for most shoppers, the experience begins with a list. “Our research shows that over 90 percent of our customers come to our stores with a shopping list,” Thomas says. “We wanted it to be as frictionless for the customer to create a shopping list in the Walmart mobile app as it is creating a list with pen and paper.”

Customers who create their list on the app can be notified of the price and location of each item in any given store, but Thomas is excited to take things further. “The best shopping list is the one you don’t have to create, and that’s what we’re working on,” he says. He wants future iterations of the app to be able to recommend specific products that meet special dietary or budget restrictions.

Walmart’s mobile app also features a “store mode” that is activated when users enter one of the geo-fences that Walmart established around all 4,000 stores it owns across the country. Store mode features new products, a price checker, and digital versions of that store’s ads.

“We found that customers use mobile differently at home than when they’re in the store,” Thomas says. “When they’re in our stores, they’re very task focused” and “focused on saving time and saving money.”

Standing in a room full of wireless technology executives, Thomas says the ultimate measure of success in mobile shopping apps will be determined in customer value, not the inclusion of augmented reality or other “whizbang features.”

Jaguar Jumpstarts Multi-Channel Campaign for F-Type

Wed, 22 May 2013 14:49:22 -0700

Jaguar is increasing its marketing efforts on social and mobile for the F-Type, its first “true two-seat sports car” in the North American market in about 50 years. Social media is playing a big part in Jaguar’s multi-channel campaign, as the brand uses TV spots, sponsored entertainment, and digital advertisements to encourage fans to enter a contest for a chance to win a “test drive of a lifetime” behind the steering wheel of the new car.

As the F-Type begins arriving at U.S. retailers this month with a starting price of $69,000, Jaguar’s campaign will gain momentum across TV, film, print, digital, mobile, and tablet channels. Using the hashtag #MyTurnToJag, fans of the F-Type can submit a story explaining why they should be selected to win one of the four test drives that Jaguar plans to uniquely curate for a winner in the metropolitan areas of New York, Los Angeles, Miami, and Chicago.

Joe Torpey, communications manager at Jaguar North America, tells ClickZ that the F-Type isn’t only the carmaker’s first two-seat sports car in about 50 years. “When you think about it from a halo product perspective, it’s probably the most significant from us in that timeframe as well,” he says. “This is really this generation’s turn to enjoy a two-seat Jaguar sports car…We also think that the platform is pretty flexible because the interpretation of ‘your turn’ could be it’s your turn to test drive, and it could also be your turn to reward yourself with a fantastic car like this.”

To succeed and drive sales of the F-Type, Jaguar must break through the cluttered auto market in the United States in a way that also helps it overcome the challenges that come with a significantly lower budget for media spend than many of its competitors. The company wants to reach the target audience for the F-Type while being “disruptive in a creative way,” Torpey adds. “We think the way to do that is with fewer, bigger, better integrations with some core partners that have real strengths in the different channels that they represent.”

Jaguar’s digital advertising plan includes a mix of basic banner ads, home page takeovers with The New York Times, Yahoo, and ESPN, and a variety of rich media ads that can be expanded to include video and stories of Jaguar’s heritage in the sports-car market. “We have those experiences built into some of the banner creative because we realize that it’s a lot to assume that we’re going to get people to stop what they’re doing and come into our site to basically spend a lot of time to investigate and dive deep,” he explains.

A home page takeover ad that ran on Yahoo earlier this week generated approximately 150 million impressions over a 24-hour span, according to Jaguar. Jaguar is primarily focusing its social media efforts on Twitter and Facebook because “that’s where the conversations take place,” Torpey adds. The company has increased its mobile presence through more premium ad placements, including home page takeovers on sites visited via mobile and tablet device. Overall, Jaguar increased its mobile spend by 30 percent for the “Your Turn” campaign.

“For us it’s really about trying to celebrate and encourage brand advocacy, and to get people talking and generate word-of-mouth because we know word-of-mouth is the most important way to drive purchase consideration. And social media is this fantastic channel that we can leverage, and if we give them something to talk about, light that fire, spark that conversation, really the product is strong and it resonates - it just goes on from there,” he says.

“The social element is really neat because now you have a chance to engage with an audience that in some ways rivals your core digital platforms, but also enhances it and contributes to it. So if you learn how to leverage those two things and understand what they’re best for, that’s when you can really get the plan to sing. Tapping into the above-the-line to drive interest and excitement below-the-line in social is critical.”

Mobile Payments Company Payvia Acquires LA-Based Mogreet

Tue, 21 May 2013 10:21:14 -0700

Payvia has acquired Mogreet, creating what is likely the largest mobile company in Los Angeles with nearly 150 total employees. The mobile payments and messaging company, which was used to great effect by President Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign team, acquired Mogreet to help close the loop between mobile marketing messaging and direct transactions.

Payvia’s direct billing deals with carriers combined with Mogreet’s CRM and messaging platforms for brands will give marketers a unique ability to drive transactions through text- and video-based messaging campaigns. Mogreet’s video and rich messaging platform is now being integrated with Payvia’s mobile payments platform, and some major customer announcements are expected in the coming weeks.

“You can drive a consumer through our platform, give them the best video, maybe drive them in store, but what if you want to actually drive an immediate transaction?” James Citron, founder and chief executive of Mogreet, tells ClickZ.

“No matter the hundreds of millions of incredible videos that we’re sending out as multimedia messages, if we want to provide an instant transaction to any of our merchants, the easiest way to do that is through a text message. And with Payvia we can complete that transaction in seconds.”

The talks with Payvia began as a partnership discussion but quickly evolved into an all-out acquisition once the two companies gathered feedback from their customers, Citron says.

“They get the ability to have the CRM capabilities and thousands of customers who are using us for all their marketing and communications. And for us, we can turn to all of our customers and tell them that they can ‘instantly start monetizing and driving m-commerce revenue through all their messaging,” says Citron, who becomes Payvia’s chief marketing officer.

Despite all the chatter and hype surrounding over-the-top messaging services of late, Citron describes how Payvia’s acquisition of Mogreet reinforces the strength and importance of carrier-supported commerce and messaging.

“If you’re a brand, you can not afford to work with a service that’s only going to reach a small fraction of your customers. And separate from that, you can’t afford typically to go work with 15 different service providers just to reach your customer on a mobile device. The biggest and the most strategic marketers go, ‘I need to go with a platform that’s going to enable me to reach my customer on a mobile device regardless of what app they’re using, regardless of what handset and carrier they have,’” he says.

“While I think some of the over-the-top services are cannibalizing peer-to-peer messaging, they’re not cannibalizing any of the brand-to-consumer or the application provider consumer messaging. That business is growing tremendously and I think no matter how successful these over-the-top apps are, at the core the average app only has a few week shelf life on a consumer’s device. Text messaging is still used by 90-plus percent of consumers every single week, versus the most popular app in the world, Facebook, is using a small fraction of the amount of time that text messaging is by the overall population,” Citron adds.

Terms of the deal are still being kept under wraps but Citron emphasizes that it’s a great transaction for the company he founded in 2006 and helped raise $14 million in funding over that seven-year span.

“I couldn’t be more excited because when I started the company I hoped to do a few things. I hoped to create a product that no one had ever created. We did that, we built the best MMS platform and the only one that’s achieved truly transformational scale in the industry. We do about two-thirds of all short code based MMS in the country,” Citron says.

“Whenever you start a start-up, you want to be able to deliver a great return to all your investors, everyone who’s believed in you, and your team and give them a bigger platform to succeed. And this does that. Our combined company has scale that’s unmatched in our industry,” he adds.

According to Citron, the newly formed company will have more messaging throughout, meaning Payvia can send out more text messages at higher speeds than anyone in North America. “We have a true global presence now and we have mobile commerce capabilities. For me, it’s the most exciting thing. We accomplished well beyond what we had humbly scratched together on a white board several years ago, and we have an opportunity together as a combined company to do something incredibly remarkable,” Citron concludes.

Google's Future Focuses Around More Closely Aligned Services

Thu, 16 May 2013 09:53:46 -0700

Google continues to tighten up and organize various services into key focus areas at its sixth annual developer-focused conference. A morning keynote that dragged well beyond three hours highlighted just how messy and unintuitive Google’s product structure can be for end users. Even with ongoing leadership changes and reorganization efforts that aim to replace the horizontal flow of ideas and services that cobbled Google’s chances for a more clear strategy for years, the company appears to have as many moving parts as ever.

Google is trying to get out ahead of these issues instead of hiding from the challenges it faces due to fragmented product lines. After more than 50 years of work and progress in real-time communication products, “we are still stuck with gadgets that get in the way,” says Vic Gundotra, SVP of engineering at Google. “Frankly, even Google’s own services have been fragmented and confused at times.”

Google revealed changes and updates across most of its portfolio on Wednesday, particularly with respect to Android and Google Play, Chrome, Google+, Search, and Maps. “We view this as one of the most important moments in computing,” says Sundar Pichai, SVP of Android, Chrome, and apps at Google. “At the heart of this journey is the impact we can have on people around the world.”

He, and indeed Google itself, is putting an ever-growing emphasis on the company’s two large platforms in Android and Chrome. The company has activated more than 900 million Android devices as of this week, marking a dramatic growth curve from the 400 million activations it had clocked by 2012 and the 100 million activations it reported in 2011.

Google wants to bring that number into the billions, and there is plenty of room for growth considering Android is still hovering around less than 10 percent in most areas of the world, Pichai adds. Google’s business goal with Android is simple and very clear, he says. It wants to bring the power of the Internet to as many people as possible.

After announcing a series of new APIs and tools now available to developers, Google unveiled its own music subscription service that will compete with the likes of Rdio and Spotify at a non-competitive monthly fee of $10 per month. Much of the early reaction focused on Google’s awkward branding for the service, which it calls Google Play Music All Access, but industry watchers and shakers could change their tune if Google is able to disrupt an industry that has mostly avoided Google’s influence to date. Key details surrounding Google’s new music subscription service were in short supply, but the service did launch in the U.S. within a matter of hours carrying an offer for a free 30-day trial.

Google Play is also growing exponentially, surpassing 48 billion app installs prior to the company’s annual developer gathering, says Hugo Barra, VP of Android product management at the company. Google has paid out more revenue share to developers on Google Play over the last four months than all of last year and revenue per user is now two-and-a-half times what it was a year ago globally, he adds.

With 750 million active users on Chrome today, Google says it’s now focusing on bringing the same level of speed, simplicity, and security that users expect from the desktop version of Chrome to mobile. “We think we can do to the mobile web what we did for the desktop web,” says Pichai. “The same capabilities that you’re used to on Chrome on the desktop are all coming to Android.”

Google+ got a refresh as well, with a new three-column format that resembles Pinterest and some of Tumblr’s themes, improved social streams, photo features, and a new version of Google+ Hangouts that the company is pivoting into a dedicated app for iOS, Android, and the web. The new Hangouts app will continue to evolve as Google intends to bring text, photo, emoticon, video chat, and eventually voice communications under one big umbrella.

Beginning with a bold declaration of “the end of search as we know it,” Amit Singhal, SVP and software engineer at Google, introduced Google’s vision and plans for the next wave in the evolution of search. Google Search can now set reminders by voice and bring conversational voice search and responses to all tablets, laptops, and desktops in Chrome. Google Now is getting a makeover as well, with a series of new cards for reminders, public transit commute times, music, books, TV shows, and video games.

Finally, the company also previewed its next version of Google Maps that it plans to streamline across all channels and platforms this summer.

GE Celebrates Tech and Science Discovery With Wonderground App

Wed, 15 May 2013 16:23:56 -0700

GE is one of those companies that is familiar to almost everyone because it is so massive and old, and yet most people have very little knowledge of what it does. GE Wonderground, a new desktop and mobile game released for the iPhone last month, is designed to inform or reintroduce consumers to the 121-year-old company’s long history in science, design and industrial technology.

Whether it’s the jet engine that powers the plane we’re traveling on or the energy technology that provides power to the cities we live in, GE wants people to discover the important roles it serves in a game it describes as a sort of modern-day treasure hunt.

The app, which was produced by GE’s agency partner Noise, was “based on the idea that GE technology is all around us, but we often don’t know it,” Katrina Craigwell, manager of digital marketing at GE, tells ClickZ. “There’s amazing technology and amazing science history all around us at the foundation of our cities and we probably don’t know about it. And for anyone who’s a science or tech geek, discovering that is always fun.”

The Wonderground app is part game and part augmented reality, presenting users with a series of missions they can play across the metropolitan areas of New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston and San Francisco. By pulling location data, the app displays a series of nearby missions that users can play when they are within range of the mission at hand. A clue checklist leads users through a discovery phase as they learn more about places like Little Tokyo in Los Angeles or Telegraph Hill in San Francisco mixed with “random and delightful” facts about GE.

“The idea is to help people celebrate their cities, learn a little bit about GE but do it in a valuable way,” Craigwell says. “The grand majority of the information, about 75 to 80 percent of the information that you uncover in the game is not about GE because we didn’t want to hit people over the head with it.”

Wonderground is not only the most involved gaming program that GE has created from a brand perspective, it is also a “heavy lift” and ongoing experiment of sorts for GE, adds Craigwell. “One of the goals with this game is to really make GE accessible to a younger audience, to a college audience, to use it as a recruiting tool in a sense as well,” she says. “We comb through it to really make sure that the stuff was interesting, to make sure that it made sense, and make sure that the GE part of the story was compelling and it wasn’t kind of just cheaply thrown in there,” she adds.

“How do we create an environment that incentivizes people to keep uncovering information? There’s a lot of information that we want to get across and we think it’s valuable at that volume. We could put it in a long video. We do that a lot and we love video but you can’t have that long of a video. So how do we create something that’s new and fresh and will incentivize people to keep uncovering information?” Craigwell explains.

GE has put considerable effort into growing its base of 1 million fans on Facebook, 100,000 followers on Twitter, other social sites and its own GE.com, alongside branded content efforts on sites like BuzzFeed,Tumblr and others.

“We spent a lot of time making sure that we’re messaging across our own base and driving from there,” Craigwell says.

To reach residents and tourists in a more analog and creative way, GE hired Artist John Pugh to paint a series of outdoor murals on walls in the cities that Wonderground currently reaches through the app.

Back online GE’s branded content on BuzzFeed is – you guessed it, a series of images running under titles like “10 Things You Probably Never Knew About New York City” and “10 Things You Might Not Have Known About Los Angeles” in addition to a video produced by BuzzFeed about places to explore in Los Angeles.

“It’s not as simple as distribution for some other things might be, but the traffic and the visitors that we’re getting from Buzzfeed are sticking with the game for quite a bit of time,” Craigwell says. “Overall user acquisition is a slow burn… We look a lot at time on site, and we have people that are playing the game from anything from 10 to 19 minutes and we’re really happy with that.”

Mobile Marketing on Pace to Surpass $400 Billion in U.S. by 2015

Tue, 14 May 2013 08:15:56 -0700

If you still think mobile marketing is a hobby, consider this: it contributed $139 billion to the U.S. economy and created 524,000 jobs last year. Does that sound like an area that belongs under “experimental” or “emerging” marketing budgets?

The Mobile Marketing Association certainly doesn’t think so, and now it has a dense 124-page research paper to back up the industry it has served as an evangelist for since 2000. The mobile marketing ecosystem is projected to generate more than $400 billion to the U.S. economy by 2015, representing an annual growth rate of 52.5 percent, according to the new “MMA Mobile Marketing Economic Impact Study.”

Greg Stuart, chief executive of MMA, notes that $400 billion is almost the size of the current gross domestic product of Argentina or Austria and would surpass the current GDP of Thailand.

Mobile is also projected to generate 1.4 million jobs across the country by 2015, according to the report. The marketers and retailers that are driving this growth spent a collective $6.7 billion on mobile marketing in 2012 and that number is projected to increase to $19.8 billion by 2015.

The study commissioned by MMA also sought to determine the effectiveness of mobile marketing spend based on its impact on mobile sales. The marketing impact ratio, or overall return on every dollar that a marketer invests in the business, peaked at $20.77 in 2012. The lead researchers were also surprised to report that mobile marketing has yet to experience the law of diminishing returns.

“When they look at that data across different sectors…there appears to be no diminishing returns,” Stuart tells ClickZ. “It’s like the law of gravity, you don’t ever get to avoid diminishing returns.” Despite that controversial concept, he emphasizes that marketers have a unique opportunity to invest in an ecosystem that is not conforming to traditional economic models or rules.

Data from the top four mobile marketing spenders indicates that increased spend across mobile marketing platforms does not increase the impact rate and that marketers who spend more on mobile achieved the highest impact ratio overall.

Mobile marketing spend was also organized by industry categories including mobile advertising, mobile direct response or enhanced traditional media, and mobile CRM. Mobile advertising gained a lead over CRM last year and is projected to further distance itself at a compound annual growth rate of 56.2 percent through 2015. Mobile advertising spend will more than triple from $3.06 billion in 2012 to more than $9.2 billion in 2015, according to the report.

Mobile direct response spending is growing at a compound annual growth rate of 77.4 percent, representing the fastest growing category in mobile. Investment in direct response is expected to reach $1.3 billion this year and surpass $2.9 billion by 2015.

While mobile CRM expenditures are growing at the slowest compound annual growth rate of 43.8 percent, the category remains incredibly steady with projections for it to clear nearly $7.7 billion by 2015.

The study also concluded that finance, retail (excluding CPG), and manufacturing (excluding CPG) were the three largest industries for mobile marketing spend. Measuring investments in mobile across 16 industry groups, the three mobile stalwarts contributed $3 billion or nearly half of the total amount of investment in mobile marketing in 2012. The report also found that the largest markets for mobile employment are being driven by the industries that spend more on mobile marketing and advertising.

Smartphone-Empowered Shopping Is the New Norm

Thu, 09 May 2013 13:15:06 -0700

Marketers have always been trying to unlock the path of least resistance to in-store purchases. While broad strokes don’t capture the various behaviors and activities that consumers go through during their shopping routines, those different pathways have become even more profound and challenging for CPG (consumer-packaged goods) marketers since the rise of smartphones.

A new study about the impact of smartphone use on in-store shopping from Google and a group of marketing agencies known as the Google Shopper Marketing Agency Council concludes that smartphones are transforming the shopping experience and that CPG brands and retailers have embrace these behavioral changes as opportunities, not challenges.

“There’s this huge shopping transformation being led by technology,” says Kevin Kells, national industry director of CPG at Google. “Increased engagement, especially in stores, is leading to greater purchases in every product category…It really is taking the friction out of the shopping experience.”

Shoppers who frequently use their smartphone to research products and compare prices in-store spend an average of 25 percent more per transaction than those who rarely augment their shopping trips with the aid of a smartphone.

“Those folks who are actually using the mobile more are buying more in-store,” Kells adds. Manufacturers are “scrambling to figure it out,” he says, but reinforces that empowered smartphone shopping behaviors and the brands that want to capitalize on these changes are “at the beginning of the journey.”

Nearly eight in 10, or 79 percent of smartphone users use their devices in-store at least once a month to assist in shopping, according to the study. Shoppers are pulling their smartphones out of their purses and pockets to assist in all product categories, but the leading CPGs include appliances (97 percent), groceries (89 percent), baby care (87 percent), electronics (87 percent), and household care (86 percent).

Total purchase amounts also increase across product categories when smartphones come into play, however, health and beauty purchases increase the most at an average rate of 50 percent per transaction. The median basket size also increases an average of 40 percent with appliances, 34 percent with electronics, and 25 percent with household care products, says Google.

The “Mobile In-Store Research” study also found that almost half of all smartphone shoppers use their device for at least 15 minutes in-store. This behavior is enabling shoppers to engage less with customer service representatives, as one in three smartphone shoppers will turn to their device to find information instead of asking employees for help. Indeed, time was cited as the primary benefit of using a smartphone while shopping with more than half of the survey’s respondents reporting that smartphones cut back on the amount of time they spend shopping now.

While some retailers have taken a more protective stance against show-rooming and deeper in-store research enabled by smartphones, Kells believes it’s only a matter of time before CPG brands and retailers embrace smartphone shoppers without reservation.

“It’s very difficult to change consumer behavior,” he says. “If you are concerned about show-rooming…I think you really have to rethink the whole shopping experience.” Retailers and CPG brands should confront this transformation by determining where they can add value to the smartphone-powered journey of shopping, he adds. “You want to start to own that digital shelf,” Kells says. “You should wake up caring as much about the digital shelf and the online shopping experience as your physical shelf” in-store.

How to Be a Successful Marketer Without Being a Jerk

Tue, 07 May 2013 15:02:58 -0700

The era of successful jerks in business and marketing is over, according to Peter Shankman. The founder of Help a Reporter Out (HARO) and now VP and small business evangelist for Vocus, which acquired HARO in 2010, has dealt with a fair amount of jerks throughout his career. ClickZ caught up with Shankman following the release of his latest book, “Nice Companies Finish First: Why Cutthroat Management is Over - and Collaboration Is In,” to learn more about his positive vibrations in marketing and how marketers can be effective without being a jerk. As Shankman prepares to launch a new consultancy next month based on the teachings in his book, he describes how business leaders can generate more revenue by empowering their entire workforce to simply do what is right.

ClickZ: How does one become a successful marketer without being a jerk?

Peter Shankman: When you look at 50 years ago, no one really cared how you acted. You could do pretty much whatever you wanted and you didn’t get in trouble because it was really hard to catch you, as it were. But, the problem is now you have everything out there. Everyone you meet, everyone you talk to, everyone you know has some sort of 24-hour connection to the Internet and the ability to grab anything - audio, video, or otherwise - anytime they want. That, fortunately, winds up resulting in the ability to lie disappearing. It used to be when you would screw up at some capacity at a company, there was nothing they could do about it. They were upset, they told their friends maybe. Now it’s everywhere and it’s very easy. So with this 24-hour connected world that we’re in, the easiest way to keep the clients you have and gain new ones is simply to be 1 percent nicer than what we always expect, which let’s face it is crap.

When you go to the hotel or the airport you expect bad things. You don’t expect the fast-food place to have your stuff on time. You go to a fast-food place and you don’t expect them to get your order right. You don’t expect the dry cleaner to have your stuff ready on Tuesday when they say it’ll be ready on Tuesday. You don’t expect the hotel to keep your room if you’re late. And so that logic is what we have come to accept, which is pretty insane. In the ’50s you go fill up your tank with gas and there’d be four guys out there, one checking your oil, one doing your tires, one doing your windshield, and the other pumping your gas. We’ve moved to this new world of you’re lucky enough if the credit card machine works. What people don’t realize is it’s actually beneficial for marketers and advertisers because now you don’t have to go out of your way to be amazing to your customers. All that you have to do now is be one level above crap. And while that sounds ridiculous, it’s actually incredibly simple. It’s doing the easiest things in the world, the simplest things in the world, and they don’t have to be that major.

What Morton’s does is when you call and make a reservation they ask you one simple question: “Are you celebrating anything for your reservation?” And if you say yes, they bring you a piece of cake. Something incredibly simple, but it makes “Oh my God, look at that.” We live in this horrendous Instagram-everything-you-eat world anyway, so first thought is: “Wow, look, they brought me a free piece of cake. That’s so cool.” It costs them what, 8 cents for that cake, but 400 people just saw it and one of them might say, “Oh, cool, maybe I’ll go there the next time I have a birthday.”

One of my favorite examples of that is about a month-and-a-half ago I was in a hotel in Dubai and I was running low on toothpaste. I get back to my hotel after a long day of meetings and there’s a brand new tube of toothpaste there and a little note from the maid that says, “Hey, I noticed you’re running low on toothpaste. I bought you a new tube of the same kind you use. I know how busy you are, I hope this is helpful.”And I was floored. So I go and I immediately post a photo of the toothpaste. Fast forward, I’m checking out two days later and the head of PR implies to me that they’ve already tracked incoming calls and reservations based on my photo. A 39 cent tube of toothpaste, dude! How much is that worth? It’s not even a question of money, what it really comes down to is empowering the employees to do these things. That’s the key. If you can do that, then the employees understand the benefit of doing it. What is the benefit of the employee at McDonald’s to be above and beyond their regular job? And more importantly, it’s probably a negative because if they do go out of there way to do something nice, “Well, that wasn’t in the manual.” So where’s the benefit when they could possibly lose their job for being nice? This isn’t about the customer service people doing better, this is about the CEO empowering the entire company with the permission to do better.

ClickZ: Brands and consumers will always define the lines between good and bad motivations in marketing differently. Has the notion of marketing for good evolved throughout your career, and how would you define it today?

Shankman: You’re not creating incredible things to reap the benefits of it, but you will reap the benefits as an added bonus. You’re doing great things because it’s the right thing to do. As you create these right things to do, the more people are going to want to hear about them, the more people are going to want to talk about them, the more people are going to want to share them. But you’re doing it because they’re beneficial to everyone, and that’s key.

ClickZ: How much of marketing is cutthroat at the core, and what can brands and marketers do to turn back that tide?

Shankman: The easiest way for marketers to realize that they have to change the tide is to simply look at how much money they’re spending on marketing versus their return compared to how much money they could spend by creating better customer service versus the return. I always use this example: Where’s the benefit of me going to a bar, approaching two hot women, and going, “You know what, you don’t know me but I’m awesome in bed.” The return on that is more than likely going to be a drink thrown in my face. I’ve done a lot of research on this, that’s exactly what’s going to happen. The flip side of that is I’m sitting at the bar not even playing attention and a girl over there sees me, recognizes me, and turns to her best friend and says, “Holy shit, that’s Peter Shankman. I’ve heard incredible things about him, he’s amazing, he’s awesome, you’re both single, you should totally go and talk to him.” That’s word-of-mouth, that’s personalized belief.

The concept of marketing as we know it from PR used to be public relations. It’s changed to personal recommendations. The reason this has never been embraced by CEOs before is that CEOs have always said, “I have to come down on the bottom line. I don’t do things to be nice just to be nice.” Well, here’s the kicker: it so comes down to the bottom line. CEOs are starting to see that word-of-mouth return is actually better than marketing return. And this doesn’t mean there’s not going be a place for marketing, there’s always going to be a place for marketing. But the level of return on word-of-mouth and on customer service has increased 10,000-fold in the past 10 years for one simple reason: we are all carrying broadcast devices.

ClickZ: Do you transfer that to agencies and brands as well? Can they improve their bottom line by being nice?

Shankman: No question about it. When I ran my PR firm, The Geek Factory back in 2000, we had about 20 clients ranging from Napster to Juno. A lot of the dot-coms were ours. And once a month, we would show up at the office unannounced with pizza for lunch. We’d just go around to our clients’ office once a month, once every two months, and show up with pizza. We didn’t charge them for the pizza, we just wanted to talk about what was up, what was the latest, what were they working on. Companies have this vision of agencies where if I call them, they’re going to bill me for this. Marketing and PR firms are starting to act too much like law firms. If we go and we start talking to them and we don’t bill them, we just say hi, we’ll probably get more information from them. And if we get more information from them, that’s probably a better way to know how to pitch them. And if we pitch them better, we’re going to get more results, and everyone’s going to win. It cost us a couple of pizzas every couple of months. We became known as the pizza agency and it was awesome.

ClickZ: You argue that it doesn’t pay to be a jerk in business, so how do you wrap your head around the fact, whether it’s perceived or real, that so many successful businesses are led by jerks? Are you convinced that their days are numbered in this new era you describe in your book?

Shankman: Well, they really are. What I saw from all the stuff I did in the book research was that companies that are nicer are making more money. So what you’re starting to see is the douchebag CEOs, as I call them, are going away. It’s easier for the board to let them go because they simply can’t justify what they’re doing to the public. I think that the concept of being a jerk is definitely going away because there’s no room for it anymore.

ClickZ: What trends or sociological changes are driving this new era of collaboration and kindness in business, and where do you see this happening most?

Shankman: In terms of collaboration, I’m seeing CEOs are getting smarter. They used to live in these ivory castles where they’d take advice from two people. I’m seeing CEOs now walking the main floor. I’m seeing CEOs spending time on the factory floor, spending time with their customers. It’s so easy - what is it, 20 minutes out of your day? That’s just the part that kills me, is you have all these companies, “Oh, I don’t have the time.” Yes, you do, you really do.

ClickZ: Finally, what are the motivating factors that should convince marketers to change their cutthroat strategies and embrace a more altruistic and collaborative spirit?

Shankman: To get CEOs to understand this, again it comes back down to revenue. I’ve never met a CEO in my life who believes cool trumps revenue. If you can explain to these CEOs that there’s money to be made on this, they will listen. And more importantly, that there’s money to be saved. I think that the key starting point is to explain that here are the studies and show them that companies that are nicer are making more money. Here’s what they’re doing, it’s not costing a fortune. And by the way, you’re also saving money because you don’t have to retrain new employees. Employees aren’t going to quit, the employees are happier. And they get it, but it has to start with them understanding there’s money to be made here. As soon as they understand there’s money to be made, they will listen.