This was the question of the hour at AWNY’s “What’s Hot in Media for 2012?” breakfast panel at the New York Hilton Thursday morning.  Chaired by TargetCast’s President and Director of Client Services Audrey Siegel, the panel featured notable industry leaders including TargetCast’s President of Interactive Marketing, Steve Minichini.  The panel shared their expert insight on how they see the advertising industry evolving and what major trends we can expect to see in 2012.

1) A more refined advertising style in the mobile world

With the increasing popularity of smart phones and tablet products it is more important than ever for advertisers to be thinking about how to build and optimize our advertising in this ever evolving mobile world.  As Steve Minichini pointed out, there is no unified voice in how we advertise through tablets, and over the next year, advertisers will begin to figure out how to most effectively communicate with the consumer.

2)  What privacy really means in our increasingly social world

With all the recent online privacy and piracy debates, consumers are more aware than ever of how companies are accessing their personal information and using it to target them with specific advertisement.  Despite this, we can expect to see a more concrete definition of what privacy really means and what rights an individual is entitled.  This will have a major effect on where advertisers are able to communicate with consumers.

3)  A continued emphasis on social media as a way to engage with consumers

And speaking of communicating with consumers, companies are finally finding a winning model of how to successfully interact with their consumers in the social world.  Many companies are hesitant to invest in social media since there are often no tangible results, but with sites like Tumblr and Pinterest now gaining popularity, companies and consumers alike are finding new ways to express themselves, and connect with each other beyond a Facebook “like”.

4)  And finally, thinking beyond TV

Between interactive TV, and the introduction of 3D into the consumers’ home, marketing is headed in a much more dynamic direction.  During 2012 we will see advertisers experiment with the most effective way to communicate with consumers through these new mediums as they stop thinking about TV as TV, and instead as video everywhere.

With all of these trends in mind, it is clear that the leaders in the advertising industry will be those who are willing to experiment and take risks on both new technology and the fresh young minds who already use this technology in their day to day life.  2012 will definitely be an exciting year!

I was watching television and a commercial for a product I had never heard of before came on the air.  The ad was for a Skanz bracelet or band as they call it, with a QR code containing personal information.  As I watched the commercial I was totally confused – the message was that it would now be easier, than ever before, for me to share my personal information – but was this something I’d been missing in my life?   

Hmmm, do I really need a QR coded bracelet with my personal information?  And if I don’t, who does?

Skanz is a new company that allows you to put your entire online persona, contact info, Facebook page, Twitter feed, LinkdIn profile, Tumblr account, etc. in one place accessible via QR code. You can place your personal QR code on an iPhone case or Skanz band in any of the styles below:

Sporting one of these turns you into a walking advertisement for yourself. When you meet someone new, all they have to do is scan your code and they have instant access to everything you want them to know about you.

I knew immediately that that this was not going to work for me.  But still, I was intrigued, and I quickly identified a handful of uses for the Skanz technology.

One thing that came to mind is the ease with which medical history would be made available for emergencies.  It certainly could replace the current medical alert bracelet.   For marketers, if an ad contained the right code, the wearer of the Skanz band could flash their personal QR bracelet and either order the product or get more information about the product without much effort.   Two truly one-to-one experiences brought to you by Skanz.

From a research viewpoint, we are still hungry for source data that can more closely connect the consumer, their media behavior and product purchase.  Today, there are research companies that are asking their participants to carry pagers and even a specially modified Smartphone with which to record their behavior.  Perhaps we could take advantage of the QR code technology to tell us which media, and more importantly which advertisements, the wearer is exposed to on a very timely basis.  

Skanz has created a product for a problem that never before existed.   But I wonder if some smart research company is not thinking how they could take advantage of a respondent’s willingness to wear their own QR code and truly change the measurement of all advertising regardless of the medium used to convey the message.  All it would take would be for the medium to have the technology to read the Skanz information on the research participants’ hand.

There are several barriers to widespread adoption of Skanz and other QR Code-based technology.  As a research instrument the technology would have to be easy to use for all age segments of the population.   For marketers who are familiar with the benefits of using BAR codes this technology might offer more immediate return path information about their customers.  It took some time for the now familiar BAR codes to gain widespread adoption and only time will tell if there is interest in moving to Skanz QR codes to enhance our information on consumer behavior.

Toyota Motor Sales USA will be the first sponsor, but we expect to see more as companies like Samsung, Panasonic and LG are beginning to develop partnerships with YuMe and/or Tremor Video. Spreading use of the technology, plus consumers’ shifting tastes to over-the-top video options with more control and substantially less advertising, challenges marketers to reach and engage this audience without annoying them.

Advertisers must remember the importance of providing ads that are interesting and relevant to the consumer. The new technology conveniently lends itself to this objective, something LG and YuMe intend to capitalize on. The application providers will also get a cut of the revenue, as well as approval of the ads that will air while their product is loading. Ad networks, TV manufacturers and content publishers working together to make internet-connected TV ads contextually relevant for the consumer means that everyone wins, including the advertisers gutsy enough to take a chance with new technology.

Many companies take advantage of this and deliver highly tailored ads to match the search queries. The result is that people expect their ads to be targeted so when you see an advertisement that doesn’t fit with your search query, it can be quite offensive. I was researching some text ads for a campaign when I ran across a perfect example from Wal-Mart of why you should make sure that your agency is using negative keyword targeting for their search campaigns.

It would have taken 30 seconds to add “coping” as a negative keyword to prevent this from happening.

This ad represents two failures. Firstly the ad clearly shouldn’t be displayed for this search query. Secondly the ad itself has a typo, which is a minor detail given the offensive nature of the keyword it is paired with but it is yet another sign that their QA process failed.

This is particularly bad given that the company is Wal-Mart, which people are far more likely to pounce on for blunders such as this. When a person types in “coping with a death in the family” I don’t think they want to see this message from Wal-Mart, especially not at this time.

In true integrated fashion, TargetCast, with the help of media partner Slate, successfully put together a location-based cross platform engagement strategy designed to target the higher education community and encourage them to roll over assets with TIAA-CREF.  The program included digital banners, content syndication, and promotional ad units fueling interest for the Slate Gabfests. At the live event, there was signage, marketing collateral, live reads, as well as a special “guests of honor” dinner with TIAA-CREF participants and Gabfest and Slate talent and management. The Gabfest is a weekly podcast series operated by Slate focusing on Politics, Sports, and Culture. Collectively, the three podcast editions attract more than 1MM downloads a month. TargetCast secured a sponsorship opportunity for TIAA-CREF to take the Gabfests on the road, executing live events at key universities and institutions around the country.

TIAA-CREF, providing the higher education community with financial services, understood that engaging their participants through quality content within a venue for relevant live programming, would be a door opener to growing assets under management.  The campaigns proved highly successful with significant lift in assets under management directly attributable to the Slate Gabfest events.  The Gabfests have been recognized by AdAge as the “Best Podcast Series” recently winning their Vanguard Award in 2011 and will continue to be an integral part of TargetCast’s media strategy for TIAA-CREF into 2012.

For more information about the AdAge/Vanguard Awarded Slate Gabfest, follow this link:  http://adage.com/article/special-report-media-vanguard-awards/media-vanguard-awards-digital-natives/230922/)

Social media makes it socially acceptable to be super-intense about our favorite things—I’m talking singing-with-our-eyes-closed passionate about our favorite foods, pictures of dogs frolicking in leaves, workout routines, limited edition action figure collections, and especially TV shows. 

People are watching more TV than ever—35.6 hours per week according to a Nielsen estimate.  That’s an average of 5 hours per day.   Yikes. Recently, a spate of sites similar to Foursquare have cropped up in response to our ravenous entertainment appetites allowing users to “check in” to their fave shows.  Like checking into a restaurant or bar on Foursquare, these sites—Miso, Getglue, Philo, Comcast’s Tunerfish, and IntoNow—enable users to let friends know what show their boob tube is dialed into in real time. The Intonow app, kind of like Foursquare and Shazam’s love child, lets users check into a specific episode by having their Smartphone listen to the program on TV.   The goal of all these sites, of course, is creating connections—connecting show watchers to each other and to new content.

Another way to up the ante on our favorite shows is through social viewing.  At Adweek’s Targetcast-hosted discussion Phoenix Rising: How Technology is Transforming Foundational Media, panelists presaged that social viewing would be the next big thing.  Gabbing to your best friend on the phone after the show’s over? So archaic—nostalgic as a Rockwell painting!   Social Viewing sites like Paltalk enable people in different locations to watch the same video at the same time AND chat about it.   Paltalk offers video chat rooms, which they refer to as screening rooms.  The screening room streams the same video to all attendees and enables them to chat.  With social viewing sites, there’s no need to mentally file away that witty commentary for later—viewers can share their shock, outrage, laughter, sadness, and elation in real time too.

During 9/11 when there was a massive number of searches for “world trade center” related terms nothing showed up except outdated informational pages about renting office space and tours. As a result they had to add links directly from their homepage to news sites to divert users away from using their search features.

On the more recent side of the war in Afghanistan we saw better but still flawed search results from Google when news broke about the death of Osama Bin Laden. Google began putting “Google News” in search results years ago to provide up-to-the-minute content at the top of search results that were tied to current events but this fix is only a band-aid on a larger issue.

If you look at the screenshot below (source: Search Engine Land) you will see that while Google News provided people with fresh content the actual algorithmic search results below were about the White House Correspondents Dinner and one of President Obama’s past budget speeches although the user intent was clearly focused on what had just gone down in Pakistan.

Google started to get into a bit of a rut with its search results, pushing down the actual results with Google news, Twitter updates, and other additional features to liven up the search results pages but not the actual search results themselves.

Earlier this week Google announced an actual fix to the problem of outdated content- a “freshness” algorithm update was launched on Monday building off the infrastructure established by the Google Caffeine update. Caffeine did not change the actual search results, it was a new way to collect and index information on the web.

Caffeine was designed to radically change the way that Google indexed content, giving them the ability to quickly index frequently changing content. The update that Google released on Monday is an algorithmic change that will utilize this high-speed indexing system to provide fresh search results.

What impact does this change have? It allows Google to respond to three separate scenarios where fresh content is necessary for a good user experience, impacting 35% of all search results in the process. Quoting from their announcement:

• Recent events or hot topics. For recent events or hot topics that begin trending on the web, you want to find the latest information immediately. Now when you search for current events like “occupy oakland protest”, or for the latest news about the “nba lockout”, you’ll see more high-quality pages that might only be minutes old.

• Regularly recurring events. Some events take place on a regularly recurring basis, such as annual conferences like “ICALP” or an event like the “presidential election”. Without specifying with your keywords, it’s implied that you expect to see the most recent event, and not one from 50 years ago. There are also things that recur more frequently, so now when you’re searching for the latest “NFL scores”, “dancing with the stars” results or “exxon earnings”, you’ll see the latest information.

• Frequent updates. There are also searches for information that changes often, but isn’t really a hot topic or a recurring event. For example, if you’re researching the “best slr cameras”, or you’re in the market for a new car and want “subaru impreza reviews”, you probably want the most up to date information.

This is a seismic shift in the SEO world, but it wasn’t unexpected. It has been clear for many years that Google wanted to move in this direction for those of us that were prepared the changes have provided a nice boost to organic search traffic.

Regardless of industry there are ways to provide fresh content whether it be starting a company blog, releasing a new product line, or finding some other way to engage your users.

Through this update Google has made it clear that if you don’t start paying attention to your content, you will be left behind.

We thought it would be fun to take a look at other new technology products and examine how their launch sales fared in the early days after their introduction.  Some of these new products have been tremendously successful, but it is also amusing to look at those that did not quite live up to expectations.

Recent technology introductions initial sales results:

2011-2012 Broadcast Season – early disappointments:

Reminder of some product misfires:

What does this mean for marketers?  Obviously it takes more than company reputation to gain and sustain public interest in your products.  Products must live up to the hype, provide a positive user experience and of course, be supported by impactful creative and well targeted media plans developed to introduce these new products to the marketplace through the most appropriate channels.

I’ve officially been a member of Voyurl for nearly 2 months now and I have to say that I like what I’m seeing so far in terms of what information is available. I’m told that I have visited 4,337 web pages and spent 3 days, 20 hours and 39 minutes browsing in that time (2,698 sites and 1 day, 6 hours and 26 minutes in the last month alone). Other fun facts Voyurl has shared with me include:

Voyurl also provides a variety of different ways to look at the breakdown of visited categories. The visual presentation is enticing and made even better with the ability to hover over any section to get the detailed information about each category.

I think my favorite graph offered is the browsing patterns among categories. This not only shows the sequence of category visits, but the frequency with which you engage in that pattern. And to make things easier, hovering over a category shows only that category’s patterns, as illustrated in the second graph below. For example, I navigate from a news site to a technology site much more often than I go from news to entertainment.

Like any new online company in the beta testing phase, Voyurl has some kinks to work out. Some of the charts seem to show incorrect or incomplete information and the zoom functionality on others only works occasionally if at all. My biggest complaint so far is the categorization of some of the web pages. For example, Hulu’s homepage is labeled as Entertainment, but pages that actually stream shows are uncategorized. This miscategorization happens on other websites as well, leaving a large chunk of my browsing unrepresented in all of the category charts.

So far this information serves no other purpose than to be interesting and amusing. Voyurl tells me I have not browsed enough to get some information, including recommended websites. Hopefully I will get enough browsing in soon to continue with Voyurl Part 3…

Steve Jobs died today.  I’ve never met him, but I’ve listened.  Closely.  He has inspired me to take chances.  To innovate and build products.  He has motivated me to do more, grow more, push harder and be the very best I could be every day.  Be the best I could be for my family and for those I work with.  He helped me understand the power of change and realize the contribution of dedication toward a vision.  I’m sick and sad but I’m thankful for the time he spent in the spotlight allowing people like me to know him better and live to a higher potential because of his inspiration.

Steve Jobs:  You will be missed.