B2B Approach To Social Media

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Posted on April 28, 2014 by Steven Copertino

B2B Approach To Social Media (click here)

Twitter to Offer Mobile Ads Beyond Twitter In Bid for Revenue

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Posted on April 17, 2014 by Steven Copertino

Twitter to Sell App Install Ads Across Mobile Apps Through MoPub

By Cotton Delo. Published on April 17, 2014.

Twitter’s app install ads

Twitter’s ad world just got a little bigger.

The messaging service — whose business is already 75% mobile — started selling ads in mobile apps beyond Twitter today, a key rationale of its purchase of MoPub, a mobile adexchange it purchased in September.

MoPub will allow Twitter’s advertisers to buy mobile app install ads through the exchange. App install ads are today the mobile web’s dominant form of advertising and a key source of revenue for Facebook and other publishers.

Via the integration, advertisers can buy mobile app install and app engagement ads on Twitter, as well as on the thousands of apps within MoPub’s network, which include WordPress, OpenTable, the mobile messaging app Tango, and the music-streaming app Songza.

Twitter’s intention to launch mobile app install ads has been a poorly kept secret. Promoted tweets with Twitter “Cards” attached in which users can click to install an app have been materializing in users’ Twitter streams over the last few weeks.

Though still in a private beta, mobile app install ads will be available for purchase in Twitter’s ad auction, and other targeting parameters can be applied to them. But separately, advertisers will be able to participate in real-time bidding to buy mobile app install and app engagement ad inventory programmatically via MoPub within the Twitter ad system. Those ads will appear as banners, interstitials, video and sometimes in native formats.

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Forget the Selfie: Samsung Is Out-Innovating Apple in Marketing Samsung’s Agency May Be Exaggerating, But It Has Something To Brag About

What was the brand and advertising value for Samsung of the infamous “selfie” taken by Ellen DeGeneres at the Oscars? Do we really know?

It was the tweet heard around the world, but was it worth $1 billion?

That was the value Publicis Groupe CEO Maurice Levy put on the star-studded Oscar smartphone “selfie” during an interview in Cannes earlier this week. He also immodestly took credit for it, which is a stretch because while Publicisbuying arm Starcom Mediavest did broker Samsung‘s sponsorship of the Oscars, the tweet itself was spontaneous, according to two sources with knowledge of Samsung’s marketing.

Now, without that $20 million Oscars sponsorship, Ellen DeGeneres would likely have taken the shot with her preferred iPhone, so Mr. Levy can indeed take some credit for setting the stage (the Wall Street Journal reported the agency negotiated with ABC to integrate Galaxy phones into the show).

More…

Will Google+ Rule the World?

Posted on July 22, 2011 by Steven Copertino

Following is an article from Ad Age on Google+ and a link to a demo of Google+.

It looks like Facebook is in for some real competition in the coming months. Google+ is in a closed friendly-user trial right now. They are gathering feedback and tweaking it, but soon it will be available to everyone and Google will know more about us and our behaviors than anyone ever has.

How Google+ Will Transform Search and Search Marketing

What Search Giant’s Social Foray Means Behind the Scenes
By: Dave Williams Ad Age Published: July 21, 2011

Google+ is gaining users faster than any social network ever before. After many stumbles, Google has finally built a social network that delivers value to consumers. That makes Google+ a bigger competitor to Facebook than anything we’ve seen.

So far, a lot of Google+ coverage has debated its value, and examined the network from a consumer and tactical standpoint. Less scrutinized is the way the launch of Google+ could end up enhancing the competitive positioning and value of Google’s search business, giving it an unprecedented view of consumer interest, social graph, intent data and conversion data.

What you want vs. what you like
The biggest difference between Google and Facebook right now is that thanks to search intent data, Google knows what consumers want. Facebook, on the other hand, has a very clear understanding of what users like and who they know. Google+ is the first step for Google to close this gap. It aims to build out a complete profile of Google’s users, giving Google access to profile data, likes, interests, and friends.

Google+ integrates across all of Google’s products to make sharing easier and more relevant, but also to add value to Google search. If Google can incorporate data from the social graph to deliver more relevant results, it will have a product competitive with Bing’s Facebook integration . This is of critical importance in order for Google to maintain search market share and growth by improving relevancy and personalization of search results vs. the aggressive challenger Bing.

In my opinion, Google is interested primarily in building user profile data to deliver more relevant and personalized search results with better, more relevant advertising. Studying Google+ and collecting even more consumer data empowers the company to integrate its data for a better consumer experience and advertising across all their products, from search to social to mobile and even to email.

Engagement and ROI
One major issue with Google+ is the absence of brand and corporate pages. If Google wants to compete with Facebook, these pages are crucial. Facebook works as an advertising platform because it goes far beyond traditional display. Rather, it’s an engagement platform where brands and advertisers interact with consumers.

Adding brand pages to Google+ will finally give Google a branding engagement platform. Right now, Google’s big revenue business is search, which relies on clicks to measure ROI and advertising success, whereas Google+ can offer a branding platform where the campaign goal is engagement rather than immediate ROI.

Once brand pages are launched and populated, the next logical step is to build an ad platform that encourages engagement and incorporates the social graph. With this, brands can appeal to consumers by using interest data — the things consumers say they actually like — just as we see on Facebook. The difference is that Google can target ads based on consumer intent data, at a higher level of relevancy than is possible on Facebook. An engagement model based on social and search intent data will improve the efficiency and efficacy of social advertising, in terms of both relevancy and performance.

Keys to success
One thing lost in Google+’s rapid growth is the importance of user engagement and time spent. Success in social networking is not determined by total number of users. Twitter has tons of registered users, but a very small percentage is responsible for the majority of activity. Google+ must regularly engage consumers, or the content loses relevancy and thus its power as a branding tool. Without broad and regular participation, scale and frequency (and successful advertising) become impossible.

The key to Facebook’s success is not just the social interest and social graph data, but the tremendous amount of time users spend on the network. That time creates the advertising opportunities. The ultimate measure of success would be for Google+ to become the first social network consumers visit when they go online. It’s a similar obstacle in search, where Google owns 65 percent of the market, compared to Yahoo’s 15 percent. Being second place is far different from being the industry leader, and Google is already late to the social game.

Google+ has several other demerits, which is to be expected for a brand new product. The system doesn’t recognize corporate Gmail addresses, a fact that agitates against its “easy-to-use” premise, especially for corporate Gmail power users. Google is also pushing the limits of data and privacy, given its recent FTC investigation. Consumers should be concerned about giving too much personal, professional and social data to one entity, and Google is already collecting data on search queries, mining usage data across its networks, purchasing data from third parties, collecting conversion data from Google analytics, taking impression and click data from its Doubleclick ad-serving product. Thanks to Google+, it will soon also know what you do, who you are, and who you know. That’s frightening from a consumer standpoint, especially if Google+ becomes the top social network.

There’s also the chance that Google could stretch itself too thin. This moment is oddly reminiscent of the time that Yahoo tried to become a portal, a search engine, and everything at once. Ultimately it diluted its brand and its position in the industry. Social networking is Facebook’s core business, and it has a massive head start and loyalty from all the core demographics.

But we’ve seen Google topple web titans before, so Google+ unseating Facebook is not outside the realm of possibility. The biggest and most important aspect of Google+ is that Facebook is no longer the only channel on TV worth watching. Strong competition leads to innovation, and a Facebook/Google+ battle will lead to a better consumer social networking experience, as well as improved advertising results and options. Google+ has value, and we look forward to further developments, innovation and continued growth.

Google+ demo
http://www.google.com/+/learnmore/

Six Lessons in App Marketing

Posted on June 10, 2011 by Steven Copertino

Good overview of what needs to be done by marketers “beyond creating an app” in order to drive awareness, usage and ROI!

By: Andrew Pavia Advertising Age Published: June 09, 2011

So you’ve made an iPhone app, now what? Lisa Bettany, creator of Camera+, an app for the iPhone which has sold 2.6 million copies and has achieved the top spot in the App Store in the first release, gave CaT attendees tips on how to sell a product through the app store.

1. Create a Twitter contest. The contest that Camera+ ran had two simple steps: follow one designated account and post as many pictures as you want. “Twitter contests generate buzz,” she said referring to them later as “Tweet blasts.”

2. Sell strategically. Releasing an app on the weekends or a holiday, such as Christmas, has proven to be beneficial to sales numbers. Also, targeting the U.S. might be a good idea, since 58% of total iApp revenue was generated from the U.S. store.

3. Create a loyal following through engagement. Camera+ app users were sharing photos daily for a year. “If they’re loving it, they’re sharing it,” she said.

4. Wow your users. Research the features people actually want. Ms. Bettany advised to take app store reviews into consideration (while taking “You Suck” with a grain of salt, she said).

5. Fix bugs and boost performance. While this may be fairly obvious, she said Camera+ problems resulted in the app dropping from the top ten to roughly the No. 180 spot.

6. Don’t get kicked out of the App Store. Jokingly, Ms. Bettany referred to the time in which Apple took its app out of the digital store for creating the ability to take a picture using the volume button. Apple did not want that feature included in this app. Spoiler alert: It is going to be a feature on the iPhone 5 camera.

With the tremendous success of her Camera+ app, Mr. Bettany said, proudly, that “zero dollars was spent on traditional advertising.”

P&G Tries Facebook Commerce Again With New Platform, Talks to Walmart About Joining After Scrapping Amazon-Fueled Effort, CPG Giant Uses Its Own E-store

Posted on June 9, 2011 by Steven Copertino

By: Jack Neff Ad Age Digital Published: June 09, 2011

Procter & Gamble Co. is taking another plunge into Facebook commerce with a new platform and an effort to bring new retailers on board after scrapping an earlier effort using Amazon as a fulfillment partner.

Tide’s new ‘Shop Now’ page on Facebook

New Tool Promises to Put Social-Media ROI on Same Footing as Traditional Media

Posted on June 3, 2011 by Steven Copertino

Interesting article in Ad Age about a new tool to measure Social
Media ROI. I think some marketers and finance people are too obsessed with measuring the ROI of Social Media, unless you are talking about a true ecommerce component like some retailers such as Express, JC Penney and others are integrating into their Facebook presence.

Most social media is considered upper funnel activity that drives awareness and consideration. This does ultimately lead to increased purchase activity by makigng your SEM more effective or increasing organic site traffic, but it’s very difficult to tie back to your SM activities due to all the other variables at play.

– Steve Copertino

Marketing Evolution, Telmar Believe Effects Can Be Predicted, Accountable Like Other Media

By: Jack Neff Bio Advertising Age Published: June 03, 2011

Social media has struggled for years to demonstrate return on investment on the same analytical playing field as more established media. Now, Marketing Evolution, which has been working on cross-media analytics for more than a decade, is joining with media planning software provider Telmar to release an ROI tool they say will do just that.

The companies will unveil the Telmar Matterhorn ROI tool, which became available earlier this week for early clients including Interpublic’s Universal McCann, during a presentation at Federated Media Publishing’s Conversational Marketing Summit June 6, the start of Internet Week in New York. That’s fitting, said Marketing Evolution CEO Rex Briggs, because a statement by Federated’s executive chairman, John Battelle, at a conference last year prompted development of the new tool.

“He lamented the fact that there was no way you could put the investment you were making in social media side by side with your TV investments or even digital display to figure out where you should be investing more or how much,” Mr. Briggs said. At that point, Mr. Briggs said he turned to Rick Brunner, a Doubleclick and Google veteran and longtime internet marketing analyst who has headed Marketing Evolution’s work on the project, and said, “We’ve got the data to do that. Why don’t we solve that?”

Mr. Briggs has been conducting cross-media effectiveness analysis with a wide variety of marketers for more than 10 years, adding new media in along the way as they emerge. The Telmar Matterhorn service will be based on data collected in working with clients such as as Unilever, Coca-Cola Co., Nestle, MTV, Time Warner and EA, among others. Inner workings of how the TMR tool evaluates media will be open for inspection, Mr. Briggs said, and open to addition of new media as they emerge.

“A lot of social media, search and digital advertising models just don’t follow the traditional reach and frequency and cost-per-thousand framework that media-planning tools have been using for decades,” he said.

In fairness, marketing-mix modeling now used by many big advertisers already can analyze sales impact from just about any marketing input, given sufficient levels of spending and a sufficiently well-defined time horizon. The problem, however, is that lower levels of spending for digital and social media often get swamped by the impact of higher-reach media, and earned media such as social and PR don’t always work on the same predictable schedule as paid media.

Also, not every campaign has as its objective an immediate sale, often focusing further toward the fat end of the so-called purchase funnel. Mr. Briggs points, for example, to automotive marketing that may aim to get a brand into consideration for a purchase that may not take place for years.

To address this problem, Marketing Evolution years ago began analyzing campaigns based on objectives often besides sales — such as changes in survey responses regarding what brands consumers are considering.

The TMR tool will look at “basically for every dollar you spend, how many people do you influence on whatever that business objective is — building awareness, changing a brand position, generating purchase intent or generating sales,” Mr. Briggs said.

Analyzing much of digital advertising isn’t so different than traditional, given that it operates on similar reach and frequency data and often similar pricing schemes, he said. But social media and other earned media, that is, public relations, depart from those norms in two key ways.

The costs are often structured very differently, with much of it coming in the form of relatively fixed salary or fee costs for internal or agency staff to, say, run a social media monitoring command center, Mr. Briggs said. Traditional analysis tools also often fail to count all or some of the pass-along effect of social media.

Lack of any ROI norms may have been OK when social-media marketing was still in its infancy and considered experimental, he said. But now the discipline has been around a few years — at least in its toddlerhood — and increasingly expected to stand on its own two feet.

“Earned media and the people curating it probably need to be held a bit more accountable today,” Mr. Briggs said.

Seemingly, such programs would have such a short history and wide range of reach, pass along and impact that it would be difficult to predict outcomes based on past experience, which is how the Telmar Matterhorn ROI tool works for other media. But that hasn’t been the case, Mr. Briggs said.

“What we began to see pretty quickly is that there is a range of results just like with any advertising,” he said. “Some TV ads are better than others. Some programs are more conducive to social sharing than others. But there are absolutely common patterns and averages. One thing we can do is say if you spend $100,000 or $1 million, what should you be expecting to get back as results? If you’re not getting these levels, the budget should really trade over to be invested somewhere else.”

At the same time, other ads in traditional media also generate social-media pass along that needs to be calculated, and draw on some of that investment in things like social-media monitoring, Mr. Briggs said. TMR can account for that, but, he said, more important, it aims to calculate the combined impact of media elements, including their synergy, rather than viewing them entirely in isolation.

Procter & Gamble Names Ilonka Laviz New Top Digital Marketer

Posted on May 3, 2011 by Steven Copertino

For the second time in a row, P&G selects an executive who has not held a digital marketing role to be its top digital marketer. What are your thoughts on this?

Always Marketer Assumes Role Held by Lucas Watson

By: Jack Neff – Ad Age Digital Published: May 02, 2011

Procter & Gamble Co. is getting a new top digital executive as Lucas Watson, who has served in that role since 2008, moves to an overseas assignment with the company. He’ll be replaced by Ilonka Laviz, associate marketing director on the Always feminine-care brand.

Mr. Watson referred calls to P&G spokeswoman Tonia Elrod, who confirmed the move and said Mr. Watson would be shifting to a role in P&G’s personal health-care business in Latin America. Ms. Laviz will transition this quarter into the role of marketing director-digital brand-building strategy and global e-commerce in the global brand-building organization. Mr. Watson, based in Panama, will be marketing director in P&G’s personal health-care global business unit.

P&G has substantially stepped up its digital and social-media marketing efforts under Mr. Watson, who reported jointly to Global Brand-Building Officer Marc Pritchard and Alex Tosolini, VP-global e-business. P&G earlier this year consolidated its digital marketing and e-commerce efforts into a single “e-business” unit.

Since Mr. Watson took the job in 2008, P&G has more than tripled measured internet ad spending to $169 million last year, according to Kantar Media. P&G also had one of the most widely watched social-media and viral-video campaigns ever with the “Responses” effort for Old Spice last year. It also had several other videos, particularly for Old Spice and Gillette, notch top spots in the viral-video viewership charts in the past year, launched its own e-store and added click-to-buy options or Facebook commerce for several brands.

Mr. Watson was associate marketing director on Pampers when P&G Global Brand-Building Officer Marc Pritchard selected him for the digital position. He didn’t have direct experience in digital media or marketing prior to that, but had worked with a Pampers brand that had one of the company’s biggest websites and online relationship-marketing programs.

Mr. Pritchard appears to be taking a similar tack with Ms. Laviz. She, too, hasn’t been a digital marketing specialist at any point in her career, but has been a strong supporter of one of P&G’s longest-running online relationship-marketing and community programs, BeingGirl.com, which primarily serves the Always and Tampax feminine-care brands, according to people familiar with the matter.

Always, the brand Ms. Laviz has worked on since 2005, most recently as associate marketing director, has relied far less on TV than other P&G brands in recent years. But measured spending for the brand has been mostly on print, which got 78% of P&G’s $78 million outlay on the brand last year, according to Kantar. TV got 21% and internet received 1%. Kantar data cover online display but don’t pick up spending on search, mobile, or website development and don’t cover the full cost of behaviorally targeted advertising.

Ms. Laviz joined P&G’s finance department 16 years ago in her native Colombia before moving into marketing on the fabric-care business there two years later. She worked out of P&G’s Latin America headquarters in Venezuela starting in 1999, and in 2004 joined the global feminine-care organization, where she helped lead expansion of the Naturella feminine-care brand from Latin America to Russia and Poland.

During her watch on Always in the U.S., the brand launched the unusual and sometimes controversial “Have a Happy Period” campaign from Publicis Groupe’s Leo Burnett, Chicago. That campaign is criticized in an “open letter” to a fictitious P&G brand manager, James Thatcher, that appeared in 2007 and has been making the rounds virally on the internet ever since.

Despite the criticism, P&G’s share in sanitary pads rose from 44.7% in 2006, before the campaign began, to 51.4% in 2009, according to SymphonyIRI data from Deutsche Bank. But Kimberly-Clark Corp.’s U by Kotex launch helped carve 0.5 points off Always’ share last year.

In a 2007 interview with Advertising Age, Ms. Laviz said, “Yes, we understand periods definitely are not the best part of the month. … But it doesn’t have to be that bad.”

The campaign, she said, “started behind the understanding that unlike tampon consumers, the pad user doesn’t want to get rid of her period. Her period is a natural part of being a woman.”

Most women who criticized the campaign, she said, are tampon users, who aren’t the target for the ads.

Strategies for Brands in the Digital Age

Posted on April 13, 2011 by Steven Copertino

I attended a terrific meeting and presentation this morning, hosted by the NY American Marketing Association. The breakfast session was entitled Strategies for Brands in the Digital Age.

The presenter was David Rogers who is the Executive Director of the Center on Global Brand Leadership at Columbia University. Mr. Rogers is also the author of a new book entitled The Network is Your Customer – 5 Strategies to Thrive in a Digital Age.

One of the main points in the book is that there is a new paradigm called the customer network and it needs to be understood, respected and leveraged by companies, but they must never try to control it and there is no need to fear it.

In the old days, there were very few places for consumers to get information about a company and its products and services. Companies were usually the only sources of “reliable” information around. It was an era of mass production and mass communication and the company was clearly in control of the product/service, the message and the brand.

Today, in the digital age and with the explosion of social networking, companies no longer “control” the message or their brands. They influence, guide and nurture the message and brand but they can no longer make misleading claims or define their brand, products and services in a vacuüm like the executive boardroom or at the advertising agency holiday party.

Mr. Rogers goes on to point out that consumers place a higher value on the opinions of friends, colleagues, family and now also those in their social networks, than on corporate ads or paid spokespeople – when it comes to evaluating a product or service.

The book goes on to identify and detail five steps to help companies develop a Customer Network Strategic Plan.
1. Setting Objectives
2. Segmentation & Positioning
3. Strategy Selection & Ideation
4. Execution
5. Measurement

Mr. Rogers also goes on to redefine the infamous purchase funnel, adding a level for loyalty and customer advocacy.

I have only read the first 40 pages but I can’t wait to read the rest. David Rogers’ insights and views and the many case studies he uses to illustrate his points make this book an easy read and a very valuable tool for today’s marketers.

Many thanks to the NY AMA for hosting this session.

Marketers Failing Interactive Part of Interactive Marketing Forrester Study: Consumers Want Cross-Channel Engagement, but Companies Are Falling Behind

Posted on April 6, 2011 by Steven Copertino

By: Jennifer Rooney Published: April 04, 2011

Attention, marketers: You’re falling behind your consumers.

A “huge disconnect” between consumer behavior and marketer behavior persists — thanks largely to CMOs who have not empowered their interactive marketing teams to deliver the consumer experience, consistent across channels, that people expect these days.

CORE test

That’s the message of a Forrester Research report, “The Future of Interactive Marketing,” out today, and explained by Principal Analyst and Research Director Emily Riley. Consumers, Ms. Riley said, “expect the information about them to carry across a mobile, hand-held, call center, website — and that very rarely actually happens. They think that you, as a marketer, should know everything about them and be one step ahead of them in terms of addressing their interests and needs.”

But marketers still lack adequate skills, resources and technology to meet that expectation, she said.

The report found that 30% of large companies have fewer than 15 interactive-staff members. That’s a constraint that limits the interactive team’s ability to use anything other than digital media in executing campaigns. And teams are still, more often than not, siloed in marketing organizations, separate from disciplines such as creative and production. In fact, Ms. Riley’s research leads her to believe that less than a quarter of Fortune 500 companies have effectively integrated interactive marketing teams.

The report’s findings raise imperatives for CMOs in structuring their marketing organizations to deliver on the future of interactive marketing — defined by Forrester not as building online campaigns, but “enabling collaborative customer relationships — through any medium or experience.”

Base: 233 marketers with revenues of $500 million or more. Source: December 2010 US Interactive Markeing Online Executive Panel Survey

“We’re looking back at the last decade as the decade of consumer empowerment; the next decade should be the decade of marketer empowerment. We’ve been talking about consumer empowerment for so long that that’s not really the story anymore,” Ms. Riley said.

Forrester’s solution, detailed in the report and at its Marketing Forum this week? C.O.R.E., which stands for customize, optimize, respond and empower — a proprietary mission and framework.

“Create customized interactions across channels,” Ms. Riley said. “Optimize so that you can deliver in real terms. You might be really good at email or search, but rarely do you have good understanding of the customer’s behavior across all the channels, and that needs to change.

“‘R’ is really that the interactive marketing organization needs to be actually responsive to address consumers’ concerns in real time with people and technology,” she said. “And it goes beyond customer service at this point. It’s about the brand promise. If they like the spokesperson in your campaign, why can’t they talk to them [just like the Man Your Man Could Smell Like in the Old Spice ads]?” Finally, she said, “‘E’ is the empower part for the interactive marketing team: Allow them to test new things.”

Ms. Riley highlighted internet-only marketers, Groupon and Gilt Groupe, as ones that understand these principles extremely well and are adept at tactics like integrating email and social media.

Indeed, “our interactive-marketing team is our marketing team, they’re really one and the same,” said Heather Freeland, CMO of Gilt City, Gilt Groupe’s Groupon competitor. “In the digital space, you’re more inherently thinking this way and you have the channels built in where you can have those conversations with consumers,” she said. Added Elisa Steele, exec VP-CMO at Yahoo: “There is no such thing in my mind as an interactive-marketing department. … So marketing practices, I call them, whether it’s brand or communications or consumer or b-to-b, we’re organized functionally, and every one of those has to be awesome at interactive,” she said.

“Ultimately I think the report spoke to the fact that interactive marketing will become the marketing organization,” Ms. Freeland said. “It’s up to CMOs to find the way to embed that within and among the different groups now rather than keep it completely separate.”

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Twitter to Sell App Install Ads Across Mobile Apps Through MoPub

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What Search Giant’s Social Foray Means Behind the Scenes By: Dave Williams Ad Age Published: July 21, 2011

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Marketing Evolution, Telmar Believe Effects Can Be Predicted, Accountable Like Other Media

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Always Marketer Assumes Role Held by Lucas Watson

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What Search Giant’s Social Foray Means Behind the Scenes
By: Dave Williams Ad Age Published: July 21, 2011