Resources for News
Joe Mandese, Feb 23, 2010 09:19 AM
It may have seemed like a no-brainer when Publicis’ VivaKi unit leaked the findings of an ambitious study to find an alternative to the current online video advertising standard – the pre-roll unit – that consumers might simply prefer select which ads they are shown online, but the real surprise is how much that preference affects the effectiveness of online video advertising. According to detailed findings released Monday at the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Leadership Conference, it is nearly five times more effective.”That’s crazy good,” gushed Tracey Scheppach, the Starcom executive who oversaw the 16-month study, which collaborated with a variety of online video purveyors, including Hulu, who’s AdSelector method was deemed the best new online video advertising format, albeit somewhat modified. Instead of simply enabling users to select, which creative from a given advertising brand they could watch prior to an online video session, the modified approach enabled users to pick brands from different product categories that might be more personally relevant to a user.
The result, Scheppach said during a briefing with Online Media Daily late last week, was that “unaided awareness,” the criteria she prizes most among advertising recall criteria, rose 386% over conventional pre-roll ads evaluated during the test.
“If you love them, set them free,” Scheppach said of the finding, paraphrasing a popular song by Sting. By them, of course, she means the consumer’s ability to choose which ads they see, a concept that has been assumed to boost relevance and recall, but which has never before been validated to the extent of the new research. Specifically, she said, the average findings of the study found that when people select their own ads, they have an unaided awareness of 68% vs. only 14% for standard pre-roll ad exposure.
Another key finding of the research, and one that Scheppach said was personally even more surprising for her, was that when given the option, people selected their own online video ads 45% of the time.
“I was surprised that 45% of them chose, primarily because we didn’t use any sophisticated addressability to it. We basically just took three different ads and put them up there,” she explained.
Asked why the other 55% of users did not proactively pick the ads they were exposed to, Scheppach said half of those respondents said it was because none of the three ads they were able to choose from were personally relevant to them.
“The sophisticated part is that we have to figure out how to serve the most relevant ads to them,” Scheppach said, adding that would be the focus of the next phase of research, which falls under the broader banner of “The Pool,” a series of research studies VivaKi has embarked on to improve the effectiveness of online advertising for its clients, and to boost Publicis’ P&L in the process.
Among other things, the findings of the Pool’s research, and how it is applied, are the intellectual property of Publicis, and the agency holding company is developing a strategy for how to exploit that. Scheppach said that’s still formative, and that the agency ultimately would like to see the entire industry benefit from the findings and utilize the techniques developed through the Pool, but she said the initial application would likely be for Publicis’ agency clients, and that it remained to be seen whether other agencies and marketers would pay Publicis for the privilege of its insights. Among the possible scenarios she said, was the idea of spinning the AdSelector system off into a separate, free-standing business that would service the entire industry. Ad agencies have successfully incubated similar technology solutions in the past. DoubleClick, which the No. 1 ad server in the online industry, which is now owned by Google, for example, was originally incubated at Poppe Tyson, a now defunct ad agency that was part of Bozell, another now defunct ad agency, that has been absorbed into Interpublic.
Scheppach said the commercial exploitation of the AdSelector findings would likely take time to develop, and that the next phase of the research would focus on methods for improving “addressability” and finding ways to get a greater percentage of online users to select the ads they are exposed to.
Study: Mobile Campaigns More Effective (But Still Present Buying Difficulties)
Posted by: | Comments| Mark Walsh, Feb 04, 2010 06:24 PM |
The latest findings from online market research firm InsightExpress suggest that mobile advertising continues to deliver better brand metrics than online advertising. The company found that mobile campaigns through the fourth quarter performed 4.5 to five times better than online ones against norms for measures including unaided and aided awareness, message association, brand favorability and purchase intent. “Online campaigns continue to offer exceptional reach, flexibility and variety,” said Joy Liuzzo, senior director of marketing and mobile research at InsightExpress, in a statement. “However, the high levels of engagement, the explosion in technical capabilities, low levels of clutter and the novelty of mobile advertising all likely contribute to increased brand impact.” Within mobile media, the Internet has proven to be the most effective branding option compared to SMS text and mobile video. Mobile Web campaigns led to increases of 9 percentage points in unaided and aided awareness and 24 percentage points for ad awareness. SMS generated increases of 5 percentage points for unaided awareness, 10 for aided awareness and 18 for ad awareness. Mobile video is still emerging, but shows strength in boosting brand favorability, delivering an increase of 13 percentage points compared to 12 for the mobile Web and 7 for SMS. Mobile campaigns overall led to a higher level of purchase intent than online ones across key consumer categories including travel, auto, retail and technology. But is the novelty factor that’s partly driving better ad results in mobile starting to wear off? During the course of 2009, “upper funnel” brand metrics related to awareness have remained largely unchanged while others like favorability and purchase intent are actually increasing. That trend indicates a greater emphasis on engagement in mobile campaigns. As a more established medium, however, the desktop Web still enjoys the advantage of being easier to buy than mobile. Despite the promise of better return-on-investment, launching a campaign across different handsets, mobile operating systems and networks remains more difficult than selling a brand online. Source: MediaPost -Study: Mobile Campaigns More Effective (But Still Present Buying Difficulties) |
It’s Not ALL About ROI
Posted by: | Commentsby Morgan Stewart, Wednesday, February 3, 2010
In December, I began working on a project with Econsultancy to understand where marketers are allocating their budgets in 2010. Consistent with other reports, we found the migration of budgets from traditional to digital channels continues. In fact, digital marketing budgets will increase by an average of 17% in 2010, and 28% of marketers are migrating at least part of their overall marketing budgets from traditional to online channels. 54% of marketers plan to increase email budgets in 2010. Another 43% plan to keep their email marketing budgets the same, leaving only 3% that will decrease spending on email. So yes, our expertise will be in demand for the foreseeable future.
Questions about how and why budgets are being reallocated are more intriguing. We’re all familiar with reports showing that ROI from email is very good. The DMA reports figures each year and, while we may debate the finer points, few disagree with the general premises that email is very measurable and provides a good return. According to our study, email is one of the most successfully measured marketing channels, along with paid search. As such, it makes sense that people would increase their investment in email and search. However, only 17% say they do a good job measuring ROI from social media, while 70% are planning to increase marketing budgets in this area. Granted, figuring out how to track and calculate ROI for social media is a hot topic. I attended OMMA Social in San Francisco last week and there was a lot of talk about ROI: tracking, proper calculation, allocation, etc. (Sorry, I didn’t walk away with any answers.) But that’s beside the point. The point is that something other than ROI is motivating brands to increase social media budgets — while cutting budgets for print, radio, and television.
So what is? Brand reputation.
While only 41% of marketers use “brand reputation” as a measure of marketing effectiveness, these marketers are significantly more likely to be shifting their budgets from traditional to digital channels than those using other success metrics. Ironically, marketers using ROI as a success metric (65%) were less likely to be shifting their budgets from traditional to digital channels. It’s not that ROI isn’t important. It’s just that these marketers have already made the transition.
Email marketers need to take note of brand reputation as well. Consider:
1) Monitoring brand reputation through social media can help avoid disaster in other areas. Promoting a product or service that is falling flat in the market only perpetuates the problem. By monitoring how your products (or those of your suppliers) are doing in-market through social media, you can get a good feel for which products should, and should not, be featured in your email program. Monitoring social media can also provide much-needed inspiration about the talking points that best highlight your products.
2) Relevance is only getting more important. We are all growing a bit tired of talk about relevance. However, your ability to deliver relevant content impacts your brand’s reputation, both online and offline. As brand reputation becomes a bigger online focus, make sure your email program is enhancing, not detracting, from that reputation.
3) Branding is no longer about simply being known, but being known as good global citizens. Several companies, like Chase Financial Services, have used social media as a tool for getting fans involved in their charitable endeavors. However, as fellow Email Insider Kara Trivunovic wrote recently, some companies have broadcast their relief efforts in Haiti by using email to notify subscribers.
So yes, ROI is a critical success measure. However, your brand’s reputation sets the stage for everything else. If your reputation is tarnished, no channel can be effective, no matter how efficient it is.
Soucre: Mediapost – It’s Not ALL About ROI
The “i” in Privacy
Posted by: | CommentsNew York Times
Trying to ward off regulators, the advertising industry has agreed on a standard icon — a little “i” — that it will add to most online ads that use demographics and behavioral data to tell consumers what is happening. Read the whole story….
Will 2010 be mobile advertising’s big year?
Posted by: | CommentsJanuary 10, 2010
The Mobile Advertising Ecosystem
Mobile ads can be delivered in the form of messages like SMS and MMS, banner and full-page ads on Mobile Internet sites, mobile search ads, in-application advertising and mobile video. Mobile ad impressions are generally bought at cost per thousand (CPM) or cost per click (CPC). The main measures of success are the number of users reached, click through rate (CTR) and the number of actions — for example, number of downloads — prompted by the ad. SMS and MMS are still considered the most effective advertising channel, with correspondingly higher pricing. Most users will read at least part of an SMS received.
Mobile ad networks distribute mobile ads to publishers like mobile websites, application developers and mobile operators. The cheapest way to advertise is via a blind ad network where advertisers can’t pick specific publishers but can often target by country and content channel. Admob and InMobi fit into this category. Premium ad networks like AOL or Nokia focus on a limited number of prestige publishers like mobile operators and specific big-traffic sites, and the advertiser pays extra to target those sites specifically. Some larger publishers and mobile operators run their own ad platform, like the one supplied by Amsterdam-based startup MADS. There are also many small players who supply niche services. Mobclix, for example, is an ad exchange startup targeting smart phones via multiple ad networks. Finally, there are the publishers themselves such as eBuddy, maker of one of the most popular mobile IM applications.
Where Is the Money?
The US mobile ad market was estimated to be around $416 million in 2009. While the majority of US mobile ad spending still goes to messaging like SMS, spending on applications and search is on the rise. MADS Sales Director Jasper de Vreught says, “We do see a development where the average spend per campaign is significantly increasing. CPC will become more important, whereas in the premium model, CPM is now still the predominant charging model.“
Mobclix supplied me with some data (not shown here) on the highest yielding application categories in October 2009. This data was from 4000+ applications with a 70% reach across iPhones and iPod touches.
The most popular finance applications (the top 100 serving ads) made 4.5 times the average advertising revenue of the top ad-serving applications overall, while social networking applications make 3.9 times the average and education applications 3.7 the average. So if you are a developer trying to make revenue from advertising, social networking looks like a great choice, since it has high ad revenue and fewer competing applications (2,098 as opposed to 17,147 in entertainment) than other categories. Gaming, on the other hand, looks like it is becoming saturated.
The most popular entertainment applications only make 0.8 times the average top applications. Despite very high CTR, utilities were also only making 0.8 times the average in October 2009 because of a lack of high-end advertisers. However, by December 2009 this had increased to 1.7 times the average due to an increase in advertisers focusing on specific types of users and apps.
IM application eBuddy recently started serving mobile ads. According to eBuddy founder Jan-Joost Rueb, “Mobile is rapidly growing even though we started only a few months ago. Mobile advertising revenue is higher than revenue from [eBuddy's non-ad-supported] pro versions right now. ”
Targeting and Technology
One of the most attractive characteristics of mobile for advertisers is the opportunity for more accurate ad targeting. Typical parameters include carrier, device type and mobile channel, with the possibility to add location, behavioral, and demographic information (the latter often requires user opt in). Frequency of use, reach and usage context are the important factors when inserting ads into applications. However, MADS founder Ashu Mathura contends that current targeting software still only does about 25% of what is needed.
MADs did a H&M campaign in which ads were served to two groups of users: all users, and those who had already clicked on a H&M ad. Unsurprising, the campaign has a much higher response in the second user group. Based on this insight, it might make sense to create a sequence of ads as part of a campaign, where a second ad in the sequence is only served to users who have clicked through the first. I could certainly see myself being interested in ads that remind me when the H&M sale starts and offers a voucher if I make it to the second or third ad. MADS also sees potential in the idea of users opting in for certain types of ads in return for rewards like discounts.
Interesting developments on the technology side include interactive video advertising (introduced last year by Admob) and making greater use of smartphone features such as the accelerometer and camera, such as for augmented reality ads.
Mobile Advertising in 2010
Most players see Google’s Admob acquisition as an endorsement of the mobile ad market in general. InMobi, which is the only ad network to reach profitability other than Admob, thinks that the industry is at the 1.0 stage. According to Anne Frisbee (Head of North America at InMobi), the acquisition has actually occurred “quite early in the evolution of the industry”.
Jasper de Vreught from MADS says that in the future “there will be a clearer division between two business models: the “long tail model” like AdWords and AdMob, and the “premium model” like Doubleclick and MADS, which are aiming to build a network of premium publishers and attract premium advertisers. MADS’ Mathura also says that while there is a lot of focus on downloaded apps right now, most of this functionality is likely to move into the cloud, and there’ll be a corresponding impact on how advertising is done.
According to eBuddy, the media agencies have still not really embraced mobile and tend to stick to the old and proven formula. Rueb says “It’s important for eBuddy to get the premium advertisers on board. There are too many VAS (value-added services) advertisers like ring tones right now.” Other players say similar things. Advertisers still like to see things like TV spots, which they understand, even though this is often not rational in terms of return on investment. Maybe 2010 will be the year when advertisers start seeing mobile less as an experiment and more as a serious part of their campaigns.
Source: Mobile Beat: Will 2010 be mobile advertising’s big year?
