The Laredo Group has just updated it’s digital marketing glossary and industry resource guide.
Continuously updated, the glossary offers over 450+ important industry terms and definitions and the resource guide lists over 500 of the most important resources you need to know about from over 30 different areas of the digital marketing industry.
This is a FREE download. Get yours today by clicking here.
(Orginally posted on www.advertising-in-motion.com)
For over the past 150 years, US companies have been actively involved in the process of advertising their products and services to a wide-range of consumers. The mechanics of most of these marketing efforts has been based on the concept of ‘reach and frequency’, namely - getting the advertising in front of as many eyeballs as possible. In a nutshell, the more people who see the ad the more new customers will be acquired. Or so we like to think.
There is little doubt that exposure to a brand or service increases the number of customers for that brand or service. But the mass marketing models of yesteryear are also highly inefficient and often rely on large numbers without being able to real measure if individual marketing programs are moving the needle or not.
The challenge most traditional media faces is that marketers are unable to know exactly how this media is being ‘consumed’ by consumers. For example, an advertiser can easily measure if a 30 second commercial spot has been played as contracted with a media outlet but can’t get a clear picture of exactly how many people saw the ad, how many understood the offer, how many made a mental note to check out the offer in the future…and how many were in the kitchen making a snack when the commercial ran.
One of the greatest advantages that online advertisers have today is the ability to accurately measure how their advertising is being ‘consumed’. The internet is a dynamic environment. Nothing online takes place without a consumer making a decision every step of the way. And every single point of contact between consumers and advertisers can be measured as well. This means that the guessing game has gone out of advertising. It’s no longer about getting an ad in front of as many people as possible, it’s now about getting the right message in front of the greatest number of people who will respond to that ad in some way. Measure how consumers are interacting with an ad and you can measure the overall effectiveness of that ad. Every single click.
This advertising accountability also means that marketers can measure campaign results during every stage of the campaign and don’t have to wait until the ‘smoke clears’ at the end of the campaign to determine success or failure. This means that no campaign’s fate is set in stone but gives advertisers plenty of time to make changes to the creative, the media buy and any other points of campaign optimization which can mean the difference between a successful campaign and a disaster.
If you’re interested in learning more about how online advertising campaigns can be tracked and measured, I invite you to check out a brand new full-day training course called “Intelligent Research, Targeting & Measurement of Online Ads & Audiences“ offered through The Laredo Group. This training focuses on helping marketers better understand the online marketing process and how to plan campaigns which can be measured and optimized along the way to greatly improve marketing results. You can learn more about the schedule and costs of these training programs at http://www.laredogroup.com/seminars3.asp.
Today was Media Post’s first iteration of a conference specifically focused on the topic of ad networks. (OMMA Ad Nets) I moderated a panel entitled “”Buyers Place Their Bets: Are Networks Living Up to Their Hype?” (details on the panel at the end of this post).
You know, sometimes one can get caught up in the sizzle of social media and mobile and all the great new media channels to reach and engage consumers, and lose sight of the steak of the mainstream digital media world. Today was one of those days that reminded me about that, and the several billion dollars generated by ad networks each year. Ad networks were once a mundane source of cheap remnant inventory at scale, but have seriously evolved. Vertical ad networks are aggregating audience contextually, while horizontal ad networks have become purveyors of sophisticated technology, algorithms and data, which helps agencies and marketers reach specific audiences based on a myriad of criteria. We see the application of data and technology to media and audiences evolving constantly. Some prime examples - AOL’s purchase of Tacoda in 2007 helped to create the largest network on the internet, Platform A, and more recently Akamai’s recent acquisition of Acerno to “…benefit the ecosystem of ad networks, online publishers and Internet advertisers by providing them with real-time, actionable data to serve more relevant marketing messages”, as stated by Mike Afergan, Akamai’s chief technology officer and SVP of Advertising Decision Solutions.
As a digital media-ologist, if you will, one theme stood out the most today at OMMA Ad Nets…
The large scale media agencies will eventually all have their own ad hoc networks: Data and technology are not only intrinsic to the network model, but competition is pushing the envelope. Soon we will see some of the data ownership shift to the agencies. There is tremendous power and efficiency when you control the data. Apparently, Havas Digital claims to have profiled 1/3 of the internet population and now issues “open insertion orders” for multiple clients at once. Their controlled data points dictate which client’s ads to serve against any given impression.
Don Epperson from Havas Digital was very upfront about it - in fact his keynote focused on Havas’ adNetic product that they developed to control the data and develop ad hoc networks, while other agencies were not as willing to share their strategies and direction in the regard. But make no mistake about it - the big agencies are stepping up. Scale is always a point of discussion when it comes to ad networks, behavioral targeting and generally applications of online advertising technology. Well, if it’s scale you want, look no further than the big media agencies.
_________________________________________________________________________________________
Buyers Place Their Bets: Are Networks Living Up to Their Hype?
After hearing the horizontal and vertical nets debate their case, our panel of media buyers enters the fray. Do they buy the arguments from the vertical networks that they curate and cultivate specialized content so advertisers get better and broader reach for niche audiences? Is this vertical inventory really more valuable to a buyer than the targeted remnants from a horizontal channel? Which of these models is aggregating the mid and long tail most effectively? Vertical networks help smaller and independent publishers get better CPMs. They are designed to capture what they hope are more engaged and receptive audiences for advertisers. Are they living up to their own hype? Is this argument over content quality important to buyers, or are most of them still just buying any kind of lightly targeted eyeballs? Our panel of media buyers and marketers explore whether the many offerings represent a fad or a model and whether more value really is being injected into the marketplace.
Moderator: Jason Heller, EVP, The Laredo Group
Lauren Boyer, Partner and Chief Global Strategist, Underscore Marketing
Russell Fradin, President, Adify
Shane Kay, VP, Digital Negotiations Director, Ford Motor Media
Joanna O’Connell, Razorfish NYC
Nate Woodman, SVP Strategic Development, Havas Digital
Another week - another slough of progressive announcements from the industry leading giant.
Google made two announcements this week, one focused for small businesses and one focused on large agencies.
Honing in on the huge market of small businesses that use AdWords for text only buys, Google released a tool that helps these clients quickly and easily build display ads. They describe it as: “… lets you create professional-looking display ads in AdWords without needing to hire a designer or start from scratch…” I haven’t kicked the tires on it, but it looks better than the MySpace MyAds builder tool that I wrote about earlier this week, which was a little rigid (v.1.0, updates to a tool like this are easy and surely will follow). Specifically the AdWords display ad builder forces a best practice or two like highlighting a call to action, this is intrinsically built into the tool.
On the agency side of town, Google has tied reporting of GoogleTV inventory into the COREMedia reporting interface, which has become pretty much the de facto standard among most mid to large agencies that buy a lot of DRTV. By tying GoogleTV reports into the CORE system, agencies can analyze results and optimize media schedules faster and more efficiently. By the way, since CORE also integrates seamlessly into Donovan and other popular agency billing systems, in theory, will make it more attractive for agencies to buy ads through GoogleTV.
While most of the industry is wondering how the troubled economic climate will affect their businesses, Google continues to laugh their way to the bank. It’s actually quite an interesting beast to watch growing before our eyes.
As social network’s Facebook and MySpace continue to drive mind boggling consumer usage, certain activities bubble to the top as immensely popular. Among those activities is photo sharing. Doug Beaver, part of Facebook’s engineering team posted a note today with some interesting facts about the amount of photos posted, shared and served on Facebook. These stats put Facebook over the previously recognized largest photo sharing site, Photobucket, which has been rolled into MySpace after last year’s $250 million acquisition.
The question on everyone’s mind…
If a photo’s worth a thousand words, how much market cap are 10 billion photos worth?
Of course the power behind social media is not the advertising options, but rather the ability to monitor, learn from and connect with consumers. However, there are plenty of advertising opportunities as well, and each focuses on tapping into the social graph to create relevancy.
After months in beta, MySpace finally officially rolled out the MyAds program, allowing for self serve ad creation and targeted placement throughout all of MySpace. For the record, this is the same program that larger advertisers had access to for some time (”hyper-targeted ads”), but now the program is available to the advertising masses…a la Google and more directly Facebook. Personally, I think this will be embraced by small advertisers in droves. While not a pull medium like search, the ability to specifically target consumers based on relevant interest is powerful, albeit I do not think that MySpace’s program, is anywhere as powerful as Facebook’s Social Ads platform.
Yesterday Google revealed some new information on the beta testing they have been doing with in-game advertising. Apparently the beta was conducted with Sprint, Sony & eSurance. include video, sponsorships & integration and extend into social gaming, which means even on MySpace & Facebook. The new foray into delivering in-game ads is described as an extension of the Ad Sense program and it will be integrated into the Ad Words advertiser interface, allowing easy extension of existing Ad Sense programs into the gaming network, but it feels like this is something that Doubleclick made possible. I guess it doesn’t really matter (except to a media geek like me). Either way, we are watching the Google empire grow before our eyes - the first Android phone officially hits the market this month, Google TV is evolving and with the current economic state of affairs, will most likely gain even more traction, and now the roll out of Google in-game. Wow - talk about being recession resistant! Note to self - buy Google stock in the down market…
google-extends-reach-into-games
I had the good fortune of bumping into a former Laredo Group training attendee at the MIXX conference in NYC last week and she invited me to drop by the her new employer’s (Pandora.com) booth to check out what they offered.
I’ve been a fan of internet radio for year mostly because it allowed me to better select the types of music I wanted to listen to while I worked. Pandora offered a similar model to what I had seen but with a pretty significant twist – It learns what music to serve me in the future based on my selections today.
Pandora learns what you want to listen to by first asking you to set up a station and selecting a few of your favorite musical artists/groups to help seed the list and get things started. It then dips into its massive archive of songs and starts making suggestions for tracks it thinks match your current tastes. As each track comes up in the playlist Pandora allows you to select whether you like the song or not by clicking on thumbs up and thumbs down icons. As a result, your personal playlist gets more and more refined and the vast majority of the songs that come up reflect a sounds and musical genres that you enjoy.
While the musical aspects are impressive, one of the things that caught my eye is the advertising approach that Pandora is using. Firstly, unlike traditional radio, Pandora works best through interaction with listeners. You could certainly have the music running in the background all day without ever looking at the Pandora page. However, the ability to control your playlist is empowering and offers a certain level of engagement. In turn, this engagement means that you need to view the Pandora playlist screen periodically to vote on how well you like the current and previous tracks. Every time you click, the page automatically refreshes to present a new ad which you can’t help but pay attention to.
The ads currently seem to be general in their scope but I can see Pandora adding a targeting feature to the advertising in the future which take into consideration the genre and age of the majority of tunes being selected as a way of better defining the age, genders and interest levels of listeners.
Rob Graham
The short answer - I sure hope so! We need a universal standard and although it does not exist yet, ScanBuy seems to have the leg up on creating a global standard. They currently read both their proprietary code format as well as other QR codes. This doesn’t mean that they will monopolize the market, but certainly does give them a head start to remaining the major player for some time.
(Not familiar with QR codes yet? On your mobile browser go to www.scanlife.com and download the appropriate software for your mobile device. Then scan the Laredo Group QR code to the right)
Earlier this year it was announced that Sprint would promote the installation of the ScanBuy reader. When I saw the ad (at the bottom of this post) in Wired magazine in Dec 2007 promoting the Scanbuy reader I was really excited. Here we are one year later and nothing.
For some reason the US is lagging behind in the QR code market, and I just don’t get it. QR codes can be a great way to activate and marketing and even non-marketing communications in all channels, and in a fairly engaging manner. Is it because our phone models and high speed data connections have lagged behind? That’s my main guess. Of course, using QR codes requires a level of education among consumers on how to use the technology, but the benefits are certainly there and we all have a vested interest in becoming part of the solution in our own ways.
Scanbuy announced that it has secured a global agreement with Samsung, the second largest phone manufacturer in the world (samsung is expected to sell over 200 million handsets in 2008). As part of the deal Samsung will preload the ScanLife mobile 2D barcode application on Samsung’s camera phones. Samsung will begin selling these phones in Spain, Italy, and Denmark starting as early as next month. Availability will quickly expand to other major markets including Mexico and the United States. Samsung’s extensive line of popular phones includes the Blackjack, Glyde, and the recently released Instinct.
Once this rolls out in the US, we will have a consumer base with a pre-installed QR code reader among the 18% of the market that Samsung represents. The ScanBuyreader is also currently available in the iPhone App Store, but I don’t know how embraced it is. Since next year has been the year for mobile for several years now - next year really does seem to be a good year for mobile marketing.
This week Leslie Laredo and I had an opportunity to catch up with old friend (and the former editor of yours truly) Rebecca Lieb to discuss the state of the state and to share some of the observations we made at the MIXX conference earlier this week.
This morning Rebecca posted an article which takes a hard look at the recent changes in digital media and why being younger in the field may be an automatic plus. Worth checking out. Click here to read the full article.
