GRPs vs. the Click

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Social Brand Channel

Social Brand Channel – A Way to Move Beyond the Banner

The call by marketers, agencies and media companies alike to move beyond the banner ad is not new but essentially gone unanswered.   Social Media has evolved not as a solution to the above challenge but an alternative.  As such if media companies want to sell beyond the banner they need to offer something other than banner ad placements.

While social media has been embraced by all integration with paid display usually lives on the landing page or the occasional “like” button built into the ad.  The opportunity for integrating social into display media however should not live within the banner ad but in the design and layout offered by the media companies in the form of a Social Brand Channel.

The reason the banner ad lives primarily in the form of 728x90 and 300x250 ad slots is due to efficiency of deployment.   The complex delivery system of ad servers working across networks, publisher sites and agencies has settled into a necessary system of scale but resulted in significant commoditization of the space.

Ad servers are actually content servers and as such can deliver virtually any form of media from YouTube videos, Flick’r photo galleries, Twitter conversation feeds, blog RSS feeds and Facebook conversation streams.  Any number of these assets can easily be formatted into a social media brand channel of assets on a media publisher’s website and synchronized with the primary branding elements of a banner ad.  Most social media feeds can easily be modified to fit a 300x250 width without any sort of creative expense or development.

The standard 300x250 wide column on most websites creates a clear opportunity to blend branding and social media based content into a Social Brand Channel offering consumers greater opportunities of engagement and entertainment with the brand.  For marketers, this allows their deployments to push social media content into branded environment creating greater opportunities for engagement with consumers.

Media companies in particular benefit as they can now sell the full column length at a higher CPM reducing reliance on low CPM ad networks.  This move allows everyone to focus on the page view vs. the ad impression to measure delivery and while offering a greater number of engagement points that can be measured through social media tools in conjunction with standard media and web analytics.

From where I stand, if media companies moved towards offering Social Brand Channels as their primary media offering, it would create a #Winning scenario for all.

Ad Agencies and Media Companies Evolve Into Competitors

Agencies, PR firms, media companies and brands use to have their place.  But it has been a long time since the Mad Men days and the respectful rules of the old guard are quickly dissipating as companies grab an ever-diverse range of marketing funds. 

For starters media companies have been hammered by shrinking media budgets and fragmented audiences whose undivided attention has spread across a number of screens and portable devices.  The evolution of online media space has been commoditized below any level to support operational revenue needs and for many the very future of their existence is questionable at best. 

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Facebook and Online GRPs

For brand advertisers with a focus on reach and frequency goals many of text ad programs on sites like Facebook and Linkedin can be counter productive.  Facebook in particular offers a neat planning tool, which delivers that total potential reach on their site of any specific target group.  However this is just a starting number and the audience is actually sub-segmented into a large and very unknown number of sub-audiences. 

As your campaign launches the Facebook system automatically begins to auto-optimize out sub-segments, which are non-performing from a CTR perspective quickly whittling away delivery

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Active and Engaged Audiences

It is somewhat ironic that online ad reps sell consumer engagement as a key reason to purchase inventory on their website.  The pitch is often the same and goes something like this: “We have the most active and engaged audience of any online publisher out there.” 

Along the way I have stumbled across an unfortunate conclusions: active and engaged audiences are great for publishers in terms of generating ad space but not so good for advertisers looking for direct response or engagement with their ads. 

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Old Spice Case Study

Old Spice viral video case study featuring the Old Spice man.  The viral campaign resulted in an increase of sales by 27%.

The campaign actually did encourage me to pick up a stick of Old Spice underarm deodorant unfortunately after one or two times of use it was rotated to the backup position of desirable deodorants.

Coca-Cola Hapiness Truck

Cool little video viral deployment by Coca-Cola on YouTube.com.

Local Marketing Strategies vs. Local Digital Agencies

The emergence of Groupon, FourSquare, Facebook and Twitter signal a new evolution in local marketing and one that does not include the agency. 

Online marketing and digital support services provided by local agencies for local business are often extremely difficult to scale at a profitable level.  The demands of digital require a wide range of resources and knowledge to effectively implement which exceed both what a local business can pay for or a small local agency can staff. 

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Facebook Reach and Frequency Campaigns

For brand advertisers with a focus on reach and frequency goals many of text ad programs on sites like Facebook and Linkedin can be counter productive.  Facebook in particular offers a neat planning tool, which delivers that total potential reach on their site of any specific target group.  However this is just a starting number and the audience is actually sub-segmented into a large and very unknown number of sub-audiences. 

As your campaign launches the Facebook system automatically begins to auto-optimize out sub-segments, which are non-performing from a CTR perspective quickly whittling away delivery and reach of the broader audience.  Conversely the frequency can greatly increase on a daily level well beyond the desired level you might be looking to achieve for the remaining target audience. 

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Integration of Pointroll with Dart for Advertisers (DFA)

Integration of Pointroll with Doubleclick Dart for Advertisers is now available.  (DFA)

Over the years one of the primary issues in utilizing Rich Media providers such as Pointroll, Eyewonder and Eyeblaster is the necessity to manually merge performance data between the provider and Dart for Advertisers.  Hence, for many media campaigns it often made sense to default to Dart’s MOTIF. 

However I was please to learn today that Pointroll is now able to push performance data into Dart for Advertisers through Dart’s open API.  However Dart does not typically offer this up as a solution and will not take requests directly from Pointroll but directly from the agency or client. 

I am assuming that this is probably possible with Eyewonder and Eyeblaster as well though I have honestly not looked into yet.

Google Calendar Invites Go to Wrong Email Address

Google Gmail calendar invites features an unwanted glitch, which will cause meeting requests to go to the unintended email address.  Here is an explanation of why and how to fix it. 

Recently I set up a Gmail account to serve as a corporate marketing account to access various Google services.  Immediately various vendors who were using Google Gmail accounts, Google domain mail and Google’s paid email service to send calendar invites to my corporate email address were not making it through.

At first I thought they were getting caught up in our corporate spam filter but later I would find these calendar invites showing up in my recently created Gmail/Google account inbox.  This came as a surprise since the Gmail account I created was never circulated or used for communication with vendor. 

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Ad Shuffle

Review of ad serving solution Ad Shuffle in both agency and publisher environments when compared to Google/Doubleclick’s Dart and Microsoft’s Atlas. 

Ad Shuffle

Every now and then over the years I would pick up a small client who could not afford a full fledge agency but in need of someone who could deliver an end to end digital solution from website development to deploying search and display media campaigns.  Clients of this nature are rarely financially worthwhile to engage with but they often provide the opportunity to test new ideas, low cost technologies and strategies in a more controlled environment. 

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Social Radar 3

Infegy, provider of the industry’s most intelligent social media monitoring and analytics platform, today unveiled Social Radar 3, providing enterprises, market research firms and digital marketing agencies with actionable intelligence delivered through the industry’s fastest and most accurate analytics platform. With detailed sentiment analysis pulling from more than 40 million Web sources over the past four years, a rich user interface, improved usability, and a packaged

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Icre8t Results represents a new breed of agencies

Icre8t Results is a new Atlanta digital agency which launched last year and headed by CEO Diane Myer.   What is truly interesting about Icre8t’s approach to digital marketing is that they are not a traditional advertising shop moving towards digital or a digital shop attempting to bring brand marketing into the fold but from day one they have been one of the first truly medium agnostic agencies I have seen.

Diane Myer is a long time digital expert in the Atlanta interactive scene and formed her agency out of a combined background in traditional marketing on the brand side and digital experience from working in some of Atlanta’s top digital agencies.  From day one she had decided that she was going to build Icre8t from the ground up with an agnostic approach to marketing but backed by savvy digital chops.

In the short time ICre8t has been around Diane has already landing clients such as Kodak and – well, a few big names which might be a little premature to announce.  But in a time when the agency model is in transition her approach is unique to the marketplace and was molded out of years of firsthand seeing where both traditional and digital shops often fail.

To be fair I have known Diane over multiple careers extending back to when I was on the media sales side of the business and later working together at the same agency.  Serving as the VP of Business Development of WPP Shop Studiocom she was often on the front lines in seeing how the relationships between digital shops and traditional shops often worked together or in many cases worked against the needs of the client.

There is often a desire by most agencies to push areas of service where they are either strongest or where they wish to grow a new area of service offering.  Both are often short sited and deliver highly biased opinions and recommendations to a client.  Diane was of the mindset years ago to one day build an agency where the world of digital skill sets and traditional offline media and brand marketing could move fluidly based on what would actually work for her clients.

I am glad to see that she has finally built what most clients have long since been asking for.



B to B Magazine

The fine folks at B to B magazine have kindly invited me to join their Atlanta conferance as a panel speaker on the subject of B to B marketing.

Event

Some of the other panel speakers include Jeff Perkins of AutoTrader.com, Terri Beck of LexisNexis, and Mike Miller Director of Marketing Operations at Equifax.

The End of the Google Content Network?

The end of the Google Content Network may or may not happen – but high-paying eCPMs to publishers for quality content is close.

The Google Content Network as an advertising medium is potentially facing its greatest threat – itself. Over the last year, Google has been quietly and slowly modifying the Google Ad Manager Platform into DART for Small Publishers.  At the same time, both the Google Content Network and the Google Ad Exchange platform have also been merged and integrated into both DART for Publishers and DART for Small Business publishers.  In essence, advertisers on the 24/7 Real Media ad network can now show up in ad space filled through the Google AdSense publisher network or, if allowed, any publisher site utilizing DFP or DFP for Small Business.

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Internet Television and GRPS

Whenever I hear buzz about a new evolution in online marketing or media technologies changing the digital landscape (ultimately followed by a predictive timeline of some sort), I always multiply that number by 3. Not only does it always seem to take far longer than anybody would predict, but also long after people have even stopped caring or talking about the arrival.

Web TV – or Internet Television – and a supportive ad platform is yet another one of those evolutions.  Now that it is finally here at a mass level, I’m amazed at how little chatter there is in the industry trade publications.

For the last 11 years, there have been countless incarnations of various content distribution and ad models supporting the long-awaited transformation of the broadcast world into the online digital era.  There has always been an industry-wide predictive thought that Internet television would be primarily browser-driven, supported by online video pre-rolls served through an ad server.  The lack of truly integrated internet television devices on the market have been very slow to arrive, leading consumers to take the initiative by hooking up the family PC in the living room to their 50” flat screen to create their own version of Internet television.

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Facebook Campaign Setup

Facebook’s self managed tool for running online ads has quickly become a hit with buyers and planners at both big and small agencies alike because on the surface, it seems easy to use.  But much like Google search, the tool has a large number of issues to be aware of.

The primary advantage of the platform is the ability to target users based on their own self-described preferences be it their job title or personal interests.  While this is unique to Facebook and a few other sites Linked-in there are already a large number of companies popping up offering technologies which target users based on their published social profiles.  Long term I believe Facebook will need to expand their ad platform outside of Facebook in order to keep from being usurped by other companies.

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