On Monday, Tapjoy announced the appointment of Patrick Seybold as vice president of global communications and marketing partnerships. The San Francisco-based mobile advertising platform says that Seybold will be responsible for all of Tapjoy’s consumer media strategies. “Patrick is a seasoned professional and an ideal fit to help lead Tapjoy's global communications team," said Mihir Shah, CEO of Tapjoy in a statement. "He offers a unique perspective within this space and brings with him a proven track record of developing strategies that will strengthen Tapjoy's position as a leader in the mobile industry."
Emeryville-based Lyris unveiled a digital marketing platform Tuesday resembling an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system built to support online advertising, part of an effort to rebuild and rebrand the company. The transformation began two years ago after Wolfgang Maasberg stepped in as Lyris CEO. The company shuttered several products, reconfigured a global sales organization, and reduced the employee count from 292 employees to 165. Lyris ONE analyzes data gathered from structured and unstructured sources like social, email, mobile and hundreds of enterprise applications that power interactive marketing campaigns. Creating a segment once took days after the database batched and marketers ran reports; the platform now allows marketers to create the segment while reviewing the data. These days "the customer becomes the channel," said Alex Lustberg, VP of marketing at Lyris. It means consumers don't care what device they access information from, so marketers must connect all messages across screens to create a consistent experience. The data collected through JavaScript tagging and a partnership built with data integration company Talend doesn't require the platform to identify the screen, but rather the behavior on the device. As the marketing front office becomes the next frontier for enterprise software, building ERP platforms for multichannel digital advertising and make the data available to marketers is an alternative to silos. "Marketers are a little afraid of owning data projects, but they need the information to target," Lustberg said. A Corporate Executive Board study of nearly 800 marketers at Fortune 1000 companies found the majority of marketers still rely too much on intuition, with only 11% of customer-related decisions integrating data, cites Lyris. Today's campaigns are aided by integrating marketing analytics that help determine the most profitable market segments. Lyris One also automates email and social exchanges and SMS notifications for mobile and data feeds for display retargeting. It's unclear whether the company plans to build out campaign creation tools for display or take in data from an ad network.
Jeff Karp, Zynga's chief marketing and revenue officer, is the latest high-level executive to leave the embattled social games company. His resignation follows news earlier Monday that CTO of infrastructure Allan Leinwand was leaving Zynga to join cloud service company ServiceNow. Other who have left the San Francisco company in recent weeks include COO John Schappert, Chief Creative Officer Mike Verdu, and Alan Patmore, general manager of “CityVille,” one of Zynga's best-known games. In a statement released Monday, the company said: “Jeff Karp is leaving Zynga, and the groups in his organization have been realigned under appropriate existing divisions. Our marketing and revenue teams have always been industry leaders, and as we continue our transition toward mobile and multiplatform game creation and distribution, their continued execution will be key to our future success.” Karp joined Zynga only about a year ago from gaming powerhouse Electronic Arts, where he was head of revenue for EA's Games label. The recent downturn in Zynga's stock price is a likely a key factor in the recent exodus of top managers from the company. It shares closed Monday at $2.82 after hitting a high of $14.69 on March 2. Zynga reported a second-quarter loss, with adjusted earnings and revenue below Wall Street's modest expectations. It lost $22.8 million during the quarter, down from $1.4 million in the year-earlier period. The announcement of Karp's departure comes just days after Zynga released “FarmVille 2,” the sequel to its hugely popular farming sim game.
Beyond educating students (and generating football mascots), universities are the world's most powerful crucibles of invention and progress. But as universities nationwide are seeing their budgets get buried by fiscal undertakers, one state system is going on the offensive with an integrated campaign meant to remind people that work done by academic researchers and artists defines how we live, who we are, and how we'll survive. The University of California's Office of the President has launched its first digital video campaign, "Onward California," comprising viral content about six alumnae and professors across the system's 10 campuses. The films, the first branded digital content from UC, unspool over the next three months, with features about luminaries like astronomer Steve Vogt, who has done groundbreaking research on extra-solar planets. The first episode launches Sept. 11 with a feature on John Bowers, director of the Institute for Energy Efficiency at UC-Santa Barbara. Bowers created a project called Ignite to Light, a solar-powered system meant to give lighting to people in countries without reliable electricity. Others featured include astronomer Steven Vogt, co-discover of Gliese 581 g, the first potentially Earth-like extra-solar planet; Terrie Williams, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at UC-Santa Cruz; Roger Bales, professor of Engineering, UC-Merced & director of the Sierra Nevada Research Institute; and artist Glenn Kaino. The trailer, which is running on UC's YouTube page, ends with Bales saying, "If California can't save the world, I don't know who can." Says Jason Simon, director of marketing at UC’s office of the president, "Within higher education as a whole, we are becoming much more marketing savvy. Branding is becoming more and more important for us. It's about growing broad-based support." He explains to Marketing Daily that the campaign is one of several ongoing efforts to make sure California's public understands the value of the state university system. "We are in midst of a fourth year of dramatic budgets cuts; we have seen $1 billion cut from state funding with a dramatic impact on tuition, so it's really transforming the face of a public institution. We are hoping to ignite what we know is a passive sense of support for the university. So this is not a recruitment effort, it's a brand effort: the real intent is to make sure people know what the university does and that the enterprise is beyond educating students." The effort includes a fall experiential tour making about 35 stops around the state, says Simon. "Athletics and culture are ways to engage alumnae and community, but there are other ways. And University of California research touches our lives on a daily basis." He says market research shows strong support for the university system. "Support for higher education and for UC is high both among voters and alumnae," he says. "They get the university's role as an economic driver. But where we fall short is in their understanding of how it touches their lives." The campaign will also involve each campus's social media fan base. "This is a really big and important problem for a really influential brand."
As all eyes turn to San Francisco this week for the kinda-annual ritual unveiling of the next iPhone, mobile marketers may well be asking, how does this really matter to me? Other than simply driving ever skyward the sexiness of mobile and deepening the love affair we already have with devices, there are some tangible effects of an iPhone release that impact developers and marketers. The App Store goes bonkers. According to app marketing firm Fiksu, the effects of a new iPhone release on the traffic, download volume and attendant marketing costs around app distribution are substantial and long-lasting. The company reiterated some of its learning from the iPhone 4S release in 2011 and now expects a similar effect. While the iPhone 5 will be introduced tomorrow, rumors anticipate a street date of late next week. One of the things that marketers should expect is the effect of pent-up demand on the app ecosystem. Between September and October last year as the iPhone 4S appeared, Fiksu recorded an increased app download volume of a whopping 29%. This increase in volume of people in the system also helped deflate the average cost of attaining a “loyal” app use, or one who reopens an app more than a couple of times. The dip in acquisition costs actually dropped last year from $1.64 in September to $1.47 in October. But the lower costs extended into November right before the holiday scurry to attain new app customers. Obviously Fiksu has a vested interest in promoting app marketing. But the company quotes industry sources who are saying that more than 20 million iPhone 5 units could flow into the system in coming months, with perhaps 8 to 10 million of them in just the last weeks of this month. Many of the iPhone 4 owners who did not go for the “S” last year will be looking to upgrade. Fiksu recommends, of course, that marketers make the most of the opportunity and market to the new app users early and before they get expensive. Well, okay -- maybe. What is also true about a new handset with new visual qualities like a longer screen is that users also revisit old apps. I expect many informational apps will simple add more data in the newfound space. But some apps with challenging interfaces and microscopic detail (yeah, I am talking to you, Final Fantasy Tactics and Bastion), may get a refresh of interest. Anyone recall the days when we used to upgrade graphics cards with faster 3D rendering speeds and higher resolutions? The first thing we did was reload or reinstall old favorites to see how they felt now. Something like that, I think, happens when you expand a smartphone screen. In other words, one of the marketing opps for app developers of all kinds is to leverage the new screen real estate in novel ways and promote the refresh. Incremental as the screen increase likely will be on the iPhone 5, a new toy is, after all, a new toy.