International sports federations receive more than $2 billion per year in sponsorship, according to the monthly Sponsorship Today, which analyzed more than 400 deals from 52 international sports federations. The results: the average deal value was about $4.6 million. The author of Sponsorship Today's analysis on the sector, Simon Rines, said that the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA), FIFA and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) account for half of all federation sponsorship income. Similarly, soccer federations such as UEFA, FIFA, AFC (Asia), Conmebol (South America) and CAF (Africa) also account for 50% of global federation sponsorship income, per the study. Other rights holders are in motorsport, tennis, athletics and cricket, but there are also a lot of sports that don't have mass media coverage and thus struggle to attract major brands. The report also questions the long-term viability of the IOC Olympic Partners program. Rines said that while the Olympic Partners program has done a lot for the sponsorship industry and set the tone for how sponsorship deals should be done, "we now have a situation where some domestic Olympic sponsors are paying more for their rights than those with global sponsorship status." For example, the Rio 2016 Games offers national deals at $300 million, while official Olympic Partner deals are $100 million over four years worldwide. So they also get rights for the Winter and Summer Games. "It's difficult to see this model continuing," said Rines. The breakdown by industry: financial services puts $360 million annually to international federations; the automotive sector comes second, with sportswear, telecommunications and alcohol in descending order. But the biggest spender is Adidas, per the study, which says the sports shoe and apparel company makes an annual investment of $106 million, which is four times more than Nike. Coca-Cola, Visa and McDonald's, which round out the top five. The problem for partnership deals is that they carry such hefty price tags that sponsors may look for less comprehensive deals. "The fact that annual rights to major properties are now well in excess of $20 million means that sponsors really are looking for value," said Rines. "If they feel that they can achieve this through personal endorsements or other links to sport, then they might consider cutting back on major federation deals."
Lenovo, the official technology sponsor of the NFL, is leveraging that investment to the hilt with a promotion that will take one fantasy football fan to every major NFL event next year. The Lenovo Fantasy Coach Season Pass Contest will reward one fan with the ability to attend the 2013 NFL Draft, scouting combine, training camps, home game tickets and trips to both the Pro Bowl and the Super Bowl in 2014. All contestants have to do is state in 100 words or less why they are the greatest fantasy football coach ever. “We tried to envision what is the greatest thing we could offer a fantasy coach,” Kevin Berman, director of North American advertising and marketing services for Lenovo, tells Marketing Daily. "The whole thing is around fantasy. [Fantasy players] think, watch and do football in ways that are different than your average fan." To promote the contest, Lenovo partnered with FunnyorDie.com to create a series of videos featuring Washington Redskins quarterback Robert Griffin III and Chicago Bears running back Matt Forte in which the athletes are confronted by “coaches” about their poor fantasy performances. “I’ve never played football or coached an actually football team in my life,” says a fantasy coach, encouraging Griffin to score more points. “But once you put on this whistle and start telling people what to do, everyone just assumes you’re qualified to coach.” (Among the advice he offers Griffin: fake taking a knee to end a game and running for a touchdown and throwing a pass into a lineman’s back and then catching it, “which counts as a reception and a completion.”) “FunnyOrDie.com brings us a credible voice with the millennial audience and a guaranteed connection point through which to communicate,” Berman says. Lenovo will also promote the contest through digital advertising on sporting Web sites (like ESPN.com and NFL.com), as well as through social media, email marketing and public relations, Berman says. The goal is to engage consumers using their interest and push them toward the company’s Web site, he says. “The excitement that NFL garners among its fans is something we’re trying to harness,” he says. “This gives us a way to engage with consumers in a way that we hadn’t been able to before.”
Morton Salt is introducing an ice melt that is safer for pets’ paws and stomachs than traditional melting salt. Called Morton Safe-T-Pet, the granular ice-melting medium is salt- and chloride-free. In conjunction with the product launch, the brand is holding a "Best in Snow" Pet Show photo contest with more than $10,000 in cash and prizes. To enter the contest, parents simply need to snap a photo of their pet suited up for winter and submit it via www.mortonbestinsnow.com by Jan. 4. A panel of judges will select winners from the eligible entries based on various criteria including creativity, audience appeal, and relevance to pet safety in winter. The Morton "Best In Snow" Pet Show Grand Prize winner receives $10,000 cash plus a Morton Safe-T-Pet Winter Bundle worth $150. Two runners-up winners each receive $1,000 cash plus a Morton Safe-T-Pet Winter Bundle worth $150. Eight honorable mention winners each win a Morton Safe-T-Pet Winter Bundle worth $150. In addition, Morton Salt, Inc. will donate to the ASPCA (The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals) $1 for every eligible contest entry and $.50 for every vote made by the public during the contest period which runs through Jan. 11, up to a maximum of $25,000. A survey commissioned by Morton reveals that one-third of all pet parents say they go to great lengths to protect their pets from the winter elements, including carrying their dogs over unsafe ice so they can take care of business outdoors. While most pet parents consider their pets as part of the family, and 70 percent think about their pets when they prepare for winter, only one in four use a pet-safe ice melt, according to Morton Safe-T-Pet's recent survey of pet owners. So it begs the question: "How do you protect your pet in the winter?" The survey reveals some interesting and somewhat humorous strategies used to keep pets safe during the winter months. Nearly one in four pet parents allow indoor bathroom breaks for their pets (23%). Almost 40% will spend more time outside in the cold to shovel and clear a path in the snow just for their pets. More than one-third of all pets are dressed nose to tail in winter clothing and accessories by their pet parents for bathroom breaks. From mini-sweaters to doggles, pet parents will spend upwards of $660 on food, apparel and winter supplies for their four-legged friends. Beyond clearing pet-friendly paths, pet parents have much to be concerned about in the winter. More than two out of three pet parents worry most about keeping their pets warm. Diet and exercise aren't just human problems, but 44% are also concerned about their pet's health at this time of the year. For those with smaller breeds, one out of four fear their dog could get stuck in the snow.
Sierra Nevada Brewing has a foot in a lot of markets, and since it competes in the niche craft beer arena it doesn't need to do much in the way of advertising. But that doesn't mean it doesn't need to update its Web site now and then. And now is good, since there hasn't been a "then" in a decade. The timing is also good because the brand has a new brewery in North Carolina to bulk up in the East Coast market. The Chico, Calif.-based brewer tapped the Seattle office of Digital Kitchen to develop a new site that includes a film about the brand. The four-minute documentary-style film (voiceover by founder Ken Grossman) details the 30-year-old brand's position, values, and history. The effort also includes in-store elements. "We have been fortunate not to have to rely on ads," says Ryan Arnold, communications manager for Sierra Nevada, adding that the brand does have a presence at beer festivals and other outdoor events. Eric Oldrin, managing director of Digital Kitchen Seattle, tells Marketing Daily that the brand needed a Web-based forum for its brand story. "When they started in 30 years ago, they were one of the first craft beers; now there are thousands." He notes that the brewer began expanding into more seasonal beers and variants a few years ago, which has helped grow sales. "Our research showed that people see Sierra as synonymous with quality and consistency," he says. "But that sense of perfection can feel stodgy. We wanted to make sure we helped the voice reflect the daring part of what they are doing." Arnold says the brand does particularly well in California, especially in the northern region of the state, and has distribution in all 50 states. Though the brand has strong recognition, it has no designs on becoming a major player as it craft is about 6% of the total beer market. The brand is getting the word out about the site via social channels, says Arnold. "When we flipped on the switch we shared it on our Facebook, Twitter and Instagram accounts and have been fortunate to have industry and online publications interested." Oldrin says the brand doesn't need much more than that."They do all their advertising in a 12-ounce bottle."
Online dating service eHarmony has shifted its media planning and buying assignment to Huntington Beach, CA-based Ocean Media, the agency has confirmed. The incumbent was Omnicom’s OMD. The client spent more than $65 million on ads in 2011, according to Ocean Media, which had been eHarmony’s media shop from 2002 until early 2011, when the client conducted a formal review. OMD prevailed in that review, while Ocean declined to participate. According to an item posted on Ocean Media’s Web site confirming the win, eHarmony has spent upwards of $700 million on advertising since its launch in 2000. Its 2002 budget, the first year Ocean handled the client’s media chores, was just $150,000. By 2007, company spending peaked at roughly $140 million. However, spending levels have declined from that peak in the post-recession years. The client did not respond to a request for comment on the shift. According to Adweek, the client also ditched its creative shop, OMD sister agency GSD&M in Austin, Texas, and handed creative chores to Los Angeles-based Handmade Productions. Adweek reported that the changes came after eHarmony’s founder Neil Clark Warren rejoined the company last July and became chief executive. Subsequent changes in the marketing management team also took place. In addition to eHarmony, Ocean Media clients include Priceline.com and Ancestry.com. Last month, online shopping site Gilt Groupe appointed Ocean as its first media agency of record. The appointment coincided with the launch of Gilt’s first TV ad campaign.
Please, not a word. In your advertising, in your PR, on your Web sites, say nothing. No matter how deeply you ache for the next of kin, and for the country, keep it to yourself. No matter how you or your employees might have pitched in to ameliorate the pain or to support their own communities, there is nothing about Sandy Hook Elementary that needs your brand name attached to it. Not one single thing. From Oklahoma City to 9/11, from Katrina to Kosovo, certain marketers pushed themselves into public view. Motives are sometimes impossible to divine. Perhaps these companies, and the people within them, just wish -- like all heartbroken bystanders -- to express how deeply sad they are, and happen to have the media budgets to do so. Too often, though, they merely prove how deeply cynical they are, and leverage their media budgets to do a little one-off marketing. In 1995, after the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City killed 168 men, women and children, power-tool toolmaker Makita took out a full-page newspaper ad to brag that its products were used by relief and rescue teams. Couched as an expression of solidarity, it was morally grandstanding upon a mass grave. "Today, hundreds of courageous rescue workers are putting their own safety at risk in hope of bringing the Oklahoma City tragedy to a conclusion. Makita Power Tools are with them in spirit and on the rescue site.” In 1998, Philip-Morris airlifted what The Wall Street Journal estimated to be $125,000 of Kraft food to Kosovar refugees. Nice gesture. Too nice to be lost in the headlines. So the company's ad agency, Leo Burnett, undertook a $1 million TV commercial to dramatize the client's generosity. They created a refugee-camp set in the un-wartorn Czech Republic, tied headscarves on 350 extras and created a poignant 60-second spot, while Philip-Morris proceeded to spend many millions of dollars airing it. Bless their philanthropic hearts. Don't begrudge them their moment of self-congratulation. This is a company that for decades addicted children to carcinogens behind a smokescreen of fictitious scientific doubt; if they don't honor themselves, who will? Anyway, even that obscenity looks like a sizzle reel for Jesus compared to what followed 9/11, when American consumers were asked to show their patriotism and honor the victims by buying a Taurus or a Lumina. Both General Motors (“Keep America Rolling!”) and Ford Motor Co. (“Ford Drives America”) launched versions of a 3000-dead Sale-a-bration, because national grief posed such a splendid opportunity. You can't personally get revenge against bin Laden, but you can get yourself a totally bitchin' Explorer. Thus were the sacred burial grounds of 9/11 trampled. It was like picking the pockets of the dead. We are now only a few days into the Sandy Hook aftermath, and so far most everybody had demonstrated respect. There will always be loathsome political opportunists, like the religious kook Mike Huckabee (“We ask why there is violence in our schools, but we've systematically removed God from our schools. Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage because we've made it a place where we don't want to talk about eternity, life, what responsibility means, accountability?”)I would like to see him say as much to some of the parents who lost their babies; I've never witnessed a man being beaten mute. But faulting an ignoramus for being ignorant is like faulting a rooster for waking you up. What defies all understanding is the perversity of, say, a film producer exploiting the tragedy to promote his new flick. Yet blogger Fruzsina Eördögh says she ran across this press release promoting the movie “Genius.” Los Angeles, CA, December 14. Those who murder all have one thing in common, says the producer of new movie on the death of the Beatles’ John Lennon.Based on initial reports, a masked gunman murdered more than 25 people -- including 18 children -- at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut on Friday morning. Two guns were found near the shooter, who was discovered dead inside a classroom, according to law enforcement officials and media reports. Witnesses said the shooter was wearing a mask but his identity was still unknown. This is the second deadliest school shooting since the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre claimed the lives of 32 people…. Ray Comfort, the producer of a new movie called “Genius,” believes he knows why people are willing to take innocent life. …..“Something tragic is happening in our country,” Comfort noted, “and most people don't know what it is. Those who want to understand why these tragedies are occurring -- and are likely to continue to occur -- should watch the free movie.” I, of course, cannot be certain this is not an awful hoax, for I'm always freshly stunned when an enterprise trades on dead children to move the needle. But assuming Eördögh hasn't been scammed, can you not envision a man with his P.R. agent on Friday, with CNN playing in the background, exchanging high fives?
Recently, my funny, prolific, and prescient MediaPost colleague Bob Garfield, the author of the award-winning book “The Chaos Scenario,” publicly declined to do a column listing the best-and-worst commercials of the year. He could not do it, he semi-joked, because he hadn’t seen any ads. Rim shot. Bob is right about the ongoing wreckage in the ad biz, of course, and the digital tumult that continues to destroy (I mean revolutionize!) the media industry as we know it. But c’mon -- there are also anomalies, in that some people actually seek out ads online, or at least, can’t avoid them. Take the Super Bowl, the network dinosaur that garnered its largest audience ever last year, while ad prices continue to escalate. Since the airing of Apple’s “1984” the audience has been trained to pay attention to, and judge, Super Bowl commercials, expecting miracles. They are often disappointed. Still, if viewers happened to be trapped in a closet, choking on pretzels, or otherwise coping with kid-based distractions during the ad pods, they tended to seek them out later online. Clearly, those old-school TV events tend to be incubators for big ad productions and new social media behavior; and YouTube and other online outlets have given the hoary TV spot -- sometimes in extra-long form -- a second life. Obviously, the number of views on You Tube is staggering -- even for spots not run during big-tent events. The spot I wrote about last week, for example, Samsung’s “The Next Best Thing is Here,” (which, admittedly ran during the Summer Olympics broadcast) with the aggressively clever pro-Android, anti-Apple, message, has attracted over 16 million views so far, even though it’s not a major cinematic blockbuster with a big budget. Or maybe it’s not so much a second life as an after life: zombie ads of the undead. Regardless, there’s a giant body of work out there, and sometimes people even seek out, send to friends, and study ads online. So let’s talk best. My contenders seem to spring from one agency, Wieden + Kennedy, which is widely considered to be the top creative shop in the world, having made products like Old Spice part of the cultural vernacular. Clearly, the agency is on an inspirational bent. I love the fat kid running for Nike. As knowing counter-programming for the broadcast of the London Olympics, which is full of beautiful bodies shown at the height of their superpowers, it features an out-of-shape, 200-pound twelve-year-old boy having trouble running at all. Exploitative? No. The kid is in on it, and bravely opens up. He’s a metaphor for what’s buried and awkward inside us all -- the stuff that makes us want to stop, or never start, trying. The spot uses an empty road and the sound of unsure footsteps to preach about greatness. We see the kid from a distance, way down the road. As he approaches the camera, huffing and puffing, the announcer says greatness is “not some rare DNA strand,” or just for prodigies or superstars. “We are all capable of it. All of us.” Or at least we are all capable of facing ourselves and our fears, and making that first, sweaty step. The spot contains all the right combinations of surprising, inclusive, and inspiring, without being cloying. I give top honors, however, to Chrysler, for its beautiful two-minute “Halftime in America,” the sleeper that rocked the Super Bowl. It took guts to stick with the tone of massive inspiration when selling a bailed-out, Detroit-based, now partially foreign-owned car company. An Italian company selling cowboy power -- it redefines the spaghetti Western. With its gorgeous, heavily black-and-white graphics, and its requiem for the USA rasped by Clint Eastwood, the ad still gives me chills. The need for inspiration comes straight from the zeitgeist, and the agency has a way of allowing brands to speak for America, infusing hope, without being ridiculously heavy-handed and pretentious. Indeed, W&K seems to have taken on the mantle of a modern-day WPA. It also did a project for Levi’s, documenting the revival of a dead industrial town in Pennsylvania brought back to life by latter-day farmers, artists, and artisans. But back to “Halftime.” In the opening, Clint is shown wandering alone in a dark alley, Dirty Harry-style, but ends up in the light, the same trajectory that the car company predicts the country, and our economy, will take. Clint spouts some poetry about our power, including, “The world’s gonna hear the roar of our engines,” an entirely Whitmanesque line. The spot is anthemic and one for the ages: right up there with “1984.” But, given that nothing is black and white (except this spot), I do have at least one qualm about “Halftime": It could easily have doubled as a spot for Obama. (O was almost halfway through the two terms of his presidency -- his "halftime" -- after all.) And if I may indulge in some armchair analysis, after it ran, Eastwood perhaps became frustrated with his inadvertent support for a “Morning Again for Obama” message. Seeking to reestablish his conservative bonafides as a “read my lips” kinda guy, he agreed to appear at the Republican National Convention. There, sans scriptwriters but full of misdirected animus, he went off the rails, performing his deeply embarrassing conversation with the empty chair standing in for the President. It was so nutty that he totally overshadowed whatever strategy the party had planned that night for the convention. In the end, Mr. E probably lost Romney a few votes. Directly, or indirectly, any spot that has that much power over public discourse deserves an award. Are you feeling lucky, Chrysler? In the next post, I will unveil my vote for “worst” ad, which also comes from Weiden + Kennedy. (A little meta concept there!) So have at it. The process has never been as big or democratic: not only has ad criticism not gone away -- but with new media, everybody’s a critic.
Facebook is a special kind of marketing conundrum. Even as marketers struggle to find meaningful social media metrics, and amidst Facebook’s own struggles to attract advertisers and raise its stock price, marketers continue to flock to the social network. That’s because, despite the metrics mystery and stock market skepticism, one thing is absolutely certain: consumers love Facebook. Knowing that audiences are ready and waiting on Facebook, many marketers haphazardly create pages on the network and begin posting away. But the key to achieving a true Facebook win lies in focusing on what drove you to the social network in the first place: your audience. Here are some critical user stats that brands must consider if they want to be successful on Facebook. Unlikes by number of brand posts We studied a random selection of 80 Facebook brand pages and uncovered an interesting trend: the number of daily Fan “Unlikes” increases with a brand’s number of posts each day. In other words, the more times a brand posts, the greater the risk of losing Fans! In fact, our research has revealed that unlikes for these brands increased by 15 percent when going from one to two posts and by another 13 percent once posting jumped to three or more times per day. The lesson here is to post relevant, useful content and not to inundate your audience with self-serving marketing posts or benign conversation starters. Pay attention to the types of posts and topics your Fans respond positively to, and adjust your content to make every post count. Social networks offer marketers the opportunity to engage in a two-way conversation with users, so your voice should never be the only one on your Facebook wall. When Facebook users “Like” a brand, they expect some product updates, but they also expect exclusive coupons, polls, special offers and other forms of relevant yet engaging content. They expect to be treated like a brand VIP, and they should be given the respect of the brand ambassador they may grow to become. In posting brand-centric idle chatter, many brands are reminding users that in fact, they haven’t done anything for them lately. The lifetime of a post Post data from the top 100 Facebook brands was examined with an eye to Fan comment activity within 24 hours of creation. The percentage of total user comments, on average, was reviewed at various intervals after the post: 30 seconds, one minute, 15 minutes, etc. After reviewing Facebook “Likes” during the first day of a brand’s post, we found that, on average, over half of a post's comments occur within its first 15 minutes of life. After 24 hours, the post’s life cycle is effectively over, with 94 percent of its total comments already made. Does this mean brands should be posting every 15 minutes? Not unless they want to be “Unliked.” What it means is that brands need to manage their expectations. A post may have tremendous reach on Facebook, but its lifespan is short -- so don’t hang too much on a single post. And as noted above, if you have nothing engaging to say, it’s better to say nothing at all. Mobile versus desktop usage patterns The analysis also looked at a diverse sample of 25 Facebook brand pages to determine whether they received more Likes from mobile or desktop users throughout the week and discovered that:
San Diego-based Covario’s commitment to clients results in increases in traffic, conversion rates and sales. But what really sets it apart? Eclectic thinking The elevator doors open to a white and orange Covario sign painted on the wall. It ties into the company's latest branding campaign sporting an image on its Web site home page of a white-haired Einstein with an orange streak, symbolizing intelligence with a twist. A few steps into the reception area and the space takes on a high-tech, real-time agency feel: The open ceiling reveals the building’s plumbing, which Covario founder and CEO Russ Mann says represents the inner workings of the Internet. A short walk down the hallway and into his office reveals a standup desk and small round conference table with a few chairs. The Harvard Business School graduate is quick to weave similes and alternate meaning from words.The name Covario comes from the “covariance” theory, a measure of how random variables change and relate to others. It reflects the company’s focus on paid and organic search, from desktop to mobile. Mann once described the word — Covario — as the variability of two independent data streams. “It’s sort of like calculus, changing over time,” he says. “If you really want to geek out remember the Heisenberg Uncertainly Principal, which suggests light is both a partical and a wave, but you don’t know which until you look.”Talk with Mann about the name change and he likens it to the Heisenberg principal, suggesting marketers can assess and understand the worth of a campaign, how it co-varies, but not both simultaneously. By 2008, that ideology had attracted $21.5 million in investments from Dubilier & Company, FT Capital, Voyager Capital and others.The Proof’s In The PuddingCovario, an independent standalone agency headquartered in San Diego, Calif., continues to evolve into a truly global search firm. About 79 percent of its customers have campaigns running worldwide. When asked about his role in driving up sales for clients, Mann points to employees and refers to it as a team effort. Mann leads about 200 employees and another 40 partners in China and around the world. Overall, company experts and technology support more than 70 Fortune 500 and Internet 1000 advertisers, representing about 1,000 brands and Web sites, including ibm, Intel, Nikon, Sony Pictures, T-Mobile, Cabela’s, and Guthy-Renker from offices in Chicago, London, Beijing, Tokyo, Singapore, Toronto, and Sao Paulo.The company generates about $100 million in gross billings, Mann says. Revenue grew 25 percent in 2012, while the advertising industry slowed to 6 percent; and search, 17 percent. The firm not only helps itself, but also clients. Guthy-Renker experienced a 259 percent rise in paid search conversions, and Samsung drew 4.4 million new Web site visitors. Covario and Guthy-Renker worked closely to restructure and cut costs for the Proactiv paid search program. The campaign drove up Web site visits, adding incremental results beyond what television did. The non-brand campaigns yielded a 15 percent year-over-year increase in traffic, 213 percent increase in conversion rate and 42 percent drop in cost-per-order. For Samsung, Covario created 4.4 million organic visitors since the campaign launch. Additionally, Samsung and Covario were able to increase total traffic by 43 percent and organic traffic by 227 percent during the holiday season. The company wanted to increase visibility in Google search results for brand and non-branded terms, and improve the experience for site visitors. Among other strategies, Covario recommended adding 23 branded new sub-category pages that were included in the navigational structure of the site. The company created an evergreen Black Friday page to capture more generic holiday-specific traffic.The Black Friday page drove more than 400,000 Facebook shares during the 2011 holiday season. The new sub-category pages drove 4.4 million visitors. Site visitors during the 2011 holiday season rose 227 percent, year-over-year.Samsung isn’t the only company seeing better results. In October 2011, SolarCity had trouble ranking well for non-branded terms, though they had adequate rankings for branded terms. The goal to drive additional Web site traffic, generate higher qualified leads, and become the proximate name on page one rankings for terms like “solar panels” led the company to work with Covario.Covario drove a 120 percent increase in non-branded organic traffic month-over-month for SolarCity, up 275 percent in non-branded organic traffic year-over-year, 200 percent increase in top-10 rankings, and managed to achieve and maintain position No. 4 for “solar panel” in Google search engine rankings for the past three months, contributing to a more than 8,000 percent increase in traffic. Proving results for its clients, Covario took the San Diego’s 2010 Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year in the Emerging Business category. The company has also won numerous MediaPost OMMA awards, along with nods from Forrester and many industry publications.This year, it launched a Creative Services team specializing in the design and multivariate testing of paid and seo campaign landing pages and micro-sites, which has experienced over 500 percent revenue growth.The team develops intelligent page designs and modular page layouts with testing, optimization and content targeting in mind. Personas are developed and mapped to specific attribution paths. Along with a/b and multivariate testing (MVT), Covario analysts align campaign ad copy with landing page content to optimize performance and conversions. Campaign conversation rate performance improvements range from 12 percent to more than 60 percent.Diversity & successThe company’s philosophy continues to attract an eclectic and diverse group of executives. Most recently Claire Long, Covario CFO and COO, from the San Diego Union Tribune, where she was responsible for the publisher’s finance, accounting and treasury.Diversity also led former iCrossing search experts Jeff Johnson, nascar aficionado and former amateur bull rider, and Mike Gullaksen to join Covario in 2009, becoming co-managing directors and senior VPs. Recently named among the Direct Marketing News “40 Under 40” group of the nation’s top young marketers, Gullaksen muscles up at the gym, keeps a flop-eared bunny at home, and serves on the Board of sempo. The two started the agency group in Phoenix about four years ago and attracted folks like Chicago-based Matt Kropp, VP of domestic client strategies and solutions, an amateur comedian who trained with Second City TV. Former Mediacom exec LuRae Lumpkin, vp of global paid media services and certified life coach, and Jeff MacGurn, VP of earned media, also recently joined the agency group. Under Mann’s direction, Covario continues to attain awards and patents. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office awarded Covario an seo patent for its algorithmic weighting system in December 2011. The Covario SEO Audit Score system analyzes the properties of a Web site to optimize search engine result listings on one or more engines. Early in 2012, Covario spun out Rio SEO, a business unit focused on technology platforms. The name comes from “rio” in Covario or the “river of content” that supports “SEO” services through automation. Along with the name came an emerging vocabulary SEO Lo Mo So, or search engine optimization for local mobile social campaigns. Rio seo focuses on seo, social and content marketing automation tools. About 40 percent of the retail traffic from the clients comes from mobile. Covario acquired Madison, Wis.–based Netconcepts, founded by Stephan Spencer and Nigel Varcoe, in January 2010 to strengthen its seo offerings, followed by San Diego-based Top Local Search (TIS) in June 2012. The company hired three of five TLS employees, including founder and CEO Bill Connard.Chris Reid joined as senior vice president and the first operating head of the Rio seo software tools business. Around the same time, Forrester Research named Rio seo “The Only Leader” in its Forrester Wave: seo Platforms, Q4 2012.