Facebook has emerged as the “strongest” digital media brand among advertisers and agency executives, replacing stalwart Google, according to the 2012 edition of an annual survey of ad industry perceptions about the media brands they use to advertise with. The results, which are based on annual polls of thousands of advertisers and agency executives conducted by Advertiser Perceptions Inc., are to Madison Avenue what J.D. Power’s annual awards are to the automotive industry. The score goes beyond simple metrics like customer satisfaction to probe other key attributes that ad executives use to value media, including ad results, audience and the image of a media company's brand. The perceived brand strength of Facebook reflects the social network’s overwhelming momentum this past year, and catapults it over last year’s strongest digital brand, Google. Advertiser Perceptions did not release a ranking, and only provided the top media brands in each category, so it was difficult to assess the relative impact on Google’s brand on Madison Avenue, but Google also failed to place in the top slot of several other important advertiser brand attributes, including “sales knowledge,” “customer service,” and “advertiser satisfaction.” First place in those categories went to Time.com, Yelp, and FoxNews.com, respectively. Last year, the No. 1 digital brands in those categories were WSJ.com, Yahoo, and ESPN.com, respectively. While Google’s flagship product and brand now lag in Madison Avenue perception, it continues to have the most strength among advertising networks, a separate category broken out by AR. The Google Display Network ranked No. 1 in overall brand strength among online ad networks for the second year in a row, which are the only two years AR has been releasing the identities of the top media brands. A vertical Google brand, YouTube did make strides against Facebook in the mobile media category, emerging as the No. 1 mobile media brand in terms of brand strength, replacing Facebook’s top ranking a year ago. Among the other key attributes for ad networks, Collective ranked No. 1 in “sales knowledge,” Specific Media in “customer service” and YuMe in “advertiser satisfaction. Among other key attributes for mobile media brands, NFL was No. 1 for the second year in a row in “sales knowledge,” while CNN was tops in “customer service,” and The Weather Channel delivered the most “customer satisfaction.” The highest-rated overall media brand among all digital and traditional media brands in this year’s report was ABC, which toppled last year’s top overall media brand, Meredith, for the hearts and minds of advertisers and agency executives.
While shopper marketing is gaining traction as a discipline among marketers, a new study from business consultant Booz & Company indicates that many consumer goods companies are struggling to use the practice to maximum advantage. Part of the problem, Booz concludes, is a lack of effective communication between manufacturers and retailers and a failure to align strategies in the space. Shopper marketing encompasses a wide variety of different capabilities and consumer touchpoints, including shopper research and insights, store design, customer relationship management, in-store communications, packaging and e-commerce. As client demand has grown, agencies are paying more attention to retail and shopper marketing disciplines. A recent study by the Grocery Manufacturers Association estimates that shopper marketing across the retail sector is now a $50 billion to $60 billion category, up from an estimated $35 billion in 2009. But the Booz study suggests that many companies, particularly in the consumer package goods sector, are struggling to get their shopper marketing strategies on the right track. According to Booz, problems occur because manufacturers and retailers disagree on strategy. ROI measurement is also an issue as is the budgeting process. More than 85% of the 50 packaged goods companies surveyed by Booz in November and December 2011 agreed that retailers focus too much on shopper discounting, even for programs that are intended to provide additional value beyond pricing. The big challenge, concluded Booz, is for manufacturers to “better engage retail partners in the development and execution of shopper solutions that deliver added value beyond price reductions.” Those that are successful, Booz said, “will earn the right to win their categories.” ROI measurement results are often inconsistent, the survey found. Most of the respondents indicated that they measure brand sales lift half the time or less from such programs, while share gain results and brand health impact were measured even less. According to the survey, shopper marketing budgets are often a matter of “beg, borrow or steal” versus having a standard line item on the balance sheet for such activities. Even 50% of the so-called “leaders” in the field acknowledge that “tin cupping,” to obtain funding from brands in the portfolio or business units during the year rather than from a dedicated budget, represents a significant source of funding for shopper marketing programs. And more than one-third of the companies Booz surveyed had no dedicated shopper marketing budget at all. Manufacturers, concluded Booz, must “develop new funding and planning processes” for their shopper marketing efforts. Pre-set budgets, the study asserted, result in “better decision making, greater lead time and superior execution.”
"Do we need an app for that" remains the first question that many media companies and marketers ask when contemplating their mobile strategy. With the new emphasis on the mobile Web, mobile search discoverability and advances in HTML5 coding, many companies this past year turned their focus from apps to the Web. But according to design guru Jakob Nielsen, apps still constitute the best strategy when it comes to usability. In a new report comparing the two mobile platforms, Nielsen and his Nielsen Norman Group conclude that “as of this writing there is no contest: ship mobile apps if you can afford it.” He says the company’s usability studies show that users just work better in apps. “The empirical data is all you need to know. It’s a fact that apps beat mobile sites in testing.” By designing specifically for the strengths and weaknesses of a given operating system, it remains much easier to optimize apps than sites. The difference in usability between a standard Web site and a Web app is not as great as it is between mobile apps and sites. Because of the inherent slowness of connections, small screens and lower interface precision, “the weaker the device, the more important it is to optimize for its characteristics,” they say. Moreover, the micropayment systems built into current app stores make a stronger business case for apps than the less adept payment mechanisms available on the Web. Still Nielsen also says that ultimately the mobile Web will become a better solution as app platform fragmentation bloats development costs and HTML5 advances and mobile bandwidth increase mobile Web functionality and usability. They contend that the introduction of the Kindle Fire, Windows Phone and good prospects of even more form factors will make app optimization for specific platforms much more costly and complicated. On the mobile Web, however, the use of responsive design, which adapts content and interfaces for multiple form factors, will help minimize development. “High-end sites will need 3 mobile designs to target phones, mid-sized tablets (like Kindle Fire) and big tablets,” they write. HTML5 will help the Web sites tie more seamlessly into operating system and phone functions as well. Ultimately, Nielsen sees apps becoming more focused on tasks that are “true applications” such as photo editing, while mobile sites will be better suited to m-commerce, social networking and news. The big question that Nielsen leaves unanswered, however, is when the needle will shift more in the direction of the mobile Web. Nielsen cites his own predictions in the early 2000s about the imminent arrival of new mobile interfaces and enhanced usability -- changes that ended up taking seven or more years to appear. “I do believe mobile sites will win over mobile apps in the long term,” says Nielsen. “But when that will happen is less certain. Today, if you are serious about creating the best possible mobile user experience, my advice is to develop apps.”
SapientNitro was recently cited as having the leading mobile practice among large U.S. digital agencies evaluated by Forrester. Mobile Marketing Daily spoke to Dan Israel, mobile strategy lead at SapientNitro, about the agency’s approach to mobile, the outlook for 2012, and mobile wallets, among other topics. Prior to joining SapientNitro, Israel led consumer mobile strategy at The Home Depot. MMD: How is the mobile group at SapientNitro organized? Israel: Overall, we’re about 10,000 strong -- 5,000 in India and 5,000 in 38 offices around the world. We have about 300 people devoted to mobile strategy, creative and technology domains with varied levels of industry experience. And in Atlanta, we have something called the Mobile Center of Excellence, focused on mobile and multichannel delivery for clients worldwide, which has about 50 to 60 people in it. So what we’ve been trying to do is pepper all the offices with people that have some sort of mobile and multichannel expertise, so that way, they can start developing some of these competencies. So not all of the offices have strategy, UX [user experience] and development. Some may have all three -- it just depends which office we’re talking about. MMD: What’s the approach in working with clients? Israel: We’re focused on what are the business objectives first, what is the right experience to overlay on that, and then figuring out what the right technology is. Then we can do one of two things: either bring together the right people who can make that technology internally, or if the client prefers, we’ll use their resources. Given that we don’t approach mobile as a channel or a piece of technology, the challenge is often to understand how people want to interact with the information on a particular device, and what’s the best way to present an experience that is easy to use, easy to understand, and relevant to that moment. We help customers understand how to weave mobile into their overall business and marketing objectives. MMD: Do clients view mobile the same way they might social media -- as a vehicle for earned or owned media rather than paid media? Israel: Let’s first make the statement that mobile and social media are becoming so intertwined that it’s hard to make a distinction. Today, there is a new term making the rounds that epitomizes this reality -- “solomo.” It refers to a mash-up of social media, location and mobile devices. In the good old days of “Mad Men,” customer experiences -- good or bad -- had limited ability to affect your business in a dramatic way. Owned media shaped what people should think, and what they should buy. Today, the combination of mobile devices along with social media networks means positive or negative customer experiences can be broadcast to a huge audience rapidly, with flagrant disregard for whatever is done in the owned media space. MMD: Do you expect clients’ mobile budgets to be bigger this year than last? Israel: Mobile budgets are going up, and in particular in the retail industry. Their customers are coming in with better information than what their own sales associates have, and you try to equalize it by providing better mobile experiences that engage consumers on their terms, and also to empower sales associates to have the same level of information. So a lot of our clients are saying, “Hey, help us figure out what we should be doing in the mobile space.” So the budgets are increasing, we are getting specific requests for mobility to be injected in everything they’re doing. It’s no longer one of these one-off things. And we’re hiring a lot in the mobile space, and we would only be doing that if we anticipated more revenue coming from our existing clients and new clients. MMD: What’s usually the biggest barrier for clients looking to expand mobile efforts -- complexity, lack of scale, uncertainty about ROI? Israel: Many clients are overwhelmed by the speed at which the device landscape and enabling technologies are changing consumer behavior. Also, many still struggle with the mindset that mobile can be approached separately, as just another channel. It’s our job to show clients that mobile has to be part and parcel of a holistic multichannel strategy. The challenges are threefold. First, some companies have the desire but not the organizational readiness to implement mobile solutions. For instance, mobile initiatives may be considered a secondary project that gets addressed when time permits. Second, some incumbent agency partners don’t bring the right mix of mobile understanding to the table. Third, some clients have legacy systems that cannot be accessed by mobile devices or connected across channels. In addition, the content may not be optimized for mobile devices, and may not even have APIs available to pull the information into access points beyond enterprise PCs. MMD: What developments, if any, do you think will define the mobile space in 2012 or beyond? Israel: I think the next big wave is mobile wallets. It’s not going to hit tomorrow, but it’s something that’s evolving. That’s a very complicated ecosystem to set up. From an NFC (Near Field Communication) standpoint, you have to get nine pieces in alignment to offer a mobile wallet. Who do companies partner with, whether you’re a financial institution or a retailer, how are the business models going to change, what are technology bets you’re going to make? Those are all things -- I wish we could make this ecosystem easier to evolve. MMD: Do you see any big winners emerging in the mobile wallet space? Israel: I think we’ll see multiple winners. I think it will probably boil down to an oligopoly. In the NFC space, you’ve got Isis and Google Wallet, in the cloud space you’ve got PayPal and Amazon. People aren’t sure what Apple is going to do, or Facebook. Microsoft just announced their mobile wallet solution. So everyone is still trying to figure out what to do. No. 1, how do you bring together all the pies of the ecosystem? The second major challenge is how do you get retailers to play ball? If you don’t lower the transaction fees, you’re not going to get retailers to put in these new POS systems and advocate for this with their own customers. No. 3, how do you get consumers to change their behavior? Why would I be incented to wave my “magic” phone over some POS system? It’s just not that compelling. So there’s going to be more experimentation this year -- this is not the year of the mobile wallet. This is the year of experimentation.
Microsoft’s longstanding online content portal MSN comes to the iPad this week in an effort to make the brand all comfy cozy during those prime-time tablet sessions. Versions of the app have been available for European markets for months, but this marks the introduction of the MSN for iPad to a U.S. audience. According to the company, this design is intended to create a “Lean-back, curl-up experience” for the portal. The signature butterfly logo meets the users at launch, and the home page seems to take its design aesthetic more from its celebrity hub Wonderwall than from the MSN Web page. The design emphasizes tiers of thumbnail images and headlines for most of the portal’s major categories, including editor’s picks, news, Fox Sports, video, entertainment, celebrities, and autos. Each tier of the design contains a limited number of stories. The app is not aiming for a comprehensive dive into the portal’s full contents so much as a selection of seven or eight top stories from each section. A Bing search engine query box is atop the home page for deeper drills into any topic. The one truly novel feature in this release is the search “lasso.” In order to search a term in the text well of an article, the user keeps a thumb depressed on the left or right margin to activate lasso mode and then circles the terms in the text. The app responds instantly with a Bing search on the highlighted keywords. The MSN for iPad app accommodates a range of content types. Tap into a video story and a clip runs in an embedded window on the landing page. Slide shows revert the screen to an all-black background that allows the user to swipe through images with pop-up captions. The app has tablet use cases in mind. Users can elect to download the full contents of the current selection of stories for offline reading. Each story also has a complement of email, Facebook and Twitter referral links for sharing. One thing notably absent from the MSN app is advertising. In our use of the app, no banners, sponsored links or interstitials were visible. MSN comes onto the iPad with its portal app just weeks before it plans to launch a preview release of Windows 8. This next iteration of the Windows operating system was designed with device use in mind. Ultimately, the company plans to challenge Apple’s dominance and Google’s emergence on the tablet platform with its own Windows-powered hardware. This app and its lasso search perhaps previews some of the functionality the company plans to build into its tablet-friendly OS.
You don’t have to tech-savvy to be at the center of mass QR-code exposure. The speckled squares of black-and-white can be spotted on cereal boxes, at the airport, and in your favorite magazine. But while marketers have been quick to adopt QR codes as their newest playthings, critics have been just as quick to point out their shortcomings. With big questions about ROI already top-of-mind, Forrester Research’s 2011 announcement that only about 5% of U.S. mobile users have actually scanned a QR code left many questioning its reach. Limiting the audience further, comScore revealed data indicating this already small subset of adopters also skewed toward younger, more affluent males. All of this led to the well-publicized voice of naysayers claiming QR codes are over-hyped, too limited in their applicability, and poorly executed. It is true that 2011 saw its fair share of challenges with quick-response technology: some marketers placed the codes in locations that didn’t have mobile connectivity (such as Red Bull’s ads in New York subways); others, such as Continental Airlines, linked to sites that weren’t optimized for mobile devices (oops). Still others created QR codes containing broken links or shoddy placement, making them impossible to scan (big oops). What critics are missing, however, is this: QR codes must be seen as an emerging technology, not a mainstream marketing channel, replete with standard KPIs and ROI expectations. Businesses should view this opportunity much like the first companies to venture from brick-and-mortar selling to e-commerce: at first, the audience was limited, the technology was bumpy, and the best practices were unknown. But so were the possibilities. Leading QR innovators are not merely expanding their marketing mix -- they are essentially redefining the customer experience. Best Buy has integrated the previously siloed worlds of e-commerce and in-store shopping by placing QR codes on their product tags, which allows customers instant access to detailed product information and buying options. Tesco, an international grocery chain, has erected billboards featuring images of its most popular products in high-traffic pedestrian locations in Korea. Customers simply scan the accompanying QR codes, and their selections are delivered right to their homes. These campaigns illustrate the nuanced control that QR code marketing brings to both marketers and consumers. For those still concerned about limited consumer adoption, it’s important to remember that every new technology has a starting point (I mean, who knew what a hashtag was years ago? #nowyourealoserifyoudont). With every forecast predicting aggressive mobile proliferation, forward-thinking advertisers are willing to make calculated investments with big money: this year, GoDaddy.com will be the first to feature a QR code in a Super Bowl ad. In a sprinting digital world, there is every reason for businesses to push forward with QR code marketing -- to define its use, test its limits, and lead its innovation. But before seizing victory in the QR code domain, it is essential to consider these three critical points:
According to the February 2012 survey, conducted by BIGinsight, the average US consumer celebrating Valentine’s Day this year will spend $126.03 on traditional merchandise, up 8.5% from last year, and marking the highest average in the NRF Valentine’s Day Consumer Intentions and Actions Survey’s 10-year history. Total spending for the day is expected to reach $17.6 billion, up 12% from $15.7 billion last year. Average Valentine’s Day Spending Per ConsumerYearAverage Spend 2009 $102.50 2010 103.00 2011 116.21 2012 126.03 Source: NRF/BIGinsight, February 2012 More than half of all tablet owners surveyed will use their device to: