Across channels, consumers increasingly find ads with localized creative to be more relevant, according to a new report from Opus Research advisory service Internet2Go. “Engagement with locally relevant marketing will tend to increase as consumers approach a buying decision,” according to Greg Sterling, senior analyst at Internet2Go. “At that point, people want to know where to purchase the desired product or service. However, the data also show that locally relevant ads seem to be more engaging regardless of where consumers are ‘in the [purchase] funnel.’” Even the simple mention of a location or city name in a mobile ad can improve click-through rates by 200%, according to mobile network ThinkNear. That specific finding is echoed by regional department store Gordmans. Last year, as Sterling notes, the company reported that it saw the click-through rates on Facebook ads increase by 200% when a city name was included in the ad. “For national-local advertisers we've seen a lift of 70% on click-through rates for ads dynamically localized and optimized versus generic ads,” Victor Wong, CEO of display platform PaperG, told Sterling. Google recently reported that click-through rates are 6% to 8% higher on mobile search ads featuring local telephone numbers compared to those without. As a point of comparison, Yellow Pages print display ads with local numbers have historically received about 40% more calls than those with “800” numbers, according to Sterling, who cited an analysis performed by CRM Associates last year. “Ads in a ‘local context’ also get a boost,” said Sterling. For example, the Mobile Marketing Association surveyed more than 1,000 U.S. adults and found that more people “noticed ads while using location-based services” than while using SMS or mobile Web sites generally. In addition, mobile ad network xAd recently published data showing that locally targeted mobile display ads saw 5% to 8% click-through rates versus 0.6% for typical mobile display ads. What’s more, in early 2012 JiWire reported that based on fourth-quarter data, a full 75% of respondents said they had taken action after being exposed to a location-specific advertisement or message. This high response rate is consistent with data from Google and Microsoft about mobile user behavior. Both companies report that after conducting a mobile search on a smartphone people tend to act much more quickly than PC users. Most of that action takes place offline, in the physical world. Based on survey data, Google reported that 88% of people conducting a mobile search took some kind of action -- call, purchase, or in-store visit -- within 24 hours. That said, the majority did so within a couple of hours. In 2010, Microsoft’s Bing team said that 70% of mobile search users initiated and completed “search query chains” within 1 hour, compared to 1 week for PC search users.
Living up to its name, Los Angeles-based digital agency Something Massive has acquired New York-based Circ.us, a tech-focused creative shop best known for some remarkable augmented reality campaigns for brands such as Red Bull, Ben & Jerry’s and others. As part of the move, the agency is adopting a new position in the crowded field of digital marketing services, claiming to be the “first post-PC advertising agency.” While that positioning may not seem politically correct on Madison Avenue, the reference comes from a well-known concept coined by late Apple Founder Steve Jobs, which essentially means that creativity is no longer bound by the constraints of a computer screen and can now migrate to any screen, or even across screens, based on how users experience them. The “post-PC” concept is at the heart of the current edition of MediaPost’s MEDIA magazine, which was guest edited by Circ.us Co-Founders Adam Broitman and Jonathan Swords. Following the merger, Broitman becomes chief creative strategist and will lead Something Massive’s post-PC push. Something Massive, which was founded in 2008 by the former management team of DNA Studio after it was sold to Whitman Hart Interactive in 2006, is headed by Partner and Co-Founder Rebecca Coleman, who said the acquisition of Circ.us expands the agency’s footprint to “all devices and form factors in more meaningful and impactful ways.” While the post-PC concept may seem a bit soft and fuzzy to some in the ad industry, Something Massive has actually created a platform for managing it. Dubbed the PPCC&C HQ, the new platform stands for “Post PC Conversation, Content and Curation Head Quarters,” and Broitman said it will help the agency and its clients develop Web sites that are more “conducive to desktop, mobile, tablet, TV and any other screen size.”
Mazda is launching what it is calling an “inside-out” ad campaign in support of the new 2013 Mazda CX-5 crossover. The effort, which mines the central theme of that ‘70s show "The Six Million Dollar Man," starts on March 28. In a sense, however, that date is really a pre-launch -- since the new creative for the CX-5 is to be initially directed toward Mazda’s North American employees and key brand influencers, bloggers and the like, who represent the "inside-out" buzz-generating part of the effort. About a week later, the campaign hits the national stage. The way the buzz part of the campaign works is that insiders get first dibs on the ad. Mazda says that diverse group will be nudged to share the content they have generated on it, broadcasting it from inside the organization out to consumers. The April 2 rollout of the traditional national campaign hits with television, cinema, print, digital (display, mobile and video) and place-based video in health clubs, airports and other locations designed to reach the active CX-5 target. The idea, per the company, is to create a large presence able to touch the target where they work and play -- not just when they are in front of the TV. The effort, which is via Mazda's dedicated ad shop The Garage/Team Mazda, features a launch ad in 60-second and 30-second versions that uses "Better. Stronger. Smarter,” a theme line playing off of the TV show’s original banner. Also suggested by the TV show is a ’70s aesthetic, which is not only retro, but probably antique at this point, given that the target consumers were not born when the show was as huge as Farrah Fawcett's hair. John Abel, Mazda’s director of marketing, explains that while Mazda has a young owner demographic, many of whom may not remember the show, the link to the TV show works because the positioning is around innovative engineering, and Mazda’s SkyActiv powertrain technology in particular. "It implies a breakthrough, a re-imagining of technology. Because we are talking about SkyActiv, we wanted to make that link right up front." The initial ad also borrows from the TV show's introductory segment, where scientists are shown working to rebuild -- in this case -- the common crossover, "The embodiment of compromise," notes the voiceover. The ad shows a claptrap SUV rolling over the desert as pieces of it fall off and blow up. "We can save it, we have the technology," (cut to a laboratory with the SkyActiv banner) as the VO touts fuel efficiency and performance and engineers in front of banks of dated computer gadgets test the "reborn" CX-5 in the desert. There will be three follow-up spots examining CX-5 product attributes like the 35-mpg fuel economy (which puts it atop the segment, per Abel), onboard technology and safety. The campaign uses the "We Build Mazdas. What do you drive?" tagline that the automaker introduced a year ago. Abel adds that the three ads following the launch spot will keep the same theme. "It's a big launch, and we love integration, so we are keen to pick up where we lead off." Abel tells Marketing Daily that the social-media jump start has a track record: the company took that tack when it pre-launched SkyActiv over Super Bowl weekend with a social-media push that he says garnered 2 million views on YouTube, Facebook, enthusiast sites, owners clubs, dealer sites and the like.
CBS and Turner may own exclusive broadcast rights to the NCAA basketball tournament, but ESPN is pulling in March Madness-crazed fans on mobile devices. New research from NPD shows the cable sports network was the most popular mobile site among Android smartphone users during the first week of the tournament, with reach of nearly 4% in the sports category. The NCAA mobile site was a distant second with less than 1% reach, followed by Yahoo Sports, with less than 0.5%. On the app side, NPD found that more general-purpose apps, like ESPN Score Center, CBS Sports and ScoreMobile, were among the top performers during the first week of the tournament. “But we also saw some NCAA Championship tournament-specific apps, such as ESPN Bracket Bound and NCAA March Madness Live, rise to the top,” noted Linda Barrabee, research director, NPD Connected Intelligence, in a blog post Monday. She suggested that uptake of the paid version of the March Madness Live app ($3.99) for Android phones may have been undermined by difficulty streaming video in older versions of the operating system. “While Google Play (formerly Android Market), indicates app support for Android 2.2 and up, there have been reported app-support problems with devices in that OS mix -- some of which may have contributed to the limited reach figures seen during this Week 1,” she wrote. The data is based on NPD’s Connected Intelligence SmartMeter, which tracks consumers' use of smartphone apps, Web sites, communications and content services. The SmartMeter, which relies on an opt-in panel of users, does not yet include tracking on iPhones. Separate findings released by comScore on Friday showed that smartphones and tablets accounted for about 20% of the Web traffic for first-round tournament games played March 15 and 16. Sports-related traffic on March 15 on tablets increased 94%, and on smartphones, 83%, compared to the average of the prior three Thursdays. NPD plans to continue tracking mobile usage during the entire NCAA tournament and release research results spanning the three-week period.
The mobile M&A just keeps rolling, along with some lofty valuations. While many U.S. companies are looking westward and eastward to buy their way into international markets, the UK banking services company Monitise plc has acquired the U.S. company Clairmail, which is considered a leading third-party provider of mobile banking and payment solutions. The acquisition will be paid by issuing new stock shares, valued at $173 million. Clairmail clams to be the provider of mobile banking services for a third of the top 50 banks in North America. It says that it has more active users of its systems than any other mobile banking provider. The technology allows bank customers to manage their accounts with advanced mobile tools like depositing a check by taking a mobile photo of it. It also protects against fraud and allows mobile payments. According to Monitise, Clairmail revenues increased 90% in 2011. Monitise says the acquisiition helps position its growth globally and builds a pure-play mobile banking solution that is larger than anything in the U,S, market. Combined, the companies will serve banks such as Royal Bank of Scotland, PNC and U.S. Bank. The expanded company will be responsible for over $10 billion in payments and transfers weekly. Monitise has existing relationships with Visa. This is yet another acquisition in the mobile segment in recent weeks. Social game maker Zynga bought “Draw Something” mobile game publisher OMGPOP for a hefty $53.1 million. And Asian telco SingTel bought U.S. mobile marketing agency Amobee for $321 million.
Well, unless the mobile ad is really, really awful…and believe me, I have seen my share of tear-jerking mobile marketing tragedies. Some of those QR rabbit holes I have jumped down for the sake of this column have registered a range of feelings. For over a decade, digital creatives have asked the question of whether a digital ad carries the same kind of storytelling and emotional oomph as the great TV spots. In the original form of the question, marketers at the early digital conferences used to ask one another routinely whether they even could recall a recently viewed Web ad. Only in this decade has the bar been raised higher, and we have heard creative ask whether a Web ad can make you cry. Well, take all that is not engaging about desktop digital advertising and shrink it down to a fraction of its size -- and there you have the even bigger problem for mobile. But according to some fascinating research involving brainwave analysis and ad response, the basic elements of human perception, cognition and emotion stack the deck against advertisers getting from a mobile ad the kind of engagement we might get from a 30 second TV spot. “We find a very interesting correlation between emotional engagement and form factor,” says A.K. Pradeep, founder and CEO of Nielsen NeuroFocus. His company measures brain waves to evaluate the effectiveness of advertising to engage attention, emotion and memory. Looking at how subjects respond to spots across every sort of large, small, medium, indoor and outdoor screen, scale matters. “The brain seems to have a very good engagement with emotions as long as the form factor or size of the face expressing emotion is the size of a normal human face.” Since faces often serve as the trigger for some kind of emotional connection with the content, this is critically important to sparking a feeling in a message. “If the face appears as big or bigger, my brain is happy to engage emotionally. When there is a reduction in the face, the emotional engagement is reduced non-linearly.” As the screen gets smaller, our ability to register a face emotionally diminishes quickly. What this means for mobile media and advertising is not that mobile messages cannot engage the user, but that they do so across different and even heightened other parameters -- namely, attention and memory. As one would expect in the less cluttered environment of the mobile phone, the user does appear to be involved in the message, and their recall can be teased with the right creative. It will be important for marketers leveraging advertising on mobile to understand that certain kinds of engagement can be grabbed more easily than others. “Attention, memory and novelty will be critical neurometrics for devices with smaller form factors,” says Pradeep. And for all of those TV programmers and marketers eying the tablet, the larger screen size does restore some of the emotional responses that diminish so markedly when content is viewed on smartphones. This is also not to say that emotion can’t be engaged altogether on mobile devices, but that we have to recognize that the key trigger for emotion traditionally in ads –- the visual - has been compromised. This may be taken as an interesting challenge for marketers to find other ways to touch the user. For instance, Pradeep speculates: “When you see a drop in the visual, are there other sensory cues like audio that can become more important in mobile?” The same music that helps drive a TV spot might have to work that much harder or differently to compensate for the diminished visual power on the smaller screen. Likewise, the touch element, which isn’t even present in most other media, can be activated here in ways that might communicate feeling. You have a chance to compensate through audio or tactile.” Pradeep says that in his research thus far, it seems that the dominance of attention and memory and the diminution of emotion in responding to content on mobile is an inherent attribute of the medium and not a property of the content itself. The other parameter at work on mobile, of course, is context. Context does not only affect relevance, but receptivity. And Pradeep warns that mobile marketers need to account not just for physical location, although that is the easiest and first thing mobile might determine. “Time is an important contextual element, and the social networks. I think we are poised at a giant revolution in advertising where location, time and socially relevant data are factored in,” he says. Nielsen NeuroFocus helps marketers manage the change in scale from TV and other larger screens to the smartphone by literally compressing 30-second spots down to the essential qualities that make them work on mobile. The subjects’ responses to 30-second spots are determined so NeuroFocus can see on a second-by-second basis what the viewer was responding to across the major metrics of attention, emotion and memory. “Our algorithms automatically compress the ad into a seven-second version for mobile,” he says. They extract the elements that the viewer was disregarding anyway and create a mobilized version just of the key elements that sparked response. “It is like taking a yellow highlighter to an ad,” he says. “But when I talk about this with creative, often they have a cardiac arrest.” But this mobile version, while not broadcast-ready, is a kind of thought exercise that indicates to the marketer how the ad can be reduced to the things the brain liked about it Of course for an even broader and more challenging test, Dr. Pradeep might want to wire up the skulls around my house. I am not sure what sort of emotion “Oh, look the puppies” is supposed to indicate. But when my daughter passes around to my wife her iPhone to show off her latest cute animal from wherever these twentysomethings find and share this stuff, something visceral is going on. “Do you know how much I spend each month to keep this family in iPhones,” I protest. “This so you can see Labradors licking the lens on YouTube?” “You see, you say stuff like that as if it were a bad thing,” my wife counters. “Have you seen this puppy? Look.” Note to Dr. Pradeep. Yes, mobile media can engage this frustrated bill-payer’s emotions, but maybe not the ones marketers want to use. On the other hand, he just gave me one more piece of evidence for the upcoming final family arguments over whether Dad really needs a 70-inch flat screen TV in the living room.
Savvy marketers understand the power of rich mobile media advertising -- with a “call” to action simply a click away -- to the tune of $1.5 billion in projected mobile ad spend this year alone, according to eMarketer. By 2016, over 70% of the world’s mobile data traffic will be video, a remarkable 20% increase since 2011. With analysts touting blockbuster figures like these, it has become crystal clear that mobile video advertising offers marketers one promising way to capitalize on the ever-expanding landscape of the mobile media ad space. According to a recent report from AAAA Media Mind, mobile ads reach “one out of every three consumers.” Therefore, the key for most industry insiders is not if mobile video advertising is the best strategy for their clients, but ratherhow to effectively engage consumers in a way that translates into revenue and sales growth. As with all newly chartered mediums, recommended methodologies and strategies are changing faster than marketers and publishers can react. The result is a wide spectrum of marketing campaign performance in need of industry insight to drive ROI, and most importantly, conversion. As the industry adapts to the introduction of new technology and digital capabilities, there are specific steps that marketers can take to maximize their mobile video advertising initiatives. 1. Introduce form to function. Today’s consumers are known to be media multitaskers. It’s not uncommon for mobile device owners to simultaneously watch television while using their web-enabled phones daily; 49% of consumers reported doing so according to recent data from Yahoo. Industry trends show more marketers are enhancing “traditional” print, broadcast and online media campaigns with mobile video advertising. It is imperative to take account of all consumer touchpoints within the brand experience-- specifically when tailoring content that is appropriate to its given medium, like capping the mobile video ad experience to 15 seconds to increase consumer engagement. 2. Beware of bandwidth. Mobile video campaigns can increase unaided brand awareness by as much as 4 times when compared to traditional online video campaigns, according to InsightExpress. With that in mind, marketers should be diligent in delivering a consistent, high-quality brand experience by customizing mobile video ads to suit the user’s bandwidth capabilities. Mobile video streaming can be significantly compromised due to bandwidth limitations. Ads served on data networks, like 3G and 4G, should be optimized for lower bandwidth so as not to perform poorly and generate negative consumer engagement. Mobile video ads delivered over higher bandwidth networks, like WiFi, lend themselves to richer features like auto-expanding video overlays. By allowing the option for manual or auto-expanding animation, consumers can experience full-screen content with minimal latency. 3. Be engaging, not intrusive. Although pre-roll has dominated the online video advertising space for some time, there are additional options for marketers and publishers to consider. Studies show that the mobile device has the power to consistently elicit response from consumers because of its personal nature. As marketers seek innovative methods for increasing consumer engagement, the consumer experience must be top-of-mind at all times. For examples, tapless, muted video ads can be delivered within the banner space or as a video overpass. These are much better formats to deliver on mobile than content-invasive ad formats such as prestitials and interstitials that take users away from the content pages they intend to consume. 4. Think local. Relevance must not be lost in the sea of mobile video advertising options. In fact, when executed properly, mobile video advertising should enhance opportunities to localize and share content, and instantly drive conversion. Customized call-to-action overlays allow consumers to locate retailers, share products via social media networks and contact retailers with the click of a button -- all from their mobile device! 5. Be consumer-friendly. Mobile operators are limiting data plans due to the explosion in smartphones and mobile. The wireless data pipe is finite, and growing mobile adoption means worsening connection speeds. Delivering data-intensive video ads can be a user experience challenge, both in terms of latency and quality. Innovative video ad formats such as intelli-video-banners offer a perfect balance for data rich video ads, wherein the starting banner ad unit can expand to a tapless video overlay when the user is on broadband WiFi, and mobile optimized streaming tap-to video while on 3G. Mobile video advertising does not necessarily mean pre-roll or video ads stitched together with video content is some way. Intelligent use of connection, bandwidth, innovative ad formats and call-to-action with video can dramatically reduce the video acquisition cost per user while maximizing engagement and ROI for advertisers.