Volkswagen has a new sports car and it isn't wearing an Audi nameplate. The factory-tuned 256 hp Golf R hatch is here, and mercifully, there's no automatic tranny available, which says everything about who this car is meant for: enthusiasts. The car also goes against the grain for the automaker, which has been focused on going mainstream in the U.S. The R is very much for loyalists. They aren't a tiny group. The main non-VW fan site, VWVortex.com, says it gets 120 million hits each month. To tout the top-of-the-line Golf, which starts at around $33,900, to that core group of fans, the automaker has launched a new iPad app to talk up the vehicle. The Herndon, Va.-based U.S. division of VW is firing up a U.S. promotion “Golf R Ultimate Fan Experience” for the 2012 version of the car, which it is calling its most powerful vehicle ever in the U.S. The program is also a way to get R fans to download the new VW Golf R iPad app, which is the portal for entering the promotion. Fans of the Golf R, which replaces the R32, get an opportunity to share what they love about the Golf R and describe why they are “the ultimate fan” through the Golf R Drivers Forever iPad app. One winner and a guest gets a seven-day, six-night trip for two to Germany in September. The trip includes a stop at VW global headquarters in Wolfsburg to tour the Autostadt and Volkswagen AG; a visit to Nürburg to drive the Golf R on the Nürburgring motorsports complex with instruction from professional drivers; a visit to Berlin for an exclusive sightseeing package Luxury hotel accommodations in each city. The Golf R Drivers Forever app, which is free, has a link to the Sweepstakes, where entrants have to describe in 256 words or less why they want to win. The app also has Golf R videos, photos, footage and interviews about the heritage and performance of the R. Mail-in entries (does anyone still do this?) are also accepted. The Golf R will compete with vehicles like the Subaru Impreza WRX STI and Mitsubishi's famed Lancer Evo GSR. For enthusiast motorists looking for the biggest muscle over weight ratio, the two competitors beat the Golf R. But the automaker's U.S. chief, commenting on the vehicle's fan base and the fact that the promotional campaign is focused squarely on R enthusiasts, makes it clear that it's not a numbers-comparison game for shoppers, and there is probably less cross shopping. The company reported a 34.6% increase in sales last month, also saw a 19.2% increase in sales of Golf R, GTI and R32 variants.
As Hulu looks to appeal to more advertisers, the company will begin charging advertisers only for spots that run in their entirety. If a viewer does the equivalent of using a DVR online and skips a portion of an ad, the marketer will not have to pay. The initiative is an evolution of Hulu’s “ad swap” offering, where a viewer can begin watching an ad and opt to switch to another more relevant or entertaining one. In that case, the initial advertiser that is pushed aside is not charged, but the marketer that benefits from the switch is. Hulu will hold a TV-style upfront presentation this week in New York, where it will plug these options, as well as its veteran “ad selector” option. Hulu, which is moving into original programming, garnered $420 million in revenue last year -- a 60% jump. CEO Jason Kilar said the company is ahead of that pace so far in 2012. He spoke Tuesday at the Ad Age Digital Conference. On Hulu Plus specifically, the pay service, the company now has 2 million-plus paying subscribers: 500,000 more were picked up in the 2012 first quarter. Kilar said there are four metrics the company uses to evaluate whether its ad experience is working for marketers: brand recall, ad message recall, favorability and purchase intent. A Nielsen arm does the measurement and compares the Hulu results to a more traditional platform, such as TV, and Kilar said brand and ad message recall are coming in at two times the other outlet. Looking forward, Kilar said he expects six trends to dominate the future of TV: *The consumer experience will be increasingly personalized, a la Pandora versus traditional radio in that business. *Content options will be exceedingly comprehensive, with unending choices available on-demand from current series to archived stuff. *The TV experience will thrive with “life.” He may have been referring to the efforts to make it more social with person-to-person connectivity. *TV will be “unusually convenient.” Favorite shows available anywhere and everywhere. *Formats will meet the content; traditionally sitcoms have about 22 minutes of content and dramas 44. Now, there will be a need to use clips or shorter offerings that can allow mobile consumption, which fits time and place constraints of transport or location. *There will be relevant, higher-value advertising. This is a core emphasis at Hulu: to move away from widely distributed ads, hoping to find the right audience within the distribution and move toward ads that have an opt-in element or ones that are more contextual.
Tablets are the primary alternative to watching full-length TV shows when traditional TV is not available. New research from Viacom says laptops and desktops are no longer the main choice after traditional TV screens. Tablets comprised a 15% share of viewing full-length TV episodes after traditional TV, according to its survey. The research says that since tablets have gained prominence, viewing of complete TV shows has declined the most on desktops and smartphones. The biggest viewing categories on tablets are similar to what is watched on laptops and desktops: comedy and music. The research says reality is the top genre viewed on television, followed by drama, science fiction and sports. Viacom says aggressive tablet users are those who use apps from MSO-cable operators, Netflix, Apple TV, AirPlay users and Whispersync. About half of those tablet owners who subscribe to a cable company that offers streaming apps use them. The 18-24 demo are heavy users of tablets, especially in the dual video experience of watching TV and using tablets. However, for all users, 77% of tablet use is done alone; 74% of tablet usage is done at home. Viacom surveyed 2,500 people ages 8 to 54. Overall, its study found that 62% use their tablets daily; also that daily tablet users spend an average of 2.4 hours per day on their devices. Eighty-five percent of tablet use is for personal reasons versus business. Colleen Fahey Rush, executive vice president and chief research officer, Viacom Media Networks, stated: "We found that the tablet is a jack of many trades –- it offers video and social experiences, it's a source of information and it's portable. But despite its versatility, other devices prove irreplaceable." Viacom's study also said most tablet owners are not ready to purge their smartphones, laptops or gaming consoles. But 65% would replace their laptop before their tablet because it lacks the work functionality; 77% would replace their iPhone before their iPad.
House Beautiful and HSN (formerly the Home Shopping Network) are collaborating to create a House Beautiful-branded marketplace for home furnishings, including online and mobile e-commerce platforms, and TV promotions, with the airing of “The ‘House Beautiful’ Marketplace” during HSN’s “Spring Home Design Event,” April 17-19. The magazine-branded marketplace on HSN’s Web site offers a range of furniture, lighting, rugs, wall art and accessories, all of which presumably received the magazine’s aesthetic blessing. A narrower range of items will be hand selected and showcased by House Beautiful editors in the “House Beautiful Picks,” a monthly feature appearing on the same Web site. HSN will gain access to House Beautiful content for all its platforms, including online and mobile. There will also be custom content created for HSN by House Beautiful Editor in Chief Newell Turner and Senior Editor Orli Ben-Dor. The HSN TV promotion will include an appearance by Turner, discussing trends in home design and directing viewers to the House Beautiful marketplace. Feeling declines in ad revenue earlier than the rest of the magazine business, a number of domestic and shelter magazine publishers have looked for new revenue streams in retail and sales partnerships. Since 2008 Meredith Corp. has licensed Better Homes and Gardens to Realogy Corporation to sell houses as Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate. In 2010, Elle Décor struck a deal for a branded product line in Kohl’s, and earlier this year Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia signed a licensing deal with JCPenney providing for MSLO mini-shops in JCPenney locations.
AT&T brings together technology and family for a Mother’s Day-themed advertising campaign targeted at Hispanic consumers. “Mother’s Day appeals to everyone, but Hispanics are very family oriented,” Roberto Garcia, executive director of Hispanic marketing for AT&T, tells Marketing Daily, adding that Mother’s Day ranks only behind Christmas and Valentine’s Day as top “gift giving” holidays among Hispanics. “We thought this was giving something with an emotional weight.” The campaign, the Hispanic portion of AT&T’s new “It’s what you do with what we do” general market campaign, features a Mother’s Day-themed commercial in which a teenage boy uses his Nokia Lumia 900 phone to record a performance by Guatemalan singer Ricardo Arjona. The boy later shows that performance (in addition to many of the phone’s other features) to his mother. The commercial features Arjona’s song, “Mi novia se me esta poniendo vieja,” which Garcia described as an emotionally powerful song that appeals to women of all ages. “For Mother’s Day, I couldn’t think of anything better,” he says. “Our celebrities are part of the daily life of Hispanic Americans in the U.S.” The commercial, which will be running through the May 13 Mother’s Day promotional period, is an extension of AT&T’s recently unveiled general market campaign. That campaign is meant to show AT&T as not just a service provider, but as a company that provides a platform for people to use technology to their advantage. “We provide a service, but it’s really our customers that innovate,” Garcia says. “The concept [of the Hispanic campaign] is the same. It’s about how people innovate with our products and services.”
At the National Association of Broadcasters show this week, IBM is unveiling new research into the ways in which people worldwide now consume media and entertainment across screens. The “Beyond Digital” study of more than 3,800 respondents in six countries finds that device-based access to digital media is cutting across traditional age demographics. For instance, while 65% of people ages 55-65 watch TV while surfing the Web or text messaging on some device or PC, 49% of those over 65 are surfing the Web, and about 30% are texting. In fact, overall, 82% of global consumers 18-64 are using connected devices of some kind now. Enter the behavioral segmentation. IBM is identifying four “digital personalities” that transcend familiar age-based segments and have more to do with their degrees of access to technology and content as well as the overall intensity of their interactivity. To wit: The “Efficiency Experts” comprise the largest share of connected consumers (41%), and they are characterized by their relatively low level of access to content and lower levels of intensity. They see the technology and the information mainly as tools for making their lives easier. The “Content Kings,” which comprise 9% of respondents, have a high level of access to content -- but their levels of interaction are not as intense as some other categories. These are the gamers, the newshounds and the movie buffs. They are consuming content rather than necessarily making media or accessing on multiple devices. The self-explanatory “Social Butterflies” comprise 15% of the connected consumer base. These people are in consistent access to the networks, but principally to engage friends and family -- not necessarily media-supplied content. And the “Connected Maestros” or 35% of users combine the behaviors of the “Content Kings” and the “Social Butterflies” to become super-users who are accessing one another and all manner of content across a wide range of devices. IBM contends that understanding audiences as segments that are experiencing media across devices differently may be the key to capturing them in the future. The company says that media and entertainment companies must begin to get beyond mere redistribution of analog content into digital channels and start thinking about crafting media experiences that are appealing to these various digital personalities and the times, places and situation in which they engage media.
A year after cutting a deal to acquire the meetup network myYearbook, Quepasa will roll out a rebranding of the merged companies as MeetMe. The project will start in July at myYearbook.com. Citing comScore metrics, the combined companies say they are among the 40 most-trafficked sites online. myYearbook in particular saw a 40% rise in active users and a doubling of registrations. Visits are up 75% and page views up 100% in the fourth quarter compared to the same period in 2010. In very short order, myYearbook became a mobile-driven company. Within just the last year or so, audiences have migrated quickly to smartphone access to the site. “Fifty-eight percent of users log in on mobile,” says COO, Quepasa, Geoff Cook, who is part of the Cook family team that has nurtured this alternative social network into prominence since the mid-2000s. “We are seeing astonishing growth on mobile year-over-year,” he tells me. Registration for the site via mobile is up 371% in Q4 2011, and now is responsible for 26% of all new registrations. In 2010, myYearbooks was only seeing 2% of traffic coming from devices. It hit 50% at the turn of 2012, and in just the last few months escalated even further to 58%. myYearbook/MeetMe has moved to a genuine “mobile first” publishing paradigm, where features and ideas are being born on the device that may never migrate back to the Web experience at all. A “Locals” appeared first on the Android app and more recently on iOS. Cook says that a survey of users showed that 54% had met someone face to face via myYearbook. Many were using a location-based feed of user postings based on recent activity, but there were also many who were just browsing profiles on the Web. They flipped this activity into a GPS-fueled proximity filter that helped locate myYearbook members in the area. The new feature increased profile browsing on Android apps by 30%, he says. myYearbook has had the same challenge as any mobile social network in taking staggering amounts of traffic and resulting inventory and making something from it for marketers. The company told All Things D recently that it was making only about 1% of its revenue from mobile. Cook says the site is approaching 2 billion mobile page views a month, and they have mixed up a number of different ad units and interstitials to monetize all of this. But as has been the case all along with the myYearbook project, the real money appears to be virtual -– as in virtual currency that allows users to gift things to one another and buy more prominent places for themselves in the user search engines. Yes, at myYearbook -- as in high school -- popularity is king and everyone is a brand unto himself or herself. You can buy credits that can be applied to spotlighting yourself. Cook says that they recently injected virtual currency buying into the Android app in Feb. and the iOS app in March. “We had low expectations going into Android and all that was written about how it under-monetizes,” he says. “But we found it was blowing away the Web on a daily active user basis.” Rather than a friction-filled revenue laggard, Cook sees Android really kicking in. “I think Google is just getting better about frictionless payments that it implemented in its most recent billing solution,” he says. The iOS version of the virtual currency model is just kicking in, but about on par with the Android version, he adds. But for all sorts of publishers who are trying to leverage incremental payment solutions or in-app upselling, Cook’s early experiences with m-commerce are encouraging. With integrated payment systems, mobile devices become payment devices that are used more effortlessly than their counterparts on the Web, which usually require either credit card entry or at the very least some involved kick-over and sign-in to a PayPal. “It is like a four to five times difference in terms of DAU value of a mobile user when it comes to buying currency,” he says. I have to wonder what the possibilities might be for a range of cross-platform content providers once they realize that their users could pay them for just about anything more easily and quickly from their phone than from the Web. With user session frequency levels so much higher on mobile than on the Web for most publishers, these media brands now have so many more opportunities to put offers and incremental paid content in front of users. I can’t count the number of strange “micro-payment” schemes aimed at publishers I covered back in the late 90s and early 2000s. People didn’t much like buying many digital subscriptions, so publishers dreamed of selling content by the piece online with a simple click. Now, as media themselves are migrating across screens, mobile presents a golden opportunity to plug a cash register into the content distribution system. That movie review, buyer’s guide, nutrition advice or some other combination of content or service that no one dreamed of paying for at their desktop may suddenly become worth a buck if it becomes available at the right place, time and circumstance. And that pay-walled archived article or one-day pass to a database on the Web might be that much more tempting to access if a tap on the site’s corresponding smartphone app will get me in effortlessly. M-Payments could help all media re-imagine what content and business models become possible in a new surround-screen environment.
Troy-Bilt touts its yard products as made to last a lifetime, so it makes sense to show one family in varying life stages throughout its TV spot. In an effort to further reach 26- to 49-year-old homeowners and DIYers, Troy-Bilt added the Shazam logo to its commercials, enabling mobile and tablet users to access additional product and song information. Unfamiliar with Shazam? It’s an app that identifies song titles and artists, allowing viewers watching TV from their tablet or smart phone to “tag” the music in the ad. Once the song is tagged, users are directed to a Troy-Bilt site that offers product information, a Lowe’s store locator and links to Troy-Bilt’s web site and Facebook page. In addition, users can also download the full-length version of the song from the ad -- Tom Luce’s “World Goes By” -- via iTunes. The ad, seen here, begins with a young man planting a tree. The spot continues on through the years, as the man is now a young husband mowing the lawn, then a young father cutting the grass on a ride-on mower, and ending as an older father whose children now help with the yard work. “We felt Shazam could be a solution that would allow us to deliver a clear, singular message in the TV spot,” said Jamie Venorsky, associate partner/creative director at Marcus Thomas, Cleveland, the agency behind the campaign. “We reached out to Shazam to study their current user profile. When we overlayed the data, it was a good fit, not just from a demographic perspective, but from a psychographic and technographic perspective, as well.” According to Venorsky, the music used was chosen from a small pool of commissioned work. “We and music house DeepMix identified and commissioned three artists to develop original demos for us. The Luce track supported the visual narrative best. From his demo, we developed the full length track, then cut down a 30-second version for the spot.” The campaign, running through May, is the first time Troy-Bilt has used Shazam in any of its advertising. There are also three different endings to the ad, each showcasing a different product. Two endings launch new products: the Neighborhood Rider riding lawnmower, and Jump Start, a cordless power starter for Troy-Bilt hand products. The third ending promotes Troy-Bilt’s existing line of TriAction lawn mowers.