While Coke’s mobilized reinterpretation of the iconic “I’d like to buy the world a Coke” campaign won the Grand Prix in the Cannes Mobile Lions awards for mobile advertising yesterday, the full list of Gold, Silver and Bronze Lions were also awarded. The Gold Lions went to: For Activation by Location or Proximity, Toyota Motor Sales and Marketing and ToyToyota Party for "Backseat Driver." For Augmented Reality Experience, Johnson & Johnson and JWT New York for "Band-Aid Magic Vision" For Use of Multiple Screens or Networked Mobile Technology, Chevrolet and Goodby Silverstein & Partners/SF for the "Chevy Game Time" For Use of Innovative Technology in Mobile, Red Tomato Pizza Restaurant and TBWA/RAAD Dubai for "VIP Fridge Magnet" For News, Weather and Media, The Village/TheVillage.RU Look At Me for "Parking Douche" For Charities, Not-For-Profit and Public Information, The Hospital for Sick Children Mobile Pain App and Cundari Toronto for "Pain Squad" For Tablets and other Devices, Bradesco Seguros and Auto AlmapBBDO Sao Paulo for "Fake Ad" For Products, Toyota Motor Sales and Marketing and ToyToyota Party for "Backseat Driver" For Products as well, Nokia Lumia 800 YOC, Berlin and Carat Dusseldorf for "Mystery Ad" For Managing Campaigns (including SMS, MMS and Mobile Email/Messaging Campaigns, The Microloan Foundation Charity and DLKW Lowe London, for "Pennies for Life" For Best User Experience, The Hospital for Sick Children Mobile Pain App and Cundari Toronto for "Pain Squad" The full slate of Gold, Silver, Bronze and Shortlisted campaigns for the Mobile Lions are available at the Cannes Lions site.
Businesses spent $132.8 billion in the U.S. last year on local ads and about $68.4 billion -- or 46.5% -- aimed to drive telephone leads, according to a BIA/Kelsey report that highlights the trend toward call-based ads. Fueled by mobile devices, U.S. small businesses spent $41.1 billion on local advertising. Of that, $24.7 billion -- or 60.1% -- of all SMBs earmarked budgets for generating telephone leads, said BIA/Kelsey analyst Matt Booth. About 11% of companies now use call tracking to follow leads from the Web, up 5% in one year. "Call conversion from a local search on a desktop local is 7%, once the landing page is viewed, compared with 57% from a mobile device," Booth said. "Mobile applications can drive up to 62% of telephone calls." By 2015, the number of local search queries on desktop and mobile devices will "equal each other." Booth forecasts call volumes from search -- organic and paid traffic --will pale in comparison to calls generated from mobile devices by 2016. BIA/Kelsey forecasts 70 billion calls from the Internet and mobile to all U.S. businesses that year, with most of them coming from mobile devices. The report, titled "Call-Based Ads: Eliminating the Unknown From Advertising," provides a historical context, explains the foundation for growth and provides market forecasts. It also highlights data from BIA/Kelsey's ongoing "Local Commerce Monitor" study, highlighting that small-business advertisers report a phone call, even more than a personal visit to their store, can become the most valuable new business lead. The research firm expects to release the full report next week at a conference in San Francisco. The report also suggests that query volume will enable downstream businesses to sell product and services, as well as generate telephone calls. Booth said call-based advertising businesses need the ability to redirect calls, enabling the growth to parallel the paid-search market. This media grew supported by queries or searches on categories, such as cars or plumbing. He estimates that about 22% of all call traffic will flow through paid-search listings. Booth said that in time, mobile searches will reflect city site, local and offline. The conversion of category calls will grow from 6% to 12% by 2016. Google will also drive growth. Earlier this year, Google began offing a service that splits the keyword bid between calls and clicks. The bid per call allows marketers to bid for phone calls, as well as clicks, when Google serves search ads on computers and tablets. Booth said the algorithm enables marketers to optimize performance across leads. "With this service, I expect Google to drive this call-based ad market," he said. The average U.S.-based business received 10.9 calls per month from desktop search last year and 34.7 calls per month from mobile, including mobile search. In 2013, the average U.S.-based business will receive 13.8 calls per month as a result of desktop search and 80.9 calls from mobile, according to the report. An influx of calls will create challenges. While the research shows that between 10% and 30% of calls are high-quality lead-based calls to a business, the massive amount of incoming calls -- combined with a high percentage of unwanted calls -- opens up issues related to analytics and call quality.
In connection with the unveiling of its new iPad rival, Microsoft has begun testing new ad concepts for apps that will run on its Window 8-powered Surface tablet. To aid in that effort, the company has enlisted the help of a half dozen creative agency partners: AKQA, Big Spaceship, Razorfish, Team Detroit, UM and Y&R. With the Surface making its Hollywood debut Monday night, Microsoft has been previewing examples of potential Windows 8 ads for advertising and publishing partners at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. One mock-up made public shows an ad for Adidas’ Predator cleats integrated with the Seattle Sounders FC app. The angled ad image of the snazzy shoes takes up about a third of the screen, which leads to a three-paneled landing page for more information about the Predators, as well as other Sounders-branded merchandise made by Adidas. Microsoft said the background of an app can also tie into a brand’s text, videos or other rich media, much the way Web pages today might run branded “skins” as part of a display campaign. Working directly with Madison Avenue to come up with effective new ad formats marks a new approach for Microsoft, according to Jennifer Creegan, general manager of display advertising experiences at Microsoft Advertising. “With these partners, we will look to create a new standard for what ads within Windows 8 apps can and will be, as well as ensure that experiences will be engaging for consumers and effective for marketers and publishers,” she wrote in a blog post Tuesday. She noted that staff from the six agencies are in the process of developing several “high-level scenarios” for ad executions in Windows 8 apps, said Stephen Kim, general manager of global creative solutions, advertising and online, at Microsoft, in a separate post today. Formal standards for tablet advertising have yet to be established, although the Mobile Marketing Association has published guidelines for ad units in the emerging category. Experimentation may remain the modus operandi when it comes to tablet advertising, but the rapidly growing segment has shown early promise for marketers. A new study by the Online Publishers Association found 29% of tablet owners say they’ve researched a product in the last six months, while 23% have clicked on an ad, 20% have used a special offer or coupon and 19% have visited a product Web site. About 38% of tablet owners have also used their device to make a purchase. The bigger challenge for Microsoft is competing with the iPad and Apple’s catalog of more than 600,000 apps, including some 200,000 tablet apps. That’s why at its tablet launch Microsoft chose to highlight hardware innovations “rather than show off any of the apps or content partnerships that many analysts believe it will need if it is to make the Surface a success,” noted the Financial Times. The FT itself has released a Windows 8 app in connection with a preview release of the operating system earlier this month. Both Windows 8 and the Surface tablet will offer a library of apps when they launch later this year, with support from other brands, including Netflix. Microsoft didn’t specify when any new Windows 8 ad formats would be available.
New research may indicate that Netflix’s appeal vis-à-vis HBO, Showtime and pay-per-view films is less than expected, given the relatively low cost. Parks Associates found that 17% of those watching HBO and other premium networks consider going with Netflix instead. Also, 16% of broadband users consider going with an online video-on-demand service while watching a movie via traditional VOD. Still, Parks Associates said its research shows that consumers appreciate the lower cost of Netflix and “viewing flexibility,” which leads to higher customer satisfaction than other services. "Consumers can pay for a month of Netflix for about the same amount as for two pay-TV VOD movies," stated Brett Sappington, the director of research at Parks. He added that research shows “consumers know the quality” of Netflix is less than pay TV, “but the cost-benefit comparison is enough to affect their purchase decisions." Netflix does suffer from lesser “picture quality,” stated Parks Associates’ John Barrett, although he added: “Pay-TV providers need to develop alternative services that counter Netflix's advantages in cost and flexibility." Some efforts are underway by cable and other operators to offer their own over-the-top services, but Parks Associates said the initiatives are hurt because the brands have far less awareness than Netflix, including Comcast and Dish Network. Those, however, are only available to subscribers. Well-funded Verizon and Redbox, which has marketing advantages with machines nationwide, are planning a Netflix-style stand-alone streaming service for later this year. If priced in line with Netflix, it could pose a serious challenge.
Many retailers have become all too familiar with showrooming, as mobile consumers shop their aisles and then order online or from lower-priced competitors discovered via mobile. The obvious response to this is for retailers to attempt to interact with consumers as they scan and shop, whether through technologies like geo-fences or plain human observation by sales associates. That would be counter-showrooming. But what if retailers could find a way to incent shoppers to scan products in their stores to promote sales of those products to others who are not in the store? This would be true reverse showrooming, using the showrooms of retailers to sell their products to people not on location. A new consumer-to-consumer online shopping startup is heading in that direction. Shop My Label, which bills itself as “an online community that supports and facilitates peer-to-peer sales,” just launched in beta mode starting with fashion and beauty products. The idea is that a consumer opens a free account to create their online shop. They select items from participating retailers to "stock" their shops. The shop owner then shares information about their store with their friends through their social networks. When their friends or anyone else buys from their online store, they receive up to 10 percent commissions on each sale. The individual stores are positioned to be marketed to each other -- mainly though Facebook, the primary sign-in method to create a storefront. “We’re a social company,” says Dearrick Knupp, founder and chief product officer of Shop My Label. Knupp is situated with more than a dozen employees working upstairs in a building in New York, only a few blocks from Foursquare headquarters. The company has signed 32 retail partners, including Saks, Delia’s, Avenue, Armani Exchange and Vince Camuto. And those retailers should be happy, since the items sold at the personal shops will be at full retail. The edge for the personal shop owner is that they can create an outfit by mixing and matching from a number of stores and brands, giving the buyer a one-stop shopping experience with payment and free shipping being aggregated. “We’re driving full-price sales, so free shipping was a necessity,” ‘says Knupp. He says that part of the marketing partnerships with the retailers is that they market Shop My Label to their customers. Shop My Label has inventory data feeds from the retailers, which Knupp says was far more difficult than anticipated. “Retailer integration is not easy,” he says. “And fashion is tough.” “We have to integrate 45,000 products just from Saks.com and we have to manage 700,000 SKUs,” says Knupp. Prices from the retailers are updated daily. The first clue of the potential mobile future of Shop My Label was when the company named as its Chief Operating Officer Boris Fridman, mobile pioneer and former CEO of Crisp Wireless (now Crisp Media). The intent is for Shop My Label to scale gradually and then add mobile as the second phase, says Knupp. With mobile, consumers with storefronts could potentially visit physical stores and scan products to have them automatically entered onto their personal store. They would then have a firsthand database of the products they viewed and scanned, giving them more detailed information to add to their marketing to their Facebook friends. This is essentially peer-to-peer selling with the premise of sellers and buyers engaging with each other while using the Shop My Label platform. The mobile consumer would become a re-packager of sorts -- an advance scout who would see and feel the products before auto-selecting for their personal storefronts. Perhaps the next challenge for the retailers at the customer level will be to determine whether the scanning shopper is doing so to use them by showrooming -- or help them by reverse-showrooming.
According to a new comScore release on insights into the U.S. tablet market, tablets have reached a critical mass in the U.S. with 1 in every 4 smartphone owners using tablets during the three-month period ending April 2012, and nearly three times more likely to watch video on their device compared to smartphone users, with 1 in every 10 tablet users viewing video content almost daily on their device. Mark Donovan, comScore SVP of Mobile, observes that “... tablets are one of the most rapidly adopted consumer technologies in history... poised to fundamentally disrupt the way people engage with the digital world... on-the-go and... in the home...” In April 2012, 16.5% of mobile phone subscribers used a tablet, representing an increase of 11.8 percentage points in the past year. Growth in market penetration was even more apparent among the smartphone population with nearly 1 in 4 using a tablet device in April, an increase of 13.9 percentage points in the past year. A lower 10.4% of feature phone owners use a tablet, suggesting that smartphone ownership is highly predictive of tablet adoption in the current market. Tablet Users Among Mobile Audiences (Total U.S. Mobile Subscribers; Ages 13+; 3 Month Average) % of Respondents Using Tablet Apr 2011 Apr 2012 Point Change Total Mobile (Feature Phone & Smartphone) 4.7% 16.5% 11.8 Smartphone Only 9.7% 23.6% 13.9 Feature Phone Only 2.3% 10.4% 8.1 Source: comScore MobiLens, June 2012 A demographic analysis of mobile device audiences indicated that tablet and smartphone audiences closely resemble one another in terms of gender composition, with tablet users just slightly more likely to be female than smartphone users. However, the age composition of audiences showed that tablet users skewed noticeably older than smartphone users. For both devices, the heaviest overall audience concentration was between the ages of 25 and 44. Compared to smartphone owners, tablet users were 28% more likely to be in the 65 and older age segment, and 27% less likely to be age 18-24. Tablet users also skewed towards upper income households, likely a function of the high price point of these devices still considered a luxury good to many consumers. Nearly 3 in 5 tablet users resided in households with income of $75,000 or greater, compared to 1 in every 2 smartphone users. Tablet and Smartphone Audience Demographic Profile (Total U.S. Tablet Owners and Smartphone Subscribers, Age 13+; 3 Month Average Ending Apr. 2012) % Share of Tablet Audience % Share of Smartphone Audience Index of Tablet to Smartphone Audience (100=Avg.)Total Audience 100.0% 100.0% 100 Male 49.2% 51.6% 95 Female 50.8% 48.4% 105 Age: 13-17 7.3% 6.5% 112 18-24 12.3% 16.9% 73 25-34 24.4% 25.3% 96 35-44 21.4% 21.2% 101 45-54 17.8% 15.7% 113 55-64 10.1% 9.2% 110 65+ 6.8% 5.3% 128 Household Income: <$25k 7.4% 11.7% 63 $25k to <$50k 17.7% 19.5% 91 $50k to <$75k 18.9% 19.5% 97 $75k to <$100k 18.3% 15.9% 115 $100k+ 37.7% 33.4% 113 Source: comScore TabLens and comScore MobiLens, June 2012N.B. comScore defines a media tablet as a touchscreen tablet device with a slate form factor, a 7 inch or greater screen size and a data connection, but no voice plan. Single purpose eBook reader devices are excluded from this definition. More than half of tablet users watched video and/or TV content on their device in April 2012, compared to just 20% of the smartphone audience, with larger screen sizes making tablets more conducive to video consumption than their smaller-screen cousins, says the report. Not only were tablet users more likely to watch video, but they were more likely to view video habitually with 18.9% of tablet users watching video content at least once a week, and 9.5% watching video nearly every day on their device. Of those viewing video at least once during the month, 1 in 4 paid to watch content, highlighting the tremendous monetization potential this platform represents for content providers. Video/TV Viewing on Device for Tablet and Smartphone Audience (Total U.S. Tablet Owners and Smartphone Subscribers, Age 13+; 3 month avg. ending Apr. 2012) Viewing Frequency% of Tablet Audience % of Smartphone Audience Ever in month 53.0% 20.0% Once to three times throughout the month 24.6% 10.3% At least once each week 18.9% 6.7% Almost every day 9.5% 2.9% Source: comScore TabLens and comScore MobiLens, June 2012 For additional information from comScore, please visit here.
Microsoft unveiled the tablet Surface in Los Angeles last night, but it wasn't the first time the technology made an appearance. The original Surface, a 30-inch computer tablet-like display, debuted at the Sheraton in Boston, Chicago, New York, San Francisco and Seattle in 2008. The intuitive user interface highlighted the ability to move and interact with content without a mouse or a keyboard on a tablet-like screen. But that wasn't the first time. Parts of the Surface interface and the Windows 8 operating system (OS) to improve advertising and search surfaced two years prior. In 2006, Ray Ozzie -- one of Microsoft's three chief technical officers at the time -- demonstrated a prototype that used touch to move content on one and between several flat screens. The prototype highlighted at the Emerging Technologies Conference in San Diego, Calif. showed the ability to share content between devices and screens, as well as interact with touch. Now think of the ability to transfer content from the Xbox TV screen to the tablet and back with a swipe. Marketers can expect Microsoft to get creative with Windows 8, Microsoft Maps, and local search apps. Not only from an artistic and creative side, but also though voice search. Surface, supported by Windows 8, will likely become the first of many portable PC-type machines that Microsoft releases. The company is working with several agencies -- AKQA, Big Spaceship, Razorfish, Team Detroit, UM and Y&R -- on potential future brand ads in Windows 8 apps. It isn't the first time that Microsoft tried its hand at hardware to diversify incoming revenue. Aside from the successful Xbox entertainment console and introduction of NuAds, Microsoft had its own music player -- the Zune -- which it shuttered, along with a line of phones. The Zune and phones got favorable reviews, but couldn't hold their own. When it comes to smartphones, Microsoft-based devices lost market share in March 2012, when they represented about 3.9% of the market, according to comScore. The research firm estimates that 24.9% of all U.S. smartphone owners also owned a tablet, up 308% from the previous year. Ronan de Renesse, principal analyst at Analysys Mason in the United Kingdom, calls Microsoft Surface "a showcase for Windows 8 and Windows RT." He believes Microsoft cannot sustain an aggressive device strategy while licensing Windows on tablets. "The big question is, if Surface becomes as successful as the iPad, will Microsoft choose to stop licensing Windows on tablets?," he asks. Not a chance, I say.