NBC announced yesterday that it already has streamed 64 million video clips on digital platforms over the first few days of Olympics coverage, and 45% of them have gone to tablets and smartphones. PaidContent reports that during a conference call with reporters, NBC Research President Alan Wurtzel said that the NBC Olympics apps have been downloaded over 6 million times. Activity to the mobile Web site has been double that seen at the Beijing Olympics, with 4.6 million unique visitors thus far. Overall, NBC says that 28 million people came to NBCOlypmics.com already, an increase of 8% over the last summer games. But the level of video serving has already exceeded that of the Beijing Games.
Professional networking site LinkedIn on Thursday said revenue surged 89% in the second quarter on strong gains in its hiring services business in particular. Net income was $2.8 million compared with $4.5 million for the year-earlier period, due to higher costs. On an adjusted basis, LinkedIn reported a profit of $18 million, or 16 cents a share. Revenue rose to $228 million from $121 million a year ago. Analysts expected LinkedIn to report a profit of 16 cents a share on revenue of nearly $216 million, according to a survey by FactSet Research. LinkedIn’s growth in the quarter was again driven mainly by demand for its hiring solutions, which help companies recruit job candidates through the site. That business more than doubled (up 107%) from a year ago to $121.6 million, accounting for 53% of total revenue. That share is up from 48% a year ago. Advertising sales grew 63%, and represented 28% of overall revenue. Subscription revenue grew even faster -- increasing 82% to $43 million in the second quarter, making up 32% of sales. U.S. revenue totaled $147 million -- or 65% of overall revenue -- with international sales contributing 81 million, or 35%. With the rollout of its redesigned home page in July, LinkedIn said it's already seeing higher engagement among its 175 million members. The company said interactions, including status updates on the site, are now at all-time highs. LinkedIn is also seeing a strong response to the iPad app it unveiled in the second quarter, with more than half of page views coming from content-focused features, such as updates, news and groups. In June, the company began testing display ads in the iPad app, marking its first step toward monetizing its rapidly growing mobile audience. On the company earnings conference call Thursday, LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner said early response to the pilot program, involving advertisers such as Shell and Cisco, has been positive. Weiner said LinkedIn is testing ads in its mobile phone properties and plans to eventually extend each of its business lines -- advertising, subscriptions, and hiring services -- to mobile. As of the first quarter, 22% of LinkedIn's traffic was coming from mobile, up from 8% a year ago.
That didn’t take very long. Barely a month after launching its weekly iPad magazine at a $19.99 annual subscription rate, AOL’s “Huffington” digital magazine has dropped the pay model. All issues now are free in the app, and the Subscribe button in the app alerts the reader they are not paying for weekly access to the mag. A report at Capital New York claims that the HuffPo staff had been told that they were moving to a free model after only five issues have already been published. A HuffPo spokesperson told Capital New York that the paid model in the app store was “inconsistent” with the HuffPo model online and elsewhere on mobile, which had always been free. According to the report, the app itself had been downloaded 115,000 times, but the exact number of paid subs off that modest level was not disclosed. HuffPo has remained supportive of the magazine model, however. More than 20 staff are focused on the weekly, which features exclusive long-form articles and large-format images and interactivity not available in the online content. The HuffPo product from AOL follows the positive experience the company has had engaging users in tablet apps. The AOL tech blog Engadget, for instance, began repackaging its longer-form reviews and articles into a free weekly Distro magazine app in recent months. The company has said that it saw engagement with this app-formatted content (the same that was also at the Engadget site) increase by 10X when being read in tablet lean-back mode. A number of publishers have been following suit by crafting Web content into more magazine-like experiences within apps. The recently issued TechCrunch app greatly enhances its look and feel in an iPad app, for instance. But the changed business model for the Huffington digital magazine comes only days after News Corp.’s subscription-based "The Daily" announced significant layoffs. The business models for content publishing on tablets remain unclear as the platform seems to sit somewhere between the legacy paid media of print and the traditionally free models of the Web.
The jury’s still out on Google+ and Google’s various gadgets, but the search giant’s overall brand value bested any other in the second quarter of the year, according to new data from General Sentiment. Reclaiming the top spot from Apple, the Google brand generated $756 million in “impact media value,” the analytics firm found. “New and improved products propelled Google to No. 1 this quarter,” said Ari Kahn, CEO of General Sentiment. By contrast, Apple’s brand generated $594 million in impact media value -- followed by Microsoft ($356M), Amazon.com ($331M) and Hewlett-Packard ($258M). “The technology sector continues to dominate the Impact Media Value list, claiming eight of the 10 top spots,” according to Kahn. In what might come as a surprise to some, Kahn said Apple’s slip was largely due to “negative buzz surrounding Siri’s shortcomings.” Samsung, Sony, Disney, FedEx and Yahoo rounded out the top 10. Regarding “perception media value” -- which measures a brand with a focus on the quality of the exposure created -- Kahn said it is the consumer and financial services companies that are making the most significant impressions. Big brand winners in this category included AXA, Ball Corporation, FedEx, Progress Energy and Mattel. During the quarter, perception media value losers included ACE Group, Avery Dennison, AmerisourceBergen, Amphenol and University of Phoenix. The University of Phoenix took hits as President Barack Obama signed an executive order to protect veterans from the aggressive and deceptive recruiting tactics employed by higher education institutions, such as this. JPMorgan Chase amassed the most negative perception media value total on the list. To arrive at media values, General Sentiment measures the purchase equivalent value of a brand's exposure, as determined by the sentiment, frequency and exposure of news mentions and social dialogue. Brands are then ranked using two metrics developed by General Sentiment to generate top 10 rankings in three categories, including brand impact: biggest winners and biggest losers.
More Americans are upgrading to smartphones, but that doesn't mean they're leaving service problems behind. Smartphone owners are more likely to report things like dropped calls, spam and slow download speeds than feature phone users, according to a new study by the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project. For example, 49% of smartphone users say they encounter slow Internet speed at least once a week, compared to only 31% of people with regular phones. And 35% on the smartphone side experience dropped calls weekly versus 28% for other cell owners. While the results seem counterintuitive -- a higher-quality phone should equate to a better experience -- it's likely that a smartphone also carries higher levels of expectation for service. Smartphone owners are typically heavier users of mobile data services than feature phone users, which may increase the chances of their running into problems. Regardless of phone type, the vast majority of U.S. mobile users experience frustration with cell service at some level. The Pew report found that 72% lose calls at least occasionally and 68% get unwanted sales or marketing calls at one time or another. Furthermore, 69% receive unwanted spam or text messages, while 77% of mobile Web users encounter slow download speeds on occasion and 46% weekly. A Nielsen survey in June found that only 7.6% of U.S. mobile users so far have h4G service, promising speeds up to 10 times faster than 3G. The Pew study also called the level of telemarketing and spam “noteworthy” because of legal restrictions applying to these activities. In the case of unsolicited text, for example, commercial parties can't send spam to cell owners who placed their mobile device on the National Do Not Call registry. Even if not on that registry, regulations bar text messages sent from Internet domain names. The Pew study, based on a survey of 2,254 adults conducted between March and April, also showed that non-whites were somewhat more likely to experience phone problems than whites. For instance, 53% of Hispanic mobile Web users face slow download times at least weekly or more often, compared with 44% of their white counterparts. 41% of black and 39% of Hispanic cell owners reported dropping calls at least weekly, versus 30% of white cell users.
Most marketer and agency executives anticipate increasing their digital video advertising spend this year, according to a new study from Advertiser Perceptions -- and a good portion of the momentum will come from the combined deployment of video creative across TV and digital platforms. The Video Advertising Convergence study, which queried Advertiser Perceptions’ database of agency and brand execs, found that 69 percent plan to increase digital video spending over the next 12 months. Respondents cited three main sources as driving the increase: a reallocation of funds from other budgets (primarily print and billboard), a general shift from banner to digital video advertising, and lastly, the migration of TV dollars to video. The study found that TV buyers, especially view digital video as an extension of their traditional TV plans, extending the reach of a TV campaign while offering more precise targeting. Michael Turcotte, SVP, digital activation at Zenith, agreed that marketers and agencies are rethinking the one-size-fits-all creative approach. “They must now balance production budgets with the multiple different ways to deploy video and take advantage of the medium's benefits. While the ‘TV’ is still the dominant screen, the other screens offer a level of engagement and targeting that help drive up ROI. Marketers must seek ways to deploy both, efficiently." Some agencies are pushing to integrate their TV and video-buying teams. "During the recent upfront, we worked hard with our digital leaders at Initiative to combine digital and television purchasing,” said Kris Magel, EVP, director national broadcast, Initiative. “It's good for the marketplace, it's good for advertisers…we are advising our clients on a holistic approach to video and they want to know more about what's available.” He added: “Media brands need to build combined digital/television packages that show the advantages of annual commitments -- with significant flexibility and research that proves its value."
Back in 2010, I served as co-chairman of the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Local Committee and co-wrote the guide on local targeting. The primary challenges the mobile ad industry faced at the time included the lack of neighborhood-level geotargeting, fragmented ad inventory sources, and few ad unit standards. More recently, as my ad tech company PaperG began re-exploring the landscape for mobile-local advertising, I was surprised to see the very same challenges, but with one major addition -- privacy. Thankfully, however, some promising solutions are on the horizon. Targeting In 2010, AdMob and many of the early players in mobile advertising claimed to have a solution for hyperlocal targeting, including the ability to zero in on potential buyers at the neighborhood level via latitude/longitude coordinates provided by smartphones. However, once targeting providers were asked detailed questions, the best they could do was city-level targeting at any real scale, since most phones didn’t have GPS capabilities at that time. At worst, targeting providers would return latitude and longitude coordinates that were imprecise because, in fact, they just described the center of a ZIP code or DMA. Today, mobile ad inventory is more plentiful than ever thanks to the proliferation of smartphones, but the proportion of inventory with latitude/longitude accuracy remains limited. The reason: some smartphones restrict access to GPS capabilities to only those apps that need it for purposes other than advertising. As a result, there are still few ways of achieving hyperlocal targeting, but the ways that do exist can be highly accurate. Inventory sources If it was hard to execute a mobile media buy in 2010, it is arguably much harder in 2012 given the flood of apps and mobile Web site versions that exist today in the market. The rise of real-time buying for mobile, where ad placement can be done programmatically without faxing insertion orders back and forth, has alleviated this problem. Mobile RTB exchanges aggregate all of the fragmented media inventory and enable a more centralized buying solution. Unfortunately, thus far, there are no mobile RTB exchanges comparable in size and scale to online RTB exchanges like Google and RightMedia. However, the rise of mobile RTB demand-side platforms -- which can place ad buys on multiple mobile RTB exchanges -- can solve this problem. Ad unit standards Perhaps the one area that has demonstrably improved on every level is ad unit standardization. There is still fragmentation as a result of varied mobile device screen sizes, but this will not change anytime in the near future. There are two separate standard-setting bodies: the Mobile Marketing Association and the Interactive Advertising Bureau. Nonetheless, for the most part some dominant ad sizes have emerged, bringing real standardization within reach. Finally, thanks to Steve Jobs, HTML5 is the only standard that mobile ad creators have to consider. Privacy Mobile advertising has flourished as these problems are resolved, but a major new challenge has emerged -- privacy. Handset makers increasingly build in privacy restrictions on their phones that make it difficult to identify unique users to target with appropriate ads. With that information withheld, location has grown in value for targeting since it provides the advertiser with actionable information about the consumer, without revealing the consumer personally. This includes demographic information, the rough likelihood of spending money, and proximity to offline points of sale. I wouldn't be surprised if in two years, locally targeted advertising becomes the majority of mobile advertising as the industry seeks a privacy-friendly alternative to Web tracking that can still reach the right demographics.
In the past seven years, there has been a 400% increase in the number of people who have suffered a "distracted walking" accident while using a mobile phone, according to the Consumer Product Safety Commission. Last year in the U.S., 1,150 people went to hospitals after walking into lampposts, falling into gutters and similar, uh, tragedies (?). A Yahoo story says this figure is likely underreported. Ya recon? Watching someone text their way toward injury presents an Always-On-Era moral struggle between the humane urge to issue a friendly warning and the delicious reward that comes from watching someone stupid enough to never look up while texting take a header into oncoming traffic. After all, these are probably the same horses’ asses who text while driving and occasionally kill a pedestrian or car full of innocents. Both New York and Arkansas apparently considered regulating the use of handheld devices and headphones while walking, but neither bill passed. Probably because legislators want to listen to Scissor Sisters while they walk from the statehouse to the nearest pub. I saw one good video on Tosh the other night of a woman (hard to tell) who walked into a fountain while texting. I can only hope someone is collecting lots of the same into a collection for our amusement -- and eventually for a federally sponsored ad campaign to "educate" the public against more of their own stupidity. New Yorkers are already infected with "sidewalk rage" directed at tourists who stop on busy corners to consult maps or stare up at the skyline, oblivious to natives who are on a forward-leaning mission to get somewhere in well, you know, a New York minute. Add in further distractions from electronic guidebooks, texting or looking up directions, and the old NYC joke ("Excuse me, can you tell me how to get to Grand Central -- or should I just go fuck myself?") will be evermore true. On the other hand, it is only a matter of time before someone offers some sort of near-field radar app that issues a warning when you are closing in on an immovable object. Expect a Siri-like voice to start off with a pleasant "You might want to avoid the barrier ahead" starting at 15 feet, and ending with a shrill "Get Your Head Out Of Your Ass!" at two feet. But it won't do you much good if your handheld is snatched from your grasp by someone just slipping out of a closing subway door, a local NYC public service to help protect you from a later "distracted walking" accident. The undercurrent question here is, when did getting or sending a communication become so urgent that it MUST be performed while walking on a crowded street? Somehow we managed to evolve through a couple of hundred thousand years (or seven days, if you fundamentally must) of history waiting to bump into the other guy in order to ask him face to face when the new seasons of “Boss” or “Homefront” would start? Letters were an improvement until email and texting (and 50-cent postage charges) rendered them obsolete (although your mom still likes to get a little note in her mailbox occasionally). Landline telephones, especially after the invention of answering machines, spawned the notion that, at least for teens, persistent communications were the only way to maintain a steady relationship. Now that everyone on the planet has a mobile device, everything that for a few millennia could have waited, has suddenly become so goddamned important that it must be said or texted RIGHT NOW, even at the risk of injury. And this we call progress.
Here's some unsettling news for mobile marketers: Sixty-nine percent of mobile phone users who text say they receive spam, with one in four text users receiving spam at least weekly. That's according to a new report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project. One reason why those findings could spell trouble for marketers (and their agencies) is that the federal Telephone Consumer Protection Act gives people the right to sue -- for up to $1,500 per incident -- when companies use automated dialing systems to send them unwanted text ads. Such lawsuits have proliferated since 2009, when the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Simon & Schuster potentially violated federal law by allegedly sending unsolicited text messages promoting Stephen King's "Cell." That ruling marked the first time that an appeals court said that text messages were covered by the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. But in the three years since then, numerous other courts followed the 9th Circuit's lead and allowed lawsuits against mobile marketers to proceed. In the latest example, two weeks ago U.S. District Court Judge Janis Sammartino in the Southern District of California ago rejected Microsoft's argument that a text-spam lawsuit should only go forward if the consumer who sued could show an economic injury. Sammartino ruled that the federal prohibition on text spam allows people to sue regardless of whether they had to pay extra to receive the messages. At the same time, not every case has gone against marketers. Taco Bell recently prevailed in two separate text-spam lawsuits. In one case, a federal judge ruled that Taco Bell didn't violate the law by sending a single text to a user who had opted out; the text was to confirm that the user no longer wished to receive future messages. In the other Taco Bell matter, a federal judge ruled that the company wasn't responsible for text messages allegedly sent by an agency. A group of 12 local franchisees had hired the agency, but a division of Taco Bell appeared to have paid for the campaign, according to the court papers. Of course, not all spam campaigns will lead to lawsuits -- especially because it's not always obvious who sent the ads. "Plaintiffs' lawyers tend to go after those with deep pockets, and at least some of the spam is tough to easily connect to anyone," cyberlaw expert Venkat Balasubramani says in an email to MediaPost. He adds that text-spam that isn't clearly linked to particular marketers hasn't so far resulted in much litigation.