U.S. decathlon gold medalist Ashton Eaton helped AT&T swamp the competition when it came to TV spots run this summer by the U.S. major wireless carriers. Betting big on Olympic-themed campaigns, AT&T had four of the five “most-liked” TV ads, according to Nielsen data released today. The media research firm determines likeability based on the percentage of adults who remembered the ad, remembered the brand and liked the ad. Using that criteria, the top-rated ad was AT&T’s 30-second spot featuring a young athlete inspired by watching (on an AT&T-powered device) Eaton clinch the decathlon gold by winning the 1,500 meter race at the Olympics. That ad had a likeability score of 32%, compared to a norm of 14% for the wireless category. Another that ran frequently during the Olympics broadcasts featured U.S. swimmer Lochte appearing to swim across the ocean to arrive at the Summer Games in London. It came at No. 5, with a 17% likeability score. “AT&T was able to capitalize on the timeliness of the London Games with innovative, ‘real-time’ ads, using actual London 2012 footage in their ads, sometimes including events that aired just hours prior. Repeated imagery of athletes achieving and exceeding goals resonated with viewers,” stated a Nielsen blog post. Verizon managed to prevent a complete AT&T sweep by taking fourth place with a Father’s Day spot in which a father and son shopping in a Verizon store manage to bond over the 4G Droid Razr, albeit mainly through gestures and grunts. Now if AT&T could only do as well against its wireless rivals in customer satisfaction ratings.
Mobile payments startup Square continues to surge ahead. The mobile payments startups today announced closing a fourth-round financing for a reported $200 million at a $3.25 billion valuation. First rumored over the summer, the latest funding comes from Citi Ventures, Rizvi Traverse Management and Starbucks. The coffee chain announced its $25 million investment in Square in August as part of its wider partnership with the company to power m-payments and credit card transactions in stores. Square also said it’s now processing $8 billion in transactions on an annualized basis, up from $1 billion a year ago. Internally, its headcount has increased from 150 to 400 employees in the last year, with plans to add another 100 to keep up with its rapid growth. “Square’s growing revenue and workforce preceded the company’s plans for international expansion later this year,” stated its release on Monday. The company’s small card reader allows small businesses to handle card payments using smartphones and tablets instead of traditional point-of-sale (POS) machines. It also charges merchants a fee of 2.75% per swipe or a flat monthly fee of $275. Square more recently has also introduced its own mobile payment offering for consumers -- Pay with Square -- that allows people to pay for items at participating retailers through its mobile app for iOS and Android devices. Square has raised a total of $341 million to date from investors that also include Sequoia Capital, Visa and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, according to the Crunchbase database.
To promote its educational technology products, computer giant Dell this summer ran a first-of-its kind campaign for the company that ran across Web-connected TVs, the desktop Web and mobile devices. The aim was to track individual consumers across the three platforms to correlate the impact of one channel with the other two. “This type of campaign allowed us, for the first time, to have an integrated, cross-channel dialogue with our target demographic across their multiple connected devices, further reinforcing our educational technology messaging,” said Mary Ellen Dugan, Dell’s executive director of global brand and advertising. Working with Dell on the effort were WPP mobile agency Joule, GroupM’s MediaCom and cross-platform ad technology specialist Tapad. The company delivered 15- and 30-second Dell spots to some six million connected TVs. Joule CEO Michael Collins said the mobile ads, linking to rich media sites, ran on a defined list of sites and apps. “However, within that site/app list, we targeted consumers who had already seen the connected TV ad and those who had not, so we were able to see the difference in performance between these two groups,” he said. The ability to reach the same users across multiple devices helped Dell to approach the campaign in terms of audience rather than specific channels, he noted. After the campaign ran for a month from mid-July to mid-August, Joule and MediaCom found a 68% lift in the time viewers spent on Dell’s mobile site compared to viewers who only saw the ads on a single device. “Our research shows that consumers who see ads on more than one device are far more inclined to take action,” said Tapad CEO Are Traasdahl. The company says its tracking technology doesn’t use personally identifiable information (PII) and that it provides clear and persistent opt-out notification to consumers. According to a recent study by YuMe and research firm Frank N. Magid Associates, 30% of all Internet homes have connected TVs, and users of those sets are generally receptive to advertising. Almost 90% said they noticed ads on the platform, with 60% noticing pre-rolls. People were also more willing to watch ads in exchange for getting free content than paying a fee. Without connected TVs, Collins said it wouldn’t have been possible to link a specific TV and smartphone to the same person in the Dell campaign. “This cross-channel engagement is the beginning of a big shift in how brands will communicate with their consumers,” he said.
Companies in North America will spend $23 billion in search engine marketing in 2012, up 19% compared with the previous year -- but search marketers have new concerns this year, according to the State of Search Marketing Report 2012. The Econsultancy report, released with help from SEMPO, estimates a 13% growth rate for search marketing in 2013. Some 58% of respondents predict rising budgets in paid search and 55% in SEO this year. The vast majority of those who are not increasing budgets are keeping them roughly the same. Meanwhile, 17% will decrease spending in paid search, and 11% in SEO, according to the study. Nearly 90% of search marketers rate the trend of mobile Internet use as significant or highly significant, and many are concerned with a lack of analytics. Agencies, with a broader focus than individual companies, are somewhat more concerned with the rise of local search. Budgets remain healthy, but search marketers point to changes in Google's algorithm, confusing cross-channel attribution models, lack of mobile analytics, and retaining talent as some of the biggest concerns for 2012. Some 87% call Google's algorithmic updates during the last 18 months "significant or highly significant." The report notes that in most cases marketers view the changes as positive, but success in combating SEO spam sites can come at the expense of many legitimate brands. Although the Google algorithm has been the most immediate concern, the integration and measurement of multiple channels continues to be a challenge, as marketers look for greater understanding of the total impact from all search-related channels. Search professionals are concerned with integration and attribution. In fact, 34% are concerned with integration and measurement with other online and offline marketing channels this year, compared with 29% in 2011. Similarly, 29% find it more challenging this year to get budgets for paid-search efforts, compared with 24% last year. This 2012 SEMPO report includes 883 respondents from 36 countries across a variety of sectors from both B2C and B2B.
Looking to tap into its key demographic of women 25-54, T-Mobile is moving into the social gaming world, by sponsoring a social networking version of King.com’s “Bubble Witch Saga” on Facebook. The primary focus of the campaign is to build awareness around the launch of T-Mobile's new myTouch devices by advertising on Bubble Witch Saga, which has more than 17 million monthly players, most of whom are women ages 25-54. Using technology developed by MediaBrix, the campaign will utilize video advertising within the game to promote the myTouch devices. Bubble Witch is a puzzle game in which players match similarly colored bubbles with each other to pop them and gain points. T-Mobile’s sponsorship includes a pre-game advertisement noting the game is now available on mobile devices (and displayed on several T-Mobile devices), as well as a logo in the upper right-hand corner of the game during game play. "King.com's Bubble Witch Saga is a natural fit with T-Mobile, given the audience demographic, the large player base and the high engagement levels of players of the game,” said Mark Charkin, executive vice president of advertising at King.com, in a statement. “Over a year following its launch, there are now more than 17 million monthly players of the game and the average user plays many times a day.”
Flipboard, the social magazine app, has struck a deal with two of Japan’s largest ad agencies, Dentsu and ADK, to help it market the service in Japan, the companies said Friday.Flipboard launched in Japan in May and has been working with the agencies since then, but now has entered into a formal partnership with the two shops.The agencies will assist in expanding the number of media companies that share content via the app and also help popularize the service among consumers in Japan and promote the platform as an advertising medium.Among the media companies recently agreeing to share content with Flipboard in Japan are GQ Japan, Wired, AOL Celebrity, the Japanese edition of National Geographic and Autocar Japan.Flipboard bills itself as a social network aggregator that offers a magazine-type format for Android and Apple devices. It presents images, stories and links from various online social media, RSS feeds and blogs in a magazine-type presentation that users can “flip” through.The app was unveiled in December 2010 and was available at first for Apple iPads and phones. Android versions were introduced earlier this year.Earlier this month, Levi's confirmed it was adding a Flipboard component to its “Go Forth” campaign this fall. The effort introduces a new ad format that Flipboard calls a “brand magazine,” which combines all the images, content and social elements tied to a campaign into a single channel in the iPad app. That campaign, orchestrated by Levi's media shop OMD, runs through October.
It may still be early days, but Apple has a long way to go if buzz for the iPhone 5 is to surpass the video marketing efforts of competitor Samsung for its new line of Galaxy smartphones. On YouTube, Apple’s “Introducing iPhone 5” video, launched yesterday, currently has around 120,000 views. As Jim Edwards of Business Insider says: “That it's 7 minutes long -- an age in Web video -- doesn't help either.” However, it should be noted that this video is mostly about product specs, rather than being purely promotional. By comparison, a hands-on video for Samsung’s Galaxy Note II has been seen by 2.5 million people since the beginning of the month and is the most-shared video in social media in the last 24 hours and seven days, according to Unruly Media’s viral video chart for tech ads. Samsung’s strong viral position may not be a coincidence, Edwards points out, as a simple search for “iPhone 5” on YouTube yields sponsored ads from Samsung at the top of the page. “And the fact that Apple hasn't yet launched an iPhone 5 commercial on its YouTube channel isn't helping either,” he adds. “It's left Samsung in the enviable position of serving video content into the gap created by Apple's lack of new advertising.” Have a look at both videos below:
When it comes to retail and commerce, mobile site visitors are three times more likely to watch a video than traditional visitors. That’s the result of a research study conducted by Invodo, which provides video commerce solutions for brands and retailers. In studying more than 100 retailer and brand clients and surveying consumers, Invodo found that only 5.5% of its traffic comes from mobile devices, but that mobile visitors account for 14.3% of all video views. Mobile video viewers are also more likely to buy. Mobile site visitors who watched a video were three times more likely to purchase a product than a visitor who didn’t watch a video. As a regular caveat, any study should be taken with a grain of salt. But these results are potentially useful for other brands, agencies and technologists too. Invodo is agnostic and focuses on the video solution, not the devices on which the video is played. So what can a brand or publisher divine from this information? “This leads us to conclude that mobile users, even more than traditional users, view video as an exceptionally valuable piece of the shopping experience. This makes sense considering that browsing a mobile website requires significant effort in terms of zooming and panning when compared to the ease of clicking and viewing a video….Even more surprising was that of the clients we looked at there was not a single instance where the mobile view rate was less than that for traditional (laptop/desktop) devices,” Invodo said. The study also found that mobile-optimized sites have the highest view rates. In addition, mobile shoppers have a higher conversion rate when they view video. Both of these data points underscore the importance of ensuring video plays well on small screens. The sites optimized for video usually have larger calls to action, which helps drive video views.
When iPhone users upgrade to the next iteration of the iOS operating system for iPhone and iPad next week, they will get a host of new options for managing their own data with third parties. While the iPhone 5 rollout and iOS outline offered by Apple at its well-hyped event Wednesday covered much of the dazzle around these products, it barely discussed an area that will be of greater concern to marketers: new privacy and data protection. It takes some digging, but about three tiers down into the Settings menu in iOS 6, next week users will find an item labeled “Advertising.” Down in here is a toggle to “Limit Ad Tracking.” A near-microscopic text link at the bottom of this screen offers the following explanation: “Ad Tracking: iOS 6 introduces the Advertising Identifier, a non-permanent, non-personal, device identifier, that advertising networks will use to give you more control over advertiser’s ability to use tracking methods. It you choose to limit ad tracking, advertising networks using the Advertising Identifier may no longer gather information to serve you targeted ads. In the future all advertising networks will be required to use the Advertising Identifier. However, until advertising networks transition to using the advertising Identifier you may still receive targeted ads from other networks.” Some background is in order. Last year Apple started warning advertisers that it would cut apps off from using the UDID identifier that is specific to every Apple iPhone and iPad. The company’s implementation of this policy was unclear. And it announced this vaguely defined Advertising Identifier when iOS 6 was first announced. Controversy ensued. Some argued that the end of UDID was the end of mobile ad targeting on iOS. Other companies offered workaround solutions. And others got behind an openUDID standard. But it is still unclear, to me at least, what this identifier is, who controls it, what “temporary” means, and even what it means that the user gets to “limit” ad tracking. Does “limit” mean that some tracking is allowed but not others? Does it mean that third parties cannot track but Apple can? After all, one inherent issue here is that Apple is the maker of an ad network as well as an operating system. Even critics of iAd have praised the network’s user intelligence and ability to target even if the scale may be limited to iOS. But what data will this identifier hold and share? What competitive advantage does Apple get out of all of this? Whether this new option for users to opt out (kinda, sorta?) from tracking has any effect on the mobile in-app ad ecosystem is anyone’s guess. Also unclear is how Apple will deal with alternative targeting approaches. The statement in iOS suggests that ad networks will be “required” to transition to the Advertising Identifier. I presume that means that alternative targeting methods like OpenUDID will be prohibited. I reached out to several ad platforms and networks late yesterday for reaction, but I have not had much response yet. Perhaps this is a sign that everyone is trying to figure out what Apple is doing and what some of the terminology here actually means. Opera, which operates one of the leading ad serving platforms and ad networks on iOS, did get back to me with a statement. EVP of Consumer Media Mahi de Silva says in part, “Apple's introduction of the Advertising Identifier, new to iOS6 -- gives the advertising ecosystem a measured alternative to UDID, which in the past has been abused by third parties to track users without the knowledge or consent of consumers and sometimes even the knowledge or consent of the developer of the application.” Along with the addition of user control, de Silva says “these are both steps in the right direction.” He goes on to say that the needs of advertisers for targeting and functions like frequency capping are legitimate but need to be balanced against privacy controls. “We, at Opera, strongly believe that this balance can be achieved through the use of the Advertising Identifier in combination with anonymous data and privacy neutral methods,” he adds. This is a story just beginning to unfold. As the mobile ad ecosystem comes to understand what the Advertising Identifier is and what if any other kinds of user profiling will be available on iOS, we will get closer to understanding if this is a big deal or not. What's interesting is that Apple has not touted privacy as a strong feature of iOS 6. And my guess is that most users will have to struggle to find the toggle that opt-outs... of whatever it is they are opting out of.
Mark Zuckerberg took the stage last week at Techcrunch Disrupt to discuss all things Facebook, including the inevitability of a true Facebook search engine. It was the piece of information that most technology writers gravitated towards; even the stock price took notice (Facebook shares rose more than $2 per following the Zuckerberg interview). Zuckerberg noted, among other things, that Facebook currently processes “1 billion queries a day” without really attempting to productize a search capability. He goes on to say, “Facebook is pretty uniquely positioned to answer the questions people have. What sushi restaurants have my friends gone to in New York in the last six months and Liked? Or which of my friends or friends of friends work at a company that I’m interested in working at -- because I want to talk to them about what it’s going to be like to work there. These are questions that you could potentially do at Facebook if we built out this system that you couldn’t do anywhere else. And at some point we’ll do it. We have a team working on search.” Why is the promise of a Facebook search engine so exciting to users and shareholders alike? After all, we have already seen social search emerge across Google and Bing results; authenticated users are presented standard search results with a social filter applied, indicating content and domains that have been shared and liked by friends. What can Facebook do internally that Bing cannot with a Facebook data overlay? As I see it, the opportunity is for Facebook to create the ultimate social discovery tool. Given its access to a data set unrivaled in its social depth and richness, Facebook can legitimately rival Google for a broader share of the search market. I see three essential components for this opportunity to come to fruition: 1) Social discovery on-demand – If Facebook’s mission is to facilitate a more open world through its ubiquity and environment of “frictionless sharing,” then what better way than to empower social discovery on-demand rather than relying on what’s pushed to users’ News Feed and Ticker? The possibility of having complete freedom to explore every crevice of the Open Graph is very intriguing. This would require a hefty engineering effort, but making everything users have shared via Facebook (adhering to users’ privacy selections, of course) searchable with specificity, at any time and across any device, would be the ultimate killer app. It might even help reverse the recent decline in user engagement across the site. 2) Degrees of separation from people, brands, and sentiment – One of my favorite features of LinkedIn is the ability to see degrees of separation from individual users or employees of select companies. Facebook could similarly demonstrate via search the degrees of separation from individuals, friends who like certain brands, or sentiment (Zuckerberg’s sushi restaurant example). Imagine being an amateur photographer planning a trip to the Grand Canyon. Having the ability to search for friends, friends of friends, friends of friends of friends, etc., who have ever uploaded pictures taken from a trip to the Grand Canyon would be incredible. You could then connect with those people for recommendations on the most scenic spots ahead of your own trip. Undoubtedly new friendships would be born out of those types of exchanges too – further enhancing the social appeal to Facebook overall. 3) Search by Open Graph Expression – Open Graph Apps are still relatively new, and Facebook seems content for now to focus its promotion on games and media apps, but the potential here is immense. As more applications enter the App Center with unique expressions beyond the “Like,” the potential to query against user activity plus unique Open Graph Expression (e.g. discovering that “Ryan ‘Wants’ iPhone 5,” rather than “Ryan ‘Likes’ iPhone 5”) would enable a much richer search experience. In my above example, friendswho are also contemplating phone purchases in the near future could solicit my opinions on which phone is best, and how I arrived at my decision to “want” the new iPhone. The idea of a fully baked Facebook search engine should also whet the appetites of those in the advertising community. Greater access to Facebook’s data set -- both what exists today and what will exist in the future -- could prove to be exactly what marketers need to better understand how social advertising functions in tandem with more traditional channels. Search may be exactly what Facebook needs: an enhancement that simultaneously improves the user experience and the company’s attractiveness to advertisers.