As part of its push into mobile advertising, Facebook recently began allowing marketers to target campaigns by iOS or Android device. The new level of targeting was added in connection with the launch of mobile app install ads on Facebook, which promote games and apps instead of brands. To further highlight mobile targeting options, Facebook ad partner Optimal has made public analytics data relating to the social net's iPhone 5 owners. The information comes from the company’s Audience Matrix social analytics tool drawing on tens of billions of consumer data points across social media platforms. Among the findings, iPhone 5 users on Facebook are 59% male, 41% female, and have an average age of 32. When it comes to location, the biggest concentration of iPhone 5/Facebook users are found in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta and Dallas. Surprisingly, tech-savvy San Francisco came in sixth. Their top three searches on Facebook: UPS, Honey Boo Boo and Obamacare. “We hope this kind of data will give them some new and unique insights, and also get them thinking about new kinds of ad campaigns they can look to run using our Optimal platform,” noted the company’s CEO Rob Leathern. Optimal also has anonymous demographic data on Android users on Facebook and information on iOS and Android users by country. While Facebook allows targeting by devices on one of the platforms—like the iPhone or iPad—it doesn’t yet offer the option to target by a specific model, such as the iPhone 5, according to a TechCrunch report last week. It also hasn’t extended mobile targeting to other platforms like Windows Phone or BlackBerry. Based on initial results from mobile campaigns on Facebook, Optimal recently said Facebook is making from 20 to 40 times more per impression in mobile than on the desktop. Facebook reported mobile ad revenue jumped to $150 million in the third quarter, or 14% of total revenue, from just $10 million in the prior quarter.
At Ad:tech NY on Wednesday, Shiv Singh, global head of digital at PepsiCo, said the company faces a real challenge with doing real-time social at scale. "We are a massive business, with our products in 97% of American households, so for something to truly resonate it has to be very big," he said. The company has focused on Twitter to support its evolution and launch of new Pepsi global positioning around "living life for the now," establishing Twitter's largest brand partnership to date. "The brand relaunch is about how to live in the current of culture, how to maximize the moment," he said. "We saw Twitter as a key anchor point." He said the days of big campaigns aren't enough. "We also found that when you put conversation at the center of ads, you get big results. You can't have strong push messages on social. The brand has to be in the current of culture and conversation." As part of the effort, Pepsi got access to Twitter data on how music is being consumed. "We have a strong heritage with music, and the more we associate with music, the more products we sell." The company created a 60-second minivideo recap of what had happened for the prior week on Twitter around music and created weekly tweet-sized, 50-second video mashups. "We've been doing that for a year. The second piece was to take a rising song and give out downloads." Third, the company organized and ran four major Twitter live-stream concerts, which were also streamed on Pepsi.com. Not only could viewers stream the concert on the social network, they could also influence it. "So for the first time on a massive scale we were able to program without TV. Also, with advertising on Twitter, we were able to see interesting engagement rates with." He said that among music enthusiasts on Twitter, 30% of them talked about Pepsi in 2012, versus around 13% in 2011.
More people than ever are using their cell phones to get health information. The share of mobile users doing so has gone up to nearly a third (31%) from 17% two years ago, according to a new survey from the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project. Smartphones are driving most of that activity. More than half (52%) of smartphone owners are looking up health information on their devices, compared to just 6% of regular cell phone users. Younger, better-educated adults, minorities and caregivers are also more likely to use their phones to get health information. M-health has long been seen as an area of opportunity for health providers, pharmaceutical companies and other industry marketers. A GSMA forecast estimated the mobile health market would grow to $23 billion by 2017 across mobile operators, device vendors, health providers and publishers. The Pew report identified certain demographic groups as heavier mobile health users: African-Americans, college graduates, women, those with an annual household income between $50,000 and $74,999, and those between 30-49. Pew estimates that 84% of smartphone owners have downloaded an app of any kind. But only 19% have downloaded an app specifically to track or manage health. Women, those under age 50, the better-educated, and those with an annual household income over $75,000 are more likely to have downloaded a health app. Given increased public awareness about tracking of app use by developers and third parties, it’s possible privacy concerns play a role in holding back downloading of health-related apps. A separate Pew report released in September found privacy considerations are leading most app users (57%) either to remove particular apps, or to decide against installing them. Exercise, diet and weight apps are the most popular types of health apps. Some 38% use an app to help track their exercise regimen, 31% monitor their diet, and 12% use an app to manage their weight. Other health apps track blood pressure, pregnancy, blood sugar or diabetes, and medication. The WebMD app was cited by 4% of survey participants. The latest study also showed few mobile users are texting for health-related reasons. While an estimated 80% of cell owners send and receive text messages, only 9% get any text updates about health or medical issues. Women, and those between the ages of 30-64, are more likely than other cell phone owners to have signed up for health text alerts. People potentially dealing with more serious health situations — caregivers, those living with chronic conditions, and people with recent significant health changes — are more likely to get text alerts. The Pew findings are based on a national survey of 3,014 U.S. adults fielded between August and September. The survey involved a mixed landline/cell phone sample and interviews were conducted in both English and Spanish.
Add Macy’s to the growing list of retailers hoping for a merry mobile holiday. The store, which has already made significant investments in its mobile initiatives, is unwrapping a new Black Friday app for phones, available next week. Store-created holiday apps grew popular last year, as it became increasingly evident that smartphone shoppers were wielding their devices to “showroom” at retailers, often leaving stores empty-handed when they found a better price elsewhere. Macy’s, which has made a concerted push to win over smartphone-loving Millennials, is making its mobile experience more appealing. Created in partnership with eBay, the app will preview Black Friday specials, allow shoppers to write personal lists they can share, and get push notifications on specials. And once the chain opens its doors at midnight on Black Friday, the app steers shoppers toward specials within their local store. It also previews exclusive merchandise, such as a new collection from MAC Cosmetics. The company, meanwhile, just posted a 3.8% increase in third-quarter sales, totaling $6.08 billion, up 3.8% from $5.85 billion in the same period last year. (Same-store sales increased 3.7%.) “Throughout the holiday season, we will be offering our customers new and fresh merchandise assortments, great value and an engaging shopping environment at both Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s,” Terry J. Lundgren, CEO, says in its release, “in store, online and via mobile devices.” Separately, Macy’s unveiled its new holiday advertising, a TV spot that lets Kris Kringle, star of the 1947 “Miracle on 34th Street,” mix it up with Macy’s current spokespeople, including Justin Bieber, Carlos Santana, Martha Stewart, and Taylor Swift. The company, now five years into its “Believe” campaign at Christmas, says 30- and 60-second versions of the JWT-created spot will air throughout the holidays. And once again, the Cincinnati-based chain is asking believers to bring letters to Santa to its stores, with each letter generating a $1 contribution to Make-A-Wish, up to $1 million.
Sell-side platform AppNexus has named former top AOL ad executive Lynda Clarizio as EVP, corporate development and operations. In that role, she will report directly to CEO Brian O’Kelley and will be responsible for managing corporate and business development, as well as overseeing administrative operations, including people, legal and policy affairs. At AOL, Clarizio held various senior positions, including president of the company’s Platform-A advertising division and president of Advertising.com. She also headed AOL’s audience business and was SVP, corporate strategic and financial planning. Most recently, Clarizio was president and CEO of Invision, which offers a management system for handling cross-platform advertising buys. Her background also includes serving as a partner at the Washington, D.C., law firm Arnold & Porter. AppNexus on Wednesday announced two new board members: Brian McAndrews, the former CEO of aQuantive, and Ed Gillis, a former executive advisor to Skype. Along with Google’s AdMeld unit, Forrester named AppNexus as the top-performing companies in an analysis of sell-side platforms. Backed by investors including Microsoft and Marc Andreessen, the company says it serves nearly 10 billion ads a day through its real-time bidding platform.
Boding well for the holiday season, new data shows that online retail shopping remained strong in the third quarter of the year. Year-over-year, online retail spending increased 15% to $41.9 billion in the third quarter, according to new estimates from comScore. That represented the 12th consecutive quarter of positive year-over-year growth, and eighth consecutive quarter of double-digit growth, comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni said Wednesday. “Such performance offers some optimism as we approach the holiday season, especially given recent improvements in consumer sentiment,” according to Fulgoni. “With the housing market beginning to show signs of recovery in addition to increasing -- if still underwhelming -- job growth, there appears to be strong enough footing to support a very healthy online holiday shopping season.” During the quarter, top-performing online product categories included digital content and subscriptions, consumer electronics, event tickets, apparel and accessories and computer software. Each category grew at least 16%, year-over-year. Also of note, according to comScore’s quarterly online retail survey, 37% of U.S. consumers say they have engaged in “showrooming” behavior, where they use a smartphone while in a retail store to check prices or even to purchase a product online. That represented an increase of 5% points in the past two quarters. comScore also found that despite a slow-moving economic recovery, there has been marked improvement in consumer sentiment in the past quarter. While 48% of U.S. consumers still rate the economy as ‘poor,’ that represents an 8-percentage-point improvement versus the prior quarter, and the most pronounced improvement since early 2009.
Premium content publishers are the best media for brand-focused advertising campaigns -- even better than social sites like Facebook. Some 63% of marketers believe premium content publishers do a better job of reaching brand goals, compared with 27% on social media, according to a new study by the Online Publishers Association (OPA). The "Branding on Display" study reveals how marketers view premium content publishers by reviewing the role that branding plays in online advertising. It analyzes agency and marketing priorities and goals, determining how brand advertisers perceive the effectiveness of different media types against these goals on publisher sites and social networks. The findings: 79% of marketers believe publishers do a better job of increasing consideration for branding goals versus 55% for social sites. Increasing brand preference received 84% versus 54%; improving brand favorability, 81% versus 54%; and increasing purchase intent, 78% versus 50%, respectively. Agencies and marketers report higher levels of satisfaction with campaigns running on premium content publisher sites at 78%, compared with Facebook at 51%. The OPA study provides insight into the role that branding plays in online advertising, as well as preferences of agency and marketer professionals when it comes to achieving objectives. The ability to measure ROI and brand recognition also ranked higher on premium content publisher sites, compared with campaigns running on Facebook. Some 55% of marketers said it is easier to measure the ROI of brand campaigns on premium content publisher sites, compared with 27% on Facebook. Brand lift measured 55% and 30%, respectively. The study shows that marketers believe premium content publishers are the best media for brand-focused advertising. Some 73% cite that it delivers the best target audience; 63% say it achieves the best branding objectives; and 61% say it provides the best media brand quality/image.
Marketing services and consulting company Sapient reported a 10% revenue gain in the third quarter to $288.4 million on an 11.4% profit gain to $32.8 million. The company said its digital agency SapientNitro accounted for about 68% of total revenues or a little more than $196 million, up about 11% from the third quarter of 2011. On a conference call with analysts and investors Wednesday, Sapient CEO Alan Herrick indicated that SapientNitro’s organic revenue growth for the third quarter was in the 8% range. The agency’s ORG for the first nine months of the year was not disclosed. The company also said today that its digital shop SapientNitro acquired Second Story, the interactive content studio. The company positioned the acquisition as a move that strengthens the agency’s “ability to redefine storytelling for today’s always-on consumer by crafting experiences that seamlessly blend physical and digital environments from Web and mobile to in-store and in-venue.” Second Story’s co-founders Julie Beeler and Brad Johnson will become part of the agency’s Global Experience Innovation team. Exact terms of the deal were not disclosed, but on the earnings call Sapient executives said that about $500,000 was being budgeted in the fourth quarter for the Second Story acquisition. Herrick described SapientNitro’s revenue increase in the quarter as good -- “but not the exceptional growth we’d had in the last couple of years” where the shop had been delivering gains in some cases in the 30% range. That said, Herrick stressed that the company believes that SapientNitro has a huge opportunity going forward to capitalize on shifting marketer dynamics as companies focus more on building consumer experiences via owned media. Given the impact of technology on marketing in the digital era, he said, CMOs are controlling a greater portion of IT budgets as well as marketing dollars as companies “shift their thinking and spending to more connected brand story telling” that requires a shift to “omni-channel business models.” In addition to basic marketing services, said Herrick, helping clients build those owned-media channels as well as helping them create e-commerce platforms are opportunities for SapientNitro going forward. Short-term issues, he said, include the unstable economic environment as well as pressure on the client side as they sort out how to budget for and create “always on” marketing models in ways that best serve their unique businesses.
How fitting that the Obama campaign, one of the most sophisticated political uses of multichannel marketing ever, ended with the world record-breaking tweet. Within ten hours of responding to the networks calling the election for him by tweeting “four more years” more than 600,000 people retweeted it. According to Twitter, the activity across its network throughout election night and especially in the moments after the call at about 11:15 ET was breathtaking, and multiples higher than had ever been seen in previous political events. According to reports, the similar Facebook post, which on both networks included an image of the President hugging the First Lady in celebration, drew 3.46 million likes and 446,044 shares. On Facebook, the level of chatter about the election Tuesday night reached a record-high index of 9.27 on a scale of 10, according to the company’s own Talk Meter metric tool. This was the kind of watershed moment that emerging media often try to manufacture for themselves. Remember the video streaming of Farm Aid years ago that was supposed to mark the arrival of online video? Or all of the mobile programs around World Cup Soccer that were supposed to solidify the arrival of the cell phone as a medium…in 2006? What set this explosion of mobile social media apart, of course, was that it was closer to spontaneous and user-driven than planned by the media themselves. This was a demonstration of how the act of reaching for one’s device and tweeting or posting one’s thoughts to a group had become a reflex for many of us. In my family, my wife and I were text messaging with my daughter so she could share her feeling of having voted for the first time in her life. That was the way we could approach living through it with her. Which is to say also that we have ascribed to this channel an important and intimate role -- one that ultimately we ascribed to the landline phone by the mid-twentieth century. I doubt greatly that many early users of the phone shared quiet intimacies over it across even the first decade or more of its use. This is a comfort that no doubt evolved as we gained comfort and reliance on it. My respective in-boxes are the most grateful that this tortuous campaign is over. An interesting phenomenon happened for me in being on the receiving end of the Obama campaign’s scary smart targeting and marketing mastery. At one point over the summer and leading up to the convention, SMS messages from the campaign were outnumbering those from my family. No joke. This does say something about how little my wife or daughter bother with the old man, but even so! Knowing something about the machinery behind the messaging for Team Obama, I understood that the contacts are synchronized across mobile, e-mail and even snail mail paths, so an action or response (or lack thereof) on one channel will trigger actions elsewhere. At some point the messaging emphasis switched from SMS to e-mail, where it just went bonkers in the closing days. Emails from Michelle and Joe had apocalyptic overtones at one point. The final SMS message from the campaign on Election Day actually asked if I would become a mobile one-shot phone bank. “Will you make one call for President Obama? Reply CALL and we’ll send you the name & phone number of one voter in a key state who needs to hear from you.” I was left with two impressions from letting myself become besieged by Team Obama. First, there are new kinds of “creepiness” associated with target marketing of the ulta-modern sort. Once you know that a marketing system is smart, nano-targeted and responsive to action and inaction, you start wondering why you are getting this particular message? Why was I getting these specific calls to action with “this is serious” subject lines? Mechanized as the system is, I had an increasingly human and suspicious relationship to the incoming missives. Second, multichannel marketing has a weird amplifier effect that can be quite negative. Until I actually counted the number of SMS messages I had from Obama in the last two weeks, I thought his team was hitting me almost daily. In fact, that impression was false. While it was more frequent over the summer, the recent messaging was down to about once a week. The relentless email messages were helping to give me the impression that I was being besieged via the most sensitive channel. I am not sure what to make of that, but there you are. This focus group of one experienced multichannel marketing as overwhelming, and I tended to focus frustration on the channel I was most sensitive about. Which suggests that we need to appreciate the potential effects of hyper-target marketing and surround-sound messaging because attitudes toward the message are likely being colored by the receiver’s own evolving relationship to each of these media. When I complained about the Obama messaging assault to someone close to the operation itself, he insisted they were only doing it because the numbers showed that it worked. Tuesday’s result may be partial evidence that he was right. But like campaign speeches that always seem to talk past us and not to us, the robo-messaging done with “personalized” appeals from the candidate or his family only adds to our (or at least my) political discontent. Feigned intimacy is to my mind more hollow than explicit disinterest, because it carries with it the reminder that there is something so much more genuine and heartfelt to be had. That contrast between the highly personal, most valued parts of our existence and the shallowness of our commercial and political culture come through on mobile devices so starkly. This is the messaging channel I use to ensure my daughter got to school on a snowy morning safe and sound. Robo-texts from pretend friends have a special ring of dishonesty here. Right beneath the pile of text messages pleading for funds, to enter “dinner with Obama” contests and that last plea to call a swing state voter is a message from my daughter describing how she got her first thrill from democracy. The actual act of voting did not affect her much, “until watching the news and seeing how close the popular vote was and then it made me think, ‘wow, my vote helped in that in some way.’” I hoped it helped something, honey.
As mobile advertising continues its rapid trajectory, more marketers are likely to weave video and rich media into their mobile spots. That’s because data continues to prove the effectiveness of video in boosting interaction rates and engagement with mobile ads. For instance, mobile video ad technology company Rhythm New Media released new findings this week showing that ads using its mini video player increase engagement rates by 30% or more compared to full page ads that don’t use video, according to its third quarter report. EMarketer has said rich media and video are expected to grow quickly in mobile marketing, though off a small base. Rich media ad spend should rise 78% to $883 million in 2013, and mobile video should double to $300 million in 2013. As a whole, mobile is only 1% of all US ad spending, eMarketer noted, but rich media ads are driving the mobile ad business. More evidence of the effectiveness of mobile video ads comes from technology platform Say Media and research firm comScore. They found that video in mobile ads increased the time spent with an ad by between 28% to 32%. Also, Opera Software, which has a mobile browser, has said that about two-thirds of users who click on a mobile video ad will actually complete that interaction and spend about 52 seconds with ad.
Now that the election is over, our TV, computer and mobile screens will be bombarded with holiday shopping pitches. From a digital perspective, marketers will be competing to grab a share of the $54 billion that eMarketer predicts will be spent by consumers online this holiday season. Today, Hispanics make up 12% of the U.S. online market, which means they will spend approximately $6.5 billion. What should marketers know about Hispanic online shopping this holiday season? Hispanics are savvy and dedicated online shoppers and few marketers are targeting them, which represents a great opportunity. Let's take a look at the data. Hispanics Are More Likely to Shop Online A recent report from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) found that 46% of online Hispanics 18+ regularly shop online compared to 43% of general market online users. Hispanics also over-index when it comes to researching products online prior to purchasing offline, with 48% of online Hispanics doing so regularly vs. 40% of general market online users. Retailers should pay particular attention to this and provide a seamless experience for online researchers to buy online. This could include buy-online – pick-up-in-store functionality, printable / downloadable product information and store locaters. So what are online Hispanics likely to buy this holiday season? The following data shows the percent of online Hispanics who researched a given category online compared to the general market.