Marketers looking to maximize the power of mobile should be aiming far beyond the click. The core constituency for device-based marketing, the 18- to-34-year-old segment recently dubbed “Generation C,” is all about sharing the deals and offers they like best. According to a new survey of this segment from ad platform RadiumOne, 50% of the young adults in its recent survey share sale offers with friends via their mobile devices. “We like to share things,” says RadiumOne VP of Mobile and Display Kamal Kaur. Among the Gen-C mobile users, they found that 54% said they use social networking apps most frequently on their phones, even more so than gaming and entertainment apps (34%), utilities (28%) and shopping apps (10%). The survey finds that 77% of Gen-C users consider personal recommendations and sales and offers as the major influencers on their purchases. Thirty-one percent of these mobile shoppers are sharing coupons, sales and ads with friends one to three times a month, with 16% sharing three to six times a month and 3% sharing even more than six times a month. Kaur says that marketers have to keep the mobile sharing effect in mind when building campaigns. “The messaging needs to be crafted and it needs to allow for sharing of the ad or the coupon.” In fact, because shoppers are often using their devices as one step in a multi-screen process that is fulfilled later, the mobile component needs to accommodate this emerging purchase path. “Mobile is a very one-person tool, owned by one person,” she says. “Being able to share a coupon or offer or to remind yourself on another screen is key." But when they do go into the store and crack open the phones, young users are aggressively leveraging their phones to get the job done, adds Kaur. “This age group is very much into comparison shopping. They like standing in front of products [in-store]. They will check reviews and cross-search. In-store, if they find a better deal they will walk out,” she says. Among young adults about half are already using their devices for comparison shopping on a weekly basis. More than half (54%) have already used their device to make a purchase in the past six months. Indeed, of mobile purchasers 32% made one to three buys, 14% made three to six buys and 9% have made more than six purchases in the last six months on their phones. With well-optimized experiences, Gen-C is very eager to engage with marketing messages, the RadiumOne survey found. Almost half (47%) of respondents said they had clicked on a mobile ad in the last three months.
Nielsen continues to build its social media research efforts -- now with the acquisition of TV program-focused SocialGuide.SocialGuide provides real-time social TV data for over 30,000 programs on U.S. TV channels in English and Spanish. The company provides marketers and other TV-related companies with analytics and data, which allow networks to engage with social TV consumer activity in real-time.The new business will be folded into NM Incite, Nielsen's in-house social media unit, a joint venture between Nielsen and management consultant McKinsey & Company. NM Incite says it provides data to the top 1,000 marketers, operating in 30 markets around the world.Terms of the deal were not disclosed.“The skyrocketing adoption and use of social media among consumers is transforming TV-watching into a more immediate and shared experience," stated Steve Hasker, president of global media products and advertiser solutions at Nielsen. "As TV networks see this phenomenon unfold, they require understanding of the impact of social TV on their programming, ratings and advertising effectiveness.”“There is no greater opportunity to establish industry metrics and standards in social TV than bringing Nielsen, NM Incite and SocialGuide together," added Sean Casey, founder of SocialGuide. Nielsen says social TV interactions continue to grow, affecting traditional TV viewing -- with, for example, more than 33% of Twitter users actively tweeting about TV-related content.
Groupon is doing more business than ever in mobile, but slowing revenue growth overall in the third quarter pushed the company’s stock well below $3 a share Friday. Groupon’s stock has fallen a whopping 86% from its IPO price of $20 a year ago on increasing investor concern about its core business model, widespread competition and daily deal fatigue among consumers. In missing both analyst estimates and its own revenue guidance in the third quarter, the company pointed to a sharp slowdown in international sales, where growth fell to 3.1% from 31% in the second quarter. "Our solid performance in North America was offset by continued challenges in Europe," noted Groupon CEO Andrew Mason, in the earnings release today. Groupon reported revenue of $568.6 million in the last quarter -- up 32% from a year ago, but short of its own projected range of $580 million to $620 million. It posted a net loss of nearly $3 million compared to a net loss of $54.3 million a year ago. To help bolster sales and diversify its main deals business, Groupon has increasingly turned to mobile initiatives. In October, about one-third of transactions in North America were completed on mobile devices, an increase of 30% from a year ago. Earlier this year, Mason said Group mobile users spend about twice as much as its desktop shoppers. During the third quarter, the company also rolled out its own mobile payments platform to compete with Square, PayPal Here and GoPago. Groupon Payments allows participating merchants to accept credit card payments using a small attachment that connects to an iOS device audio port. It charges a fee of 1.8% plus 15 cents per swiped transaction compared to PayPal’s 2.7% and Square’s 2.75% (or $275 flat monthly rate). “We expect the company to increasingly integrate its payments, scheduling and rewards tools for merchants in order to drive higher merchant retention for its daily deals business while also closing the loop with users,” wrote JPMorgan analyst Doug Anmuth in a recent research note. In the quarter, Groupon also introduced Breadcrumb, an iPad-based point of sale system for bars, restaurants and cafes in the U.S. The service, which includes an iPad, mobile app, printer, router and wireless service, works with the company’s new payments system. From a user standpoint, Groupon’s iOS and Android apps have earned high marks. In the App Store, the its app has a rating of four out of five stars (all versions), while in the Google Playstore, it has four and a half out of five stars. The company rolled out new versions of both apps in late August aimed at making it easier to find current deals and see larger images of offers.
Forrester is predicting that this holiday season, Americans will spend 15% more online than they did last year, with mobile and tablet options leading to increasingly fussy shoppers. The challenge for retailers is understanding that while consumers are always motivated to find a better deal online, they are also looking for more than the best price. So extras like free store pickup, price matching, and mobile optimization will all make a difference this year, writes analyst Sucharita Mulpuru in the report. “While price is critical, retail eBusiness executives must look to add value elsewhere in the customer purchase funnel to retain customers,” she writes. “Ensuring that critical content is available (and tested) on mobile devices will be imperative this holiday season, as consumers will continue to use mobile devices for product research and even for buying.” Price is still the leading reason a shopper moves from one site to another, with 85% of consumers saying it’s critical. But Forrester reports that lower shipping costs (61%), in-stock products (41%), coupons and promotions (34%) all play a role. The report predicts that as consumers continue to weigh all factors, they will be harder to impress, “as aggressive promotions, discounts, and free shipping have become holiday table stakes.” For m-commerce, mobile optimized features such as express checkout are also increasingly part of shopper expectation. Forrester estimates that by the end of the year, 135 million American adults will have smartphones, and 60 million will have tablets. (And 18% use their phone to shop, as do 24% of tablet owners.) But she adds that the “value of mobile extends far beyond the transaction, as consumers more frequently use those devices to research a product than to buy it.” In addition to hunting for deals and free shipping, Forrester expects consumers to be as committed to shopping on key days, including Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday. That makes it tough for retailers to stand out. “In 2011, 76% of the top 50 online retailers called out holiday promotions prominently on their home pages; furthermore, 50% of those retailers highlighted some sort of free shipping promotion,” it says.
Jeremiah Knight, group account director of digital at Lexus' AOR, Team One, is heading up major changes in Lexus' online position, including a redesign of the lexus.com. At the core of the changes are customer service, scalability, simplicity and engagement, he explains. Knight tells Marketing Daily that the kind of work he's doing for the luxury auto brand would not be possible if digital were siloed at the agency -- so all interactions with marketers were secondhand. "The result of that is an artificial understanding of a client's problems," he says. "At Team One, where I've had an opportunity to grow my own team for Lexus, we have been able to do amazing fundamentals work." He says having a direct line to marketers helps put a lid on the tendency among digital planners and developers to do technology because it's new, and maybe aesthetically cool. "It's less technology for the sake of technology and more of a focus on real consumer-centric utility, which I admit is a word that kind of has a negative connotation; but if you look at what people most often want, it's utility. The most beautiful executions have great utility." That philosophy, he says, is central to Team One's "perpetual-data kaizen" philosophy [kaizen is a Japanese term for constant improvement in product and production]. The goal, through a rolling upgrade of Lexus.com, is to make it easier for consumers to digest information, and to make the template viable on all screens. "The older template was very text-heavy and tab-focused, and was not therefore designed for ingestion on smartphones or mobile, and it wasn't 'future proof' in terms of new devices," he says. "We were interested in responsive design." That means one template one server instantly scalable to any screen versus the redundant labor-intensive practice of doing multiple templates for multiple devices, he explains. "If you go to a small-aspect ratio like a smartphone, responsive design means the experience changes. You publish once and make it scalable." Knight says another focus at lexus.com is easy-to-share content. "Our responsibility at the page level is enabling that behavior partly by [focusing on] bite-sized social content, including videos and photos." The idea is that if someone wants to show a friend a photo of, say, a Lexus ES, they don't have to send the entire page or URL, but can extract just the photo. "That content should be unlockable and shareable."
Callaway Golf is launching a social campaign via Austin, Texas, digital firm Mass Relevance that precedes the January launch of a high-tech driver. The effort, "Tweet to Unleash," targets year-round golfers who are inclined to engage in social media. The campaign lets golfers Tweet with #LongestDriverInGolf to get a look at the club and be entered to win one of 10 drivers before they hit the shelves next year. It also lets users unlock various portals to content and shows multi-stream, real-time tweets from participating golfers and a counter with the number of drivers still available to participants. The creative around the Twitter ticker has beauty shots of different parts of the driver, with a “tweet to unleash” message for each photo. When you tweet, you can then get an in-depth rundown of whatever element of the club is hinted at by a given photo. "What sets up well is the execution element of our strategy; it allows us to have more of a conversation with fans and followers and let them feel more part of what we do versus a one-way message," says Harry Arnett, SVP of marketing at Callaway. He tells Marketing Daily that the campaign bucks the status quo. "This is a secretive, controlled, and highly 'marketed' sport when it comes to product launches; it's where consumer electronics was eight years ago. We wanted to do the exact opposite of that and let consumers feel like part of it, let them comment on it -- good, bad and ugly.'' Says Mass Relevance CMO Matt Corey: "Callaway is going to be one of the first that jumps out to say we are going to tie paid media, digital efforts, and other marketing to drive to an owned media experience. The effort follows a similar one-week project last summer via Mass Relevance that drove more people to follow them on Twitter than the top three competitors combined, per Corey. "At the end of the day, marketers are looking for ways to amplify the brand.” Arnett says the approach also aligns with Callaway's brand DNA around being approachable, friendly and fun. "So we wanted to do that in a modern and contemporary way. It's sort of the tip of our spear; this the first breaking of the ice. This is also a test to see how this might work going forward." The KPI's are oriented toward awareness, click throughs and conversation, he says. "[Twitter] has become an integral part of conversation in the culture at large. We want to build out this network -- a Callaway environment -- from internal to sales reps and customers." He adds that PGA tour players will also participate.
First, RTB in mobile is at a tipping point today. Second, there are significant technological differences between RTB as commonly known and applied in online digital advertising, and RTB in mobile advertising. That said, MediaPost has chosen the right time to offer a dedicated column that addresses the ins and outs of RTB advertising whether for display, mobile or video. As such, I think establishing some building blocks as a foundation for future articles might be the best place to start. If you are involved in digital advertising, you are probably aware of RTB, a common capability of online advertising that occurs through a demand-side platform (DSP). A DSP enables advertisers to place a bid on an impression based on their perceived value of a web viewer using pre-determined targeting criteria. The bidding is done within milliseconds on an impression-by-impression basis, not through a bulk-buy ahead of time. If there are multiple advertisers bidding, the highest bidder wins the placement (usually at one penny more than the second highest bid - better known as a “Dutch auction”), and a targeted ad unit is delivered. The RTB process is becoming more common in mobile advertising, bringing along many proven benefits along with a unique set of new opportunities and challenges. Moreover, the advent and expansion of RTB in online and mobile advertising overall has opened to door for a much more transparent, efficient and measurable marketplace. This is where RTB will get very interesting. In online display RTB, cookies are used as they have been for some time in traditional networks, to track and target a viewer’s behavior (audience targeting) and then determine the value of that viewer for a potential advertiser. Here n lies the rub for mobile RTB (although one could also argue its advantage): Cookies are technically deficient in mobile. As a result, cookie-based behavioral data that is available to online digital RTBs is simply not available in mobile. For RTB to be effective in mobile, data must be aggregated from various sources and modeled using complex algorithms that can provide predictive results. In other words, hundreds of data sources and historical results provide a mathematical picture to determine when, where and whom to serve an impression to. Much has been written about the sensitivities surrounding “cookies” that track personal behavior when consumers browse the web. Not only are consumer watchdog groups lobbying for legislation to restrict the information collected on individuals, but the FTC is also taking a hard look at how personal data is tracked and stored. Even Microsoft’s newest IE release has a built-in default to prevent behavioral tracking. Amazingly, the limitations of a cookie-less mobile RTB system have spurned innovation that actually may raise questions in the near future about how and when to use pure cookie-based audience targeting. It is entirely possible that the data-driven approach born in mobile RTB may in fact provide a new path for online to follow in the near future. The evolution of RTB in both online and mobile is just the beginning of a paradigm shift in digital advertising. This shift will move us quickly toward a data-driven, result-oriented advertising marketplace re-founded on cost efficiencies and beyond-the-click measurability. Mobile RTB is leading this shift, and will become even more important as we progress to the future. I look forward to continuing this dialogue, and I welcome your comments along the way.
According to David Payne, Chief Digital Officer at Gannett, about half of the traffic to USA Todayis coming from mobile devices now. He calls it “a train coming through our business.” As everyone well knows by now, the offline dollars that became “digital dimes” shrink further into mobile pennies for many publishers. The temptation of course is to throw Web models at the new device and hope and pray that the money will follow the eyeballs. At yesterday’s OMMA Premium Display event in New York, Payne made a compelling case for reversing some of the polarity of that response. Instead of applying Web models to mobile, start by understanding that the Web ad model was misguided from the start. In fact, you can use some of the lessons of devices to retool the Web. For all of its talk about being friendly to branding, the Web has always tended to occupy the bottom of the funnel, closer to direct response goals and performance pricing. To produce what Payne calls a “healthier ecosystem,” he showed how Gannet radically redirected its flagship Web property, USAToday.com using tablets and smartphones, specifically touch interfaces, as the driving inspiration. Now, the USAToday main topic pages look and feel much more like a tablet app than a browser-bound site. Navigation “ears” on either side encourage left to right moving through major hub pages. Stories are rendered as illustrated tiles that flip to reveal a summary when moused over on a desktop or tapped on a touch screen. In fact, you can tap a button to turn the page into a “Cover View” that lets you ratchet through the top stories as a series of full-screen images and headlines. I was curious about the wisdom of this approach, since the modes of use on devices and Web are quite different. Publishers online, especially news and information brands, suffer notoriously brief time-spent metrics compared with offline print and TV media and often much less than tablet or even smartphone versions. But part of this involves the mode of use. After all, the Web is often used during the day, in offices, in a multi-windowed multitasking mode that encourages hopping across ever so many different sites. Increasingly we are driven by search into the side doors of most content brands, and we understand intuitively that any mouse click we make will initiate some kind of laggard page load. Layering a tablet-like feel to a web site isn’t going to change the mode of use, would it? Just because you make a site look more like a tablet app doesn’t mean that users working in different modes will respond by acting the same way they do in a tablet app, right? According to Payne, in fact, users do change their behavior, at least to some degree, in response to a more touch-like design. The USAToday site is not dependent on individual page loads but a smoother, less laggy swiping mechanic that engages the user even on the desktop. He said that better flow and left to right movement of the new design is in fact resulting in better engagement with the content. In essence, he suggested, when you break the longstanding tradition of browser mechanics, then people’s behaviors actually change. When you invoke a more app-like architecture that is not bouncing people from page load to page load within a field of tiny ad boxes that also promise to bounce them from a site, you are modeling behaviors that are closer to TV and print. Perhaps they are less apt to bounce across as many sites. The degree of focus we often find occurring on touch devices may start appearing on the desktop. Well, maybe. I am still not convinced that mode of use is at least as important as design in determining user behavior. But I will be the first to agree that the desktop browser is among the least comfortable and engaging environments for media consumption man has invented. But productivity demands that the mouse and keyboard will be with us for some time to come. Much as I like the redesign of USAToday, it craves to be touched, not clicked. Still, Payne’s main point from a marketing perspective is that designs like these clear the field for much more engaging advertising. In a phrase he used several times in his keynote, the singular slide in or full page ad takeovers replace the five or eight “little boxes” ads used to occupy on a traditional browser site. While many ad clicks do still work in the traditional way of opening a new tab to a landing page, the ideal formats for this experience bring the deeper marketing message into the app-like architecture. “We move every pixel we can off the page to make every device a marketing platform,” says Payne. We also get a new level of intrusiveness with which users have to contend. Every hub at USAToday.com that I have loaded also includes a slide-in ad unit that occupies the right quarter and need to be closed in order to see the full screen. This surely creates a great lift for the advertiser, because the ad requires an action to clear it and forces at least a passing glance at the unit. I am less pleased as a user that I have to push an ad out of the way whenever I move to a new section in order to enjoy the content. Regardless, there is an important underlying point to the USAToday redesign that speaks to how the architecture of the Web as we have known it discourages engagement. And it is an interesting counterpoint to the last decade of behavioral targeting, which focuses so tightly on tracking behaviors and chasing all of these users who a browser-based, hyper-linked Web architecture sent scurrying to millions of sites. You can see Payne’s entire keynote at the OMMA Premium display site.