Following a trial in San Francisco earlier this year, OpenTable on Monday said it will expand its mobile payments service nationally in the coming months. The new feature allows users to pay for meals through the OpenTable iPhone app in addition to booking restaurant reservations. OpenTable, which was acquired by Priceline in June for $2.6 billion, has rolled out mobile payments to about 45 restaurants in New York and will extend the service to 20 more cities by year’s end. People pay with OpenTable by adding a credit card to the app, with no check-in, scanning or barcodes involved in the process, according to the company. An OpenTable spokesperson declined to provide details on the pilot program in San Francisco, except to say that the initial results suggest the ability to pay via mobile at tables leads to faster turnover of tables and “encouraging trends in tip and check size.” The company isn’t charging customers or restaurant clients extra for mobile payment, providing it as a value-added service. Other companies this year have begun to offer a pay-at-table option through their mobile services including PayPal and Cover. The aim is to eliminate the sometimes-frustrating experience of having to wait to pay a restaurant tab. “OpenTable’s prospects look particularly promising, as it has relationships with 31,000 restaurants from its reservation service that it can tap into,” noted Jordan McKee, a senior analyst, in a commentary about the payments service in June. Interestingly, a recent USA Today story indicated that widespread mobile use has actually led people to linger longer at tables as they text, tweet or post photos of meals to social media. The move into payment is part of OpenTable’s broader push to be more mobile-centric. Last year, it seated 110 million diners via mobile, and in the first quarter, 40% of the total came through mobile. OpenTable, on average, seats more than 15 million diners a month. It charges restaurants a monthly fee to seat diners booking online. Among New York restaurants adding OpenTable’s m-payments service are Agave, Café Luxembourg, Il Buco, Le Cirque, Ruby Foos and The Odeon.
Ad management platform Sizmek on Monday announced it has acquired Aerify Media, a mobile tracking and retargeting firm. Sizmek paid $6.25 million in cash for Aerify. Sizmek will retain all Aerify employees and plans to fully integrate Aerify’s tech into Sizmek’s ad platform, MDX. “Sizmek acquired Aerify Media to strengthen our technology platform, adding mobile expertise and talent to the company,” stated Neil Nguyen, CEO and president of Sizmek. “Through Aerify, Sizmek acquires new capabilities in the exploding mobile app market.” Andrew Bloom, SVP of Sizmek, explained to Real-Time Daily that Sizmek is acquiring Aerify to round out its mobile tech stack. “We’ve been delivering ads into mobile environments for a while, so the actual delivery component of our mobile tech stack is strong,” Bloom said. “What this is about is the attribution and tracking capabilities. It’s challenging in mobile -- particularly in-app -- to attribute what’s actually happening within the app.” Aerify has an SDK and APIs that help advertisers understanding what consumers are doing inside apps. “That’s their core technology,” said Bloom. Once integrated to Sizmek’s platform, Aerify’s tech will connect the delivery of Sizmek-delivered ads to app installs. The retargeting component of the company, explained Bloom, comes from collecting consumer information based on in-app behavior. Retargeting on mobile has been difficult to achieve because mobile devices don’t collect cookies, so Sizmek is working around the cookie conundrum by using Aerify’s tech to build in-app audience profiles, based on what consumers have done inside of apps. Advertisers can then retarget against those profiles. Bloom also highlighted Aerify’s “deep linking” technology, which is connected to the retargeting component of the company. Essentially, the deep linking tech remembers where a consumer was on the path to purchase before dropping out. For example, if a consumer was on Step 4 of buying shoes in an app before leaving, the retargeted ads would link the consumer straight back to Step 4. Bloom claimed mobile retargeting typically puts consumers back to the home page. Both companies are headquartered in New York.
Searching for the latest news on George Clooney, Jay Z or Prince George of Cambridge? Microsoft has quietly rolled out SNIPP3T, an iOS app built on the Bing platform that gives fans another way to get the latest information on celebrities, from actors to musicians. Bing's partnership agreement with Apple, announced last year, seems to be paying off. Powered by Bing, the iOS app aggregates and curates top celebrity news that users want to follow in real-time across YouTube, traditional entertainment sites and social media. The SNIPP3T app lets users scroll through individual stories, images, videos, social mentions, and profiles of more than 10,000 celebrities without having to jump from one app to another. Bing helps the app understand relationships between stories, and identifies trending topics. For those who perform the same search for a celebrity daily, the app automates the search process by subscribing to people of interest to view a personalized stream of related headlines. Users subscribe to their favorite celebrity, tap to view their profile and explore timeline of news stories. The app also has a feature that allows users to share their thoughts about the latest news with other fans.
Google has begun testing "Listen Now" ad units, along with Spotify, Rhapsody and Apple's Beats Music, to simplify purchases for consumers through an advertisement. In the Listen Now ad unit, consumers searching for music by an artist can preview a song or songs by clicking on the button that appears in search results, which takes the listener to one of several music services either on desktop and mobile. "We're happy to help users quickly find legitimate sources for their favorite movies, music and more via Google search," a Google spokesperson says. "As always, the ads are ranked according to a variety of factors, including bid, relevance, and click-through rate." The Google spokesperson would not confirm the addition of Listen Now means anything more than the ability to click-through the ad unit to hear tunes on Google Play, Rhapsody or Spotify. The ad unit, once again brought to the forefront by The Wall Street Journal, signals a more important move toward a "buy" button in ads and in search results. Bringing ecommerce to the search engine creates another revenue stream. However, the buy button in banner and display and ad units is not new, but rather is a service waiting for consumers to feel comfortable and technology to mature. Some suggest the move just adds music to the existing movie and TV ad unit running since last year, but a Buy button would more favorably compete with Facebook's and Twitter's tests. It also reduces the number of click and makes bidding more competitive. For consumers, a buy button in search resuts would make it easier to purchase content, give Google more information about the consumer to retarget and cross target products, and eliminates the need to reenter credit card information to make the purchase. Last week, engineers at Two Tap publicly introduced the feature as an API to integrate into a variety of applications. The feature backed by some heavy technology investors. In June, Klick Push rolled out a platform allowing brands to integrate music into banner ads or use tunes as a way to drive loyalty. The company licensed through recording labels about the rights to about 10,000 songs.
Mobile ad network Millennial Media on Monday reported that revenue increased 18.1% to $67.3 million in the second quarter. It posted an adjusted loss of $15.1 million -- or 14 cents a share -- compared to a loss of $3.1 million, or 4 cents a share in the year-earlier period. Analysts, on average, had expected the company to report a loss of 12 cents a share on revenue of $73. 2 million. Millennial Media has struggled to contend with the growing mobile advertising clout of Google and Facebook. Google alone this year is expected to capture half of mobile ad spending globally, with Facebook accounting for 22.3%, according to eMarketer. Millennial, by contrast, will see its market share continue to slip, to an estimated 0.4%. In its earnings release, the company said it reached 650 million unique users monthly, including 170 million in the U.S. It also served ads across about 60,000 apps and mobile sites. “As the mobile ad industry continues to shift and evolve, we too must grow and expand our unique assets,” stated Millennial CEO Michael Barrett. “We will continue to strengthen our mobile network foundation, while accelerating our programmatic exchange and open platform to further define our place in the market and reinvigorate revenue growth.” To that end, the company last month announced a partnership with programmatic ad-buying platform Turn to make mobile inventory available to Turn customers from the Millennial Media Exchange (MMX). A year ago, Millennial acquired rival mobile ad network Jumptap to enhance its expertise in real-time bidding on ads and expand its reach. But the merger hasn’t helped it gain ground on the Internet’s biggest players, like Google and Facebook, which increasingly focused on mobile to drive ad growth. In the last 12 months, Millennial’s stock has fallen from a high of $9.38 to $2.95, as of Monday’s close. Shares were down almost 10% in after-hours trading. For the current quarter, Millennial said it expects total revenue to fall in the range of $65 million to $70 million. To help bolster its fortunes, the company in June brought on Marc Theermann, formerly head of mobile platform sales at Google, as its vice president of business strategy.
Just as the World Cup showed marketers the power of real-time social with second-screeners, brands are looking to Saturday's Premier League kickoff as a new chapter in involving themselves in conversations around the nation's most popular game. I have to admit to rolling my eyes, however, every time I hear the word "real-time." Why? Because it is already being trotted out repeatedly ahead of the first ball being kicked. And for the rather more obvious reason -- it very rarely refers to "real time." Even the poster child of the "no make-up selfie" saw a cancer charity leap onto a growing phenomenon a week or so after it started to snowball. Don't get me wrong -- it will be very exciting, not just because it's the start of a new season, but the broadcasters and the mega sponsors are going to get a run for their money. Traditionally Sky, the BBC and more recently, BT have not had a lot of competition in social media -- certainly not in, dare I say, "real-time" social. They are the ones closest to the action who can send out teasers of the action they have just shown or that is coming up, and it is they who can set polls, solicit views on the theme of the day and so on. This season, however, there will be some new faces. Subway saturated our World Cup screens with Daniel Sturridge adverts and will be working this year with his team, Liverpool, to come up with a string of virals and content that is waiting for the right moment to be released. The same goes for Carlsberg, which has been very active around football in social throughout the World Cup and will no doubt hope to carry the momentum through to the new season. A really interesting one to watch will be Puma. It's now the kit maker for Arsenal and so has an excellent platform from which to reach out to second screeners in -- you guessed it -- "real time." It also has a long list of well-known Premier League footballers it sponsors -- including Cesc Fabregas, Sergio Aguero, Santi Cazorla, Michael Carrick and Mikel Arteta -- which one can imagine will be used to provide real-time reactions and behind-the-scenes glimpses throughout the season. The sportswear brand has publicly made clear its intention to use the upcoming football season as the catalyst through which it starts to claw back market share and brand awareness from arch rivals Adidas and Nike. My question is how "real-time" are any of these going to be, because as sure as a couple of high-profile managers will be sacked before Christmas, every successful tweet or Facebook post will be labelled "real-time." If a brand is going to use sponsorship of a team or a football star as the basis of activity, you can assume it will be anything but "real-time" to arrange the content. Far too many permissions. Brands are already talking about having virals stored up for "real-time" campaigns -- but if they're being lined up are they not, by definition, the opposite of "real-time?" I'd love to know how many brands are empowering a marketing executive with their Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Tumblr account to live blog news, views and opinions around games. With the passions involved, surely it's just too risky. So while some may be brave enough to ask "real-time" questions of what fans think of a game or a player's performance, surely what we're talking about here is real-time delivery of pre-arranged content? And let's face it -- you can't release anything in any other time than "real-time," can you? Everyone has to hit "post" -- and so, by definition, isn't everything real-time? Where the season will likely be won and lost by marketers is in real-time judgements. Some may be lucky enough to have a well-known player tagging them on a post on their views of the game or agreeing to send a quote, but the vast majority of social activity will not have such a live insider's view feel to it -- certainly not content that cannot be found on their Twitter profile. The clever brands will be arranging time with their stars so they have content ready to unleash in as near as you can get to "real-time." Maybe a Fabregas video on how he practices free kicks, which can be posted the moment he bends one over the wall into the top corner. Aguero talking about the pressure of being favourites for the title to go out the first time Manchester City loses a game? Arteta being interviewed about scoring in front of a former team as Arsenal's game against Everton begins or, should it happen, after he scores? So for real-time should we really be talking about making a lot of previous work look effortless through real-time execution? To be effective, and to even be possible (with all the necessary permissions), real-time marketing is surely an illusion. The only thing "real-time" about it is the timing of when you chose to unleash "real-time" content that has been planned and compiled far in advance. Reactive marketing may sound less positive than "real-time" -- but to me, it certainly sums up the path to second-screener social success. Just as any comedian knows, when you're called on to be spontaneous on a chat or games show, it's best to be "caught out" on the spot with a bunch of material you've been practising all week.
Beaconing (verb): To lead and direct customers to specific areas and products using small, radio-transmitting devices called beacons, typically battery operated. Process includes messaging, often in the form of text messages and full-screen ads and offers, generally managed by retailer or brand and intended to provide useful, relevant and valuable information. Mobile shopper agrees in advance to receive such information. Overall goal is to enhance the shopping experience. Though based on a small piece of hardware transmission capability, beaconing is about to become more an activity than a technology. Beaconing has been the missing piece in the mobile shopping puzzle. The technology is essentially invisible and can work without the mobile consumer having to do anything, usually a major hurdle for any mobile shopping technology. The point is that even if shoppers are being made more aware of various mobile technologies being deployed in and around stores, it doesn’t mean they need or want to know the details about the technology itself.