Being able to track campaign performance across devices has become increasingly crucial to advertisers as consumer attention shifts from desktop to mobile screens. To that end, Facebook on Wednesday rolled out cross-device reporting for ads, allowing marketers to see how people are moving among devices and across mobile apps and the Web. “Facebook already offers targeting, delivery and conversion measurement across devices. With the new cross-device report, advertisers are now able to view the devices on which people see ads and the devices on which conversions subsequently occur,” stated a Facebook blog post today. As an example, the company said an advertiser can view the number of customers who clicked an ad on an iPhone, but then later converted on desktop, or the number of people who saw an ad on desktop, and later converted on an Android tablet. In a recent analysis conducted between May 15 and July 24, Facebook found that among people who viewed a mobile Facebook ad in the U.S., nearly a third (32%) eventually clicked on the same ad on the desktop within 28 days. The conversion rate was lower over shorter periods of time. So within a week of seeing a mobile ad, 22% converted on the desktop, and after a day, 11%. The cross-device reporting relies on data from Facebook’s conversion pixel, a piece of tracking code used in conjunction with the social network’s software development kit (SDK), to get reports on which device someone saw an ad and eventually converted. The overall aim is to go beyond last-click attribution to see how different devices and app actions influenced a click. To see cross-device conversions for campaigns, advertisers can go to the Facebook Ad Reports page, click Edit Columns and select Cross-Device on the left-hand menu.
Square just got a big new competitor. Amazon on Wednesday announced its expansion into mobile payments with a new point-of-sale (POS) service that combines a mobile app with a secure card reader that lets small businesses process card transactions via smartphones and tablets. That makes the service—dubbed Amazon Local Register—a direct rival to similar POS offerings from heavily venture-backed start-up Square, as well as PayPal. A key selling point for the Amazon system is that it would charge businesses 2.5% for each transaction swiped compared to 2.75% for Square Register and 2.7% for PayPal Here. Amazon is also launching Local Register with a promotion that lowers the rate to 1.75% for customers that sign up before October 31. “We understand that every penny and every minute counts, so we want to make accepting payments so easy and inexpensive that it no longer gets in the way of a business owner doing what they love - serving their customers and growing their business,” stated Matt Swann, vice president, Amazon Local Commerce. Jordan McKee, a senior analyst with 451 Research, noted that Amazon’s push into mobile payments has been rumored for over a year as the company looks to expand its empire into offline retail. “At the end of the day, less than 10% of transactions occur online,” he said. “The real opportunity is at brick and mortar locations. So Amazon has been eying a way to tap into that.” Offering a lower transaction processing rate—paired with its reputation for strong customer service--could also help it gain traction, especially among independent contractors that may be especially sensitive on pricing, added McKee. Launch of the POS system also comes a couple of weeks after Amazon quietly introduced a consumer-facing mobile wallet app in the Amazon Appstore and Google Play. While the Amazon Wallet doesn’t yet support mobile payments or the ability to store credit cards, the move underscores the company’s wider ambitions for mobile payments. “That’s going to be the tip of the iceberg on the wallet side as they start to build out that value,” noted McKee, who likewise sees more services being added to Amazon Local Register over time. “This is really a long-term play, I don't think it’s just, here’s a point-of-sale system, take it or leave it.” On the mobile front, Amazon in June also debuted its long-rumored smartphone, equipping the new Fire phone with a “Firefly” button to help users identify and buy items like books, songs and movies more easily from its online store. When it comes to Local Register, the company said its card-swiping attachment and software will be compatible with devices including the iPhone and iPad (running iOS 7), Kindle Fire tables, select Android smartphones and eventually the Fire phone, as well. The system comes with 24-hour customer support and in-app reporting to track sales trends, peak sales times and bottom-line performance, among other metrics. For its part, Square has recently been adding various e-commerce services beyond its core POS system for merchants to help fend off challenges from bigger players like PayPal and Amazon. In that vein, it acquired San Francisco-based food delivery start-up Caviar earlier this month to provide delivery from restaurants and cafes it works with.
IgnitionOne announced Monday the acquisition of Human Demand to strengthen its position in mobile marketing and advertising, and audience and tracking services. The technology will integrate into IgnitionOne's Digital Marketing Suite (DMS), adding services like mobile display advertising and cross-device tracking. The technology gives brands deeper reach into mobile audiences and users of mobile apps across display, video and rich media. It also adds features in cross-device tracking to support cross-channel attribution and user data. The most important change this acquisition brings IgnitionOne, its clients, and the industry is in automation. It supports improvements in mobile ad targeting through an integrated platform supported by accurate data. Brand marketers look for companies that can give them more from less -- meaning better integrated services from fewer vendors and partners. "They want this because they are not systems integrators," IgnitionOne CEO Will Margiloff explains. "Marketers want data from various media, Web site and CRM channels to work in concert with each other, automatically. We solve that monster problem." Along with Human Demand's 65 billion monthly mobile real-time bidding requests, IgnitionOne acquires the partnerships with major mobile ad exchanges, third-party data providers and access to thousands of mobile publishers. Tag an index for brand safety of more than 2 million apps onto that list. The Human Demand acquisition also increases IgnitionOne's programmatic inventory to include mobile-specific partners such as MoPub, Nexage, Smaato, and more, Margiloff said. The technology significantly increases the company's targeting and modeling capabilities in programmatic to include location-based targeting as well as app audience data. Programmatic buying has been a major part of IgnitionOne's strategy for years, even before the industry referred to audience-automated buying as programmatic. The company built a programmatic display module in its DMS. DMS, a digital marketing hub centralizing the ability to buy, manage and optimize digital media across search, display, social and mobile, offers a programmatic audience targeting service in the U.S. through its demand side platform (DSP) module, but Netmining also will benefit from this acquisition by expanding mobile advertising and targeting capabilities. Human Demand CEO Howie Schwartz also joins IgnitionOne based from the company's New York headquarters, along with his team. Margiloff said the integrated teams will work quickly to integrate Human Demand's technology into IgnitionOne's DMS to build out the company's vision of simplifying marketing, centralizing data and providing the industry with the most complete and integrated technology solution.
Random iPhone App of the week: Phones and tablets have become kitchen tools in their own right, guiding users through delicious recipes. But what happens when you have to swipe to the next instruction and your hands are covered in flour, sugar or something sticky? Enter the Olivari Audio Cookbook, the brainchild of Olivari olive oil. The hands-free app reads recipe instructions out loud, using voice commands to take cooks through the process step-by-step. Users have access to hundreds of recipes from Eating Well magazine, and cooks can add their own recipes as well. Don't panic about going too slow while making a recipe, for users go at their own pace when using the voice control. Twofifteenmccann created the free app, available in the App Store.
The world of business telecommunications solutions should be less about what the solutions are, and more about how they work for the people using them. With a major rebrand of its business technology services (and a multimillion-dollar marketing campaign), Sprint is focusing less on the what, and more on the who, of business services. The new Sprint Business brand, which will run with the tagline “For companies with people in them,” is built around the idea that the best companies are the ones with the most engaged employees, and that removing obstacles — by embracing advanced collaboration and mobility tools — is the best way to help drive their success. “We want to shine the spotlight on the challenges that [companies and employees] have everyday, and highlight the solutions,” Marin Martinovic, director of business marketing for Sprint, tells Marketing Daily. “We’re speaking more relevantly around them, not just shouting solution-centric messages.” The brand positioning was developed with Velocity Partners, a London-based business-to-business firm that works with technology-driven companies. The Sprint Business brand uses as a key insight that by 2020, Millennials will make up more than half of the workforce by 2020, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor. The concept also acknowledges how the concept of work has shifted to account for more contract and off-site work happening every day, says Tom Roberts, Sprint’s senior vice president of marketing. “We see Millennials making up a much higher portion of the workforce and wanting to work in different ways,” Tom Roberts, senior vice president of marketing, tells Marketing Daily. “We want to emphasize that what we are doing is helping them work more effectively and enjoy their jobs.” Advertising behind the new brand will be distinct from it’s consumer-targeted marketing, with an “edgier” feel that shows off how the technology empowers employees. One print ad, for instance, shows 12 smaller pictures of a firm’s employees, highlighted by a larger picture of the boss, with the headline, “I work for them.” The body copy stresses, “these people carry this business on their shoulders. Every day, no matter what they are up against.” “It’s edgier than what we’ve done in the past,” Roberts says. “It will be edgy but employee-focused, mobilizing them to do what they’re capable of.” In addition to highly targeted television, print and digital advertising, Sprint Business has revamped its website to include new ideas about how to enable different ideas of work and a blog dedicated to subjects such as collaboration tools, mobile security, mobile workforce management and managing cloud-aware networks. Those subjects will be communicated through text reading, “Collaborate. Mobilize. Accelerate. Work this way.” “Two-thirds of the [business technology] sales process happens before engaging with us. They do assessments and needs studies,” Roberts says. “We think what we’re doing in content management and develop will help in those earlier stages.”
If everyone has a mobile device, why is mobile marketing so difficult for marketers? Why are the companies tasked to deliver mobile marketing opportunities so challenged in the marketplace? The answer is surprisingly simple, as was recently stated very clearly by a colleague of mine, Jeff Frantz. Mobile is a “meta-channel,” as he puts it -- exactly the right phrase and one I sincerely wish I had thought of first. Most digital marketers were caught flat-footed by the rapid rise in consumer use of mobile browsers via smartphones. Adoption had been projected for years, but actual planning against the mobile audience was limited -- and for good reason. At the launch of the iPhone, any marketer who was running standard banner ads on the Web could say a portion of their marketing was “mobile,” because they knew a portion of the audience was exposed to their ads through a mobile browser. Every network and DSP could say they delivered mobile ads because of the same rationale. Of course, this was only half true, and it overlooked the challenges of cookie tracking and creative development for websites. While these marketers could say they were “mobile,” they were over-representing themselves dramatically. Fast-forward to today. Mobile is a channel, but one that’s woven into almost every other channel. Mobile connects the digital world to the real world with location-based GPS, iBeacons, QR codes, etc. Responsive design enables a Web developer to create multiplatform websites and email templates that resize based on the device and viewer being used. The technology exists to allow creators to create once and content to be delivered everywhere, which is exactly as it should be from an experiential point of view. But marketers are still looking at mobile as an after-thought. Technology has put make-up over the blemishes that result from marketer’s shortsighted view of mobile. To succeed in mobile, you have to scrub the strategy to make sure it’s sound and not repurposed from somewhere else. You have to do the research and figure out how your customers are truly accessing mobile, and once they are there, what are they doing? Once you know what they’re doing, what can you be doing to deliver them the information they need? The answer to this is not as easy as it sounds, and I acknowledge that completely. The answer usually sounds something like this: “My customers are spending time on social, so I should test some native ads on Facebook. Those cannot be secured through the Facebook Exchange, so I need to work directly with Facebook. Additionally I should work with a mobile ad platform to get my ads into apps, where my audience is. Last, I will make sure my emails are designed to be delivered on a mobile device. Done – my mobile strategy is complete.” This is not going to cut it. Mobile’s biggest benefit is understanding the path back and forth from different devices and into the offline world. Data is at the core of this challenge, and data can provide the solution. 2015 is going to be the year when cross-device mapping becomes commonplace, and marketers will know by matching mobile devices (including location), desktops and other screens what the actual path was for a consumer on her journey. Data and the analytics of cross-device mapping will provide a truer view into attribution, so my point here is that mobile as a meta-channel becomes the key to unlocking true attribution for marketers. As a meta-channel, mobile can become one of marketers’ most valuable tools for understanding how their messaging truly works. It’s meta -- but meta implies a complete view, in my eyes. Do you see the same challenges when it comes to mobile -- or is there a simpler way to explain the “state of mobile” in 2014?
The ability to bring sensory experiences to the mobile screen just might change the way consumers purchase goods and services online. Devices could one day simulate sticky and smooth sensations through electrovibrationby altering the voltage levels on glass surfaces that change the friction between the fingertip and the screen. Researcher Hong Tan, based at Microsoft Research in Asia, demonstrates an electrostatic haptics prototype device on which the gray area feels rough, like sandpaper, and the dotted line has a notched texture for scrolling. Today "we touch the screen with a numb hand and cannot feel anything but a piece of cold glass," she said. Tan describes technology from Microsoft that creates human computer interaction enabling users not only to touch, but to feel what's on the computer screen. In the mid 2000s as Sony began to develop 4k digital projection systems -- the same chips now in televisions -- the entertainment industry set out to create in-home entertainment systems with sensory experiences. Moviemakers wanted the earth to shake and the air smell musty when dinosaurs walked across the screen or the light in the room dim or flicker when the twister touched down in the movie Twister. The sensory awareness would enhance the movie experience in the home living room. Touchscreens were step one. Sensory experiences will follow. But by the time we see this on mobile devices, artificial intelligence technology from companies like Viv Labs -- along with the next version of Google Now, Microsoft Cortana, and Apple Siri -- will be well on its way to change online advertising and targeting based on the technology's ability to learn, aggregate and process data from the phone and across the Web. One clue comes from the description of Viv on the company's Web site: Viv is taught by the world, knows more than it is taught, and learns every day. Tan has been working on sensory experiences for more than 20 years. In 2001, she and coauthor Alex Pentland published a book chapter on "Tactual Displays for Sensory Substitution and Wearable Computers."