With Facebook and other rivals offering better video communication tools, Skype was in serious need of a reboot. The Microsoft-owned service relaunched on Thursday with several new features, including one that closely resembles Snapchat Stories. Dubbed Highlights, the Stories clone encourages users to create a “highlight reel” of their day with photos and videos -- with the intention of sharing them with friends and family. After people post a highlight, their connections can react to it with emoticons or text. Revolving around a new “Find” panel -- for easier searching -- the entire Skye interface can now be customized to reflect users’ favorite colors. Going big on bots, Skype will also be more closely linked to services like Stubhub, BigOven and Expedia. Users will be able pull ticket pricing and seating options directly into theirs chat; find a good cookie recipe; and check flight times and pricing for an upcoming trip. At launch, the new Skype is only available to users of the Android mobile operating system. Support for Apple’s iOS is expected in a matter of weeks, while desktop support is slated for later this year. Of course, Microsoft is not new to the bot game. By late last year, more than 45,000 developers were already using its Bot Framework, according< /a> to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. This is not the first instance of Microsoft stealing from Snap’s playbook. The software giant recently unveiled Sprinkles -- a camera app, which uses artificial intelligence software to suggest smart captions. Much like Snap’s flagship Snapchat app, Sprinkles can also frame users’ faces, then custom fit the images with fun graphics. The app also features hundreds of emojis and stickers. Also of note, Microsoft is no stranger to social. The company officially completed its $26 billion acquisition of LinkedIn last year.
Partnering with Yahoo on branded bracket games around two major sports events this year paid off in millions of online orders for Pizza Hut, the fast-food brand reports. In fact, the games, combined with Yahoo marketing campaigns, resulted in Pizza Hut’s three biggest-ever digital transaction days. Pizza Hut had set a record for online orders during 2016’s Super Bowl, and the brand wanted to build on that in 2017. Yahoo and Pizza Hut collaborated to launch Squares Pick’em, the first digital game of its kind on Yahoo Sports, to engage fans before and during the 2017 Super Bowl. After signing up, users invited friends to pick Pizza Hut-themed boxes on a 10 x 10 grid. Each square represented a possible score at the end of every quarter of the game. The winners weren’t offered any big prizes; they were motivated simply by the chance to be able to brag about their picks. Pizza Hut continuously engaged fans, offering promotions for online orders using advertising on the Yahoo homepage and Yahoo Sports, as well as extensive native, display, search and email advertising. Fans spent more than 9 million minutes playing Yahoo’s Squares Pick'em around the Big Game, and 70% of consumers accessed the game on their mobile devices or tablets. Based on the success in converting that Super Bowl bracket-game engagement to orders on PizzaHut.com (Pizza Hut isn’t revealing the exact numbers of transactions), the brand went on to sponsor Yahoo Sports’ Tourney Pick'em — a bracket challenge on the Yahoo Fantasy app and desktop experience timed for the Men’s NCAA Tournament. “Sports fans are looking for new ways to take part in the biggest sporting events of the year,” David Daniels, Pizza Hut’s VP of advertising and media, notes to Marketing Daily. “Working with Yahoo to make the viewing experience more interactive let us reach highly engaged fans who are ready to eat Pizza Hut pizza wherever they’re watching the games.”
Google has released data on its most recent Android Security Rewards program. The company said Thursday that there were no payouts for the top reward for what it describes as "a complete remote exploit chain leading to TrustZone or Verified Boot compromise" -- the highest award amount possible. Google did pay 115 individuals with an average of $2,150 per reward and $10,209 per researcher. The top research team, Core Team, got over $300,000 for 118 vulnerabilities reports. The company also paid 31 researchers $10,000 or more. Overall, there were more than 450 qualifying vulnerability reports from researchers, and the average pay per researcher rose by 52.3%. The total Android Security Rewards payout doubled to $1.1 million dollars. Since the rewards program launched, Google has rewarded researchers more than $1.5 million dollars. Perhaps Google is getting better at protecting Android users. Apparently, no researchers have claimed the top reward for an exploit chain in two years. Each Android release gains more security protection. In March 2017, Google released the Android Security 2016 Year In Review report -- which details how it keeps at the present time, 1.4 billion devices running on the operating system safe. The report says that in 2016, more than 100 security researchers made public contributions to the security of Android, for a total of nearly $1 million in security rewards.
Google has been hit with two new trademark infringement lawsuits over results in the search ads. Both complaints, which were brought independently in the last several days, come from businesses that contend their names were used to trigger search results. In one case, the New York law firm Gorayeb & Associates alleges that its name was used by a legal referral service to trigger click-to-call ads in Google's search results. Those ads allegedly direct visitors to Accident Injury Law Center, a legal referral service based in Oklahoma. In addition to Google, Gorayeb also sued the legal marketing agency Quintessa Marketing and the legal referral service -- both of which allegedly are owned by the same person. The law firm alleges that in March of this year, people who conducted mobile Google searches for the phrase "Gorayeb and Associates" were shown a click-to-call ad for the Accident Injury Law Center. The text of that ad allegedly said, "Can Gorayeb And Associates Help You? Let Us Fight On Your Behalf!" The phone number associated with the ad allegedly had a 646 area code, which is associated with New York. "Potential clients viewing the 'Click to Call' Google advertisement for Law Center would likely be confused and deceived into believing that, when they clicked to call, they were contacting Gorayeb," the law firm says in a complaint filed in the Southern District of New York. The law firm argues that its trademark was infringed by Google, which allegedly allowed the referral service "to mislead potential clients and other consumers and to benefit financially and to free ride on the good will and professional reputation of Gorayeb." Google also was sued for trademark infringement by New York based fashion retailer Teri Jon Sports, which says Google is enabling an alleged counterfeiter to sell knock-offs. The complaint, filed this week in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, alleges that Google enables the Hong Kong company Readmob -- which allegedly sells counterfeits -- to use the term "Teri Jon" to trigger ads on Google's search results pages. "Google offers search options that help lead consumers to the Readmob Websites’ fraudulent listings of Teri Jon Products," the complaint alleges. Teri Jon's lawsuit also includes claims against Readmob and against payment companies PayPal, American Express, Visa and Mastercard, which allegedly "have been facilitating the financial transactions that allow Readmob to confuse the general public as to the the source, origin, or sponsorship of the fake products." Google allows trademarks to trigger AdWords ads, and sometimes allows trademarked terms to appear in the ad copy itself. The company's policies have resulted in other litigation in the past, but Google either prevailed in all of the prior cases or settled them, according to Santa Clara University law professor Eric Goldman, who has closely followed the lawsuits. Google's biggest courtroom defeat in the area occurred in 2012, when a federal appellate court ruled that a trial judge was too quick to dismiss a lawsuit alleging that Google violated Rosetta Stone's trademark by allowing it to trigger search ads for other companies. The 4th Circuit Court of Appeals said Rosetta Stone should have been able to proceed to trial against Google. The companies ultimately resolved that case on confidential terms, and also said in a joint statement that they planned to "meaningfully collaborate to combat online ads for counterfeit goods and prevent the misuse and abuse of trademarks on the Internet."
The Michaels Companies Inc., an art supplies chain with over 1,200 stores and an online presence, will work with Acxiom Corp. to offer a more a more personalized omnichannel customer experience. Acxiom will provide campaign measurement and analytics across both digital and offline channels. The arrangement is an expansion of an existing collaboration. Email is an important part of the channel mix, an Acxiom spokesperson noted. Other key channels include direct mail, mobile and digital channels. The ongoing work will feature Acxiom’s Open Garden approach, resulting in a complete view of the customer, the firms said.. Acxiom brings together strategy, first- and third-party data and identity resolution based on ethical use of data, they added. “Acxiom connects our marketing and advertising ecosystem at the data layer,” said Steve Carlotti, EVP marketing for The Michaels Companies, in a statement. “This will help us improve our customer engagement, increase the relevance of our customer communication, and enable us to more fully measure the effectiveness of our marketing programs.” Michaels reported 2016 net sales of $5.2 billion, a 5.8% increase over fiscal 2015. Net income increased 4.2% to $378.2 million, or 7.3% of sales. At the end of fiscal 2016, the company ran 1,223 Michaels stores, 109 Aaron Brothers stores and 35 Pat Catan’s stores.
Sling TV’s new TV marketing campaign “Get Picky” harkens back to the phrase "a la carte TV" all to spur more consumer business with the emphasis on choice. In one spot, a nervous woman goes into a coffee shop and gets too detailed about her coffee request. She ends her request with this: “Oh, can you put a heart? “A broken one,” says the barista, played by Danny Trejo. Then speaking into the camera in his usual gruff, tough-guy character: “If you can get picky with your coffee, why not get picky with your TV? A voiceover then says: “Introducing a la carte TV... Start building your perfect TV package from $20 bucks a month.” Another spot has several guys talking about their vacation and getting specific about their needs -- a beachfront house, but no sand, a pool with a jacuzzi,and a massive TV -- by the jacuzzi. Then Trejo appears coming out of a shower, toweling down: “And a Octagon for fighting!” He adds to the camera: “If you get picky with your bro weekend, why not get picky with your TV?” In addition to the TV campaign, Dish says the campaign will include exposure on digital, mobile, social, print and new media platforms. Sling TV was the first major virtual/digital pay TV provider of networks, starting in January 2015. According to estimates, the Dish Network service has grown to around 1 million subscribers. But overall pay TV business at Dish Network have been slipping in subscribers. In the first three months of 2017, Dish Network, for both its satellite pay TV service and Sling TV, lost 143,000 subscribers, Dish Network company-wide now has 13.53 million total subscribers.
Programmatic advertising emerged as an automated way to buy and sell ad inventory through exchanges that connect advertisers to publishers. The exchanges started with search, but today they cover all channels ranging from display, social, and mobile to television, radio and out-of-home. As the ability to target audiences via programmatic became more apparent, marketers enthusiastically adopted it. In 2016, U.S. programmatic digital display ad spend alone was estimated to reach $22.10 billion, according to eMarketer. That’s a jump of nearly 40% during the previous year, and represents 67% of all U.S. digital display ad spend. One factor driving the success of programmatic is the ability to select the audience you think will be most interested in your ad, and then use dynamic creative to deliver an impression designed specifically for them. Art And Science Need To Come Together The analytics and data management teams are often the instigators of data-driven advertising. They’re the experts at looking at data and creating core audience segments. However, in order to drive business results from digital efforts, they need to disseminate that data to other teams. Planning is a continual process –- with feedback loops between data and creative. Marketers, designers, and copywriters must remain true to their creative vision, but be flexible enough to react to data and adapt in real-time. Gathering insights from various data sources and uniting agencies and partners throughout the campaign process may lead to growing pains as you make changes to your process and organizational structure, but the end result is smarter, more effective advertising. Programmatic Boosts Creative Efforts Programmatic was initially known primarily as an easier, cheaper way to buy media. But now you need to support programmatic creative as well. The ability to compare creative performance in a real-time A/B test environment -- and action those insights immediately -- improves engagement and conversion performance. Cost savings are a key advantage in programmatic, but marketers are more interested in a tool that empowers them to combine ad execution with the needs of the modern media environment. Key benefits of programmatic advertising include audience targeting, managing and optimizing multichannel campaigns in real-time, and reaching consumers across their purchasing journeys. Use Both Sides Of Your Brain In today’s age of smart data, with predictive analytics and real-time personalization, marketing has moved from a right-brain profession to one that encompasses both sides. The key is to take the plethora of data at your disposal and find the meaning needed to build a complete picture of each customer. Creatives have always wanted to know more about their customers –- but without data, creative insights often come only from intuition. Today, great campaigns are fueled by ideas, data, emotion and information. Some argue that programmatic advertising leaves little room for creativity, but the human element remains essential. The best advertising has always been simple: great imagery that elicits an emotional connection, a few pointed words or a tagline to tell the story, and a strong call to action. Retarget Customers Who Already Know You Once you can mass-produce ads, you still need to quickly test and optimize the creative components to improve campaign performance. Usually a customer stops by your site and one of three things happens: they don’t buy anything, they place something in a shopping cart but abandon it, or they buy only an entry-level product. Retargeting is highly effective and a no-brainer source of quick revenue. On other Web and social sites, you serve ads with products that customers viewed, or even put in their carts on other sites previously. Or sometimes you will up-sell and show them premium products you think they’d like. In addition to retargeting, you want to acquire customers who have never visited your site -- but you may know little or nothing about them. You can use your audience or data management platform to find people who look like the customers you already have and create segments based on their attributes. For example, one segment could be high-income luxury vacationers or value-focused families with children. Data Will Help You Become A Better Creative Person Programmatic advertising brings order to the chaos of holding relevant, one-to-one conversations with millions of customers and prospects. But for creatives, producing ads to feed the machine can feel like slicing and dicing the big idea. Although some creatives see the modular, data-driven approach as an affront to their art, programmatic is just getting started. The goal should be to maintain a high level of creativity, but to use technology to automate the execution and provide valuable learnings in real-time. By merging insightful data with imaginative design and copy, you can pull new audiences into your brand story. With programmatic advertising capabilities, you can manage technology, grow channels, analyze customer data, develop creative, and effectively reach audiences.
A few things still stand in the way, but most people globally say that virtual and augmented reality ultimately will become as popular as smartphones. The main reason for not having tried VR or AR is the lack of opportunity, based on a new study. However, consumers have high expectations for virtual and augmented reality, with more than half (55%) expecting it to become as popular as smartphones in years to come. The study comprised interviews of 16,000 consumers who have heard about virtual or augmented reality in Australia, Brazil, China, Germany, Japan, The Netherlands, United States and United Kingdom. The study was conducted by research company Opinium for the payments company Worldpay. There is no shortage of what consumers want to do with VR or AR. Here are the most popular areas of interest:
Bill O’Reilly would be on television this evening if Mercedes-Benz and other advertisers had not pulled their ads from running during his show. These advertisers muscled O’Reilly off the air because it became factually apparent he grossly mistreated women in the workplace. These advertisers didn’t want their brands connected to that behavior. Cars.com and other advertisers are staging a similar boycott of another Fox show. The host in question disrespected the life of a murder victim and his family, by continually reporting news about the crime that was factually uncorroborated because it made for a more sensational narrative. These advertisers didn’t want their brands connected to that behavior. In response to the boycott, Fox issued a retraction, and the host in question promised to stop covering that story. You may (or may not) think these boycotts were politically motivated, but we can agree they caused change to occur quickly, while defending the value of human life. Advertising is a business. Life is precious. This advertising boycott thing has legs. I read yet another heartbreaking article about a texting and driving death. This one was about Ben Lieberman, whose 19-year-old son Evan was killed in an auto accident. It took six months and multiple court proceedings to allow police to access mobile data showing that the driver of the car Evan was sitting in was texting at the time of the deadly accident. Ben Lieberman took his unimaginable pain and redirected it to a solution. He teamed up with a technology company to create a “textalyzer,” which acts like a breathalyzer, reporting if a driver was texting at the time of an accident. Lieberman is hoping this will act as a deterrent from texting and driving, just as the breathalyzer has caused drinkers who drive to think twice before getting behind the wheel. The article about Lieberman then reported how much resistance there will be to this new technology because of privacy issues. Sorry, Mr. Lieberman, you understand, right? I would love to know what percent of text message sessions occur while a car is moving at 60 miles per hour. I would love to know what percent of mobile visits to Facebook (and other social media platforms) take place from a moving vehicle. Is it 5%? 10%? 20%? Maybe the percentage isn’t that high given the base, but I suspect the raw number is shockingly high. If you had these stats, you could then apply an estimate to account for drivers versus passengers — and then we would have a data point on the enormity of this epidemic. If stats aren’t your thing, a drive on the Garden State Parkway on a holiday weekend will tell you how pervasive this problem is, despite “do not text and drive” marketing efforts. We can point our fingers at the car companies, the cell carriers, the phone manufacturers, the social media platforms, and of course consumers themselves. Or we can look in the mirror as an industry, and own our contribution to this societal problem. Mobile ad dollars are helping fund the senseless killing of human beings caused by phone addiction. Why do advertisers want to be connected to this behavior? What if advertisers boycotted running their ads on mobile devices until this problem of texting while driving was resolved? What kind of statement would these brands make to parents everywhere, if the mobile ad industry was told it wouldn’t see another ad dollar until this problem was eliminated? We don’t lack the technology to arrest this problem. We lack the incentive. A mobile advertising boycott would fix that. If mobile advertising died tomorrow, consumers wouldn’t even notice. If it died temporarily and for the right reason, it could save thousands of lives.
Brick-and-mortar stores are increasingly being closed every day. Store traffic and sales are down, impacting many brands and retailers. Ninety percent of all retail is still done in physical stores and, let’s face it much of the purchase intent starts online. Can online behaviors drive more foot traffic … specifically, can influencer content pointed at a specific retailer on behalf of a brand/product increase foot traffic? Brands are flocking to influencer marketing and there is a demand for proof points to the value of influencer marketing. We sought out a mobile geo-fencing and measurement partner with an eye for examining the behavior of people exposed to influencer content versus an identical unexposed control. Together with this mobile location data and our first-party audience pixel data, we pursued the idea that the right social content could inspire more in-store visits. Measuring foot traffic through pixel data, combined with geo-fencing technology, allowed us to tap into the shopper DNA and consumer intelligence that has been lacking in the past. We looked to expose content and weigh the results against an unexposed household. Test households were pixeled upon visiting influencer content pages and then were further cookied to check for overlap with the mobile location panel. The exposed panel’s mobile devices are routinely polled for location (latitude and longitude) i.e., frequency, proximity, and time spent at the target venue, be it a retail store or other event-based locale. By serving specialized influencer content to the exposed audience, the chance of a consumer taking an action is already notably higher. Tracking the physical path-to-purchase through geo-fencing at a specific retailer provides the solution for justifying influencer content creation that clients have been searching for. The content not only drives consumers in-store, but also does so in a timely and measurable way. Traditional and digital media struggle to record the actual relationship between content served and foot traffic related to advertising content. This new measurement offering will enhance a brand’s presence among consumers while providing valuable store conversion data. Our results showed that 48% of the exposed group visited the retailer within four days versus only 29% in the identical, but unexposed, control group. The positive store conversion rate of 18.2% for the test vs. control affirmed that influencer campaigns can impact in-store traffic when implemented alongside audience pixel data and this data allows clients to target an audience they know is already interested in their product or brand. This adds another feather in the cap of influencers and their content, making them a valuable part of the marketing mix. It’s time influencer marketing be given a seat at the table and integrated across the marketing mix on both national and local levels.
Being a fast-follower may not work when it comes to artificial intelligence. That’s a potentially huge problem for the vast majority of companies — the mainstream of American and global businesses that have watched and waited as wave after wave of new technologies emerged over the course of the last 20 years. From the PC to “local” networks to the Internet to cloud, mobile and social. For each of those tech waves you could turn out fine if you waited, learned from the pioneers in your industry, and then followed quickly with the benefit of their lessons. Common principles emerged from early adopters of cloud computing, the mobilization of work, and the socialization of business that enabled fast-followers to start out, on day one, at a much higher level of implementation sophistication than their predecessors. But with learning technologies like AI, you’re not the only one who needs to learn lessons — the technologies need time to learn, too. And every company’s situation is different, especially when it comes to marketing. While there will certainly be lessons learned that “raise the floor” in terms of foundational AI/machine learning technology infrastructure, it simply does not stand to reason that application-level progress of company A (or companies A through Y) will be of any benefit to company B (or Z). A very closely related challenge that many companies are running into as they consider AI initiatives is the “toddler problem,” according to Mike Nicholas, a founder of Born, the new AI-focused agency subsidiary of MDC Media Partners launched in November 2016. The toddler problem is this: AI programs start out as dumb models that must learn on the job in order to achieve greatness. The machine learning algorithms that today can determine, in fractions of a second, the best route for you to take across town, or across the continent, began their artificial lives as empty-headed toddlers. They tried and failed, tried and failed, etc., and each time learned a bit and became a little bit better. The more times they tried, the more they learned. After billions or even trillions of tries — interactions — they’re faster and smarter than any program anyone could have written. Remember how “challenged” newborn Siri was to understand what we were saying? Well now there’s a $249 pair of headphones that will simultaneously translate real-time spoken language among English, French, Spanish, and Italian.* The toddler problem is a big concern for brands because it leads to a chicken-and-egg problem (sorry to mix metaphors). AI requires a lot of data — i.e., interactions. You need thousands or millions of interactions before your AI agent (or chatbot) gets super-smart. The only way to get all those interactions is by exposing your toddler-level AI to customers and letting them hack away at it. That, Nicholas says, stops most brands dead in their tracks. No way will I let a 3-year-old represent my brand! But then it won’t get smart. Marketers who are used to fine-tuning their work to perfection before letting it into the light just can’t wrap their heads around this problem. Fans of human brain physiology and evolution will note that this is the same phenomenon which, in humans, requires our species to have a far, far longer childhood than any other species on earth. One approach some businesses are trying is to stand up an internal AI to support customer service reps. That way, the rep becomes a human filter between the AI’s recommendation and the customer, ostensibly preventing the stupidest mistakes from damaging the brand. The AI learns through interactions with the customer-facing humans. The challenge here, though, is getting enough interactions, quickly. The brands with the guts to release toddler AIs to the world will get a first-mover advantage that probably overcomes all but the worst reputation-damaging screw-ups from the toddler. As my AI Insider column partner, Sarah Fay, pointed out in her keynote talk at MediaPost’s Marketing AI conference, when you think about it — and when you do the math — first-mover advantage in the AI era will be virtually impossible to overcome. Which brings me back to my opening sentence: Being a fast-follower may not work when it comes to artificial intelligence *Sci-fi subplot note: I try hard to convince people to read science fiction to learn about new technologies, since so many of the geeks inventing the stuff grew up reading it and are now trying to build what they read. With regard to the “universal translator,” “Star Trek" got there first (though by calling for the invention in 2151, it missed the mark by more than 125 years). But “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” got there funniest: "The Babel fish is small, yellow, leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the universe. It feeds on brain wave energy, absorbing all unconscious frequencies and then excreting telepathically a matrix formed from the conscious frequencies and nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain, the practical upshot of which is that if you stick one in your ear, you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language: the speech you hear decodes the brain wave matrix."
Something interesting is happening. The Instagraming, Snapchatting hipster crowd are readjusting their glasses and peering at something on their screens. It’s a communication form so old, that it’s about to enter its retro phase. And if hipsters have taught us anything, retro is cool. What am I talking about? Curated newsletters. These digital relics that initially emerged in popularity in the late 90s/early 2000s are experiencing a major comeback that is largely being driven by Gen Y’s love for email. As social media becomes a pay-to-play space for marketers, some of the authentic connections between brands and consumers that it initially promised has boomeranged back to email. A newsletter, especially, can be a viable way to deliver personalized content to consumers that is approachable, genuine and less formal. Should every brand have a newsletter?While I love a good newsletter, I don’t think it makes sense for every brand. If you have invested in a lot of content, such as a frequently updated blog, then a newsletter definitely makes sense. If you’re short on content and can’t invest in changing that reality through content production or curation of content from other sources, you’ll want to pass on creating a newsletter. The worst thing you can do is promise great content to subscribers only to fall short of expectations. If you’re going to do it, make sure you do it well. If you need inspiration and great examples, take note from companies that have centered their business models on newsletters: The Muse, The Hustle, Refinery29, The Skimm, Lenny Letter, Clover, Finimize and The Daily WTF. There’s even a site that curates the best newsletters in a single place by topic called, Letterlist. The site touts that you can “fall in love with your inbox like it’s 1999” by signing up for many different types of newsletters based on your specific interests. If you’ve decided to go all-in on a newsletter, here are some areas to think about: Design. The great thing about newsletters is that you can consider it the B-side of your brand. As a result, much like the less-censored and creative songs on the B-side of vinyl records, you get some freedoms here to be more expressive and authentic with your subscribers. Be creative and personable, but keep simplicity in mind. Make sure the design is organized in a way that makes it easy to skim—especially on a mobile device. And sure, if it fits your brand, you can inject personality through funny animated gifs/memes and other creative elements that are a bit risky elsewhere. Just make sure you keep visual friction to a minimum. You don’t want the design to be so busy and heavy that it seems like too big of a time commitment to read upon opening. That will drive down readership. Content. Much like the design, you can be creative with grabby subject lines, headlines and content. This is your chance to share the edgier and less formal side of your brand, so don’t be afraid to inject personality into your content to engage your subscribers. You also want to ensure that the content is personalized to the recipient. You can ask recipients what they are interested in or reference an individual’s behaviors across channels to determine the content each will receive. For example, if a recipient recently clicked on an article about travel, then ensure she receives content on travel in the next newsletter. Frequency. While I don’t normally advocate for allowing subscribers to modify frequency since that gets too challenging for marketers to manage, newsletters are an exception to that rule. If your newsletter is sent on a daily basis or multiple times per week, allow your subscribers to manage frequency in a preference center to a less frequent option. Daily may be too much of a commitment for many of your subscribers, but many may be fine with a weekly or monthly cadence. Does your brand have a newsletter? What are some ways you’ve approached the design, content and frequency? What are some different ways you’ve engaged subscribers to give them a glimpse into the less formal side of your brand? Let me know in the comments!
Well, if you read PJ Bednarksi’s "VidBlog" Wednesday, you already know this publication is in transition. In fact, this is the last edition of "VidBlog" -- and Online Video Daily, for that matter -- before MediaPost integrates its video coverage into a new daily omnibus covering all digital media and platforms: Digital News Daily. What makes video different than the rest of that mix, is it isn’t a medium or a platform, but a media content format or experience. As a result, it’s also been one that’s been hard for the industry to categorize or define. A good example of that is two reports I received over the past couple of days -- Kleiner Perkins’ Mary Meeker’s most updated deck, and Magna Global’s 2017 Programmatic Report. Neither of them has an explicit breakdown for the video advertising marketplace, but lumps them into the broader category of “digital” media. Personally, I find that frustrating, because I look to these sources as definitive benchmarks for media industry markets. It’s frustrating, because we all know that consumption of video content is growing, and advertising impressions within it, but there’s no neat way of putting your arms around it. It’s also frustrating, because “video” traverses a spectrum from pure-play digital video -- online and mobile Internet or apps -- to over-the-top TV and subscription video services to conventional TV. Most frustrating of all is the fact that we know those newer forms are growing fast, but there’s not way to measure its relative share. Just like cable expanded broadcast’s television “universe,” digital video is expanding the “video universe.” The question is by how much?
Want to generate opens, click-throughs -- and sales? Send personalized emails and follow some longstanding direct marketing rules. Those were among the points presented by Roger Barnette, CEO of MessageGears, in a Webinar for the Data & Marketing Association last Friday: “How Brands Are Using Data to Drive Better Email Engagement and Higher ROI.” This is a “a particularly challenging topic for enterprise email marketers with larger data sets and perhaps more stringent privacy concerns,” Barnette said. Customers should feel like “the brand is doing you a favor, as opposed to feeling like you’re being pitched.” But that’s not easy to achieve, judging by a study done by Ascend2 for MessageGears. When asked to list their email marketing goals, 54% said the most important one was to improve email personalization. Barnette was not surprised by this. He noted that improving customer retention (cited by 46%) and increasing the engagement rate (41%) were secondary and tertiary goals, but added that “if you improve your email personalization, you’re going to have better retention and increased engagement. Here are the most effective email personalization tactics: Behavior triggered emails — Cited by 44%, these are emails based on a particular trigger or event. “The customer is actually waiting for the email and will open it to make sure that their item was shipped, or that their credit card went through,” Barnette said. They include welcome emails, order confirmations, flight updates, unsubscribe confirmations and loyalty updates. But here’s a reminder: If marketers fail to see this as an opportunity to sell product, they’re “wasting one of their most engaged moments with the customer,” Barnette said. “Now the opportunity should be relevant. It should be free shipping on the items in the cart that was abandoned, or for a life status update, a car rental opportunity.” Individualized Email Messaging — This is deemed effective by 42%. Barnette commented that “Behavior triggered emails are reactive to an event, and extremely timely, individualized emails, while personalized, are more proactively sent by a brand. For example, Orbitz might send flight suggestions based on likely destinations that a customer has flown to with them in the past. 1-800 Contacts will send offers based on the specific lens prescriptions if they’ve filled out a form. Email List Segmentation — Audience segmentation, in which you drill down to send more relevant email, is celebrated by 41%. What does it consist of? Let’s say you’re selling fishing products. If it’s late February, your offer is going to depend on the location. “If you’re in the Upper Peninsula in Michigan, you’re going to be fishing on ice, but in South Florida you’re going to be in shorts and out in the ocean,” Barnette said. “So just targeting user based on fishing will not get the job done.” The content will be “wildly broad.” Responsive email design — Listed by 40%, this is a “fundamental strategy that sits underneath of the types of emails we just described,” Barnette said. He noted that 56% of emails opened are opened on mobile devices, and that 80% of users say that if email is not pleasant to look at on their mobile device, they’re “going to delete it — outright. So all the hard work that went into getting your data and targeting your message is gone.” Self-Managed preference center — Barnette stated that this should be obvious, but “too many brands don’t have self-managed preference centers.” How true: Only 35% described this as an effective tactic. But a study by Email Monks found that 46% of the respondents when they get too many emails. It’s the main reason by far – the second is that the email looks like spam, but that was cited by only 17%. Localized Content — This especially important for global brands. The Localization Industry Standards Association (jokingly referred to by Barnette as LISA) reported that “for every dollar you spend on localized content, you get $25 back,” Barnette noted. And localization is about culture as much as it is language. “If you’re selling chips in the U.S., people think you’re selling potato chips,” Barnette said. “In England, they think you’re selling French fries. “Potato chips are called crisps there.” Engagement Data — This is “first-party data, data that you have, on a property you own,” Barnette observed. He urged listeners to “understand the browsing behaviors of customers on your site, the types of products they're interested in buying, and the types of things you can infer based on what they've searched for on your Web site.” It’s especially powerful when you tie into the data in your CRM — for example, where they live and what they’re interested in purchasing. You can make an offer in your brick-and-mortar location. OK -- we have studied the major choices, but the lesson isn't over. Barnette went on to describe core tenets of a data-driven email strategy: Be consistent across all channels — Some brands put content on Web sites that’s different from what they send in emails. Why? Because the channels teams don’t work together. When they do, it makes everyone's job easier, Barnette said. Test and Learn — “It sounds kind of trite,” Barnette said. “But it is a fundamental part of your DNA, especially in a data-driven environment. There are so many variables to test. Thomas Edison said, “I haven't failed 700 times, I've succeeded in learning 700 ways this won't work.” Follow the Rules — Barnette reported that “too many firms run afoul of the rules.” And he advised marketers to observe the appropriate rules for email deliverability, to follow can spam, to not buy lists and to “make sure you are doing what you need to do to get into the consumer's inbox.” You may not be doing anything nefarious, but if you're not careful about following deliverability rules, you might get blocked anyway,” he warned. Make Peace with IT — “You need access to data and IT owns the data,” Barnette said. At the most successful brands, IT and marketing work hand-in-hand, and “sometimes they sit on same floor in same room,” Barnette continued. They have the same goals, and are accountable for their joint progress, he added. Before class is dismissed, here are a couple of other stats from the MessageGears survey, starting with the biggest barriers to email marketing success: