"The Extreme Diet Coke & Mentos Experiments," a consumer-generated sensation later adopted by the brands themselves, was named Best in Show at the OMMA Awards show on Tuesday night. Creative Breakthrough was awarded to a mobile campaign executed on behalf of Motorola at the Hong Kong Airport by The Hyperfactory, Ogilvy/Hong Kong, and Aura Interactive, Australia. In it, travelers said goodbye to loved ones by using their mobile phones to post photos of themselves with goodbye messages on digital screens in the new airport. The campaign also featured video farewells from David Beckham and Cantonese pop star Jay Chou beamed to the airport via Bluetooth technology. It also won Best Mobile or Wireless Campaign. Carat was the agency with the most wins, garnering OMMA Awards for Best Standard, Flash or Rich Media Expandable Banner for Reebok; Best Campaign in Social Media for Adidas; and Best Search Campaign for Reebok (RBK Custom). Deep Focus picked up two awards with Best Rich Media Campaign for HBO/Flight of the Conchords, and Best Viral Campaign for Court TV/Parco P.I. Other winners were:
At OMMA's Widget session track on Tuesday, executives from RockYou and Slide.com, two companies at the forefront of the widget craze, said their portable applications netted 90 million and 134 million unique monthly page views respectively (and Slide didn't even count Facebook users). But when asked how many of those viewers had actually loaded the widget onto their page, the numbers dropped to about 15-20 million for RockYou, and 30 million for Slide--roughly one out of five for both companies. This distinction between page views and actual user engagement with widgets (and ultimately, the brands associated with them) was a focal point of the panel's discussion. According to panel moderator Seth Goldstein, CEO of the Facebook ad network SocialMedia, the widget "users-to-viewers" ratio was an important takeaway for all marketers in attendance. "The big numbers you hear are people that are passively encountering the widget," said Goldstein. "And any time a company can throw out [stats] in the millions and billions, that's a sign of where dollars are going to go. But it's the level of engagement for marketers that's the question mark." Goldstein also tasked the panelists with spelling out the difference between portable applications and widgets, as the terms are often used simultaneously--adding "confusion to the hype" surrounding a medium with clear, but slightly misunderstood, potential. According to Sonya Chawla, senior director of ad sales at Slide.com, "We're open to every platform. Some people call them widgets, Google calls them Gadgets--but we call them TV boxes internally because it's like letting users take a little TV and put it on their own profile pages." "A widget is a simplified app," said Maurice Boissiere, vice president of client services of the widget development and management firm, Clearspring Technologies. "They can have dynamic functionality, like the ability to make content fresh and relevant, but not the two-way communication of a deep application that's fully integrated into a social graph like Facebook. But I think both terms will stay around." The panelists agreed that publishers or advertisers planning to use widgets need to make sure they have enough quality content to feed them with and an actual strategy for promoting them--because widgets don't just go viral by chance. "Viral growth is engineered," said Goldstein. "You can't just build a widget, put it somewhere and they come," said Boissiere. "The initial burst comes from seeding a widget inline with content. Users are going to NBC.com for content around 'The Office'--they're not going to go to Facebook first to get that content." According to the panelists, the recent wave of publisher and advertiser interest in widgets was arguably tied to Facebook's decision to open its platform to developers. "With an app on Facebook, you as an advertiser can build a multipage experience that goes beyond just a widget," said Ro Choy, head of business development, RockYou. "You can create a microsite in a user profile." Choy added that the widget's success also depends on building real functionality into the application. "You have to create an experience--a reason for users to invite their friends to that application," said Choy. "The engagement of the social network user is tied to the platform, so if it sits directly on the page, it's easier for a user to invite their friends and engage with it." Chawla added that applications and widgets are the way to go for advertisers targeting social networkers, as brands like Cover Girl and content partners like MGA Entertainment and CNN have already run successful widget campaigns. "People are so engaged in the social network, if you require them to leave to monetize them, you'll never win," said Goldstein. "It's selling against what they want to do. You build an app where they stay, and you use it for branding, direct response or to get some data."
Because of its present inability to scale, mobile will remain on the margins of Digitas' media planning strategies, according to its vice president and media director Jordan Bitterman. "It doesn't have the scale," Bitterman said during a breakout session on Tuesday afternoon. "Our marketers are looking for scale." Earlier this year, on the heels of its $1.3 billion acquisition of Digitas, Publicis announced plans to accelerate its position in digital media and interactive marketing services, with the goal of deriving 25% of its total company revenues from digital interactive and mobile marketing services by 2010. Conversely, Bitterman said he and his peers at Digitas can't get enough of widgets. "With widgets, we've had some good experiences," he added. "We're seeing click-through rates of 10%, and engagement beyond that click is also very high." Emerging as a viable ad channel, over 81 million consumers in North America--or a full 40.3%--were exposed to Web widgets in April, according to a widget tracking service recently launched by comScore. What's more, comScore's Widget Metrix service is only tracking widgets--mainly photo- and video-streaming players--that can be embedded on Web pages like blogs and social networking pages, rather than desktop widgets. (Notably, YouTube's video players are not being tracked by comScore.) In April, photo-sharing widget maker Slide was the top widget provider, with a worldwide reach of more than 117 million unique viewers, or 13.8% of the total worldwide Internet audience. Today, Slide has some 134 million unique viewers worldwide--and about half of them are in the United States, according to Sonya Chawla, senior director of advertising at Slide. And while business models are still an afterthought for some widget makers, many are looking toward bright futures as ad networks--a goal the new third-party user-measurement will help facilitate. Slide still does all of its ad serving through DoubleClick. For Slide, what already looks like a bright future will get even brighter once it figures out how to properly measure the real value of advertising via widgets. For that, said Chawla, Slide needs to start accurately measuring engagement, purchase intent, and the brand lift a widget experience offers. During Tuesday's breakout session, "Metrics For Emerging Technologies," Bitterman said Digitas isn't doing a whole lot of measuring across emerging mediums and its various Web experiments. "We're constantly trying new things, so it makes it difficult to measure," he said. "Overall, we try to turn [each campaign] into a study on its own."
Executives, attorneys and CEOs agree that so-called Web 2.0 is a minefield for companies--but a minefield companies must cross whether they want to or not. What panelists at the National Advertising Review Council's NAD Annual Conference argued--in one form or another--is that although the Web is protean, the law isn't. And that if one follows the letter of the law, which might be called "truth in blogging," there's a decent chance one will also avoid blowing up one's brand. Mark Serrianne, CEO of brand consultancy Northlich, was one of four speakers at the NAD annual conference Tuesday, as part of Advertising Week in New York. He said the broader issue was the lack of companies' ability to control information, and the temptation companies have to try nonetheless. He set the stage with a couple of personal anecdotes: first, the day he walked into his office and found that his secretary--with whom he shared an interest in politics--had learned, online, not only that he'd given money to a certain candidate, but how much, to the dollar, through a link on Huffington Post. The other enlightening moment was at a local gas station, where he saw several teens talking--not to each other, but into different digital devices. "I don't want to belabor the obvious, but we have been talking about the news media, because we have to navigate regulation and self-regulation with that backdrop," he said, recalling how easy it was to be a PR guy for the Army in Saigon during the Vietnam War, at least as far as controlling certain elements of the news. "Fast forward: now we have real-time feedback and absolutely no room for error. Consider the current demonstrations in Burma," he said. "The media was banned from covering the event, but it was all over the TV, because of people taking photos and videos and putting them on the Web. "Today, the appetite is never-ending. The appetite for programming is huge. And the news is being shaped in real-time. Not just delivered, but shaped. So in that environment, think recalls, Vioxx, product tampering. Think about the challenging situation toy manufacturing must have now getting ready for Christmas. "We live in a constant state of catch-up. Newsrooms are called information centers, and viewers and readers are experts; journalists have their own blogs; they want information to come back. And," he went on, "the term 'credibility' has changed. Trustworthiness is now the inclusion of multiple viewpoints." Thus, he added, the advent of terms like "crowd sourcing" and of groups like the Word of Mouth Marketing Association. "We have an emergence of all sorts of new, non-paid activities that we, as regulators, must understand--like street theatre, buzz marketing, and influencer marketing."
Rich media shop EyeWonder has acquired Vendi Interactive, a Germany-based digital ad firm and Web-streaming technology provider. Vendi's co-founder, Ken Gitzen, will stay on as EyeWonder's managing director for Germany. Vendi will now serve its existing clients, including GroupM, under the name EyeWonder. Along with the purchase, EyeWonder is expanding its European presence, with new offices in London and the blowing-out of its Dublin office. The company has named Barry Bedford as managing director of both offices. Bedford was previously the managing director of EyeWonder's Dublin office. John Vincent, CEO of EyeWonder, sees Europe as a key factor in the company's growth strategy. EyeWonder is committed to serving as the technological bridge between key stakeholders in the global interactive digital advertising arena--including publishers, agencies, brands and media buyers--and their online audiences, said Vincent. "Our acquisition of Vendi interactive enables us to fortify that role in Europe." Over the next 12 months, the European Union's five largest countries--France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK--will experience 25% growth in ad spend, according to eMarketer. By then, European Web users are expected to reach the 136 million mark. Still, expansion abroad is just one part of EyeWonder's overall growth strategy. Just last week, the shop launched a new service for advertisers to run video and rich media campaigns across major instant-messaging clients. Named InstantWonder, the service synchronizes with AOL's Instant Messenger, MSN's Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, ICQ Instant Messenger and MySpace's recently launched MySpaceIM Messenger.
Exponential has announced the launch of EchoTopic, a contextual advertising solution that will serve ads onto sites within the Tribal Fusion network according to specific topics--as opposed to keywords. The online advertising tech and service company has been testing the service with select clients for over a year, opening it up on Wednesday to marketers seeking to target users in the technology, media & entertainment and financial services verticals. Proprietary tech built into the EchoTopic platform scans and indexes each page in the network, using semantic analysis to determine which "content trees" or topics are most relevant. The contextual ads will appear when users mouse over a highlighted topic (either as an in-unit text ad or a balloon, depending on publisher choice). Emeryville-based Exponential joins a number of companies offering performance-based ads that are embedded within relevant content on a page--not adjacent to it. The ad units can incorporate text, graphics and video, and can also be combined with dynamically generated messages to deliver a more customized campaign. "We've been investing time developing the category channels and sub-channels that we've built into Tribal Fusion," said Alistair Goodman, Exponential's vice president of strategic marketing. "But it's only been about a year since we started using technology that indexes and understands the content of every page--and delivers an ad against it." Adding EchoTopic brings the company closer to offering the full breadth of online advertising solutions--including local and general search, display, performance marketing and lead generation--moves that big players like Microsoft and Google have recently made to gobble up more marketer dollars. "We're all moving toward integrated offerings, because the industry is shifting from being tech-focused to being marketing-focused," said Goodman. "Advertisers don't care about bits and bytes, they care about how you help them reach their targeted audience." According to Justin Weber, managing member of Computing.Net, an IT support and service site, "When it comes to relevant keyword selection, EchoTopic has been head and shoulders above similar offerings. It has been a great, non-intrusive source of incremental revenue for Computing.Net." Computing.Net, LLC was one of the publishers included in the beta tests, and Exponential chose to begin with the technology vertical to see how well the semantic analysis would fare. "The goal is to contextualize all 15 content channels and subset channels, an activity that will take us into next year for sure," said Goodman. EchoTopic ads can be purchased on a CPC basis, and according to Goodman, "the pricing will be demand driven, depending on the vertical, and comparable to other providers in the market."