Scott Sorokin, formerly president of Carat USA, has been tapped by Mindshare to take on the newly created role of global digital head. Sorokin is widely recognized as one of Madison Avenue's true digital media pioneers, and has nearly a quarter century of experience working on some of the earliest digital developments, both pre- and post-Internet. Prior to that, he had a career as an advertising creative. At Mindshare, Sorokin will be expected to oversee digital for top global client Unilever, while advancing the agency's worldwide digital communications efforts. Based in New York, Sorokin will report to London-based Mindshare worldwide CEO Dominic Proctor. "Scott's primary role will be to lead global digital media initiatives for our Unilever client, but he will also work closely with Phil Cowdell, head of Mindshare North America, to help us develop and implement our digital plans for all our clients," Proctor said. "He also will serve on Mindshare's global executive committee." Sorokin assumed the presidency of Aegis Group's Carat in mid-2007 when the shop merged its digital unit, Carat Fusion, and its traditional media unit, Carat, into one integrated media services agency. He later left Carat in late 2008 over what was said to be a "mutual" decision, but just as the Aegis shop was reeling from weak new business and a spate of layoffs. Sorokin joined Carat as president of Carat Fusion in 2006. Earlier, he was global account lead for Intel at Interpublic Group's MRM Worldwide. Earlier still, Sorokin had digital and creative leadership roles at MRM Worldwide, Digitas, and Modem Media. He also was co-founder and managing director of Grey Interactive Worldwide. His background includes broad experience with major marketers such as Dell, Procter & Gamble, Hasbro, Coca-Cola, Intel, and HP.
In a finding that appears to defy some conventional industry thinking, new research released by Nielsen Co. indicates the so-called phenomenon of "cord-cutting" - people who replace a portion of their TV viewing with online video streaming - is real, but it also cuts both ways. Since Nielsen began simultaneously tracking TV viewing and online video usage in its national TV ratings sample earlier this year, it has found that nearly as many people have shifted some share of viewing away from online video, as have shifted toward it. The data, which comes from Nielsen's new "convergence panel," was revealed to clients late Wednesday during a webinar entitled, "Cross-Platform Insights: The Relationship Between Television and Internet." Nielsen executives cautioned that the findings are based only on four-months of data, and that seasonality, and the volatility of TV programming schedules, may be a factor, and that it would require at least a year's worth of data before any genuine trends would begin to emerge. "I think it really is important to keep in mind, that as new as online video is, it's still a very small part of the total video people are consuming," Jon Gibs, vice president-media analytics at Nielsen Online, and one of the executives responsible for the analysis, told Online Media Daily during a briefing before Wednesday's webinar. In fact, the overall takeaway of the Nielsen analysis should help quell the anxieties of the TV industry that online video is an imminent threat - or by that same token - and significant immediate opportunity for programmers seeking to extend their presence online. Currently, Nielsen estimates that only about 1% of total U.S. video consumption - traditional TV viewing (95%), time-shifted viewing via digital video recorders (4%), and online video (1%) - occurs via online video streaming among the total U.S. population. Online video usage is about twice that rate for young adults ages 18-24, but at 2% is still a relatively tiny amount of their total video consumption. Gibs said the main reason for this is that online video usage is still new and the penetration is small relative to television. He noted that the U.S. Internet population, as mature as it is, still has about 100 million fewer users than television. But when looking at the data among online streaming users emerging from Nielsen's new convergence panel, some interesting - and seemingly contradictory - patterns begin to emerge. During the period tracked - November 2008 through March 2009 - Nielsen found that 30% did cut at least part of their TV cords, shifting a greater share of their viewing to online video. But almost as many - 29% - cut some of their broadband cords too, shifting some share of their online video streaming usage to TV viewing. Forty-one percent experienced no change. Gibs also cautioned that the amount of shifting that took place among these users was relatively small. Among those who increased their online video usage, only 2% boosted it by 10% or more. Among those who increased their TV usage relative to online video, only 1% boosted it by 10% or more. And with only an average of six minutes per day of online video consumption, Gibs noted that even a 10% shift toward online video streaming usage is a relatively small drop in television's barrel. "Is cord-cutting a real phenomenon? Is cord-cutting something we should be worried about" All the data we looked at, including this one, should suggest it is not," Gibs said, adding that the biggest shifts away from TV viewing also appear to be occurring among people who already were the lightest viewers of television to begin with. "When you talk to people who are cord-cutters, anecdotally, these people tended not to be big TV viewers in the first place. They tend to be a casual TV viewers," he said. Most importantly, the Nielsen data suggests that while some share shifts are taking place, the overall affect is an expansion of the video consumption pie, meaning people are simply using online video to expand the amount of time they spend watching TV, not reducing it. In its presentation, Nielsen described increases in online video consumption as the "icing on the cake" for the overall television marketplace, and over time, Gibs predicted that online and TV platforms wouldn't necessarily manifest as an either/or proposition. "It's likely to be much more of a blended experience," he said, with consumers toggling between traditional TV and online video depending on their location, mode of access and viewing disposition. In fact, the new Nielsen data reveals that the workday, especially from lunchtime through the afternoon, tends to be the "prime-time" of online video consumption. And that the peak usage for online video in the home, tends to be in early fringe - from 7-8 p.m. - just before most Americans begin watching conventional prime-time TV programming.
Time Warner on Thursday is likely to announce additional details regarding its plans to spin off all or some piece of its AOL unit. Time Warner's board of directors are expected to make the final decision during a Thursday morning board meeting. Industry blog TechCrunch broke the story on Wednesday, citing "sources close to AOL." Time Warner and AOL representatives had no comment regarding the news on Wednesday. Late last month, Time Warner revealed preliminary plans to purge AOL in a regulatory filing, going so far as to separate AOL on its first-quarter earnings release. "We're ... working to determine the right ownership structure for AOL," Time Warner head Jeff Bewkes said in the earnings release itself. The question remains whether AOL's dial-up Internet service will be separated from the new AOL, or if it will remain part of the package. AOL's ad sales dropped 20% in first the quarter -- or $109 million -- which surpassed the 18% decline in the fourth quarter. "Driving the decrease in advertising revenues were declines in sales of advertising on third-party Internet sites, as well as display advertising and paid-search advertising on AOL Network sites," read the Time Warner earnings report. Time Warner is also in talks to buy back Google's 5% stake in AOL. Google, which has owned the stake since investing $1 billion in 2005, notified Time Warner in January that it was exercising a right to force Time Warner to take the Internet unit public, or buy back the stake. Time Warner said in late April that it has the right, but not the obligation, to buy Google's interest with cash or shares. In February, Bewkes explicitly said that spinning off all or part of AOL was a viable option for the New York-based company. Seen as preparing for a spinoff, Bewkes recently hired Google executive Tim Armstrong as the unit's chairman and chief executive, while also revising debt agreements that threatened to restrict the transfer of its assets. In March, an AOL insider told respected industry blogger Kara Swisher that Armstrong "would not have taken the job if the plans for a spin out of AOL were not in place ... The only catch is the poor economy, but even that should not prevent Time Warner from doing what's right to finally fix AOL."
Smartphones made up only 12% of device sales worldwide in 2008, but accounted for 35% of mobile ad impressions in April 2009, according to AdMob's latest mobile metrics report. Using phone sales data from Gartner, the study also showed that while the iPhone accounted for only 8% of the smartphone market, it generated 43% of mobile ad impressions in April. (Ads served into iPhone applications made up a significant portion of overall impressions.) By contrast, Symbian-powered phones, which boast a 52% share of handset sales, generated only 36% of mobile impressions during the quarter. Apple devices accounted for 26.2% of worldwide ad impressions, edging out Nokia phones with 25.9%. In the U.S., Apple generated 34.7% of impressions, followed by Samsung at 18.6%. Apple also drove 43% of mobile Web traffic on smartphones globally and 50% in the U.S. The AdMob study found that the iPhone was responsible for 65% of HTML Web traffic among smartphones, while Google's Android-powered device -- representing just 1% of smartphones -- claimed 9% of HTML usage. Symbian phones accounted for only 7% of vists to HTML sites. "Right now, it's clear that usage of mobile Web sites, applications and HTML sites is growing. But just because iPhone and Android overindex more today, it does not mean HTML sites will rule," stated the AdMob blog in a Tuesday post on the April metrics report. "We think that regardless of where the big players place their bets, it will be the consumer that decides what gives them the best Internet experience on their mobile device and that will be what they use."
Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz had a busy week. After an on-stage interview at the D: All Things Digital conference and another for CNBC's "The Kudlow Report" that's expected to air Thursday in excerpts throughout the business day, she could be forgiven for being tired. "We are not a search company," she told CNBC's Jim Goldman, suggesting Yahoo is no different than any other software company competing against Microsoft, though it doesn't sell operating systems. "Just because we are on the Internet does not mean we are a search company." Bartz told Goldman Yahoo is much broader than a search company. When Goldman suggested that Yahoo tries to compete with Google, Bartz said Yahoo is positioned completely different. She says people don't go to Google to research what's happening in the financial world, connect with similar interest groups, or get the headline news of the moment (Really, Ms. Bartz?). She attempted to make the argument that Yahoo is very different than Google, yet just as special. When asked how Bartz intends to unlock the power of Yahoo to continue the company's turnaround, she confronted Goldman. "There's no turnaround at Yahoo," she said. "Yahoo is only down 13% year over year. Far less than most people in the advertising business, far less if you look at a lot of advertising-related companies, they are down 30 to 40%. In this market down 15% is the new flat." Bartz said the turnaround is more mental than physical. It's about continuing to grow and expanding the company's reach. Yahoo has the No. 1 finance Web site, news site, sports site and email service in the world, and "all this business of turnaround is just crazy," she said.
Earlier this year, women over 55 were identified as the fastest-growing demographic on Facebook. Now it looks like they're going in reverse. During April and May, the number of U.S. Facebook users over 55 actually dropped by 650,000 after increasing by 1.6 million the prior two months, according to new data from the Inside Facebook blog. Did college-age kids kick their parents off the site? Or have they fled Facebook for the latest craze, Twitter? Hard to say. "Maybe older users are still getting acclimated to how to use Facebook's real-time stream to share information with friends and family," surmised Inside Facebook editor Justin Smith. That view suggests the latest redesign that rolled out in March, featuring more frequent updates in users news feeds, may not have been to their liking. The changes provoked a backlash that led the social network to make revisions that give people more control over what type of information appears in their "stream." In any case, Facebook's overall growth slowed in the last two months from the beginning of the year. In April and May, active U.S. Facebook users increased 4% to 60.4 million, compared to 11% to 56.1 million in February and March. Growth only accelerated in the 18-to-25 age bracket, which surged by 1.8 million users and makes up one-third of all Facebook members. By contrast, the increase in users 35 and over -- which had doubled in February and March to 17.1 million -- slowed considerably in the last two months, adding only about 292,500. Those ages 26 to 44 now make up 43% of Facebook users, however -- up slightly from the 41% at the end of March. Women still represent the majority of Facebook users at 56%, with more women than men in every age bracket.
Traditional print media drives online leads, according to data released today from Telmetrics, a Toronto-based company focused on advertising call tracking and measurement solutions. Telmetrics found that URL visits represented 44% of leads on average, while call traffic generated 56% of leads. Tracking unique URL activity in addition to call measurement demonstrated a 78% increase in overall leads driven by print Yellow Pages. Specific categories such as Automobile Dealers and Florists demonstrated higher volumes of Web activity. Ads for Automobile Dealers resulted in 184% more clicks than calls, while Florists generated 126% more clicks. The company measured consumer Web activity generated by more than 1,200 print Yellow Pages ads from November 2008 through April 2009. Each ad included both a unique URL and phone number. Telmetrics President Bill Dinan was surprised at the results. "We wanted to determine whether the print book was driving online traffic," he says. "I was a bit of a skeptic at first. I believe traditional behavior would see someone going to search to look for a URL versus going to a traditional offline media property." While the first step was to understand how offline ads drive online traffic, the next phase will focus on conversion rates. The study will analyze the number of clicks generated by each participating Web site. Dinan thought the numbers would have been around 10%, rather than closer to 50%. During the timing evaluated, the ads that used unique URLs -- for example, florists2.com -- were more often visited than client-specific domains with URL extensions such as publisher.com/ florists. Telmetrics, founded in 1990, supports customers such as national advertisers, Yellow Pages publishers, agencies and online search companies. It created the URL tracking app, which provides integrated lead reporting, to aid efforts by Yellow Pages publishers in proving the value of the print medium. Print Yellow Pages publishers across North America commissioned the study. The company can record call and URL activity because each ad includes a unique phone number and URL tracked back to a specific advertisement.
Marketers struggling to measure investments in Facebook campaigns might have a better tool to determine budget allocations. Omniture expects to release an App Measurement for Facebook. The software development kit (SDK) is free to customers in the online marketing suite. The Facebook application maps the process and follows people through the product review cycle, giving marketers insight on when users drop something in the shopping cart or make a purchase. In a nutshell, it connects the Facebook campaign to conversions such as the last click or product purchase. "Marketers have had trouble connecting the dots between spending 'x' dollars in the Facebook application on promotions and generating 'y' dollars on the ecommerce site," says Matthew Langie, senior director of product marketing at Omniture. Langie says retailers can now develop a Facebook page and determine how people convert. The SDK relies on a JavaScript tag developed by Omniture that works on any Facebook application. Developers "wrap the code around the application" and collect data on how visitors to the site interact with the campaign. "Pathing," which tracks how people flow through Facebook, gives marketers insight as to where people click. If 80% of the traffic doesn't use a particular feature, marketers can remove it and concentrate on something else. Aside from App Measurement for Facebook, Omniture has released a similar product for iPhone, Android and BlackBerry. It also has introduced an app that integrates with Twitter. Marketers who want to measure metrics and investments in several channels can view the results in SiteCatalyst by setting up reports to analyze traffic, tying the numbers to orders received. If the iPhone application drives more traffic than Facebook, the marketer can begin investing more in the campaign, producing better results. The National Hockey League (NHL) has not confirmed that it will tap App Measurement for Facebook, although the league relies on Omniture for analytics and Facebook to connect with fans. The NHL does not harvest any data from Facebook and respects user privacy 100%, says a spokesperson. Fans openly offer in email sign-ups on the league's Web site information on who their favorite teams are. "Whether it's on a paper all-star ballot in an arena, or through an emerging online channel, the more our fans share about themselves with us, the better we can super-serve them with the most relevant content, services and merchandise," the spokesperson says. With App Measurement for Facebook, online marketers can segment users better to understand the type of person adopting the application. For example, SiteCatalyst segments Facebook users by the number of friends they have such as "Users with 500+ Friends," or "Users with 100-200 Friends." Marketers can compare performance across multiple apps to understand the most popular among Facebook users. Another view compares multiple TV Show App performances against user activities performed in each application, such as stories read and images shared. It also tracks the number of users who invite their friends to add the widget, for example, and provides a view of the conversion funnel to help marketers understand how Facebook app users are converting, enabling online marketers to improve conversions.
Two New York lawmakers are pushing to revise the state's reporter shield law to include professional journalists who blog. Currently, New York allows journalists associated with a variety of media outlets to protect confidential sources, but does not expressly mention blogs. "Unfortunately, New York state law has not caught up to the blogosphere," says State Senator Tom Duane, who introduced the bill. "This is an attempt to catch up and make sure that New York state law explicitly protects bloggers who are journalists." State Assembly member Linda Rosenthal joined Duane in proposing the measure. Even with the change, the shield law would still only apply to professionals, defined as people who derive "gain or livelihood" from news-gathering. That description appears to exclude citizen journalists or other amateur reporters. Duane says he proposed the revision in response to a recent incident involving the New York City political blog Room 8. Last year, the Bronx District Attorney attempted to subpoena information from the blog. The authorities ultimately withdrew the subpoena, but the incident still served as "a wake-up call," Duane says. Some media observers say that even without the revision, New York's shield law arguably protects bloggers. As written, the statute applies to journalists associated with any "professional medium of communicating news or information to the public." New York judges have interpreted that definition broadly in the past. For instance, courts have held that book authors are protected by the law, says Gregg Leslie, legal defense director at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. Still, Leslie says the change would mark an improvement for journalists because there is no guarantee that New York judges will uniformly decide the current law covers bloggers. "To fix the law to remove any ambiguity is always the best bet," Leslie says. There is no federal shield law, but all states except Wyoming allow journalists to protect their sources, at least in some circumstances. Many states limit that protection to people who gain revenue from journalism. Leslie says that the income requirement often stems from a fear that protecting amateurs would mean that nearly anybody could avoid testifying by creating a blog. "It would become overwhelmingly hard for courts to function if everybody claimed to be a blogger to get out of testifying," he says. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press has argued that the better course would be to protect people engaged in news-gathering without regard to the their status.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced the release of Microsoft's new search engine, Bing, Thursday morning at the All Things Digital conference. The service will roll out over the coming days, with full deployment by June 3. The Redmond, Wash., company designed the search engine as a "decision engine" with intelligent search tools to help simplify tasks. The engine goes beyond search to help people get answers to simplistic questions such as finding the fastest route home, as well as more complex queries that involve researching a product purchase or planning a trip. Bing organizes popular results in several ways that are designed to help people get answers without having to guess the right way to phrase a search term. The technology moves beyond elementary search into intuitive tools to help customers make better decisions, focusing initially on four key vertical areas: making a purchase decision, planning a trip, researching a health condition or finding a local business. The results aim to provide a more powerful kind of search service. Microsoft identified three design goals to guide the development of Bing: deliver great results; deliver a more organized experience; and simplify tasks and provide insight, leading to faster, more confident decisions. The new service, intended to do more than the standard search experience, includes deep innovation on core search areas including entity extraction and expansion, query intent recognition and document summarization technology as well as a new user experience model that dynamically adapts to the type of query to provide relevant and intuitive decision-making tools. The new brand will include Microsoft's mapping platform, Virtual Earth, which it will rebrand as Bing Maps for Enterprise. Technology from Microsoft's April 2008 acquisition of Farecast is now a central part of Bing Travel. Microsoft's cashback program, now dubbed Bing Cashback, with more than 850 merchants and more than 17 million products available, will be fully integrated into the Bing Shopping experience.
Search excels as a direct response medium, but can also be used as an awareness/preference tactic. I used search as an awareness/preference tactic for Microsoft Windows OneCare anti-virus software campaign and the campaign recently earned the Festival of Media's "Best use of Search" award. Norton and McAfee have the majority market share and awareness in the anti-virus software category. But imagine a visitor searching for anti-virus software and seeing eight separate ads about OneCare, an anti-virus solution they were unaware, and if the visitor had awareness, the ads moved them closer to consider OneCare as their anti-virus solution. Google does not allow a paid keyword to appear more than once per root URL. To get around this requirement I worked with Microsoft PR to identify positive Windows OneCare third party online articles and I opened separate Google accounts for each third party editorial article. A bonus is the hypothesis that third party editorial is more 'believable' than advertiser web sites. At the beginning of the search campaign, I used the same OneCare branded text creative for each link to measure the CTR among the various publishers. The CTR results allowed me to set bidding based on the worst to best CTR to determine the optimal bid amount per link, minimizing the overall spend while maximizing the click volume. Sites with the highest CTR were sites that directly related to software content (PCWorld.com, MicrosoftWatch.com) compared to NYTimes which has a great brand, but doesn't directly relate to anti-virus software (a 20x difference in CTR was common). As per 'normal' search results, branded keywords performed better on a CTR basis than non-branded keywords (a 10x difference was common). On branded keywords, it was easy to cost effectively road block all the ads. For non-branded keywords, it was more costly to roadblock all the ads but depending on your keyword conversion and the CTR of each creative, you can strategically bid per keyword and by creative to maximize your lead volume and minimize your budget while driving your competitors out of the market. Overall, the campaign generated over 12 million 'impressions' and 66,000 clicks at a cost-per-click of $4.27 per positive Windows OneCare review. Based on the results, future tests could include measuring Google only vs Google search partner sites, contextual targeting (rotating creative per keyword), branded vs non-branded text creative (to measure cost of branded creative), increase/decrease of editorial links, as well as using third party ad serving (this buy drove directly from Google to editorial articles) to measure unique clicks (reach/frequency). The idea for this test came about early last year as I wanted to test Google's rule of not allowing a keyword to be purchased by two advertisers appearing on the same page in the same Google Adwords account. I purchased wine keywords for WineBlueBook, a wine buying guide I publish. I bid on wine keywords that drove to WineBlueBook and the same keywords driving to an editorial piece about WineBlueBook that appeared in The Napa Valley Register. The article was about WineBlueBook but had no links to WineBlueBook. Google did not allow both ads to run but the surprising result was the paid search traffic sent to The Napa Valley Register converted as well as the paid traffic sent directly to WineBlueBook (I measure successful conversions as a request for a free sample issue of WineBlueBook). Therefore a visitor clicked on The Napa Valley Register paid AdWords link, read the article, then manually typed in WineBlueBook.com in their browser, visited WineBlueBook.com and provided their email address to receive their free issue. Given the supply and demand pricing model of search and the vast amount of information on the Internet which makes search a daily task for Internet users, building awareness and preference using search is not only achievable but also cost effective.