Expanding its push into the mobile space, video ad network Tremor Media said Tuesday it will offer HTML5 support for its interactive video ad units. The HTML5 format for publishing and delivering ad-supported Web video has been championed in particular by Apple Inc. as an alternative to the Adobe's pervasive Flash technology. The company has all but banned the use of Flash on the iPhone, iPad and other Apple devices on the grounds that the latest version of the HTML programming language provides superior performance and reliability. To that end, Tremor will launch HTML5-compatible formats initially for the iPad before expanding the service to other devices including the iPhone and Android-based mobile phones by year's end. "With the introduction of the Apple iPad, publishers have a new mobile platform in which to reach a highly engaged audience," said Charles Parra, vice president of product management for Tremor. With the move, the New York-based company will extend HTML5 support through its flagship Acudeo platform, which powers in-stream video advertising for some 2,000 Web publishers. Tremor is also working closely with long-standing partner Brightcove to ensure that its HTML5 formats can be easily integrated by the Web video provider's clients. "By working closely with partners like Brightcove, we continue to provide our advertisers with the most engaging ad opportunities across any device, and our publishers with the best solution to monetize their mobile video content," said Tremor CEO Jason Glickman. Brightcove is among various online video and mobile companies that announced support for the HTML5 standard earlier this year in connection with the launch of the iPad this spring. The emerging video format got a big boost at the start of the year when Google added HTML5 support for playback of YouTube videos. Mobile ad networks such as JumpTap and Greystripe have also gotten on the HTML5 bandwagon. While other networks may serve HTML5-based ads, Parra argued that Tremor's existing Acudeo platform would offer a greater ability to track campaigns and provide ad verification to publishers, advertisers and agencies. In addition to standard pre-roll units, HTML5 support will extend to more advanced formats including its vChoice & vChoice iRoll units that give users more control over the types of ads they see. Tremor ranked as the second-largest online video property behind Hulu in July based on the number of in-stream ads served, with nearly 452 million -- reaching 19% of the U.S. population, according to comScore. In April, Tremor raised an additional $40 million in venture funding, bringing its total to $82 million. Given that war chest, Glickman indicated the company is not ruling out a potential acquisition to accelerate its move into mobile video advertising. "We see mobile as a big deal in the years to come," he said.
In a setback for the QVC shopping network, a federal judge has said that vitamin marketer Andrew Lessman, who sells supplements on the Home Shopping Network, may continue to use his blog to criticize competing products sold by QVC. U.S. District Court Judge Sue Robinson in Wilmington, Del. ruled that while Lessman's blog posts about the QVC products potentially were misleading, the company wasn't entitled to an injunction because it had not shown the statements confused consumers. Specifically, Robinson ruled, users' comments posted to Lessman's site did not indicate that people were eschewing QVC products because of Lessman's allegations. Although Robinson denied QVC's motion for a preliminary restraining order against Lessman, QVC still will have an opportunity at a later date to present surveys and other evidence that could show consumers were confused by the online statements. The legal dispute stems from posts Lessman made in January about two supplements sold by QVC. One post, dated Jan. 20, alleged that one QVC product was composed of "99% additives." "I have long received your questions regarding QVC's vitamins, but I followed my Grandma's advice" 'If you have nothing nice to say, then say nothing,'" Lessman's post begins. "So I said nothing; however, that will now change." The post went on to criticize a QVC supplement, saying that the active ingredients make up only 1% of the product. "Perhaps a bigger tablet fools you into thinking you're getting more, but who knows?" he writes. Lessman added that "a significant body of troubling research" links one of the ingredients in QVC's products to cancer. He also directed viewers of HSN to his blog to read his allegations about QVC's products. QVC filed suit against Lessman in U.S. District Court in Delaware in February, arguing that he violated federal and state false advertising laws. QVC requested a temporary restraining order requiring Lessman to refrain from making disparaging remarks online. Georgetown University law school professor Rebecca Tushnet, who drew attention to the decision on her blog, said it made sense based on the limited amount of available information about whether consumers were confused, but added that "more evidence could make the difference." Lessman himself originally sold products on QVC, but defected to HSN in 1997. He was in talks to return to QVC, but the discussions collapsed earlier this year. Shortly afterwards, he began criticizing QVC online, according to the court opinion.
Brand Affinity Technologies -- which specializes in teaming up pro athletes with online advertisers -- has raised another $20 million, the company plans to announce Tuesday. The Series C round of financing was led by Miramar Venture Partners, along with participation from existing investors, including Newport Coast Investments, RimLight Capital, Fulcrum Venture Capital and ad pepper media International. Founded in 2007, BAT tracks a network of nearly 40,000 pro athletes, more that 3,600 of whom it has partnered with advertisers for less than your typical celebrity endorser. As a result, BAT is on track to double its revenues to $30 million this year, while expanding its celebrity endorsement roster by 177%, according to Ryan Steelberg, the company's president and CEO. "This financing will provide the growth capital required to continue to expand and refine our ... service offerings," says Steelberg. "The power of celebrity is universal." Clients include AT&T, Ford, Comcast, Intuit, Samsung and Web-based ticket seller StubHub, which works with BAT to run display ads for local events. According to BAT, campaigns with pro athlete endorsements deliver 13.5 times average conversion rates and 3.5 times average click-through rates. Separately, a study conducted last year by Insight Express found that celebrity endorsements have remained relevant in an increasingly digital world. Indeed, when banner ads featuring video and still images of pro athletes were tested against the same ads with no endorsement, the study found a 180% increase in unaided brand awareness. It also found a 56% improvement in message association, where participants correctly absorbed the attributes of tested products and services. In addition, the study found a 39% improvement in brand favorability and a 27% increase in purchase intent.
BrightEdge has integrated the SEOmoz Linkscape index of 450 billion links to provide marketers with a list of the exact backlinks competitors use to rank above the fold in organic search results. The companies plan to announce the deal this week. Both BrightEdge and SEOmoz believe the tool gives marketers clarity into SEO campaigns. Enterprise customers can access Linkscape, available in the BrightEdge SEO Platform through the integration layer, BrightEdge Connect, which ties together data from multiple sources. Search engines consider backlinks one critical ranking signal. Similar to the way marketers link SEO performance to the campaign's return on investment, Linkscape will offer a metric for backlink information to increase revenue generated by keywords. "Through the BrightEdge platform, the tools give marketers at Fortune 1000 companies the insight into how competitors beat them in natural search results," says BrightEdge CEO Jim Yu. Fifty-two percent of companies expect to spend more on SEO in 2010 compared with 2009, according to the State of Search Engine Marketing Report 2010. The report, published earlier this year by the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization, suggests that only 9% expect to spend less. While SEOmoz focuses on small- to medium-sized businesses and consulting services, BrightEdge supports enterprise clients that run large campaigns. SEOmoz founder Rand Fishkin does not expect the increase in API calls will overload the Linkscape platform as more enterprise clients adopt the platform. The Linkscape API data call works akin to data requests from Google AdWords, Facebook or Twitter. "We operate with a similar type of structure to make it easy for people familiar with APIs," Fishkin says. "The unique thing we saw with BrightEdge during the tests is a high quantity of requests. It's not typical, but it tests the load to confirm we can handle it." The tests also provide insight into the type of data that enterprise clients want, which will help improve the information SEOmoz collects with each crawl. BrightEdge can tell SEOmoz if it only crawls a portion of their domain pages. He says the tools can crawl and index between 40% and 60%, but the focus remains on the "good Web" and not the bad. Fishkin says search engines take those "deep dark corners of the Internet we don't want to index" into consideration, along with "domain hops" when ranking. That means Web sites are connected through steps of separation. Even in this scenario, bad links can penalize a site's ranking. For example, cnn.com links to mediapost.com, and mediapost.com links to seomoz.org, and seomoz.org a few years ago has someone hack a page on the site and link to mikeshouseofviagra.com. It doesn't just calculate page hops, but relies on a page-rank algorithm biased by these trusted feed sets that help identify good and bad links. The tools not only cement SEOmoz's move earlier this year to provide a series of SEO tools to marketers and advertisers, but capitalize on a feature Yahoo began to phase out. The SEOmoz team is reminded of that target daily. In fact, a white board drawing of a bulls-eye and arrow going through it at the SEOmoz headquarters reads "Yahoo Site Explorer, about 150 million queries per month." Fishkin says that since SEOmoz operates in the cloud, it can add machines on demand. He hopes to capitalize on Yahoo's recent change in the way it handles advanced searches, specifically those showing link data, through Site Explorer. Previously, Yahoo was the only major search engine that displayed public link information about any site in its index. Google and Bing both provide link data for registered site owners on their own site inside their Webmaster Tools platforms. With Bing powering Yahoo, commands such as "link:" and "linkdomain:" no longer allow modifiers, restricting marketers from a key source of competitive link data. For example, the search query "linkdomain:wikipedia.org inurl:blog" previously returned a list of pages linking to Wikipedia's Web site and containing the word "blog" in the URL string -- these types of searches no longer return results. SEOmoz's Linkscape index and tools powered by their API remain one of the only sources for this type of advanced link research and data. BrightEdge is among the first platforms to take advantage of these features inside their software. Yahoo plans to maintain its Site Explorer Web site, which offers basic link data, through 2012. That's when Bing's worldwide integration is complete. Bing has not indicated what -- if any -- link data it will provide following this move, but currently doesn't offer any public link information.
Consumers expect the Web to play a key part in gearing up for the upcoming school year, according to new data from Web measurement service Compete. Nearly one-third (30%) of back-to-school shoppers surveyed by the firm said they plan to do at least half of their purchasing online. Product categories that will benefit the most from that trend include electronics, dorm room accessories and kitchen supplies, suggesting that items for the college crowd like computers and furniture will be more likely to be bought online. When it comes to back-to-school shopping overall, however, the picture looks quite different. Not surprisingly, school supplies lead the way, with 84% of shoppers planning to go online for things like books, notebooks, pens, paper and the like. The next-most-popular categories were clothing, at 70%, followed by shoes, at 58%. After that, there's a big drop-off to electronics, at only 20%, with bed and bath, dorm room accessories and kitchen supplies all coming in at less than 15%. Overall, most people expect to spend as much or more than last year despite the lagging economic recovery, according to Compete's Online Shopper Intelligence study. More than half (54%) of consumers plan to spend about as much as last year on back-to-school goods, 24% will plunk down more, and 23%, less. "Seeing an increase in back-to-school shopping portends well for the upcoming holiday season," noted Compete analyst Debra Miller in a blog post. "In fact, we found that 12% of those surveyed plan to spend more than last year. And hopefully, by the time the sweaters come out of the closet, this number will be even bigger." A separate, recent study from ad technology firm PointRoll found that consumer interest in back-to-school ads online doesn't necessarily peak in August. Interaction rates for apparel ads, for instance, grew from 5.47% in July to 6.6% in September -- with August the lowest, at 5.23%. Apparel and school supply retailers, however, typically cut promotional back-to-school efforts online 75% by the end of August. At the same time, interest in computer ads appeared to peak in June and taper off by the end of August, suggesting that electronics retailers could benefit by timing marketing pushes to earlier in the summer.
Do you want to succeed at social media or social media marketing? There is a huge difference. It's the difference between using social media tools and adopting social media philosophy. The difference between sparking posts about your marketing and posts about your product or service. The difference between marketers who focus externally on how the brand is broadcast versus internally on how the brand is realized. So do you want to succeed at social media or social media marketing? The answer is the former, but many marketers focus on the latter. I'd like to make this difference more real by sharing two examples -- the first in the entertainment industry and the second my own experiences in a mall this weekend. "Snakes on a Plane" is the entertainment industry's greatest pre-release social media success story to date. The Guardian called it, "Perhaps the most Internet-hyped film of all time." Fans produced their own T-shirts, posters, trailers, novelty songs and parodies. Producers organized a contest to select a fan's music for use in the movie. The filmmakers added shooting days in order to implement changes suggested by fans on the Internet (including Samuel Jackson's famous and unprintable line about snakes.) But what were these people fans of? Not the product, apparently. As EW put said about the movie: "SOAP came in below even the most ridiculously cynical predictions." The reasons why the social media buzz failed to produce business success are many (including that the PG-13 film was edited to an R rating due to fan input, a change that fatally narrowed the audience -- so much for the wisdom of crowds). In the end, "Snakes" was a social media marketing success but a social media failure. To move the discussion out of the theater and into the mall, I am struck by how few retailers are paying attention to the difference between social media success and social media marketing success. This weekend, I visited three retailers in search of men's apparel: ·Retailer One: I spent 15 minutes trying to find someone to offer assistance. The only employees to be found were behind checkout counters with long lines. I left frustrated. ·Retailer Two: I walked into a fitting room to try on shirts and found it looking like hell's storage room (or an average teen's bedroom) with deep piles of clothes. I left disgusted. ·Retailer Three: I entered Nordstrom and found it clean and staffed. I got attention and helpful assistance from an employee. And I spent $250. Retailers One and Two are plotting social media marketing success. They have "Join us on Facebook" links on their home pages -- one has 500,000 fans and the other has 1 million. They've enabled their catalogs with social tools so that site visitors can share products with their social networks. They run social promotions including online events and sales. And they spark engagement around fashion trends and scintillating discussion starters, such as "Pick your preference: black or brown shoes?" But what good does this all do if these retailers fail to provide the sort of real-world experience that get people saying positive things? While tools customers can use to post material to social networks are helpful, what matters more are experiences that inspire people to engage with and about the brands in social ways. I don't think it is any coincidence that since the recession began in December 2007, Nordstrom's stock (JWN) is down just 10%, while the stock of the other two retailers is down between 30% and 50%. And while Nordstrom has fewer Facebook fans than the other two retailers, it has more fans-per-location based on it 193 stores. Nordstrom succeeds at both social media and social media marketing. Does your organization want to be "Snakes on a Plane" or does it want to be Nordstrom? Do you want people buzzing about your marketing or about your product or service? The difference is not found on Facebook or Twitter, but in the ways companies are led. Marketing leaders that only focus on messages in social channels but fail to attend to how the brand is realized in actual product and service experiences may succeed with social media marketing but fail miserably with social media.
Do you want to succeed at social media or social media marketing? There is a difference--a huge difference. It's the difference between using social media tools and adopting social media philosophy; the difference between sparking posts about your marketing and posts about your product or service; and the difference between marketers who focus externally on how the brand is broadcast versus internally on how the brand is realized.So do you want to succeed at social media or social media marketing? The answer is the former, but many marketers focus on the latter. I'd like to make this difference more real by sharing two examples--the first in the entertainment industry, and the second my own experiences in a mall this weekend."Snakes on a Plane" (SoaP) is the entertainment industry's greatest pre-release social media success story to date. The Guardiancalled it "Perhaps the most internet-hyped film of all time." Fans produced their own T-shirts, posters, trailers, novelty songs, and parodies. Producers organized a contest to select a fan's music for use in the movie. The filmmakers added shooting days in order to implement changes suggested by fans on the Internet (including Samuel Jackson's famous and unprintable-on-this-blog line about "m&f%*#f+!@ing snakes".)But what were all these fans fans of? Not the product, apparently. As Entertainment Weeklyput it, "SOAP came in below even the most ridiculously cynical predictions." The reasons why the social media buzz failed to produce business success are many (including that the PG-13 film was edited to an R rating due to fan input, a change that fatally narrowed the audience--so much for the wisdom of crowds), but in the end SoaP was a social media marketing success but a social media failure.To move the discussion out of the theater and into the mall, I am struck by how few retailers are paying attention to the difference between social media success and social media marketing success. This weekend I visited three retailers in search of men's apparel:* Retailer One: I spent 15 minutes trying to find someone to offer assistance. The only employees to be found were behind checkout counters with long lines. I left frustrated.* Retailer Two: I walked into a fitting room to try on shirts and found it looking like Hell's storage room (or an average teen's bedroom) with deep piles of clothes. I left disgusted.* Retailer Three: I entered Nordstrom and found a store that was clean and staffed. I got attention and helpful assistance from an employee. And I spent $250.Retailers One and Two are plotting social media marketing success. They have "Join us on Facebook" links on their home pages--one has 500,000 fans and the other has 1 million. They've enabled their catalogs with social tools so that site visitors can share products with their social networks. They run social promotions including online events and sales. And they spark engagement around fashion trends and scintillating discussion starters such as "Pick your preference: black or brown shoes?"But what good does this all do if these retailers fail to provide the sort of real-world experience that get people saying positive things? While tools customers can use to post stuff to social networks are helpful, what matters more are experiences that inspire people to engage with and about the brands in social ways. I don't think it is any coincidence that since the recession began in December 2007, Nordstrom's stock (JWN) is down just 10 percent while the stock of the other two retailers is down between 30 and 50 percent. And while Nordstrom has fewer Facebook fans than the other two retailers, it has more fans-per-location based on it 193 stores. Nordstrom succeeds at both social media and social media marketing.Does your organization want to be "Snakes on a Plane" or does it want to be Nordstrom? Do you want people buzzing about your marketing or about your product or service? The difference is not found on Facebook or Twitter, but in the ways companies are led. Marketing leaders who only focus on messages in social channels but fail to attend to how the brand is realized in actual product and service experiences may succeed with social media marketing -- but fail miserably with social media.
The BlueKai Pulse is an analysis of data from the BlueKai Exchange, the world's largest online auction marketplace that manages anonymous intent data on over 160 million unique consumers across top-tier e-commerce, online travel agency and auto comparison sites. This installment specifically examines intent actions across retail, auto, and travel verticals for the month of June 2010. Intent actions are defined as views of specific models or brand pages on automotive comparison websites, trip configurations for flights, hotels, car rentals, cruises, or vacation packages on travel websites and activity on retail price comparison or e-commerce sites. "Top 10" is defined by overall data volume which indicates the most popular categories in each vertical. "Gainers and Decliners" reflect the most significant month-to-month jumps or falls for specific intent actions, which is indicative of seasonal shopping behaviors. The top 10 gainers in retail is led by purchase intent for Soccer equipment and gear in celebration of the 2010 World Cup. An overview of the top 10 back-to-school retail categories highlights the popularity of the Apple iPad as well as branded laptops over desktop computers. The Jeep Grand Cherokee is a new addition to the top 10 auto list and also led in the top 5 auto gainers with 168% more purchase intent exhibited than the month before. The jump in popularity may be attributed to the rollout of the new Grand Cherokee 2011, which was made available for purchase in June. This month's top 10 list indicating purchase intent for domestic vacation packages reveals two Hawaii destinations, Oahu and Maui. Interestingly, these two cities did not show up as top cities for hotels & lodging purchase intent, indicating Hawaii travelers' preference for booking packages vs. hotel, airfare, and car rental a la carte.