A revamped Google AdWords interface rolls out during the next few weeks, offering a Display Network Tab that enables advertisers to bid, target and optimize display campaigns in one screen. Its goal is to help marketers determine how combining multiple targeting types -- such as keywords, placements, topics, interests or remarketing -- impacts the reach of the campaign. The changes are intended to make it easier to buy, click and track display advertising on the company's network. Google said the feature will more effectively and easily extend search campaigns to display, as well as increase the return on investment by targeting higher-performing keywords. Marketers are a bit skeptical, but can clearly understand how the changes will impact strategies. Kenshoo CMO Aaron Goldman said marketers can already do that through the Google Display Network. "Basically, you pick keywords you want to target, submit a cost-per-click bid, load up your image or text ads, and Google will deliver across its network of publishers," he said. Google built display capabilities in AdWords on top of the platform initially designed for search advertising. Now the company says it has improved the contextual engine that matches ads to pages based on keywords. The Next-Gen Keyword Contextual Targeting tool allows marketers to see the performance of display campaigns at the individual keyword level of the platform, rather than previously having to use themed ad groups. Janel Laravie, founder at Chacka Marketing, said targeting by keyword -– rather than ad group level -- should help marketers better optimize ads. For example, a marketer tries to sell blue high-heeled shoes for a retail store. The theme of the campaign in the ad group plays on the color blue, with keywords like blue heel and blue spike. If an ad underperforms, marketers hadn't been able to readily identify the one keyword in the ad group causing the entire list of keywords to perform poorly. It could be that the keywords "blue heel" maps to the words "North Carolina blue tar heel," a basketball team. The link would make the keywords completely irrelevant and cause the ad group as a whole to decline in value and underperform. Google explains that the contextual engine matching ads to pages based on keywords remains at the heart of display-buying through AdWords. The new tools combine the reach of display with the precision of search, using Next-Gen Keyword Contextual Targeting.
Trollbeads, the Copenhagen-based company, is considered to be one of the leading firms in the beaded jewelry business worldwide. But in the U.S. market, where it commenced business in 2003, the firm has been a laggard. Now, after assuming control of the U.S. operation from a licensed distributor, Lund Trading, in 2011 after a court battle, the company is repositioning itself in the U.S. with help from SAI, the Philadelphia-based shopper-focused communications and marketing strategist. According to Ada Yung, who joined Trollbeads USA as director of marketing last May, a big problem in the U.S. was that Lund didn’t devote much effort to creating a brand identity or developing a relationship with customers. Instead, it relied on the company’s network of retailers to do most of the marketing. “It was kind of limited,” she said. After joining the company last year, Yung set about looking for a “strategic partner” to help develop a branding and marketing makeover. She felt the company needed more strategic direction than the typical creative ad shop could deliver. After talking with SAI, she hired them to conduct market and consumer research. That initial project segued into ongoing project work, including a campaign focused on the weeks leading up to Valentine’s Day with more campaigns to follow. The strategy was very different from a year ago, when the company used its entire budget on magazines. This year, after brainstorming with SAI, and with essentially the same budget, a broader media mix -- including digital and social media -- was in play. The strategy shift also included broadening the target consumer to include younger professional women (under the age of 35) who are still establishing their personal sense of style “as it relates to fashion and design,” said Bill Melnick, director of strategic planning at SAI. Core to the digital part of the campaign was the application of behavioral and geotargeting to serve flash banners to targeted shoppers. The banners drove shoppers to online or mobile landing pages where they would find incentive offers and retail locators. There was also a Facebook tie-in, where the company has 50,000-plus fans. Facebook ads, pre-roll video and QR codes in magazine ads also supported the campaign. According to Yung, results were beyond expectations, with higher-than-average digital traffic and click-through rates, and with sales that exceeded projections by 150%. Next up is a Mother’s Day campaign and after that, the holiday season. Yung said she believes the results of the Valentine’s Day campaign portend “a breakthrough year” in 2012 for brand awareness, consumer connectedness and sales. “We’re showing up where our consumers are,” she said.
Katz 360, the cross-platform digital division of Katz Radio, has signed a strategic agreement with Audience Partners, an online ad platform that specializes in political and cause-related advertising, to offer Katz’s political advertising clients “micro-targeting” of online registered voters, via online display, mobile and video advertising. Audience Partners and its subsidiary, CampaignGrid, maintain a national file of over 187 million registered voters, which can be filtered to find online voters that meet a number of detailed criteria. Using this data, Katz’s political ad clients will be able to target highly specific audiences of online voters segmented by party affiliation, voting history, and congressional district, along with related demographic, behavioral and lifestyle data. The political ad-targeting service complements Katz’s existing digital advertising capabilities, ranging across online digital audio, mobile, database and display. Katz’s Online Network has aggregated a national portfolio of media Web sites, including the majority of the nation’s terrestrial broadcast streams, a large number of newspaper publishers, and most pure-play Internet webcasters. For its part, since being founded in 2008 Audience Partners’ subsidiary CampaignGrid has served more than 400 political campaigns and causes. Brian Benedik, president of Katz 360, stated: “In this political cycle, advertisers and candidates are starting to appreciate the enormous value of targeting audiences online, which can capture incredibly effective results and near real-time, responsive flexibility." Pat McGee, Katz Radio Group’s vice-president for political sales and strategy, said the new partnership would also complement Katz’s offline TV and radio sales efforts for political advertisers.
Witnessing an explosion in mobile computers and the apps they support, one might forgive pundits and experts for fearing the fall of the open Web. New research from Pew, however, suggests that the Web and apps can -- and most likely will -- coexist. A majority of industry experts -- 59% -- agreed that the Web will be stronger than ever by 2020. Specifically, they believe that “the open Web” will continue to thrive and grow “as a vibrant place where most people do most of their work, play, communication, and content creation.” By contrast, this majority predicts that apps accessed through iPads, Kindles, Nooks, smartphones, Droid devices, and their progeny will be useful as specialized options for a finite number of information and entertainment functions. Last year, The Pew Internet Project and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center invited an unspecified number of experts and Internet stakeholders to predict where the Web was heading. The survey questions were written to generate detailed written responses -- not to derive a clear-cut statistical outcome -- so respondent choices should not be taken as a representative measure. That said, Pew and Elon found that some 35% of its expert respondents agreed with the notion that most people will prefer to use specific apps by 2020. By then, this minority expects, "most industry innovation and activity will be devoted to apps development and updates, and use of apps will occupy the majority of technology users' time.” Whether apps and the Web can exist together or not, mobile computing devices are clearly overshadowing their stationary counterparts. “Mobile tools such as smartphones, tablets, netbooks, and laptop computers are now a primary source of Internet connectivity,” according to Janna Quitney Anderson, the report’s co-author and an associate professor of communications and director of the Imagining the Internet Centre at Elon University North Carolina. The latest surveys of U.S consumers by Pew shows that nearly two-thirds connect to the Web via a smartphone, tablet computer, or an on-the-go laptop computer. By 2016, Cisco estimates there will be 10 billion mobile Internet devices in use worldwide. (Considering the world population is only expected to be 7.3 billion then, that will amount to 1.4 devices per person.) Targeted software applications -- tailored as they are for the mobile computing experience -- appear to be following mobile’s growth trajectory. Apple recently announced that 25 billion apps had been downloaded from its App Store, which opened in 2007, while Google’s Android Market hit 10 billion downloads late last year.
The Internet has had no small impact on the hospitality industry, with half of hotel bookings now handled through digital channels compared to 1% a decade ago. But hotel companies for the most part have not focused heavily on developing a digital strategy and operations. Some stand out for digital innovation. A new study ranking more than 50 luxury hotel brands based on their Web site, social media, mobile and digital marketing efforts cited Four Seasons, Hilton, and Marriott as the top names in the business. The analysis conducted by digital think tank L2, in partnership with Buddy Media, assigned hotels digital "IQ" scores from 70 to over 140 corresponding to ratings from “feeble” to "genius.” Only the top three, for example, earned the “genius” label with scores of 140 or higher. Four Seasons edged out Hilton by 150 to 149, while Marriott had a score of 143. About a dozen, or 23% of the hotels studied were rated as “gifted” including Hyatt, Sheraton and Westin. The bulk of hotels (38%) were deemed “average” or “challenged” (29%), forming a bell curve in the hotel rankings. Only two were dubbed “feeble” -- Raffles and Rosewood. That’s a big improvement from last year, when a third of hotels scored in the “feeble” category for their digital dysfunction. A year ago, only 10% made the “average." At the high end, “brands that nabbed 'genius’ or 'gifted’ rankings experimented across platforms with tactics including concierge mobile applications, on-site user reviews, shareable destination guides, and programming on Instagram, Pinterest, and other emerging platforms,” stated the L2 report. Taking an in-depth look at the Four Seasons’ digital offering, the study highlighted its $18 million site relaunch, accounts on all the major social networks, and an integration with TripAdvisor that includes curated reviews on pages showcasing hotel properties. L2 also found that hotels with multiple brands significantly outpaced independent hoteliers on digital platforms, registering an average digital IQ of 109, versus 92 for independent private brands and 87 for independent publicly traded ones. Brands such as Marriott, Hyatt, Starwood and Hilton leverage technology investments across their portfolios through shared online and mobile platforms, digital marketing tools, and cross-selling. While hotels indicated that they would spend more than a third (34%) of online budgets on site upgrades and optimization, companies have been slow to adopt best practices, according to L2. Many hotel sites added the Facebook “Like” button last year and other social-sharing enhancements, but only 40% overall offer such features. Still, hotels continued to expand their presence on social media. The percentage of brands with both global and individual property pages on Facebook rose from 73% to 95% in the last year, while the proportion on Twitter rose from 56% to 70%. Nearly two-thirds have set up on newcomer Google+ and 60% are using Foursquare. Like social media, mobile has become an increasingly important channel for hotels. Two-thirds of brands now support a mobile-optimized site, with all of those providing mobile-booking capability. Companies with a strong mobile presence may be capturing the most profitable bookings, since 70% of bookings via mobile are for same day (high-price) stays. Android and iPad apps were the main focus of mobile development last year, mirroring the mass adoption of the Google operating system and Apple device, respectively. Regardless of platform, the study faulted luxury hotels for making limited use of user ratings and reviews, except for Four Seasons and Starwood. L2 noted that sites employing user reviews send 39% less traffic to online travel agencies, “suggesting that on-site reviews gave customers more confidence when booking.” That’s assuming, of course, the reviews were mostly positive.
Google was hit with a potential class-action lawsuit for changing its privacy policy in order to enable aggregation of data about signed-in users across a variety of platforms, including Android, Gmail and YouTube. "This change violates Google's prior privacy policies, which deceived and misled consumers by stating that Google would not utilize information provided by a consumer in connection with his or her use of one service, with any other service, for any reason, without the consumer's consent," David Nisenbaum, Pedro Marti and Allison Weiss allege in their complaint, filed on Wednesday in federal district court in Manhattan. They are seeking class-action status. A Google spokesperson declined to comment except to say the company hadn't yet been served with the complaint. Google's new policy, which took effect on March 1, allows the company to target ads and search results more precisely by drawing on a broader pool of information about users than in the past. The company isn't collecting any additional data or sharing information with outsiders. Google says the new policy is simpler for consumers and will benefit them by enabling greater personalization. People can't opt out of the new privacy policy, but generally can stop Google from combining data across platforms by signing out of services or using different browsers for different tasks. Nisenbaum and the other consumers argue that Google's new terms mark a significant departure from its prior promises to keep data collected for a specific purpose, like delivering email, separate from information collected for other services, like displaying YouTube clips. "The value in Google's ability to create a clear, well-rounded picture of the consumer -- as opposed to its previous privacy policy that created largely anonymous puzzle pieces that could not be linked together (and were not always accurate) -- is unquestionably significant. It is also unquestionably invasive, and is being done in violation of its previous privacy policies." They argue that Google violated various laws, including the federal computer fraud law, federal wiretap law, and a New York state law against deceptive business practices. Google also faces fallout over its privacy policy revisions in the EU, where a top regulator has said the new policy appears to violate a directive requiring companies to tell consumers how their data will be used. The lawsuit filed this week joins dozens of other privacy cases that have been filed against Facebook, Google and other Web companies in the last two years. Web companies agreed to settle some of those cases. But in some other instances, companies that fought the allegations were able to prevail because the consumers weren't able to show they had suffered economic injury -- which is typically necessary in lawsuits alleging violations of federal computer fraud or wiretap laws. In one contested case, however, a federal judge in New York allowed consumers to proceed with a privacy case alleging violations of New York's deceptive practices law to proceed. In that matter, U.S. District Court Judge Deborah Batts denied Interclick's motion to dismiss the lawsuit, which accuses Interclick of using "history-sniffing" technology to discover which Web sites users previously visited.
In a blog post this past week, a reporter for the New York Times pondered the paradox that although folks online say they care about the collection of certain personal data, not many are willing to pay to avoid it. The post cited a study where about 500 people in a lab were given the option of buying movie tickets from one of two online companies. Both companies asked for names, dates of birth, and e-mail addresses. One company also asked for a mobile phone number in exchange for a discount of 65 cents for the tickets. Fewer than one in three participants (29%) agreed to pay the extra money to keep their cell phone number out of the hands of the online movie ticket company. Only 9% agreed to pay a premium to avoid getting marketing e-mails. Similarly, Pew Research has found that nine out of 10 people surveyed said they were satisfied with the performance of search engines. And yet 68% said they were “not O.K.” with targeted advertising because they did not like their “online behavior tracked and analyzed.” Hopefully this enduring paradox is not lost on legislators, who are being pressed by the self-anointed "privacy" industry to pass laws that either limit online tracking or make opt-out the default choice on data collection. But I think the idea of paying not to be marketed to has traction already. Most certainly one of the reasons my cable bill runs to $250 a month is so I can get programming uninterrupted by commercials (well, the nudity and slow-motion violence don't hurt either). As part of that cost, I’m paying for a trio of cable-owned DVRs so I can tape nearly everything that is not on the premium tiers. I can watch a network show in 40 minutes instead of 60, and a football or basketball game in minutes rather than hours, by skipping past the seemingly endless commercials. Why stop there? I would pay the postal service $5 a month to stop delivering those annoying flyers and marketing postcards. Although I throw out 99% of the catalogues that come by snail mail, one will occasionally grab my attention, so those aren't as onerous. I would be happy to have the .0007 cents of the pro rata share of money theaters get to show me commercials before the feature starts, added to my ticket price. Some classical music would be sufficient and welcome. Although I don't really mind newspaper ads (except the bulk inserts in the Sunday edition, which are pretty easy to pitch all at once) I would let the local paper add a few bucks a year to stop putting ad stickers on the front page and using those wraps that cover a quarter of the section. Oddly, they are always from the same mattress company -- and just as oddly, I would never set foot in their store simply BECAUSE of the wraps. Loyal readers already know I pay for satellite radio in all of my cars. To me, radio advertising is about the most annoying and torturous form of marketing ever invented --right up there with not-very-attractive young adults trying to spray you as you walk past them in department stores. Even though I have signed up for every Do Not Call list I can find, I still get those unwanted phone calls -- and I still hang up on them. Add another few bucks to my monthly phone bill so I don't have to get up from the table to slam down the receiver. Would I pay not to be tracked online? Not really. I kind of like getting ads from places where I routinely shop online -- or their competition. I often click on Google ads since I figure they probably have the item I am looking for. Over the years, the ability to deduce my real interests has gotten decidedly more sophisticated and accurate. This is not to endorse any and all kinds of online ad units (not a big fan of auto-play video, have to admit), but I am happy to see fewer smack-the-monkey ads and more that really interest me.