Forget about click-through rates. When it comes to online video advertising, it’s the “completes” that count, according to new research from Vindico. “Click-through rate was created in a neophyte ad world dominated by display and search,” according to the video ad platform. “It should play a small part in measuring the success of a video campaign alongside other more powerful measures, like completion and engagement.” Rather, advertisers should evaluate a range of variables when evaluating performance, such as whether their video ad ran as in-banner alongside content or "below the fold." These situations would likely account for high impressions with low CTR as viewers are most likely not viewing the ad when it’s playing at the bottom of a page. Judging by "completes," mid-roll is the clear way to go, as they achieve the highest completion rates (94%) of all ad positions in 2011, Vindico found, based on tens of billions of ad impressions served in 2010 and 2011. Video ads placed during long-form content had a higher completion rate -- 88% -- than those placed with short-form content, 76%. In other words, a viewer who makes the commitment to watch a 30-minute episode is more invested in watching the associated ads, while a comparatively less-invested viewer “snacking” on short-form videos is somewhat more likely to click away when presented with an ad, Vindico finds. Completion rates across site types indicate that premium content on video centric sites yield higher completion rates. Overall, 2011 was a year of massive growth in online video ads, according to Vindico -- as it saw a 134% growth in digital ad volume and 16% growth in average campaign size. Ad-served impressions also rose last year as marketers pushed for ad-serving to be used on their digital video ad campaigns. Year-over-year, Vindico saw a 92% increase in ad-served impressions, with ad serving making up nearly half of all total impressions delivered. That said, attention spans remain short, Vindico finds. As such, 15-second ads remain the most successful (78%) with audiences; while 60 seconds are the least (54%). Also, despite the growing prominence of online video, marketers are still unlikely to splurge on platform-specific content. In fact, all but 2% of video ads were repurposed TV creative in 2011. A well-strategized digital campaign always takes into account video ad frequency and its effects on viewers, Vindico notes. Studies by the ad platform have shown that there is a frequency “sweet-spot” for marketers to keep users most interested and engaged. After frequency reaches this point, the completion rate for a campaign may drop. Ad serving helps advertisers control the number of times a user is exposed to the video ad, thus preventing “viewer fatigue.”
With the rise of the mobile era, smartphones and tablets have become almost as ubiquitous in the living room among device owners as TV remotes. New research from Forrester confirms the two-screen viewing phenomenon, showing 85% of U.S. tablet owners use their devices while in front of the TV. Moreover, only 12% say they are watching less TV since getting a tablet. To capitalize on the emerging tablet-TV connection, a host of companies large and small from Comcast to Shazam to Viggle are rolling out new services and applications to keep viewers engaged across the two screens. Among the latest is Aereo, a new venture funded by IAC and other investors offering live streaming broadcast TV via an iPad browser for $12 a month, starting in New York City. Given the scramble to woo two-screen viewers, the Forrester report by Sara Rotman Epps rates the efforts of five major players in the space so far: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft. It identifies Apple as the early tablet-TV leader, courtesy of the iPad. With 55 million of the devices sold worldwide since December, no other tablet has attracted nearly as many developers. Later this year, the iPad will add its latest TV-related feature, mirroring via AirPlay to Apple TV. While only 4.2 million Apple TVs have been sold, 1.4 million of that total came in the last quarter, suggesting that adoption is accelerating. At the other extreme, Epps finds that Google has made the least headway in conquering the tablet-TV media tandem. She points out that Google TV has largely flopped, with Logitech announcing in November that it would stop making Google TV devices after losing more than $100 million. Android-based tablets like Sony’s Tablet S are actually more advanced than the iPad in hardware for TV-related use, but have not approached the sales of the Apple tablet. For Microsoft, the key is to hook up the Xbox with tablets. With more than 66 million of the gaming units sold to date, the report suggests that Microsoft should use an API (application programming interface) for developers to create cross-platform games and content. “For example, starting a game on your Xbox and continuing to play on your iPad or Windows tablet would be a compelling way for Microsoft to exploit its own tablet-TV connection,” argued Epps. She describes Facebook as a “passive player” in the mix, with TV ads often inviting viewers to “follow us on Facebook,” and social TV apps like GetGlue making sharing via Facebook and Twitter a key part of its offering. With 62% of tablet users accessing social networks on their devices, bigger opportunities loom for the dominant social media service. Prior research has suggested that tablets are turning into e-commerce as well as media platforms. In that light, the Forrester report scolds Amazon for missing an opportunity to build up a tablet-TV commerce business via the Kindle Fire, which sold 5.5 million units in the fourth quarter. It points out that because the device does not even have a microphone, TV check-in apps like Viggle and Miso will not create versions compatible with the Amazon tablet. Among other findings, the study -- based on a survey of 5,000 adults -- showed that growing tablet adoption has come at the expense of PCs rather than the living room TV. More than a third (35%) of tablet owners say they use their laptops less since getting a tablet, and 45% have no plans to buy an e-reader now, either. Smaller TVs in other rooms, like the bedroom and kitchen, are also being displaced by tablets. About a third (32%) of tablet users say they will not buy another small TV, while only 7% say the same about large-screen TVs. After the living room, the most popular places in the home to use a tablet are the master bedroom (79%), followed by the kitchen (53%), and the home office (35%).
As Google continues to move into wearable devices and augmented reality, analysts might need to rethink the influence hardware and cloud computing technology will have on financial models. For now, a bevy of analyst and data reports released Wednesday analyze technology and trends that are likely to influence Google's Q1 2012 financial earnings when the company reports after the close of the stock market Thursday. When it comes to organic searches on engines, Google sites led the U.S. explicit core search market in March 2012 with 66.4% market share, followed by Microsoft with 15.3%, Yahoo at 13.7%, Ask Network at 3%, and AOL at 1.6%, according to comScore. While comScore's data does not include mobile queries, The Rimm-Kaufman Group Q1 2012 report attempts to break it out -- at least for its clients. Mobile made up 12% of organic search visits in Q1 and 13% of paid-search clicks. Google holds a 91% share of mobile paid-search clicks, according to the report. Heading into 1Q earnings, Macquarie Securities analyst Ben Schechter explains his long-term view on how mobile continues to transform Internet use in a research note. He believes a key question for estimating Google's revenue remains how to quantify incremental search volume and search share gains from mobile versus potentially lower mobile monetization and mobile traffic acquisition costs as a percentage of revenue -- especially since the Motorola deal still has not closed. Concerned about Google's delay in closing the Motorola Mobility deal, Schechter writes: "while mix issues may mask the near-term impact of mobile TAC, we think this is one of the most critical issues for Google going forward." He supports a whopping stock price target of $725. In the Internet Stocks Q1:12 Preview, Citi analyst Mark Mahaney recalls that Google recently disclosed that approximately 6% of its ad revenue now comes via mobile devices. That should rise when Google releases its 7-inch tablet that could compete directly with the Amazon Kindle Fire. It could have an improved and full-featured Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich OS, he writes. Mahaney expects Google to report Thursday $8.16 billion in net revenue, up 25%, compared with the prior year's quarter and flat sequentially. He writes that this compares with consensus expectation of $8.13 billion.
Social marketing began to take a bigger share of budgets at traditional search engine marketing firms in Q1 2012. Referral traffic from Pinterest to Web sites varied depending on the brand and company, according to an RKG digital marketing report. On average, Pinterest referral traffic share took 0.5%; Facebook provided 5.2% of referral visits in Q1; and Twitter, 0.4% among Rimm-Kaufman Group clients. In terms of all site visits, however, the three social sites combined for less than 1% of tracked visits, per the data. As for SEM, the decline of Google cost per clicks continues to be the major topic for most. But Mark Ballard, senior research analyst at RKG, sees Google's Product Listing Ads format as another important metric. Clicks on Google PLAs rose more than five times in the quarter compared with Q1 2011, accounting for 11% on Google, according to the RKG's report. PLA cost per clicks came in 18% below standard text ads in Q1. Overall, CPCs on Google fell 9% compared with Q1 2011, Ballard said. Mobile took 12% of organic search visits in Q1 and 13% of paid-search clicks. Google holds a 91% share of mobile paid-search clicks. Tablet share of paid search nearly quadrupled from year to year, as the iPad alone accounts for nearly 7% of all clicks. The Kindle Fire now holds 4% of tablet click share to the iPad’s 88%. RKG's findings also dispute reports that Bing and Yahoo continue to make a comeback. The company sees the duo struggling to make gains. Bing and Yahoo paid-search spend grew 7% overall, but ad clicks declined 4%. Volume from non-brand terms looked weak, but traffic quality in terms of revenue per click rose sharply. Paid-search spend grew 30% in the year-over-year rate in Q1 2012 -- up 31% sequentially -- across RKG clients. Ad clicks rose 36% sequentially. Marketers spent 35% more on paid search overall, driven by a 36% increase in spend on non-brand traffic terms. While Google generated 84% of the ad clicks, its share of organic search traffic rose to 76%. Bing and Yahoo took 10.4% and 10.8% share, respectively. Technology and consumer electronics companies supported by search marketing agency Covario spent 22% more in Q1 compared with the year-ago quarter and 1% higher sequentially, according to the company's Global Paid Search Spend Analysis report. The study's author, Charles Gaylord, research analyst at Covario, attributed the decline in keyword prices for the second straight quarter -- down 3% sequentially to search engine algorithm changes. He believes it will stabilize in the second half of 2012. Gaylord said trends are pretty much in line with Covario's expectations that global tech brands will spend between 18% and 22% more in 2012. This includes 18% to 20% growth in the Americas, 15% to 18% in parts of Europe and more than 40% in Asia-Pacific. The Covario report suggests the Yahoo-Bing Alliance may benefit from the implementation of "broad match," and showed 2% quarter-on-quarter growth. However, Yahoo-Bing is still down 20% year-over-year, and currently holds 13% market share, among electronics manufacturers. Baidu, which commands the majority of market share in China, a hot bed for manufacturing in this sector, grew 4% quarter-on-quarter and 142% year-on-year. Baidu accounts for 9% of all paid search spending globally.
In the last few years, Poptent has emerged as one of the main players in the niche for crowdsourced video advertising. The company matches its network of 50,000 independent videographers and filmmakers globally with assignments primarily for online video- -- but also traditional TV. They include spots from brands from American Express to Crest to FedEx. Each assignment posted to the Poptent site draws from 35 to 100 submissions, from which participating marketers choose one or more of the video ads produced on spec. Advertisers typically pay $7,500 to $10,000 per winning spot, and Poptent to date has awarded a total of about $4.6 million in cash payments to contributors for completed projects. Now the company is building on that model by launching its own video production unit that taps its most talented producers to create ads and Web marketing videos for clients in-house. The move follows a six-month testing phase during which Poptent Productions has created spots for advertisers including Dell, Intel, Jaguar and General Mills. Poptent President Neil Perry said the step was prompted by marketers seeking to leverage the company’s video ad resources, but on a private basis. “A lot of brands are interested in sending assignments, but don’t want them to be shown on our public Web site” for competitive reasons, he said. Now they have that option, while still being able to create ads for only a fraction of production costs for a traditional TV commercial. That means paying $40,000 to $50,000 for a Poptent-produced ad compared to $250,000 or more for a 30-second TV spot. “We also get work done in a much shorter amount of time -- spots are done in five to seven days and put on air right away,” said Perry. Among the more high-profile ads created during the test phase was a 30-second spot for the Dell XPS laptop that ran during TV broadcasts of college football's BCS national championship game and was in regular rotation on ESPN SportsCenter. A separate crowdsourced Poptent-created ad for Dannon’s Oikos Greet Yogurt brand even made it to the Super Bowl. The humorous spot starring actor John Stamos was the first yogurt commercial to run during the big game. For the most part, however, Poptent ads won’t have as grand a showcase, running as online-only pre-rolls or within display units. Perry points out the company is also handling an increasing amount of custom video work for brand Web sites or their pages on social properties like Facebook and YouTube. “There are so many places to put video now, companies don’t have enough of it,” he said. Poptent is counting on that demand to fuel the growth of its new production unit, which Perry predicts will eventually rival its crowdsourced video business. The privately held company does not disclose revenue or other financial figures.
A group of consumers who unsuccessfully sued Facebook for using their names and photos in ads won't have to pay the social networking service's legal bills, a federal judge has ruled. In the ruling, issued this week, U.S. District Court Judge Richard Seeborg rejected Facebook's attempt to recoup $700,000 in attorneys' fees for winning a lawsuit about whether it violated California's publicity law. That law says that people have the right to control the commercial use of their names and images and provides for damages of $750 per violation. Seeborg wrote that even though he dismissed the potential class-action lawsuit, he hadn't decided whether Facebook violated the California law. Instead, he tossed the case because the consumers couldn't show that they had the right to bring a case in federal court. Therefore, he said, Facebook didn't prevail in a way that would entitle it to recover its legal bills. "While it may have achieved its 'objective' of a dismissal, the decision in effect was only that plaintiffs had sued in a forum that could not decide their claims, not that the claims failed for a substantive reason," he wrote. The lawsuit -- filed by Robyn Cohen, Shannon Stoller, Christopher Marshall, Bryan Siglock and Debra Lewin -- alleged that Facebook's Friend Finder tool unlawfully used their names and photos in ads without their consent. Friend Finder searches people's email contacts, finds the ones on Facebook, and then suggests them as friends. The consumers alleged that Facebook wrongly promoted the tool by displaying their names and photos in ads to their friends. Facebook's ads for the feature said that Friend Finder had helped the members find other friends, and suggested that people "give it a try." Seeborg dismissed the case last October on the theory that Cohen and the other users didn't show they were injured by the ads for Friend Finder. Absent a tangible harm, the users did not have "standing" to proceed in federal court, the judge ruled. Seeborg never reached the substantive question of whether the tool violates California's misappropriation law. After Seeborg threw out the lawsuit, Facebook filed papers seeking reimbursement of $706,950 for its attorneys' work on the case. Facebook says the amount is "reasonable," given that the lawsuit sought more than $100 million in damages. Facebook says that attorneys from its outside law firm Cooley, as well as contract attorneys, worked for almost 1,500 hours on the case. In most situations, winners in litigation aren't reimbursed for their legal fees. But the California misappropriation statute at the center of the lawsuit says that the prevailing party is entitled to recover attorneys' fees. The users who brought suit about Friend Finder ads countered that Facebook didn't actually "prevail" on the misappropriation claim, arguing that Seeborg dismissed the case before deciding whether the feature violated California's law. Seeborg agreed with that reasoning. "Although California courts recognize a broad range of case outcomes as supporting fee awards to prevailing parties where there is an applicable fee-shifting statute, Facebook has not shown that the result here falls within those types of dispositions," he ruled.
The Arkansas-based developer of shortcode applications for marketers and publishers SumoText has acquired the mobile marketing arm of Phoenix Media/Communications Group, g8wave Mobile. The g8wave group is based in Boston and was part of the media company that publishes The Boston Phoenix and operates the WFNX radio station and Stuff Magazine. g8wave has been the mobile media and marketing group within Phoenix for over ten years. The company will continue its current work with clients, but will be able to move its agencies and brands to the SumoText platform to help them execute and measure mobile campaigns. SumoText provides services such as geo-fenced messaging, MMS message builders and a longstanding short-code platform. SumoText maintains over 40 short codes with 5,000 active keywords and locations. SumoText claims over 300 marketers, agencies, broadcasters and publishers as its clients, including Hershey’s, The National Guard, FitnessQuest and Boar’s Head.
My pre-teen daughter has a smartphone that’s way smarter than I am. But she almost never uses it as a phone; mostly, she texts and plays games on it. Seems like the actual phone is the least-used function on her smartphone. I don’t have a smartphone. In fact, my phone is a blithering idiot. Just signed up for the No G/No App/No Bar/Drop A Call/Skip a Hyphen Plan from T-Mobile, and it suits me fine. My daughter, however, is mortified. By everything I do. In fact, I discovered some time ago that all of my authority over her (to the extent that it exists at all) for the foreseeable future is directly related to my ability to mortify her in front of her friends. All I have to do is threaten to bust a move. Suddenly, I’m drunk with power. My mobile phone remembers all the phone numbers I long ago forgot. Still, somehow I manage to dial the occasional wrong number. Apparently, I’ve not only forgotten all the phone numbers I once was compelled to carry with me in my head, I’ve forgotten how to dial them as well. Kind of a technology-induced Alzheimer’s: I get stupider as my phone gets smarter. I remember when my father took me to Disneyland in 1968. A seasoned sports writer, he was in Los Angeles to interview O.J. Simpson, who’d just won the Heisman Trophy. In Disneyland, we happened on the AT&T/Bell Telephone exhibit, where they were introducing the push-button phone. It was a simple display: a standard rotary dial phone alongside a new push-button model, both beneath a giant stop watch, and all accompanied by a strapping young man in a snappy Bell blazer. Unfortunately for AT&T/Bell Telephone, the unctuous young man selected my father from the crowd to help demonstrate the superior speed and ease of the new push-button phone. He gave him a 10-digit number to dial, first on the rotary phone. My dad, with years of experience dialing the phone with one hand while watching Willie Mays on the field and typing 60 wpm with his other hand, blazed through the 10 digits in a heartbeat -- without even looking at the phone. I could see the beads of sweat already starting to form on the brow of the handsome but hapless AT&T/Bellboy. “Well,” he said, half-anticipating the disaster just ahead of him, “if he dials the number that fast on the old phone, we can only imagine how quickly he’ll dial the same number on the new push-button phone.” Keep dreaming, I thought to myself. Years later -- having long mastered the push-button phone – my father would call me at all hours to ask why his Windows desktop task bar suddenly wound up at the top of the screen, or why he had just incurred yet another cryptic system alert: YOU HAVE COMMITTED AN UNSPEAKABLE ACT! He passed away just before smartphones hit the market, but I can imagine him still seated somewhere in front of his antediluvian Underwood, still puzzled and still outmatched by his own technology. I can even imagine his very next question: “Can you help me change the ribbon?” I miss him. Sometimes, it seems like life these days is just an endless string of fatuous euphemisms. I spend most of mine just trying to figure out how best to manage my time with all of my time-saving digital devices. Stephen Covey was right: Rather than trying to prioritize our schedules, we should schedule our priorities. We need to put first things first. Think I’ll text that thought to my daughter.