Nielsen is approaching an “inflection point” in terms of the ad industry adopting its Online Campaign Ratings (OCR) as the currency for online advertising buys and it is getting “significant uptake” on its recently launched Cross-Platform Campaign Ratings (XCR), with WPP’s GroupM once again pushing the industry toward a new media currency, Nielsen CEO David Calhoun said this morning during a quarterly earnings calls with analysts. “If GroupM’s early runs are indicative, I don’t think the others will even hesitate,” Calhoun said of the big agency holding company’s initial foray into the new cross-platform ratings, which comingle TV and online audience estimates into one integrated rating that can be planned, bought and posted on, just like traditional TV ratings. “It’s going to take a while, because you need all the agencies to understand what it is, and have it line up with the TV ratings today,” Calhoun said, adding that it would be “months before we can get it even distributed in a way before it can become a standard.” Noting that big sellers such as ESPN and Hulu are already pushing the XCR ratings, Calhoun implied that it will ultimately be up to Madison Avenue to decide whether it becomes an advertising trading currency such as its conventional TV ratings, or its new OCR ratings appear to be becoming for online ad buys. He said GroupM is showing some “progress” and was hopeful that it could influence other agencies and advertisers to follow suit. GroupM historically has been very influential in motivating the rest of the ad industry to get behind new media trading currencies, as it proved several years ago by ending an industry stalemate around time-shifted TV viewing estimates, and convincing the industry to move toward TV’s current “C3” ratings, which include live viewing plus seven days of DVR playback viewing. During the call, Calhoun noted that TV networks have been pressuring Nielsen to include more days of time-shifted viewing, but that it was ultimately up to both sides of the marketplace -- both buyers and sellers -- to determine that. While Nielsen is hopeful that XCR may ultimately become a new media-buying currency for combining TV and online audience impressions, Calhoun said OCR is approaching an inflection point as a legitimate industry currency for buying online advertising. “With respect to the measurement of [online] video, I think we’ve already seen it,” he said, adding that he believes Nielsen is “getting very close” to achieving that same inflection point in terms of OCR becoming the standard bearer currency for all online advertising buys. He noted that Nielsen has measured 1,800 campaigns across more than 100 advertisers to date, and recently launched in the U.K., with plans to add five more overseas markets soon. While Nielsen has been giving its OCR data free to big marketers and agencies to vet the service, Calhoun said, “we pretty much have most of the TV networks signed up.” In response to an analyst’s question, Calhoun dismissed allegations from rival comScore that Nielsen’s OCR ratings do not sufficiently account for the “viewability” of online ads, which currently is a contentious issue in the online ad industry, with many buy-side stakeholders pushing to make it an industry standard for advertising’s proof-of-performance. “I understand that our competitor has tried to make that a big deal,” he said, emphasizing “it is not.” He explained that the reason is that measurement of “viewability” will become “less and less important, because all of the [ad] servers are going to determine that. I don’t see that as a big factor now, and even less in the future.”
Microsoft's investment in Adchemy is proving that search intent could become the most important signal in online advertising. The company led a $61 million investment in 2011, agreeing to a partnership that supports brands running Bing Ads. About 100 campaigns, from Overstock to Macy's, use it across the Yahoo Bing network. Microsoft is not an Adchemy customer, but rather a partner. Brands that advertise on Bing work directly with Adchemy IntentMaps to build search campaigns based on intent gleaned from the search query. ModCloth, for example, works with the company to reach prospective customers searching for vintage-inspired clothing and shoes. Some 86% of conversions are from new customers, according to Murthy Nukala, Adchemy founder and CEO. "When looking out five years, I can't see it clearly without the kind of infrastructure that identifies intent," Nukala said. Intent continues to become more than keywords. The average campaign using IntentMaps relies on about 430 intent signals, representing approximately 500,000 keywords, which simplifies the management of paid-search campaigns. Nukala explains that some clients increased keywords to more than 1 million, but they are managed by 1,400 intent signals. The average campaign has seen a 436% increase in traffic-generating keywords, he said. Microsoft reported Thursday in its fiscal Q1 2013 results that online advertising revenue rose 15% -- driven primarily by improvements in search, but offset in part by a decline in display revenue. There was no mention of tools supporting the Yahoo Bing network. Intent signals will become a substitute for keywords in what Nukala calls the "post-query world," where consumer behavior on mobile devices allows them to interact with content across the Web or in vertical engines, sites and apps. "When people go to Pinterest and see red-leather boots they click or share the picture to show interest," he said. "Search harvests that intent, with the technology mapping the intent to identify words that help consumers discover the product."
Clothing might not seem the likeliest product category when it comes to mobile shopping. But new data from Spotzot, which operates a platform powering mobile coupons and offers, says women’s and men’s apparel were the most popular categories among mobile browsers. The findings were based on ad impressions and interaction on Spotzot’s network over the last nine months. The company has created a mobile shopping index measuring the effectiveness of mobile offers and ads across more than 100 product categories and subcategories and 1,000 top U.S. retail chains. The index ranks lead-generation performance by the ability to convert a shopper’s interest into purchase intent. (Total shopper intent/shopper interest x 100). Shopper intent covers all queries for each category from mobile shopping, search and location-aware applications and sites. Shopper intent reflects things like click-throughs to Web sites, phone numbers and driving directions to nearby stores or retailer coupons. In terms of interest, women's and men's apparel were tops followed by consumer electronics, health and beauty, home and garden, and computers. Top products more specifically included women’s shoes, mobile phones and tablets, face and skin care products, handbags and laptops and desktop computers. Sanjay Mittal, Spotzot’s co-founder, chairman and CTO, said the top categories reflect the abundance of retailers that sell some type of clothing or accessories in its network. “When we look at merchants in the top 1,000 [retailers], there are a disproportionately large number of department stores and specialty stores dealing with men's and women's apparel,” he said. In relation to Spotzot's shopper index, correlating interest and intent, automotive (parts and services) had the highest index score of 56%, followed by consumer electronics (52%), sports and fitness (49%), computers and office (46%) and toy, party and gifts; and jewelry and watches (both 45%). Women's apparel -- the top segment in shopper interest -- had the lowest average score (34%) of the 11 overall categories analyzed. That suggests initial interest is not necessarily translating into purchase intent as much as in other categories. Mittal noted the higher conversion rate for auto parts ads than those for women's apparel is partly a factor of the total offers and products for each category. “If you look at an offer on a can of machine oil or a tire, there’s not a whole lot to browse,” he said. “But if you’re looking at offers for shoes or handbags, it’s almost like a reading experience. You can look at 15 or 20 items, and maybe one or two catch your eye." The research also showed that eight of the 11 categories were directly influenced by sales and coupons. Consumer interest in discounts was high in areas including auto parts, jewelry and watches, home and garden, and kids and babies. Spotzot says its SpotAds can reach 100 million U.S. mobile users and deliver click-through rates 10-30 times higher than top mobile and online ad networks and three times more leads to stores. Apps including ShopSavvy and CardStar use Spotzot's platform to run offers in their mobile apps. In terms of devices, the vast majority of shopping activity tracked by Spotzot takes place on smartphones, with tablets accounting for less than 10% of traffic, Mittal said.
The world became smaller for RocketFuel and its U.S. brand clients after the company inked a deal in Japan with cyber communications inc. (cci), a wholly owned Dentsu subsidiary. The deal supports media buying for U.S. companies in more than a dozen countries. While most advertisers -- even multinational brands -- plan and buy media locally, the companies share best practices in a variety of media such as programmatic buying and artificial intelligence, which RocketFuel founder Richard Frankel describes as the method used by computers to learn to solve problems and serve more relevant ads. RocketFuel, now with offices in 15 cities worldwide, wanted a partner to enter the complex Japanese market typically filled with pre-existing relationships, Frankel said. Those existing partnerships and government regulations make it difficult for U.S. companies to enter and find success on their own. The two companies plan to share resources. Rocket Fuel and cci will send employees from each company to the other for training and sharing of resources. Hideyuki Nagasawa, president and CEO of cci, said the company has relationships with more than 1,000 agencies and publishers. While cci brings the expertise in the local market, Rocket Fuel will bring knowledge and technology related to programmatic buying, and real-time media buying of exchange inventory. Data will support the relationship, with RocketFuel supporting 11 million attributes of consumers, from weather to kids in a household. "With all that data, it's about testing and figuring out what information to use for any given campaign," Frankel said. "The challenge isn't getting access to the data, but what to do with it." What does international expansion give local U.S. mom-and-pop stores? Frankel said country-specific markets tend to have different uses of technology. Japanese consumers who are early adopters of mobile and mobile payments make country-specific local markets important, but also international ecommerce services for Japanese travelers.
Apple is expected to up the ante in the tablet wars when it unveils the iPad Mini at a press event on Tuesday in San Francisco. The small version of the original Apple tablet, expected to offer a 7.85-inch screen, will stand as a more direct competitor to popular 7-inch tablets like Amazon’s Kindle Fire and Google’s Nexus 7. With 10 million units reportedly ordered for the fourth quarter, Apple has high hopes that the Mini will be a strong seller over the key holiday shopping season. The latest tablet could also prove a boon for marketers on the advertising front, according to some ad executives. The Mini could help expand the overall tablet audience, which tends to be more affluent than the overall mobile audience. “We know from industry studies that 56% of tablet owners make over $75,000, and 46% have made a purchase after interacting with a tablet ad, so this creates a new, potentially very lucrative frontier for digital marketers,” noted Kurt Hawks, general manager of mobile ad network Greystripe. Some 29% of tablet owners say they have researched a product in the last six months, while 23% have clicked on an ad, 20% have used a special offer or coupon, and 19% have visited a product Web site, according to a survey released in June by the Online Publishers Association. In that vein, Hawks pointed to a recent iPad campaign for a breakfast bar that had a 19% interaction rate and an average of 31 seconds spent with the ad. “We expect these results will be repeated with the iPad Mini,” he said. Krishna Subramanian, CMO of mobile marketing firm Velti, suggested that the Mini could even help boost ad performance over its predecessor. That’s based on data from the company’s Mobclix ad exchange showing that 300 x 250 banner ads on Kindle Fire have a click-through rate of 3.3% compared to 1.9% on the iPad. If the Mini delivers results closer to the comparably sized Kindle Fire, it would be an improvement over the iPad for that common ad type. “Based on our data, we’re seeing that a smaller screen size on tablets leads to higher mobile marketing engagement,” said Subramanian. The Mini’s smaller screen size will also make it more of a truly mobile device than the 10-inch iPad, according to Greg McAllister, co-founder and CEO of m-commerce software provider PushPoint Mobile. Research has shown that much tablet use takes place at home rather than on the go. “The iPad mini is the ‘Goldilocks’ device for mobile marketing because it’s just right -- not as small as a smartphone with the limitations a smaller screen creates, but not as large as current tablets, whose size makes them less portable,” said McAllister. To capitalize on a growing tablet audience, mobile ad network Mojiva last week announced the launch of a tablet-only network reaching 40 million devices globally. Given burgeoning demand, IDC in September raised its forecast for the tablet market to 117 million units this year, up from 107 million. With a price believed to be under $300 for the 8GB version of the iPad Mini, it could prove an attractive alternative to the larger iPad selling for $499, as well as the $199 Kindle Fire. Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster has estimated the Mini could cannibalize 20% of iPad sales.
In the realm of social media, do liberal Democrats make better brand advocates than conservative Republicans? Yes -- or at least they have been in the run-up to this year’s presidential election, according to new research from the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project. All told, 52% of liberal Democrats report “liking” or promoting material related to politics or social issues that others have posted, compared to 38% of conservative Republicans. What’s more, Democrats (who identify themselves as social media users) are more likely to use social media to encourage others to vote -- 42% have done so, compared with 36% of Republican social-media users, and 31% of independents. “There are mixed partisan and ideological patterns among social media users when it comes to using social media like social networking sites and Twitter,” according to Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet Project. Yet Democrats and Republicans appear to be equally willing -- 42% versus 41%, respectively -- to use social media to post personal thoughts or comments on political and social issues. Overall, some 60% of American adults report using either social networking sites like Facebook or Twitter. Some social sharing activities are more likely to be pursued by younger users compared with those ages 50+. Spanning political ideologies, younger users are more likely to post their own thoughts about issues, post links to political material, encourage others to take political action, belong to a political group on a social networking site, follow elected officials on social media, and like or promote political material that others have posted. Pew gathered its findings come from a nationally representative survey of 2,253 adults ages 18 and older, which was conducted this summer.
Analytics company KISSmetrics has agreed to settle a class-action lawsuit by promising to avoid using ETags or other "supercookies" to track people online without first notifying them and giving them a choice. The company also will pay $2,500 each to the consumers who sued -- John Kim and Dan Schutzman -- and around $500,000 to the attorneys who brought the case, according to court papers filed on Thursday. If approved by U.S. Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler in San Francisco, the settlement would resolve a dispute alleging that KISSmetrics violated wiretap laws by using ETags (and other supercookies) for tracking. ETag technology is controversial because it can be used to track people across the Web, even when they try to protect their privacy by deleting traditional HTTP cookies. Kim and Schutzman filed suit last year, shortly after researchers at UC Berkeley published a report detailing how KISSmetrics allegedly used ETags to store information in Web users' browser caches. When those users deleted their cookies, they could be recreated with information from the ETags. Within days of the report's publication, KISSmetrics said it had stopped using ETags. Until the practice came to light last year, the only way for users to avoid KISSmetrics' tracking was either by clearing their browser caches between each Web site visit or by installing the AdBlock Plus extension. The proposed settlement calls for an injunction banning KISSmetrics from using ETags (or other hard-to-delete cookies) to "repopulate HTTP cookies or as an alternative method to HTTP cookies for acquiring or storing information about a user’s Web browsing activity and history, without reasonable notice and choice." KISSmetrics isn't admitting liability as part of the settlement agreement. A separate lawsuit against both KISSmetrics and the video service Hulu (which allegedly worked with KISSmetrics) is still pending. In that case, Hulu is accused of violating a federal video privacy law that prohibits movie providers from sharing information about the films people watch without their consent.
The First Amendment is the most fundamental and beautiful pillar of our democracy. I love it more than corned beef. I love it more than "Breaking Bad." I love it more than Nexium. And every two years I hate it. I hate it more than sloe gin. I hate it more than "The Bachelorette." I hate it more than the Yankees. Because of the near absolute freedom of political speech, politicians are free to fill the airwaves with lies. Some are trivial, some are shocking, but they are the currency of modern politics. In advertising and in person, virtually all candidates -- regardless of party -- abuse our most sacred right in order to smear their opponents with blatant mischaracterizations of their records, their statements and their motivations. For the past two months, residents of Virginia, Ohio, Florida, Colorado and Nevada have been inundated with countless slimy assertions by the Obama and Romney campaigns and their SuperPAC proxies. And residents of all 50 states have gotten the same treatment in 460 Congressional races, not to mention governorships and hundreds of down-ticket battles. If you spend any time on the Web sites of PolitiFact.com or FactCheck.org -- and you should -- prepare to be nauseated. If you look at the most recent 44 claims evaluated at PolitiFact, 15 are rated as true or mostly true, 19 are judged false or mostly false. Another is so brazenly false it is given the “pants on fire” rating. The remaining 9 are deemed “half true.” Another word for half-truth? Lie. Because what is left out of a half truth is further information or context that negate the nominal facts of the claim. For instance, without straying from the facts, you could say that the Manson Family was an energetic group of volunteers dedicated to reducing population growth. It’s particularly easy to assemble little facts in service of a big lie by artfully cherrypicking legislative votes. In such a way, voting for an omnibus budget bill that has an amendment tacked on calling for, say, a tax credit for vineyards can be twisted into: “He voted to subsidize the alcoholic beverages industry.” If you count all the procedural votes before final passage, you can say: “He voted 8 times to subsidize the alcoholic beverages industry.” Another trick is to pluck economic statistic out of context to mischaracterize your successes or your opponent's failures. In the current campaign, hardly a statistic that either candidate has uttered about the economy can be taken at face value. (For a good summation of what face value is, look at this neutral but enlightening analysis of key economic metrics under the Obama administration.) The way the numbers have been distorted by the candidates and their SuperPACs is simply breathtaking. According to measurements by the fact checkers, the Mitt Romney campaign has significantly outlied the Obama campaign -- by a 5:1 ratio, according to PolitiFact’s tally. On the other hand, supporters of the president can claim the most heinous smear of the campaign: a Priorities USA ad featuring former steelworker Joe Soptic, who lays responsibility for his wife’s cancer death at the feet of Mitt Romney. Soptic speaks of losing his family health insurance when Romney’s Bain Capital shut down his steel mill. “And a short time after that my wife became ill,” he recounts. “I don’t know how long she was sick, and I think maybe she didn’t say anything because she knew that we couldn’t afford the insurance. And then one day she became ill and I took her up to the Jackson County Hospital and admitted her for pneumonia. And that’s when they found the cancer, and by then it was stage four. It was -- there was nothing they could do for her.” What the ad doesn’t reveal is that his late wife did have health insurance from her own job when Soptic was laid off. Or that she had health insurance on her next job. Or that her diagnosis came in 2006, five years after the plant closing. Or that in 1991, Romney was running the Salt Lake City Olympics, not running Bain Capital day to day (or, according to him, at all). Yet, Soptic’s conclusion is this: “I do not think Mitt Romney realizes what he’s done to anyone, and furthermore, I do not think Mitt Romney is concerned.” Ah, so he’s a remorseless murderer. President Obama has nine weeks to disavow this ad. He has declined to do so. That’s what they mean by free speech. You are free to abuse it in the most vile ways. Whoever wins the presidency of the United States may or may not well serve the nation. He may or may not fulfill campaign promises. He may or may not succeed in reducing long-term debt and stimulating the economy. But one thing you can be certain of: Whichever man is elected next month is a liar.