Forrester Research has released a method for benchmarking a company's "mobile maturity," as campaign budgets continue to rise. The guidelines are intended to help marketers understand different growth stages, and determine budgets to create a cross-media strategy and road map. Advertisers will spend $77 billion on interactive marketing by 2016, similar to the amount today spent on television, Forrester estimates. Search marketing, display advertising, mobile marketing, email marketing, and social media will comprise 26% of all advertising spend as marketers embed more media in the mix. "The Score Your Mobile Marketing Maturity" report describes three processes: Organization, Planning and Execution, and Measurement. Each section lists a series of questions, such as "How does your organization view the importance of mobile marketing," along with possible answers like "Mobile marketing is the connective tissue between online and offline channels and is key to any marketing campaign." About half of all companies have some type of mobile marketing strategy. While the personal nature of the device creates a tighter bond between brand and consumer, no event mobile ad campaign can live in a silo. Tagga Media confirmed that theory during a recent campaign with adidas. The company, which specializes in mobile marketing and advertising strategies, developed a cross-channel campaign in partnership with adidas SLD (Sports Licensed Division), according to Amielle Lake, Tagga founder and CRO, which views mobile as the backbone to cross-channel strategies. The campaign aimed to raise awareness and sales of adidas college football attire through Kohl's Web sites in Tennessee, Wisconsin, Nebraska and Michigan. The co-branded initiative created a cloud-based, cross-channel campaign that increased sales between 30% and 100% across each of four markets. In 21 days, the campaign generated more than 13,000 entries and leads across all four markets. For each entry, consumers entered their name, phone number, mail and email address. About 1,968 were completed via SMS. It also prompted 49,000 page views across all four sites in the four markets. The cross-channel campaign began on Aug 24 and ended Sept. 15. Consumers entered the sweepstakes online via a branded landing page or in Kohl's department stores by texting a keyword to a short code and completing the entry form on a branded mobile optimized page. Once the sweepstakes entry form was completed, customers were presented with a success page that included a link to the Kohl's e-commerce store. Customers could purchase adidas college football merchandise directly from their mobile or desktop devices. Winners received prizes ranging from college football team merchandise to game tickets.
Marketing services and consulting company Sapient reported a 10% revenue gain in the third quarter to $288.4 million on an 11.4% profit gain to $32.8 million. The company said its digital agency SapientNitro accounted for about 68% of total revenues or a little more than $196 million, up about 11% from the third quarter of 2011. On a conference call with analysts and investors Wednesday, Sapient CEO Alan Herrick indicated that SapientNitro’s organic revenue growth for the third quarter was in the 8% range. The agency’s ORG for the first nine months of the year was not disclosed. The company also said today that its digital shop SapientNitro acquired Second Story, the interactive content studio. The company positioned the acquisition as a move that strengthens the agency’s “ability to redefine storytelling for today’s always-on consumer by crafting experiences that seamlessly blend physical and digital environments from Web and mobile to in-store and in-venue.” Second Story’s co-founders Julie Beeler and Brad Johnson will become part of the agency’s Global Experience Innovation team. Exact terms of the deal were not disclosed, but on the earnings call Sapient executives said that about $500,000 was being budgeted in the fourth quarter for the Second Story acquisition. Herrick described SapientNitro’s revenue increase in the quarter as good -- “but not the exceptional growth we’d had in the last couple of years” where the shop had been delivering gains in some cases in the 30% range. That said, Herrick stressed that the company believes that SapientNitro has a huge opportunity going forward to capitalize on shifting marketer dynamics as companies focus more on building consumer experiences via owned media. Given the impact of technology on marketing in the digital era, he said, CMOs are controlling a greater portion of IT budgets as well as marketing dollars as companies “shift their thinking and spending to more connected brand story telling” that requires a shift to “omni-channel business models.” In addition to basic marketing services, said Herrick, helping clients build those owned-media channels as well as helping them create e-commerce platforms are opportunities for SapientNitro going forward. Short-term issues, he said, include the unstable economic environment as well as pressure on the client side as they sort out how to budget for and create “always on” marketing models in ways that best serve their unique businesses.
Premium content publishers are the best media for brand-focused advertising campaigns -- even better than social sites like Facebook. Some 63% of marketers believe premium content publishers do a better job of reaching brand goals, compared with 27% on social media, according to a new study by the Online Publishers Association (OPA). The "Branding on Display" study reveals how marketers view premium content publishers by reviewing the role that branding plays in online advertising. It analyzes agency and marketing priorities and goals, determining how brand advertisers perceive the effectiveness of different media types against these goals on publisher sites and social networks. The findings: 79% of marketers believe publishers do a better job of increasing consideration for branding goals versus 55% for social sites. Increasing brand preference received 84% versus 54%; improving brand favorability, 81% versus 54%; and increasing purchase intent, 78% versus 50%, respectively. Agencies and marketers report higher levels of satisfaction with campaigns running on premium content publisher sites at 78%, compared with Facebook at 51%. The OPA study provides insight into the role that branding plays in online advertising, as well as preferences of agency and marketer professionals when it comes to achieving objectives. The ability to measure ROI and brand recognition also ranked higher on premium content publisher sites, compared with campaigns running on Facebook. Some 55% of marketers said it is easier to measure the ROI of brand campaigns on premium content publisher sites, compared with 27% on Facebook. Brand lift measured 55% and 30%, respectively. The study shows that marketers believe premium content publishers are the best media for brand-focused advertising. Some 73% cite that it delivers the best target audience; 63% say it achieves the best branding objectives; and 61% say it provides the best media brand quality/image.
Boding well for the holiday season, new data shows that online retail shopping remained strong in the third quarter of the year. Year-over-year, online retail spending increased 15% to $41.9 billion in the third quarter, according to new estimates from comScore. That represented the 12th consecutive quarter of positive year-over-year growth, and eighth consecutive quarter of double-digit growth, comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni said Wednesday. “Such performance offers some optimism as we approach the holiday season, especially given recent improvements in consumer sentiment,” according to Fulgoni. “With the housing market beginning to show signs of recovery in addition to increasing -- if still underwhelming -- job growth, there appears to be strong enough footing to support a very healthy online holiday shopping season.” During the quarter, top-performing online product categories included digital content and subscriptions, consumer electronics, event tickets, apparel and accessories and computer software. Each category grew at least 16%, year-over-year. Also of note, according to comScore’s quarterly online retail survey, 37% of U.S. consumers say they have engaged in “showrooming” behavior, where they use a smartphone while in a retail store to check prices or even to purchase a product online. That represented an increase of 5% points in the past two quarters. comScore also found that despite a slow-moving economic recovery, there has been marked improvement in consumer sentiment in the past quarter. While 48% of U.S. consumers still rate the economy as ‘poor,’ that represents an 8-percentage-point improvement versus the prior quarter, and the most pronounced improvement since early 2009.
As part of its push into mobile advertising, Facebook recently began allowing marketers to target campaigns by iOS or Android device. The new level of targeting was added in connection with the launch of mobile app install ads on Facebook, which promote games and apps instead of brands. To further highlight mobile targeting options, Facebook ad partner Optimal has made public analytics data relating to the social net's iPhone 5 owners. The information comes from the company’s Audience Matrix social analytics tool drawing on tens of billions of consumer data points across social media platforms. Among the findings, iPhone 5 users on Facebook are 59% male, 41% female, and have an average age of 32. When it comes to location, the biggest concentration of iPhone 5/Facebook users are found in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta and Dallas. Surprisingly, tech-savvy San Francisco came in sixth. Their top three searches on Facebook: UPS, Honey Boo Boo and Obamacare. “We hope this kind of data will give them some new and unique insights, and also get them thinking about new kinds of ad campaigns they can look to run using our Optimal platform,” noted the company’s CEO Rob Leathern. Optimal also has anonymous demographic data on Android users on Facebook and information on iOS and Android users by country. While Facebook allows targeting by devices on one of the platforms—like the iPhone or iPad—it doesn’t yet offer the option to target by a specific model, such as the iPhone 5, according to a TechCrunch report last week. It also hasn’t extended mobile targeting to other platforms like Windows Phone or BlackBerry. Based on initial results from mobile campaigns on Facebook, Optimal recently said Facebook is making from 20 to 40 times more per impression in mobile than on the desktop. Facebook reported mobile ad revenue jumped to $150 million in the third quarter, or 14% of total revenue, from just $10 million in the prior quarter.
A judge has dismissed a potential class-action lawsuit alleging that Citibank violated a consumer protection law by texting a user to confirm that he wanted to opt out of receiving future messages. "Imposition of liability ... for a single, confirmatory text message would constitute an impermissibly 'absurd and unforeseen result,'" U.S. District Court Judge Irma Gonzalez wrote in a decision issued last week. The ruling threw out a lawsuit by a consumer, Boqdan Ryabyshchuck, who alleged that Citibank violated the federal Telephone Consumer Protection Act. That law prohibits companies from using an automated dialing service to send SMS messages to people without first obtaining their consent. The statute provides for damages of up to $1,500 per violation. Ryabyshchuck alleged that he contacted Citibank in May of 2011 to apply for a credit card. He gave his cell phone number to the bank as part of the application, according to the court papers. A few days later, he received an SMS message instructing him to call Citi Cards. That message said he could opt out of future text messages by replying "stop." He did so, spurring Citibank to send him a final message confirming that it would no longer send him texts. Ryabyshchuck then filed suit in the Southern District of California, where he unsuccessfully argued that the final confirmatory text message was illegal. News of Gonzalez's decision was reported by Venkat Balasubramani on the Technology & Marketing Law Blog. Gonzalez's decision to toss the lawsuit is in line with a ruling issued earlier this year by U.S. District Court Judge Marilyn Huff in a case against Taco Bell. In that case, Huff wrote that imposing liability for a confirmatory text message "would contravene public policy and the spirit of the statute-prevention of unsolicited telemarketing in a bulk format." Jason Ibey, the consumer who sued Taco Bell, recently filed an appeal with the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. Facebook, MySpace and Twitter also faced similar lawsuits last last year. But those cases were all withdrawn shortly after they were filed, and prior to any rulings about whether sending a text in order to confirm an opt-out request violated the law.
Sell-side platform AppNexus has named former top AOL ad executive Lynda Clarizio as EVP, corporate development and operations. In that role, she will report directly to CEO Brian O’Kelley and will be responsible for managing corporate and business development, as well as overseeing administrative operations, including people, legal and policy affairs. At AOL, Clarizio held various senior positions, including president of the company’s Platform-A advertising division and president of Advertising.com. She also headed AOL’s audience business and was SVP, corporate strategic and financial planning. Most recently, Clarizio was president and CEO of Invision, which offers a management system for handling cross-platform advertising buys. Her background also includes serving as a partner at the Washington, D.C., law firm Arnold & Porter. AppNexus on Wednesday announced two new board members: Brian McAndrews, the former CEO of aQuantive, and Ed Gillis, a former executive advisor to Skype. Along with Google’s AdMeld unit, Forrester named AppNexus as the top-performing companies in an analysis of sell-side platforms. Backed by investors including Microsoft and Marc Andreessen, the company says it serves nearly 10 billion ads a day through its real-time bidding platform.
Longtime Publicis media chief Jack Klues -- one of the most powerful and highest-paid media executives on Madison Avenue -- will retire as CEO of its centralized VivaKi unit at the end of the year. Klues, who will remain with Publicis Groupe through the first half of 2013, will help oversee a repositioning of VivaKi, which to date has primarily serviced its founding Publicis shops -- Digitas, Razorfish, Starcom MediaVest and Zenith Optimedia -- to be available more broadly to other Publicis agencies and the market at large. CFO Frank Voris will succeed Klues as CEO and work closely with Rishad Tobaccowala, who will remain its Chief Innovation and Strategy Officer. An executive board will be comprised of SMG CEO Laura Desmond, Zenith Optimedia CEO Steven King, Razorfish CEO Bob Lord and Voris, marking a noticeable void from Digitas' management in that mix. Klues, who began his career in the media department of a pre-Publicis Leo Burnett, was part of the team that spun its media department off into Starcom, which ultimately merged with MediaVest to form one of most highly regarded media organizations on Madison Avenue. He was also a chief architect, along with former Digitas CEO David Kenny (now CEO of The Weather Channel) and Tobaccowala, in the formation of VivaKi. When the unit was originally founded, the company described it as an "industry-facing" entity that would work behind the scenes with suppliers to develop new opportunities in digital and traditional media that would benefit Publicis' media and digital shops and their clients. But the agencies would always remain the "client-facing" entities, insofar as their service goes. As part of today's announcement, Publicis said VivaKi would be transformed into a broader "platform" for other Publicis agencies, as well as the "market," as part of Publicis' overall goal to accelerate its "digital transformation." Details were not disclosed, but the company cited VivaKi innovations, such as the VivaKi Nerve Center, the Pool and its Audience On Demand trading desk as examples of products and services that would be brought to the general marketpalce to service "clients outside" Publicis, as well.
Kudos to DC, home of Superman, Batman, Swamp Thing, and more recently the daring reboot of its entire superhero line of comics in an attempt to make the genre accessible to newbies. The company has also been very aggressive in moving to digital formats and distribution. Last year, when Amazon introduced the first Kindle, DC signed a deal to put about 100 of its key graphic novels exclusively on the new device for a limited period. This was enough to spark Barnes & Noble’s ire and retaliation by removing those graphic novels from their stores for a time. That is all Kryptonite long under the bridge now, however. Now DC is moving beyond selling only the larger graphic novels across platforms, but this week introduced single-issue digital distribution through Apple’s iBooks, Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nooks. The publisher had been selling digital editions of its comics via the Comixology app and its own branded app on the same day and date as hard copies. Now the distribution becomes wider, and arguably outside the geekdom of dedicated comics apps. DC told VentureBeat that sales of digital comics have risen almost 200% since this time last year. In my own discussion with executives at the comics companies and at third-party app distributors, they all argue that digital is not cannibalizing print at all -- or not yet. In fact his has been one of the strongest years for the comic book industry in a while. DC’s radical reboot of its superhero books seems to have worked. And devices like the smartphone and tablets have given digital editions the platform they deserve -- richly colored, vibrantly lit, and enlarged in ways that highlight the artistry even greater than print. Digital editions of comics have an interesting pricing strategy that invites discovery. In their first weeks of release, new comics titles usually are selling for the standard cover price of $2.99 to $3.99. But within a month these same issues often are reduced to 99 cents, making them ripe for impulse buys. This is a fascinating segment for all media types to watch when it comes to merchandising content on mobile devices. The apps from Comixology and iVerse in particular do a great job of programming sales and parsing new releases throughout the week, not just the traditional “new comics Wednesday.” Unlike even the relatively static iTunes App Store and Google Play, these guys program the storefront in one- and two-day cycles to give regular users a reason to come back daily. Clever hooks with current affairs or upcoming comics-related films, maintain relevance. In many ways they put the lie to Apple, Barnes & Noble and Google’s “Newsstand” paradigm for digitized print. These apps look and feel like nothing of the sort, and instead see the marketplace as a place where marketers push, not where readers passively browse.
You may or may not have noticed Instagram's announcement that it launched profile pages for a select number of users and brands this week. (Non-power-users, fear not: yours should be accessible in the next week or two.) But either way, it's a big deal. At first glance, it seems like a relatively "lite" launch: similar to Facebook's timeline release, you get a big image above your head (comprised of a composite of your photos), seven randomly selected recent images (sorry, no choice in the matter on this one), and a chronological display of your photos (like a Facebook timeline, you might even say). But first glances are usually short, blurry, and hard to describe. So let's take a second one. Why Instagram is way more than just stand-alone photos Instagram recently surpassed the 100-million-user mark. It's owned by Facebook. It might have facilitated the most photographed event in history over the past few weeks, as Sandy’s devastating impacts gave rise to more than 800,000 “#sandy”-tagged photos on the platform (Mashable bumps that figure up to 1.3 million when other superstorm-related hashtags are taken into account). Co-founder and CEO Kevin Systrom has pointed to "Big Data"-type visions, like "if you're in New York, knowing which stations have gas," and tracking where the highest concentration of Instagramming is happening in any given moment. The corollary, then, of brand-driven engagement also exploding should not be hard to envision. Think geographically targeted special offers, image-inspired contests, and viral friends-and-family photo-tagging campaigns. Scrupulous readers will note that Instagram is already facilitating major brand engagement. But here is the difference, and the reason why Instagram profiles are quite significant: most of a brand's Instagram-driven engagement today occurs on other platforms, like Twitter, Pinterest, and Facebook (the last of which has promised Instagram users to keep their beloved service separate… ish). Let's say you're Nike, for example. You want to engage your audience around an Instagram-enriched photo stream of your sponsored athletes, right as they are heading into game time. And you would like to give away prizes to the users who create the most inspiring captions. With pre-profile Instagram, you can't. Why? Because, in pre-profile Instagram, you can only share individual photos with your existing subscribers. In other words, every image has its own, dedicated page. It is, in effect, siloed. The only way to truly create "brand engagement" using pre-profile Instagram is to share photos across your owned platforms, those that engender, well, the most engagement: Facebook (create a “game-time” app that allows people to caption the photos), Twitter (assign the photo stream a hashtag), and Pinterest (create a board featuring the best-captioned photos). The post-profile Instagram: Welcome to native brand engagement In the future, of course, you'll still want to engage multiple platforms. Now, however, with the launch of profiles, and with the assumption that Systrom’s ultimate vision far transcends the mere time-based and randomly selected photos that profiles currently display, the likelihood of native, brand-driven Instagram engagement becomes very real. Instagram, in other words, becomes its own full-blown engagement platform -- one worthy of a robust strategy, with its own complexities and necessary sensitivities to terms of service and nuanced rules of netiquette. Everyone has “Pinterest strategies,” and “Twitter strategies,” and “Facebook strategies” these days. Up until now, an “Instagram strategy” has usually consisted of choosing cool pictures to post to our owned channels. Friends, readers, colleagues: not any longer. The day Instagram made its investors happy Instagram is evolving. Facebook’s investment in the service now represents roughly $715 million, and it’s reasonable to assume that Mr. Zuckerberg will want to start making some of that money back in the not-too-distant future. Considering that nearly all of Facebook's revenue comes from advertising, and taking into account quotes from Systrom like “We're obviously very excited by the adoption of Instagram by the world’s major brands and we'll continue to build products that suit both them and users alike,” one need not be too radical of a visionary to portend that native, brand-sponsored Instagramming is not so far away. Call it the Image Economy, the Instagram Economy, the imagesphere -- whatever you want. Regardless of how you describe it, however, it’s time to start getting ready to put one more strategic playbook in your social marketing mix. Readers: what do you think? How close (or far away) are we to a brand- and advertising-driven Instagram? And how can Systrom keep his users happy while taking steps toward turning his fully free service into a money-making, investment-returning business?