Using data aggregated from a variety of exchanges, programmatic video ad buying platform TubeMogul discovered that RTB video in the U.S. was at an all-time high last month. They discovered that in-stream video ads available for RTB averaged over one billion streams per day in the U.S. This new data was stacked up against display inventory, which, while still ahead of RTB, is shrinking. The video ads available for RTB are growing at just under 18% per month, while the display inventory is shrinking about 8% per month. This data is in-line with many people’s predictions that RTB has a huge future in online video. It future is even more promising if the industry can agree on (or even find) and accurate, consistent form of measurement. While it shouldn’t be all that surprising that online video RTB ad inventory is growing at 18% per month, it’s definitely good news for the industry. However, without quality targeting and measurement standards, nobody will be able to take advantage of the ever-growing possibilities. Hopefully, the rapid growth of available space will force smarter decisions. If the ads can’t keep up with what the people are doing, there is a ton of wasted opportunity. By the looks of it, ad space available for RTB in video isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.
Media Innovation Group, the digital strategy and marketing unit of WPP’s 24/7 Media, has named Michael Mamarella general Manager-North America and Nicky McShane managing director-Europe. Mamarella, who has been in charge of strategy and operations for the region at MIG since joining the unit in mid-2011, has also been promoted to a senior vice president. McShane, who is based in London, joins MIG after 12 years in the performance marketing field, including stints at Adlink Media, Affilinet, Deal Group Media and Impact Radius.
A digital media company -- Google -- ranks as the highest in terms of Madison Avenue’s overall brand perception for the first time in an annual survey of advertisers and agency executives. The results, which are being released today as part of the “What Advertisers Think About The Industry’s Highest Rated Media Brands,” is based on the opinions of more than 2,000 advertisers and agency executives polled by Advertiser Perceptions Inc.The ascendency of the Google brand name is a first for a pure play digital media company. Last year, ABC ranked as the No. 1 overall media brand in the minds of ad executives. In 2010, the first year of the study, Meredith ranked No. 1.Given its overall perception, Google’s brand not surprisingly also dominated the digital ad networks category with its Google Display Network scoring No. 1 in overall “brand strength,” though Tremor Media ranked No. 1 in “advertiser satisfaction,” Vibrant Media dominated “customer service” and the Meredith Women’s Network topped “sales knowledge.”ESPN had the greatest overall brand strength in the “digital content” category, while Facebook dominated the “digital portals and social” and “mobile” categories. Highest Rated Media Brands -- 2012: MEDIA COMPANY Highest Rated Media Company — Google PRINT Brand Strength — ESPN The Magazine Sales Knowledge — Cooking Light Customer Service — Martha Stewart Living Advertiser Satisfaction — Food Network DIGITAL CONTENT Brand Strength — ESPN.com Sales Knowledge — Bloomberg.com Customer Service — Economist.com Advertiser Satisfaction — People.com DIGITAL PORTALS AND SOCIAL Brand Strength — Facebook Sales Knowledge — AOL Customer Service — Yahoo! Advertiser Satisfaction — Twitter DIGITAL AD NETWORKS Brand Strength — GDN Sales Knowledge — Meredith Women’s Network Customer Service — Vibrant Media Advertiser Satisfaction — Tremor Video CABLE TELEVISION Brand Strength — ESPN Sales Knowledge — NFL Network Customer Service — The Weather Channel Advertiser Satisfaction — AMC BROADCAST TELEVISION Brand Strength — NBC Sales Knowledge — ABC Broadcast Daytime Customer Service — ABC Broadcast Daytime Advertiser Satisfaction — ABC MOBILE Brand Strength — Facebook Sales Knowledge — Fandango Customer Service — Jumptap Advertiser Satisfaction — Millennial Source: Advertiser Perceptions Inc.
Vine, the new six-second video-sharing app from Twitter, is -- in a word -- exploding. Industry reactions are all over the place: from envisioning a new standard for online video advertising to questioning whether Vine's "porn problem" is merely a blip on the radar or a more persistent, damaging issue. But I'd like to point to a different implication: the future of real-time marketing. Why, you might ask, is Vine "more" real-time than other social apps and services -- say, for example, YouTube? After all, on YouTube, anyone can record a video and publish it instantly. So, in that sense, it is, technically, real-time. Here’s the difference: YouTube isn’t designed to be a real-time medium. Twitter, on the other hand, with its 140-character limit, is. Its constraints naturally, and near-automatically, lend themselves to real-time. Six seconds, like 140 characters, is real-time by design. And that’s why it’s so important to contemplate from a real-time marketing perspective. The Medium, the Message, and the Marketer A good way to think about all of this is through Marshall McLuhan’s now-ubiquitous, but no less profound, maxim: “The medium is the message.” Six seconds doesn’t convey a message of “depth,” or “insight,” or “conversation.” Rather, it conveys now, breaking, and ultimately, real-time. And because it’s being launched through Twitter, by Twitter, Vine naturally builds a cultural pattern, a habit, of associating “six seconds” with “real-time.” Six seconds allows you to test -- quickly. To experiment. To take risks at a fairly low cost, financially and with reputation. Six seconds is enough time for a customer service rep to, right after a phone call, record herself saying “thank you,” or holding a cute sign that reads “thank you” -- and not just smiling statically in an immovable picture, but dynamically adding that human je ne sais quoi that can mean the difference between a customer thinking “nice” and exclaiming, “Oh, that’s adorable!” Six seconds isn’t, in and of itself, a necessarily profound number -- unless Vine was looking to replicate Hemingway’s six-word story in digital form -- but it forces new constraints on old formats. Those constraints, in turn, create new cultural habits and norms: just think of how the 140-character limit has forever changed the course of culture. And marketing is nothing if it's not being culturally relevant. The Real-Time Marketing Opportunity for Brands Vine’s new cultural norm is this: real-time, micro-form creativity. When we see a “vine” now, we expect to be surprised, delighted, intrigued, moved -- but whatever it is, we expect to see something creative. For any brands involved in content marketing, this should be seen as a new -- and inviting -- playground. In fact, brands are already jumping on the swing sets. If you have a new product launch, for example, instead of, on one hand, simply taking an Instagram shot, or on the other, creating some kind of preview video of some length in some format, you now have permission to make a fun, intriguing six-second montage that leaves people wanting more. Or you can make it easier for fans to submit content and co-create a globally crowdsourced story in real-time. You can record and share your employees’ quirky personalities in a matter of minutes. You can give creative updates on campaigns, projects, and initiatives. You can build suspense for an event. You can share what’s happening at that event, while it’s happening. You can share your six favorite photos, or your two favorite moments, or the three funniest laughs, from the event after it’s over. See, this is the trend. Vine doesn’t kill traditional, long-form creativity. But, like all new constraints that become cultural norms, it will force marketers and content creators to innovate with less, to tell a bigger stories in smaller containers -- to become, well, more real-time.
Mobile is a mess,” said Forrester’s Senior Analyst Joanna O’Connell during last week’s OMMA RTB event. Her panel of agency execs pretty much agreed. Limitations in the creative palette of the small screen, platform fragmentation, and limited tracking and metrics are frustrating everyone, especially as the they feel the need to invest in the “next big thing.” One major way for post-PC platforms to become a more palatable solution for media buyers is for mobile to stop being just mobile. Lumping together two very different platforms, smartphones and tablets, in most metrics around the field was an early marriage of convenience that needs to end. Deloitte predicted that 2013 will be the last year the industry conflates ad performance, scale and conversion metrics as simply “mobile.” None too soon. As a recently released study of cross-platform behaviors from Adobe makes clear, the use cases, sensibilities and effectiveness of the two devices are different in ways that marketers need to understand and embrace in their targeting. “We believe tablets are a more intuitive shopping device that lends itself more to completing a transaction,” says Adobe Senior Product Marketing Manager Dave Dickson. The company's survey, fielded in late November and early December, the height of the holiday shopping season, found that 44% of tablet owners use their device for shopping, compared to 20% of smartphone owners. But the central difference between the two devices is that the larger screen leads people to the buy button. Among those mobile users who do use their devices to shop, 55% of tablet owners say they purchase products on the device, while 28% of smartphone owners do. Adobe, which makes an app publishing platform, likes to underscore the special role of apps vs. mobile Web use for device-based shopping. Asking consumers to project their behaviors into the future, 60% of current tablet shoppers said they expected to increase their use of apps for shopping in the next year, and even 25% of non-shoppers on tablets expected they would. Dickson contends that apps tend to be the environments where customers engage more deeply with retail brands and ultimately tend to convert to purchase. Web browsing on tablet and smartphone tends to be about retailer discovery, while apps are about immersing oneself in the product catalog. 70% of tablet shoppers and 68% of smartphone shoppers say they tend to download apps connected to brands they already know, and 67% on both devices say they only use apps from their favorite stores. In fact, distinguishing between tablet and smartphone targets is important to the messaging. Consumers shopping on both devices say that, foremost, they look for money-saving offers from retailers (52% on tablets, 67% on smartphones). But the next most popular feature for tablet owners (49%) are images and slideshows of the products. Tablets are for luxuriating with the merchandise. On smartphones, 60% of shoppers say store locators are most important, followed by ability to make purchases (58%), couponing (57%) and support for loyalty programs (56%). There is a lot of evidence that the personal social channel is among the most effective ways for retailers’ mobile apps to get discovered. The Adobe survey found that among tablet shoppers, 89% cited friends as the greatest influence on what they buy via their devices. The same was true for tablet non-shoppers (79%), and for smartphone shoppers (67%) and smartphone non-shoppers (77%). Fairly close behind among mobile shopping influences, however, were email communications from companies, online ads, Facebook and online videos. Clearly, in order to drive mobile shopping behaviors, retailers need to take a multichannel approach and make customers aware at every turn that a device-based experience is available to them. While app stores are still the leading source of discovery for users (42%), 32% say they are finding out about apps from company Web sites. One of the earliest of users' mobile behaviors that carriers noticed in the days before smartphones was what we might call the “look at this" effect. People tended to show off the cool new thing on their devices to others. That activity is still alive. Adobe found that 53% of people share opinions about apps in person. Curiously, only 22% of people say they find out about apps in a retailer’s store. Arguably, that is the one place a merchant most wants to engage users. Letting a user know a valuable app is available from the brand in-store can be the best defense against showrooming. It puts the consumer into the brand’s digital loop so that even if customers don't make the buy on the spot, the retailer has the opportunity to capture them later on the Web or device. Dickson says that 2013 will be a year when many retailers start focusing on tablet deployments. I think many of these companies need to focus on cross-screen synchronization. People are making purchase decisions in increments and across devices, from Web to tablet to smartphone, in different places and times. Loyal consumers may be leaning back and shopping on their tablets during prime time, but they need an easy way to push that information to the smartphone they bring into the store. Likewise, a product they discover and contemplate in store they will want to research on the desktop or on the tablet. The next big stage in learning to target different content to the various screens is allowing the consumer to knit these experiences together more easily.