Advertising on Google and Bing for retailers has become similar to merchandising. Create a paid-search ad that drops the consumer directly on a product-specific page, but give brands the option to merchandise through search. It prompted Marin Software to create a "searchendising" strategy, partnering with Mercent to deliver the goods. Rather than drop consumers on a generic landing page from a paid-search ad, brands with product-specific ad copy or product-specific keywords should consider taking consumers to a specific product page, explains Marin VP of Marketing Matt Lawson. "Imagine rather than walking in the front door of a store, the consumer shows up in the sweater section and pays for the merchandise there," he said. "They may never see the jeans, socks and shoes." Features like Google's product listing ads support the move to cross-sell and searchendise, but also give advertisers an opportunity to cross-sell merchandise with recommendations on the brand's product page. Lawson said brands need to bid on product-specific keywords. Product feeds make it easier to pull out and bid on terms, such as "Nike Swoosh 11 shoe." The Marin and Mercent agreement builds search campaigns specific to products in the feed, Lawson explains. It supports retailers manage shopping feeds sent to sites like Amazon, eBay, Google Shopping and affiliate networks, speeding the process of putting inventory and product descriptions online. The product feeds also support paid-search campaigns to match online descriptions with search engine marketing paid-search campaigns and product listing ads. Seasonal merchandise can become a large portion of a company's product catalog, so translating descriptions into keyword groups and promotions becomes time-consuming. Price changes and out-of-stock items create other challenges the partnership solves when it comes to syncing information between search campaigns and catalogs descriptions, similar to a feature from Kenshoo.
LONDON – The retail implications of mobile media go far beyond so-called “m-commerce” -- the instant conversion of a retail purchase via a mobile device -- but likely have even greater long-term effects for consumers and marketers alike, a top strategist at London-based mobile agency Somo Global said this morning during a presentation at OMMA Mobile Europe. In fact, that executive, Somo Chief Strategy Officer Ross Sleight, went to far as to assert: “I think in e-commerce, we have taken the fun out of shopping.” Sleight indicated that the problem with mobile media -- especially tablets -- is that many marketers, agencies and retailers are thinking of it as an extension of a Web site, and are utilizing it in prosaic, task-oriented and conversion-oriented ways that aren’t leveraging the high-impact experience value of mobile technology. “Shopping on Amazon isn’t any fun,” he quipped, adding that tablets, by contrast, are about “bringing things to life.” Sleight gave an example of a campaign Somo recently implemented for Domino’s Pizza that went well beyond conventional task-oriented conversions, and provided emotional and eye-catching displays and options that enabled consumers to customize and upgrade their pizza orders with “extras” ranging from “cole slaw” to “chicken wings.” He said the power of the campaign was in its ability to harness the high resolution of retina displays to “make the pizzas look mouth-watering” in ways that conventional Web browsing experiences might not. “This really showed that creating a tablet-only experience drove more sales in day one than it would have done on the Web,” he said, citing other examples of retailers who utilized the highly visualized nature of tablets to create custom content experiences that went beyond the kind of conventional brochure-ware that retailers usually utilize the Web for. Offering examples of U.K. retailer Mark & Spencer’s new “Home” iPad app, Sleight said it was more of a “magazine-like” experience showing beautifully rendered home furnishing settings where the products are more in the background than listed as inventory on a retail Web page. “This is not about ‘search for a sofa,’” he said, “This is about, ‘give me sets, give me shots, make it more magazine-like. Make the retail experience look, wow!’” The point, he said, is to utilize the “engagement” value of tablet computers to bring some “joy with shopping,” and to leverage magazine-like or event TV format content to do that. Noting that tablets are equally capable of rendering high-quality video, he quipped: “A picture says a thousand words. And a video says a thousand pictures. I think we will see a lot more of that.” Sleight noted that mobile devices are playing a direct response role too, especially as the “second screen” response mechanism for people watching television, but that when consumers bring their mobile device into retail shopping experiences, they begin to adopt other behaviors and habits that are beginning to augment their shopping experience, especially how they research the brands and products they buy at retail. Sleight said he’s been spot-checking this phenomenon every three months by going into a major retail location and observing how people utilize their mobile devices while shopping. “Every three months I see more and more people whip out their mobile and checkout products,” he said, noting that they might be “checking for prices” or researching additional information about the product instead of talking to a sales associate. The important thing, he said, was to understand that while people are beginning to convert purchases directly on their mobile devices in retail locations, more of them are doing research that may be converted later online via a conventional computer Web browser or even at a retail location. “If mobile affects anything on the purchase journey, it’s not all about the silo of e-commerce,” he said, adding: “We’ve got a medium here that is affecting the research and customer purchase journey.”
The Internet might eventually kill traditional broadcast radio, but marketers at neighborhood stores, as well as large companies like Nike and Lexus, now have tools to create a branded-Internet radio station, augment with topic-specific interviews, and subsidize airtime with jingles and four minutes of ads through Radionomy. It turns out that Europe-based Radionomy, which built a platform allowing anyone to create and program their own Internet radio station with licensed music from well-known artists, enters the U.S. market this week after attracting more than 13 million listeners in other parts of the world. Unlike Pandora, humans program the content monetized with ads -- about four minutes per hour. The number of radio station listeners determines the monthly income generated by ads sold on a CPM basis. Thierry Ascarez, vice president of business development at Radionomy, says some stations might have more than 500,000 listening hours per month based on a $5 CPM. "It's a Google AdSense for audio," he says. Helping to gain listeners to generate revenue, Radionomy built in social features, such as embedded players for Facebook and the ability to build a basic Web site to support the player and station. Listeners can share stations and music on Twitter and Facebook. In other parts of the world, Radionomy supports more than 6,000 stations and 92 million listening sessions monthly; 42 million hours of streamed music each month; and 50 new Radionomy stations created each day A version available in Europe, but not yet in the United States, allows brands to build their own radio campaign in five steps. Radio station producers can bring advertisers to the Radionomy platform. In the U.S., programmers pick from a list of prerecorded ads. The platform targets ads to listeners based on demographic and geographic location, based on the devices' Internet protocol address and other signals. A New York-based ad house sells the ads. Companies like Netflix and Walgreens have recently signed advertising agreement. Standards built into the software follow traditional broadcast radio rules. The tools built on the G2 platform, a new version of the service, offers custom options through Radio Manager, a Web-based dashboard centralizing functions needed to run an online station; Planner to assist producers create and manage their station; and new versions in iTunes for iPad and iPhone, as well as Facebook apps. A new version of the Android app and a desktop app will be available in November 2012. The feature will become available in cars with Internet access via directories like TuneIn. Ascarez said Radionomy works with traditional broadcasters in Europe because they view the technology as a gateway to increase listening audiences through a search engine and directory of music stations.
Consumers don't generally "trust" advertising -- but in certain advertising platforms combinations those trust numbers get better.The worst results, Nielsen says, are from "text ads on mobile phones," which have a 71% "Don't Trust Much/At All" score. Online banner ads hit a 64% number, which is also the same untrustworthy number for "ads on search engine results."By way of comparison, some traditional media does a bit better: "Ads on TV" score a 53% untrustworthy mark; with product placements on TV at a distrusting 60%. Ads in magazines are at 53%, while ads on radio score 58%.The best trusting results are drawn from general consumers' opinions and recommendations from "people I know" information -- where they hit a 70% and a 92% score, respectively, when it comes to "trust completely/somewhat."Nielsen says there is a remedy to some of the negative feelings about advertising when marketers combine social and paid advertising. Looking at ads with and without a social layer, it discovered that purchase intent is much higher when adding a social component.The report says: "Knowing that the advertised brand is liked by our friends builds trust." One example shows that social ads hit 55% better results in ad recall than non-social advertising results.Looking at branded company sites -- owned media -- Nielsen says that in one example a brand's Web site, along with paid digital advertising, drove sales lift three times higher then of paid digital ads alone.Nielsen recommends that marketers look at other combinations for positive results. Image by Shutterstock
Mark Zuckerberg took the stage last week at Techcrunch Disrupt to discuss all things Facebook, including the inevitability of a true Facebook search engine. It was the piece of information that most technology writers gravitated towards; even the stock price took notice (Facebook shares rose more than $2 per following the Zuckerberg interview). Zuckerberg noted, among other things, that Facebook currently processes “1 billion queries a day” without really attempting to productize a search capability. He goes on to say, “Facebook is pretty uniquely positioned to answer the questions people have. What sushi restaurants have my friends gone to in New York in the last six months and Liked? Or which of my friends or friends of friends work at a company that I’m interested in working at -- because I want to talk to them about what it’s going to be like to work there. These are questions that you could potentially do at Facebook if we built out this system that you couldn’t do anywhere else. And at some point we’ll do it. We have a team working on search.” Why is the promise of a Facebook search engine so exciting to users and shareholders alike? After all, we have already seen social search emerge across Google and Bing results; authenticated users are presented standard search results with a social filter applied, indicating content and domains that have been shared and liked by friends. What can Facebook do internally that Bing cannot with a Facebook data overlay? As I see it, the opportunity is for Facebook to create the ultimate social discovery tool. Given its access to a data set unrivaled in its social depth and richness, Facebook can legitimately rival Google for a broader share of the search market. I see three essential components for this opportunity to come to fruition: 1) Social discovery on-demand – If Facebook’s mission is to facilitate a more open world through its ubiquity and environment of “frictionless sharing,” then what better way than to empower social discovery on-demand rather than relying on what’s pushed to users’ News Feed and Ticker? The possibility of having complete freedom to explore every crevice of the Open Graph is very intriguing. This would require a hefty engineering effort, but making everything users have shared via Facebook (adhering to users’ privacy selections, of course) searchable with specificity, at any time and across any device, would be the ultimate killer app. It might even help reverse the recent decline in user engagement across the site. 2) Degrees of separation from people, brands, and sentiment – One of my favorite features of LinkedIn is the ability to see degrees of separation from individual users or employees of select companies. Facebook could similarly demonstrate via search the degrees of separation from individuals, friends who like certain brands, or sentiment (Zuckerberg’s sushi restaurant example). Imagine being an amateur photographer planning a trip to the Grand Canyon. Having the ability to search for friends, friends of friends, friends of friends of friends, etc., who have ever uploaded pictures taken from a trip to the Grand Canyon would be incredible. You could then connect with those people for recommendations on the most scenic spots ahead of your own trip. Undoubtedly new friendships would be born out of those types of exchanges too – further enhancing the social appeal to Facebook overall. 3) Search by Open Graph Expression – Open Graph Apps are still relatively new, and Facebook seems content for now to focus its promotion on games and media apps, but the potential here is immense. As more applications enter the App Center with unique expressions beyond the “Like,” the potential to query against user activity plus unique Open Graph Expression (e.g. discovering that “Ryan ‘Wants’ iPhone 5,” rather than “Ryan ‘Likes’ iPhone 5”) would enable a much richer search experience. In my above example, friendswho are also contemplating phone purchases in the near future could solicit my opinions on which phone is best, and how I arrived at my decision to “want” the new iPhone. The idea of a fully baked Facebook search engine should also whet the appetites of those in the advertising community. Greater access to Facebook’s data set -- both what exists today and what will exist in the future -- could prove to be exactly what marketers need to better understand how social advertising functions in tandem with more traditional channels. Search may be exactly what Facebook needs: an enhancement that simultaneously improves the user experience and the company’s attractiveness to advertisers.
In 1975, Pepsi launched their famous Pepsi Challenge, in which blind taste tests were conducted at various malls and pubic locations to gauge whether they would choose Coke or Pepsi. No surprise: the majority of consumers chose Pepsi over Coke. After all, if they’d chosen Coca-Cola, Pepsi-Cola would have buried these results 30,000 leagues under the sea. The Pepsi Challenge is probably the most “classic” and direct example of the Cola Wars. In recent times, we’ve seen this brought to life in more indirect, tired head-to-head advertising, typically launched during one of the Super Bowls. Pepsi takes a more aggressive, “you’re ugly and your mother dresses you funny” approach, whereas Coke says, “chill out mate. Why can’t we all get along?” Still, there’s something brave and ballsy about publicly taking on a competitor and letting the product do the talking, versus the creative directors. Along the same vane, probably worth sending props to Domino’s, which took a different, yet related approach with their Pizza Turnaround initiative. Segue to present day, with Microsoft’s Bing finally ready to shake off its inferiority complex by taking on the mighty Google in a head to head, “blind” taste challenge. In “Bing it On,” consumers can type in any search term they choose and then have to choose between search result A (on the left) and B (on the right) as being the better/higher quality result. Alternatively, they can judge the round a tie. The catch if that they don’t know which search engine is on which side and the order is never consistent. (Sometimes, Bing is on the left and sometimes on the right.) I took the test. Google won 4-0 with a fifth tied. My initial reaction was to beat up on Microsoft. Yet another example of PC Guy getting the short end of the stick. In this case, they’d put it out there; let it all hang out…and now everyone was staring, pointing and laughing. Or were they? On the surface, Pepsi won the Challenge against its bitter rivals, Coke. And yet Coke remained the preferred choice in the market. People use products, but they buy brands. Purchase decisions are typically not logical, rational or functional, but rather emotionally driven. Malcolm Gladwell critiques the methodology of the Pepsi Challenge in his book, Blink, as fundamentally flawed based on initial “gut” reactions to sweeter tastes. Another way of looking at it was simply that labels do make the difference and when last I checked, we don’t purchase colas with our eyes closed… So how does this impact Bing? People have biases. Routines. Ingrained perceptions. And habitual behavior is the hardest to change. When I took the test, it’s quite possible (I’d even argue decisively probable) that subconsciously, I was visually looking for the search results that were the most consistent with my typical Google experience, as opposed to the best quality results. The real innovation here was getting people to take the test in the first place – regardless of the results. Turning a ! into a ? is probably 80% of the battle in today’s crowded marketplace. Just getting a consumer to doubt the unquestionable efficacy of Google is a victory in of itself. What if Google’s results aren’t the best results out there? There’s an old saying, “you never get a second chance to make a good first impression.” That may be true, but it’s also equally true to state that “you do get a second chance to make a good second impression.” And with that in mind, I decided to take the challenge again using keywords: Sales Force, Serena Williams, E.T., iPhone 5 and RFiD This time, Bing won 4 out of 5 rounds, with the 5th going to Google. That’s good news for Microsoft. The bad news of course is that functional benefit is not necessary a guarantee of success (see Pepsi) Bing it On!
Google has confirmed that it will soon join Mozilla, Microsoft and Apple in adding a do-not-track setting to its browser, Chrome. With the move, Google is fulfilling a promise it made in February to start offering a browser-based do-not-track setting. Despite the news, the browser-based approach to do-not-track seems to have lost momentum from earlier in the year, when everyone from the Federal Trade Commission to the online ad group Digital Advertising Alliance went on record as supporting the concept. The move to develop browser-based headers gathered steam a few years ago, shortly after the FTC called on the industry to develop a simple way for consumers to opt out of all online tracking. Mozilla responded by creating a do-not-track header for Firefox; the other browser manufacturers followed suit. In February, the initiative got a big boost from the Digital Advertising Alliance, which said it would require members to honor do-not-track settings. (Unlike browser settings that block cookies entirely, a do-not-track command only sends a signal to publishers and ad networks that users don't want to be tracked. Those companies then must decide how to respond.) Since then, however, no one has been able to agree on what do-not-track actually means. Some advocates say that companies shouldn't collect any data from users who activate a do-not-track header. Other people say that companies should be able to gather information for purposes like analytics or frequency capping, but should stop collecting the type of data that will enable personalized ads. The Internet standards group World Wide Web Consortium is trying to forge an agreement on that issue, but so far has had no luck. Meanwhile, the definition of "track" isn't the only sticking point. Microsoft said in May that Internet Explorer 10 would have the do-not-track command activated by default. That move drew complaints from the ad industry, with the DAA going so far as to say that its members wouldn't be required to honor do-not-track signals that were set by default. Last month, Microsoft retreated somewhat by stating that Windows 8 will offer users two choices at installation: "express settings" or customized. Only the express settings will include do-not-track by default. But even that decision didn't stem criticism. Apache developer Roy Fielding was so irked that he wrote a "patch" that negates a do-not-track command from IE10. Now, publishers using Apache who want to honor do-not-track settings will have to change Apache's default. The upshot is that do-not-track is still very much a work in progress -- and Google's decision to add the header to Chrome won't change that fact.
“The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.” (Peter Drucker). In today’s marketing world of exploding social media, seemingly infinite consumer choice, transient time- and place-shifting advertising experiences, the value exchange of consumer information and business value is as fluid as it’s ever been. We tend to use the terms preference center and subscription center synonymously, yet in most cases they offer very different values to the consumer and the business. The belief is that the consumer understands enough about the brand they are engaging with that they will self-select options of communications, including cadence, type of communication and even communication channel. The belief is that the consumer will update this information somewhat regularly so it doesn’t get outdated. I’ve always been a bit of a skeptic when it comes to the value of preference centers, but some of the social media polls and surveys have given me hope that there is a better way of designing these experiences to make them fun, interactive and meaningful without being so obvious. The problem with the “centers” is not that they don’t work, but they work for such a small population of your customers that engage, the business value is typically negligible. I’ve seen many that were launched without much thought of a long-term view of consumer engagement or how this would adapt over time as your program grows, communications increase, and channels become more diverse. It’s simple, any form of behavioral information has a shelf life, and self-disclosed information has an even shorter span of value, and few preference or subscription centers offer much incentive for consumers to keep this information updated. The primary challenge of any consumer preference center is still the same: How do you create and sustain engagement? It starts with being realistic about your goals, and being a bit skeptical about the quality of information you collect -- and ends with making it meaningful, even for the two minutes you’ll have them engaged. The vast difference between subscription centers and preference centers is that one is designed to manage how a brand interacts and communicates with you as a consumer, the latter is about understanding your product/service interests to allow for coordination of content that is relevant to you. One may be a derivative of the other, but managing these and building strategies for engagement value are different. Years ago, when I was working with a beer brand, we had a lot of fun scripting preference center questions that were a riot, and for which completion rate was high. They were not only demographic-driven, but labeled many psychographic trends through fun, interactive questions. The humor was a bit on the edge (as you can get away with that in this category), but most importantly is, it was changed continually depending on the time of year and promotion. These questions were all designed to know the same things about a consumer: consumption and communication patterns. Now that you have so many more outlets to have fun with this process, use them.
Moderator Anthony Fuller directed the question to Matt Champion, Media Services Director, Fetch Media, which did a campaign for Calvin Harris, picking up an award. Champion: You have to make sure you're spending your money in the right places, there are many layers to mobile. With the Calvin Harris project, Fetch Media spent money with Shazam, for example, using techniques on the platform to target. 'You want to get the right context and the right audience; each layer adds a cost; but does have a placement on the schedule; if you only spent money on networks, you’re not tapping into all of the layers in mobile,' said Champion. You can create bespoke brand experiences. For a turnkey solution, with the availability of drag and drop programmes, there’s nothing stopping anyone creating this themselves.