Display ads will incorporate a variety of social elements in future campaigns, but integrating creativity and dynamic data today can provide marketers with indispensable consumer mindshare and loyalty. The technology now exists to create these opportunities. The challenge may seem daunting to some marketers, but technology has made opportunities creative and dynamic ads limitless, Neal Mohan, vice president of product management at Google, told OMMA Global attendees in San Francisco Thursday. Google has the ability to integrate real-time data into display ads that serve up messages based on the time of day, the weather in a specific region, and more. "It's a combination of taking in real-time data and determining what elements of the ad should go where," Mohan told MediaPost. "You need to do this on the fly across millions of impressions every day. You can't do this once or twice daily, but all day long." Powering these changes now and in the future, Mohan spoke about four themes during the OMMA Global keynote made possible through technology. They include using data in real-time to target audiences; doubling down on creativity for video, mobile and other formats; embracing innovations by measuring ad effectiveness; and incorporating social elements into all campaigns. Trying to decide the creative pieces to use in each ad and assembling the ad in real-time creates pretty major challenges. It's not technologically easy, Mohan says. While companies need to make ads creative, technology makes it possible to customize them for millions of impressions. For example, advertisers can bid on the DoubleClick Ad Exchange in real-time. If they need to sell 1,000 basketball tickets an hour before a game, they can buy those ads in real-time. Google acquired Teracent, a technology company that makes ads dynamic based on real-time information, in late 2009. The ability to ingest the feeds from numerous data sources, such as ticket sales or weather, provides the template to serve up dynamic ads. The technology takes the ad creative, breaks it up into pieces such as background and ad copy, and builds it to serve up the assembled creative to consumers based on data feeds. So when Huntington Beach, Calif. reaches 80 degrees, Starbucks can serve up local residents who venture online ads for iced coffee and switch it back to hot coffee 30 minutes later when the temperature falls. While social networks have empowered customers to provide brands' feedback in real time, technology has enabled those same features in display ads. Integrating into display ads a variety of social elements such as product reviews and feedback could help marketers gain loyal customers, too. About 59% of all people online use social networks at least once monthly, Mohan says. "We are learning that the Web is social, just like real life," he adds. Think about building brand loyalty by gaining a percentage of the 5 billion pieces of content shared weekly on social sites across the Internet, or a percentage of the 50 million tweets on Twitter talking about the company's products. Potential applications made possible by technology will encompass everything from real-time feedback to the ability to share endorsements for a campaign among friends. Imagine being able to see the friends who choose to not only follow an advertiser, but publicly endorse the brand and ad campaign, Mohan says. "Consumers could publicly declare their affinity for a brand or they could share their preferences for certain products online," he says. "The most successful advertisers will use these signals as a way to optimize their display campaigns." Google ran a recent analysis of a consumer products goods company that ran a multimedia campaign across television, print, outdoor, cinema and online. Using complex cross-channel modeling, Google found the YouTube portion of the campaign garnered an additional 2.6% incremental reach above the TV spot, equating to millions of viewers that would not have otherwise seen the TV spot. About 25% of the YouTube viewers had never seen the TV spot. But what if you can measure online and offline campaigns and tie them back to real growth? Google does this by using geographic data tied to the display campaign that companies can now measure increases in store sales by region. It lets marketers calculate the return on investment for online campaigns by looking at the sales in stores for that area. This type of technology allows marketers to move beyond the click.
Despite evolving strategies and performance standards, brands are no doubt experiencing social media success. Late last year, Coca-Cola tapped Mediatronica, a social media technology and services company, and syndication technology provider Conduit, for a broadly distributed "Zero" promotion. According to new data released by the soft-drink maker, Coca-Cola Zero branded content was distributed to 1 million users within 24 hours of the campaign's launch. Within 10 days, the campaign had reached 8 million people in over 30 countries and generated nearly 1 million minutes of total viewing/engagement time, according to Mediatronica. Of all the social media tools affecting media and campaign strategies, apps potentially have the greatest impact, according to Mediatronica founder Eli Chapman. "The ability to connect with and communicate with millions of users via browser apps is a game changer," said Chapman. Encouraged by the success of the Coca-Cola Zero campaign, Mediatronica and Conduit plan to work together on future, unspecified projects. The next stage of the Mediatronica-Conduit partnership includes brand campaigns that will attempt to leverage Facebook-connected branded content and applications, geotargeted and demographic-targeted branded applications. San Mateo-based Conduit helps publishers to syndicate their content and applications directly to a user's browser. Last March, for example, Travelocity tapped the company to offer travelers a browser-based "community toolbar" through which they could access free add-on services, including driving directions, language translations, currency conversion, flight status and travel support. Worldwide, other brands in Conduit's network include Fox News, Lufthansa, Major League Baseball, Greenpeace, TechCrunch and Softonic.
With Foursquare the breakout star of last year's SXSW festival, a host of social location startups were scrambling to be the darling emerging from the 2010 edition of the music and high-tech hoedown. Talk of "location wars" or "geowars" began filtering through the blogosphere even before the event kicked off, since the space has gotten superheated and Foursquare has become the new Twitter. Now, even Twitter and Facebook are trying to become Foursquare by launching their own location-based features. TechCruch's MG Siegler (who was actually at SXSW) has already complained of "check-in fatigue" in trying to track a slew of different social location services at the confab, including Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, Whrrl, Brightkite, Burbn, MyTown, CauseWorld, Hot Potato and Plancast. "Even with great AT&T service, this would take a solid 10 minutes or more to check-in to all of them. And it took even longer when I'd have to pause to explain to my friends what the hell I was doing on my phone all that time," he wrote. And there's perhaps dozens more me-too startups out there, including Booyah's MyTown, which boasts having more users than Foursquare or Gowalla. If ever an area cried out for consolidation, it's social location--a natural monopoly even more so than online social networking. People will want to be on the service that most of their friends are on, not a half dozen different networks trying piece together a social map from fragments. It's one thing to track a number of different social networks sitting at home or work; it's another when you're out on the street or in a bar and want to get information about where other people are and what they're doing as quickly and easily as possible. Marketers will also ultimately aggregate around one or two key players in the space to reach the largest audience and streamline promotional and advertising efforts. That doesn't necessarily mean Foursquare will be the sole survivor, despite its first-mover status going back to its origins as Dodgeball. MySpace was way ahead of Facebook in the social networking game at one time and look how that's turned out. And Google certainly wasn't the first search engine to hit the Web. With plans to launch its own location offering next month, Facebook itself could end up sucking up all the oxygen in the niche or acquiring Foursquare or a hot competing startup. Or another upstart will emerge that will blow away the current crop of social location darlings. Keep in mind that a year after debuting in 2009 at SXSW, Foursquare now has 600,000 users--as many as Facebook was adding a day last year. Gowalla, about 100,000. There's still room to grab mobile real estate here. But ultimately it's a winner-take-all equation, meaning at some point we'll be mercifully spared having to hear about the "next Foursquare."
With Google's across-the-board thrust into mobile of late, one piece that seemed to be missing was social networking. That started to change last month with its rollout of the mobile version of Google Buzz, the search giant's social-media sharing platform that lets users send out posts with their exact location. It continued that effort this week with Google launching an Android widget for Buzz, and more interestingly, a version of its Orkut social network for Android phones. Orkut, of course, never gained any traction in the U.S. but became popular in certain other countries, chiefly Brazil and India. To the extent that Android expands in the markets where Orkut already has a strong user base online, the new Orkut app for Android can help bring those users over to the mobile side and help offset inroads by Facebook. The blog Inside Facebook last summer reported Facebook in the space of two months had doubled its number of users in the two countries, though still trailing well behind Orkut. With a 33% growth rate as of November, the blog predicted Brazil will eventually become the home to the most Facebook users in South America. So anything Google can do to hold onto existing customers there by creating a seamless mobile extension would make sense. True, Android may have only small penetration in those markets like Brazil and India now, but if the open operating system keeps growing like it has it should gain a stronger foothold in those countries over time. In Google's post about the new Orkut app, one commenter in Brazil noted that Android is already available through devices including the Motorola Milestone, Dext, Backflip and Quench devices, among others. Underscoring the pressure Orkut is under from the world's biggest social network, he added, "But most people are moving to Facebook now."
Display ads will incorporate a variety of social elements in future campaigns, but integrating creativity and dynamic data today can provide marketers with indispensable consumer mindshare and loyalty. The technology now exists to create these opportunities. The challenge may seem daunting to some marketers, but technology has made opportunities creative and dynamic ads limitless, Neal Mohan, vice president of product management at Google, told OMMA Global attendees in San Francisco Thursday. Google has the ability to integrate real-time data into display ads that serve up messages based on the time of day, the weather in a specific region, and more. "It's a combination of taking in real-time data and determining what elements of the ad should go where," Mohan told MediaPost. "You need to do this on the fly across millions of impressions every day. You can't do this once or twice daily, but all day long." Powering these changes now and in the future, Mohan spoke about four themes during the OMMA Global keynote made possible through technology. They include using data in real-time to target audiences; doubling down on creativity for video, mobile and other formats; embracing innovations by measuring ad effectiveness; and incorporating social elements into all campaigns. Trying to decide the creative pieces to use in each ad and assembling the ad in real-time creates pretty major challenges. It's not technologically easy, Mohan says. While companies need to make ads creative, technology makes it possible to customize them for millions of impressions. For example, advertisers can bid on the DoubleClick Ad Exchange in real-time. If they need to sell 1,000 basketball tickets an hour before a game, they can buy those ads in real-time. Google acquired Teracent, a technology company that makes ads dynamic based on real-time information, in late 2009. The ability to ingest the feeds from numerous data sources, such as ticket sales or weather, provides the template to serve up dynamic ads. The technology takes the ad creative, breaks it up into pieces such as background and ad copy, and builds it to serve up the assembled creative to consumers based on data feeds. So when Huntington Beach, Calif. reaches 80 degrees, Starbucks can serve up local residents who venture online ads for iced coffee and switch it back to hot coffee 30 minutes later when the temperature falls. While social networks have empowered customers to provide brands' feedback in real time, technology has enabled those same features in display ads. Integrating into display ads a variety of social elements such as product reviews and feedback could help marketers gain loyal customers, too. About 59% of all people online use social networks at least once monthly, Mohan says. "We are learning that the Web is social, just like real life," he adds. Think about building brand loyalty by gaining a percentage of the 5 billion pieces of content shared weekly on social sites across the Internet, or a percentage of the 50 million tweets on Twitter talking about the company's products. Potential applications made possible by technology will encompass everything from real-time feedback to the ability to share endorsements for a campaign among friends. Imagine being able to see the friends who choose to not only follow an advertiser, but publicly endorse the brand and ad campaign, Mohan says. "Consumers could publicly declare their affinity for a brand or they could share their preferences for certain products online," he says. "The most successful advertisers will use these signals as a way to optimize their display campaigns." Google ran a recent analysis of a consumer products goods company that ran a multimedia campaign across television, print, outdoor, cinema and online. Using complex cross-channel modeling, Google found the YouTube portion of the campaign garnered an additional 2.6% incremental reach above the TV spot, equating to millions of viewers that would not have otherwise seen the TV spot. About 25% of the YouTube viewers had never seen the TV spot. But what if you can measure online and offline campaigns and tie them back to real growth? Google does this by using geographic data tied to the display campaign that companies can now measure increases in store sales by region. It lets marketers calculate the return on investment for online campaigns by looking at the sales in stores for that area. This type of technology allows marketers to move beyond the click.
Despite evolving strategies and performance standards, brands are no doubt experiencing social media success. Late last year, Coca-Cola tapped Mediatronica, a social media technology and services company, and syndication technology provider Conduit, for a broadly distributed "Zero" promotion. According to new data released by the soft-drink maker, Coca-Cola Zero branded content was distributed to 1 million users within 24 hours of the campaign's launch. Within 10 days, the campaign had reached 8 million people in over 30 countries and generated nearly 1 million minutes of total viewing/engagement time, according to Mediatronica. Of all the social media tools affecting media and campaign strategies, apps potentially have the greatest impact, according to Mediatronica founder Eli Chapman. "The ability to connect with and communicate with millions of users via browser apps is a game changer," said Chapman. Encouraged by the success of the Coca-Cola Zero campaign, Mediatronica and Conduit plan to work together on future, unspecified projects. The next stage of the Mediatronica-Conduit partnership includes brand campaigns that will attempt to leverage Facebook-connected branded content and applications, geotargeted and demographic-targeted branded applications. San Mateo-based Conduit helps publishers to syndicate their content and applications directly to a user's browser. Last March, for example, Travelocity tapped the company to offer travelers a browser-based "community toolbar" through which they could access free add-on services, including driving directions, language translations, currency conversion, flight status and travel support. Worldwide, other brands in Conduit's network include Fox News, Lufthansa, Major League Baseball, Greenpeace, TechCrunch and Softonic.
Talking about social tools in display advertising, Neal Mohan, VP, Product Management, Google, told OMMA Global attendees the future of display advertising means incorporating social elements in every display campaign. Consumers can provide feedback in real time. From a laptop or mobile phone friends can communicate through social networks, but what if that communication happened through a display ad. What about ads that let you know your friends have indorsed the product in the ad?
Asked for his predictions about social gaming in the next 12 months, Lee Blickstein said the coming year will be “about distribution, getting outside the walled garden of Facebook.� Blickstein said game publishers are moving to reach users by multiple channels, adding that this will be an important step in scaling up social game advertising.
Talking about social tools in display advertising, Neal Mohan, VP, Product Management, Google, told OMMA Global attendees the future of display advertising means incorporating social elements in every display campaign. Consumers can provide feedback in real time. From a laptop or mobile phone friends can communicate through social networks, but what if that communication happened through a display ad. What about ads that let you know your friends have indorsed the product in the ad?
Because advertising is still an add-on for social gaming, advertising needs to be standardized to make it easier for publishers, since their primary concern is game play and gamer experience. The concern isn’t just the appearance of the advertising, and how the game player interacts with it, but also how it fits with the back-end logistics, according to Zynga’s Robert Goldberg: “If the advertising impacts either our players or our production cycles, we won’t do it. So we need standardization to make this work.�
Currently online casual gaming is still experimenting with ad models, in part because it's core business has been located elsewhere -- and that's a virtue, according to Zynga's Robert Goldberg: "The good thing is that this is a medium that is not ad-supported, it’s virtual goods-supported -- and that's actually good, because it means we can take our time and do this the right way." That said, Goldberg said Zynga has delivered some big successes for advertisers, including for Microsoft, where they "drove 400,000 conversions to their fanpage on Facebook in 16 hours," and Universal Pictures' Public Enemies, where "16 million gifts were exchanged in three days."Â
Obviously any kind of product integration depends on contextual appropriateness, and the panelists at the social game discussion had some examples of “do’s� and “don’ts.� Adam Krause, senior manager of online advertising for Ubisoft Entertainment, recalled a promotion for Assassin’s Creed where game players could employ one of the killers in another virtual world. On the other hand Krause cautioned that “you wouldn’t, say, try to put Craftsman Tools in the World of Warcraft.�