In the wake of Facebook introducing mobile-only buys on the site this month, the company’s ad partners cite strong early demand for the new ad option, based partly on promising results. Facebook initially launched mobile ad placements at its fMC conference in February, but only as part of a bundled ad buy on the site. Now marketers can choose to run sponsored story ads that appear only in a Facebook user’s mobile news feed as a separate buy. While it’s still early, third-party ad sellers on Facebook say the mobile ads so far have outperformed their desktop counterparts. They point to click-through rates of 1% or better in mobile compared to an average rate of 0.05% for ads generally on Facebook, according to a Webtrends 2010 estimate. The novelty factor could play a part in that higher response rate, as well as the ad format simply occupying a larger share of the screen on a mobile device. “If you’re on an iPhone, the unit takes up almost the entire screen, or a significant chunk of that real estate,” said Rishi Dean, SVP, product at Nanigans, which specializes in Facebook advertising. “Compare that to a desktop version of Facebook, where you’ve got seven ads or whatever on the right rail, competing for attention.” Recent data from comScore also showed adult U.S. smartphone users spend an average of about 15 minutes a day on Facebook’s mobile properties -- more than Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Foursquare and Tumblr combined. Nanigans recently added the mobile-only ad feature to its Ad Engine platform for running Facebook campaigns, allowing clients to target sponsored stories in mobile according to demographic factors like gender and age, as well as geographically. Dean said demand for mobile-only buys has been highest among mobile app and game developers, for whom his firm has already run multiple campaigns. “It didn’t really make sense for them to advertise on the desktop-only or on the desktop and mobile when they really wanted to drive people into the App Store,” said Dean, whose clients in the social game space include Kabam, Kixeye, Atari. But he expects a wider range of advertisers, especially in the local and long-tail categories, to embrace mobile advertising on Facebook over time. In that vein, Facebook has begun testing location-based mobile ads using real-time data for targeting, according to a Bloomberg report Monday. While the company didn’t provide details about prospective location-based ads, Carolyn Everson, Facebook’s head of global marketing solutions, said the mobile-only news feed ads had drawn “really significant interest” so far. Lucy Jacobs, COO of Facebook ad firm Spruce Media, said the company has been encouraged by the high click-rates in testing of mobile ads so far, with rates typically ranging from .8% to 1.7%. Sponsored story ads featuring brand page “likes” have performed especially well. However, Facebook ad partners have noted that while click rates are higher in mobile, conversion rates are lower. Nanigan’s Dean, for instance, pointed out that people who click on app ads in mobile don’t end up installing the app as often as they do on the desktop. That’s partly because mobile users are sent off Facebook to the App Store or Google Play to get an app rather than the more seamless process of downloading a native Facebook app on the desktop. (Sponsored stories don’t yet allow people to link directly to the company’s new App Center.) Even so, ad executives say the higher click rates in mobile compensate for lower conversion rates. “It does net out to be a bit better overall,” said Dean. The heightened interest hasn’t just come from app developers. Simon Mansell, CEO of Facebook ad specialist TBG Digital said about 20 clients clients, including Heineken and Hugo Boss, have made mobile part of broader ad buys on Facebook. One unnamed client spent about $112,000 in a week just on the mobile portion of a campaign, he noted. “There’s been demand to move more spend over to mobile,” he said. “It’s based more on performance of ads on mobile, than clients phoning up and saying ‘I want to be on mobile’” Other social ad firms are gearing up to launch mobile ads in the next quarter. “For a lot of our clients, it’s definitely part of their planning cycle,’ said Josh Backer, co-founder and EVP, ad delivery at Unified, which just raised a $14 million round of funding. That includes clients from app developers to banks to business-to-business companies.
Nissan North America today is launching the campaign for its 2013 Altima. It will be the company’s largest ever. The effort, via TBWA\Chiat\Day, begins with four TV spots and a lot of digital advertising, plus print and out-of-home. The tag for the brand has been “Innovation for All” since the launch of the Leaf electric car last year. For the Altima launch, however, the tag is “Innovation that Excites.” Earlier this year, Nissan launched a brand umbrella campaign, "Our Most Innovative Year Ever," to presage the rollout of five new vehicles over 15 months. The Altima effort touts such features as a redesigned suspension, a category-unique, tire-fill alert feature that tells you when the tire is at the right pressure, new NASA “zero gravity” seats, 3D driver display, and power/acceleration benefits. The advertising push will also bring in the "Wouldn't it be cool" mantra the company has been using for recent campaigns. That theme will also be applied to forthcoming efforts for the 2013 Pathfinder crossover and Sentra compact car. Altima’s support begins with a 60-second spot that will also run on 3D cinema screens. The spot uses computer graphics to show how the new Altima is much evolved from its predecessor. Voiceover is by actor Robert Downey, Jr. Animated banners say things like "Wouldn't it be cool if your car was as smart as you smartphone?" and "Wouldn't it be cool if your car was as fast as it looked?" Print says things like "Go further, go faster, go lighter." Out-of-home in 12 major markets says things like "38 (s)miles per gallon," and "Vroomier." "We kind of decided as an entity a couple of years ago to hone in on innovation as a brand differentiator to set us apart from competition,” says Vinay Shahani, who in April took the reins as director of marketing at the Franklin, Tenn., U.S. arm of Nissan. “We found it has been a successful thing for us.” Shahani tells Marketing Daily that the media mix will include a large digital component. "We know the majority of our consumers in market and ready to purchase are leveraging the Internet to do research and perform shopping tasks, so it makes sense to be there. The percentage of digital is much higher than in the past." The company, for example, is doing a brand-level social media program later this summer called “Innovation Garage,” where people can showcase their own inventions and ideas for a chance to get it chosen for development. Erich Marx, who heads up Nissan's social media programs, says that’s in the works. Also on tap is Altima Experience an online short-video series in five episodes about people who Nissan chose -– based on personal essays -– to travel to the automaker’s proving grounds in Arizona to drive the new Altima. “Those videos will start coming out [Monday], on Facebook, Google, Twitter and YouTube,” he says. “For each vehicle launch we will have special, fun, quirky, shareable social activation.” Shahani says that in addition to takeovers of traditional portals, the digital mix includes third-party auto sites like KBB.com and Edmunds.com. There is also a renewed focus on behavioral targeting. "We can serve ads based on past behavior," he says. The digital strategy is also aligned with experiential marketing partners like Rodale and the Heisman Tour Presented by Nissan, which give the automaker both grassroots and digital opportunities. The goal, says Shahani, is to grow market share at the expense of Camry, and Accord. "I would say that historically if you look at who our buyer is, we have a younger customer who is probably more interested in the performance of the vehicle and having something that looks unique, that meets their core needs. But we have bigger aspirations with this vehicle, so we can't settle for the share we have enjoyed," he says. "To grow it we have to go after Honda, and Toyota. Their customer bases are older and less emotionally driven [when it comes to cars.] So, obviously when reach out to them we have to talk about reliability and the value proposition."
Pity the poor honey bee. Despite all kinds of scientific studies about its dwindling numbers, it still buzzes below the radar of most consumers, so Whole Foods Market is making this the summer of the bee. The Austin, Tex.-based retailer says it’s putting bees center stage through the end of July, including a social-media campaign intended to raise funds and awareness. The effort involves a tweet-to-give and pin-to-give program, to help support the Xerces Society, a nonprofit organization that protects wildlife through the conservation of invertebrates and their habitats. Consumers can also “Adopt a bee” through the company’s Facebook page. In-store events will include screenings of such films as the “Vanishing of the Bees” or “Queen of the Sun: What are the Bees Telling Us?” Since bees pollinate more than 100 fruit and vegetable crops across the world, they are critical to organic farmers, so for every organic cantaloupe sold at Whole Foods Market stores, 25 cents will be donated to Xerces. The U.S. Department of Agriculture offers a 1:1 match for all donations made to Xerces, and both Annie’s and The Hain-Celestial Group are also donating funds to support Xerces. Other participating brands include Almond Breeze, Amy’s Kitchen, Evian Natural Spring Water, Mrs. Meyers Clean Day, Stonyfield, Terra and Yogi Tea. Whole Foods says the goal is to raise $180,000 to restore pollination habitats that Xerces will support. Whole Foods has also teamed up with Xerces to host webinars for Whole Foods’ farmers, to learn more about habitat restoration solutions for their farms. “Pollinator conservation is critically important to protecting both global biodiversity and agriculture, but they’re increasingly at-risk from factors like habitat loss and pesticide use,” a Xerces Society spokesperson says in its release. “Through this partnership with Whole Foods Market, we’re expanding public awareness about the importance of pollinators and empowering farmers nationwide to help protect them.” Xerces also works with other nonprofits to promote bee-boosting ideas, such as the University of Texas’ Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center.
Marketers have continually questioned Twitter's ability to produce a viable search engine. They may soon get their answer. John Wang, former search engineer at LinkedIn, joined the real-time social marketing site to work on the "next-generation Twitter search infrastructure" as a software engineer working on open-source projects. Providing insight into the direction of Twitter search, Wang explains his interest in real-time and semi-structured search systems, with a specialty in full text search, semi-structured, vertical and faceted. He believes the Web is heading into real-time information, similar to real-time bidding on display advertisements that process data to target ads on the fly based on consumer clicks and preferences. Ruslan Belkin also joined Twitter from LinkedIn in March, as director of engineering, search and relevance. While Twitter can process real-time searches, the challenge becomes building the technology to turn search keywords and phrases into actionable data that serves the most useful information and target ads in real-time. Twitter began making search improvements since its acquisition of Summize in 2008. About a year ago, the company began talking up changes to its search infrastructure. At the time, Twitter began providing personalized search, which offers more relevant results along with images and videos related to the query. When users search for a name, they see tweets alongside that person's @username in the search results. For example, previously, searching for "Justin Bieber" might only serve up tweets that included the phrase "Justin Bieber," without @justinbieber. Now, Twitter shows tweets with @justinbieber in the search results. This happens when Twitter's technology becomes confident that the real name and user name match. Twitter also made improvements to its search widget, adding relevance and duplicate filters. Now those widgets provide more relevant search results. Aside from search improvements, Twitter's Web site lists close to 100 job openings, from systems development to advertising and sales. The company is looking for an ad quality product manager to identify and implement quality signals, predictive models and data analysis to serve up the perfect ads to the correct site visitors. Twitter also wants to hire an Android mobile product manager responsible for Twitter’s offerings across various Android devices, including mobile phones, tablets and televisions.
In the wake of Facebook introducing mobile-only buys on the site this month, the company’s ad partners cite strong early demand for the new ad option, based partly on promising results. Facebook initially launched mobile ad placements at its fMC conference in February, but only as part of a bundled ad buy on the site. Now marketers can choose to run sponsored story ads that appear only in a Facebook user’s mobile news feed as a separate buy. While it’s still early, third-party ad sellers on Facebook say the mobile ads so far have outperformed their desktop counterparts. They point to click-through rates of 1% or better in mobile compared to an average rate of 0.05% for ads generally on Facebook, according to a Webtrends 2010 estimate. The novelty factor could play a part in that higher response rate, as well as the ad format simply occupying a larger share of the screen on a mobile device. “If you’re on an iPhone, the unit takes up almost the entire screen, or a significant chunk of that real estate,” said Rishi Dean, SVP, product at Nanigans, which specializes in Facebook advertising. “Compare that to a desktop version of Facebook, where you’ve got seven ads or whatever on the right rail, competing for attention.” Recent data from comScore also showed adult U.S. smartphone users spend an average of about 15 minutes a day on Facebook’s mobile properties -- more than Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Foursquare and Tumblr combined. Nanigans recently added the mobile-only ad feature to its Ad Engine platform for running Facebook campaigns, allowing clients to target sponsored stories in mobile according to demographic factors like gender and age, as well as geographically. Dean said demand for mobile-only buys has been highest among mobile app and game developers, for whom his firm has already run multiple campaigns. “It didn’t really make sense for them to advertise on the desktop-only or on the desktop and mobile when they really wanted to drive people into the App Store,” said Dean, whose clients in the social game space include Kabam, Kixeye, Atari. But he expects a wider range of advertisers, especially in the local and long-tail categories, to embrace mobile advertising on Facebook over time. In that vein, Facebook has begun testing location-based mobile ads using real-time data for targeting, according to a Bloomberg report Monday. While the company didn’t provide details about prospective location-based ads, Carolyn Everson, Facebook’s head of global marketing solutions, said the mobile-only news feed ads had drawn “really significant interest” so far. Lucy Jacobs, COO of Facebook ad firm Spruce Media, said the company has been encouraged by the high click-rates in testing of mobile ads so far, with rates typically ranging from .8% to 1.7%. Sponsored story ads featuring brand page “likes” have performed especially well. However, Facebook ad partners have noted that while click rates are higher in mobile, conversion rates are lower. Nanigan’s Dean, for instance, pointed out that people who click on app ads in mobile don’t end up installing the app as often as they do on the desktop. That’s partly because mobile users are sent off Facebook to the App Store or Google Play to get an app rather than the more seamless process of downloading a native Facebook app on the desktop. (Sponsored stories don’t yet allow people to link directly to the company’s new App Center.) Even so, ad executives say the higher click rates in mobile compensate for lower conversion rates. “It does net out to be a bit better overall,” said Dean. The heightened interest hasn’t just come from app developers. Simon Mansell, CEO of Facebook ad specialist TBG Digital said about 20 clients clients, including Heineken and Hugo Boss, have made mobile part of broader ad buys on Facebook. One unnamed client spent about $112,000 in a week just on the mobile portion of a campaign, he noted. “There’s been demand to move more spend over to mobile,” he said. “It’s based more on performance of ads on mobile, than clients phoning up and saying ‘I want to be on mobile’” Other social ad firms are gearing up to launch mobile ads in the next quarter. “For a lot of our clients, it’s definitely part of their planning cycle,’ said Josh Backer, co-founder and EVP, ad delivery at Unified, which just raised a $14 million round of funding. That includes clients from app developers to banks to business-to-business companies.
Nissan North America today is launching the campaign for its 2013 Altima. It will be the company’s largest ever. The effort, via TBWA\Chiat\Day, begins with four TV spots and a lot of digital advertising, plus print and out-of-home. The tag for the brand has been “Innovation for All” since the launch of the Leaf electric car last year. For the Altima launch, however, the tag is “Innovation that Excites.” Earlier this year, Nissan launched a brand umbrella campaign, "Our Most Innovative Year Ever," to presage the rollout of five new vehicles over 15 months. The Altima effort touts such features as a redesigned suspension, a category-unique, tire-fill alert feature that tells you when the tire is at the right pressure, new NASA “zero gravity” seats, 3D driver display, and power/acceleration benefits. The advertising push will also bring in the "Wouldn't it be cool" mantra the company has been using for recent campaigns. That theme will also be applied to forthcoming efforts for the 2013 Pathfinder crossover and Sentra compact car. Altima’s support begins with a 60-second spot that will also run on 3D cinema screens. The spot uses computer graphics to show how the new Altima is much evolved from its predecessor. Voiceover is by actor Robert Downey, Jr. Animated banners say things like "Wouldn't it be cool if your car was as smart as you smartphone?" and "Wouldn't it be cool if your car was as fast as it looked?" Print says things like "Go further, go faster, go lighter." Out-of-home in 12 major markets says things like "38 (s)miles per gallon," and "Vroomier." "We kind of decided as an entity a couple of years ago to hone in on innovation as a brand differentiator to set us apart from competition,” says Vinay Shahani, who in April took the reins as director of marketing at the Franklin, Tenn., U.S. arm of Nissan. “We found it has been a successful thing for us.” Shahani tells Marketing Daily that the media mix will include a large digital component. "We know the majority of our consumers in market and ready to purchase are leveraging the Internet to do research and perform shopping tasks, so it makes sense to be there. The percentage of digital is much higher than in the past." The company, for example, is doing a brand-level social media program later this summer called “Innovation Garage,” where people can showcase their own inventions and ideas for a chance to get it chosen for development. Erich Marx, who heads up Nissan's social media programs, says that’s in the works. Also on tap is Altima Experience an online short-video series in five episodes about people who Nissan chose -– based on personal essays -– to travel to the automaker’s proving grounds in Arizona to drive the new Altima. “Those videos will start coming out [Monday], on Facebook, Google, Twitter and YouTube,” he says. “For each vehicle launch we will have special, fun, quirky, shareable social activation.” Shahani says that in addition to takeovers of traditional portals, the digital mix includes third-party auto sites like KBB.com and Edmunds.com. There is also a renewed focus on behavioral targeting. "We can serve ads based on past behavior," he says. The digital strategy is also aligned with experiential marketing partners like Rodale and the Heisman Tour Presented by Nissan, which give the automaker both grassroots and digital opportunities. The goal, says Shahani, is to grow market share at the expense of Camry, and Accord. "I would say that historically if you look at who our buyer is, we have a younger customer who is probably more interested in the performance of the vehicle and having something that looks unique, that meets their core needs. But we have bigger aspirations with this vehicle, so we can't settle for the share we have enjoyed," he says. "To grow it we have to go after Honda, and Toyota. Their customer bases are older and less emotionally driven [when it comes to cars.] So, obviously when reach out to them we have to talk about reliability and the value proposition."
Pity the poor honey bee. Despite all kinds of scientific studies about its dwindling numbers, it still buzzes below the radar of most consumers, so Whole Foods Market is making this the summer of the bee. The Austin, Tex.-based retailer says it’s putting bees center stage through the end of July, including a social-media campaign intended to raise funds and awareness. The effort involves a tweet-to-give and pin-to-give program, to help support the Xerces Society, a nonprofit organization that protects wildlife through the conservation of invertebrates and their habitats. Consumers can also “Adopt a bee” through the company’s Facebook page. In-store events will include screenings of such films as the “Vanishing of the Bees” or “Queen of the Sun: What are the Bees Telling Us?” Since bees pollinate more than 100 fruit and vegetable crops across the world, they are critical to organic farmers, so for every organic cantaloupe sold at Whole Foods Market stores, 25 cents will be donated to Xerces. The U.S. Department of Agriculture offers a 1:1 match for all donations made to Xerces, and both Annie’s and The Hain-Celestial Group are also donating funds to support Xerces. Other participating brands include Almond Breeze, Amy’s Kitchen, Evian Natural Spring Water, Mrs. Meyers Clean Day, Stonyfield, Terra and Yogi Tea. Whole Foods says the goal is to raise $180,000 to restore pollination habitats that Xerces will support. Whole Foods has also teamed up with Xerces to host webinars for Whole Foods’ farmers, to learn more about habitat restoration solutions for their farms. “Pollinator conservation is critically important to protecting both global biodiversity and agriculture, but they’re increasingly at-risk from factors like habitat loss and pesticide use,” a Xerces Society spokesperson says in its release. “Through this partnership with Whole Foods Market, we’re expanding public awareness about the importance of pollinators and empowering farmers nationwide to help protect them.” Xerces also works with other nonprofits to promote bee-boosting ideas, such as the University of Texas’ Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center.
Marketers have continually questioned Twitter's ability to produce a viable search engine. They may soon get their answer. John Wang, former search engineer at LinkedIn, joined the real-time social marketing site to work on the "next-generation Twitter search infrastructure" as a software engineer working on open-source projects. Providing insight into the direction of Twitter search, Wang explains his interest in real-time and semi-structured search systems, with a specialty in full text search, semi-structured, vertical and faceted. He believes the Web is heading into real-time information, similar to real-time bidding on display advertisements that process data to target ads on the fly based on consumer clicks and preferences. Ruslan Belkin also joined Twitter from LinkedIn in March, as director of engineering, search and relevance. While Twitter can process real-time searches, the challenge becomes building the technology to turn search keywords and phrases into actionable data that serves the most useful information and target ads in real-time. Twitter began making search improvements since its acquisition of Summize in 2008. About a year ago, the company began talking up changes to its search infrastructure. At the time, Twitter began providing personalized search, which offers more relevant results along with images and videos related to the query. When users search for a name, they see tweets alongside that person's @username in the search results. For example, previously, searching for "Justin Bieber" might only serve up tweets that included the phrase "Justin Bieber," without @justinbieber. Now, Twitter shows tweets with @justinbieber in the search results. This happens when Twitter's technology becomes confident that the real name and user name match. Twitter also made improvements to its search widget, adding relevance and duplicate filters. Now those widgets provide more relevant search results. Aside from search improvements, Twitter's Web site lists close to 100 job openings, from systems development to advertising and sales. The company is looking for an ad quality product manager to identify and implement quality signals, predictive models and data analysis to serve up the perfect ads to the correct site visitors. Twitter also wants to hire an Android mobile product manager responsible for Twitter’s offerings across various Android devices, including mobile phones, tablets and televisions.
The number of mobile Internet users will surpass desktop users by 2014, according to a forecast by comScore, which also estimates that a 47% rise in smartphone users -- equaling 106.7 million or 45.6% of the U.S. mobile population -- occurred in the year prior to March 2012. The data, part of the research firm's State of the U.S. Internet report, also details trends in social, online advertising and e-commerce. And while Android-operated smartphones now hold 51% market share -- up from 35% last year -- will the pocket-size devices live up to the ad-revenue-generating gadget Google touts, or will it fizzle out for brands as a money generator and do nothing more than make the lives of U.S. consumers a little bit easier? Putting numbers into perspective, the U.S. only accounts for 13% of the Internet population. When calculating the distribution of the world's Internet audience, comScore states that the U.S. holds about 14.6% of the online population, down from 66% in 1996. Asia-Pacific is next with 41%, followed by Europe at 26.6%, Latin America at 8.9%, and the Middle East and Africa at 8.8%, according to comScore. In Mary Meeker's latest Internet Trends report, she characterizes mobile advertising in the U.S. as a $20 billion missed opportunity. Yes, maybe -- but desktop ads and search engine marketing are not like mobile ads and search engine marketing. The I'm-going-to-hide-my-head-in-the-sand-because-I-don't-recognize-the-difference syndrome will continue to stifle growth and performance. Brand marketers must overcome a learning curve. Mobile ads and search engine marketing will do more to promote local companies than national retailers, but mom-and-pop and mid-size businesses need to learn how to connect mobile advertising and search engine marketing with social media and build apps for smartphones and tablets to succeed. Overall, worldwide, people conduct more than 4.1 million searches per minute, according to comScore -- but it's unclear whether that factors searches in apps or links to social platforms. For example, take the social site Pinterest, an electronic pin-board. Most consumers, and many marketers, don't realize the marketing potential from the site. comScore found Pinterest to be the fastest-growing social media network in both unique visitors and clicks from search engines. The network saw more than 4,377% growth in the year prior to May 2012. The report suggests that Pinterest users spend more, buy more items and conduct more online transactions than most other social media buyers. They are second only to LinkedIn users in the Buying Power Index of the top five social media sites. Businesses looking to build mobile apps should not count out Apple. Flurry, a mobile app and measurement platform, estimates that seven out of every 10 apps that developers build are for iOS. The company admits that Google made some gains in Q1 2012, rising a bit more than 30%. Flurry believes this is largely due to seasonality, as Apple traditionally experiences a spike in developer support leading up to the holiday season. The chart shows the number of consumer applications sessions across devices as of May 2012, along with revenue-generating opportunities. It turns out that "Android delivers less gain and more pain than iOS, which we believe is the key reason 7 out of every 10 apps built in the new economy are for iOS instead of Android."
Paul Adams, global head of brand design at Facebook just showed a new way of visualizing the way people interact during a presentation at the Festival of Creativity in Cannes, France today. The visualization, which he calls the “map of humanity,” is kind of like the social graph 2.0 – a visualization of the ways in which all human beings are connected. Presumably, the connectivity is drawn from a certain social network platform, but that wasn’t Adams point. His point is that it isn’t technology that connects people. It’s people. The reason, he says, is that while technology is changing fast, “people change incredibly slowly,” and we are still fundamentally driven by some key behaviors and motivations: to build relationship and “control the way people see” us. In fact, Adams says we are defined by the groups we belong to, which is how we create our sense of identiy. Mathematically speaking, he says, we belong to “four to six” separate groups, with no more than 10 people in each group. “They are pretty small,” he said.
Don’t bother mentioning the “I” word to Socialcam CEO Michael Seibel. Ever since Facebook famously bought Instagram for $1 billion or so, the press and VCs have been swarming around the purported hunt for the next Instagram. “I think it is more distracting than anything else,” he says. The enormously popular video-sharing app and site gets that treatment all the time. Seibel and his crew of four spun off from Justin.tv, where he was a co-founder, in the fall of 2010 to launch SocialCam in spring of 2011. But VCs are not his main target and hurdle, he argues. “In video we have a fundamental challenge. We need to convince people that taking video is extremely easy and valuable.” Instagram and photo-sharing apps had the long legacy of snapshot photography working in its favor. Transferring those user reflexes to the mobilized video cam is not as easy as it seems. “Convincing people to take videos at all is a harder problem,” he says. For all of the talk about mobile video being the next hot category, “it is not the mirror image of the challenge Instagram had.” And yet Socialcam has generated over 14 million app downloads, and some of its leading posters have well over 1 million followers each. But that pales against the amount of activity they see coming to the main Web site. Both site and app were launched simultaneously, and the site proved to be an especially effective driver of app downloads, Seibel says. While he is campaigning to make video-taking as much of a reflex among consumers as mobile still photography, no hard sell appears to be necessary with brand marketers. “The brands are coming to us -- not the other way around,” Seibel says. In fact, he counts about ten brands on the Socialcam leaderboard that have over half a million followers already. Lipton Iced Tea, Sierra Mist, Oprah’s OWN network, and even General Electric have in excess of 500,000 followers. Musicians and sports teams have proven to be especially powerful here. One of the advantages of Socialcam as a marketing vehicle over the standard social nets like Facebook is the alerting system. When you follow anyone on SocialCam, it sends a mobile app alert whenever a new item is posted. This, of course, forces providers to be reserved. This can’t be treated like Twitter. “I think those followers are a lot more valuable,” he says. Unlike sponsor posts in social network feeds that can scroll by unnoticed, this is a more one-to-one relationship. “The brand can get a direct connection.” He says that despite the alerting mechanism, he is not seeing users becoming overwhelmed. While he wants video to become more of a reflex for people and advertisers, the natural hurdle comes in handy here. “It is pretty cool. The bar for creating video is pretty high. The brands will create maybe two videos a week.” Sixty- to ninety-second clips are the norm among individual users, and that is the length Seibel recommends to brands. Some brands like the Brooklyn Nets are already creating spots that are exclusively for Socialcam, and others are repurposing video assets they have elsewhere on the Web. OWN, for instance is pushing out celebrity clips from its on-air programming. The Nets will throw into their mix a spot interview with GM Billy King from the sidelines after a game. My impression is that years of experience with Justin.tv have given Seibel and co. a head start on some other startups when it comes to imagining both a monetization path and future uses for advertisers. They already have a VIP program for brands that advises on best practices and the new ideas spin off of this. They are already working with film studios on promotions involving custom video filters that help the consumer replicate the look and feel of the entertainment company’s film. But in my mind the killer potential here is when the alerting system is married to geo-fencing. Farther out, Seibel is imagining the ability to leverage location as a trigger for a video alert. “One of the future use cases we are thinking of is letting brands send videos to followers when they are in a location.” If a Brooklyn Nets follower walks into the team’s new arena, they will get pinged with a new introductory video welcoming them to the venue with instructions and directions for optimizing their experience. The same idea can be applied to a mall or any retail venue. What if Walmart or Target pinged you at the entrance with a video clip on the week’s specials? While obviously it has its limitations -- not the least of which is its reliance on opt-in -- there is a natural logic to finding ways of pushing video to users over devices and in sync with location. As Seibel says, “traditionally what a brand does is pound you as hard as it can when you are at home. But we think we can help brands message people in the real world when they are in a position to buy something.” Whatever the hurdles, the geo-fenced video push model is a remarkable idea that literally untethers the power of video promotion from the TV or the desktop. There is no arguing that video remains the most compelling storyteller for advertisers. Finding reasonable and user-friendly ways to release that medium from its usual anchors in the home is one of the great tasks of outdoor advertising. But mobile is the natural, more personalized venue for this project. Better that video come to us in a personalized way when and where we need it than make every mall and retail location look and feel like Times Square.
Tom Eslinger, Digital Creative Director at Saatchi & Saatchi and moderator of YouTube’s session at the Festival of Creativity in Cannes, France, starting his session by promoting another social media platform, Twitter. “We have a few questions that I got from Twitter,” Eslinger said. But don't feel bad for YouTube. Apparently Enslinger was promoting the social video platform in a far more sublime way. "He even dressees in YouTube colors," panelist Damian Kulash, quipped, pointing to Enslinger's red and white attire. Kulash, who is a singer with the band OK Go, which createscreative mustic videos distributed via YouTube, says the band uses the social video platform to "make some cool shit."
As brands and publishers put greater emphasis on their social media presence, we’re seeing myriad approaches to distributing content, whether it’s links to articles, images -- or, more and more often, video. However, what many don’t understand is that consumers have different expectations for experiencing content on social media platforms. Every active player in the video content value chain -- from publishers to advertisers -- needs to understand the differences in measurement, consumption and advertising acceptance before building a social video strategy. Facebook remains the dominant social platform when it comes to video distribution, and thus has established the core social measurement with the “Like.” However, social video strategy should not start with “Likes,” but with three goals: discoverability, returning viewers and driving consumer conversations. Advertisers and content owners should drive to develop an audience that will continue to return and drive interest and awareness for the newest and most relevant videos. And the easiest way to unveil the right formula is to program video significantly different from other distribution platforms, measuring success through loads of trial and error. What resonates on Facebook is often very different from what works on a more content-focused website. As video publishers and distributors of sports video, we’ve found that highlight packages work well on traditional editorial coverage websites. Conversely, avid Facebook users know they can engage with this content elsewhere, so they’re far more interested in alternative programming and features inside the network. For example, we’ve seen them respond better to the “Not Top 10” version: compendiums of sports lowlights, bloopers and errors. And while evergreen content has performed well, we see huge spikes in viewership of content that relates to current events and can become part of the real-time conversation. This can vary from fun, engaging editorial that brings content to life, or controversial hard-hitting analysis of important stories that resonate with a fan base. In many instances, the video isn’t the center of attention, but something that encourages discussion. The length of the content plays a factor in social as well. Two minutes earns views and consumer engagement on a website if the video is relevant to the page content, but that doesn’t necessarily work on Facebook. While users average more than 12 minutes on Facebook daily, those who watch video want something quick, and 30 to 40 seconds is generally the rule of thumb. Of course, short videos create greater difficulty for monetizing video, and it inevitably puts advertisers at a disadvantage. The brevity of the video eliminates any possibility of pre-roll. Consider putting a 30-second spot before a 30-second video, and you’re toast. Brands find far more success spreading advertising messages by integrating with the video content itself. Video integration can come in the form of an overlay, product placement or branded content produced by the brand and/or content partner. And while it’s important to include brand assets on the page as well, given the share-ability and viral nature of Facebook, branded content is currently the best means of maximizing monetization efforts. Facebook is a smart way to distribute video to a social media audience, but it has to be done in the proper fashion. There’s still a lot of debate over how to measure successful social video strategies, but content producers and advertisers that leverage shareability and monitor their views and responses will be on the right track. Even then, monetization strategies need to consider the audience and respect the very nature of social media. Content owners and advertisers need to walk before they run here, as these are the keys to driving the social media consumption -- and, with any luck, a seamless consumer experience.