Social feeds in premium display advertising become more important as brands and their agencies look for ways to advance media. As part of the discussion, panelists at the MediaPost OMMA Premium Display conference in Los Angeles Tuesday talked about the possibility of Facebook offering a banner or takeover ad on its home page. What role do social, real-time bidding, and search contribute to premium display advertising? The panelists agree that agencies and brands must keep the conversation going, but Charlotte Cochrane, director of digital invention at Mindshare, said it's the responsibility of agencies and clients to provide content worth sharing. The paid media buys should complement the earned media, she said. While the term "display advertising" may conjure images of old-time digital advertising, the panel of experts agrees that social and analytics play a major role. It's about real-time optimization, based on data -- especially when pulling in social content and coordinating insights from the community. When it comes to Facebook, Patricia Galea, SVP of digital at Edelman, believes the ads in the feed have more value than those down the right rail. "It's about providing content for members," she said. "It's all about pushing and amplifying content rather than creating a rich-media ad unit." Adam Kasper, EVP at Havas Digital, doesn't view the ads down the right rail as a "premium experience." He's wondering when Facebook will introduce a takeover home page ad that may integrate social feeds. What is premium advertising and how should analytics play a part? For Kasper, gathering analytics starts even before the campaign, but the metrics behind premium advertising is "squishier," he said. That's the challenge. There's always a proxy for premium digital -- rarely a fixed measurement. "That's the flaw with premium advertising," he said. "The programmatic type of buying is measurable and rolls into a return on investment" or measurement that procurement executives or chief financial officers look for in order to quantify investments.
Marketers that post photos to Pinterest must make the same disclosures as in more traditional forms of advertising, the Better Business Bureau's National Advertising Division has ruled. Specifically, the NAD said the diet company Nutrisystem should have added disclaimers to photos it uploaded to a Pinterest page devoted to a campaign touting "real customers." The campaign featured people who had lost significant amounts of weight -- in some cases more than 100 pounds -- while on Nutrisystem. The NAD characterized those photos and captions as testimonials, and ruled that Nutrisystem should have made a "complete disclosure of material information" -- including that the consumers featured in the ads are exceptional. Nutrisystem contended that it inadvertently omitted to include disclaimers with the photos and captions, which were live for two months before the NAD inquired about them, according to the organization. The company has since added language stating that the people featured in the ads were paid, and that their results are not typical. This decision is not the first time the NAD has said that marketers need to make disclosures on social media sites. Last November, the organization found fault with a Facebook promotion by contact lens seller Coastal Contacts. In that case, the NAD said that marketers can legitimately entice consumers into “liking” pages on Facebook by offering free merchandise -- but that those companies must fully disclose the terms and conditions of the offers. Coastal Contacts had asked consumers to "like" a Facebook page in order to receive free glasses, but the ads soliciting the “likes” didn't say that consumers still had to pay shipping charges and that only certain styles of glasses and types of lenses were eligible for the offer. The promotion also didn't initially convey that Coastal only planned to give away a total of 10,000 glasses.
Social feeds in premium display advertising become more important as brands and their agencies look for ways to advance media. As part of the discussion, panelists at the MediaPost OMMA Premium Display conference in Los Angeles Tuesday talked about the possibility of Facebook offering a banner or takeover ad on its home page. What role do social, real-time bidding, and search contribute to premium display advertising? The panelists agree that agencies and brands must keep the conversation going, but Charlotte Cochrane, director of digital invention at Mindshare, said it's the responsibility of agencies and clients to provide content worth sharing. The paid media buys should complement the earned media, she said. While the term "display advertising" may conjure images of old-time digital advertising, the panel of experts agrees that social and analytics play a major role. It's about real-time optimization, based on data -- especially when pulling in social content and coordinating insights from the community. When it comes to Facebook, Patricia Galea, SVP of digital at Edelman, believes the ads in the feed have more value than those down the right rail. "It's about providing content for members," she said. "It's all about pushing and amplifying content rather than creating a rich-media ad unit." Adam Kasper, EVP at Havas Digital, doesn't view the ads down the right rail as a "premium experience." He's wondering when Facebook will introduce a takeover home page ad that may integrate social feeds. What is premium advertising and how should analytics play a part? For Kasper, gathering analytics starts even before the campaign, but the metrics behind premium advertising is "squishier," he said. That's the challenge. There's always a proxy for premium digital -- rarely a fixed measurement. "That's the flaw with premium advertising," he said. "The programmatic type of buying is measurable and rolls into a return on investment" or measurement that procurement executives or chief financial officers look for in order to quantify investments.
Marketers that post photos to Pinterest must make the same disclosures as in more traditional forms of advertising, the Better Business Bureau's National Advertising Division has ruled. Specifically, the NAD said the diet company Nutrisystem should have added disclaimers to photos it uploaded to a Pinterest page devoted to a campaign touting "real customers." The campaign featured people who had lost significant amounts of weight -- in some cases more than 100 pounds -- while on Nutrisystem. The NAD characterized those photos and captions as testimonials, and ruled that Nutrisystem should have made a "complete disclosure of material information" -- including that the consumers featured in the ads are exceptional. Nutrisystem contended that it inadvertently omitted to include disclaimers with the photos and captions, which were live for two months before the NAD inquired about them, according to the organization. The company has since added language stating that the people featured in the ads were paid, and that their results are not typical. This decision is not the first time the NAD has said that marketers need to make disclosures on social media sites. Last November, the organization found fault with a Facebook promotion by contact lens seller Coastal Contacts. In that case, the NAD said that marketers can legitimately entice consumers into “liking” pages on Facebook by offering free merchandise -- but that those companies must fully disclose the terms and conditions of the offers. Coastal Contacts had asked consumers to "like" a Facebook page in order to receive free glasses, but the ads soliciting the “likes” didn't say that consumers still had to pay shipping charges and that only certain styles of glasses and types of lenses were eligible for the offer. The promotion also didn't initially convey that Coastal only planned to give away a total of 10,000 glasses.
The average content posting by an advertiser on a Facebook page has a shelf life of about 18 hours, according to a recent analysis led by Colin Sutton, U.S. director of of OMD Word. Sutton’s team defined shelf life as the length of time that users provide feedback after content is posted, and it was less for Facebook than other social media platforms. That short shelf life, especially on Facebook, is not surprising. For one, Facebook is the dominant social network. It has massive user adoption, and its essence is a stream of fresh updates, not perishable archives. Social is all about content rivers and news feeds. Moreover, most Facebook new and archived content is not indexed in public search engines for latent discovery, interaction and feedback. In contrast, a blog post I wrote about the resurrection of handwritten letters receives a surge in traffic every few months because of its search engine visibility and seasonal search behavior. So how can marketers create greater presence and longer content shelf life in social channels? Here are a few ideas to get the ball rolling. 1. For starters, you have to publish a higher volume of new and relevant content. Not only must your message be engaging, but it must publish frequently enough to coincide with when your fans and prospects are focused on the stream. Nobody pays full attention to his social stream, so you’d better be there when he/she is. 2. Given sporadic attention paid to the social stream, brands should publish variations of content to increase the odds of connecting at the right time. Segment larger content assets into smaller, multiple components that seamlessly link to one another. 3. If marketers stop advertising on Facebook, their posts are likely to reach only about 20% of their fans (or less). Therefore, not only should you sustain advertising on Facebook to continually generate fans you can message, but you should engage in sponsored stories to amplify your content and user interaction -- hence, extend content shelf life. 4. Diversify your content syndication to multiple social channels. If your brand is a consumer one, most of your social interaction may reside on Facebook. But be sure to maintain content presence in other venues (like YouTube) to increase the odds of driving more meaningful connections. The OMD analysis confirmed that YouTube lends itself to longer shelf life for content. Why? Because it’s the world’s largest video network, whose archives are fueled by a high volume of searches from the world’s most popular search engine. 5. I’ve mentioned archives a number of times, and I’m going to do it again. Given the perishable nature of content in social streams, it is critical to complement and integrate your social syndication efforts with content publishing and archiving on your own hosted websites, which are likely to be connected to major social graphs, anyway (including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and good old email). Your own websites’ high visibility in search engines, along with potentially deeper experiences, will extend the shelf life of your growing bank of content. Social has introduced a new paradigm of paid, owned and earned media -- and it’s real and here to stay. In doing so, social also has introduced a new dichotomy of “streaming versus permanence.” Yet to be a successful marketer in a digital world, it is critical to seize the strengths of both streamed and permanent content, and make them feed off one another throughout your entire marketing communications mix. You must tap into the immediacy and impact of the social stream, while leaving the door open for more immersive exploration and discovery in permanent venues over the long term.
With so much information being uploaded or available on the Web, trust becomes a more powerful filter for sifting through the data. Consumers must trust a brand and its ads before consumers will click on the link, watch a video, or make an online purchase. The findings are apparent in The Trust Factor study recently released by About.com. Trust has become a prerequisite for consumers to enter the purchase funnel. Some 84% of survey participants said trustworthiness has become a requirement before interacting with a brand or source of information. Brands and content must trigger key trust "cues" before being considered, according to the study that was conducted between March 19 and June 1, 2012, which analyzes responses from 1,500 participants. Consumers expect brands to deliver reasons to trust them combined with other content and sentiment from consumers who might have bought products prior, which explains why recommendations play an important role. When it comes to building trust in the social networks and applications, reviews have become the most valued tool. The study identifies Facebook "Likes" as having little meaning. About.com identifies 10 elements of trust. Some 99% of survey participants consider accuracy the most important element to gain consumer trust. Relevance follows with 98%; and fairness, format, transparency, and expertise tie for third at 97%. Choice and reliability are next at 95%, and awareness at 93%. In terms of content, marketers should consider format, expertise and accuracy as the top trusted elements at 65%, 64% and 64%, respectively. Interestingly, survey results found that consumers don't make purchases based on social trust elements. In this category, awareness at 30% took the top spot. Social integration does boost the trust factor. Some 41% said allowing them to see reviews from people in their social network influences trust. Thirty-six percent said it helps to see photos where other people explain their own experience, compared with 33% who see a "like" or recommendation from a friend. Twenty-seven percent said connecting with people who may have been searching for similar types of information influences trust, compared with 25% for seeing the number of likes a piece of content received, and 21% for seeing what content others have pinned on Pinterest. Thoughtful reviews, however, inspire trust twice as much as Facebook "likes." The survey finds that 50% of consumers trust reviews, compared with 25% for "likes."
When's the last time you went online to find an ad? A panel of industry experts at the OMMA Premium Display Digital conference in Los Angeles on Tuesday discussed the state of digital storytelling to create emotions. Traditional story telling doesn't allow viewers to jump to the middle or the end of the tale, but search and social do, making digital storytelling non-linear. Marketers need to learn how to integrate search and social media. Don't just tell consumers about the product, but what the brand stands for and how they fit into that story.
I woke up yesterday morning to a report from NY1 that it could take months before we learn the motive of the Aurora, Colo. murderer. Then I arrived at the office, logged into Facebook, and saw that youthful face with the shock of flaming red hair all over my feed. Could that be his motive? Reports said that the killer wasn’t an avid social media user, with the exception of Adult Friend Finder. We need to redefine what it means to use social media. One doesn’t need to actively participate in social networking services in order to effectively use them. To manipulate social media is to use it. The Colorado killer, whose name I can’t even bring myself to write, must be thriving on his social media notoriety. Ten years ago, if I didn’t want to hear more about the murderer, I could choose to tune out the media. I could turn off the TV, stick to FM radio stations, skip newspapers and magazines, and avoid CNN.com and Drudge Report for a few days or weeks. That might have taken more effort than it was worth, and I would have lost something in the process, but I could manage it. Now, I can’t. My most important media sources are my friends and peers, the ones I choose to friend and follow. I can’t turn them off. I can’t say, “No more photos of the mass murderer, please.” I can’t say, “I’m over posts about the presidential candidates until the debates happen and we can try to find one shred of substance hidden amongst the partisan attacks.” I can’t say, “Why do I need to hear about what sports team you’re rooting for right now?” The reason I can’t say that is that I care. I learn more about people that way. I get closer to them. It’s the only news source I can’t turn off because I don’t want to turn it off. That’s where the manipulators come in. Manipulators aren’t always evil. Look at the most-funded projects from Kickstarter. These aren’t getting funds through massive ad budgets and brand building. These are brands being built from scratch. The companies don’t own much owned media at all. They propose what they hope is a great project or product, create a compelling story, and milk the press where they can. Practically the only way these projects get funded is if they wind up spreading through social media. Brands do their part to manipulate social media as well. When Taco Bell airlifted a truck full of tacos to a remote Alaska town, it wasn’t targeting the town’s 6,200 residents. Neither was TNT when it staged a seemingly spontaneous action epic in a quiet Belgian town. Both were YouTube bait. TNT racked up 36 million views and a Cannes Gold Lion. Yes, these brands may be participants in social media as well, but they created events that only matter if people share the footage. It hardly matters if the original event even happened; the live witnesses were not the target audience at all. And now we have the killer. He crafted a story. He carried out his plot. Hundreds of millions of people are talking about him, and he may ensure his story continues for months, or perhaps years. His motives are currently unknown, but how could he not relish the attention? Just the idea of it -- that his manipulation may be happening right now -- makes it all the more tempting to turn it all off. Then, I keep reading. There are the victims’ memorials, and the testimonials to life. There are links to the essay by Jason Alexander, who offered the most eloquent analysis of the Second Amendment that I have ever read. There’s Slate exploring the phenomenon of men giving their lives so that their girlfriends could live. There’s context. There’s insight. There’s meaning. I can’t shut it off. I don’t want to shut it off. I know what I must do instead: accept it, embrace it, and be a part of it.