Unicast

Sunday night's Season 4 premiere of Mad Men brought in 2.9 million viewers and was the most watched episode of Mad Men ever, which means 2.9 million of you saw the PR stunt that Peggy Olson and Pete Campbell pulled off.

After fretting over possibly losing the Sugarberry Ham account, Peggy suggests that they hire two actresses to fight over a ham at a grocery store in order to generate press over the product. The stunt is a success and Pete and Peggy are awarded additional dollars to their advertising budget.

What this scene reminded me of is this – we are all looking for ways to get our brand or our clients’ brand out there without having to break the bank.

With the advent of social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, companies are jumping at the chance to generate buzz around their product. But is it really working?

According to a recent report that was released today by digital agency 360i, 90% of tweets come from consumers and only 12% of consumer tweets mention a brand. The top brands mentioned on Twitter are Twitter itself.

Furthermore, only 1% of consumer tweets that mention a brand are part of an active conversation with that brand, meaning that companies are failing to engage their consumers in a conversation.

So what does this mean for businesses both large and small?

Unfortunately in this case, showing up is not half the battle. Businesses need to build relationships with their consumers and take on a personality. As 360i states, “there remains a largely untapped opportunity for brands to create deeper connections with consumers via earned media and to learn more about what motivates them with online listening through Twitter.” The real value for companies who join social networking site is to create a conversation that allows brands to become a more meaningful part of people’s lives.

I’ve been reading a lot about social media recently, and just found an excellent presentation by Paul Adams, a Sr. User Experience researcher at Google, that takes a look at real life social networks and compares them to online social networks. It highlights just how much the current online social networking experience falls short of what we expect based on our real world interactions.

His main point is that current social networks mistakenly dump everyone you know into a giant bucket, called “friends”, and that this is completely unlike anyone’s social network in the real world. Not only is this as ill-advised as inviting everyone you know (work friends, drinking buddies, girlfriends and ex-girlfriends) to a single party, but it’s also wrong in that most people in most people’s networks would not even be described by them as friends – many are co-workers, alumni of the same high school etc. Nevertheless this is where we are today. The workaround for this situation is to take on the onerous work of maintaining separate identities online. The non-workaround is to say the-hell-with-it, and realize after you’ve spent a year fruitlessly looking for work that you still have an album of photos in your Facebook account of you throwing up on other people at parties.

There are of course a lot of cantankerous old people and conspiracy theorists (I’m looking at you Maya) who realize this model is pretty messed up, which is why four NYU students were able to raise $200,000 in funding on KickStarter to start building a new social network that would give users control of their own personal information rather than hosting it on a 3rd party like Facebook, or broadcasting it to the entire world like Twitter.

But I think businesses should be equally concerned with rushing into advertising and marketing in the messy and relatively untargeted world of current social networks and on the Internet at large, and should also be throwing some of their weight behind a better alternative. Companies may have the same or greater difficulties maintaining separate identities for their products online, especially if they appeal to different and perhaps conflicting market segments.

And, as Paul points out in his presentation, recommendations from “strong ties” are an order of magnitude more effective than those from people who are further removed. Marketing via social networks today is perhaps closer to leveraging the circle of trust, but there is a whole new level to take it to which will benefit both consumers and businesses. Everyone down from the Unilevers and P&G’s of the world should be considering (and possibly investing in) new models that protect individual privacy and support real relationships over click-to-friend relationships. The days of 10,000 “friends” are numbered.

I highly recommend reading the entire Paul Adams presentation if you have any interest in such things (which is likely if you’ve read this far): http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-network-v2

Both of the images below are from the presentation.

I’ve read several pieces lately about the advertising industry’s attempts to decode what women want, the latest being this review of a book called What Women Want (which happened to be written by a man). The buying power of women is rapidly expanding, and everyone is trying to figure out how to cash in on that trend. As a person who has been female since, oh, before I was born, I’d like to offer some tips straight from the horse’s mouth:

1. KNOCK IT OFF WITH THE PINK. I am so sick of having the “female version” of every product looking like it’s been dipped in Pepto-Bismol. We are capable of viewing and appreciating more than one color. We are complex, dynamic grown women, so please consider using a complex, dynamic color palette when speaking to us instead of the color of the booties they put on us in the hospital when we were born. Also, pastels are not always necessary.

2. Instead of “women,” could we just be treated as “people?” There is so much advertising aimed at women (especially moms) that makes me think, “Gosh, my husband’s the one who does that.” And when I see an ad for something marketed to women that men could use too, I think, “Why am I being singled out here?” Gender inequality is shrinking, and advertisers have some catching up to do with this new emerging reality.

3. Make our lives easier. I am never going to remember to fill out the survey on the two-foot long receipt when I get home. I have consistently failed to remember to take the coupon with me when I go to buy something. I don’t want to get an email to take a survey every single time I have my car serviced. I want fewer pieces of paper to carry around. I want the coupon to be on the box and ready to use at checkout. I don’t mind sharing my feedback with you, but you have to make it easy and non-intrusive for me. I want to subscribe to your email updates instead of being magically enrolled and having to figure out how to unsubscribe, and if I do subscribe, I want to hear from you when it’s actually relevant, not every day. I want you to keep your message short and sweet and then give me the option to find out more quickly and easily.

Women are busy these days, so if you can keep that in mind when crafting and delivering your message, you’ll reap the rewards, and so will we.

4. Respect our age (This is the part where I’m supposed to say “Even if we lie about it.”). Grown women don’t need to be talked down to in the “hey girlfriend!” vernacular in order to be interested in what you have to say. If you’re marketing to grownups, feel free to leave out the OMGs and BFFs and gossipy tones and give it to us straight. It doesn’t need to be juvenile to be fun. Also feel free to retire some of those old “women are like this and men are like that” clichés—yes, women like shoes. Ha ha. Let’s move it along now.

That’s my list—ladies out there, do you have any others to add?

At the current time, the general model for successful internet marketing and revenue generation consists of engaging users with brand messages and ultimately persuading them to take a call to action to purchase a good or service, either online or off. However, emerging technologies, increasing internet traffic, and the growing popularity of social networking has opened the door to a $5.5 billion dollar virtual commerce industry that could possibly have large ramifications to the future of online marketing and product sales.

For those unfamiliar with virtual commerce, it is described as the exchange of virtual goods or “gifts” as they are most popularly known amongst Facebook users. In other words, virtual commerce is the exchange of pixels for fake money (which must be bought with real money). Americans spent roughly $400 million on virtual goods last year, and this number is only expected to increase, especially following this week’s news of Facebook fostering a partnership with Malaysia-based MOL Global, a company specializing in virtual currencies. The entire industry is only two years old with much of the revenue and research coming out of Asia, but current trends seem to follow real world trends for consumer products, the laws of supply and demand, and the “Invisible Hand” of economics if you will.

For example, a luxury “out of production” Golden Halo, which can be worn by characters in the online world of Gaia Online, recently sold for $6,000 on eBay. To say that virtual goods will continue to follow these trends is probably jumping the gun, but it will be interesting to see how this online community develops in regards to security and how currencies can be exchanged across social networking platforms, dating sites, and other areas of the internet.

As virtual goods become more popular and user friendly, it is only a matter of time before advertisements with an immediate call to purchase within an ad unit emerge. For example, an ad featuring a virtual good with all of the necessary purchasing fields and a “Buy Now” button is a conceivable option. For now the virtual goods industry is still in it’s infancy, and not capable of making waves in the larger pool of digital marketing, but if people are willing to pay $400 million for “products” that cost a company virtually nothing, you better believe developers will be willing to spend money on game changing ways to market them online.

Everyone’s favorite site to watch full episodes of television on the web, Hulu made lots of news this week. One report has video game enthusiast rejoicing as it was announced that Hulu is close to signing a deal with Sony that would bring a paid version of the site to the Playstation. According to the Bloomberg report the Playstation version would still present users with the opportunity to watch both current and archival shows in their entirety. The deal would open Hulu up to a larger market and allow them to compete with Netflix.

In other Hulu news rumors continue to fly that the site is close to bringing Viacom programs back to the site. In mid March Viacom pulled two of Hulu’s most popular shows The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. However this time these shows may only be available in a new subscription based version of Hulu. In addition to adding Viacom shows it is also reported that Hulu may add shows by CBS to this subscription only service.

The Unicast Business Intelligence team has compiled general benchmarks related to campaigns served in the US during Q1 of 2010. These benchmarks are assessed across all Unicast tagged campaigns and are tracked across individual formats and verticals. This report provides a summary of the engagement and interaction performance of some of the most popular ad formats served by Unicast through March, 2010.

Key Findings Include:

•Branded Canvas ad formats, which are fully custom interactive units positioned within full episode video players, produced very high interaction rates and average video view time.

•Consumer Packaged Goods produced the longest average interaction time across verticals.

Unicast Analytics Benchmark Report Q1 2010

Recently, we finalized a report to help online advertisers know what women want from the web. By surveying 578 women in the U.S., we’ve helped shed further light on the influence women have when it comes to their purchasing power and how they plan to use it on the web this summer.

Some key findings that were revealed in our report were that 76% of women plan to use the web to connect with friends and family, 67% will keep up with the news, 64% plan to shop for sales/compare prices, 59% intend to entertain themselves (play games, listen to music or watch TV/movies), and 48% will research travel/vacations.

The fact is, women have enormous purchasing power and as advertisers we need to be aware of how to reach them – 85% of all brand purchases are made by women. As women continue to bring more of their daily tasks online this summer, we need to be prepared to get access to the women who will be plugged in this summer. To learn more and read the full report then visit the link below and see the numbers for yourself.

Unicast's 2010 What Women Want From the Web Report

Social media offers businesses a host of ways to connect to their customer base. It’s more than just a buzzword; it shows consumers that you want to be connected to them by more than just a purchase. It shows that you’re technologically savvy, and maybe by extension, smarter and easier to do business with. It reminds people your business exists when they forget. The benefits can be huge if you do it right, but what if you’re too small to have a marketing department and you wind up doing it on your own? How much effort do you wind up having to expend, and what’s the return on your investment?

Let’s start with why it’s worth the effort. I recently was in need of a spare bed for my guest bedroom. I started doing my research online, and quickly wound up at Amazon, which I think is a great site for user-friendliness. I easily found what I was looking for, but the shipping charges were more than I was willing to spend, and I had to have it by the weekend because I had guests coming to town. I shopped around on several other major furniture sites that I knew had locations in my city. If I couldn’t find what I was looking for with a simple keyword search, I abandoned the website pretty quickly and moved on to the next one. I finally wound up on websites for some strictly local companies that had no catalog or search functionality or anything remotely resembling that on their website and wound up having to make phone calls (so old-fashioned!). Their websites were basically a glorified version of their entries in the phone book. I did eventually end up buying from one of them. Well, they got my business, so how exactly did they fail with their $2.00 website and lack of a social media platform?

      1. There were literally DOZENS of other opportunities for someone else to snag my business before I ever found out about this place. If those previous websites hadn’t been so disappointing as well, there’s an excellent chance I’d have purchased somewhere else first. I wound up at my ultimate destination against pretty steep odds.

      2. When making a major purchase or trying new restaurants, I often head first to Facebook and ask for recommendations from my virtual community. Or go to Yelp and look up reviews for places (which I actually did do with a couple of those sites). Those are the easiest places to start the hunt because I’m already on them, so if the mountain comes to my virtual Mohammed, they’ll get all the attention first. When there’s no info there, I start browsing websites.

With that in mind, I think we can safely say that your odds of making a sale are definitely improved if you have a better plan of attack that involves social media. The plan might look something like this:

      A. A robust website that is easily searchable and has the information your customers are looking for (like your prices/rates). This will be the core for everything else you do; all the rest of your social media efforts will lead back to this. Bonus points if you have an email subscription option (and for heaven’s sake, don’t send anyone an email unless they request it through that first). A caution here though: use the email sparingly—this does not need to be a daily thing! Extra bonus points if you have a blog on your site that shows the human side of your business, and mega-bonus points if it’s actually entertaining and informative.

This piece will take the most time to maintain, and you may be tempted just to stick with that and skip the rest since this will be a fair amount of work. But you’d be missing out on some opportunities.

      B. The Facebook page. This should be a complement to your website, but it also accesses people that your website can’t. The great thing about a Facebook page is that it’s easy to set up, but don’t make the mistake of letting it languish after that; get in there, spend some time on making “friends”, and make regular updates (though not so many that people hide you from their news feed). If you change something on your website, let people know about it on Facebook. Got a coupon or special deal or contest? Put it up there with a link to your site. Add a new photo every once in a while, update it a couple of times a week to keep things relevant, and you’re on your way to creating an actual community with your customer base.

      C. The Twitter feed. The ubiquitous companion to the Facebook page. Since so many people are on both, if you don’t catch them on one, you’ll have the other to help cover your bases. It’s a good idea to put things like coupons and special deals on here too because they can be easily passed around.

      D. For the truly advanced, check out how you can incorporate location-based services like Foursquare and Gowalla. I recently read a great article about how to do this here. Since this functions as a sort of game, offer some reward for people who check in frequently and become “mayors,” etc.

So you’ve set up all of these things, and now it’s a question of keeping them maintained. Focus first on your website. When something new happens on the website, announce it on Facebook and Twitter and wherever else you can think of. If something important happens at your business, think about how you’re going to let everyone else know. Since you’re reaching a much larger audience than you normally would, you’ll be reaping the benefits of all this increased exposure. And hopefully, you’ll be able to maintain these things without undue burden as you’re trying to keep your smaller business running.

A lot of controversy has come up surrounding Apple’s recent change to its developer terms prohibiting Google and other third party affiliates from collecting analytical data from iPhone and iPad apps. We will leave it for the courts to decide, but it’s not completely clear if this is an attempt by Apple to monopolize an emerging market, protect their stake in the smart phone market from Google and others, or just Apple being “different” (which doesn’t seem to be so different anymore). Despite what tricks Apple may have up their sleeve, there are a few daunting realities surrounding this information collection that are no secret to all parties involved.

The sheer volume of data collection coming from mobile users is going to increase exponentially. With the growing popularity of mobile computing, marketers are going to want to start looking at things like location, time, and previous interactions within the mobile device.

The value of this data is going to increase. With new metrics being collected, data will be used to create more innovative ways of ad delivery, and of measuring success. In a dynamic online advertising environment where tiny changes to ad design or placement can mean a world of difference in performance, it forces marketers to buy in, or bust.

And lastly, Apple clearly wants to collect and do things with this data that it doesn’t want Google to know about. This is really no surprise from Apple, but does create artificial barriers to competition and stirs up even more bad blood between fierce competitors, who most certainly will be required to play nice at some point in the future. However, for the foreseeable future, Apple has the tablet market cornered, and doesn’t want to provide information to anyone who may infringe upon that.

Competitor AdMob’s CEO Omar Hamoui wrote in a blog post, “"Artificial barriers to competition hurt users and developers and, in the long run, stall technological progress."

This may be true Mr. Hamoui, but is it “an attempt to monopolize, combine or conspire with any other person or persons, to monopolize any part of the trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations” as prohibited by the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890?

This will have to be left for Washington to decide, and with a law originally written in 1890 with no concept of “information” as a commodity or mass marketing in general, it could really go either way. In the meantime, the data keeps rolling in.

What do you do when Apple reports that two million iPads were sold in less than 60 days? You create the first-ever tablet task force, duh!

With the debut of iAd fast approaching on July 1, 2010, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) has created the Tablet Task Force to help create an infrastructure that would help support a variety of rich new advertising opportunities for the inevitable emerging technologies of tablets and e-readers. In the short period of time the iPad has been on the market, developers have created over 5,000 apps that take advantage of all its features and not to mention more than 200,000 apps already in the App Store that were created for the iPhone or iPod touch. The objectives of the Tablet Task Force are to explore and define the best practices in the area, build a solid foundation for ongoing growth and provide guidance on the development of ad standards.

“The ad market is developing for tablets and e-readers as the excitement builds for those devices.” said Bob Carrigan, CEO, IDG Communications Inc., Co-Chair of the Tablet Task Force and a member of the Executive Committee of the IAB Board of Directors. “Their growth will create new revenue for media companies, agencies and technology companies and new experiences for users.”

Although, IAB was the first to create a tablet task force, they won’t be the last to create a support group that will help developers answer all their questions, especially with the current controversy and skepticism surrounding applications such as iAd. In just the last month, Apple has had a number of potential antitrust cases arise regarding its developers terms to exclude analytics companies from collecting data on users.

One thing’s for sure, we wouldn’t love Apple without a little bit of controversy along with a little bit of smoke and mirrors. Let’s just hope that the Tablet Task Force will help bring clarity to this rapidly growing market. In the mean time, let’s kick back with a bucket of popcorn and a coke and see what is in store for us in the next few months.

For more information on the Tablet Task Force, and to download “tabvertising—iPad and other tablets: the advertising and marketing opportunities,” please go to: www.iab.net/tabvertising