The Starcom team and the 140 Proof team have built up a great partnership, and we’re delighted to see them get much-deserved praise from AdAge in their “10 Standout Shops” list:
It’s been a booming new-business year for Publicis’ Starcom, as the firm continues to embrace the paid, owned and earned trifecta. Contributing to its 14% growth in revenue, the firm won A-B InBev, Burger King, Novartis and a portion of the billion-dollar-in-billings Microsoft account. It also brought in smaller pieces of business such as Universal Parks and Groupon.
We’re looking forward to an exciting 2012, as we work to help Starcom’s customers succeed in the social stream. Cheers!
Amazon and Apple are massively successful retailers, the envy of digital and brick-and-mortar businesses alike. Currently, the two tech retailers enjoy a place among the biggest, most successful companies in the world. But they have a blind spot. The premises on which they’ve built their market advantage are now no longer the most important things in digital. They’re missing a data asset that would allow them to understand their customers better: the interest graph.
What is the interest graph?
Not to be confused with the social graph, which describes who you know, the interest graph describes what you like. On Facebook, the difference between the social graph and the interest graph is easily understood as the difference between a friend request and a Like. On Twitter, the social graph and the interest graph is mapped via only one vector — the follow — but in this case, following influencers is what signifies interest. If you follow an influential account like @David_Lynch on Twitter, it’s safe to assume you probably like indie films.
The interest graph attracted significant interest from technologists in 2011. Read Write Web said the interest graph is part of “the future of the social web,” while PayPal founder Max Levchin boldly predicted success for companies that capture the interest graph. So far, all Amazon sees is your shopping cart; companies leveraging the interest graph see your hopes and dreams.
What must Amazon learn from the interest graph?
Amazon could detect purchase intent earlier and identify under-served customers
What Amazon already knows about its customers:
- products purchase data (backward looking)
- wishlist data (sparse)
What Amazon could discover from the interest graph:
- our favorite brands (aspirational)
- new purchases shared by our friends (social proof)
(Amazon attempted in 2010 to expand its recommendations engine with a still-in-beta program that taps into the social graph, but the app’s intelligence is currently limited to Facebook friends’ Likes.)
What must Apple learn from the interest graph?
Apple could recommend songs and apps with greater accuracy
What Apple already knows about its customers:
- songs and apps purchased (backward-looking)
- location (and possibly what sites you visit, though it would cause a privacy uproar)
What Apple could discover from the interest graph:
- musicians who we follow but haven’t purchased yet (forward-looking)
- our friends’ apps
Ramifications of the interest graph for e-commerce
In a surprise upset, Apple and Amazon, with their massive product catalogs, cash hoards, and fulfillment channels, could potentially lap Twitter and Facebook in the race to monetize social. The e-commerce giants could create a much richer portrait of their customers – and better predict their behavior — by leveraging the interest graph. However, if they snooze on the opportunity (or waste valuable time building “abandoned garden” social networks like Ping), someone else could develop interest graph technology for e-tailers first and gain the advantage.
Interest graph technology has powerful ramifications for e-commerce as a whole. Information in the interest graph (which is public, by the way), can clue retailers into the aspirations of their customers — at the brand awareness stage.
Score one for the tablet audience: from an e-commerce standpoint, they’re worth more than your average visitor.
Adobe’s newly released Digital Marketing Insights report found that tablet users in 2011 spent 21% more per purchase than desktop users.
Why is that? Demographics have a lot to do with it: if you can afford a tablet, you’re generally more affluent. And the fact that tablets are mostly used on the weekends — prime shopping times — plays into it too.
At 140 Proof, we’ve built tablet apps into our network, and they’ve proven popular with advertisers. If your client is looking for a way to increase brand awareness among affluent audiences like tablet owners, contact us at hello@140proof.com.
At 140 Proof, we’ve been working with Chevrolet on dozens of campaigns. For the 2011 Super Bowl, we were delighted to be part of Chevrolet’s success, and Chevrolet has even bigger ambitions for the 2012 game: mobile games.
Today, Chevrolet announced they’re releasing the Chevy Game Time app for smartphones and tablets, and the app hits Android and iOS app stores this Sunday. Chevy Game Time quizzes football fans about game broadcasts, teams, and in-game commercials for the chance to win one of thousands of prizes (including a free Chevy, of course).
For more info, watch the video on YouTube.
2011 was a huge year for social advertising. As agency teams reorganized and scrambled to take advantage of social as a modern media framework, the campaigns got bigger and smarter.
Marketers will face important challenges in 2012, as customers are more savvy than before and late-adopting brands enter the social stream. Take a look at the top 5 upcoming social stream trends of 2012: each one will affect brands’ marketing plan in different ways.
1. Online Video Is Getting Social
“It’s not only in the stream, but video is feeding back into the stream too”
Video is powerful. Brands are learning that adding video to a site increases traffic and improves SEO, and marketing email effectiveness increases 90% when video is used (Creattica). In the social stream, Twitter users post YouTube links 500 times a minute, and Facebook users watch 150 years’ worth of video every day.
What’s your brand’s social video strategy for 2012? Are you increasing the volume of video you produce and share, or building entire campaigns around video content?
(Soon, 140 Proof will unveil a special offering for brands interested in enhancing their video strategy. Stay tuned.)
2. Smartphones Rule
“Brands not mobilizing in 2012 are behind the curve”
The smartphone buying spree of 2011, plus the growing tablet market, means customers are now spread across many devices. Most adults 18-34 own smartphones, and Mary Meeker of Morgan Stanley has predicted that mobile traffic will overtake desktop traffic by the end of 2014. This doesn’t mean that you need to hire a team to create apps for every platform, but it does mean you need:
- mobile-optimized digital assets and communications
- a mobile advertising strategy
- a thorough understanding of how customers use devices
At 140 Proof, we help our customers navigate social advertising on every platform, with platform-independent ad units as well as smartphone-only campaign strategies for brands who want to reach that slightly tech-leaning, slightly more affluent audience.
3. Social as a Second Screen Will Change TV Media
“Social will circle back on TV, influencing shows and ad buys”
Social buys are already tagging along to the broadcast TV buy, as we saw last year with Victoria’s Secret Fall TV Continuity (140 Proof’s #1 campaign of 2011).
Additionally, broadcasters are starting to recognize the value of social as the second screen for television. And the fact that TV shows have their own Facebook pages and all the show actors are active on Twitter…the line between social and broadcast will continue to blur.
Social advertising, as a complement to upfront or scatter buys, promises a strategic flexibility that’s tougher to get in the high-overhead world of TV production. TV shows will be designed and promoted with the knowledge that viewers use the second screen as a backchannel. Social advertising campaigns will be built up in advance of show premieres, in increasingly more ambitious efforts to shape public opinion.
4. Big Data Will Start Overwhelming Brands
“Social means big data, and social ads mean bigger data”
At 140 Proof, we’re already up to our ears in big data. Studying the interest graph means we analyze those many-to-many relationships, and the data points multiply like bunnies as our audience members click and Like their way through the Internet. Our Data Science team is dedicated to researching and reporting on the interest graph. And Luke Lonergan of EMC recently told Forbes of companies who underestimate the impact of Big Data on their business: “They are going to miss the opportunity or get overwhelmed. Those with data science teams begin to understand; others don’t see how much it can do.”
The kinds of big data created continues to grow in volume and change in kind, but now there’s a critical mass of teams getting a handle on it. In 2012, R&D teams will have more tools and resources to choose from, as data streams and online behaviors are better understood.
5. Brands That Can Speak It Real Will Win
“Good social strategy supports sustainable customer relationships”
A new surge of brands will be entering the social stream in 2012. This is the year of the late mainstream. If your brand already has a social media and a social advertising strategy, you’re ahead. Why? Because you’ve adopted that socialspeak that people expect in the stream: personal, more lighthearted, and direct.
Read “5 ways to get creative with 140 characters”
And it goes even deeper than tone. AdAge delved into the power of the sustainable relationship at the start of 2012:
The new imperative, according to Rogers, is “How do you, as a marketer, get the subset of the loyal customer who doesn’t just buy your product again but … writes those positive reviews? They share your links and retweet you on Twitter and post a photo of themselves with your product on Facebook and “like” you on Facebook and generate all these network conversations, which go back to the top of the funnel and influence other customers in your network at their own stage of awareness, consideration, preference or action.”
At 140 Proof, we help brands new to the social stream make a home there: by advising on campaign strategy, taking the message to the right audience, and adapting creative to the special tone of the social stream.
“What challenges is your team most concerned about in 2012?”
Let us know in the comments below, or on Twitter at @140ProofAds.
by jm3.
P.O.E.M., or Paid (vs) Owned (vs) Earned Media, is a strategy framework that buyers and planners use to segment campaigns and channels. Paid / Owned / Earned gave us a common lingua franca to organize our conversations and separate the big buys from the experimental backwaters. But in 2011, standing on the banks of the social stream, thinking in terms of Paid / Owned / Earned will break the back of your media team and send money leaking out of your strategy. Here’s why: the world has changed.
Looking back to its inception, Paid / Owned / Earned is really two things: 1. a classification system for media types, and 2. a relational model, describing how those media types affected each other. The relational model is actually the more valuable, less commonly seen version. Here’s a version of how they can be visualized:
POEM envisioned Paid, Owned, and Earned channels as discrete entities: either you bought massive reach in a channel you controlled (paid), or you had the intern send out some tweets to your followers (earned), and these two initiatives had very different resource structures and, yes, budgets. But thinking of Paid vs Earned as unrelated in 2011 will get you booted back into the traffic department.
POEM assumed that each digital channel fit into a neat bucket. The new ad formats springing forth almost weekly from Twitter + Facebook blend paid and earned media opportunities, creating new ways to spend money and annihilate POEM’s neat “is it paid or earned?” distinction in a single stroke. Is a Facebook Sponsored Story from Nike featuring my friend who recently bought shoes considered paid or earned? How about a social stream ad with a funny tagline that I retweet to my friends? Or a rich media banner with a viral video and a share button? Paid / Owned / Earned distinctions don’t make room for these new ad experiences that are becoming the leading edge of digital brand campaigns.
So as Twitter and Facebook become a much larger share of digital ad spend (which now exceeds 20% of media spend [1,2]), the old POEM no longer fits. It’s time for digital advertisers to create some new media classifications and relational models that can evaluate new hybrid models. Creating new vocabularies for this stuff enables more productive conversations about the value of advertising channels like Twitter and Facebook, and helps us sort out the wheat from the chaff.
Here then, is my humble proposal for a NEW framework for our new hybrid universe. It’s an updated set of guidelines I’ve dubbed, “MASS,” and it just might help us hold new hybrid paid/earned platforms accountable to a higher set of standards that end up making things more valuable for everyone. Here it is:
Measurable
- Can you track activity and engagement in the channel using trusted third-party verified tools?
Authentic
- Does the message rest comfortably in the customer’s world, representing a clear and valuable position the brand stands for?
Scalable
- “I need 2 million mommy-bloggers tomorrow.” Can this channel deliver that kind of reach without sacrificing targeting specificity?
Social
- Our world has become the web, and the web has become social. Ad solutions without social actions are just customer budget stolen.
The MASS framework is something we’re trying internally at 140 Proof to help customers evaluate their branded digital and retool media plans to scale social. Is it perfect? Hardly. Does it shine a bright light into the most relevant bits of the most innovative ad formats on the market today? We are beginning to think it does.
I welcome questions, comments, slings, arrows, and remixes in the comments section.
They’re dropping like flies at this year’s CES, the annual Consumer Electronics Show held annually in Las Vegas. Writers from major tech blogs like TechCrunch, Gizmodo, and Business Insider have all reported intense CES fatigue.
TechCrunch: CES is overwhelmingly large
Meanwhile, the show floor itself has evolved (or, really, devolved) into something so mammoth that it would be literally impossible to see all (or even most) of it. It takes up not one, not two, but three separate multi-million square foot halls… and even then, it spills out into ballrooms and side venues all over Vegas.
(Read more at “CES: A Wonderful Example of Not Knowing When to Stop”)
Gizmodo’s Mat Honan goes Ballardian on scene
I fantasize that I am the only one here, in a post-apocalyptic trade show. Alone among these elaborate booths. Free to scamper up on top of them. Free to grab what I want, and actually play with it, like a child. I want to see it all catch fire. I want to pour gasoline in the ducts and light a long fuse, and watch from the street as it burns and burns and burns. My guess is that the flames would be quite beautiful, colored by chemical washes and treated glass. My hangover is killing me.
(Read more at “Fever Dream of a Guilt-Ridden Gadget Reporter”)
For another view into the show and why covering it in the press is such a draining experience, try Steve Kovach’s “One Day in the Life of a Tech Blogger at CES” published by Business Insider.
Is money spent on CES worth it for brands?
Given the saturation of vendors, advertisements, and products at CES, does the conference generate a real return on the investment? Are brand awareness dollars better spent elsewhere than CES, or is the conference now simply a check-the-box expense for gadget manufacturers?
As promised, Facebook started pushing Sponsored Stories into the main News Feed area of the Facebook web site, bringing ads to the most popular location. The paid placements, now called Featured Stories, will be shown to the fans of the brand advertisers only, with an initial frequency cap of one Featured Story per day.
The change comes over six months after Twitter.com made a similar move, adding Promoted Tweets to users’ timelines on its site for followers of the advertiser. (As of September 2011, Promoted Tweets in Timelines can now be served to anyone logged into Twitter.com, regardless of the brand follow relationship.)
Read more about the Featured Stories rollout:
Facebook Puts Sponsored Stories Into News Feed And Calls Them Featured Stories
