Attention Austin-bound Brand Marketers:
Join us on March 13 to discuss outstanding social campaign strategies and examples of how brands are using social to increase the effectiveness of their marketing efforts.
Our CTO John Manoogian III (@jm3) will be joined by Jason Harris of Mekanism (@jason_harris), Kristin Maverick of The Barbarian Group (@kmaverick), and Sarahjane Sachetti of Formspring (@sf_sj). Tech writer Jolie O’Dell (@jolieodell) will also make a special appearance.
If you’re in Austin for Interactive, drop by, say hello, and bring us your questions about getting the most out of social.
Epic Battle: Creative vs Discipline in Social
- Tuesday, March 13, 9:30am — 10:30am
- InterContinental Stephen F. Austin, Capital Ballroom A
- Panel info link
- Panel description:
As social media marketing moves from experimental to institutional, brands no longer question social media marketing as a line item. That said, the strategies and deployment of social campaigns continues to introduce big questions about ROI versus spend and effective measurement has been a trendy topic without clear answers for years. The tension introduced by the the creativity made familiar by traditional brand campaigns and the measurement that performance/Internet marketing allows has created increasingly urgent questions for CMOs, agencies and social networks alike. This panel brings together divergent voices in the evolving social media marketing realm and will address the questions brands, agencies and social networks need to answer in 2012.
Why Big Publishers Are Looking to “Sponsored” Posts for Ad Revenue
The moves are part of the shift by many brands to think of themselves as publishers in their own right. As Todd Sawicki, chief revenue officer of Cheezburger, said, “It’s a form of advertising that the online world is uniquely qualified to distribute.”
Our friends at Pandora on brand relevance, social music, and what music to listen to in the office.
by jm3.
P.O.E.M., or Paid (vs) Owned (vs) Earned Media, is a strategic 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 2012, 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 2012 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.
140 Proof CEO and CTOs Jon Elvekrog and John Manoogian III speak out in Forbes and in USA Today about the Interest Graph, Facebook’s Ad Platform CPM, and what it means for the social juggernaut to expand its targeting and dominate the feed.
In Forbes:
Jon Elvekrog, CEO, and John Manoogian III, CTO of 140 Proof, a social ad company: The cofounders, who work less with Facebook than with Twitter (thus the name, a play on the number of characters in a tweet), believe Facebook is only now starting to emerge from a long bout with what Elvekrog calls “Googleitis.” That’s the tendency of ad companies to create ad systems that look like Google’s, which is to say automated and focused on direct-response.
Such has been the case with Facebook’s ads until recently, they say, when the company has begun to see results from “a pretty big pivot toward a brand- and audience-centric approach” in the last six to 12 months, says Manoogian. Still, the pair thinks Facebook remains mostly dependent on direct-response ads, a business that Elvekrog notes “isn’t exactly broken” at close to $4 billion in revenues. “But that momentum may slow them from changing too much too quickly” toward the brand focus that Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and most ad folks think should be its ultimate mainstay.
In USAToday:
Improving its CPM is a matter of Facebook “targeting” what users subscribe to and status updates from friends, says John Manoogian III, CTO of social advertising company 140 Proof. “They’re not really taking advantage of the feed. They’re still putting most of their effort into the right rail” ads on the side of member profiles, where both attention and clickthrough rates are lower. The feed is where users look, and where ads perform the best.
140 Proof is pleased to announce a partnership with naan studio to support Echofon for Firefox. 140 Proof ads will begin appearing in Echofon’s popular Firefox client, in addition to the Echofon clients for Mac, Windows, and iPhone. Echofon has been part of the 140 Proof network since 2010.
What are 140 Proof Ads?
140 Proof ads are short, paid advertising messages that appear on social stream apps. We do our best to show you relevant ads, but you can always send us feedback at @140ProofAds if something seems wrong. Learn how 140 Proof ads are targeted.
Why Is Echofon for Firefox Showing Me Ads?
Building and maintaining useful apps like Echofon bears substantial costs. Developers can choose to pass along these costs to the user (by charging for use of the application) or keep the app free for users by incorporating paid advertising.
How Do I Remove Ads in Echofon for Firefox?
Users can remove ads by buying an Echofon for Firefox license for $9.99. To upgrade, go to the Echofon menu and select the “Remove Ads…” menu item.
How to Advertise on the 140 Proof Network
140 Proof reaches digitally engaged consumers across all social streams, with a monthly audience of 44 million and a total reach of 160 million. Learn more about the 140 Proof audience.
Echofon users with further questions can tweet us at @140ProofAds.
Ad teams are gearing up nationwide to shift their efforts away from everything nonpolitical and lock in for an intense year of political advertising. Given the growing influence of social seen in the last two presidential elections, how big a role will social play in 2012?
President Obama’s social strategy in 2008 was hailed as a coup (New York Times). And AdWeek says, “the use of social and online media has increased exponentially among political organizations” (emphasis ours).
Could social eclipse TV and print for the hearts and minds effort this year? We’ll explore this theme next week in a special installment of our video series on 140 Proof.
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!
