These types of ad units support bigger, bolder placements
(ADWEEK) The Online Publishers Association, in its effort to get the digital publishing world to adopt bigger, bolder ad creative, just got a major boost from a nonmember.
Yahoo has quietly begun rolling out the OPA’s “Pushdown” ad unit — a placement introduced nearly a year ago as a means of creating more intrusive, brand-friendly creative units for the increasingly commodified display ad market. Continue reading
Recent studies point to a strong connection between social media marketing and tactics such as paid search. This means that companies need to carefully align their social media efforts with other online initiatives — and that requires strategic planning, according to eMarketer.
A study of U.S. Internet users by comScore, GroupM Search and M80 found a significant amount of brand leverage when paid search campaigns were combined with social media efforts.
Among survey participants who were exposed only to paid search ads for specific products, 23 percent searched on product terms after seeing the ads.
However, when paid search was combined with social media marketing relevant to those products, 38 percent of respondents searched on product terms.
More impressively, when paid search was combined with social media influenced directly by the marketer, 65 percent of respondents searched on product terms.
In five years, Dell went from being the poster boy of ignoring the emerging social Web to becoming a model for how to orient a company around social media. Its journey began in 2005, when Facebook was barely beyond a dorm room project. Problems with Dell customer service percolated on blogs under the moniker “Dell Hell.” The company, founded by Michael Dell with a focus on customers, reoriented itself to be more responsive. Continue reading
At a time when many brands are stuck in experimentation mode in social media, Pepsi is placing a staggeringly large bet on it. Pepsi was absent from the Super Bowl for the first time in 23 years, redirecting money to an ambitious social marketing-centered program called Refresh Everything that will direct $20 million to charities. According to Pepsi execs, the program is appealing because it rested on four big trends: crowdsourcing, doing good, sharing and transparency.
Refresh Everything is the culmination of years of social-media work done by Pepsi, the perpetual No. 2 behind Coca-Cola in the soft drink market. Pepsi’s still a big spender in traditional media — it spent $89 million in U.S. advertising on the brand in 2009 — but Coke outguns it by a 33 percent margin. Social media, offering a more level playing field, is where Pepsi is making its stand with one of the largest commitments to the space yet seen. Continue reading
In October 1994, Hot Wired ran the first Web banner, an ad placement for AT&T carrying the promise of a new era with the message, “Have you ever clicked your mouse right here? You will.” In the ensuing time period, the banner has generated billions of dollars in revenue but has also come to be seen as a symbol of failure. Its place as the pre-eminent form of Web advertising was eclipsed in 2000 when Google borrowed the paid search advertising system pioneered by Overture and turned it into a moneymaking machine. Since then, the display advertising business has played second fiddle to search, despite the fact that search pages make up only a fraction of Web traffic.
That situation is slowly changing. A new Web ad architecture is developing that promises to remake how advertising is bought and sold, borrowing the best of paid search auction systems while going beyond their targeting to allow advertisers to show each ad only to the audience they want. The automated exchanges, fueled by vast amounts of Internet user data, provide promise and potentially peril to all parts of the industry, from clients to agencies to publishers. “It’s going to facilitate a lot of brand dollars coming online because they’ll be able to buy audience — and right now it’s really hard for them to do it at scale outside of a few portals,” says William Morrison, an analyst with ThinkEquity.
In a sign of the digital times, Web giant targets social-networking as the next frontier for its Gmail platform
Looking to cement and possibly expand its stature as the Web’s top resource for information — a position that is gradually being threatened by social venues like Facebook — Google has introduced Google Buzz, a product designed to transform Gmail more of a social networking environment.
Over the next few days, Buzz will automatically roll out to all Gmail accounts with no downloads required, according to a blog post by Gmail product manager Todd Jackson. Buzz is initially all about sharing diverse content, while its grander ambition is to make Gmail a conduit for much of the information traveling among networking sites. Continue reading
Coming soon! Popsci reports that a multitouch skin that can make any surface a touchscreen will be released this summer.
Portuguese company Displax will “market a multitouch capable, super-thin polymer “skin” that can be applied to any material — flat, curved, opaque, transparent, you name it — creating a digital muli-touch surface virtually anywhere, from a wristband to a desktop to a pane of clear glass.”
Very cool. Displax says that the skin will be able to detect even the subtlest of touches – even blowing on it. A futuristic, sci-fi existence is creeping closer, becoming more and more of a reality.
SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — Google Inc.’s launch of “Google Buzz” is the company’s latest attempt to catch up with Facebook and Twitter after one big fail in social networking.
Remember Orkut? The social network was launched with much fanfare by Google in 2004. You had to be invited to use it, the same approach it later followed with the launch of Gmail. It generated hype and “buzz.” Now, Orkut is mostly popular in Brasil and India but ranks nowhere near the 350 million active users on Facebook.
Creating a “buzz” around products, services, businesses or events is a requirement from all clients. There is no social media marketing wand that someone will wave and target audience will automatically start coming to your site. And what works for one brand may not work for another.
The process of creating buzz doesn’t start from creating a Blog or creating a video, it’s a social media strategy that encompasses social media and word-of-mouth marketing. We have compiled a list of social media tools that companies use to build their social media marketing mixes. Continue reading
(ADWEEK) Advertisers that bought spots in this year’s Super Bowl saw a sharp spike in online references relating directly to their brands, according to research conducted by Prophesee, a unit of Interpublic’s Initiative that monitors and analyzes consumer conversations, blogs and other online social-media activity.
Of the 38 brands that ran ads during the game, 75 percent saw the number of blog posts about them double, compared with the average for Sunday evenings over the past six months. And about one-third of those brands realized a threefold rise in the number of blog posts about them, per the Prophesee survey. Continue reading
Clients take a dim view despite agencies’ investment in talent and services
(ADWEEK) Traditional agencies are continuing to invest in digital talent and services but, based on a new survey from RSW/US, clients aren’t that impressed with the results.
Ask to rate their traditional agency’s digital skills on a scale of 1 to 10 — with 1 equating to “poor” and 10 meaning “excellent” — only 3 percent of the 277 client executives polled chose excellent, and almost half – 47 percent — ranked their shops between 1 and 5. Continue reading
American teenagers and young adults — a group known to market researchers as “the Millennials” — just aren’t that into Twitter, writes Therese Poletti.
See full story
Can new developments in real-time bidding give search a run for its money?
Banner ads, nearly given up for dead, are showing new life thanks to developments in the display ad business that could close the gap between ad spending on search and display ads.
Despite the plethora of banner inventory, marketers have been earmarking more of their Web budgets to search since it has better return on investment. Research firm eMarketer estimates that U.S. advertisers spent $11 billion on search ads in 2009, compared with less than $5 billion on display ads.
But the rise of automated, real-time exchanges — which collect data used to fine-tune ads based on targeted audiences — are showing returns that rival search, according to some marketers. Continue reading
Brands that grasp today’s ”double-click mentality” click with consumers.
While the reviewers pick apart Apple‘s iPad, one unassailable argument remains: We are not just living in digital times, but on digital time.
From getting news to reading the latest best-selling novel, to watching reruns of Gilligan’s Island, most of the content, products, information and entertainment we enjoy is available with a click. Consumers are conditioned to get what they want when they want it. I’m not sure this “double-click mentality” is necessarily a healthy thing, but it’s real, and the reality has huge implications for marketing and media executives. People want things that are immediate and convenient. Woe to marketers–even bricks-and-mortar retailers–that don’t get this. Double-click gratification is a table stake.
Hip-hop magazine The Source is celebrating Black History Month, in part, by briefly showcasing different brand ambassadors. To kick things off, they interviewed Lewis Williams of Burrell Communications. It’s not very long, so give it a look. The videos are meant to complement a piece about “African-American and multicultural ad agencies and the pioneers that founded them” in a print piece called Brand Ambassadors.
The Source Interviews Lewis Williams – The Big Tent – Advertising Age.
Jason Uzarraga 