About Brian Kress
In his early career aspirations, Brian thought he would channel his passion for art and witty, satirical ideas into a role as an art director. So, armed with an advertising degree from Southern Methodist University (with a minor in communications and almost-minors in philosophy, anthropology and art), he started down the advertising road. But he soon found that choosing typefaces wasn’t as interesting as playing in the world of brand. And that started him on the path to planning, strategy and consumer insights. At Click Here, Brian translates brands into the interactive world. He looks at consumer trends and emerging technologies, and then uses the forces of his inner geek to find solutions for his clients. As he puts it, it’s about understanding the brand, the consumer and the category to find a place where they intersect and can live in harmony. Fitting for his role as an interactive strategist, Brian is a self-described media maven who is always accessing some type of information, video, music or art. In the rare moments he’s not consuming media, he pursues right-brain interests – though not always well – like playing the drums, drawing, or tickling the keys.
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Back when online video was new, it was rumored to kill the 30-second spot. Citing the benefits of a “lean-forward” audience, interactivity and targetability, industry experts predicted in-stream online video advertising to steal significant dollars from the traditional TV spend. Yet it still hasn’t made even a dent in the traditional linear TV budget. In fact, linear TV continues to dominate the video advertising space with $61 billion being spent on broadcast advertising in the U.S., compared to $2.2 billion in connected video.
Where has online video so far missed the mark? Most reasons aside, the major issue has been reach. Linear TV simply has more eyeballs for more hours than online video. But that’s beginning to change. Not because people are abandoning the comfort of their couch for the posture-fixing desk chair, but because we’re bringing more and more connected devices into the living room. Between Xbox 360s, Boxee Boxes, Vizio IP TVs and mobile devices, our entertainment channels within the living room are increasingly connected.
As the national audience shifts their attention toward the rapidly growing number of connected devices, we as advertisers should be prepared to change their perspective on what we currently think of as TV advertising. Instead of the static 30-second stories we’ve done our best to ignore, the coming future of TV advertising combines the reach of the current linear TV landscape with the interactivity, targeting and analytics we’ve come to expect from PC video advertising.
There are a few major opportunities we see connected video bringing to the living room in the near future:
1. Highly targeted advertising in a lean-back environment – Combine the same great targeting efficiencies that digital brings to the table with the massive reach offered by the living room forum.
2. Interactivity from the couch – The app-led environment of connected TVs affords advertisers the opportunity to go beyond passive viewing and actually interact with the content they’re watching. Advertising in this space will allow viewers to drive the new sports car, buy (and play) the new video game and investigate the latest changes in cancer treatment.
3. Efficiency in cross-media campaigns – Ad networks in the space are already building out landscapes of advertising opportunities that transfer views across several media. This ability allows advertisers to run sequences of messages and frequency requirements across several devices, including mobile, PC and TV.
4. Advanced analytics for TV – Rather than rely on GRPs and self-reported data in tracking studies, connected TV can build in metrics that know actual viewership, interaction rates and influence on behavior in other touchpoints.
While these are just a few opportunities, the changes in advertising will likely be drastic. What do you think? How else might connectivity change TV advertising?
All over CES this past week, there have been new launches in television technology. No, this year we’re not talking about 3-D, we’re talking about tech that makes TV smarter. Hooking up TVs to the internet, building in processors and operating systems, and giving some new power to third parties might make 2011 the year that TV starts really messing with the business of a few categories.
Here, we’ll outline three very interesting TV innovations that have deadly implications for three very different industries.
Industry 1: Video Games
Threat: Vizio’s OnLive-capable TVs
OnLive is a video game system that streams games in real time. Players don’t need any hard media at all, instead just a quick Internet connection. Previously, OnLive has rolled out PC and Mac versions of the software, last month they launched their first microconsole and now they’ve integrated directly into Vizio’s latest-and-greatest TV sets.
This move, if it catches on, completely negates three major chunks of the video game supply chain.
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• First: It hurts the retailer. Games are purchased directly from the OnLive service, so no need for a middleman to take a layer off the top. The games are currently very limited as well, so there are yet to be any problems with sorting through a massive library.
• Second: It hurts the publisher. Without any hard copies of games to sell, there is no need for the distribution capabilities of a publisher in the supply chain.
• Third: It hurts the consoles. When the TV has the brains, there’s no reason to have an extra box (much less three extra boxes) sitting beside it.
Industry 2: On-Demand for Cable and Satellite Companies
Threat: Netflix integration on many TVs (including Sony Bravia, Vizio, Samsung, LG, Sanyo, Panasonic)
While it’s not new for this year’s CES, more than ever before, connected TVs are integrating Netflix into their application offering, even to the point of including a “Netflix button” on remote controls from a variety of companies. Say goodbye to on-demand video services from cable and satellite companies, whose only practical benefit anymore is getting movies more quickly than Netflix, and prepare for your TV to source your movies once again.
We have seen a few issues standing in the way of the on-demand takeover.
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• First: Netflix is having issues with their streaming catalog. As any subscriber will tell you, they’ve yet to get contracts in place for a lot of the movies that America wants to watch most – particularly in the new releases arena.
• Second: Netflix requires a speedy Internet connection for a true HD experience. In our house, we find ourselves renting or buying the Blu-ray version of visually rich movies and streaming those where we don’t care about visuals.
Industry 3: Desktop Computer
Threat: App-driven nature of all smart TVs
Desktops’ utility in the home has slowly been deteriorating over the past several years. From high-speed laptops and portable tablet devices, to cloud storage and skyrocketing mobile capability, new and integrated devices and services might be killing the desktop.
One example is Skype’s recent expansion from the traditional desktop perch to mobile devices, Blu-ray players and now TVs. The idea of the living room tele-presence might be another nail in the coffin of not only the home telephone, but also the desktop computer.
All this new innovation stems from the new mantra of TV manufacturers: There’s an app for that.
We’ve heard that somewhere before…
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It may be obvious, but cash and checks are no longer the preferred method to pay for things. No, that function has been traded, in large part, for magnetic strips and ones and zeroes.
As more and more digital enters into the stream of cash flow, enterprising start-ups have been looking for new, interesting, convenient and cost-effective means to change the way we pay for stuff. And there are a lot of ideas out there along these lines.
Rather than dive into the crazy, Minority Report-like world of iris scanning, voice identification and other biometric technologies that exist, if at all, on the scientific fringe, we’d instead like to discuss three new payment technologies that are real and emerging as a result of rapid expansion and adoption of new communication platforms:
Tweet to pay – Have a Twitter? Have followers? Haggle well? “Pay with a Tweet” is the first social payment system, where people pay with the value of their social network. Every time somebody pays with a tweet, he or she tells all their followers about the product.
How does this work? Retailers sign up for the Pay with a Tweet program, where they then offer discounts and samples to customers who agree to promote the product with a noneditable URL that leads back to the retailer website.
From here, the retailer sends you a coupon for whatever service you’ve “bought.”
There are certainly a few hurdles to overcome for this technology:
1. Is it worth offering free samples to every tweeter?
2. How do you place a value on one tweet over another? Are more followers better?
3. What checks and balances are in place to assure that my followers are real people?
With these issues, there are still some major fixes left to solve on Pay with a Tweet, but the idea of couponing in support of spreading the word for your brand seems fair at its core.
Text to pay – Text-to-pay technology isn’t exactly new, but is still emerging in the U.S. The best success of text to pay, though, is from the Red Cross Haiti campaign, where people donated $37 million through text messages alone (which accounted for 14% of overall donations to the Red Cross).
Despite this nonprofit success, the text-to-pay trend has still yet to hit retail in a big way. But that doesn’t mean that plenty aren’t trying. Of all the vendors selling this competency, XIPWIRE appears to be the one doing it right. Through XIPWIRE, a mobile subscriber, rather than charge a purchase back to their phone bill, will link an account to your phone number and then text a certain word to a shortcode (five-digit, SMS-specific number).
Outside the U.S., though, text to pay is making some progress. Dunedin, New Zealand, for instance, is using text-to-pay parking meters.
Mobile payment – In addition to payment through apps (as mentioned in Jeff’s post a few weeks ago), there are a number of types of mobile payment options surfacing. The most viable that is beginning to gain some traction is a mobile technology called Square.
Square uses mobile phones as the payment device with a simple application and a card reader plugged into your phone jack.
Most adoption of the Square technology that we’ve seen has existed inside hip boutiques and short-term, “pop-up” stores or events, but expect it to be coming to a retailer near you. Square is one partnership away from mass adoption – and it’s getting more and more publicity.
In large part (and not to get too nerdy here), these new systems mark a paradigm shift in the point-of-sale experience. Like many other things digital, they take control from the retailer and put the POS opportunity into the hands of consumers – making that experience look more like Amazon.com and less like a grocery store.
The only thing that’s standing in the way is a few details to get these systems off the ground in a real way.
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On July 12, videos from “Old Spice Man,” aka “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like,” started showing up on the Internet. But these weren’t normal spots, but instead responses to fans from across the Internet.
For instance, here’s a response from Old Spice Man to Twitter user Jsbeals, who asked Old Spice Man to ask for his girlfriend’s hand in marriage
In the ensuing three days, the production team for Old Spice created 183 video responses to question threads from Twitter, Reddit, Digg, Facebook, blogs and 4Chan. Over the next seven-day period, they amassed a whopping 36 million total views to their social media experiment and built significant brand credibility with the thought-leaders and meme-starters of the Internet.
From the success of this brief initiative, advertisers should take away a few lessons:
1. Adapt your brand assets to fit an emerging medium – Old Spice used the strength of the character they created in their offline campaign. Even before this initiative, Old Spice Man had become something of an Internet celebrity. Netizens used the cadence of the original spot inside their own conversations and posed rhetorical questions about the Old Spice Man’s mythical nature. Old Spice was sure to leverage the equity they had already built for this character when bringing their brand into the social space.
2. Ensure quality content – Old Spice accomplished this by doing two things:
a. They used social media experts as copywriters – Not only did the Old Spice Guy have funny comments, but the comments were relevant to the communities. For instance, knowing (and leveraging) the Internet’s fascination with Ninja and Pirate battles.
b. They looked for comments where they could have success – They didn’t respond to every single comment left to them. Instead, they found comments that created the best opportunities to reinforce their brand message. For instance, choosing to answer “How can I smell like fighting and space shuttles?” rather than “Dear Old Spice Man: I tried Old Spice and the results were underwhelming.”
3. Produce content in real time – This was the most important piece of this project’s success: they recognized that social media is a real-time world. As such, these responses had to take place quickly and still retain a high production value. In most cases, the Old Spice responses came within an hour or two of the questions posed. Of course, this didn’t happen by magic; no, real-time messaging takes significant planning and “on the ground” resources to do it right.
4. Publish where your fans are – Don’t make them find you (even if you already have a social media presence). Dig into the forums and communities that aren’t particularly brand-friendly, but are where conversations are happening. For this promotion, Old Spice used a social media monitoring software to find conversations about the brand and looked for opportunities to embed themselves in “virally-relevant” communities.
5. Stay true to your communication goals – Of course, it’s important to stay true to your brand and the goals of your advertising. In many responses, Old Spice made sure to not only answer questions, but did so in a way that spoke about the brand and the product. For an initiative like this to remain loyal to your brand goals, you have to be willing to devote an extensive time investment from a broad team, from careful strategic planning down to execution.
We should say that this campaign has, so far, failed to produce sales results for Old Spice Red Zone After Hours Body Wash. In fact, according to SymphonyIRI, in the 52 weeks ended June 13, sales of the brand are down 7%. While those figures won’t include results from this social media initiative, it may show problems for the “Old Spice Man” direction overall. It’s a solid reminder that mass attention doesn’t necessarily mean money in the bank. UPDATE: It looks like sales are up, too! Recent sales figures show a lift last month of 107%.
In all, though, Old Spice created a unique and breakthrough execution founded on a few of the tenets of social media marketing; principally, that real-time, personal content is sure to win the hearts and minds of your audience. I’d challenge you, dear reader, to define and learn from what is and isn’t successful both from your and your competitor’s emergent media practices. With enough insight into how the medium works, you, too, can build a breakthrough campaign.
For more on how this was pulled together, see this article: http://creativity-online.com/news/behind-the-work-old-spice-responses/144947
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If you haven’t noticed, social networking has infiltrated our lives. We post our résumés, our pictures, our relationships, our minute-by-minute thoughts, nearly everything we are to create better connections with our friends and loved ones.
Quick to follow suit, gaming has been revolutionized because of social networking, creating a new genre that could perhaps end up being the main genre of gaming: social gaming. Social gaming in essence is playing games as a way of social interaction, and we currently see it in two forms: (1) playing games on social networking sites and (2) having social experiences inside traditional gaming venues. As we enter the next decade, we expect that these two separate pieces of social gaming will begin to merge.
What We’ve Seen So Far
2009 was a hallmark year for a couple of new forms of gaming: social gaming and mobile gaming, particularly because it saw some validation from the traditional gaming world. For instance, with its base of a few hundred million users, Facebook accelerated through the ranks to become the biggest gaming platform man has ever known. Also, game-publishing giant EA opened two new divisions focused around nontraditional gaming: 8lb Gorilla is a “micro-studio” that builds inexpensive games for the iPhone, and EA acquired Playfish, one of the leading studios in building social games on Facebook. Each of these moves demonstrated the viability of these new forms of gaming and a hint that they are probably here to stay.
As a result, consoles started to take this whole “social thing” to heart. OnLive, a microconsole dedicated to, among other things, sharing your gaming experiences with your friends, launched a beta program, which is expected to be released in early 2010. Microsoft’s Xbox 360 added access to Twitter and Facebook from your console, allowing users to find and follow their Facebook friends on Xbox 360. Sony’s PS3 launched PlayStation Home, a virtual world where users create an avatar, decorate a personal apartment and find friends in public spaces.
From the other hall of social gaming, the social networks, game developers have started to hone in on a model for social gaming. The model is typically referred to as “freemium,” which, at its heart, allows users to play the game for free, but to get additional, exclusive items, they may need to pay a small price. In Farmville, the most popular game on Facebook with 75 million monthly active users, players build their own farm by hoeing land and purchasing various seeds, animals and other farm necessities.
On top of the freemium model, the most successful Facebook games add, of course, a social element. Using Farmville as an example, friends can give other friends gifts like fences, geese or apple trees, or help fertilize crops. Also, any and all activities in the game are available to publish to the gamer’s wall for all of his/her friends to see.
Predictions for 2010
Social Networking Sites Provide Consistency of Platform for Social Interactions
One of the major problems currently in the social gaming space is that many developers haven’t agreed on a platform for how users will socialize their gaming experience. Most games currently create their own platform for social interactions by building leaderboards, allowing users to communicate over a headset with a team and setting up a profile on a console.
Instead, we expect that 2010 will give us, or at least start down the path of giving us, a swath of games and consoles that rely on a single platform for social interactions.
As of right now, the closest to building that platform is the player with the widest network, Facebook. Facebook has taken painful steps to build a good method for distributing connections off the site in their product Facebook Connect and the newly announced Open Graph. Facebook currently allows Facebook users to log into third-party websites, applications, mobile devices and gaming systems with their Facebook identity. While logged in, users can connect with friends via these media and post information and updates to their Facebook profile.
In 2010, we expect game publishers, developers and consoles to continue their exploration of what Facebook can offer and leverage the platform to find new, interesting ways for users to share their play with friends.
Influx of Beautiful, Inexpensive Games that Rely on the “Freemium” Model
While the social networking world has seen the value in the freemium model for producing games, many of the more traditional gaming outlets have yet to realize its potential. Some games, such as the Sims and World of Warcraft, are getting close, but we expect that 2010 will see a number of new games that leverage the console and, to a lesser extent, mobile’s ability to build immersive, 3-D worlds that gamers can access for free, with upgrades to purchase.
Something to keep an eye out for in this instance is Sony’s Sodium One. Sodium is a new sci-fi Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) game that will launch as part of PlayStation Home on the PS3. Rather than taking the Farmville path or a 2-D Flash game that, according to the PlayStation Home director, “pales in comparison to a traditional gaming experience,” Sodium takes the next step with social gaming, making it “as enjoyable and compelling as traditional console games.” The game takes place in a sci-fi space world with a virtual economy and virtual goods, a series of casual mini-games and “Salt Shooter” – where players pilot a hovercraft to kill robots and earn resources to upgrade their ships and add components to their PlayStation Home.
While we haven’t seen Microsoft or Wii announce anything that fits the freemium model exactly, if Sodium One is successful in bringing more users over to PlayStation and growing Home’s 10 million user base, we should certainly see something coming out of the other respective camps.
Why this Matters for Marketers
As the social gaming world takes shape in 2010, marketers will be greeted with a slew of new opportunities to make an impact in this space.
1. Participating in the social platform of choice. Regardless of whether Facebook Open Graph ends up as the social platform going forward, marketers should certainly enter the fray. When thinking of ways to leverage digital and gaming, marketers should take into account ways to include their targets’ social connections as part of the promotion.
2. Sponsoring freemium virtual goods. The easiest opportunity for brands in the freemium-type experience is to sponsor a piece of content. It may be as easy as Tropicana sponsoring a free orange tree to put on your farm in Farmville that produces better-selling oranges, or it could get to a place where a marketer could have their own store inside a virtual economy built by one of these games. Every avatar needs some new clothes, you know.
Social gaming is certainly an emerging opportunity and field that will not only change the way we as marketers interact with our customers, but also the way our customers interact with each other. It is important that industry leaders participate as this marketplace grows and help to shape the outcome.
View all 10 trends here: Ten Digital Trends for 2010… and Beyond.
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As we near the launch of the iPad, we’re seeing more and more invention around it. One of the most surprising and interesting set of inventions coming to the Apple device are those from the world of magazines.
Here’s the summation of the recent events as shouted by mussed-hair newsies on streetcorners:
EXTRA, EXTRA: PUBLISHERS REJOICE OVER IPAD.
Magazine publishers continue to worry about falling circulation numbers, hoping this faddish Internet disappears as if it were a bad dream. As such, they’ve been working hard trying to re-invent themselves, with their latest scheme surrounding Steve Jobs’ iPad. The device, with its blend of old media charm and new media interactivity, may well be the savior of their medium, which has driven them to start experimenting with iPad apps.
What follows are three of the best examples and demonstrations that we’ve seen:
Wired was first out of the gate to launch a really neat iPad app demonstration:
Some have started to experiment with what the iPad means for magazine covers
And others still have been experimenting with what feature stories could look like.
Conde Nast has even made a commitment to build iPad apps for each of its top publications, leading the charge of “let’s go save our medium.”
From everything we have seen so far, it appears the iPad has become the future-hope of magazines to become relevant in the digital age.
With all the invention happening in the space, there is a surprising lack of reference to how advertisers expect to interact with this new medium. Unilever, Toyota Motor, and Fidelity Investments have already signed on to $200,000 marketing programs with Time magazine, and the most we know about what those deals entail is that they’re full-page ads.
We are left with merely a lot of questions:
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What new ad platforms will rise from the ether?
What iPad capabilities will we be able to leverage?
Can we link over to our own apps?
How much fun can we have?
How standardized will the offerings be?
And maybe most importantly, who will actually pay for and use these apps?
There are plenty of questions rising from what we’ve seen so far in the magazine on eReader space. One thing is for sure: As magazines reinvent themselves on the iPad (or whatever supercharged eReader wins out), so will print advertisers.
So, as our clients begin to plan their strategies for the iPad, we’ve pulled together a few ideas of how we’d like to start:
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1. Reach out to publications, especially those we run in regularly. Ask if they’re planning on building something for the iPad; ask what kinds of opportunities there will be for advertisers.
2. Be a part of a pilot program. As we saw with iPhone and Facebook apps, a novel technology experiment rewards those advertisers that get in on the ground floor. Also, publishers will be greeted with enough skepticism and uncertainty that we can also get in for cheap.
3. Build creative executions that push the available technology. Don’t be satisfied by repurposed or limited creative. This is a unique space which will deserve a unique execution.
4. Know what other brands are doing in the space. See how they leverage the technology and the audience.
5. Watch iPad sales and audience data. While the technology is really cool, we, of course, need to make sure someone sees it. The marketplace as a whole is still pretty unsure about the iPad.
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Mock as you will Apple’s new “magical” device, but the iPad – and soon-to-be derivative products – presents several new opportunities for brands as the mobile tablet space takes shape.
Even though it may not be the perfect device some critics expected, the iPad takes a new perspective on the tablet. Yes, it looks and feels like a hormone-injected iPod Touch, after all it has those exact same application icons, but this is a major change for the tablet space for several reasons:
- It’s not a laptop, it’s a tablet – Rather than cutting the keyboard from a regular OS, as most tablets are wont to do, the iPad instead uses the iPod Touch functionality proven to work for touch-screen users’ big, ugly fingers.
- A real display, and real speed to match – Most tablets have big, ugly, slow processors to match low resolution screens. With a full HD display, an efficient processor and a touch screen that feels organic, the iPad has the hardware advantage.
- A pre-loaded App Store – As with most Apple products, the magic of the iPad is in the software. It will leverage the 130,000-app App Store built for iPhone and iPod Touch users, and made it simple for app developers to upgrade their apps to the tablet space.
The iPad’s main benefit, particularly for marketers, is that it has laid ground for a new world of mobile applications, ads and websites that can display large, intricate brand experiences.
As we’ve seen happen with iPhone and other slate smartphones, on-the-go will become the primary surfing space for iPad users. These users will need much deeper, more functional websites than those we tend to think about for on-the-go users; they’ll be built for extended web usage, while still needing to live in the touch-screen world.
All this isn’t to say that iPad users should be treated exactly like normal desktop users. With the lack of file storage, Flash, and propensity to be on the go, we still need to consider use cases specific to users of the iPad and other tablets that are surely to emerge upon Apple’s success.
A few rules on how brands might ease into this space:
Be location aware
With devices connected to cell towers, we have the ability to target any mobile users’ location within a reasonably tight range. Marketers should build location-specific messaging into their content to improve the iPad users’ experience.
Include long-form content
Without the limitations of the small screen, iPad users will be more likely to engage and stay engaged with an experience on the web.
Remember, it’s touch screen
Lists of small links, long text fields on websites that work with a mouse and normal keyboard won’t work here. Consider new and innovative ways to cater your features and functionality to touch-screen users.
While it’s still in its early stages, most of the influence of the iPad is still yet to be seen. What else do you think the iPad means for mobile?
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Virtual goods – items with no intrinsic value in the real world – are a booming economy. 12% of Americans have bought virtual goods in the past year from an industry that analysts estimate to reach $1 billion in the U.S. for 2009 alone.
Payments for virtual goods are typically made through microtransactions, which allows users to spend just a few dollars to give a gift or get them ahead online. For instance, Facebook Gifts typically go for $1 each.
Until now, most social games have used fake brands for their virtual goods, but the opportunity for brands in the real world to make a virtual world impact has demonstrated its power. Similar to how we have seen brands impact more traditional video games, the presence of real world brands in the social gaming space will lend an extra bit of realism to the overall experience. As a result, branded virtual goods on Facebook are clicked on 10 times more often than their non-branded counterparts. At the same time, the brands themselves benefit from extra recognition, exposure, and consumer interest from simply participating inside the emerging media format.
We see brands as currently having three opportunities in the space:
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1. Sponsorships
– The brand presence in the space could be as simple as sponsoring a piece of the overall virtual good experience. Like other sponsorships, virtual good sponsorship does best at establishing leadership.
Purina brand pet food announced late last year that they act as the exclusive virtual kibble supplier in FooPets, a place where users can care for their virtual pet. As a result, every time you feed your little virtual Fluffy, a big bag of Purina is what pours kibble into the bowl, nourishing your companion.
2. Unlocking exclusive content
- A brand could act as a hero, giving social gamers deals on special or limited-run goods. The brand could be the provider of access, thereby building some affinity.
For example, Facebook recently expanded their virtual gift offering to include music, sports gifts, charity gifts and e-cards. While we haven’t seen it happen yet, a brand could be the provider of, say, free helmets for the teams in the bowl game that they sponsor, or a selection of holiday songs leading up to Christmas.
3. Selling branded virtual goods
- Branded virtual goods have the potential to provide an extra benefit for ownership. Not only would the user get a recognizable brand name on their stuff, but it could also unlock special advantages, creating a bit of realism and building brand equity. For instance, if Nike sneakers make your avatar run faster and jump higher in your social game, they might also in the real world.
Virtual goods are an emerging marketplace, creating many micro-economies from 1′s and 0′s that tap on our natural human need to give to one another and nurture what we have. As this marketplace grows, we expect that brands will be more and more prevalent in the space.
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From text to apps to mobile sites, mobile marketing presents a wide range of opportunities. Today, I’m going to explore one of the most promising platforms, mobile search advertising.
As of March 2009, there are a little short of 20 million mobile subscribers using search engines, a number that is expected to climb to 60 million by 2013. In this search environment, Google is the far and away leader, capturing even more market share than it does in desktop search with more than 90% of the U.S. mobile search market.
How is mobile search different?
Today, the mobile search market, particularly in Google’s case, is conveniently integrated with the general search campaign. This meaning that search engines will typically serve the same ads within a mobile search as a desktop search. Over time, though, websites will feature more mobile-specific content. In the future, we expect that search engines will grant this content a higher ranking than its standard, desktop counterpart when competing for the same keywords from a mobile device.
That isn’t to say that marketers shouldn’t build a separate mobile campaign. People searching on their mobile phones aren’t as keen on typing in specific searches as they might be on the desktop, so our mobile search campaigns likely need to be a little different. Mobile search campaigns often require a different set of keywords – usually shorter and more general, and need to be monitored and optimized on their own. In addition, mobile search ads often have the option to include a phone number and a click-to-call link inside the ad itself.
Cost and performance
As with desktop search, the price of mobile search campaigns varies depending on the keywords you choose and how much you bid. For these campaigns, marketers set a daily budget and are charged only when a user clicks on their ads. Placement depends on whether or not they out-bid other companies competing for the same search keyword.
There have been conflicting reports on performance of mobile search ads. Some have enjoyed significantly better results than their desktop counterparts – often reaching 15% click through rates – while others have had difficulty even reaching their desktop search numbers with 0.5%. Brand metrics tell a different story. We’ve seen consistent increases of brand metrics, particularly unaided brand awareness, when a marketer has top position on mobile search results.
Considerations
Along with an up and running mobile campaign, it’s important to live with a couple things in mind:
Think post-click
Because many mobile campaigns currently experience high click through rates, it is important to build interesting and appropriate mobile websites. More often than advertising, these sites have the opportunity to include rich brand experiences like video and, for some phones, interactive elements.
Think integration
Mobile advertising works best as part of an integrated campaign. It’s a channel that has the flexibility to compliment both traditional and digital media over a wide range of objectives. Often, mobile can act as the brand bridge between the traditional and digital worlds, blending the sometimes-disparate experiences together. The best practice here is to keep pointing your audience to the next brand experience. From print, point to mobile, from mobile, point to online, from online, point to an event.
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There has been plenty of discussion across the web about measuring online advertising campaigns. Many posts cite our industry’s current fix, the click through rate, as a good solution, but we’ve found that integrating brand metrics into our view of success makes for a more complete picture.
Historically, online campaigns have had the luxury of ubiquitous behavioral accompaniment. Along with CTR, we track other behavioral metrics (aka Key Performance Indicators) such as impressions, interaction rate, total clicks, cost per impression, cost per interaction, cost per click, leads or acquisitions, visits to key website pages, purchases, and cost per significant action; each built and widely used throughout the online marketing world to help us better understand how our media changes people’s behavior.
While these behavioral metrics are certainly important, we feel that these metrics alone don’t tell the whole story. They tend to be a narrow window into how successful our campaigns are. Instead, what we have started to recognize is that value comes from more than clicks, time, and transactions. The most valuable customer isn’t necessarily the one that clicks, interacts, or even buys the most.
We’ve found that our behavioral metrics tell us the most when accompanied by attitudinal ones, metrics that help us understand how our advertising changes our brand in the minds of the target over time. These metrics allow us to better plan and place messaging considering how it effects our brand in the long term.
We use three types of studies on a number of clients to give us a more complete look at how our advertising is truly affecting our target:
1. Online advertising effectiveness studies: These studies issue brand tracking study-like questions to gauge the brand and sales impact of our online advertising. Most providers (our preferences listed below) use a control/exposed methodology, having each group respond to a questionnaire that includes common brand metrics like awareness, preference, motivation, persuasion, etc.
Insight Express, Dynamic Logic, Factor TG
2. Buzz monitoring: Buzz monitoring studies aggregate all the conversation happening online about your brand or category – in traditional or social media – and use that data to gather insight and make messaging recommendations. See our post on capturing conversations for more info.
Nielsen BuzzMetrics, TNS Cymfony, ScoutLabs
3. Net Promoter score: The sworn tool of loyalty marketing geeks, the Net Promoter score, asks a single question on a 0 to 10 rating scale, “How likely is it that you would recommend our company to a friend of colleague?” From there, it categorizes responses into three groups: Promoters (9 to 10 rating), Passives (7 to 8 rating), and Detractors (0 to 6 rating), then subtracts the Detractors from the Promoters. “Good scores” vary industry to industry, but, typically, anywhere over 40% is strong.
Each of these fills a gap of knowledge that the behavioral metrics certainly do not. When used in conjunction with those behavioral metrics, particularly when balanced per the objective in an index, we’ve been able to spend smarter and persuade more effectively.
What other methods have you used to find the attitude behind the behavior?
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