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.
Contact Brian Kress
Posts by Brian Kress
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
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.
No Comments | Trackback | Categories: Digital Trend Reports, Social Media | Email This Post
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:
-
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:
-
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.
No Comments | Trackback | Categories: Uncategorized | Email This Post
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?
No Comments | Trackback | Categories: 1000 Ft. POV | Email This Post
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:
-
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.
No Comments | Trackback | Categories: 1000 Ft. POV, Research, Social Media | Email This Post
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.
No Comments | Trackback | Categories: 1000 Ft. POV | Email This Post
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?
No Comments | Trackback | Categories: 1000 Ft. POV | Email This Post
Bowers and Wilkins is a British hi-fi speaker company, and one of the most recognized names in high-performance speakers. They claim a constant pursuit of perfection, and B&W goes to great lengths (sometimes lengths that will set you back $60,000 for a pair) to ensure that their speakers make a “transparent reproduction of recorded sound.” In order to engage the audiophiles of the world, even those who may not be in the market for a $10,000 set of speakers, they needed to choose an alternate path to advertising for engaging their audience.
We had an interesting discussion around B&W at last week’s Likemind that explored their use of Twitter. Rather than using their Twitter account to announce product launches, distribute press releases, or push deals, B&W uses Twitter to present interesting articles about sound and ask its followers for their input on the debates of the industry.
As evidenced by their Twitter presence, they noticed an important commonality about their audience, that those who will want the best in speaker design are also looking to participate in the discussion and future of sound. And they don’t stop meeting this insight about their audience at Twitter, but have created their own society, dubbed “The Society of Sound,” that survives to instigate big sound conversations and share in the love for music. With fellows including Peter Gabriel and others successful in the industry and passionate in the pursuit of pure sound, the Society of Sound is a powerful testament to B&W.
From both their Twitter profile and their Society of Sound, B&W’s messaging strategy, rather than discussing the merits of their product, focuses around curating content that reinforces their brand values while delivering practical benefit to their prospects. This approach from B&W is an example of a brand that wants to mean something very specific to a select group of people rather than everything to everyone. The brand-as-curator mindset may help find platforms to communicate that are both powerful in message as well as useful to their end customer.
Around a year ago (and a spike around two years before that), the marketing blogosphere was enamored by the idea of brand utility. Brand utility had been summed up by a single epiphany from Bob Greenberg at R/GA, where he became certain that brand culture would move away from the metaphorical (as embodied in the TV spot and its interactive extensions) and toward the useful. In an approach of brand utility, said brand would forgo the common approach to advertising focused directly around benefits and instead drift towards using media to improve the usefulness of its product. Product and messaging become one in the same.
Does the B&W example qualify as brand utility? Does the utility of the brand need to relate directly with the product that you’re trying to sell, or can it simply be a different, useful set of content that reinforces your values?
Either way, B&W shows us a path for deep engagement and clear communication with our customers:
1. Learn about your target. Answer the question: what is a shared passion between your brand and your target? What is a discussion that they’re already having that you can contribute to?
2. Curate content around that discussion. Twitter seems to be a useful option given its ability for quick distribution of content. Articles, comments, questions, and branded content each have a place in the feed. Scale up your engagement by incorporating content from thought leaders, exclusive content, and even branded forums.
No Comments | Trackback | Categories: 1000 Ft. POV | Email This Post
Books – well, the bulk of books – throughout their long history have managed to abstain from the persuasions of advertising within their pages. Often, those ads that do live somewhere within a book’s pages are relevant only when the book first launches, so as a result, most publishers have had a hard time justifying selling ad space to advertisers. Now, a patent filing from Amazon employees may suggest a new way of providing ads in books that could stand the test of time.
Amazon’s proposed ad model is dynamic advertising both within their Kindle ebook business as well as their on demand printed materials.
The new model isn’t contextual ads (i.e. “To eat more chikin or not to eat more chikin, that is the question.”), rather Amazon hopes to place ads throughout ebooks between chapters, following a certain number of pages as well as in the margins. The patent demonstrates how ebooks could update to more “modern marketing” by taking cues from websites – supporting “free” content by advertisements. See below for a chart of how it might work:
From the printed materials side of the business, Amazon wants to leverage the on demand printing capability of their BookSurge company to place ads into those books. They currently have a large on-demand market for those out-of-print and/or rare books that only a few people will want every year. So rather than print a run of books that will likely not be sold, Amazon chooses to print these books once someone has purchased them from Amazon.com. As a result, they want to create an arena for advertisements that are relevant within the pages of an on-demand printed book.
The dynamic ad serving capability would also allow Amazon to use some of the rich information it has on its users for advertisers to match up to the right target. Because they have a rich purchase history as well as geographical information about its users, Amazon has the potential to use this information to help its advertisers to get the right message to the right person.
There has been much speculation around how this will effect the pricing for books from Amazon.com. A few options seem to be:
-
1) a lower price for the book for those readers willing to view advertisements
2) free ebook versions – supported by advertisements when you purchase a hard copy of a book
3) just another way for Amazon to monetize the content that they sell
An extra shower may be in order for saying this, but will books soon become a new avenue for advertisers to explore? It may be too early to judge, but we know a couple of things inherent in the situation:
Audiences are certainly engaged with the content on a page – possibly the most of any medium – which will be attractive to advertisers.
eBooks are already slated to reinvigorate a dwindling business for book publishers – Forrester estimates that 13 million people in the U.S. will have some kind of reading device by 2013.
Source Material:
Amazon Patent 1: On-Demand Generating E-Book Content with Advertising
Amazon Patent 2: Incorporating Advertising in On-Demand Generated Content
Amazon Charts Course Toward E-Book Advertising – AdAge
Amazon Patents Detail Kindle Advertising Model – MediaPost
Amazon Wants Patent For Inserting Ads Into Books – Slashdot
Coming to Amazon Kindle eBooks: Dynamic Advertising? – Search Marketing Communications
No Comments | Trackback | Categories: 1000 Ft. POV | Email This Post
Google has been the crowned king of search for some time now. In some ways, having a 70% to 80% market share has got to go to Google’s head. Having dedicated much time and energy to additions and alterations to it suite of products, some have started asking “what has Google missed?” It’s a question that has led to two new high-profile search products with very different objectives: Microsoft’s Bing and Wolfram Alpha.
In answering this question, we won’t only need to know what Google has done, but also what it plans to do. Luckily there are blogs these days, and in a 2008 post called the “Future of Search” Marissa Mayer, Google’s VP of Search Products, discusses, as you may imagine, Google’s perspective on where search is headed. She details out strategies for improving search like making it more mobile, multimedia, personalized, social, all ways to build upon Google’s foundation: the algorithm. It’s a post I’d encourage you to read, if you have a moment.
There is, though, a key problem we see with these search solutions of the future, and it’s a foundational problem. Each of her solutions are based on a mashup mentality, uniting the current results and content with new and interesting types of and ways to search. At the heart, it represents the basic assumption that Google’s algorithm does a good enough job in delivering relevant results.
But it doesn’t. We often find irrelevant results from Google’s. Posts not relevant to what we’re asking, unclear and untrustworthy information, and few options to treat different searches with a different type of output.
What Google Has Missed
This gives us an idea of what Google is missing:
1. An approach to treat different searches in distinct ways. For instance, a search for movie-related information shouldn’t pull or display results in the same way as a search for jet engine-related information.
2. An algorithm that gathers and displays the information that you’re looking for without pointing you to a web page. A key way to speed up the searches that we make is to keep us in familiar format and display only that information that is immediately relevant to our searches.
In come the latest pair of “Google killers.” Wolfram and Microsoft hope to dethrone Google by providing results in a different way, even changing the content that we receive altogether. They’ve begun to notice opportunities in the search marketplace that Google simply isn’t focused on: foundational ones, and they each have their own unique approach to how they’ll exploit them.
Microsoft Bing
Bing’s strength, at it’s core, is Microsoft’s understanding that different kinds of searches require different kinds of answers and interfaces. It treats a search for travel differently than a search for shopping by providing a different set of information and a different type of visualization for each. Google has started down this path with its suite of products meant for specific types of searches, but Microsoft has beaten them to an integrated platform that does the leg work for you.
Wolfram Alpha
Wolfram Alpha takes a different approach. Referring to itself as a “computational engine,” it has a single focus: rather than sending back web pages that may have results of the questions you’re looking for, Wolfram Alpha attempts to give solutions to you directly. Want to compare histories of two stocks? Just ask it. It goes about providing information by collecting and hand-curating info from databases across the web, eventually (read: a few hundred years) uniting all knowledge under a single source.
The Future of Search
Both Bing and Wolfram Alpha have their own set of issues, though. Microsoft uses an algorithm similar to Google’s that is spiced up with better functionality – you still get a lot of results that don’t pretain to what you’re looking for. It won’t take much for Google to catch up to the integration piece and leave out any competitive advantage for Bing – with the exception of their clever distinction between a “decision engine” and a “search engine.” (Future question reminder: how heavily does marketing effect the search business?)
Wolfram has an interesting approach, but its reliance on human input and customization of results might get it moving slower than the world expects. It needs something to streamline the possibilities of customized searches to truly be a reliable “computational engine.” It does, though, seem to have Google temporarily beat in the database game, Google’s comparable product Google Squared has some work to be done.
Hopefully, what all this means is that we’ll start to see some true competition in the search marketplace. Bing and Wolfram Alpha are pushing Google into minor panic mode, which is making them rethink some of those foundational elements in their service. What they seem to remember is that it doesn’t cost much to switch search engines. I’ll often start with Google and if I don’t find what I want fast enough, I’ll search on another engine.
We hope that what we’ll see result is both an exploration in new interfaces from search engines as well as an improved algorithm that helps us find the right results faster. Google’s missing something; it should search for it in Bing and Wolfram Alpha.
No Comments | Trackback | Categories: 1000 Ft. POV, Research | Email This Post
No Comments | Trackback | Categories: 1000 Ft. POV, Best in class | Email This Post