So if we finished all our Christmas shopping two weeks ago does that mean our spending won’t be counted in the annual hand-wringing over retail sales figures? Probably not, but it should be. That’s just one small reason why the news is broken, because all these breathless stories over the state of the economy don’t look beyond the press releases that are distributed by various parties with skin in the game.
Advertising
The CW is launching a campaign for their new fall shows that will acknowledge the current variations on the idea of “talking about” a show. The ads will feature copy such as “TV to blog about” and “TV to text about” and more. If you ask me the campaign says more about The CW’s target demographic than it does about communications technology.
Gotta say, the video of Jimmy Kimmel’s routine in front of ad buyers at ABC’s upfront comes off a lot less like a “kick in the crotch” to the network and more like a “cynical take on the reality every knows but doesn’t acknowledge.” Isn’t the role of a comedian to point out the ridiculousness of an institution?
One of the biggest challenges facing advertisers these days is finding a way to effectively tap into and monetize the real-time web. The problem is that advertising is, by and large, a laborious process that does not adjust easily or quickly and the web is increasingly doing just that.
The online classifieds category has more than doubled since 2005 according to Pew Research, with newspapers and traditional purveyors of classified advertising missing out on almost all of that while craigslist and its ilk have been the primary sources of that growth.
Marketers are very worried, according to a new survey, about the hijacking of their brand online, but many don’t know what to do about it.
Yahoo’s Newspaper Consortium is actually showing signs of success, with some papers saying participating in the program has increased their online ad sales and subsequent revenue.
If you watch Hulu and find the volume of PSAs to be…interesting…since it means that spot was unable to attract an advertiser here’s why: Media buyers don’t know what to do with it. It’s too big to warrant a traditional online video approach but too small to fit into a traditional TV approach. Bank on this – When Hulu figures out how to maximize its revenue and get over this roadblock the advertising world will be in for a rather substantial shift.
In an effort to retain ad dollars some online publishers are becoming more agreeable to full-site takeover ads, a type that advertisers love since it gets in front of people’s eyeballs in an aggressive fashion. I’m not saying they’re the best idea, but I’d expect to see more of them on high-profile sites that want to make brand advertisers happy.
Media
Good luck keeping up with and finding the people who are illegally using your copyrighted material, says Liz Gannes. The cutting edge will always include a small subset of people determined to misuse the creations of other people and the way the law functions means companies are constantly playing catch-up. For those looking to try to find out where their content is being ripped off, there are a couple of tools profiled by Forbes.
The economic reality of printing the title has cause the Newspaper Association of America to cease publication of Presstime, the trade group’s magazine on the industry. Presstime will continue to exist online, but you have to marvel at the meta of the decision.
YouTube is giving content partners, especially those from networks and other media companies, more control over both the advertising within and the presentation of their shows and videos on YouTube’s site. The idea, as is often the case with YouTube, is to make the content more attractive to brand advertisers and bring more of their money to that site.
Social Media
As Jordan at MarketingPilgrim says, don’t quite take a study reporting people don’t have their purchasing behavior influenced by social media at face value. There are lots of ways it, like any other advertising platform, influences thinking that isn’t immediately recognized and so it would seem niave to say it doesn’t influence people at all.
Have fun with it, but make sure social media isn’t taking over your life.
Advertising/Marketing
I have to love the story that ABC has some sort of super-secret metric for their advertising that proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that those ads lead directly to sales for the advertisers. Unfortunately they can’t prove it because advertisers are reluctant to share numbers on the resulting sales.
Pretty sure I and most of the people I know were already aware of the notion that, in our role as marketers, being polite to people on social networks and not hammering them with irrelevant invitations or messages was a good idea. But just to reinforce that fact the Internet Advertising Bureau in the U.K. has issued a statement to that effect.
Statements being made by the FTC and other governmental regulators make it sound like the window for self-regulation of the behavioral-targeting ad industry might be closing soon. While there are no proposals being bandied about yet, if the big players in this market don’t come up with some guidelines that protect consumer interests and lay out best practices as well as restrictions, it’s clear the FTC is ready to step into this conversation. Unfortunately a rampant outbreak of Don’tKnowWhatTheyreTalkingAbout seems to have broken out among the lawmakers.
General Mills has recruited 900 bloggers – 80% of which are moms – into a new product sampling and review program. Deals like this that are huge in scope and give the marketing industry media an excuse to write the word “mommyblogger” often get a lot of coverage and analysis while more targeted efforts often languish. The program, and others like it, is designed to take advantage of the fact that women put a lot of weight behind the reviews of other women they consider peers in online communities.
If there’s a decent call to action and some value for the consumer, smartphone users are actually clicking on ads they see on their mobile devices.
Media buyers and agencies are embracing the change enacted by some cable news channels that keeps the crawl of news at the bottom of the screen going during commercial breaks. Instead of being concerned it distracts from the ad they feel it’s helping people pay attention and not fast-forward if they’re doing some time-delayed viewing.
An upcoming Forrester report on the state of the interactive advertising industry shows there’s still growth occurring and in it future, with “social media” programs being the biggest winner in terms of percentage of dollars. Mike Manuel, though, points out that “social media” touches a number of different departments and not all of this is going to marketing initiatives.
Greg Verdino writes about the idea of “earned attention” as being something the marketing industry needs to shoot for and I couldn’t agree more.
Media
A new study shows that cross-media multi-tasking, specifically instances of people going online while also watching prime-time programming on television, almost doubles between Monday and Thursday. That could be a boon to advertisers who include a URL in their ads since it means people could immediately react and go to their site, but that would necessitate a strong call to action to visit the site, which is something most ads astoundingly lack.
More people are watching more content on multiple platforms according to research from Accenture. Some of the stats are a tad misleading – the story shifts from talking about television-type shows to the more generic “online video” and I think there’s a broad swath of content they’re talking about – but overall I agree with the notion that as content becomes available on more platforms people will shift their habits to whatever fits their needs.
The Chicago Tribune has put the brakes on a program that allowed online readers to access and comment on stories that had yet to be fully vetted and published. The kibosh came from editors who received complaints from writers and other staff members over this extraordinarily unorthodox idea.
Retail
Consumer feedback site Yelp.com is now allowing businesses to participate in the discussion and correct any incorrect information. There are a number of guidelines they must follow (stay on topic, this isn’t an advertising forum, etc) but it’s nice to see businesses being given an opportunity to at least respond.
The idea of collecting sales tax on online purchases is gaining steam once again as states continue to see falling local sales tax revenue and eye enviously states like New York that instituted such a tax last year.
Seems even with concerns about spending being on their minds, grocery shoppers are still giving increased weight to a manufacturer’s sustainability and other “green” practices when deciding what brand to purchase.
I’m torn between thinking the new initiative by Toys ‘R’ Us to put packaged goods and everyday staples in a new front-of-store section is either the best idea ever or the worst thing possible.
Social Media
Erin at Queen of Spain is calling out all the people who think of themselves and call themselves “mommybloggers” but don’t actually talk at all about their lives as moms, instead filling their sites with reviews and promotions. Kelby Carr hits some similar notes as well.
Data portability – functionality that allows online users to use a single login for multiple sites – will lead the push into the next wave of the social web according to a new report from Forrester Research. The thinking goes that even sites without a social networking component will be able to add “members” (there are hints of this in Google Friend Connect and other tools) and will be able to customize content based on the data these people bring with them about themselves and their networks.
Apparently people use Twitter for timely information updates. Huh. Similarly it’s not that surprising that Twitter doesn’t have a huge return-visit percentage, with a lot of people who sign up with outsized expectations not returning to it the next month. Those numbers are questioned, though, since a lot of people wind up not visiting Twitter but using a third-party app like TweetDeck
Media: A study of journalists shows that 60 percent of them now contribute to a blog or website, with a third of them just getting started in the last year. I’m assuming this means something beyond just having a column repurposed online.
More talk about putting mainstream news content behind a pay wall, including news that the Associated Press is in discussions for just such an arrangement.
User-generated content continues to grow, with social networks being the largest creation platform for said creation.
Advertising: YouTube is selling more video ads to deeper-pocketed advertisers according to a new study. There’s also a significant amount of the most popular videos that came from marketers themselves.
Whatever it winds up looking like, there’s little doubt that the television advertising model is changing as media options proliferate and younger viewers enter the marketplace who have never known a world without on-demand, commercial-skipping viewing.
Creative agencies will this year be invited to the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s discussion on banner ads, a discussion that will try to bring together the needs of publishers and advertisers, two sides who sometimes have different views of a banner ad’s place in the world.
Ad networks are great for publishers who aren’t able to sell their own ads, but they’re also pushing rates down, which isn’t so great.
Mobile ads have high recall rates, especially among iPhone users. The format is expected to continue growing this year despite the recession, based largely on that recall number, something that’s falling for other platforms.
Social media: Despite all the talk that social media marketing expertise will eventually be part of everyone’s toolkit, Jim Tobin thinks there will always be a need for a someone or team of someone’s who are specialized in that field and are able to guide the way.
Retailing: A new study by Forrester Research draws a very clear line between effective customer service capabilities and customer loyalty, including the tendency of people to become enthusiasts and evangelists of a particular brand.
