iMedia Connection - ad:tech blog

One of the biggest stories in the group-buying craze came this past September when Whole Foods offered a $20 voucher for $10 via the daily deal site LivingSocial. The offer made headlines, but it also raised questions from marketers, who wondered if these daily deal offers were actually beneficial for the brands involved. Some wondered if $10 off a $20 purchase was enough to bring new consumers to stores, and if those shoppers would return after they redeemed their voucher.
At ad:tech New York on Thursday, Mitch Spolan, Senior VP of National Sales LivingSocial, put all the doubts to rest by sharing the numbers.

1 million vouchers sold out in 14 hours
“Whole Foods” and “LivingSocial” were both Twitter trending topics throughout the day
“LivingSocial” was Google’s top search of the day (“Not because of us, but because of Whole Foods,” said Spolan.)
Nearly every online media outlet covered the story

Users were also turning to Facebook, where the shared the deal with friends and, more importantly, talked about exactly what they’d buy, whether it was guacamole or salad. In doing so, they gave Whole Foods earned product endorsements that the brand simply couldn’t buy.
In the end, Whole Foods revealed that shoppers who used the voucher... Read more

In his opening day keynote at ad:tech New York, Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jon Leibowitz briefly surprised the assembled digital marketers by talking about the transparency of pants.
He wasn’t talking about see-through trousers. Instead, Leibowitz was explaining how his daughter could easily go online and get all the information she wants about a pair of pants – size, color, price – in just a few clicks. Why then, does it often take so many more clicks to get through an online privacy policy or an opt-out page?
Concern over potential FTC regulations or a “do-not-track” list has grown over the course of the past few years, and several online marketing companies and trade groups are leading a self regulation effort that is now hitting a critical mass.
Still, the chairman kept his keynote speech at ad:tech on the light side, peppering it with jokes and referencing ad:tech’s ever-vibrant party scene. The FTC doesn’t want to shut down the party happening online, Leibowitz said. The organization just wants to make sure that consumers understand that free content is paid for with targeted advertising, and it’s up to the marketers assembled at ad:tech this week to make transparency their number one priority.

When comparing online advertising to other media, the word "measurability" comes up quite often.  But one of the problems about having so many metrics is that marketers are often inundated with numbers. More often then not, they have trouble understanding what's truly relevant, and which numbers show any return on investment.
Metrics experts try to make sense of everything but, according to Shelley Sanders, Digital Analytics Strategist at Carmichael Lynch, sometimes even the experts get mislabeled too. According to Sanders, she's been referred to (jokingly, of course) as "the person who works the numbers to make campaigns look successful," but that line of thinking isn't getting anyone anywhere at the end of the day.
In a session called Measuring Digital ROI: Are Your Ad Dollars Boosting Your Bottom Line?, Sanders and a panel of experts tried to help marketers unravel the mystery and understand their ROI.
One of the key things is to get the focus back and examine the difference between metrics and goals, according to Stewart Pratt, Director of Data and Analytics at SapientNitro. Instead of measuring the actual return, marketers just keep adding more metrics that show how we get to the return. The rise in social has forced online marketing... Read more