These days everyone is desperately trying to figure out the best ways to leverage social. In fact, if you type the phrase “social media” into Google, over 500 million results will appear. That’s more than the results for just “media”. Marketers are feeling the pressure to become more “social” from senior management and scrambling to put together social media campaigns so that they can check that box off of their marketing deliverables. Many marketers think by launching a Facebook page or getting a lot of Twitter followers that they have satisfied their social media needs. Once marketers realize that it takes much more to drive social activity that will result in ROI and the resources required for managing these social initiatives, they are quickly on the hunt for social media experts to assist them; and there are many who claim to be social media experts ready to serve your every need.
Marketers have started to tackle their social media needs, similar to how they have historically approached every other marketing tactic - by isolating and siloing their strategic parameters, success metrics, and analytics. We’ve seen this time and time again. This is how marketers dealt with banner advertising in the ‘90s,... Read more
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Social Media "Experts"…Really?!?
Tags: branding, content strategy, Digital Marketing, Facebook, social marketing, Social Media, social media strategy
Posted in Ad Networks, Creative Best Practices, Media Planning & Buying, Social Media, Targeting, Web Analytics | 3 Comments »
Why Twitter’s Keyword Targeting in Timelines is Only Half of the Equation
Last week, Twitter launched a new ad product called “Keyword Targeting in Timelines.” This new targeting method enables advertisers to reach users based on the keywords in their recent Tweets and the Tweets with which users recently engaged. Twitter’s Kevin Weil later said that the big advantage of this new targeting technique is timing.
Twitter’s new capability is a well needed platform move and is similar to Google’s ability to target in “real-time” whoever searches for “buy shoes.” One could argue that searches have clearly better intent than tweets. For example, “Justin Bieber’s new song is awesome!” (and getting served an ad for his album). Keyword targeting doesn’t provide any timing advantage on any other platform, without understanding the sentiment and context of the entire tweet.
Twitter is right, timing means nothing if you are unable to react to things that happen right now. The big opportunity for advertisers is how to engage users in moments that matter to them. Advertising is about being in the right place and in the right time, yet finding the right users who have explicitly expressed interest isn’t scalable, it requires an intelligent approach to finding new users who also may be interested but haven’t expressed... Read more
Tags: advertising, keywords, marketing, real time marketing, real-time, social advertising, social marketing, twitter
Posted in Ad Networks, Ad Serving, Media Planning & Buying, Opinions | No Comments »
Why Mozilla Needs To Look Beyond Users Alone
We are all aware of the uproar incited when Mozilla announced that it was releasing a patch that would effectively block third party cookies for their users. Mozilla is doing this, it claims, because users are scared of companies tracking their whereabouts and are crying out for better privacy protection.
But a browser company that owns 30 percent of the browser market has a greater responsibility to the industry they operate in than to just the user. Mozilla is ignoring a huge portion of these parties. I really believe that the company feels that they are working on behalf of their users, but I also don’t think Mozilla realizes all of the touch points that they are operating within. The user is the main party they interface with, but the Firefox browser interfaces with the web, and there are a number of parties involved beyond just the User. Let’s take a look at those parties.
Meet the surfer: The surfer, or “the user,” as many like to call this constituent, is the innocent person who traverses the web, day in and day out, reading this and purchasing that, watching that video and looking at this friend’s latest pictures or update. The surfer... Read more
Tags: advertising, Data, online advertising, Privacy, publisher, rtb, Safety, Semantic
Posted in Ad Networks, Ad Serving, Media Planning & Buying, Opinions, Targeting | 1 Comment »
Farewell ‘Push’ Marketing, Hello Brand Journalism
My career as a journalist spanned nearly a decade. When I left to launch online video startup, BizBOXTV, I quickly discovered storytelling was part of my DNA, evident in the process and style of my new media company and how it approached its first productions.
It wasn’t about story-boarding or scripting, it was about asking questions, getting answers, and weaving content together to produce an interesting and useful story. The benefits of combining the approaches of traditional journalism and brand storytelling seemed obvious. It’s something we’ve called “brand journalism” since day one, and it’s picking up speed as the new-media world continues to evolve, along with consumers’ habits.
Businesses are using social media, web video, and digital publishing to speak directly to consumers. It’s a way for brands, big and small, to use the approach of professional journalists to create, curate and share expert content in the form of blogs, articles and video. Brand journalism is obviously not as impartial as journalism, but it’s a way for a brand to engage an audience with relevant and interesting material. The content must be factual, and keep “relevance to... Read more
Tags: bizboxtv, blogging, boeing, brand journalism, calgary, canada, cisco, content creation, content marketing, corporate video, customer engagement, digital media, home depot, journalism, lisa ostrikoff, online video, online video production, PR, public relations, social engagement, Social Media, Storytelling, toronto, usa, video marketing, vlogs
Posted in Ad Serving, Creative Best Practices, Media Planning & Buying, Opinions, Social Media, Targeting, Uncategorized, Video | No Comments »
Structural Efficiencies and The Opportunity Gap
Too often I hear people in our industry speak of the inefficiencies in display advertising purely in terms of cost. Whilst the display segment has scale (at circa $35b and growing), the economies borne of scale remain conspicuously absent for all stakeholders – publishers (supply), agencies (demand) and of course the stakeholder funding the industry, the advertiser. You may or may not subscribe to the view that the contemporization of the display advertising market is inevitable (for what it’s worth I’m a subscriber), but too few of us view the introduction of structural efficiencies as having a direct and profound impact on display’s revenue opportunity. The distinction between the impact of efficiency on cost versus revenue is important.
Cost management is a largely protectionist dynamic. And so whilst technology driven efficiencies at scale can and will reduce cost for everyone, the much larger prize is the ‘opportunity gap’. While approximately 30% of our total media consumption is online (in its various forms), it still represents only 20% of total ad spend. This 10% gap – the opportunity gap – equates to circa $70b per annum, meaning display’s pro rata share is worth somewhere between $20-$25 billion a year and growing. Factor... Read more
Posted in Media Planning & Buying | No Comments »
