Continuing to lose face among marketers, new research shows that clicks and total impressions are far from the best way to measure online conversions.
Rather, new findings from comScore and Pretarget — both of which market ad targeting services — show a stronger correlation between ad “viewability” and hover time, and conversion rates.
The findings indicate that the traditional way of buying mass impressions and hoping for conversions, i.e., “spray and pray,” is not the most effective approach, according to Kirby Winfield, senior vice president, corporate development at comScore.
“It once again demonstrates the perils of relying on click-throughs for measuring the performance of display ad campaigns, with this metric showing virtually zero correlation with total conversions,” Winfield said.
To arrive at these initial findings, the “intent targeting” specialists at Pretarget analyzed 263 million impressions over nine months across 18 advertisers in numerous verticals. Pretarget then used comScore validated Campaign Essentials to collect “viewability,” and hover data and a DSP to collect click and cookie-based conversion data.

Read more: MediaPost
With New Video Portal, AOL Puts The ‘On’ Back In America Online
Sometimes, what’s old is new again. AOL, whose robust content syndication strategy has helped distance itself from its aggregator past, is once again touting itself as a portal – this time for all things video.

The new hub, dubbed “AOL On,” was dubbed Tuesday evening during its portion of the digital “NewFront” to advertisers, agencies and the press in New York City.
With big acquisitions like The Huffington Post and 5Min Media, AOL had been focusing on spreading its influence to other sites and syndicating content around the Web. Now, it seems, the company wants to bring those eyeballs back.
With AOL On, the Web giant is bringing its entire video offering under one umbrella. AOL On is comprised of 14 discrete channels and more than 300,000 videos, including a new slate of seven original Web series (also something the company has tried in the past), and some 1,000 publisher content partners.
Many of the publishers have been part of AOL’s 5Min syndication network, and while their video programming will continue to be syndicated through that platform, they will for the first time be organized around a single destination.

Read more: MediaPost

As a marketing professional, I spend a lot of time learning and educating on digital trends.

With the current rate of growth, mobile marketing has been one of the most exciting to monitor. The data on user adoption is changing almost daily, with consumers actively changing the way they consume, share, and publish. To keep up with these changes, brands and media companies are regularly making advancements that impact our industry.

For this column, I spent some time with my agency’s mobile strategy team to define the top four current trends.
More Data Capture, More Targeting
Advertisers have been able to target by location, content, and demographics for some time now. Recently “social targeting” and retargeting across mobile-enabled platforms has emerged. The new capabilities represent a significant opportunity to hone ad delivery. They also allow for greater customization of messaging. •Social targeting (e.g., partners like LocalResponse, Twitter, and Facebook): Scrapes social conversations tied to location to target users. Great for determining very specific communication opportunities. •Retargeting (e.g., partners like Tapad, BlueCava, and Adelphic): Uses connected devices that require registration to trigger usage patterns. Technology can then serve ads based on data collected. The “Holy Grail” will be a connection point and solid data capture between all digitally enabled platforms (desktop, IPTV, phone, and tablet)…but you can’t be too greedy.

Content Is Adapting
Read more: ClickZ

Say Media Debuts Content Ads

Say Media is among the latest online publishers to adopt a “viewable” impressions standard for display ad campaigns.

The company, which operates a network of sites spanning categories like fashion, technology and food, has introduced a new ad format based on a cost-per-exposure pricing model that charges only for ads visible within a user’s browser.

The new Content Ads from Say Media use technology are developed in-house to recognize when an ad unit is viewable and are geared toward small and medium-sized businesses running ads against endemic content within its network.

Earlier this year, comScore released research based on a study of a dozen brand campaigns showing that nearly a third (31%) of online display ads are never seen. Studies by AdSafe and others have estimated that figure to be even higher.

Ads may not be seen for a various reasons, including a slow-loading ad, users not scrolling down far enough on a page to see an ad “below the fold,” or other technical causes. Say Media’s new ad format and exposure-based ad pricing coincides with a broader industry push to shift from the traditional “served impression” for campaign reporting to the viewable impression as part of the “Making Measurement Make Sense” (3Ms) initiative.

The effort by the Interactive Advertising Bureau, Association of National Advertisers and the 4As calls for a set of standards for measuring viewable exposures, among other things.

Read more: MediaPost

As mentioned in a recent article on the top five ad formats that will boost your brand, comScore asserts that the creative has four times the impact on results as the media plan does. An analysis of 400 campaigns indicates that the creatives contributed to 52 percent of the overall results, while the media plan contributed to just 13 percent.

Choosing the correct ad format can definitely boost your brand, but there’s a lot to be said for good ideas, regardless of how they are delivered.

Here are some compelling creative ideas that you can put into action to drive engagement and make the user experience more memorable. Example campaigns have been mainly drawn from last year’s MediaMind Rich Media award submissions.

Change up the standard interaction rules As the world becomes much more touch-centric, the same old point-and-click can start to drag a bit. If you can show your users a bit of non-standard interaction love, it’s hard to for them to resist at least trying it out.
read more: iMEDIACONNECTION
Grow Your Revenue Faster: How to Efficiently Engage More Buyers
Today’s business challenges are largely focused on marketing – how are you presenting your products at the time prospective buyers start looking? And where are your buyers looking for information about what products to buy?

The answer is: primarily through Internet searches and their social networks. Whether you are marketing to other businesses or to consumers, customers’ preferences are established way before they talk with your salespeople. How do your marketing people ensure that your products are being considered as early in the buying process as possible and with the best possible information?
How are the most advanced companies evolving their marketing and sales teams into the new world so they beat their competition like a drum? The answer starts with a clear and expanded role for marketing, promoting products and services where your buyers are figuring out what to buy, and aligning marketing with sales so your teams leverage each other to maximize productivity and teamwork – it’s a matter of life and death for your company. Sound revolutionary? Not really.

There are five steps to maximize revenue growth today. I assure you the results can be stunning:

1.Show up early and often. Engage prospective buyers the instant they start looking for your kinds of products. Leverage PPC, SEO, digital advertising, and partnerships that lead prospective buyers to your website – and custom landing pages so 100 percent of your prospective buyers are now engaged with your company in a way that’s better than your competition.

2.Develop trust; content is king. Marketing must develop prospective customers’ interest by sharing white papers and educating prospective customers about what’s possible using your products (versus your competition) via a highly evolved website that’s chock-full of valuable content that you share with prospective buyers so you earn their trust and respect.
Read more: ClickZ

Media buyers are always looking for better ways to evaluate expected campaign performance. Video ad network YuMe on Thursday is expected to debut a proprietary algorithm that aims to identify the best placement of video ads across digital properties.

Publishers such as MSN, MSNBC Digital Network, IDG Entertainment and Glam Media use YuMe’s ACE ad management platform.

The new Placement Quality Index (PQI) measures key performance metrics, including interaction rate, video completion rate, video player size and player on-page location.

A baseline PQI is calculated continuously for YuMe’s Connected Audience Network, so new campaigns can be evaluated in real-time against the average performance of the entire network.

As a marketer’s campaign progresses, the real-time PQI calculations allow YuMe to automatically adjust campaign placements in an effort to optimize performance.

With a continuously updated stream of metrics, the PQI does away with “outdated or oversimplified data,” claims YuMe CEO Jayant Kadambi.

As such, YuMe is selling brands on the promise that their campaigns will reach “the right audience and run on sites that yield the highest possible performance,” according to Kadambi.

Read more: MediaPost
Will Facebook’s Premium Ads Be a Game Changer?
The most successful brands on Facebook share a common trait – they’ve figured out a way to connect with users around a shared interest or passion. They build upon that foundation and success by creating unique and engaging content, encouraging conversations, and adding value. While “likes” can build quickly through word of mouth, they are often accelerated through the integration of the brand’s Facebook address across all key touch points and via promotions and advertising to Facebook’s more than 126 million active users in the U.S. and Canada. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that Facebook was the U.S. display advertising leader for the second straight year according to eMarketer, with $1.73 billion, followed by Google and Yahoo. But with Google nipping at its heels, Facebook is once again looking to change the game, and it starts this month with the launch of Premium Ads, its new ad format.
Facebook’s Premium Ads, announced officially at Facebook’s “fMC” confab on February 29, combines the strengths of Facebook (where connections, conversations, and community flourish) with the triad of marketing disciplines (paid, earned, and owned media so central to every leading brand’s media strategy). Premium Ads not only puts a brand’s page and relevant post in front of the right audience, but it leverages an individual’s connections, i.e., “social context” to amplify its relevance and trust. The result, according to Facebook’s internal testing, is expected to delight advertisers. Specifically, according to Facebook, Premium Ads are:
Read more: ClickZ

Online advertising could use some simplification. Anybody that has spent more than two months working in the online advertising space will tell you that it is a fast-paced, complex, confusing, always changing, and exhausting industry that has few, if any, dedicated rules, set procedures, or processes that everybody agrees with and follows. Even companies offering the same services use different names to refer to the same thing: online advertising, Internet marketing, display advertising, and so on. Luckily, some companies are dedicating themselves to making certain tasks a little simpler. San Francisco-based startup Canned Banners is an example of such a company.

Simpler Tools for Easier Advertising

Since 2009, Canned Banners has been automating display ad design. Its self-serve tools help you build professional quality display ads quickly and cheaply, without requiring design or development knowledge. Its service makes display advertising cheaper and easier for everyone from local businesses to Fortune 500 companies. While this sounds potentially useful, what Canned Banners is planning to roll out next might strike a chord among a larger audience within the online advertising industry.
Read more: ClickZ

Wildfire and Adaptly Introduce First Social Marketing Solution With Integrated Ad Technology That Optimizes Engagement
REDWOOD CITY, Calif. and NEW YORK, Feb. 27, 2012 /PRNewswire/ — Wildfire, the global leader in social media marketing software, today announced with Adaptly the integration of Adaptly’s unique social advertising and optimization technology with the Wildfire Social Marketing Suite. The combination of Wildfire’s market-leading suite of tools for designing, publishing, and managing brand content through social media – used by more than 10,000 customers, including many of the world’s most recognized brands, such as Facebook, Amazon, and Target – with Adaptly’s ad optimization technology gives marketers, for the first time, unified control over the combined effect of paid, earned, and owned social media to maximize consumer engagement with the brand. Engagement encompasses social actions such as likes, comments, and sharing of content.
Unlike first-generation ad serving solutions – which focus on traditional metrics such as cost per clicks, fans, or impressions – Wildfire’s solution integrates Adaptly’s technology that optimizes social ads not only for cost but also for maximum engagement. Adaptly’s proprietary technology aggregates more than 160 social metrics from a brand’s earned and owned channels, analyzes the impact of paid media on earned media in real time, and continuously refines ads (including content and target audience) to reach the best social audiences and drive ongoing engagement – the objective that marketers care about most today – at the lowest cost. This self-optimizing technology is unavailable from any other vendor, and Wildfire is the first to bring it to the broad market through a complete integrated social marketing solution.
Content and Advertising Integrated into a Single Seamless Solution
The ability to integrate advertising with content is becoming a critical requirement for social marketing thanks to the launch of Facebook’s Sponsored Stories ad units, which allow marketers to turn fan-generated content into social ad units. For brands to run Sponsored Stories ads they must successfully engage consumers. The Wildfire Social Marketing Suite provides all the tools needed to engage consumers through social media. Extending the Wildfire Suite with Adaptly’s social advertising technology now enables marketers to optimize their whole social strategy in a single seamless solution.

Read more: PRNewswire

Today’s social media networking sites are conduits to build, expand, and reinforce brands’ relationships with its target audience. Social media in today’s brand management arena is not just about setting up a Facebook Page and post content that is no different from similar editorial material found on the corporate website. It is about brands building an online relationship with its customers that encapsulates trust, reliability, and service-centricity. Indeed, the intent of any social networking strategy must mirror the same focus and attention that offline relationships are built on over the years.
What this means is that it takes time for companies to create a profile on the social media environment to engage with the online community. Invariably, this approach raised questions on how brands should measure the success attributed to social media. This is especially tricky. Some brands perceive social media similar to the many digital channels available to advertisers, whereby there’s an implicit perception that measurement standards adopted for online advertising applies in social media.

In my opinion, the success metric from social media networking is improved sales revenue, and it has to be clearly attributed to the social media strategies implemented by the brand or its appointed agencies. This approach builds on the belief that discussions that that originate from social media networking will lead to revenue opportunities for brands and advertisers.
Read more: ClickZ
AOL Ad Platform Customizes Display
Hoping to attract more brand dollars, AOL has debuted a technology platform for marketers to customize the design, delivery and management of display advertising. Pictela Enterprise gives ad agencies a guided self-service interface to manage their clients’ brand assets and serve them directly into online display ads.

“We are putting the power of publishing in the hands of the ad agencies and their clients,” said Greg Rogers, senior vice president, premium formats at AOL and CEO of Pictela — which AOL acquired in late 2010.“Think of [Pictela Enterprise] as a content management system for ads.”

The platform is certified to serve its ad units across AOL, Advertising.com and most major online publishers.

Building on AOL’s Project Devil initiative, Pictela’s product suite of products and services includes a cloud-based platform for the creation, delivery and analysis of premium ads.

At launch, the system supports six IAB standard ad sizes, including 300×1050, 300×600, 970×90, 728×90, 160×600 and 300×250.

Read more: MediaPost

“You can’t manage what you don’t measure,” is an old management adage. However, by the same token, just because you can measure something, does not mean you should manage by it.
I authored a previous iMedia article about why clicks are the wrong metric. In that article, I alluded to the view-through effectiveness of display advertising despite the absence of clicks. In the spirit of that conversation, I want to discuss the relevance of other metrics in determining campaign success
Use: Brand measures like lift in awareness or consideration You can’t click on a billboard, radio, or TV ad but we know they impact awareness, consideration, even purchase intent. Of course, the same is true of online ads. If the campaign has a branding objective, then optimize to it, ideally with a real-time data-driven approach.
Brand marketers want solutions that demonstrate improvement over time, transfer learnings across campaigns from top of the funnel to mid-funnel, and finally, result in sales. Everyone loves search for converting in-market folks but don’t always remember to widen the funnel. As a marketer, if you rely on offline media (namely, TV) to be your lone awareness vehicle, then you’re subject to over-saturation in television and missing out on cross-media optimized exposure. Complement offline with a digital awareness initiative.
Read more: iMEDIACONNECTION
Twelvefold Extends ‘Spectrum’ Ads To Mobile
Twelvefold Media (formerly BuzzLogic) has brought its Spectrum ad platform, which targets display ads at the page level based on topic, audience and social activity, to the mobile realm.

The company says its Spectrum for Mobile solution will allow more precise targeting on smartphones and tablets than what is typically available today. It notes that traditional mobile ad solutions target audience based on categories or targeted to keywords. Spectrum for Mobile matches ads to more specific content, such as “easy-to-make, healthy snacks for kids that contain whole wheat and are loved by moms.”
Read more MediaPost

Calculating ROI in social media is a hot topic. As companies have rushed into the elusive social media marketing gold mine, many are left trying to figure out if all the time and effort is paying off.
The problem is that social media is extremely difficult to measure. In a former life, I worked as a financial analyst at P&G, and a big part of my job was to measure the ROI of our different marketing efforts. In calculating the return on traditional media, we often found that we couldn’t exactly calculate everything, so we resorted to some creative approaches.

There are many challenges to measuring the return from social media, most notably:

•Volume of social media activity isn’t always related to social media efforts. A provocative television spot or a new product launch can generate social media mentions that aren’t related to your specific social media efforts.

•The value of social media is more than just marketing and can involve product research, customer service, public relations, and consumer research. All of these benefits can’t easily be tied back to a sales number.

•Even what we can count isn’t always accurate. When measuring online, we often look at the last click that led someone to our website, and brands will look at traffic and possibly sales generated from social media sites. The problem is that we know in marketing that it takes up to seven touch points to build a brand impression, and only attributing the last click minimizes the role that other marketing tools played.

•Traditional metrics of reach don’t work well because the quality of impressions on social media sites can be very different. We measure traditional media based on reach or how many people are exposed to the message, but in social media, the message can range from positive to negative and from passive to highly involved, making it difficult to determine the value of each impression.

These are only a few of the challenges that you may face as a part of your social media marketing measurement. Creative Ways to Measure (or at Least Validate) Your Social Media Efforts Measuring ROI isn’t always an exact science (unless you have a large measurement budget based on complex modeling), but there are some approaches to measurement that can at least validate your efforts.
Read more: ClickZ
Microsoft Adding Social To Brand Display Ads For Guaranteed And Non-Guaranteed Inventory Says GM Creegan
As part of Social Media Week festivities in NYC, Microsoft Advertising announced what it’s calling “People Powered Stories.” Formally launching next month, the offering will begin by incorporating social commerce tech from Bazaarvoice and is the first step in Microsoft’s social display strategy.

Microsoft Advertising GM of Display Advertising Experiences, Jennifer Creegan said on the Microsoft Ad blog, “We believe it will give marketers the ability to create ads that tell powerful stories and create brand relevancy beyond just a ‘Like’ by adding the authenticity and believability of real people’s real stories.” Read more – and see examples.

Creegan and Brant Barton, GM, Media Solutions for Bazaarvoice, discussed the announcement and its implications with AdExchanger.

AdExchanger: Can you talk about the significance of today’s announcement for Microsoft?
Jennifer Creegan: I would bucket it down into a couple of simple points. We are passionate about how we’re bringing social advertising to the entire marketing campaign. As we did research across both the consumer landscape and the marketer landscape, it became clear that there was a crossover need around word‑of‑mouth marketing, and specifically, ratings and reviews.

For us, the significance of this announcement is that we’re taking what we have been good at for a long time, which is interesting brand canvases across the digital ecosystem, and marrying that with our ratings and reviews content so that the marketer can have their story, and their consumer stories, tell a still more complete story, if you will, to potential customers. Bazaarvoice is our first partner in the People Powered Stories social framework.
Read more: AdExchanger