Jumptap: Android, Apps Up Traffic Rates
While both iPad and Kindle traffic increased over the holidays, Kindle jumped from holding a 10% share of tablet traffic at the beginning of December to a 30% share at the start of 2012. At the same time, the iPad’s share over December shrank from 59% to 44%, while that of Android and other tablet platforms dropped five points to 26%, noted mobile ad network Jumptap.
Thanks to the proliferation of Android-powered smartphones, however, the Google platform strengthened its position as the dominant mobile operating system overall on Jumptap’s network, which reaches 95 million U.S. mobile users per month and 142 million worldwide.
Android’s traffic share jumped 21 percentage points in 2011 to finish the year with a commanding 59% piece of the market. That gain came at the expense of both Apple’s iOS, which dropped seven percentage points to 22%, and BlackBerry, which fell 11 percentage points to 15.7%.
Throughout 2011, however, iOS outpaced Android in ad click-through rates. For its year-end report, Jumptap compared click rates among the latest three versions of the rival platforms in wide use. While the rate for iOS has improved with each successive release, the opposite is true for Android. Apple’s new iOS 5 release had a click rate of .91% compared to .74% for iOS 4 and .61% for iOS 3.
By contrast, Android 3.0 had a rate of .59%, down from .69% for Android 2.0 and .75% for Android 1.0. The study didn’t evaluate click rates for Android 4.0, the latest version of Google’s mobile platform, also known as Ice Cream Sandwich.
The report also shed light on another long-running mobile rivalry — apps versus the mobile Web. While many predict HTML5 adoption will ultimately make the mobile Web triumphant, the Jumptap data showed apps actually narrowed the gap in traffic share last year. The two formats ended 2011 in a virtual dead heat after the mobile Web began the year with a 55.1% to 44.9% advantage.
Jumptap says marketers don’t necessarily have to have either a mobile site or app to advertise in mobile, however. Roughly one-third of its advertisers don’t have either, but are using mobile landing pages in their ad campaigns. Of course, if an ad is meant to drive traffic to a company’s own site, it’s best to have one optimized for mobile devices.
The study also looked at the effectiveness of data-targeted campaigns in the fourth quarter. The company works with third-party data providers, including Acxiom, TargusInfo, Datalogix and Polk, to provide information about consumer demographics from purchase history to income level to what cars people own.
Read more: MediaPost
Time Matters: The Role Of Real-Time Bidding for Publishers
Perhaps no single technology has as much potential to disrupt the advertising ecosystem of online publishing as Real Time Bidding (RTB). For an imperfect but simple 30 second visual primer on what RTB does, click here. There is a shift happening and the surge of inventory that flooded onto exchanges in 2011 attests to it. As Demand Side Platforms (DSP) became ever more an executional tool of choice for many advertisers, the supply side has been pushed to follow suit and make their inventory available through marketplaces. Thus, the tried and true world of direct and network sales is threatened with disruption and the potential commoditization of inventory.
For small publishers, the advent of real-time, exchange-based marketplaces has been nothing but good. In many cases, it allows their impressions to compete on a level playing field against much more established titles, fueled by the individualized audience and interest information readily available through online data providers.
Large publishers, however, should be concerned that the growing importance and availability of targeting data on RTB platforms separates the importance of context from determining the value of the impression. In other words, if you can know what a person wants specifically, it matters less where you serve the display ad because you do not have to infer quite so much about them from where they are.
The impression transparency inherent in RTB environments causes some in the industry to fear that their use will cause CPMs to begin a “Race to the Bottom” as inventory becomes commoditized. Others think it a natural progression towards efficiency, especially for impressions that will always generate less demand such as those for remnant inventory. The Rubicon Project recently published a study that concurs with the latter and this study from Ignition One offers evidence for the former. Obviously, the jury is still out.
So, if you represent a large publisher, what are you to think about the potential role of RTB in your organization? Is it friend or foe? There is no “one size fits all” answer to this question, but I do have some considered advice on an approach to find your own:
Read more: AdExchanger
The Modern Agency
Ad agencies are engaged in a wrenching transition, driven by technological change. The very underpinnings of the agency business are shifting, as the business confronts a variety and challenges in digital media. Digiday is embarking on a series of video interviews with agency leaders to discuss how the modern agency is built. There’s little doubt there is not an easy blueprint for the “agency of the future.” There will be new agencies, evolved “traditional agencies,” and even new hybrid marketing companies that are part agency, part tech and part media.
The series is made possible through the sponsorship of Videology, the video advertising platform until recently known as TidalTV. To introduce the series, I sat down with Videology CEO Scott Ferber to get his view on how technology is shifting the agency’s role. Ferber, who founded Advertising.com and sold it to AOL for $435 million in 2004, believes that agencies will evolve to become technology enablers, stitching together pieces of tech created by others. He’s mostly down on the idea of agencies owning technology. See the full interview below.
Paid, Owned, and Earned Content…Ineffective Without Optimization
If content is the crux of all our marketing efforts, we should be learning, adjusting, and optimizing. If not, it will lead to a negative consumer experience.
One of my first columns for ClickZ was the importance of content and its role as a tangible media format. In the last few months, content continues to be a hot topic. The volume of content being distributed is increasing and the way an advertiser collects and uses data is changing. In our everyday professional lives, it’s easy to “set it and forget it,” but this can counter all the hard work put into content development and distribution.
So where to begin? The most common way a user will reach your content is through a basic search, meaning that search engine optimization is vital to your content planning approach. The optimization plan will need to take into account how all the content is distributed, be it via web, video, mobile, tablet, and social posts.
With media planning in its traditional sense merging with these specialized fields (search, social, mobile, experiential, and video), it’s important to make cross-channel content optimization central to any strategy. To do so (and remain sane), here are a few guidelines:
1.What are consumers already telling me? Social behavior, social trends, and search queries represent some of the best data for determining content needs and optimizations across all channels. It’s easily accessible to advertisers and beneficial when tied to syndicated and longer term research.
Example: Use data from Twitter, Facebook, or Google. The consumer is already being vocal, and as an advertiser you have access, so mine this data to improve content development and inform optimizations for existing content.
2.Is my content relevant to the experience? What is your consumer seeking? Take the research from step one and apply it to their experience, get a basic understanding of the consumer’s needs in a specific environment, and make sure your content answers their question.
Startup Unified Unveils Social Marketing Platform for Enterprise
Powerful though it may be, for marketers, big data can be a big headache.
For brands that want to reach audiences across the growing landscape of social platforms, executing effective campaigns can mean managing different strategies, different planning and buying processes, and different analytics tools. Crunching data across multiple social platforms and reporting performance can become a labor-intensive operation for a lucky (or not so lucky) few.
Unified, which launches today, aims to streamline the entire cycle of marketing across major social ecosystems with technolog intended for enterprise clients. Calling it the industry’s first “Social Operating Platform,” the company says it will help global brands and agencies simultaneously execute campaigns on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, StumbleUpon and other social services with a patent-pending tool that manages each step of the process, from planning, buying and optimizing campaigns to analyzing earned media and determining returns on the investment.
“There’s a definite shift happening from traditional buying to real enterprise-class, big data management in the advertising space,” Unified CEO Sheldon Owen told Adweek.
Break Accelerates Social, Boosts CPVs With Pass-Along Content
Break Media, the big digital video advertising network, says it has started a new video technology designed around the growing cost-per-view ad-buying metric.
The new technology, called Social Video Accelerator, combines guaranteed video distribution including pass-along advertiser content. It will run across the Break network — including Break.com, the Web’s big comedy video site, which now reaches more than 120 million unique viewers each month.
While cost per view (CPV) ad models are growing, less than half of video publishers are offering it, says Break Media.
