The Digital Ad Industry Needs To Innovate For Consumers
“Data-Driven Thinking” is a column written by members of the media community and containing fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.
David Levy is co-founder of SocialVibe, a digital advertising technology company.
Jerry Neumann posed a question on AdExchanger the other day that should strike a chord with anyone who works in media and advertising: What If Online Doesn’t Work For Branding?
Branding plays a critical role in the development of a company and its products, and brand advertising has represented enormous investment from brands to garner consumer attention within quality content like magazines, TV, music, and news. Yet while digital disruption has flipped traditional media on its ear, the consumer-focused innovation that propels media forward seems to have been left behind when it comes to brand advertising. Jerry is right to call this into question, and he issued an apt challenge: How do we disrupt branding?
What Sells the Digital Magazine?
A magazine is a pretty amazing work of art. It consists of a collection of the most incredible curated insights, editorial opinions, and photographs for a specific genre. In the print world, everyone knows that the cover of a magazine needs to be very carefully crafted in order to compel you to purchase it at the newsstand. Anywhere from 10 to 45 percent of a print magazine’s sales can come from single copy sales (aka, at the traditional newsstand). With this heavy reliance on sales by cover, I wondered…is the same true for success on the digital newsstand?
A few weeks ago I noticed that three digital publishing apps changed their icon on the iPad from a static image representing their company to a dynamic image showcasing their “cover news” for the day. If you haven’t seen them yet, check out how The New York Times, The New York Post, and The Daily all showcase their app. In it, each day you see a very clear cover line and image that is meant to be compelling enough for you to stop and download/buy the app.
Interestingly, at my company, we have been seeing a different phenomenon where it isn’t just the cover but the content inside of the issue that is driving a digital reader to discover a magazine they never knew they couldn’t live without.
Recently we posted a collection on the Titanic. In this collection the visitor was exposed to free articles about the Titanic. Quietly in the corner of the article was a reference to the name of the magazine the article came from. In this case, magazines like Town and Country and Popular Science were successfully able to engage new potential subscribers through the content locked under the cover by sharing it to an audience who followed a common theme.
Read more: ClickZ
AccuWeather, Amobee Team On Mobile Advertising
AccuWeather has struck a partnership with Amobee to use its mobile platform for ad-serving, campaign management and ad targeting for inventory worldwide.
Under the agreement, AccuWeather will use Amobee’s Pulse for Publishers solution to power advertising across its mobile Web sites, as well as its smartphone and tablet apps for iOS, Android and other mobile operating systems.
The company estimates the global audience for its mobile apps at half a billion devices, driven by deals with the 10 largest device manufacturers. Many sell their handsets pre-loaded with the main AccuWeather app.Underscoring the growth of mobile data use, the weather brand says it fulfills 2.2 billion data requests from mobile devices worldwide, triple the amount at the start of 2011.
Jim Candor, executive vice president/chief business officer for AccuWeather, said the pact with Amobee would help the company provide large brands and agencies with the tools to run campaigns across its mobile properties as its global inventory expands, especially in the Asia-Pacific region. Last month, Amobee was acquired by Singapore-based mobile phone and services provider SingTel for $321 million.
Through the deal, SingTel aims to expand into the mobile marketing arena, especially in the area of one-to-one connections between brands and consumers.
Time to Stop Talking About ‘Scale’ And Start Targeting
As a catalogue marketer in the 1990s, I knew which mailing lists would work best for the dress shirt company I represented. We used multiple criteria to measure data quality. But, we always kept the list sources separate, so we knew what worked well and what didn’t work as well. Each data set would become its own brand to us, because each data set would perform differently.
Of course I would track the results and optimize my campaign and work with the lists that brought the highest ROI. Since we were selling higher-quality men’s dress shirts, lists from other higher quality men’s apparel companies would generally perform better, though not every time.
We would expect a performance difference between Florsheim shoe buyers and Johnston and Murphy shoe buyers, for example. Each list would elicit a different response, as you might expect.
I would buy these lists granularly and optimize against more precise data lists, which obviously required transparency from data providers, and a certain integrity in the data sets themselves. This may seem as obvious in terms of “best practices” to you as it does to me.
So, ask yourself: Why does our online industry today do the exact opposite of this?
We have the technology
We can target and measure audiences in so many ways today; you would think it would make sense in this digital world that we would stay granular – and transparent. But, we’re not. Instead, most of the data ecosystem strives for scale instead of precision, blended data sources instead of transparency and quality. Too many of us are making huge, blind buckets of data that are bloated and inaccurate.
Read more: AdAgeDigital
Alloy Digital Acquires Leading Digital Women’s Lifestyle Media Network and Publisher B5Media
NEW YORK, April 20, 2012 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Alloy Digital, a leading creator and distributor of media and entertainment for the 12-34 demographic, today announced that it has completed the acquisition of B5Media, one of the fastest-growing female-oriented lifestyle digital publishing and media networks.
B5Media’s websites include award-winning TheGloss.com, Crushable.com, Blisstree.com, Mommyish.com, and TheGrindstone.com, featuring content focused on fashion, beauty, wellness, career, relationships, parenting and entertainment. The B5Media network, which has distinguished itself through honest, intelligent and relatable content, reaches females 14-34 and boasts a combined audience of more than 4 million monthly unique visitors.
The B5Media sites join Alloy Digital’s top ranking network of owned-and-operated web properties, including Gurl.com, Teen.com, and Smosh.com, which is also one of the top-three most subscribed to channels on YouTube.
Alloy Digital is the largest media and advertising network of young adult targeted websites, attracting more than 70 million consumers each month and reaching over 43% of P12-34 internet users. The network holds its position as a top-10 video network delivering several hundred million streams monthly and has ranked at top of its category for more than three consecutive years running according to industry measurement leader, comScore.
Read more: GlobeNewswire
Does Everyone Hate Banner Ads?
Whether you’re in advertising or not, at some point, everyone has been a banner ad hater. From a loud auto-initiated video at the office to an inundating takeover by Taylor Lautner – one that mysteriously became the background of my iPad and then wished me a “Happy St. Patrick’s Day” – we’ve all been victims of an unwanted, unwarranted, or irrelevant banner ad. Even when I tell people what I do, and mention online banner ads, their faces typically show a mild tolerance for the topic. Or they say flat-out, “I hate pop-ups.”
EMarketer estimates spending on U.S. online advertising will grow by nearly a quarter in 2012. However, banners’ projections are below average for the category. And they’ll continue to grow at a slower pace than other forms of online advertising such as paid search, video, and mobile. While banner click-through rates continue to decline, marketers are working to find more ways to validate that banner messaging resonates with consumers, from engagement to direct response metrics.Guess what? The secret is out: blasting billions of untargeted impressions to the masses and tracking latent activity is not an effective form of advertising – at least to some of us it is.
According to comScore Ad Metrix, AT&T, which has been the leader in advertising impressions for the last several years, served nearly 106 billion impressions in the U.S. during 2011. What’s more, the number of advertisers who served over 3 billion impressions in Q4 2011 increased from 24 to 46, compared to the same quarter the previous year. But let’s put this in context. EMarketer reported 231.9 million online users (18+) in the U.S. last year. So, if every adult watched an AT&T ad an even number of times, then it would have been seen an average of 456 times during the year. Yikes! Apparently we have a ways to go in shifting the paradigm.
Read more: ClickZ
