Credit TalkTalk: Digital Antropology Report 2009 Published
Many companies out there are researching digital usage and trying to undersand how we are all using digital technology in our daily lives — but few publish their findings as part of their marketing and brand building effort. Talk Talk has.
The Digital Anthropology Report 2009 is a well thought out and easy to digest publication.
Interestingly it also proves an point we’ve all intrinsically believed and is typically referred to by some variant of the pareto rule: E-ager Beavers that love downloading and reading and searching but can’t be bothered to upload, run a blog or comment heavily like Digital Extroverts are the largest tribe. And the lurkers outnumber the publishers 3 to 1.
Brave Client Award – Kinder Chocolate
There are times when you really have to be impressed with the power of social media.
Take a simple idea — like a competition based on voting to allow a chocolate bar company choose a set of pictures for its next years packaging — and what do you get? A absolute frenzy. 
It was all very simple — 1 vote per child per day. And the top voted child ended up with over 20,000 votes.
Celebrity and Competition: An amazign recipe for getting engagement.
Not that it wasn’t expected.
–We put in Captcha codes on voting and tiered the competition to ensure only panel selected children went to a second round.
–We ensured that selection was based on funny quotes, not just photos or votes.
–We built registration for the final round.
Nonetheless we did hope for a bit of activity and we got it. Over 4700 entries. Nearly 8 million pageviews with visitors for hundreds of counries. Facebook groups. Recruiting votes from local football club forums. Amazing.
Powerade – Take to the Streets and a basketball tracking robot!
This past week-end the combined teams of the iris London — integrated, Experience and Digital — put on a fun event at the NBA Take to the Streets event at Clapham Common.
It was quite a nice integrated event / sponsorship leverage idea which in 2 sec was a Powerade sponsored a freethrow competition.
The event was a huge hit and all of the onsite signage and engagement ideas were fantastic, but more importantly, clearly,
check out the basketball tracking robot!
As people took their shots, Noah the robot captured the angle the ball hit the hoop and took a picture of the player which was printed out well adorned with Powerade branding.
Reminds us why we are all here – and why we love this business. Helping our clients to do good fun effective marketing … one robot at a time.
Media Automation – All media will be served
One of my favourite topics is the increasing complexity of media planning and how it is moving towards a search model where it literally is no longer planned in campaigns. Basically the sophistication of what ad is served where gets so complicated it can only be managed by a computer.
Automated Media-Buying Platforms Gaining Traction by Mark Walsh, Yesterday, 3:12 PM
As agencies increasingly turn to automated systems to buy media and manage online ad campaigns, more money is flowing to startups that provide that technology. In that vein, digital media-buying platforms MediaMath and Traffiq both announced new venture capital funding Monday.
New York-based MediaMath secured $12.5 million in venture capital and debt financing, with the $10 million venture investment led by Safeguard Scientifics, Inc. and including QED Investors and European Founders Fund. The $2.5 million in debt financing came from Silicon Valley Bank.
Started in 2007, MediaMath says it serves billions of ads per month through its platform on behalf of 20 agencies, including the major holding companies.
Online ad marketplace Traffiq, meanwhile, has raised $10 million in a second-round venture financing led by Grotech Ventures and Greenhill SAVP and including prior investor Court Square Ventures. In connection with the investment, Grotech general partner Steve Fredrick and Greenhill managing director Brian Hirsch have joined the New York-based company’s board of directors.
Last month, New York-based Traffiq announced partnering with Havas Digital to automate online media planning and buying in the agency’s New York, Boston and Chicago offices. Both companies’ systems are designed to help streamline the notoriously outdated process for online media planning and buying that includes faxes and paper notes. The startups are also competing with established players such as Donovan Data Systems and MediaBank in pushing to develop state-of-the-art media-buying systems.
Future of Marketing
There were a couple of stories recently that remind me why we all have to understand Search.
Search Marketing is Marketing 2.0 on steroids. It is not just the auction process or sponsored links or automated bid management, it is all of it and the fact that there are no campaigns but instead ongoing optimisation. And it is constantly changing as engineers re-work their algorithms to make their search platforms work better and decrease search spam.
When you consider the new concept of Link Intent and the fact that these marketing platforms will sit under our “TV” video viewing and you understand we all have some work to do.
Get ready madison avenue, soon, very soon, all media will be served!
LINK INTENT
Everyone recognises the positioning of a headline is critical. What happens when the pages you’ve created, your bid strategy and the actual behaviour of searchers impacts whether your ad is shown at all? Welcome to Link Intent.
Authority, temporal factors, anchor text anomalies, document ranking and relevance, excessive reciprocals, TrustRank and harmonic rank, page segmentation and humans all come into play when search engines determine relevance.
Confused? Check out this article: Understand How Search Engines Consider Link Intent
or if you are real glutton for punishment: Detecting Nepotistic Links by Language Model Disagreement
GOOGLE OFFERES TARGETED TV ADS
MOUNTAIN VIEW, California: Google, the online search giant, has formed a partnership with a technology company that will allow marketers buying cable airtime via its television advertising platform to tailor spots for specific audiences.
It has been argued that Google has exerted a mixed impact on the advertising, marketing and media industries, although the company was forced into a rare retreat earlier this year when it closed its radio and print ad services.
The internet pioneer has now agreed a tie-up with Visible World, which has developed a system enabling brand owners to “target viewers with real-time offers, products, and creative based on geography, programming, inventory levels, time of day, weather, and other business conditions.”
Such a result is achieved by drawing demographic and other information from cable set-top boxes, which can then be used to alter various aspects of communications, such as the script or promotional offers featured, as appropriate.
Among the other facilities the “intelliSpot” software provides is to allow advertisers to withdraw commercials that are found to be under-performing, and replace them with alternative executions.
Google will pay Visible World to use this service, which will be made available through its TV Ads portal, described by the Mountain View-based firm as a “flexible, all-digital system for buying more accountable and measurable TV advertising.”
Mike Steib, director of Google TV Ads, argued “audiences are more and more fragmented. One ad with one message for one audience is not the right thing for everyone.”
Lenovo, the IT company, has previously worked with Visible World to run 50 targeted ads containing bespoke offers and links to a campaign website, allowing the company to track results.
It originally bought the relevant cable inventory using Google TV Ads, and was said to have been one of a number of advertisers which encouraged Google to consider an alliance with Visible World.
CableVision, the cable provider, and DirectTV, the satellite broadcaster, are also both attempting to make inroads into behavioural advertising.
However, Craig Moffet, an analyst with Bernstein Research, recently wrote in a summary to investors that “addressable advertising on cable has been two years away from reality for, oh … about 10 years.”
YouTube, the video-sharing portal owned by Google, is also trialling a new service enabling its content partners to insert ads of their choosing into material they have uploaded to the site.
The FreeWheel ad-serving programme is also used by CBS and Warner Brothers, and effectively means YouTube is part of a broader, third-party ad network for the first time.
Data sourced from Wall Street Journal/Brand Republic; additional content by WARC staff, 29 July 2009
Volley Return – XBox 360 Project Natal
The latest announcements on the tech front are almost like watching a tennis game. Just when you thought it was safe to forget about Technology for a day or two, it keeps coming.
Start a week ago.
Microsoft laun
ches Bing — a search engine that has some interesting new features but got people more excited because it launched using its name as a verb in its tag line — “Bing & Decide.” The question that came to mind was Bing and decide if Bing is better? Like Avis’ famous “We try harder,” it is just asking us to give poor newcomer Bing a chance. No question the “stop searching and start deciding” is a real insight and I’m sure we’ll see more of it across clients.
Then Google shows off truly mindblowing innovation across a host of areas with Google Wave. Touted as e-mail had it been designed today, it covers a range of innovations from real-time IM to real-time translation and e-mail thread playback. As has been noted, could be too big.
Now it is Microsoft’s turn.
Project Natal for the XBox. Aside from controller-less gaming, this puts XBox exactly where Microsoft has always wanted it — the center of the home as the living room computer. Video chat, connections to e-commerce, media choosing and playing.
Hold on to your laptops, the next year is going to very interesting.
Google Wave – That is Innovation
This will be an interesting one to see, how Google’s Wave application or platform is adopted.
It is ambitious.
On it’s surface the screenshot makes it look like some form of new social network, and that is where it could be end up.
But the intent is much more profound. It is like these guys got started and just couldn’t stop. It is amazing it works at all!
–IM / E-mail integration for people online
–in line editing of documents
–image management
–playback of all changes and gadget events
And all opensource with ability to be hosted or used as a service.
Can’t wait to get an account to work with. Need to bribe a google developer.
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/05/went-walkabout-brought-back-google-wave.html
Google Wave Developer Preview at Google I/O 2009
