Optimizing media based on real time attitudinal scores

One of the things that fascinates me about this online advertising industry is innovation every other day. I get the opportunity to meet with a lot of media technology companies ranging from ad verification to video ad-networks to research vendors to ad serving companies.

Most recently the technology that amazed me was the ability to optimize media or generate look-a-like models based on attitudinal scores. Not only will you know the impact of the media, but you would also be able to reach similar audience which is interested in your brand and will show increase in attitudinal scores. If you can scale this, then, there is a lot that one can do from creative message sequencing to driving users to different landing pages based on their responses to …..

Some of the vendors that are able to do this are Vizu and Dimestore working with various ad networks like InterClick. I feel this is a next step in finding similar audience based on survey responses vs. the traditional way that Quantcast has been selling for the last few years.

Social Media: How many fans really view your post

As social media platforms like Facebook are being used by advertisers to reach millions of users, it is critical to accurately represent the impact of posts/comments on Facebook.

Yes, there are 750MM+ unique users on Facebook, but not all of them are active at any given time. Thus, when a comment or post is pushed on your company/brand's Facebook page, not all of your Fans see/interact with them or have the opportunity to see/view them.

According to sources at Facebook, only 5-15% of the fans view the post in their newsfeed. So, if you have 100K fans, only 5-15K of those fans will actually view your post.

The main reason for this dramatic drop off is the fast moving news feed. Typically, a post is active only for about 30-45 minutes.

Also, the EdgeRank algorithm that Facebook uses keeps into account the Affinity, Weight, and Time to pick the stories/post that appears in a user's news feed. So, the more a user or fan interacts with a brand's facebook page and the more fresh/updated the posts are, the more changes of the posts to show up in fan's newsfeed.

It is estimated that this percentage is even low for Twitter as it is even fast moving. Typically, 5-7% is considered as industry norm for Twitter posts or Tweets.

So, please be careful in representing the opportunity to see/view impressions.

If you have 100MM fans and your brand posts a story on Facebook – approximately 5-15MM users will view the post.

Accounting for in-stream video ads

As more and more media dollars are moving towards in-stream video ads, it is important to ensure that the advertisers are only paying for the ads that were actually served. In the past or even currently, a lot of video ad-publishers/networks prefer to serve the ad themselves vs. serving the ads via a 3^rd party like Media Mind or DoubleClick. When the publishers serve the ads, they offer to implement a 1x1 pixel from a third party ad server. Most of the publishers tend to push back indicating that implementing 1x1 is their solution to 3^rd party ad serving.

The issues causes by the publisher serving the ad and implementing a 1x1 pixel are as follows:

1. This leads to reliance on media publishers to correctly implement the tracking pixels (1x1 to measure impressions and click-commands to measure clicks)
   
2. The use of 1x1 tracking provides no insight on how the impressions are counted
   
3. The 1x1 pixels are implemented by the publishers and they can implement the pixel to record an impression at their liberty e.g. at page load or pre-buffer or incorrectly
   

In order to accurately count the number of impressions, as per IAB, it is necessary that the impression is counted "post-buffer" and not "pre-buffer".

IAB recommends that the video ads are served using a VAST/VPAID standard. Not only does this allow the 3^rd party ad servers to serve the ad but also provides more metrics like % video viewed, so advertisers can know what % of video was viewed by the end users.

Utilizing VAST/VPAID standards to serve video ads helps drive higher accountability for in-stream video advertising.

Utilizing mobile banners ads? Do you have a mobile ready destination?

As having a line item for mobile in the media plan is becoming more and more common/required by the management, it is very important to have an end to end mobile experience. It is a very bad user experience if the banners appearing on mobile phones are being used to drive users to a desktop website.

One thing that is for sure is that your site will experience a very high bounce rate (users will leave the site as soon as they land). OR if you still notice that the users are taking actions, be assured that if you update your destination website to a mobile based website, you will see a huge jump in performance.

Driving users to a desktop based application will also take a long time to load the website, which can be frustrating as well.

All the issues mentioned above, will not only lead to bad user experience but can also lead to a negative impact on your brand. Essentially, users click on banners to get more information about your brand but due the website not optimized for the mobile they will not be able to get any information that they are seeking.

Mobile Applications vs. the Mobile Web

The question of using mobile applications vs. the mobile web is getting a lot of attention recently. One of the key questions that need to be answered is – “Is there a fundamental difference in how the users make use of these two sub-channels within mobile devices?”
Based on my knowledge from industry trends, newsletters, talking with experts – the mobile applications are utilized by users who know exactly what they need to do. Example: Paying bills, making a purchase from Amazon, ordering tacos from Chipotle, connecting with a friend on Facebook, looking for recipes, playing music for your toddler etc. On the other end, users utilize the mobile web to search for new things. Example: finding a FAO Schwarz store in NYC, trying to learn more about a new product, trying to find a customer service number.
Thus, net net – Mobile web is more useful for searching the web vs. the Mobile Applications are used by used when they know exactly what they need to do.

Launching an Mobile App and Keeping it alive

Most of the major marketers already have a mobile device app or are working on getting one live soon. The marketers should think very seriously on why they want to launch an application on the mobile devices. Does it fit the overall strategy of the campaign, brand. How will they be able to maintain it?

Most of the successful applications like Fandango, Facebook, Chipotle, and Amazon have provided a medium for users to utilize the mobile web in their day to day life. For example: Fandango, Chipotle and Amazon have made e-commerce easy. They have literally provided transactions on users fingertips. This shows how mobile devices are helping drive mobile commerce or mobile retailing. Facebook, as most of you know has exploded in terms of the user base with the mobile technology – revolution in social networking.

One more important point to think about before launching an application is how the application will survive in this world of new applications launching every day. Like any other marketing program – the mobile application also needs to be kept upto date, refreshed with new features, content etc. If the user is going to go through the exact same experience multiple times, the chances of the user re-visiting the application are slim. Even if it is a mobile commerce application, the user feedback needs to be addressed in a very pro-active fashion.

Use of bloggers for social media: Social Influencers

Many advertisers are starting to use bloggers to write specific articles about their company to help increase the awareness or product advocacy. But the key question is how to find these bloggers.

There are a few key common rules that should be followed to find relevant social influencers for your brand:

1. Read what he/she writes about – A blogger will typically not change his/her topic, if he/she doesn't write regarding your brand or industry, move on.
   
2. Make initial contacts: Post comments/links of their blog to catch their attention
   
3. Reach out to the person for advice or questions on how you can improve your business
   
4. Provide incentives example: Free visit to your plant, samples of your new product etc
   

Also, please don't feel that a marketer needs to connect with each and every blogger who writes relevant posts. A blogger with a very small following and who doesn't update often is not that important vs. a blogger who has a huge following and provides update every often. These bloggers are similar to the media companies. Consider being close, connected to the bigger companies or bloggers who have the biggest impact.