Group
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EU to provide 45,000 micro-loans to unemployed and small entrepreneurs
EU Employment and Social Affairs Ministers agreed on a new facility to provide loans to people who have lost their jobs and want to start or further develop their own small business. The European Microfinance Facility will have a starting budget of EUR 100 million which could leverage more than EUR 500 million in cooperation with international financial institutions such as the European Investment Bank (EIB) Group.
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How Online Advertising Really Works In Europe; Real-Time Bidding Best Practices Whitepaper | ExchangeWire.com
Are low click rates evidence of display advertising having little impact on consumer behaviour? Comscore has just released a whitepaper on how online display advertising is affecting European consumer behaviour. The results were based on Comscore’s proprietary panel, of which 400,000 are resident in Europe. The findings of the paper will again raise debate about attribution. Does display create buying intent at the top of the sales funnel, and should the industry be looking beyond the click? The report concludes that ad response is higher in the UK and European markets than the US. Comscore looks at some key criteria as to why there is a discrepancy between the two including, exposure to fewer ad impressions, higher search activity, and the creatives designed by European advertisers. [Comscore Report]
Are low click rates evidence of display advertising having little impact on consumer behaviour? Comscore has just released a whitepaper on how online display advertising is affecting European consumer behaviour. The results were based on Comscore’s proprietary panel, of which 400,000 are resident in Europe. The findings of the paper will again raise debate about attribution. Does display create buying intent at the top of the sales funnel, and should the industry be looking beyond the click? The report concludes that ad response is higher in the UK and European markets than the US. Comscore looks at some key criteria as to why there is a discrepancy between the two including, exposure to fewer ad impressions, higher search activity, and the creatives designed by European advertisers. [Comscore Report]
RTB is still not anywhere to be seen in the European market, despite what some companies are saying. It is good opportunity for European publishers to get up to speed with this trading methodology before it gets traction here. Improve Digital’s US partner, Pubmatic, recently released a whitepaper on how publishers can profit from RTB trading. The paper seeks to demystify the technology, the acronyms and the key players in the space. It also advises publishers on who they can partner in the space. I can name about three here in Europe presently ready to trade, but that figure should rise significantly in the coming months. [Pubmatic Whitepaper]
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13 Tactics to Make Social Media Work Harder - ClickZ
Miki 6 days ago
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With last year's exponential growth of Facebook and Twitter, marketers accept that social media is a requisite element of any integrated marketing strategy. But social media is new and in some ways different from traditional media. The challenge is leveraging social media effectively to build your prospect list and customer base, drive sales, and develop customer advocates.
While marketers intuitively understand this, many need to use some fresh tactics to help build a social media marketing plan that achieves these goals. Here are 13 actionable tactics:
- Understand how and why members of your target market use social media. As with any marketing plan, it's critical to know your target audience so you can develop properly tailored content and communications to meet their needs. Here are three factors to consider to better understand why they participate in social media:
- People want to connect with people who have similar interests to socialize.
- People are looking to expand their network of relationships, especially in situations where they need a personal referral.
- People use social media as a search filter to get input from trusted sources.
- People want to connect with people who have similar interests to socialize.
- Develop content that meets consumers' needs and interests. This should go beyond just broadcasting some offer. You should limit promotions to one out of 12 messages at most. Specifically, provide information that fulfills customers' and social media participants' needs. Remember, with social media, your audience is broader than your target market. Consider the following types of content and information:
- Provides product support and/or how-to information. This is particularly useful to encourage purchase (for example, recipes) or to provide additional instructions for post-purchase.
- Relates to consumers' hobbies and personal interests. Also, consider targeted communities like Ravelry and Dogster.
- Provides humor, because everyone likes to be entertained.
- Acts as a communication channel to aggregate relevant news, announce meetings, etc.
- Provides product support and/or how-to information. This is particularly useful to encourage purchase (for example, recipes) or to provide additional instructions for post-purchase.
- Use a variety of forms of content and understand the role that each plays in social media. A combination of time specific and evergreen information is necessary. Some types of social media drive people to your Web site and your other social media pages. Among the different formats to consider are articles, commentary (including comments, reviews, discussions, and tweets), blog posts, photos, audio, video, presentations, and Webinars.
- Enable social media participants to share content. This applies to the content on your Web site and third-party social media sites, as well as your other communications and collateral. Remember, information is currency in their relationships.
- Support and promote consumer-generated content. This should be across a wide range of venues, including consumer comments, reviews, and discussions on community sites and bulletin boards; and vehicles like TripAdvisor, Yahoo Answers, and LinkedIn.
- Integrate product information into your content/story. This is necessary for readers to find your product. Make your products part of your story. It's important that your Web site and purchase pages are optimized so visitors can share, save information, and purchase.
- Leverage social media's ability to serve as a search function. In part, Twitter's time on site is low relative to sites like Facebook because it acts like a search engine by sending readers to other sites and content.
- Use content in social media to help build organic search optimization. Provide keyword rich content and links to other areas of your Web site and offer related information. This is particularly important with the introduction of real-time search results.
- Listen to, interact with, and recognize consumers. They want to be heard and acknowledged. They want human interaction, not an automated communication.
- Provide immediacy and nimbly react to events as they unfold. For example, people mobilized and donated to Haitian causes within minutes of the recent earthquake. The key is to make your communications relevant on an individual basis and to enable smaller contributions.
- Participate in social media with a human voice and a personal story. This refers back to "The Cluetrain Manifesto."
- Encourage employees to participate in social media. Trust them to build relationships outside of the traditional channels of sales, support, and service. Develop guidelines to empower employees and give them appropriate training. This gives your company a real human face and builds cohesion both internally and externally.
- Track relevant conversations, responses, customer relationships, and sales across social media forums. Also, measure specific initiatives to determine which ones are most effective for your offering and customer base. Use these results to help modify and refine your tactics.
Overall, it's important for marketers to know that social media is not one specific campaign or set of initiatives. It requires a change in mindset that demands ongoing commitment and reaches across your entire organization. The creative use of social media is critical to ensure that your marketing continues to be in tune with the needs of today's consumers.
- Understand how and why members of your target market use social media. As with any marketing plan, it's critical to know your target audience so you can develop properly tailored content and communications to meet their needs. Here are three factors to consider to better understand why they participate in social media:
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'Wired' Chief Says iPad Will Rescue Magazines
Miki 11 days ago
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Chris Anderson has seen the future of magazines -- and it's on a tablet. In an address at the American Association of Advertising Agencies' Transformation Conference in San Francisco today, Anderson, the editor-in-chief of Wired, extolled the possibilities for the magazine industry via Apple's iPad and other future tablet-computer platforms. Wired staffers have been working to create a tablet version of the title for six months, with the goal of having it ready in May. "We've been looking for a way to do it better, and the good news is that I think we found it," said Anderson. Presently, online versions of magazines lose "the coherence and majesty of the [printed] medium," said Anderson. Tablets, on the other hand, offer impressive functionality, such as 360-degree views and iPhone-like screen sliding, plus collapsing and layering -- all of which make the user experience vastly more compelling than the Web, he said. Additionally, the success of the iPhone, Kindle and the emergence of cloud computing have paved the way for devices that are less powerful and lighter with a longer battery life than standard laptops, Anderson said. The iPad is just such a device, and it will sell millions of units in its first month and tens of millions in the following months and years, he predicted. "It will take less than 10 years for it to become mainstream," he said.
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Nearly one-fifth of marketing dollars will go to social in five years
Social marketing budgets are constantly going up, according to “The CMO Survey” from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and the American Marketing Association (AMA).
Marketers were already planning on upping spend in August 2009. They have continued to increase outlays since then, with respondents in February 2010 claiming they will devote nearly one-fifth of their marketing budgets to social media in the next five years.
Looking across sectors, business-to-business (B2B) spending is nearly in line with business-to-consumer (B2C), except in the lagging B2B products category. While B2C services were behind the game in August 2009, spending in that area has caught up and will remain in line with other outlays for the next several years. B2B product marketers will remain behind the curve over the next five years.
Notably, spending plans for every sector were higher in February 2010 than they had been just six months earlier.
Growing B2B spending on social media lines up with the general goals of B2B marketers: customer relationship management and brand-building, which respondents claim will be the highest growth areas in the next year. Social marketing, with its strength in boosting brand engagement and loyalty, is an effective medium for both purposes.
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AdMob-Mobile-Metrics-Jan-10.pdf
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Tie Club for Men
Video player -
Beefing Up Banner Ads....
In October 1994, Hot Wired ran the first Web banner, an ad placement for AT&T carrying the promise of a new era with the message, "Have you ever clicked your mouse right here? You will." In the ensuing time period, the banner has generated billions of dollars in revenue but has also come to be seen as a symbol of failure. Its place as the pre-eminent form of Web advertising was eclipsed in 2000 when Google borrowed the paid search advertising system pioneered by Overture and turned it into a moneymaking machine. Since then, the display advertising business has played second fiddle to search, despite the fact that search pages make up only a fraction of Web traffic.
That situation is slowly changing. A new Web ad architecture is developing that promises to remake how advertising is bought and sold, borrowing the best of paid search auction systems while going beyond their targeting to allow advertisers to show each ad only to the audience they want. The automated exchanges, fueled by vast amounts of Internet user data, provide promise and potentially peril to all parts of the industry, from clients to agencies to publishers. "It's going to facilitate a lot of brand dollars coming online because they'll be able to buy audience -- and right now it's really hard for them to do it at scale outside of a few portals," says William Morrison, an analyst with ThinkEquity.
The promise of digital display advertising has always been that it would allow marketers to put the right message in front of the right customers at the right moment. For the most part, it's fallen short. Display is hampered by the fact that it doesn't have a clear intent signal like search. Instead, display advertising has looked for signals elsewhere, with mixed results. Content is still the top proxy used for finding the right audience. The clear drawbacks to this are that site audiences are far from monoliths. What's more, a travel advertiser might want to reach not just male sports enthusiasts, but male sports enthusiasts who are interested in traveling to Las Vegas.
Contextual ads, which key off specific content, have also come up short with their relevance. The same goes for behavioral ad systems, which were thought to be the next big thing in helping display close the effectiveness gap with search.
Instead, advertisers want to directly target audiences. Publishers and networks have long promised this but generally failed to deliver, at least at scale. Now, thanks to advances made in advertising exchanges like Google's DoubleClick unit, the promise is becoming reality. Advertisers can hook into a half dozen or more exchanges with a set price they are willing to pay for a particular audience -- i.e., that male 18-35 who is interested in traveling to Las Vegas. In the snap of a finger, when a user arrives at a page, an exchange makes a critical decision based on the data available about a user. It trolls through the bids to find the best match for the user. These computations are done on a banner-by-banner basis, in real time. The user on the page might not fit the profile of a Las Vegas traveler, but other data could indicate a female looking at SUVs, triggering a bid from an automaker.
"What's happening is that you as a buyer will have the opportunity to make a decision about which ad impressions are most valuable across a gigantic swath of impressions," explains Nathan Woodman, svp of corporate development at Havas Digital. For now, only a small portion of Web advertising goes through such systems. Forrester Research, however, forecasts that 30 percent of online advertising will flow through such marketplaces by the end of 2010.
Google has placed a big bet in the area by making it a core part of its effort to be as big of a player in display ads as it is in search. Last September, it relaunched the DoubleClick Ad Exchange with real-time bidding to act as a spot market to bring together Web publishers and ad buyers. The exchange is meant for what Google calls "nonguaranteed" impressions-the ad inventory not sold via a direct sales force. "While the display ad industry is quite large today, we think it can be substantially larger," notes Neil Mohan, vp of product management at Google. "Our goal is to grow the overall pie."Instead, advertisers want to directly target audiences. Publishers and networks have long promised this but generally failed to deliver, at least at scale. Now, thanks to advances made in advertising exchanges like Google's DoubleClick unit, the promise is becoming reality. Advertisers can hook into a half dozen or more exchanges with a set price they are willing to pay for a particular audience -- i.e., that male 18-35 who is interested in traveling to Las Vegas. In the snap of a finger, when a user arrives at a page, an exchange makes a critical decision based on the data available about a user. It trolls through the bids to find the best match for the user. These computations are done on a banner-by-banner basis, in real time. The user on the page might not fit the profile of a Las Vegas traveler, but other data could indicate a female looking at SUVs, triggering a bid from an automaker.
"What's happening is that you as a buyer will have the opportunity to make a decision about which ad impressions are most valuable across a gigantic swath of impressions," explains Nathan Woodman, svp of corporate development at Havas Digital.
For now, only a small portion of Web advertising goes through such systems. Forrester Research, however, forecasts that 30 percent of online advertising will flow through such marketplaces by the end of 2010.
Google has placed a big bet in the area by making it a core part of its effort to be as big of a player in display ads as it is in search. Last September, it relaunched the DoubleClick Ad Exchange with real-time bidding to act as a spot market to bring together Web publishers and ad buyers. The exchange is meant for what Google calls "nonguaranteed" impressions-the ad inventory not sold via a direct sales force. "While the display ad industry is quite large today, we think it can be substantially larger," notes Neil Mohan, vp of product management at Google. "Our goal is to grow the overall pie." -
What Works in Online Video
Shorter spots see higher completion rates
According to analysis of video ad network YuMe, online video viewers became less likely to click on preroll ads, or watch them to completion, over the course of 2009.
Between Q1 and Q4, click-through rates trended steadily downward, from 1.88% to 0.74%. Completion rates dropped as well, to 66.3% in Q4.
Broken down by length of preroll, there was a trade-off. While completion rates were higher for 15-second videos than for 30-second spots, the longer ads received more click-throughs. Additionally, view-to-completion rates fell throughout 2009 for both types of video ad, but rates for the shorter ads dropped more dramatically over the period.
Average click-through rates for the year were almost doubled on longer videos, at 1.5% for 30-second ads versus 0.8% for 15-second prerolls.
YuMe found that video ads targeted to children and teens ages 6 to 14 had the highest video ad click-through rate, at 3.5%, but the lowest rate of viewing to completion. It was the ads targeted at the oldest users (over 35) that were most likely to be watched to the end, at a rate of 77.4%.
Online video analytics and distribution company TubeMogul reported somewhat higher completion rates for 10- to 30-second preroll ads appearing before short-form video clips. Nearly 16% of viewers clicked away rather than watch the ad to completion.
Rates were worse at magazine and newspaper sites, with nearly one-quarter of viewers abandoning the video, while just 10.9% clicked away from prerolls in front of video from large broadcasters.
Earlier research has shown that in addition to location and industry, video ad size and creative have a significant effect on success metrics.
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What Growth In The European Non-Premium Display Market Might Look Like
The data available on the European non-premium display market is sorely lacking. The chart below is based on data from ThinkEquity’s projected growth in non-premium display globally and previous IAB Europe audits on the European online advertising market. The chart gives an indication of the opportunity for those companies operating in this market, and the challenges facing publishers looking to monetise this growing area of their online display. Let’s assume that this entire non-premium inventory share is flowing through ad networks, ad exchanges, yield optimisers and private exchanges. There are some caveats that could bump up these numbers. The first of these is the “secondary display market”. This market is essentially under-monetised inventory that publishers sell though a premium exchange or partner. Does it have a value? Unfortunately, no data is currently available on the “secondary display market”. Then there’s the real possibility of agencies deciding to shift chunks of their display spend (thanks mainly to the DSPs) onto the exchanges. Publishers will then be forced, by economic necessity, to trade more inventory through these platforms. These all could alter the landscape drastically, and figures for online display sold through automated platforms would have to be revised up.
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YouTube's Top Money Makers Are Record Labels
Music videos from Sony and Universal on YouTube have more advertising sold against them than any other group, according to analysis from TubeMogul. Below is an approximation of the daily share of YouTube's monetized views based on the number of videos that carry ads in YouTube's daily top 100 most-viewed. This is why Sony, Universal, and YouTube are teaming up to launch Vevo, the big web music video site, December 8th. According to TubeMogul, 3.94% of YouTube's daily views come from the two labels. This also shows how broad YouTube's base of publishers is, since only two represent more than 1% of the daily share of monetized views.
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Privacy Restrictions May Open Ad Targeting Doors - eMarketer
Industry responses to government could boost behavioral targeting spending
With the effective mixing and mining of audience data becoming increasingly important to online advertisers, the role of behavioral targeting has grown more central.
eMarketer estimates online advertisers in the US will spend more than $1.1 billion on behaviorally targeted advertising. By 2014, spending will hit $2.6 billion. The estimate represents steady growth rates of about 20% from 2009 through 2014.
The figures include spending on online ads displayed to a select audience whose interests or intentions are revealed by Website or ISP tracking data, audience segmentation or predictive analysis.
Behaviorally targeted ad dollars will rise as a proportion of online display spending from 14.2% in 2010 to nearly 20% by 2014, when ads targeted based on interests or intentions will account for 7.6% of total US online ad spending.
However, with ad targeting and privacy issues in the public eye, marketers face the possibility of regulation or legislation that sets boundaries on how they can use audience data.
While that warning might imply lesser spending growth than estimated, it could also make for a more stable market with clarified rules.
“A more open deal between the two sides, the ad industry and consumers, could help draw more ad dollars to behavioral targeting,” said eMarketer senior analyst David Hallerman. “In that case, traditional brand marketers would be less concerned about giving a black eye to their brand image through what some consumers see as privacy violations from behavioral targeting.
“And many consumers would wind up more educated about the essential anonymity of behavioral targeting and therefore could more readily accept such ad targeting in exchange for free content,” Mr. Hallerman said.
For more information, see the upcoming eMarketer report, “Audience Ad Targeting: Data and Privacy Issues.”
