Media Week

Today, Che Guevara finds himself adorning key-rings, T-Shirts, mugs and virtually every possible form of merchandise conceivable to the human mind. Ironic, but perhaps proof that the longevity of most modern social endeavours are eventually decided by their ability to ring in commercial gains.

What works for Che Guevara, needs to work for social networks as well. While all social networks base their USP on the ‘connect’ they establish among users, their longevity is decided by their ability to translate this ‘connect’ into euros. Primarily, euros from advertisers confident that they are getting value. It’s that value part that is the key. With an intention of tackling this problem head on, Facebook in partnership with Nielsen has announced a product to help measure the impact of ads that appear on Facebook. The product, ‘Brand Lift’, will measure some metrics of ad effectiveness on users’ minds through surveying Facebook users.

I spoke about something similar in my last post before Neilsen/Facebook released this product, and although it doesn’t get involved in the user generated side of things, it’s a step in the right direction. Brand Lift polls users’ to gauge their involvement with Facebook ads on key parameters such as aided awareness, ad recall, message association, brand favourability, and purchase consideration. The system then compares the responses of users who have seen the ads with those of people who haven’t. This comparison will give marketers insight into the value of advertising on the social network.

It’s quite similar to Dynamic Logic in some respects, which is no bad thing. However, I would question whether the slightly ‘touch feely’ measurement of Brand Lift will be good enough to resist the cuts of Marketing and Financial directors when online, in their minds, is synonymous with definitive ROI. What’s probably needed is a meeting in the middle with further development of tools like Brand Lift, and education on non-ROI softer metrics.

Digital marketing technology has two main pillars: delivering a message and measuring the effectiveness of that message.

One of the reasons why digital is such an interesting area to work is because both of these pillars are in constant flux. Obviously, delivery mechanisms are becoming more and more refined and targeted - companies are finding ever more ingenious ways to deliver the right message, at the right time, to the right people. However, as the media landscape changes, what's also changing are the metrics used to evaluate the effectiveness. I won't go as far as stating that sales or bottom line ROI is going to be anything more than paramount - these will always be important- but it's clear that the measurement architecture that exists with current technology is probably not developing as fast as the media landscape. Novelty is great, but it comes at the cost of expertise.

I recently attended the rather good "Measurement Camp" where the core topic of discussion is how to go about evaluating social media. What was clear is there is a pretty wide consensus of opinion.

From speaking to various agencies, I can see that there are big differences in the way social media effectiveness is measured and reported. It also seems a bit worrying that different tools give different values for the same metric. Very often the problem is the availability of data. Tools working form incomplete, and different datasets can’t seriously be relied upon.

The logical solution is to access the data at a single source, where it can be easily tapped and consistently reliable. By the source, I mean the social networking platforms. It would be great to see the agencies and social platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Myspace et al) get together and agree a standardised model. The platforms could report the metrics (number of brand mentions, visits to pages mentioning brands, sentiment of those pages, unique visitors...etc.) or aggregated metrics into one "score". The data would be reliable, more insightful and in everyone’s interest.

It took a long time to agree on the offline Advertising Value Equivalency (AVE) metric, but its success shows that it can be done.

I was having a look at the US version of Bing to get a better understanding of what the UK version will look like when the army of Microsoft developers have finished customising it for a UK audience.  Needless to say, the US version is a lot more functional and has a lot of nice features. One compelling feature is the travel tab, which looks to be powered by Farecast- a third party website.

This got me thinking. If a search engine's sole reason for existence is to catalogue the world's information and provide the user with the correct answer, surely the best experience would be that the user never needs to leave the results page at all? Afterall, a significant number of sites are just more specific search engines themselves - why not use one all powerful engine to rule them all (or at least aggregate the results)?

The July rise in Bing search share to 8.9% in the US, although not barnstorming, would suggest that users are happy with it. So, does this mean we could see the Farecast/Bing model extending beyond that travel vertical and territory? Google Base is probably the oldest and most well-known example of this sort of model, and for a retailer is an absolute must nowadays (I've seen clients get up to 15% of their revenue from GBase).  However, GBase is retail focussed and not really pushed by Google. It could do with some TLC. Yahoo ‘trusted feeds' is another that follows in a similar vein.

One offshoot of this model becoming more prevalent could be that you may see a race between sites to make their content as readily available to the engines as possible - this means feeds, XML type feeds. It becomes the publisher's responsibility to make their content neat and understandable for the engines to relay back to the user (beyond the standard remit of SEO).  We could see this becoming increasingly important in site development briefs and maybe as its own stand alone ‘feeds' channel within a marketing department.

Obviously, from a strategic point of view, there are some hefty reasons why a publisher would not want to hand over all content/inventory to the engines. However, I think there is mileage in this sort of activity, but it requires the correct commercial architecture to make it interesting to the content owner (so they invest in producing the feeds), and to the engines (so they push it more readily). It's almost a catch22.

With the news that Yahoo and MSN are back courting each other, I thought it relevant to talk about the (not so) recent MSN advertising summit. Actually, the fact I can talk about it at all is something to be celebrated. All too often entry to these events is dependent upon donning a pair of NDA handcuffs. MS did consider this, but then removed the requirement in a gesture of openness. Hopefully others will follow suit.

Convergent (and synchronised) consumption means that digital advertising, through different forms, is becoming both ubiquitous and fragmented at the same time. Think: mobile, display, TV, video, search, gaming, etc... With people jumping between digital mediums at an ever increasing rate, it’s becoming increasingly important to integrate the advertising media.

Channel integration has been an industry buzzword for a long time, but I would say the evidence suggests it’s falling far short of what the technology is capable of.  Media is better when it’s tailored, and failing to recognise you have a heterogeneous audience and deliver targeted, integrated messaging is opportunity and budget wasted.

The issue probably lies with the level of technical and resource requirement to build an all-encompassing media delivery system that delivers targeted messaging across all channels.

Historically, this has meant changing the agency structure and building the media strategy around the messaging delivery technology (usually the adserver), which is fraught with complexities. However, it looks as though MS may be about to make things a lot simpler.

When it launches, the new Microsoft advertising platform looks as though it will allow users to buy media across different channels and target that media dependent upon individual’s activity. For example, only showing car-insurance display ads to people who had Binged ‘car insurance’. (That’s Binged not binged, although I can’t get enough of searching for ‘car insurance’, as readers will know.)

At the moment, it just looks like search and display, but the hire of Ashley Highfield (of iplayer fame) and the recent launch of MS long-form streaming video (not to mention windows mobile and the Xbox) seem to be a strong indication that the MS ad platform will eventually offer complete and easy channel integration.

You have a lot in common with the octopus. You may not know this, but you see things the same. I don’t mean from a personal perspective (although the octopus may like strictly come dancing as much as the next human), but from a physiological perspective. Let me explain: the human and octopus eyes bear more than a passing resemblance. Both have a lens, a variable aperture, and a fovea. This is a textbook example of convergent evolution. Both animals have evolved to the same design because this is the best structure to solve the animals need to see its surroundings.

I came across another example of convergent evolution recently whilst attending the IPA’s Digital Innovation day. Roughly speaking, the day consisted of speed dating event, with some healthy debate and presentations thrown in for good measure. The purpose was to showcase some of the good work going on in the UK’s academic institutes and start a dialogue between media agencies with the desired outcome being some sort of synergy and joint project work.

What I found absolutely stunning, was how virtually the same technologies were being developed within the universities and digital media. With often the biggest difference being the name. One such example is behavioural targeting and computational persuasive technologies. Both consist of delivering personalised messaging to encourage a particular behaviour – whether it be stop smoking, or to choose a particular provider for your car insurance renewal.

The UK is purported to have the world’s most advanced digital economy, and there are reasons for and against that argument. Broadband penetration and bandwidth is a big part of the drive to keep that top spot, but technology and innovation should be given equal emphasis.

Coming up with ideas is one thing, but what is more important is that the great ideas get turned into commercial products. Judging from what I saw, media agencies can perform pivotal a role in facilitating this.

Well done to the IPA for having the foresight to set up such an event!

With the apparent early success of Bing, could we be seeing the beginning of a rival to Google that, in terms of marketing activity, receives a significant share of media agency’s attention? MSN and Yahoo search have historically been slightly neglected by media agencies (and some clients), even though there is some volume to be had. The problem is resource – it requires an equal amount of time to manage each search engine – and the benefit simply doesn’t match the cost.

If search share grows on Bing, media agencies and clients will stand to gain more from managing the search advertising and will start to do it in the intricate manner currently only afforded to Google. This means we should start to see advertiser bidding competition heating up, which would be good news for Bill Gates.

A possible offshoot of a search duopoly would be that demand grows for tools that can manage activity across multiple engines, especially the mirroring of campaigns. This seems logical as the account structures, keywords, and creative are all pretty similar for the 3 engines, which means there are some big time savings to be made by using tools (some already in existence, and new ones) that deploy the same account to all 3.

However, I do wonder that if Google begins to feel threatened, they may try to employ the little-known ‘Functional Separation’ clause in their Adwords API terms and conditions.

Functional Separation. Any information collected from an input field used to collect AdWords API Campaign Management Data may be used only to manage and report on AdWords accounts. Similarly, any information or data used as AdWords API Campaign Management Data must have been collected from an input field used only to collect AdWords API Campaign Management Data. For example, the AdWords API Client may not offer a functionality that copies data from a non-AdWords account into an AdWords account or from an AdWords account to a non-AdWords account.

In a nutshell it means 3rd party tools that use the Google API to communicate with Google can’t produce a tool that allows clients and agencies to mirror their search campaigns across the three main engines. This would mean more demands on resource and hinder revenue growth on the other engines. Having spoken to some technology service providers, they allege that Google has started to enforce this clause, but only on a few rare occasions at the moment, and not having put this to Google it is unconfirmed. I don’t know if Doubleclick will be subjected to this restriction, but apparently the decision will need to come from the very top.

It seems like “the year of the mobile” has been touted ever since the first braying yuppie put their signet ringed finger to DTMF keypad. I’m not going to talk about mobile advertising here, beyond saying I do believe we may finally be at the tipping point. Enough said.

I’m going to talk about the subject of debate I recently had about another ‘Sword of Damocles’ waiting to take the place of mobile advertising – is this the year where targeting technology takes off?

Like mobile advertising, targeting technology has been around for a while. It exists in many forms – a quick brainstorm revealed 11 distinct types of targeting available to digital marketers, ranging from Geographic to Psychographic (personality type) – but almost without exception they are a rarely used weapon of mass attraction within the media agency’s arsenal.

With increasing economic pressure creating an increasing demand for line-by-line justification of marketing spend, it seems like the stage is set for brands to embrace targeting technology as a way of sweating diminishing budgets.

Let’s not forget, one of the big winners of the recession has been Search Marketing. Search advertising is a form of targeting technology – by definition, people searching for “car insurance” are either in the market for car insurance or very bored – but Search is just one element within the online space. The 95% of people that don’t convert are lost to the aether.

Joining up the digital channel spectrum under one over-arching targeting strategy can be a superbly effective method of closing the loop and plugging the leaky bucket. In this way, Search becomes a method for consumer segmentation.

However, despite singing the praises of targeting technology, I can’t ignore the spectre of privacy concerns that may be the yoke currently holding back development and mass adoption.  If this is the case, we need to have a grown-up debate to clearly define rules, regulation, and user opt-in procedures to ease consumer (and Brand) fears.

The technology is waiting for us – why is it being ignored?