Who want some engaging digital ads without intruding on viewer experience

It has been proven that creating interesting, unique advertising content without intruding the user experience is critical

In Showtime, a mobile marketing agency, the app team, as well as our digital creative design team, started partnering with our program marketing department. Program marketing is essentially the brand managers for the shows and the company is trying to do thing differently.

“The program marketing team also has the responsibility for creating the creative in our paid media campaigns,” said Ken Todd, vice president, of digital content syndication and mobile development at Showtime Networks, Inc., New York. “So, as the mobile marketing spends continued to grow, we wanted to go beyond the typical banner ad that we have been doing, which was basically program promotion, tune in with a tap to watch the video.

“There’s obviously a great space for that type of mobile advertising, but we wanted to carve out a couple of special executions on the media plans to try to really focus on using some more interactivity using the experience that have developed using native applications for mobile devices.”

The network is known for its attention grabbing mobile material across all platforms, advertising and its own content.

Data integration
Todd displayed some examples of some of the company's most successful ad campaigns.

The premium network sponsors the application for the annual SXWX festival that creates a way for Showtime to develop something out of the ordinary instead of the traditional banner advertisement. 

In the second year that Showtime sponsored the app, it tapped a real-time trending data approach used in the previous year’s version of the app but incorporated it with show promotion. 

For instance, the Showtime show Penny Dreadful was promoted on the SXSW go app with tarot cards that users could get a digital reading from, incorporating trending data from the festival.

Tarot card feature in the SXSW Go app in 2014

In this year’s festival, Showtime provided a streaming loop of programming to watch while waiting in line as well as an on-demand feature. The banner ads on the app were themed to coincide with the festival and Showtime programming such as “tempted to sneak away, Join the stream,” for the show The Affair.

The banner ads also integrated with the landing page of the app.

Standing out
The network also executed a takeover of the New York Times’ tablet app for the launch of the show, Ray Donovan, where consumers could view an interactive video promoted the show. Consumers could tap on the video, pausing it and providing more information about the character.

This was a simple and engaging way for viewers who were not familiar with the show to become involved and get an overview of what the show was about.

A shake-to-reveal ad was developed for the show Homeland, too. Users would shake their mobile devices to uncover more about the show and could click to watch the trailer.

Engineers also created a way for users’ mobile devices to vibrate coinciding with an explosion for the season four trailers of Homeland. 

Homeland Season Four's mobile ad campaign 

A recent Penny Dreadful ad campaign allowed users to pan through the environment of the show and tap anywhere interested consumers would want to learn more.

“As we go through the creative process every time, we’re thinking about how can this be different, how can this utilize the capabilities of the native device and how can we stand out in the crowd to make our programming really jump out at the consumer,” Mr. Todd said. “We know that the mobile device is a very intimate and personal device and we’re trying to be very careful not to disrupt your experience.

“But if we catch your attention, we want to immerse you in our programming that Showtime provides and give you a memorable experience,” he said.

The Facebook P2P Mobile Payment is more than just a payment method

Online Payment has been a dream of Facebook for eight years. It was also clear that when the company hired former PayPal executive David Marcus last year that it was planning to turn that dream into business.

Not surprisingly, Facebook has announced launching of peer-to-peer (P2P) mobile payments into its Messenger application. Honestly, it works basically like GMail payments or Square Cash that only supports debit card transactions, and for now only in US.

According to the announcement, “The first time you send or receive money in Messenger, you’ll need to add a Visa or MasterCard debit card issued by a US bank to your account. Once you add a debit card, you can create a PIN to provide additional security the next time you send money. On iOS devices you can also enable Touch ID. As always, you can add another layer of authentication to your account at any time.” Theoretically, the money is immediately transferred. However Facebook indicates that it can take up to three days to receive the funds depending on the underlying bank’s policies.

Given the popularity of Facebook around the world, it is reasonable for us to say that this mobile payment method will ultimately roll out globally and it could become quite successful (for different reasons in different countries). Beyond that, a more interesting question is what might come after the P2P mobile payment.

Obviously, such a powerful payments capability could enhance e-commerce on Facebook or provide consumer spending data to Facebook ad targeting. In just last week, Facebook announced the acquisition of TheFind, publicly discussed as a way to improve Facebook Ad targeting and relevance. However, TheFind is a shopping site that could provide Facebook with an immediate e-commerce marketplace capability. It still remains to be seen whether e-commerce is the next target that Facebook is moving towards. Mobile payments would obviously be supportive of e-commerce. It’s also not inconceivable that Facebook would get into in-app payments or offline mobile payments in physical stores at some future point. Marcus has experience with all these things.

All these payment scenarios also raise the prospect of “closed loop” transactions and the ROI reporting and optimization benefits they imply.

Brand Following and Engagement on Instagram

Following the blog on Instagram’s new advertisement tool last week, I will post several hard facts about marketing on Instagram.

Recently, a new study by digital think tank L2 pointed out that the number of Instagram follower does not proportionately related to engagement rate for brands on this innovative social platform. L2 tracked the Instagram activities of 250 major brands in nine categories --- auto, beauty, consumer electronics, drinks, fashion, retail, sportswear, travel, and watches and jewelry - over the last year. The results are showed in the graph below:

Of all the brands, Nokia has the highest engagement by far, despite its relatively small and stagnant following. Companies with the best correlation between audience and engagement - including Nike, Starbucks, GoPro, Aeropostale, and Victoria's Secret Pink - generally share a combination of millennial popularity, strong lifestyle branding, and iconic visuals.

However, we do notice one thing that helps increase engagement --- variety of content, such as mixing in lifestyle photography and celebrities, rather than solely posting product shots. Looking at the top 200 photos by engagement rate, the study saw a disproportionate number of photos from Patagonia, Pabst Blue Ribbon, and Maserati. While Maserati's strongest impression was a photo of a car, those for PBR and Patagonia were photos of Bill Murray wearing shorts covered in the beer company's logo and a ski mountain, respectively, images that aren't solely of the brand's products.

Moreover, one thing that doesn't increase engagement is posting more often; the study actually found an inverse relationship between post frequency and engagement. The average brand posted 110 photos during the first quarter and achieved 1.15 percent engagement. During the third quarter - at which point brands were officially posting more content to Instagram than to Facebook, partially because of the former's younger audience and less-restrictive algorithm - brands posted an average of 9 more photos, and saw engagement drop to 1.03 percent.

In general, automotive brands, particularly Mazda, have the highest engagement. But the sportswear category isn't far behind, with above-average engagement, in addition to having a strong growth rate within its community - by far the largest, of all the industries. No brand encapsulates that better than Nike.

Nike is above-average in growth and engagement, while maintaining a massive following of nearly 13 million users. The sportswear giant also leads in brand hash-tagged posts. Starbucks and Chanel are the second and third follower, with about 20,000 less each.

Instagram took a surprisingly big step forward as a marketing tool!!!

Initially released in 2010, Instagram took a big step forward as a marketing tool this week. Instagram announced that, for the first time, it will enable placement of live links in posts, as part a multi-image advertising format for the first time.

Speaking more precisely, Instagram is now offering a new carousel-based advertisement format for advertisers on its platform. The new format enables marketers to display multiple images that users can view by swiping left on the mobile screen. By offering this new function, Instagram wishes to help brands share stories through imagery and also to offer opportunity for users to know more about brands through the app. “Since we began offering a way for advertisers to reach people on Instagram in 2013, we’ve heard from marketers that they want to tell sequenced stories in beautiful, compelling ways that lead to meaningful results for their businesses,” Instagram said in its official blog announcing this launching. The blog also mentioned that Instagram also received feedbacks from users that indicate users’ interest of learning more about a brand though their substitution in Instagram.

More than this multiple imagery display, Instagram also allows advertisers to link their photo or video ads to outside websites and sources. Instagram simply put a “Learn More” button at the end of photos series.

Check the new ad format here!

This tiny magic button activates broad potential of online marketing campaigns on Instagram platform. “For instance, a fashion company could use the carousel to deconstruct the individual products in a ‘look.’ A car company might share an array of different features of a vehicle and provide a link to learn more about the new model. Or, an advertiser could showcase how multiple ingredients come together to make a delicious meal,” mentioned in Instagram’s official blog post.

The ability to link an imagery post to other sites will certainly be a welcome change for marketerst. One of Instagram’s shortcomings as a promotional tool is that there’s no way to include clickable links within posts. Because of that limitation, Instagram has long been considered a place for businesses to build their brand and plant their flag rather than drive traffic back to their websites.

Instagram, however, typically moves deliberately with new advertising foramt and so is this time; the company said carousel ads are being introduced on a limited basis. “In the coming weeks,” the blog post stated, “you may see carousel ads and might notice variations of the format as we learn what people are most interested in and what performs best.”

As spend on brand apps keeps rising, how to maximize the engagement of brand apps?

This week I came across an article indicates that brand apps are falling short when it comes to consumer engagement. It has estimated that the total spend by British consumers on brand apps has hit £4.04 billion a year – a 24% increase compared to the previous year. Such a strong rise in spend suggests that if brands had worked harder on engagement of their apps to deliver more compelling apps, the results could be even more explosive.

It also suggests that Apple users are the most valuable target audiences for brands since those using iOS spend an average of £89.36 or 29.7% more than those on Android.

Despite the high spend however the study supported the fact that brands must do more to engage their users if they want to maximize user spend and usage. The report showed that the number of apps downloaded by the average consumer rose only marginally from 5.5 to 5.9 year on year. Time spent in app also remained static for nearly a third of those surveyed customers (29.5%) with only a quarter spending more time than ever in the apps.

For those where time spent using brand apps was actually falling, a number of reasons were indicated in the report. One in three said that repetitive or irrelevant notifications were putting them off spending so much time in brand apps while for 16.4% the perception was that brands had got lazy and weren’t being either interesting or innovative enough with their apps to retain users’ attention. Similarly 10% felt that brands’ failure to update apps frequently enough – whether with new content or to remain timely with other marketing campaigns and projects – had been a turnoff.

As for brands, it is always necessary to work harder if they are to increase engagement and release the potential of the app channel and its rising spend further. Brands should not feel satisfied about the current situation – they need to have a content strategy planed in advance, be ready to update their apps with innovative new features at least once every six months, and promote their apps as forcefully as possible through other marketing channels. Most importantly, brands have got to listen to their customers when it comes to things like notifications – if brands fail to do that, they will almost certainly have their apps uninstalled before the apps can actually bring benefits to the company.

See the Oscars from digital marketer's aspect

See the Oscars from digital marketer's aspect

No award show is bigger than the Oscars. In 2014, 43 million people made it the largest non-sporting television audience since the finale of Friends. But the event isn’t just about a few hours on a TV screen. Through digital, audiences are engaging with the Academy Awards well before, during, and after the actual event. On Google alone, there were tens of millions of Oscar-related searches last year. It would likely take decades to watch the variety of Oscar-related content on YouTube. All this adds up to many new opportunities for digital marketers to participate in these massive cultural moments beyond the telecast. Let’s look at some data from Google Trends and YouTube.

“Oscar” Starts Early Online

Along with the celebrities themselves, fans are getting ready for the Oscars well before the big night. There was a 10 percent growth in "Oscar party" search interest from 2013 to 2014, and this interest started trending a week before the event. And according to YouTube, the "watch time" of Oscar movie trailers spikes as soon as the nominees are announced, and it stays strong as the awards approach.

The Red Carpet Is Getting Longer

Of course, awards are as much about the fashion as the accolades themselves, and Oscar dresses are always a highlight. But interest in the red carpet is extending far beyond the night itself, even beyond the event. For the first time in recent years, searches for "red carpet" in 2014 were fragmented into two big spikes — one around the Globes and one for the Oscars — plus a larger bump around the Emmys.

After the Awards, the Oscars Live on — on YouTube

As celebrities head to after-parties, audiences head to YouTube, where the party lasts a lot longer. In fact, there are many more searches for the Oscars the day after the awards than on the day itself, both on YouTube and Google. Back at work, people are catching up on the highlights and lowlights so they can join in water-cooler conversations, and video is their medium of choice. People watched multiple decades’ worth of Oscar-related content on YouTube in the days following last year's show. In 2014, there were 25 times more YouTube searches for the Oscars on the Monday after the awards than on the day itself. On Google, there were four times as many searches.

It doesn't end yet. Videos about award shows are watched for months after the event itself. The Oscars in particular have a long shelf life, with interest picking back up in the fall. People aren't just looking for clips from the show. They want to learn and see more — behind-the-scenes footage, celebrity beauty tutorials, and funny moments— and share it with friends.

There are more than 300,000 YouTube videos about being behind the scenes at the Oscars and, last year, 60 percent of their views happened in the eight months after the event, according to data from YouTube. Leonardo DiCaprio’s reaction to not winning an Oscar became a meme unto itself — thousands of hours of video about it have been watched in the past year.

Compare the performance of channels across Mobile & Laptop

As we have covered topics about natural search, paid search and online display advertisement, it would be interesting to explore a bit about the performance of each channel. Here I would like to share some insightful metrics from Marin Software indicating the effectiveness of each channel.

In its Q4 2014 Benchmark Report, Marin Software, an online advertising company that is managing $6 billion in annualized ad spending across the web and mobile devices, looked at performance by device across social, display and search campaigns running through its platform. Overall, desktops lost 6.3 percent of click share, primarily to smart phones, which grew by 4.8 percent.

First of all, let’s take a look at click-through rate across platforms.

Obviously, the noticeable trend here is that advertisement engagement rates on mobile devices outperform desktop on all three platforms as search remains a dominant position over other platforms.

However, when it comes to conversion rates, things become a little dramatic. Conversion rates continue to be far lower on mobile devices compared to desktop and tablets.

From my point of view, lower conversion rates on mobile devices, especially in terms of online search, are mainly driven by the habit of consumer when they use online search. First, people tend to search on mobile devices when they need to explore a concept, find a place, check item availability or just quickly grab some information. Their intentions are not directly related to purchase. But people will absolutely be influenced by advertisements through such search experience. It just the matter of how we should measure this kind of hidden impact while conversion rate did a poor job so far. Secondly, only those “quick tasks” seem to be reasonable handled through our mobile phones. This means the period of time that consumers spent on each mobile search might be too short to actually stimulate a purchase.

Marin Software conducts 57% of its campaigns on Facebook with more than 60% of clicks come from mobile devices. However, only 34% of conversions happened on mobile.

Cost-per-click (CPC) mirrors conversion performance. CPCs are highest on desktop on search, social and display, and overall, CPCs are higher on search, followed by display and social.

As consumers continue to spend more time on their mobile devices, it seems quite necessary for companies and marketers to figure out a better way that brings more sales on mobile devices. It is also interesting for us to keep an eye on this trend.

Data and graphs cited from: http://www.marinsoftware.com/data-integration/channel-connect

Social media is turning consumers into emotionless robots

As the rapid development of social networks, content marketing on social platform has evolved from a buzzword into a rampant industry. Both the social networks and marketing agencies have built their business model on flooding social feeds with brand-back copy. However, as a prevailing marketing channel, is content marketing on social media as effective as we have expected?

To solve this doubt, a research was designed by Havas Media that examined and recorded the emotions of social media users when they were confronted with several types of content. Havas also wanted to find out if the common assertion that Facebook provided little more than rolling coverage of cats and baby photos, causing users to have even shorter attention spans on contents.

After initial studies, where several Facebook users had their emotions recorded, Havas obtained a surprising result that more than 80% of stories in social media do not generate any emotion response in consumers.

Although marketers have done quite well in generating click using social channels thanks to the linkbait tactics adopted by a lot of media agencies, they fail to take into account the actual emotional response of consumers. Emotion plays a significant role in terms of content marketing as it shapes the brand perception along with fueling in engagement and memorability.

Havas displayed an assortment of Facebook material to 50 respondents, including sponsored ads, trending articles about a variety of subjects and authentic, anecdotal stories posted by friends, while recording the emotional responses of users.

After analyzing the result, Havas found that it was only when a social headline showed anything outside of the norm did a respondent choose to pay attention and exhibit an emotion. Not one of the sponsored ads, however, had this effect, with all of them being ignored. Stories where the topic was shocking, offensive, amusing or cute evoked the most amount of emotion in users, and all of those stories were equipped with visual images. This result clearly indicates the preference of consumers about contents on social media.

It is even clearer that emotion needs to make a return to social media if marketers expect their advertising contents have some value. If social marketing continues in its current guise, where companies rigidly obey a certain formula, then content will become like “wallpaper” and users will skip to what might cause surprise or offer a more personalized experience without doubt.

Mobile Marketing: a good lessen to learn from the New York Times

Recently, I came across an article on New York Times turning its focus to mobile marketing on social apps. With the help of Gallop Labs, a mobile marketing automation platform and a recent winner of Facebook’s Innovation Award, New York Times came up with an innovative way to utilize the huge data gathered from the publisher’s app. "Under the hood of the mobile analytics dashboard, there is a ton of detail on their users. Marketers can use this data to drive more targeted advertising based on what users are looking at and what they’re interested in at the right time and with the right message,” said Farzana Nasser, co-founder and chief strategy officer at Gallop Labs, New York.

In July 2014, the New York Times equipped its new app with functions that allows users to customize their experience by choosing what types of news they want to receive. The development of these features was introduced to encourage more engagement with the apps, given users can filter different news genres, depending on their personal interests. However, these fancy updates bring the company far more benefits than simply attracting new app users and retaining current users. More importantly, by adding these features, the New York Times will gather tons of valuable data revealing the interests of their app users.

Gallop recognizes the channels, such as Facebook and Twitter, that marketers can use to deliver not only targeted contents but also appropriate advertisements. Gallop then encourages their clients to use these channels to better acquire, engage and retain app users. In a similar way that Facebook remembers the sites its users visit and then develops coordinating ads, Gallop’s capabilities can use the habits of dedicated New York Times’ users to advertise more targeted information to them while they browse on their favorite social sites. By using a combination of algorithms, specifically in-app behavioral data, Gallop aims to help New York Times' marketers optimize their campaigns based on post-install metrics.

From a company perspective, let customers choose the content they want to receive is definitely a good choice. With data that indicates consumers’ interests and habits, marketers are able to look past the bigger picture and know users on a personal level, enabling them to provide an overall pleasant experience while using the app and recruiting users that will keep coming back. “We see a huge focus on driving cheap installs within mobile advertising these days, and there is not as much of a focus on high quality users,” Ms. Nasser said. “If users don't stick around after their install and do not drive revenue, they aren't too valuable."

So if we are able to offer customers more autonomy while make them more valuable to the company, why not?

What Is the Meta Description Tag?

What Is the Meta Description Tag?

The Meta Description tag is a snippet of HTML code that belongs inside the <Head> </Head> section of a web page. It is usually placed beside the other two Meta tags ---the Meta Title tag and the Meta keywords tag.

In the source code of a website, the proper syntax for the Mega Description tag looks like:

<META NAME="Description" CONTENT="Your descriptive sentence or two goes here.">

The Meta Description tag is mostly used for storing information that tells a search engine user what the website is all about.

The Meta Description tag is the last line in the picture.

Many years ago, the information contained in a Meta Description tag could slightly increase a website's ranking in search engine. But nowadays, neither Google, Bing, nor Yahoo counts Meta description as a ranking factor.

In other words, whatever keywords you put in your Meta Description tag, it will exert no impact on the actual position of your web-page in the search engine result. Thus, in terms of rankings, web-designers could easily leave it out altogether.

But should you really do that?

There are couple of reasons that make Meta Description tag an important supplement of your SEO and overall online marketing strategy:

1. As we saw before, Meta descriptions (or part of Meta descriptions) can be used as the description of your web-page if it shows up in a search engine.
2. Meta descriptions are often used as part of the descriptive information for your web-pages when Google shows "extend sitelinks" for your site.
3. Meta descriptions are used as the default description in social media marketing links such as Facebook and Google+.

The Meta description tag gives you a little bit more control over what people might see before they click over to your site in a search engine. The more compelling it is, the more clicks you should gain. If your Meta description tags can help with that, then it's absolutely worth the several minutes of time it takes to create simple, interesting, keyword-rich tags.