Millennial Marketing Tips from 4 of the World's Biggest Digital Platforms

Executives from Facebok, Snapchat, Twitter and Pandora gathered at ZenithOptimedia Group's Mobile Day event to give advertisers tips on how to more effectively reach millennials - adults ages 18-34 who don't respond to traditional advertising and are increasing "cutting the cord" (consumers who ditch TV sets to watch videos on smartphones and tablets). Four interesting insights for the digital players are:

1. Get Local

Steve Hwang, director of operations and strategy at Snapchat, said brands should be involved on a more local level in the real world. Snapchat's core group of 18- to 24-year-olds hate feeling like they are being marketed to. Instead they want to watch videos and look at photos their friends are sharing. Snapchat has a "Live Story feature" that curates streams about nearby events that brands can buy full-page placements in. 

2. Less is more with video

Although it seems like autoplay video has taken over Facebook, brands are still struggling with building the right content for the platform. Facebook advises brands to make four, eight- and 10-second videos that grab people's attention in a news feed. Once people tap on a video, the sound automatically kicks in, which helps hook them to watch longer clips. 

3. Find social's new celebrities

According to Twitter, vine stars are hotter than Hollywood A-listers for millennials. Some influencers have followers and a social graph that is far bigger than any celebrity, and brands should try to emulate or work with these people when posting videos, photos and GIFs to Twitter.

4. Data-backed creative

Pandora revealed that women age 18 to 34 like to listen to YouTube violinist Lindsey Stirling on the Pandora, and they overwhelmingly listen to her from the company's app. This is an example of data that can shape a campaign and determine if it should run on mobile or desktop. Brands should tailor creative message to the environment and mindset. 

Source: 

http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/top-millennnial-marketing-tips-4-worlds-biggest-digital-platforms-165888

Huggies goes digital to Reverse the Declining Birth Rate - Happy Valentine's Day!

I nearly fell off my chair when I came across this article on Huggies (a Kimberly Clark brand) partnering with Pandora to roll out the "baby making station" channel online.

In the crowded and competitive marketplace of selling diapers, anecdotally speaking here with my 20 month year old son, I applaud the Huggies team for coming up with a creative way to reach a perhaps new and lesser addressed segment of the market; soon to be parents.

Besides directly affecting the declining birthrate, another potential accomplishment from the campaign is creating tremendous brand equity with a pipeline of consumers that didn't know they have a problem that needs a solution until 9 months from now.

http://adage.com/article/cmo-strategy/huggies-pandora-promote-baby-making-holiday/297175/

The Current State of Online Media Sharing

Online file sharing is a big business. According to a recent Times Online article, an average teenager’s iPod contains 800 illegal music files. Additionally, DrownedinSound.com reported that 95% of music downloads in 2008 were illegal. With its eyes set on all of this lost revenue, the music industry is successfully fighting back, leaving companies and individuals scrambling and looking for new (and still legal) ways to provide and share media, such as music, online.

Just in the past few years, several media streaming providers have popped up, including Hulu for television shows and Pandora for music.

Hulu, a collaborative effort by News Corp and NBC Universal, has seen rapid growth since its inception. With over 370 million streams each month, Hulu has grown into the largest streaming television site on the Web.

Pandora, a music site offers a novel approach to sharing music online. Labeled as a radio station, Pandora allows its users to create customized radio stations by entering their favorite artists into an engine, which then builds a playlist. While artists don’t seem to make money from the Site, Pandora does by referring listeners to iTunes to purchase music heard on the Site. Other major competitors in this space include Imeem and Last.fm.

As internet properties continue to launch media streaming sites, the industry will need to react. So the questions will remain – how long will these sites be viable, how will these sites impact the music and television industries and will new laws be enacted to stop this type of online streaming?

Internet Radio Pandora and Tivoli

Saul Hansell in his May 29 New York Times article, “The Ascendance of Internet Radio”, discusses the Tivoli radio with its CEO, Tom DeVesto.

For those who are unaware, Tivoli radio is an Internet Wi-Fi radio that is priced from a few hundred dollars to as high a thousand dollars.  The user can select a station by genre or geography. There are probably at least 100 stations broadcasting via the Internet. Is this real competition for Pandora and Last FM? No, in my view.  I purchased a similar WI-Fi radio from Acoustic Energy a few years ago, and have disconnected it since my discovery of Pandora. 

The problem with Tivoli radio is just that. It is a radio. Pandora and Last FM are software based. These music solutions can be used with a desktop, a notebook or even a mobile phone like the iPhone. The computer can be easily hooked in to a stereo system with a mini pin to RCA adapter to get a big stereo sound.  Moreover the music is from Pandora is customized by the user. Software leapfrogs the hard ware again. 

Pandora can turn the corner

 Clair Cain Miller, in her May 24 NY Times article Ad Revenue on the Web? No Sure Bet ,

discusses the difficulty that Internet start-up are having in generating revenues. The article mentions an interview with the founder of Pandora, the Internet radio station. Pandora is finding it difficult to generate revenues from advertisers and well as subscribers. They attempted to charge a monthly subscription fee for the service. This did not go over well.  Now they are trying a hybrid model “freemium” .  This model charges the subscriber $3 per month for an ad free subscription.

 

The problem in my view is that it really hard to offer something free then later charge. We consumers are so trained that all on the Internet is free especially if we look long and hard enough for it. It’s just the way it has always been. 

 

Was just happening to consider the Pandora proposition over he weekend at my Memorial Day cook out.  We needed music for the out doors. Boom box radio was too much talk and the music from the station that my 20 year old nephew chose was too narrowly focused for a crowd of ranging from grade school to 1970’s era disco, Fusion, Funk.  Playing CD’s is too cumbersome. So I hooked my iPhone to my kid’s plug-in speakers.  I started the Pandora app- and the music that played for the next hour or two was mostly appealing to most of my guests.  The best part was the fact that there were no commercials or blabbing DJ’s.  There was enough appealing variety that some folks could tap a foot, strum an air guitar or sing along.

 

PANDORA IS GREAT FOR THE CONSUMER. Heck they have 10 million listeners per month. I would guess that as unemployment increased, this figure has gone up a bit – more people with more free time and probably listening to the Blues. My children listen to it while they do homework in the evenings. I listen to it in the car as I do my weekend choirs. It’s also great for my commute to Manhattan.  But in this type of economic environment how can service like Pandora survive as ad revenues drop off? Seems to me that at some point in time Pandora and Last FM (another Internet radio service) will have to begin taking audio ad’s after say the 10^th song.  Maybe it’s a 15 second commercial – a radio jingle Web 2.0 style for the Internet. I would imagine that banner ads on the web site would have limited appeal because this is an audio experience.

Personally this would not be obtrusive considering that 80-90% of the songs I hear are customized to my taste. This is still a small price to pay. The alternative is radio with way too much talking nonsense, or shuffle CD’s – lots of work and over half of the songs not so appealing OR play list from iPod.  The iPod  alternative is limited by the personal library- songs purchased. Satellite radio has always been a non-started for me – always got poor reception, and customer service was terrible. 

So could it be that Pandora and Last FM become the new radio media.  Customized selection of songs, with just a few commercial ads. Would need a dose of customized weather and news say every hour or so for a few minutes. Alternatively we could just press an icon to go directly to customized weather and news- something like a  RSS – Stitcher combination.   I see traditional radio on the way out in 5-10 years. Who needs it? 

A New Ad Strategy From Pandora

As a Pandora loyalist, I was excited to hear the company announce a new strategy to make money from advertising.

Over the past few months, I’ve cringed at the company’s failed attempts to monetize its enormous user base (21 million registered users and 2 million users/day) with banner ads and rich media. Why would a site selling ‘sound’ ever think that visual display ads were its best path to advertising revenue?? But I digress.

The new advertising model which leverages Pandora’s aural content by interjecting 15-second commercials every hour or two will likely prove a more effective means to deliver an advertiser’s message to a mass audience. However, the company will likely face challenges in quantifying the value of these impressions for its established advertisers because 1. Customers listening to Pandora are not likely to ‘click through’ and 2. The site won’t be able to drive enough traffic/new users to an established brand in order for the brand to see the direct effect of the campaign.

In the press releases announcing this audio ad launch, Pandora lists core advertisers as McDonald’s, Bose and American Idol. These mass market brands are going to be the toughest to prove an ROI to. However, new brands looking to generate mass awareness, may be an easier target as newer brands will feel (and thus track) the effects of a small traffic increase more so than a well established brand. So even if consumers aren’t clicking through directly from Pandora, an increase in search traffic following the ad could provide a measure of the ad’s effectiveness.