Content Marketing's Clickbait Problem

I found this article on Mashable brief but interesting. It details the clickbait problem of digital advertising that we all know too well.. Display ads popping up that promise an interesting article/content and then once you click, direct you to something completely different. This results in distrust and frustration among users, and hurts the site's reputation as well.

Many sites are cracking down on clickbait with Facebook recently announcing new measures to eliminate clickbait and Buzzfeed backing a no-tolerance policy. Content creators have also begun to support new metrics versus the standard click through rates. These new metrics are based on things like number of shares, time spent on site, etc. These developments may be an indication of the future of digital advertising metrics and payment plans. Clicks may not be enough and may not be the right way to measure the effectiveness of ads.

http://mashable.com/2014/12/10/content-marketing-clickbait/#djZ1Gvjvp8qS

Facebook reports strong earnings on growth in mobile ad revenue.

Facebook reported strong earnings last week sending the stock up over 16% on the news.  Both revenue and profits beat analyst expectations and investors were pleased to see that 49% of revenue is coming from the Facebook Mobile platform.  This is much higher than well-established advertising competitors like Google and Yahoo indicating Facebook’s strength in quickly monetizing the platform. 

The key driver in the revenue growth has been the introduction of news-feed ads- the pesky messages that interrupt the stream of your friends updates/comments when you open the application on your mobile device.  The reason these ads have been so popular with advertisers is that companies now have much better data to support the efficiency of the channel.  For example, Facebook has partnered with Nielsen and Datalogix to help collect loyalty data and to track purchased for CPG companies.  This, in turn, has given advertisers much better insight into their return on investment and has encouraged them to increase spend.  This strikes at one of the fundamental issues with investing in the social media ecosystem- that the metrics to indicate success or failure of a particular campaign or product are still under development.   I spoke with the Head of Social Media at Vice about this issue and he mentioned that the standard metrics that are currently used – reach, engagement, etc – are just a guess at what actually matters.  He mentioned that every day they his team looks at the data to understand whether they can extrapolate meaningful insights for their clients.  This is both exciting and frustrating for the marketing community.  Over the next few years, it will be interesting to see whether the power of mobile has staying power as a major advertising channel, or whether advertisers will be disappointed with the yield on their investment and put their money elsewhere.  

http://adage.com/article/digital/facebook-s-mobile-ad-revenue-49-ad-business/245027/

SEO Quake for FF

Just a quick note--I've been doing a lot of pagerank research at my internship and SEO Quake, a plugin for your browser is fabulously good for this. And they finally released it for Firefox (in our lecture notes it's only for Internet Explorer).

It takes a little tweaking but you can rig this up in preferences so that a page of Google search results will list Pagerank and a whole lot of other metrics next to each URL. Extremely handy when you need to do a quick survey of a keyword/phrase.

Happy SEOing.

Hulu Advertising - Breakthrough?

Due to a newfound obsession with reruns of Modern Family and Glee, I have become acquainted with the fascinating 0nline media platform that is Hulu. As a reminder to most of you, birthed in 2007 as a joint venture between News Corp and NBC, Hulu is an attempt at a competitor for Youtube. Although they experienced initial trouble raising advertising revenue in 2008 and 2009, the site has become a dominant advertising platform.

How did Hulu go from noteworthy struggles in 2008-9 (http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/mar2009/tc20090330_571175.htm) to kicking the proverbial advertising a*$ today?

What did they do?

From a quick perusing around their site for specifics on their advertising, it is clear that they decided at some point to invest a lot of effort into innovation and for adding value for them and for advertisers themselves.

Hulu created much smaller increments of videos during the shows on the site that are accompanied by Like / Dislike boxes that both attract viewer attention as well as supply a new and valuable metric for advertisers. When crossed with the sign-up information of the user, these likes/dislikes are valuable demo/behavioral info.

Hulu also created free content that can help advertisers use their services: there are case studies on the site.

The last thing that exemplifies the sleak style and technology of Hulu is their gallery and ranking system for this past year's Superbowl Commercials: http://www.hulu.com/adzone2011#50120562

Check it out

Focus on the Goals

The phrase "focus on the goals, not on the metrics alone" jumped out in last week's class. Over and over again I see companies intent on building website traffic, increasing ad impressions or boosting their number of facebook fans, with little understanding of why these activities might (or might not) be important.

Getting millions of people to your website is only valuable if they are qualified leads -- people who you might convert to customers, donors or advocates. If they are there for a reason that isn't core to your business, they might be a waste of resources.

The misalignment of goals and metrics isn't new (see this piece from Bain for a great non-digital example), but because digital marketing is so unfamiliar to many institutions, the possibility of misalignment is greater. Corporate executives are likely to see social media as an inexpensive "experiment" rather than a marketing strategy that is core to their business goals. Companies build digital operations, but approach them with less rigor and lower standards of accountability than other marketing plans.

Of course there are complications in the digital world. It's far more likely that a media mix will be responsible for a boost in sales than any one channel, and tracking back the "why" of success is often impossible. But the digital world offers tremendous opportunity as well. Right now, Facebook and Google allow information-gathering that have tremendous marketing implications.

Even more exciting, as convergence becomes a greater reality, there is opportunity for better conversion metrics on all media platforms -- particularly television. A "clickable commercial" or product placement would offer previously unheard of data directly related to placement, timing and quality of particular ads.

If marketers can remember that creating cool new stuff and attracting eyeballs are not goals unto themselves, there will be unprecedented opportunity to capitalize on new technologies.

What's in a metric?

There was a brief article in today's New York Times about the lack of a reliable metric for determining Hulu's online audience.  The Times kindly calls the indeterminate audience count "imprecise", but it cites a range of 8.9 million (Nielson) to 42 million (comScore) for March 2009.  Such a spread indicates that data is not just imprecise, it's bordering on useless; this is particularly the case since this audience count is needed to drive Hulu's programming decisions as well as advertisers' spending decisions.

How is it possible that such wild variations in reporting are possible when there are established standards for measurements?  Is it simply because, as a marketing sub-field, online video advertisements have yet to be properly standardized?

Hulu is a big website with major corporate interests.  What I find more perturbing, then, is the mapping of this issue of underdeveloped metrics on to smaller companies and organizations.  What does such a business do when it knows that it wants a greater online presence but it also has an extremely tight marketing budget?  It undoubtedly becomes harder for that business to justify the spending on online media and search marketing when even the big counting firms can't seem to be in agreement about what constitutes unique visitorship and audience size.  I don't think that this uncertainty warrants the extreme conservatism of not spending on online marketing at all; I do think, though, that the uncertainty results in exponentially larger amounts of risk -- proportionally speaking -- for the smaller businesses who are just interested in getting their small share of the pie.