Are Super Bowl TV Ads Obsolete - Part 1

As American as the Super Bowl, every year tens of millions of Americans tune in for the country's favorite game as well as the ads and the halftime performance headlined by America's top performers. It's for this reason that NBC, FOX and CBS can get away with charging north of $5 million dollars for a 30 second ad. But honestly, is it worth it for brands to be spending monstrous sums for 15 to 30 seconds of airtime?

Measured simply by eyeballs, the super Bowl guarantees brands such as Coca-Cola and Pepsi, over a hundred million views.  The views are great but I would be hard pressed to find an American who has never sipped one of the two colas, let alone seen one.

So why do household staples such as Kraft and m&m's get in on the Super Bowl ad bidding war? They do it for the love of the American people because we buy brands that we  know, therefore more likely to trust and love.  However, research by Genesis media shows that 90% of people report that they would not buy something because of a 15-30 second ad that they saw during the Super Bowl. As such, these ads are targeted at maintaining loyalty/ brand awareness more than selling much like buying your partner an anniversary gift is aimed at showing you care rather than convincing them of your love.

However, this is not the case for all brands. 

For fresher faces such as Weather Tech and Monster Products, Super Bowl ads actually may make sense. Monster Products, the team that brought us "Beats by Dre" and several other celebrity branded electronics was unknown to me until I began doing research for this article. In the same way, I imagine that Monster Products' Super Bowl ad will give the company a boost in searches, a much needed independence of the brand from celebrity figures so that it can stand on its own feet and actually have a marginal impact on sales while minimizing budgets for endorsements.

When all is said and done, the elephant in the room is the fact that more Americans are turning to streaming over watching cable. Especially with mobile streaming cookies, brands are empowered to target the right audiences. Why then, don't we have separate mobile ads and real time ad bidding processes to optimally match ads with the most likely buyers on mobile rather than casting a wide net that will likely not move the needle.

http://www.adweek.com/brand-marketing/super-bowl-lii-ad-tracker-all-about-the-big-games-2018-commercials/

Facebook is Changing - What this Means for Digital Marketing

Here's the original NYtimes articles:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/12/technology/facebook-news-feed-changes.html?_r=0

At my company, we rely heavily on Fbook and Instagram to drive significant traffic to our e-commerce website.  We have noticed over the past two years that Fbook has significant de-prioritized organic content from appearing in their News Feed.  With the announced changes, I did a little more digging into what this means for us as a brand.  The Facebook team has confirmed that they will be changing the News Feed portion of the platform to feature more posts from ‘personal’ accounts rather than pages.

In the coming year, Facebook may decide to split the news feed into “personal” posts from friends and a secondary “explore” tab, where non-promoted posts from Facebook pages will be placed in a secondary feed. It is commented by many that promoted posts will keep their place on the main feed, requiring the need to pay to reach Facebook followers. 

Facebook’s head of its News Feed Team mentioned that those who want to still see posts from their favorite brands will, however, still be able to through prioritizing the pages (and friends) whose posts they are most interested in. Posts regarding conversations stemming from live videos, celebrities’ posts, private groups and other highly interactive posts will also still be among those highlighted on the news feed.

They have not announced a set date of when this change will take place but when it does, it will likely have a noticeable affect on page reach.  While this looks big and sounds big, there are some ambiguities as far as how far reaching this change will be. Publisher and user content may be split up in different ways than Facebook had originally experimented, and the impact may not be as drastic. However, there is no concrete information to share.

It is too soon to tell how my company will need to alter its Facebook strategy in order to remain successful on the platform. One way we can plan to begin to counter this is to start adding "Calls to Share" where we can. Another easy fix is to insure the use of engaging featured images and video clips with welcoming headlines.

Additionally, I think that we are going to have to move towards more long-form textual content and video content to drive engagement.  Engagement seems key to the algorithm.  We'll have to move from a hard sell to a soft sell.  

Facebook Messenger Kids

http://mashable.com/2017/12/04/facebook-messenger-kids-app/#7kVO4V62zmqw 

In December 2017, Facebook released a new app called "Messenger Kids" which is an extension of the Facebook Messenger platform. The goal of Messenger Kids is to allow children to connect with close friends and family through their tablet or smartphone. Kids can conduct group or 1:1 video calls while using interactive masks, reactions and sound effects. Facebook spent a great deal of time and research with kids and parents in developing the app and finding the right balance between connection and safety. 

The launch of Messenger Kids begs the question of what responsibility social media companies have in preventing kids from growing up hooked to social media and promoting safe online environments. The functionality they've enabled seems to indicate that they are genuinely concerned about safety. For example, Messenger Kids accounts have to be associated with a parent's existing Facebook account and parents approve all friend requests. Still, it's clear that Facebook is trying to create their next generation of users and will benefit greatly from getting young users to interact early on. 

Lastly, I'm curious about how/if Facebook will allow brands onto the platform similar to how brands can have bots on Facebook Messenger. If they decide to go this route, this could open up a whole new channel for brands to interact directly with a younger demographic and help to influence parent's purchasing decisions. 

Living Advertorials... Meaning, Digital Advertorials

Retail is dying. Well, the old retail is dying, leaving brands scrambling to figure out how to keep customers walking through their doors. Younger brands have the advantage of testing out new ideas, and some to great success. One overarching goal of these new retail experiences is that all brands are looking for ways to encourage their clients to take selfies or photos of the store interior, and share them on social media.

The lengths to which the brands go to to provide a sharable in-store experience cannot be underestimated. From optimal selfie lighting, to incorporating perfume-spraying robots into a fragrance launch, the experience is prioritized. Brands have started hiring set design professionals to accomplish the theatrical, experiential layout they want their stores to have. More than anything, though, the customer has to be able to capture a bit of the experience so that they can share on social, known affectionately as user-generated content.

The importance of user-generated content (UGC) also cannot be underestimated. Word-of-mouth is still the most powerful endorsement for a product or experience, and UGC does just that, and the ability to spread-the-word is made all too easy by social media. Of course, this works for both good and bad endorsements, but the idea is that if the in-store experience is really good, the customer will be happy to share, and someone else will see, go and have a similar experience and share, and on and on it goes, until people tire of that experience and the retailer needs to reinvent the experience to start the cycle over again.

https://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/professional/turning-physical-stores-into-living-advertorials

Google’s Waning Search Domination

Google and Facebook have historically captured the vast majority of overall digital marketing dollars. Google has displayed prolonged and absolute dominance within search ad revenue specifically, however this supremacy is on the decline due to competitors like Apple, Amazon and Pinterest growing in relevance and eating away at Google’s market share.

Two macro trends that are affecting Google’s share of search spending are overall market growth and a substantial shift from desktop to mobile. The overall size of the search market is expanding as new sources of search come online. Google will struggle to capture all of these growth areas. Google primarily stands alone in desktop search, but the mobile search market is much more crowded with competition and therefore it will be difficult to capture all the growth.

The biggest area for concern is in retail. Consumers are more likely to search for products directly on Amazon’s website or through Alexa (voice search category) than through Google search.

I don’t find it surprising that Google’s long time dominance in search is finally being challenged by the likes of Amazon. Search ad revenue is a massive market and it was inevitable that other entrants would start to capture market share. Amazon is well positioned on both desktop (amazon.com) and voice (Alexa) and Apple also retains a stronghold in voice (Siri). It is particularly interesting to read this article alongside of the book “The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture” by John Battelle, which details the early landscape of search in 2005. I don’t think even John could have forecasted these changes and advancements into mobile and voice.

http://adage.com/article/digital/amazon-apps-chew-google-s-search-market-share/311910/

Is Amazon the Next Search Giant?

When I think about where to go to start my search on the web, Google almost always comes to mind first. To say that Google has won the game in Search is perhaps the understatement of the century. However, an increasing amount of the time when I'm searching for a specific item I'll go directly to Amazon, Jet, Walmart.com, or some other major online retailer.

Accordingly to this article in AdAge, I'm not alone in my behavior. As someone who spends a lot of time thinking about retail (I work in Market Research in the consumer purchasing sector) I spend most of my time thinking of the implications that Amazon is having on other retailers. Perhaps the bigger implication is what Amazon is doing to Google. Amazon is cutting into Google's market share in search and the implications could be huge.

Amazon's fastest growing segment is in Advertising, and while their search business is small potatoes compared to Google, what they have is billions of data points on consumer purchasing behavior. Ads drive sales, and if they can optimize the search experience for customers, more customers will make purchases there, and if more customers convert to purchase from Amazon ads, then advertisers will devote more of their ad dollars there.This could definitely be a changing tide for Google!

Link to the article in AdAge about Amazon's increasing share of search.

Link to the Business Insider article about Amazon's growing Advertising business.

When Will Digital Replace Linear TV?

The old-school network TV model of advertising is the last biggest challenger to digital when it comes to share of marketing budgets. It makes sense: the internet hasn't seemed to brands like a better place to show video ads, and brands have been reluctant to step in. One big reason for this is brands' addiction to Nielsen ratings, which for a while simple didn't exist for online advertising, and now are roughly approximated by Nielsen.

Several things are changing that could accelerate the substitution of "Connected TV" and other digital formats for linear TV. First, fewer and fewer people are even watching scheduled programming. A recent Nielsen report shows a gradual decline in that category, as it's replaced (and then some) by viewership on mobile devices (including laptops) and other connected devices, like Apple TV and Roku. Second, content aggregating middlemen and technical innovations are making it less scary and easier for brands to show ads on Hulu, or on espn.com, against the brand's own data and with good assurance of frequency capping and other controls. Finally, publishers are recognizing the shift and pushing their inventory more aggressively through Connected TV / other online means.

For video advertisers, now should be the time to focus on a digital video strategy, and to place less strategic emphasis on linear TV advertising. Digital is much more valuable: it can be merged with other online buying audiences and metrics, it is increasingly available for purchase on a cost-per-completed-view basis, and it allows for all of the control in targeting that is possible in digital and impossible in direct-bought linear TV. Of course, many new, small brands understand this - and will never buy a linear TV ad, instead going straight to digital. The smarter big brands will be the first to drop linear TV for a comprehensive video strategy focused completely on digital.

http://www.adweek.com/tv-video/nearly-70-million-u-s-households-now-have-a-connected-tv-streaming-device/

There Is No Such Thing As Brand Safety

There's an outcry every month or so when some poor advertiser learns that their creatives have been serving on a page right next to [insert here any one of the trillion possible atrocities that can be found on the internet]. In the best case, it's an innocuous placement on a good domain but with mismatched content - like an airline ad next to a news piece about an airline disaster - but more often it's a creative serving somewhere it shouldn't be serving at all.

The latest example of the former is thanks to the recent "suicide forest" scandal on YouTube. YouTube is one of the top premium inventory sources for online video - but the reality that's slowly being discovered is that YouTube is only brand-safe if the brand trusts YouTube's content creators; trusting YouTube is not enough.

Examples of the latter happen probably billions of times per day, when something slips through whatever controls the brand's agency or trading desk has in place and serves on a domain that it shouldn't. This has been aggravated over the past several years due to the growth of programmatic, but is now being countered by ads.txt and other controls.

Brands are letting this matter more than it should, in many cases constraining what would otherwise be effective campaign strategies to avoid it. But brands need to recognize that aside from a sensible whitelisting strategy (or even better, blacklisting), any measures they take will just be illusions of control. The internet is still the wild west - instead of pretending otherwise, after taking sensible and minimal steps, brands should focus on performance against KPIs.

http://adage.com/article/digital/youtube-explores-possibility-screening-preferred-videos/311925/

Facebook's Trying to Connect People....More

Facebook is altering its newsfeed to try and connect more people and try and stimulate more meaningful conversations.  Facebook is going to change the way the Newsfeed is ranked, with preference given to articles posted by friends, family and group members over those by publishers and brands.  The newsfeed will also prioritize articles that elicit more comments, over those with more "likes" as Facebook believes that comments encourage more meaningful interactions among Facebook users.

I think this is a good start to using Facebook as a platform to encourage more meaningful relationships but I think one key issue that is not being addressed is connecting people with different views or opinions to have conversations about their differences and trying to understand each other's perspective.  Most people are friends with others who have similar interests and political views and so the articles and opinions that are shared tend to reflect shared beliefs.  What would be revolutionary would be to have people who have different beliefs and political opinions into discussing openly and rationally their differences. 

The other issue that is not necessarily addressed by this change is the elimination of "fake news." Facebook is trying to minimize fake news, hate speech, etc, but  inflammatory articles that are fake often elicit the most number of comments, and this new policy may inadvertently actually promote articles they are trying to suppress.

https://www.wired.com/story/facebooks-adam-mosseri-on-why-youll-see-less-video-more-from-friends/

Inescapable Pop Up Ads

There has been an interesting new development in the evolution of pop up ads on mobile formats that is causing frustration for users and potentially even greater damage. You have probably come across this new phenomenon at least once before while using your mobile browser- a pop up ad that doesn’t have an easily found close or exit button and when activated or clicked on, redirects you to the advertiser’s website.

This type of redirecting pop up was usually only found on non-reputable websites, but advertisers are finding creative ways to hide their intentions and these pop up ads are now appearing on NY Times and other well-respected publishers' websites. The reason this eludes publishers is hidden or non-apparent coding or in sufficient screening of ads. What’s even worse is that this type of redirecting pop up ad could expose publishers and users to malware attacks.

The good news is that the industry is becoming increasingly aware of this activity and beginning to be more diligent and cracking down. Publishers have revamped their vetting process for ads, Google is developing Chrome tools to prevent unwanted redirects, and installing mobile ad blockers is another way to combat this problem.

Hopefully this nuisance doesn’t stick around for too long and publishers get wise and limit the ability of advertisers to get through with this type of mobile ad content.  

https://www.wired.com/story/pop-up-mobile-ads-surge-as-sites-scramble-to-stop-them/