ADOTAS – For more than half a decade, Berlin-based tech firm Sponsormob has remained relevant in an industry characterized by incessantly shifting trends. Founded in 2006 by CEO Peter Glaeser and COO Jet Patel (pictured), Sponsormob created the first CPA network for mobile, and now the company has rebranded itself, with a new slogan (“Mobile conversions. Data driven. Worldwide.”) and, more importantly, a new real-time-bidding (RTB) platform for mobile, which launched earlier in January. By offering RTB, Sponsormob aims to simplify processes for advertisers, with instantaneous and relevant ad placement that allows for a larger scale of ad purchasing across an array of publishers and, as a result, leads to more conversions. And because Sponsormob operates with ad networks, exchanges, yield optimizers, publishers and social media, it presents advertisers the opportunity to work with just one partner to handle all those needs.

In a recent Skpe chat, Jet Patel said that the new technology came about, on the publisher’s side, after “six months of development work. We’ve invested a lot of time.” As companies in the space catch up to Sponsormob’s earlier leads and focus on new ways to utilize the opportunities presented by mobile devices, Patel said, “We want to differentiate ourselves.” The capacity for RTB gives Sponsormob that edge — other companies, he said, “can’t really optimize on the go.” Sponsormob’s algorithm, he said, “yields greater results” through data optimization, and he pointed out that when working with a new client, his company conducts extensive testing, looking at the mobile carrier, the handset and tens of thousands of clicks in order to deliver the right ad to the right user at the right time.

There’s been a lot of discussion lately about how mobile devices — as wide-ranging and nuanced as the term “mobile” may be — present challenges and opportunities for advertisers, because of their portable nature and the highly personal relationship can users have to them. But Patel underlined the need for transparency. The user’s choosing to opt in to ads can lead to eye-popping click-through rates, and Patel acknowledged, “I think that’s the most important thing, that people opt in.” He pointed out the importance that “everything has legal liens — users are aware of what they’re downloading.”

When it’s transparent, though, methods of advertising via mobile can be both effective and creative. Patel cited Sponsormob’s Click-to-Call service. He said the insurance industry is one channel where it’s worked very well. The way it works is, a user clicks on an ad and is led directly to a call center. That process, he said, is “considered an elite. We’ve transferred it to mobile.”

Patel said he sees companies working with mobile technology approaching a point when they can target ads with the level of sophistication that the web has. “Come 2012, it’s catching up with a lot of things,” he said. “There are unique ways you can access users and engage with them.” He pointed to “apps focused on geolocation targeting” as key in the process, especially as inventory in mobile apps expands. Meanwhile, for Sponsormob specifically, he said that while up to now, “we’ve been focusing on direct advertisers, we’re looking at a solution where we can go to publishers” with more opportunities for branding and revenue. The company’s been focused on Germany and the U.S., he said, and it’ll give some more attention to the U.K. and France in the future. “The biggest difference [is] — well, the time difference!,” Patel said. “Things need to get done very quickly.”

Subscribe to the free Adotas.com Newsletter

addthis_url = 'http%3A%2F%2Fwww.adotas.com%2F2012%2F02%2Fsponsormob-leads-the-way-into-rtb-for-mobile%2F'; addthis_title = 'Sponsormob+Leads+the+Way+Into+RTB+for+Mobile'; addthis_pub = 'adotas';

ADOTAS – In the latest episode of The Future of Engagement, marketing consultant and Influence People chief Murray Newlands’ video interview series, we meet meet Kimling Lam, marketing and communications director of SaaS company Meltwater Group. Lam talks about how brands can work with social media to find their audience, interact with them — that means sharing engaging, fun content unrelated to your brand in addition to messages about your brand — and monitor these conversations over time. She discusses the idea of social CRM, the applications for good customer service that social networks present, examples of how to stay abreast of social trends, and some of the myths of social media. “That you should be on every channel… is absolutely a myth,” she asserts. Instead, she says, brands should use the channels that work best for their message and their audience.

Subscribe to the free Adotas.com Newsletter

addthis_url = 'http%3A%2F%2Fwww.adotas.com%2F2012%2F02%2Fvideo-social-media-monitoring-comes-to-the-future-of-engagement%2F'; addthis_title = 'Video%3A+Social+Media+Monitoring+Comes+to+%26%238220%3BThe+Future+of+Engagement%26%238221%3B'; addthis_pub = 'adotas';

DM CONFIDENTIAL - According to 11mark, three-quarters of Americans with mobile phones have used their phones in the bathroom, with more men than women reporting that they don’t go to the bathroom without their mobile phone.

Seventy-five percent of Americans with mobile phones have used their phones in the bathroom, according to 11mark. The gender split is nearly identical, with 74 percent of men and 76 percent of women saying they’ve used their mobile phones in the bathroom.

Meanwhile, 30 percent of men vs. 20 percent of women said they don’t go to the bathroom without their mobile phone, according to the report.

11mark goes even deeper into the details to find that:

• 20 percent of men and 13 percent of women participated in work-related calls in the bathroom
• 26 percent of men and 15 percent of women sent/read work-related email in the bathroom
• 41 percent of men and 36 percent of women browsed the web in the bathroom
• 13 percent of men and 7 percent of women made a purchase while in the bathroom

Android users are the most likely to use their mobile phone in the bathroom, with 87 percent of Android users saying so, followed by 84 percent of BlackBerry users and 77 percent of iPhone users.

BlackBerry users are the most likely to answer a call while in the bathroom (75 percent) and initiate a call while in the bathroom (48 percent). Meanwhile, iPhone users are the most likely to use social networking sites while in the bathroom (53 percent) and use an app while in the bathroom (67 percent).

According to 11mark, 91 percent of Gen Y mobile phone owners use their phones in the bathroom, while 80 percent of Gen X mobile phone owners, 65 percent of boomers and 47 percent of the silent generation do the same.

The report also highlighted that 16 percent of Gen Y mobile phone owners made a purchase while in the bathroom, while 10 percent of Gen X, 6 percent of boomers and 2 percent of the silent generation have done the same.

“Based on the trend, bathroom buying is poised for growth,” according to 11mark.

Getting down into the health aspects of this trend, 11mark found that 92 percent of respondents said they always wash their hands after using the restroom, while 14 percent said they always wash their phone after using the bathroom.

A separate report from Google and Ipsos MediaCT Germany found that more consumers use mobile phones than laptop/desktop computers in all five studied regions of the world (U.S., U.K., France, Germany and Japan).

Subscribe to the free Adotas.com Newsletter

addthis_url = 'http%3A%2F%2Fwww.adotas.com%2F2012%2F02%2Fweird-study-mobile-purchasing-while-in-the-bathroom-on-the-rise%2F'; addthis_title = 'Weird+Study%3A+Mobile+Purchasing+While+in+the+Bathroom+on+the+Rise'; addthis_pub = 'adotas';

ADOTAS -Facebook launched Timeline at f8 last September. Like Keystone Kops on a chase, marketers instantly clamored to conjure up and share ideas on how they could take advantage of it. Then Facebook played the wily criminal foiling the chase. They made it clear that Timeline wasn’t for companies and their products. Rather, it was designed for those living individuals among their users. There would be no brand pages allowed, not for now anyway. A few weeks ago, they showed they were sticking to their guns by surprisingly going after a public service organization: Israel’s anti-drug authority had created a clever “split Timeline” to show how the same person could live quite disparate lives if he went down the path of drug abuse. Facebook labeled it a “fake profile” and asked that it be taken down.

Things have begun to get more interesting. Facebook recently announced and is now rolling out “Sponsored Story” ads, opening up one door into Timeline for branded content. On the heels of that came a fascinating blog post by business analyst Jeff DeChambeau arguing that Timeline is, in fact, explicitly designed for the benefit of advertisers. DeChambeau says that while its overlay is a calendar format, the content users populate within it is actually laid out much more sporadically than original Facebook pages. This affects deeper engagement when someone visits a Timeline page, forcing them to spend more time and energy to discern what they’re seeing. That engaged state of mind then makes them more receptive to new ideas. Cue the ads. (DeChambeau references Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, which breaks down human thinking into categories based on high and low cognitive effort.)
The idea that the Zuckerberg bunch is now deeply immersed in the field of behavior-based advertising is a theory backed by strong supporting actions. With Timeline, there is simply too much potential for what marketers can do with the format, starting with that big, beautiful banner at the top, to not eventually give them access to it or some variation of it. And as of this week, there have been reports that brand pages are on the way and may be launched on the last day of February, according to some rumors.

At our shop, we started tinkering with the beta after f8, first using it to curate an exhibit of our own work. From there, we moved on to creating real applications with an eye to what sort of programs might benefit the kind of companies we represent. Ultimately, we developed six key applications for how brands can leverage it.

1) Timeline is a wonderfully visual storytelling device that can help personalize brands. Its format enables communication from a personal, almost individual perspective. This enables marketers to develop compelling stories that can connect with consumers on an emotional level.

2) Its format is ideal for drawing people into story- and setting-based marketing for entertainment products. It’s now a common tactic to expand on a film or video game universe with prequels, side stories and other bonus content to generate interest prior to its premiere and to expand its audience after launch. Timeline represents one of the best marketing tools yet to develop and showcase this type of campaign.

3) It’s a great place to execute on buzz-building programs. An example would be a campaign building up to a big reveal or rollout that’s driven by consumers who participate and share. Traditionally, these campaigns use Facebook as a primary point of genesis, but then require the development of an open graph-connected microsite or Facebook canvas-based application. Now Timeline gives marketers a great tool for facilitating them right where the very off-limits “Wall” used to be.

4) It can be harnessed by long-standing brands and products. Brands with some level of built-in affinity or history can curate compelling exhibits showcasing their legacy, even their transformation through rebranding. The message that a brand has been around for a long time is powerful in adding legitimacy and relevance to it.

5) It’s a great tool to establish a pedigree for new products or startup enterprises. A new product can use it to feature its history, from concept to R&D to launch. For a startup company or new brand, it’s a great way present how it was founded or developed and the successful milestones it met along the way.

6) It gives marketers a place to curate exhibits and give consumers “behind-the-scenes” access to popular marketing campaigns. Highly creative campaigns have always managed to take on a life of their own, going viral or developing memes to become part of pop culture. Now there’s Timeline to exhibit work in a way that can be compelling to marketing savvy consumers. It could even be used to heighten buzz around a high profile campaign. With the Super Bowl around the corner, think of how a brand with some legacy there could showcase their old ads and build interest in their next one.

Let’s be clear. We’re not saying that brands should have access to a fan’s Timeline. We simply think its features and functions are a huge step in the right direction for brand pages. Rather than being suffocated behind a text well, its format helps integrate messaging into a single compelling story and lets fans interact with it. Facebook may feel there needs to be a “warming up” period before turning a new feature into another marketing channel for them. It has taken this approach before. But it’s just a matter of time. For brand stakeholders, it’s worth coming up with a general strategy, even drawing up a few rollout-ready ideas for when Timeline fully comes online.

Subscribe to the free Adotas.com Newsletter

addthis_url = 'http%3A%2F%2Fwww.adotas.com%2F2012%2F02%2Ffacebooks-timeline-meant-for-brands-all-along%2F'; addthis_title = 'Facebook%26%238217%3Bs+Timeline%3A+Meant+for+Brands+All+Along%3F'; addthis_pub = 'adotas';

ADOTAS – Fashion Week is about to descend upon New York City in a burst of swirling colors, bold new styles and weighty prognostications about what’s “in” and what’s “out.” These eight days in February are crucial. Retail buyers will make decisions that determine what men and women wear – and not just in the precincts of high society, but on Main Street, U.S.A.

Admit it — wouldn’t it be great to have an inkling ahead of time what the hot styles will be?

You could, of course, phone your favorite designer and ask him or her to give you a sneak peak. But if you are not on friendly terms with any designers, you could find your answer online. It’s possible – if you know where to look.

The explosion of social media in recent years, coupled with the rise of advanced analytics technology, has made it possible to forecast any number of trends. This isn’t just for fun – companies are starting to use the burgeoning field of social media analytics to make important business decisions.

Let’s say the head buyer at a major retailer wants a better idea of where fashions are heading. First, he could use sophisticated software to sift through massive amounts of online data to look at the universe of people who discuss fashion online. Starting with literally thousands of people, the powerful algorithms would narrow the list down to a small number of influential bloggers who are extremely passionate and knowledgeable about fashion.

The software would specifically home in on social media mavens who sit at the center of huge social networks and have many followers. Why is this important? A recent IBM inquiry into footwear styles illustrates this point nicely. Using analytics, we looked at the universe of people who discuss shoes online, ultimately identifying a dozen “fashoenistas:” folks who blog and Tweet, do podcasts, etc., about shoes.

We discovered that these bloggers aren’t traditional experts – they don’t work in the footwear industry. But they are incredibly knowledgeable about shoes — that’s why they’re so popular. They might spend countless hours shoe shopping and invest considerable amounts of money in footwear. They read everything they can find on the topic. They often have friends in the industry. They think about shoes far more than most people.

An analysis of what these fashoenistas wrote online from 2008 to 2011 showed that their discussions of increasing heel height peaked towards the end of 2009, and declined after that.  For example, between 2008 and 2009 they wrote consistently about heels from five to eight inches, but by mid 2011 they were writing about the return of the kitten heel and the perfect flat.

The fashoenistas were on to something. While heels on women’s shoes are still high in 2012 — as a visit to any shoe store will confirm – the trend appears to be changing, with lower heels becoming increasingly popular. The advanced insight provided by the fashoenistas is the kind of specific, actionable data that could be used by shoe manufacturers and retailers looking for insight into the kind of shoes to, respectively, manufacture and sell in the coming season.

Similarly, retail buyers could use social media analytics to forecast the most popular color for women’s fashions in a year’s time. Or skirt length. Or trends in makeup.

Nothing is going to replace Fashion Week – it’s a unique extravaganza, an amazing mix of fashion and commerce. But social media analytics can be indispensable in helping retailers understand trends that are yet to be born. It can help them see Fashion Week with new eyes. In a business where even a single misstep can spell disaster, that’s a pretty big deal.

 

Subscribe to the free Adotas.com Newsletter

addthis_url = 'http%3A%2F%2Fwww.adotas.com%2F2012%2F02%2Ftaking-social-media-analytics-to-fashion-week%2F'; addthis_title = 'Taking+Social+Media+Analytics+to+Fashion+Week'; addthis_pub = 'adotas';

ADOTAS - Who really clicks on ads anymore? That’s not necessarily a rhetorical question — it’s one of several mediaFORGE poses in this white paper, released earlier this week. mediaFORGE provides technology that aims to determine post-engagement attribution, which the company insists is a much better way to measure a campaign’s success than click-throughs are. If, as the paper suggests, what we call a “view” often isn’t viewed and what we call an “impression” doesn’t actually create an impression on the viewer’s mind, and if optimizing an ad campaign for a better click-through rate narrows your target audience to an unnecessarily small group of viewers who might not be the audience most inclined to make a purchase… then what needs to change, and how? mediaFORGE proposes engagement to be a better gauge of success than click-throughs, and naturally the paper’s authors explain how their company can provide the right answers to its clients — but along the way, they lay out a carefully researched argument that the era of CTR may be over. Below, you can read an excerpt, and you can read the whole thing at mediaFORGE’s website.

 

Engagement: Leading the Display Metric Revolution
A Position Paper from mediaFORGE

Executive Summary
Engagement is the metric that most successfully ensures ads meaningfully influence user behavior. Where clicks and impressions have inherent deficiencies as indicators of overall banner ad campaign success, engagement succeeds. There is an industry consensus that traditional display campaign measurement tools are inadequate. Limited viewable ad inventory challenges validity of attributed view-through conversions. Narrowing target audience to optimize campaigns for clicks leads to substantial opportunity cost. Campaigns should be optimized for engagement to maximize yield. Tracking ad engagement validates that impressions were viewable. Clicks are not the exclusive indicator of purchase intent.

To empower advertisers to make the right decisions when exploring campaign metrics, mediaFORGE has detailed its position on why optimizing campaigns for impressions, post-impression attribution, and click-through rate (CTR) does not give an adequate
understanding of campaign performance, and how post-engagement is able to substantiate performance with much more meaningful results.

I. Era of Dynamic Display Advertising

With today’s advanced technology, the best online display ads are rich with website-like capabilities, making ads personalized and allowing customers to have an interactive experience without ever leaving the page they’re browsing. A recent Adobe study revealed that consumers who were exposed to interactive ads had stronger engagement, message involvement and purchase intent than those who saw static ads. What’s more, advances in consumer tracking technology have enabled ad creators to feature tailored content that matches each individual’s shopping/browsing behavior – giving consumers a more personalized ad (and brand) experience than any other advertising medium. Combined, these innovative features not only make ads more noticeable and inviting to consumers, but they empower them to engage with advertisements without committing to a click. Engagement ranges from scrolling through featured products to searching catalogue inventory to watching a video. And because all this can be done within the ad, it extends the unique experience of visiting a brand site to properties throughout the web. The dynamic features of this new generation of online display ads has made them increasingly influential in the conversion process and more capable than ever of attracting shoppers that wouldn’t have otherwise returned to make a purchase. However, the value of dynamic display advertising would be completely lost without the ability to track engagement and, more importantly, its influence on user behavior. The great news is that this capability exists.

II. State of Interactive Ad Measurement

Recent conversations regarding the “Making Measurement Make Sense” (3Ms) initiative indicate that advertisers recognize the shortcomings of campaigns focused on impressions or post-impression attribution and with campaigns optimized for clicks. In explaining the genesis of the 3MS initiative, the IAB website states that “while consumers have embraced digital media and continue to adopt […] new media behaviors, the marketing and media business have yet to create the tools necessary to keep up with consumers’ behavioral changes.”  The organizations behind 3Ms (IAB3 , ANA4 , and 4As5 ) are making a clear call for higher quality performance metrics. What’s surprising is that engagement has, so far, been overlooked. As advertisers consider new standards for understanding display ad influence, it’s important that they recognize ad engagement, and subsequent post-engagement conversions, as a viable metric that will help improve optimization and attribution techniques. Not only does engagement add a more comprehensive evalutation of campaign performance, but it also fills doubt-raising gaps left by impressions, post-impression attribution and CTR.

…

V. Clicks

Knowing that impression volume and post-impression attribution give little insight into banner ad success, clicks and click-through rate (CTR) have become a crutch for those hoping to understand campaign performance. Historically, marketers haven’t had anything else to reference. If asked if they ever click on banner ads, almost everyone will say “no.” In fact, according to comScore/Starcom research, just 16 percent of Internet users would answer “yes” – and half of those (only eight percent of all users) generate 85 percent of all clicks.10  Very few people click on ads, and those that do, do so often. So, campaigns optimized for CTR only succeed by narrowing the targetable audience and serving ads to users that have a higher propensity to click. This is highly effective at increasing CTR, but will return deceptively impressive results for those marketing managers who think clicks are the ultimate indicators of campaign performance. The question that marketing managers must ask themselves is, “Is my now narrowed audience of likely clickers the group I’d really like to reach, and does this strategy yield the best possible outcome?”

No. mediaFORGE contends that, because typical users don’t click on banner ads, advertisers forfeit a large pool of opportunity by optimizing for CTR. For e-commerce advertisers, sacrificing profitable incremental revenue for marginal improvement of CTR is unnecessary. Not all buyers are clickers and not all clickers are buyers – in fact, most of them are not.

…

On average, those who engage with dynamic interactive display ads return and convert 44 percent faster than those who click through. This significant improvement suggests that, although a click-through is a demonstration of interest, it’s not the most convincing indication of purchase intent. mediaFORGE CTR ranges from .08 percent to 1 percent, while engagement rates range from 10 percent to 20 percent – an indication that users are more comfortable interacting with shoppable ads than clicking through to another website. In the case of retargeting, it’s unreasonably assumptive to think that users are immediately ready to return to a site from which they recently abandoned.Interestingly enough, those that do interact with dynamic banner ads also spend more on average than clickers. Sixty percent of campaigns studied had a five percent higher post-engagement average order value (AOV) than post-click.

Read the unexcerpted report here.

Subscribe to the free Adotas.com Newsletter

addthis_url = 'http%3A%2F%2Fwww.adotas.com%2F2012%2F02%2Fgoing-beyond-click-throughs-to-rope-in-consumers-a-white-paper-excerpt%2F'; addthis_title = 'Going+Beyond+Click-Throughs+to+Rope+In+Consumers%3A+A+White+Paper+Excerpt'; addthis_pub = 'adotas';

ADOTAS – Another week, another round of new gigs. Here are the hires and promotions we heard about this week. Maybe you’ll spot some familiar names. Did we miss anyone?

• Steve Sincavage has been named chief financial officer of mobile ad/marketing messaging provider Mobile Posse. Previously, he’d been CFO of Rivermine Software.

• Advertising media software provider Telmar has named Corey Panno president of Telmar Group. He had been the company’s president for North America.

• Lucy Jacobs is now chief operating officer of Facebook Ads API developer Spruce Media. This is a newly created position. She had previously been adBrite’s vice president of sales, marketing and business development.

• Ad agency Brunner has promoted former vice president and director of public relations Shari Boyle to senior vice president and director of public relations.

• Digital communications agency Horn Group promoted former New York City office principal Ben Billingsley to the role of partner.

• Matthew Kirk was named chief scientist for enterprise social media management provider SocialVolt. He comes to SocialVolt from Wetpaint, where he’d held a software engineering position.

• Online ad campaign performance optimization company Maxifier has appointed Xiaoming Shao to the role of managing director for Asia Pacific. Shao had previously been managing director for Asia Pacific with AudienceScience.

• Nancy Marzouk is now chief revenue officer of tag management and attribution company TagMan. Previously, she served as vice president of sales at IgnitionOne.

• Eric Rosenthal has been named general manager of digital advertising technology provider OpenX Technologies‘ enterprise business. This is a newly created position. Rosenthal comes to the company from AOL, where he’d been vice president of national sales.

• Cloud-based telecom customer experience company Globys has appointed Chek Lim senior vice president of engineering. Lim had previously held the same position at Motricity.

• Diana DiGuido is now a senior director for client services with digital marketing company PM Digital. She had been an account director with Zeta Interactive.

• Ad tech company AudienceScience has named Stuart Colman vice president, international. He’ll simultaneously continue to serve his prior role as managing director for Europe.

• SaaS email/mobile/social marketing company Emailvision hired Andrew Bonar, naming him worldwide director of deliverability. He’d earlier spent several years as an independent consultant for a number of companies internationally.

 

Subscribe to the free Adotas.com Newsletter

addthis_url = 'http%3A%2F%2Fwww.adotas.com%2F2012%2F02%2Fthis-weeks-new-hires-2%2F'; addthis_title = 'This+Week%26%238217%3Bs+New+Hires'; addthis_pub = 'adotas';

ADOTAS - With the Super Bowl fast approaching and the potential for advertising via mobile devices being one of the hottest-button issues in the industry, there’s been a lot of discussion about what this Sunday’s game — for advertisers, a vehicle for rolling out the most creative and ambitious campaigns they can muster — might accomplish for ad reach. It’s easy to hypothesize, but today, we took a look at two brand new studies that asked what Super Bowl viewers actually expect to be doing with their smartphones and/or tablets during the game. The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and mobile advertising/marketing tech provider Velti each conducted surveys (both through Harris Interactive, which conducted the research) — Velti looking more closely at how close users expected to keep their mobile devices during the game, and the IAB weighing Giants and Patriots fans against each other in their regular mobile usage (as if they needed another thing to compete over).

The IAB’s survey found that 56 percent of smartphone users and 46 percent of tablet users expected to use their devices during the game, while Velti’s found that 60 percent of mobile users expected to look at or use their devices. (Use, I can see, but look at is another thing — I’ve seen football games, and they last for hours, and I’ve seen what people do when their phones vibrate, and with those odds, 60 percent seems like a lowball estimate — but I digress.) Velti’s survey found 30 percent of users under the age of 45 would watch the game with device “in hand” (which raises the question of how that experience differs from “in pocket”), and 47 percent of users ages 18 and up (that’s everyone in the survey, for the record) said they’d check or use their devices more than 10 times during the game. The IAB’s study found 74 percent of 18- to-34-year-olds said their phones would be part of the Super Bowl experience for them, and 51 percent of that demographic said they’d be texting, emailing or instant messaging during the game.

Advertisers naturally want viewers to watch those all-important ads, but they have competition this year: According to Velti’s survey, 26 percent of mobile users who said they’d be watching the game also said they’d be likely to look at their mobile devices during commercial breaks. That’s twice as many as the number that said they’d be likely to check their mobiles during game play. But the IAB has edifying numbers, stepping back from just mobile usage: 41 percent of the Super Bowl viewers they asked said they would use a computer of some sort to learn something about Super Bowl ads, and 18 percent said they planned to watch those new commercials on a computer before or just after the game. Only 8 percent said they planned to watch highlights or replays, to put that in perspective.

Oh, and who’s more immersed in mobile, Giants or Pats fans? The IAB picked Patriots fans. Even though Giants fans use their mobile devices to access more sports content, Pats fans watch more video on their mobiles. Hey, they threw in a chart:

 

COMPONENTS OF IAB MOBILE SPORTS SAVVINESS INDEX (NATIONAL AVERAGE=100) Giants Fans Patriots Fans Smartphone ownership 112 111 Tablet ownership 123 104 Weekly or more frequently (percentages of consumers who own a smartphone or tablet): Watch videos via smartphone or tablet 100 114 Post to social media via a smartphone or tablet 98 131 Access sports content via a smartphone or tablet 147 136 Send or receive e-mails via a smartphone or tablet 104 95 Send or receive text messages via a smartphone or tablet  

100  

104 Read news via a smartphone or tablet 110 97 Final Index Score (Weighted Average): 114 116

 

 

Subscribe to the free Adotas.com Newsletter

addthis_url = 'http%3A%2F%2Fwww.adotas.com%2F2012%2F02%2Ftwo-surveys-what-are-we-doing-with-mobile-devices-during-the-super-bowl%2F'; addthis_title = 'Two+Surveys%3A+What+Are+We+Doing+with+Mobile+Devices+During+the+Super+Bowl%3F'; addthis_pub = 'adotas';

ADOTAS – When you only mount a political campaign every four years on a national level or two on a local level, you probably haven’t kept up on the explosive growth of data-driven targeting that makes traditional contextual buys — such as FoxNews.com for Republicans and Huffington Post for the Democrats — less efficient for the candidate (or his Super PAC). Making broad assumptions about people based on what sites they visit is so, well, last-century. First, there is waste in reaching those who don’t meet the assumptions, and often you have to pay CPM that is far more expensive than if you found your voters elsewhere.

Here’s what I mean. Through our technology, Tribal Fusion identified 3.3 million politically active individuals. We matched these users to over 12,000 demographic and behavioral traits from first-party proprietary user data, as well as third-party data sources. From this we saw interesting trends and tendencies that could help political candidates find their voters in unexpected places where the CPMs are less and the audiences are prequalified to like the candidate message. Democrats, for example, tend more to:

Be in-market for Ford Explorer and cosmetics
Be fans of Beyonce and Michael Jordan
Research adoption and elder care
Search for retail and hospitality employment
Have health concerns such as hair loss and plastic surgery

Here is a graphic representation of their interest trends (click to enlarge):

By contract, Republicans tend towards:

Shopping for Corvettes and corporate attire
Being an investor with $250,000-plus income
Like the Utah Jazz and NASCAR, Keith Urban and soap operas
Researching real estate and taxes

Here is what they look like in the aggregate:

Independents have their own set of tendencies and interests that include:

Bohemian and environmental
Listen to Drake and watch animated TV
Are heavily involved in apartment hunting and exercising
Research personal debt and criminal law
Have health interests are such as beauty products and anxiety

Here is their infographic:

 

So now advertisers are armed with the behaviors predictive for each audience. These behaviors provide deeper understanding into each segment, sometimes supporting existing stereotypes, sometimes revealing new surprises. However, the true power lies in the ability to target, and to do so at scale. The scale is there because these audiences aren’t defined by a few hundred survey respondents or any one single data point, such as a site visit. Using these data points, campaigns can craft online media campaigns to accomplish specific strategies. You may already be able to see how President Obama might approach Independents by highlighting his student loan plan and green jobs program. And I wonder if anyone on the Obama campaign has considered targeting NBA fans and elder care researchers to drive advocacy and campaign donations?

Subscribe to the free Adotas.com Newsletter

addthis_url = 'http%3A%2F%2Fwww.adotas.com%2F2012%2F02%2Fhow-can-online-tendencies-and-interests-find-the-right-voters%2F'; addthis_title = 'How+Can+Online+Tendencies+and+Interests+Find+the+Right+Voters%3F'; addthis_pub = 'adotas';

ADOTAS - As I stepped onto the Metro-North train the other day, I spotted a series of ads from Google near the doorways. The one that really captured my attention is below. It left me asking why Google (and others) are releasing these ads.  The short-term answer is, as Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, says in this New York Times piece, ”I think they’re made to justify certain business practices.”

The longer-term answer is: sunk costs and the path of least resistance. It’s cheaper to fight for the least amount of regulation than it is to change the Google algorithm and to make the significant hardware changes to go with it.

Yet a new Comscore report out yesterday indicates $12.4 billion in advertising is wasted every year. The biggest driver, according to the report, was when ads are placed next to content that is “unsafe.” As the ReadWriteWeb story states, “Among ads that were seen, 72 percent of the campaigns in the study ran alongside site content that was ‘not brand safe.’ If you’re advertising cheeseburgers, and your ad runs next to a news article about the obesity epidemic, you’re not likely to get much value out of it.” That means all the data collected about individuals’ behavior online can be for naught.

What I wanted isn’t always what I want. To correct for this problem, Google uses a keyword-plus-statistics technique that often doesn’t work. I may in fact be looking for beetles that buzz, even if I have previously looked for Beetles that beep. To Google the word beetle is a token, a series of letters in a particular order, B-E-E-T-L-E.

Now add the statistics. The tokens ”beetle” and “beep” were probably in the presence of the token “car” or “Volkswagen.” Likewise, the tokens ”beetle” and “buzz” were probably in the presence of the token “insect.” Associations are made despite every stats professor in the nation drilling the same famous phrase into our heads: “Correlation does not prove causality.” My old Volkswagen quite often buzzes and beeps.

Semantic technology provides data on the meaning and context of every word, sentence and paragraph. Two measures are used to define the efficacy of the webpage description: precision and completeness. Precision is straightforward. Is it right?

Completeness is about reach: Does it include all that should have been included in a set of identifiable conditions — entities (people, places and things), categories and emotions?

The diagram below shows a complex sentence with two notions of sentiment. The fly-away boxes show two assigned definitions. The first is an understanding of a major brand — Motorola. The second is the use of the word “great.” What makes this sentence tough to understand is that “lousy” is negative and “great” is positive. But which objects in the sentence are the adjectives attributed to?

The “lousy” in front of Motorola is easy — an adjective in front of a noun modifies it. But the adjective “great” is way out of position — to the right of the “buttons” it refers to. Yet semantic technology still gets it right.  The SBJ (“the buttons”) at the bottom of the fly-away tells me so, indicating “great” is associated with “buttons.”

Keywords with some statistics don’t get this right. They declare the sentence “neutral” simply because a positive and negative cancel each other out. For user-generated content (UCG), this analysis is wrong.

So accuracy in understanding the meaning of a word makes a difference. What about completeness or reach? Below you see two diagrams for the word “gas.” The first shows just the upper and lower branches of hierarchically related meanings when the gas is used in the context of gasoline. Less specific forms of gas are fuel and hydrocarbon, whereas more specific forms of gas include the 21 additional concepts you see.

When the definition of gas changes to “natural gas,” the associated concepts changes dramatically. Any system that does not take account of the in-context definition of the word and its associated concepts will have very little completeness or reach. In other words, keywords plus statistics have very little reach.

These diagrams are showing only the hierarchal relationships between words and only at two levels. But you can think of all kinds of relationships between words that would again change these diagrams and the extension of levels beyond two that are possible.

Semantic technology maps out all the levels and relationship types between all words. This approach tackles the completeness or reach task of content targeting in a way that keywords plus statistics never will.

Good to know may not be good for me. Everyone in the ad technology business says they have one goal — get the right ad in front of the right person at the right time. But when Comscore says $12.4 billion went right down the toilet, it screams for improvement in how our digital understanding of ads, content and people match up, so that this waste disappears.

So in the end you could argue Google’s “good to know” campaign is a slick piece of PR to downplay the privacy issues in digital advertising. Even if you had every Google user give an explicit “OK” to turning over privacy for Google services, what really is missing is how much better those services could and should be. Good to know isn’t good for me, but it is good for Google.   

Subscribe to the free Adotas.com Newsletter

addthis_url = 'http%3A%2F%2Fwww.adotas.com%2F2012%2F02%2Fgoogles-good-to-know-may-not-be-good-for-me%2F'; addthis_title = 'Google%26%238217%3Bs+%26%238220%3BGood+to+Know%26%238221%3B+May+Not+Be+Good+for+Me'; addthis_pub = 'adotas';

ADOTAS – Well, it finally happened: Facebook filed with the SEC for an initial public offering — a move that most didn’t expect to come for months, before rumors started swirling over the past week. The company’s looking to raise $5 billion, and it hopes to trade under the ticker FB. That figure marks the biggest IPO for any internet company. Prior to the filing, Morgan Stanley had been announced as leading up the IPO once it happened, and later today, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America/Merrill Lynch, Barclays and Allen & Company were all announced as underwriters as well. Meanwhile, the New York Times reports sources near Facebook say the network ultimately is “aiming for a far greater offering that could value it as high as $100 billion.” You can read the SEC filing here.

Facebook reported revenues of over $3.71 billion in 2011, and it claims 845 million users. Today’s announcement is significant for reasons we probably don’t need to explain to you, and it also poses challenges for Facebook’s future that we probably don’t need to explain either. Incidentally, this Saturday, Feb. 4, marks the eighth anniversary of the network’s launch.

 

Subscribe to the free Adotas.com Newsletter

addthis_url = 'http%3A%2F%2Fwww.adotas.com%2F2012%2F02%2Ffacebook-files-for-ipo-seeks-5-billion%2F'; addthis_title = 'Facebook+Files+for+IPO%2C+Seeks+%245+Billion'; addthis_pub = 'adotas';

ADOTAS - Mobile marketing made tremendous strides in 2011. Exciting developments gave a glimpse into what we can expect from mobile advertising in 2012. Among clients, partners and peers, we see three major trends that will ensure that the mobile advertising world keeps the ball rolling in the right direction, driving exciting and engaging user experiences and effective results for advertising campaigns. Three trends for 2012 are:

• Further emphasis on developing specifically for the tablet
• Rolling out new ideas, new ad units and new executions
• Bigger and better rich media initiatives

In 2012, we will see further emphasis on developing specifically for the tablet. Last year was all about the tablet, and this trend looks set to explode. Forrester Research estimated that tablet sales in the U.S. are expected to double from 26 million in 2011 to more than 50 million in 2012. Forrester analyst Ted Schadler predicted that “this [tablets] will be the fastest uptake of any device in the enterprise ever. Faster than PCs, faster than laptops and faster than smartphones.” Advertisers and developers who create ad units built specifically and strategically for tablets are experiencing phenomenal user engagement. The critical industry lesson from 2011 is that tablet users have a radically different experience and consume content and media in a very different way to other mobile devices. We need one product for the person who is on the go and seeking information related to their location (smartphone users), and another for someone unwinding at home, accessing books, TV shows or movies (tablet users). It is going to be important in the coming months for advertisers and developers to analyze which mobile device they are developing for in order to create engaging, results driven campaigns.

The second trend to watch for in 2012 is companies rolling out new ideas, new ad units and new executions to further differentiate in this medium and get the best possible return on investment. Many advertiser clients are looking to mobile ad networks to help them scale their brand in an interesting and engaging way and to find a balance between reaching as many people as possible while still being unique. What is the key to this? HTML5. It is opening creative floodgates in mobile advertising, and we expect 2012 to be the year of rich media expandable units. Mobile web and HTML5 have allowed many advertisers to develop the types of creative executions that can run across any mobile web device and operating system, allowing those advertisers to focus on their campaign objectives.

Lastly, bigger and better rich media initiatives will be a major part of every ad buy. Rich media, with its sophisticated graphics, animation and streaming video provides an immersive user experience and enables advertisers to effectively reach consumers and inspire interaction with the brand. With video, advertisers can give mobile audiences a TV-like experience on the go and generate the same emotive connection with the user as TV does. The combination of sight and sound, and the ability to tell the story quickly and effectively engages the user. This can be a hard task in an environment that is quite often transactional. Other rich media solutions we predict being more popular include: voting or polling, click-to-call, click-to-buy, click-to-map, and click-to-calendar. Mobile rich media allows advertisers to build creative based on their marketing objectives and to understand the results very quickly. It has also shown higher interaction and conversion rates than standard mobile banners, facilitating user interaction and brand engagement.

Mobile video advertising is one of the fastest growing aspects in the marketing industry today. Next year looks to be full of more exciting developments and these three trends are giving agencies and advertisers a view into what is going to work in mobile.

Subscribe to the free Adotas.com Newsletter

addthis_url = 'http%3A%2F%2Fwww.adotas.com%2F2012%2F02%2Ftablets-html-big-creative-point-to-mobiles-future%2F'; addthis_title = 'Tablets%2C+HTML5%2C+Big+Creative+Point+to+Mobile%26%238217%3Bs+Future'; addthis_pub = 'adotas';

ADOTAS – Today ToneMedia launched its new ad platform, which delivers targeted ads to consumers based on their music preferences. If this sounds familiar, that’s probably because the company’s been kicking around its ToneTargeting technology since last year, in what CEO/founder Val Katayev characterized as “stealth mode” and under the banner of leading ringtone marketing company ToneFuse. (In fact, ADOTAS wrote about the technology this past spring.) In spinning off from that parent company, ToneMedia’s now working with over 150 online publishers — music-related sites, like blogs and sites that host song lyrics — and a number of national brands to reach, according to a statement from the company, about 120 million consumers worldwide, including 55 million in the U.S.

The impetus behind ToneMedia came from Katayev’s discovery that “music and lyrics” has been Google’s top-ranked search category since 2004 (that’s overall, not every year). As such, Katayev explained over the phone, that creates a situation whereby “from publishers plugged into our platform… we process a lot of information about users,” via their specific interest in “lyrics, artist bios, et cetera.” Eventually, he explained, “we decided to bring in behavioral data — right now mainly from third parties,” but he pointed out that in the company’s future plans, “we’re not locked into third parties.” ToneMedia can also use its presence on music-related sites to collect valuable consumer insights directly. “We can survey our users and collect their own data,” Katayev pointed out. By cross-referencing consumer buying behavior and purchasing patterns from third parties, ToneMedia’s able to discern, without using cookies, the buying behavior of users associated with about 150,000 recording artists.

“It’s not going to be as accurate as behavioral data,” Katayev acknowledged of the process, “but it’s so scalable… and so much more effective.” ToneMedia not only sorts data into categories pertaining to each of the aforementioned 150,000 recording artists, but also into more than 900 audience segments, which Katayev can be as specific as “pet owners” or “AT&T Wireless users.” And while this all ends up leading to some amusing discoveries about the way fans of certain musicians might be expected to spend money (compared against everyone who searches for music online each month, Adele fans are 89 percent more likely to consider traveling to Australia, Lil Wayne fans are more than 400 percent more likely to buy a Blackberry, and Foster the People fans are 78 percent more likely to be the IT decision makers in their respective households), it also leads to, according to Kateyev, “3 to 15 percent engagement rates,” depending on the type of ads delivered to the user. He also credited the Flex ad units, which ToneMedia uses for its ads, in delivering higher performance. “The browser is our canvas,” he said of Flex’ capacities.

Subscribe to the free Adotas.com Newsletter

addthis_url = 'http%3A%2F%2Fwww.adotas.com%2F2012%2F02%2Ftonemedia-targets-customers-based-on-music-tastes%2F'; addthis_title = 'ToneMedia+Targets+Customers+Based+on+Music+Tastes'; addthis_pub = 'adotas';

ADOTAS – In the latest edition of his video series, The Future of Engagement, marketing consultant Murray Newlands (head of Influence People) offers a commentary about Facebook’s IPO, which is expected… well, pretty much any second now. In this video, Newlands evaluates what drove interest in the Facebook IPO across various social media channels. Compellingly enough, he found more of the discussion happened on Twitter than on Facebook itself, which he credited to Twitter’s ability to facilitate a certain kind of dialogue. “The social media conversation is all about neutral conversation,” he points out, “which is people literally sharing that news.” He notes the IPO was seen, all in all, as positive news, and he discusses people’s inclination to share positive news. He also poses the question of what Facebook might do with the money an IPO would net for the company. Might it look to acquire another high-profile internet company?

Subscribe to the free Adotas.com Newsletter

addthis_url = 'http%3A%2F%2Fwww.adotas.com%2F2012%2F02%2Fvideo-facebook-ipo-comes-to-the-future-of-engagement%2F'; addthis_title = 'Video%3A+Facebook+IPO+Comes+to+%26%238220%3BThe+Future+of+Engagement%26%238221%3B'; addthis_pub = 'adotas';

ADOTAS – Late yesterday, Forrester Research released its new Wave Report on cross-channel campaign management. The report took a close look at the challenges advertisers and marketers face in a cross-channel campaign — from designing and budgeting it to executing it and analyzing its effectiveness, considering the complexities in understanding and properly implementing social marketing, local advertising, mobile tech and real-time decisioning. Forrester researched and rated 12 products offered by 11 companies (Alterian, Aprimo, ExactTarget, IBM, Infor, Neolane, Oracle, Pitney Bowes, Responsys, SAP and SAS), over 81 criteria and incorporating surveys, product demos and in-depth executive analyses across 156 different companies utilizing those cross-channel services.

Forrester senior analyst Robert Brosnan, who oversaw the report, pointed out on the Forrester blog that although 11 companies and their services were weighed against each other with the same criteria, there’s some room for subjectivity in looking at the results. Because of the complexities of  a cross-channel campaign, certain of those companies provided services better suited for certain demands. The report groups the 11 firms into categories: “marketing generalists,” “interactive marketing specialists,” “data and analytics specialists” and “enterprise application providers.” The idea is that breaking the market down into those categories should paint a more accurate picture of each company’s strengths and weaknesses.

Brosnan also explained the report “could have evaluated another 10 vendors,” on account of the field’s growth and nuances, and that he expects to see new vendors, models and functions over the next couple years. Furthermore, the report stated,“Marketers are aggressively shifting budget to digital media and seeing interactive as more effective than traditional efforts,” and that “in the future, marketers will select applications for their ability to orchestrate the always-on, bi-directional, and cross-channel dialogue between customers and businesses.”

You can read a summary of the report, or download the whole thing, here.

Subscribe to the free Adotas.com Newsletter

addthis_url = 'http%3A%2F%2Fwww.adotas.com%2F2012%2F02%2Fforrester-releases-wave-report-on-cross-channel-campaign-management-tools%2F'; addthis_title = 'Forrester+Releases+Wave+Report+on+Cross+Channel+Campaign+Management+Tools'; addthis_pub = 'adotas';

ADOTAS – Believe it or not, there was a time when privacy was revered. One’s innermost thoughts remained under lock and key (literally) in a diary, not played out online in excruciating detail. Now, private lives are led in public. While older generations struggle with the lack of anonymity this new world engenders, today’s youngest generation — collectively known as Generation Z or Generation Next — seems to embrace it. Indeed, it’s part of their DNA. They grew up with Twitter, for example, while a pre-Twitter world is a hazy memory for even Generation Y.

These digital natives are often derided for willingly sharing so much personal information. But truth be told, one doesn’t need texts and tweets, or Facebook and Tumblr for that. Indeed, with one innocuous transaction online, details on buying preferences, location and personal information are all tracked (contributing, by the way, to the overflow of unsolicited email in your in-box). It’s called behavioral targeting, and although it’s the surest way of delivering relevant promotions to the right individuals, it also seemingly invades our privacy.

So, does privacy have to be a casualty of this technology? Perhaps not: By proactively managing expectations with the brands you have a digital and business relationship with, consumers can take back control and reinstate a level of privacy that anyone can be comfortable with.

Read the Fine Print

However careful some of us are to keep personal information under wraps, merely existing in the 21st century alongside sophisticated technology forces us to relinquish at least some privacy, like it or not. Take, for instance, the typical grocery store rewards card, which can likely be found in every wallet on earth. In essence, it exchanges the deal of the day for your personal information: You use it every time you shop, and in turn, it takes note of your buying behaviors. That’s why, along with your receipt, you get a slew of unsolicited (albeit sometimes welcome) coupons customized to your preferences. It’s  behavioral targeting at its best.

Although these club card-generated coupons may be a welcome result of behavioral targeting, spam and otherwise unsolicited email, byproducts of behavioral targeting, are not. That’s why it’s important to manage your relationships with the companies you patronize, and read the “fine print.” Customers can do this by “flagging” and by opting-out of information-sharing, both of which exist to assure customers that no personally identifiable information is taken, and that any unscrupulous parties breaching privacy are monitored and subject to sanctions. Also, it is worth noting that unless you proactively opt-out most companies will share you PII. Completing an annual opt-out request online is ideal as a paper submission may take a while to complete.

Marketers: Commit to ‘Clean’ Lists

But the onus to fine-tune behavioral targeting and eradicate spam should not fall solely on the consumer. For although they must take care to opt out of sharing information, marketers, too, must commit to doing business with only those list-rental vendors that offer permission-based email lists. Alternately, they can count on “clean” lists from self-service lead-generation platforms. Either of these will ensure marketers reach the right targets, and therefore find a greater return on their campaigns and fewer complaints of spam.

Another benefit: The commitment to data integrity through demand for permission-based email lists will also likely spur widespread change in the list marketing industry as a whole, pushing out list-rental vendors that refuse to conform to industry best practices.

It may seem that privacy is a casualty of technology and convenience. But we do, in fact, have the power to recapture at least some of it by managing our relationships with our preferred brands. Using this approach, we can coexist with technology while sparing our private lives.

Subscribe to the free Adotas.com Newsletter

addthis_url = 'http%3A%2F%2Fwww.adotas.com%2F2012%2F01%2Fmanaging-your-privacy-in-a-public-digital-world%2F'; addthis_title = 'Managing+Your+Privacy+in+a+Public+Digital+World'; addthis_pub = 'adotas';

ADOTAS - Since launching in 2011, device fingerprinting service AdTruth has taken pains to illustrate its cookie-free tracking methods protects users’ privacy: It registered with the Internet Advertising Bureau, it implemented Mozilla’s Do Not Track header (and it was the first device identification provider to do so), it scored a thumbs-up from Mozilla, and today it became a member of the World Wide Web Consortium (WC3), joining W3C’s Tracking Protection Working Group.

“We were the first vendor to get [such recognition] from Mozilla,”  AdTruth CIO Ori Eisen said in a phone conversation today, “and I believe we’re the first from the WC3.” While the concept of device fingerprinting might raise some eyebrows — indeed, Eisen said “people were very leery” when AdTruth first appeared — the company’s been highly vocal about privacy issues, saying its methods provide more privacy than cookies and seeking confirmation from the aforementioned organizations. “We don’t tag the device at all,” Eisen pointed out. Instead, AdTruth’s technology “captures about 100 pieces of data, generated on the server side,” to create a device ID.

Eisen said today’s announcement is just the most recent in a series of approvals and certifications AdTruth is seeking, and that others, to be announced, are in the works.

Subscribe to the free Adotas.com Newsletter

addthis_url = 'http%3A%2F%2Fwww.adotas.com%2F2012%2F01%2Fadtruth-gains-w3c-thumbs-up-for-privacy-protection%2F'; addthis_title = 'AdTruth+Gains+W3C+Thumbs-Up+for+Privacy+Protection'; addthis_pub = 'adotas';

ADOTAS – Big-time data management and marketplace service eXelate announced today it’s joining up with big-time ad analytics firm Nielsen Catalina Solutions, with the goal of helping consumer packaged goods (CPG) marketers deliver more relevant digital ads to consumers, based on those consumers’ purchase behavior in brick-and-mortar stores.

Nielsen Catalina Solutions is the joint operation of precision marketing company Catalina and research giant Nielsen, and it provides single-source analytics to gauge the performance of CPG marketers’ ad campaigns. eXelate manages a data cloud consisting of online and offline data for 300 million users around the world. eXelate’s data “expands Nielsen Catalina Solutions’ digital footprint” (as a press release put it), and the partnership allows “a select list of online media partners” to reach their prime audience and measure ROI, optimizing the process via a closed loop system.

This partnership is the most recent fruit of a professional relationship between the two companies dating back to the 2010 that has also yielded the offline data set Prizm, which brought Nielsen’s offline segmentation data into eXelate’s data platform. “a little over a year ago,” he said. With this new partnership, eXelate CEO Mark Zagorski said in a recent phone conversation, the two companies can provide “the same CPG targeting for the online world that brands have offline.” Instead of targeting ads by demographics, “we can now move to… purchase proclivity.” Now the companies have the combined ability to “capture offline CPG purchase data — products like shampoo, cereal, that kind of good stuff — [and] bring it online.

“The online world is always trying to steal revenue from the offline world,” Zagorski explained, saying eXelate tries to pick up that revenue “on our own terms, our own metric. For a lot of brands and CPG companies, they just don’t get it. We need to speak their language. We need to get that data online.”

Zagorski pointed out eXelate is putting privacy protocol into place, and that the partnership with Nielsen Catalina Solutions preserves those privacy preferences. “We recognize the Do Not Track header,” he said. “We offer a preference manager” so users can “clearly understand the data being collected.”

This partnership, Zagorski said, will ideally yield, in part, a clearer vision of “cross-media attribution. We need to do a better job of tying the online data to offline data,” he said, including the consumer’s relationship to “products you see online but don’t buy online.”

Subscribe to the free Adotas.com Newsletter

addthis_url = 'http%3A%2F%2Fwww.adotas.com%2F2012%2F01%2Fexelate-nielsen-catalina-solutions-partner-to-bring-cpg-data-online%2F'; addthis_title = 'eXelate%2C+Nielsen+Catalina+Solutions+Partner+to+Bring+CPG+Data+Online'; addthis_pub = 'adotas';

GRAPHICMAIL – Over time an email marketing list may erode as people lose interest in your offerings or, worse yet, become annoyed by your newsletter sends. Regardless of the reason, emailers have to accept a certain amount of list depreciation as things go on, but when that list begins to lose too much mass too quickly, it might be time to consider a few ways to stem your unsubscribe rate.

There’s always something you can do to save some of your subscribers. Following are three day-to-day campaign tips that are sure to minimize your opt-outs:

1) Listen to your readers.

First of all, in opt-in email marketing, a subscriber ignored is a subscriber lost — which is why you need to take whatever campaign feedback you get seriously, while you still have that person’s attention. A little remedial communication is always a lot easier than getting someone back onto your list after they’ve left.

Most of the time, though, people will unsubscribe quietly and without logging any complaints, despite all of your hard work to keep them satisfied. When this happens, you need to take the opportunity to solicit feedback from them and act on it. Chatting to a disgruntled reader who has opted out probably won’t help you save that email recipient, but it may help you prevent future subscribers from leaving your list.

2) Customize email frequency.

Are you bombarding your subscribers’ inboxes, or leaving them too scarce for their tastes? Just as you could let them choose the types of emails they receive, you should also let subscribers adjust the frequency at which you send to them. A major step in preventing unsubscribes is in letting your email newsletter recipients tell you what frequency is right for them, which can vary from daily, to monthly, or anything in between.

Everyone on your list will have a different frequency that’s the best fit for them. So, offer customized email frequency options at the bottom of every email and also on the page to which your unsubscribe link navigates, as a final effort to retain your subscriber. You can send these emails to your inactive subscribers, too, asking them to select their ideal sending frequency to re-engage and prevent an impending unsubscribe.

3) Improve you segmentation.

The more specific your email subscriber segments are, the better able you are to deliver content that speaks directly to their interests, making you a welcome fixture in their inbox.

Not everyone signs up to your newsletter for the same reasons — they live in different places, they have different behavioral patterns and they like different products. This being the reality, marketers need to split up their lists and craft messages accordingly. Email segmentation is important because it allows you to deliver only the most relevant, customized content to your subscribers. Suppose you could create two or three different offers that would appeal to different groups of your subscribers, depending on their needs, wants, interests and objections. The more relevant an offer is, the more likely someone is to take you up on that offer, and the less likely they are to unsubscribe.

Subscribe to the free Adotas.com Newsletter

addthis_url = 'http%3A%2F%2Fwww.adotas.com%2F2012%2F01%2Fthree-ways-to-lower-email-unsubscribe-rates%2F'; addthis_title = 'Three+Ways+to+Lower+Email+Unsubscribe+Rates'; addthis_pub = 'adotas';

ADOTAS – For the past few weeks, you’ve been acquainted with The Future of Engagement, marketing consultant and Influence People head Murray Newlands‘ video series that features discussions with forward-thinking industry leaders about how to reach, and form connections with, a wider audience. (ADOTAS has shared Newlands’ interviews with Mark Schmulen of Constant Contact, Alex Rowland of Alphabird and David Spark of Spark Media Solutions — take the chance to get caught up, if you’re not already.) By most accounts, you’ve found the series… well, engaging. Today, Newlands launches a new series, dovetailing with The Future of Engagement — it’s called The Future of Publishing, and it’ll air live from San Francisco later today, Jan. 31, at noon, Pacific time (3 p.m. on the East Coast, or 20:00 GMT, if you want to plug that into your date-and-time converter). You’ll be able to watch it from this post, so remember to come back in a few hours. In the video, Newlands and VigLink CEO Oliver Roup will be speaking with HubPages CEO Paul Edmondson, NetShelter president and co-founder Pirouz Nilforoush, and SEO manager Yulia Smirnova.

Newlands announced that there’s also a contest, hosted by Playkast, on the Future of Publishing Facebook page throughout the week. After the show, viewers will be able to answer a series of questions related to the discussion, and by scoring well, you can enter into a drawing to win an Amazon Kindle.

If you don’t see the embedded video, click on the justin.tv link below to watch.

Watch live video from futureofpublishing on www.justin.tv

 

Subscribe to the free Adotas.com Newsletter

addthis_url = 'http%3A%2F%2Fwww.adotas.com%2F2012%2F01%2Fnew-video-series-the-future-of-publishing%2F'; addthis_title = 'New+Video+Series%3A+The+Future+of+Publishing'; addthis_pub = 'adotas';