Advertisers are finding that banner ads in mobile games are viewed as an annoyance, reports Digiday. Companies like Kiip and Appsavvy, and San Francisco-based Gimmie, have found an alternative: rewarding game players with coupons or points toward a purchase.
Advertisers using Kiip applications offer what Kiip calls “Real Rewards for Virtual Achievements.” A player who, for example, achieves a high score in “Slam Dunk Basketball” may receive congratulations and an offer from such consumer brands as Sephora, Carl’s Jr., Dr. Pepper and 1-800-Flowers.
Thusfar, no market research exists to quantify the benefits to those advertisers, or to the game developers who incorporate Kiip, AppSavvy or Gimmie (now in private beta testing). But Kiip CEO Brian Wong estimates the number of mobile game players in the U.S. is 15 million, and growing; and increasingly female. But in addition to those top brands, in-game reward developers are attracting heavy investment. Kiip was incorporated only in July 2010, and has since received $4.4 million in funding from True Ventures, Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, and Crosslink Capital. Appsavvy has received $3.1 million in first round funding, also led by True Ventures, and a private investment by About.com Founder Scott Kurnit.
QR Codes in Traditional Ads Lure “Curious Consumers”
About half of all smart phone users have, at least once, scanned a QR code, reports eMarketer. But are they effective as an advertising vehicle?
Perhaps. A full 41% of respondents in a survey by research firm Chadwick Martin Bailey scanned a QR code to get more information about a company, product or event. Another 18% used it to find discounts, but only 6% used the code to buy something. The strongest purpose is that the smart phone user was simply curious what the QR code would do.
On the plus side, of those who regularly scan QR codes, 18% were moved to purchase. And consumer awareness of QR codes is on the rise, with eight out of 10 aware of them. Finally, consumers scan those QR codes from advertisements, most frequently from print advertisements in magazines, at 35%; billboards and signs at 11%, and direct mailers at another 11%.
Beauty Marketing Going Social, but Not Abandoning Traditional Advertising—Yet
Beauty product makers are clinging to traditional advertising venues: consider the ubiquitous Cover Girl and “Maybe It’s Maybelline” TV spots, and the still-thick ad-heavy Glamour, Vogue and Cosmopolitan.Still, marketers are hedging their bets with social and mobile campaigns, aimed at “going viral” and creating customer engagement, reports global market research consultancy Kline & Company.
During the 2011 holiday season, marketers ramped up viral campaigns to attract consumers, chiefly those looking for the best deals on personal care products. They turned to social and mobile media for discounts and promotions, and Kline believes “marketers are finding that mobile couponing offers significant advantages over paper-based forerunners in delivering higher redemption rates and encouraging impulse purchases.”
While broadcast and print media ads and coupons remained strong, marketers reported feeling “threatened” by new technologies that enable potential customers to screen out TV ads. For print advertising, they reported feeling constrained by inflexible publication dates and comparatively high costs. They enjoy the real-time adaptability and keyword-based targeting available in mobile and social media. Also, the relatively young and trend-setting demographic natural to those media. Still, those marketers and advertisers feel underserved by the metrics available from those media, and how they stack up against print and television. Kline has devised and a proprietary 5-point metric which it believes rates marketing methods on how critical each is for a given brand.
The study, Beauty Marketing 2011: U.S. Promotional Activities and Strategies Assessment, finds advertisers establishing presences in venues including Facebook, YouTube and the localized Foursquare, where they believe they can accurately target a given demographic. The marketers are tapping into the emerging potential of the still-in-infancy “Facebook commerce” (f-commerce) and “mobile commerce” (m-commerce), and treat these media as sales channels versus brand-awareness opportunities. They are also using those media to engage with enhanced loyalty programs and new sampling methods.
“Opportunities Abound” In Ad Support for Mobile Content
Mobile devices mean “More touchpoints for marketing messages,” observes eMarketer in some just-released research. The online journal/industry thinktank projects that revenues from ad-supported mobile music, games and video will grow 52.7% in 2012 to $433.8 million. eMarketer expects that revenue to top $1 billion by 2015.
eMarketer believes the double-digit growth is fueled in part by audience demand for advanced mobile content like games and music; and because mobile content providers are leaning more heavily on advertisements. Nearly 30% of their revenues will come from ads by 2015, versus the less than 20% of 2011. The remaining 70% will be from paid revenues like subscription and download fees.
Still, the dollar amount of those paid sources will leap from $1.16 billion in 2011 to $2.52 billion by 2015. All told, mobile music, gaming and video content should bring in revenues of nearly $3.59 billion in 2015.
GroupM, WPP Launch Xaxis Audience Buying Resource | 3GTV Pilot Goes In-Store with Top CPG Brands
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GroupM announced the launch of Xaxis, a global audience buying company that combines the demand-side data and technology resources of WPP, and the trading leverage of the GroupM agencies into a single resource. The solution aims to offer advertisers the ability to target specific audiences directly, independent of website, app or media platform, using a database of audience profiles. In forming Xaxis, WPP brings together a portfolio of audience-buying capabilities including B3, targ.ad, GoldNetwork, GroupM DSP and the GroupM Marketplace. In 2010, the businesses that have combined to form Xaxis executed approximately 4,000 campaigns for more than 400 GroupM clients.
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LivingSocial Families has launched in six new locations: Metrowest Boston, Mass., Waco, Texas, Des Moines, Iowa, Huntsville, Ala., Cardiff, United Kingdom, and Paris, France. With the addition of these sites, LivingSocial Families has extended its reach to 135 markets worldwide, and its members are getting discounts of at least 50% off on local experience, according to the company.
- The Ritz-Carlton has launched World Concierge on Foursquare -- a first for a luxury hotel brand to extend exclusive services to a mobile public audience, according to their statement. Tips will be populated regularly by concierges from Ritz-Carlton hotels around the world. Foursquare users are able to find local information by visiting the profile of The Ritz-Carlton or by checking in to locations of interest.
Outdoor
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Automated Media Services (AMS) has launched its new media platform, 3GTV Networks, into nine Bloom grocery stores in the Washington D.C., area. The AMS pilot program is the first test of its media platform which allows brands the ability to communicate in the retail store. Some leading household CPG's, including PepsiCo, Kraft Foods, Nestle Purina, have signed on for the pilot, the company reports. The platform has an in-store digital communications backbone that allows for digital messaging at the shelf-edge, two-way communications, shopper tracking and measurement tools, and other activities in development.
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Specialty display solutions, Planar Systems, has partnered with NBA franchise, the Portland Trail Blazers, in the installation of the Planar Clarity Matrix LCD Video Wall System to boost fan engagment, brand loyalty and sales of season tickets at the Rose Garden Arena. The 132-square-foot Clarity Matrix LCD video wall features information about exclusive events with players and alumni, highlights season ticket holder discounts, and provides high-resolution videos and images from Trail Blazers games. The nearby 30-square-foot Clarity Matrix Wall of Fame depicts life-sized images of players, writes Digital Signage Expo.
9 NJ Public Stations May “Go Across the River” | Pandora IPO Next Week
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Nine stations in the public New Jersey Network have been slated for sale to noncommercial operators based in neighboring New York and Philadelphia metro areas, along with a proposal to LMA WNJN-TV to New York’s WNET. But state legislators may block the move because state is already underserved when it comes to broadcasting, and that control of NJ station will go “across the river,” writes Radio Business Report.
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Pandora Media will price its public stock offering on June 14 and begin trading on the NYSE as “P” on Wednesday. Depending on pricing and demand, the IPO of the online streaming “radio” service could raise from $109 to $140 million, according to Radio Business Report.
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"106.7 Lite fm Presents Broadway in Bryant Park" will run the eleventh season of its Thursday lunchtime summer concerts in New York City in July and August. Bank of America will award a year's worth of free Broadway tickets in a promotion.
Chart: B2B Publishers, Reported Profitability 2010
About this chart: Source: Folio Magazine. "2011 Folio: B-to-B CEO Survey," May 2011. About their data: The survey sample of 1,000 was selected by Folio and Readex Research from domestic subscribers with executive management titles in b-to-b and con-sumer publishing. Data was collected via mail survey from January 14, 2011 to February 28, 2011. Results were filtered to include only those who say they are involved in b-to-b publishing. The margin of error based on those 217 respondents is plus or minus 6.2 percent at the 95 percent confidence level.
Ad-Supported Apps Beating Try-Buy Model | Lady Gaga Daily Deal Crashes Amazon
- The “try-buy” gaming model has lost ground due to the growth of ad-supported mobile gaming apps. The ad-supported business model for PC video game distribution now provides three to seven times the revenue of the traditional try-buy model, according to research from Exent, owners of a gaming website FreeRideGames.com. Their research found that the try-buy model has one to two percent industry average conversion rate, which ceases to earn any additional revenue after purchase. The ad-supported model, however, continues to generate revenue for an average of 195 minutes of game play, per user, per game.
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After Amazon was overloaded Monday when it offered Lady Gaga’s new album in the MP3 format at 99 cents, the company is trying again today. The surprise one-day promotion was so popular it stalled the company’s servers, but Amazon promises that it will be prepared for the next try, reports the New York Times.
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AdMob has been part of Google for just short of a year, and Google has reviewed the growth of the mobile industry in that time. Google says that estimated 300 million smartphones were shipped in the past year, average smartphone data usage has doubled, and the app market now numbers in the hundreds of thousands. In terms of mobile advertising, traffic on the AdMob network has grown more than three and a half times, and it gets more than 2.7 billion ad requests every day. In just the past six months, traffic from tablets on the AdMob network has increased by 300 percent, the company reports.
NYT Boosts Subscriptions Through Events Marketing | Amazon Kindle Tops Paper Book Sales
- Like the rest of the industry, the New York Times found that selling subscriptions by phone became less effective and much more expensive as the federal “do-not-call” registry was put in place, reports poynter.org. So, it has replaced telemarketing as a source of selling new subscriptions with “events marketing,” i.e., pitching a booth at a well-trafficked venue like the U.S. Open tennis tournament. The new sales channel has grown from a handful of local events mid-2000s to 850 events last year. About a third are in New York, and the rest national. Such events have become the second largest sales channel after the Web and that the program will expand further in 2011.
- Amazon is now selling more e-books than print or hardback combined, a marker that probably could have been hit much sooner if its digital books could be read outside the Kindle platform, writes paidcontent.org. As well, Amazon reports that its $114 ad-supported Kindle is now the best-selling of the homegrown e-readers. It took Amazon less than four years from the launch of Kindle in November 2007 to reach this point, a moment of much glee for CEO Jeff Bezos. In his statement, Bezos said: “Customers are now choosing Kindle books more often than print books. We had high hopes that this would happen eventually, but we never imagined it would happen this quickly—we’ve been selling print books for 15 years and Kindle books for less than four years.”
Pepsico Wins SABRE Award for Best PR | Report: Fraud is Tougher to Detect
- Pepsico, in partnership with Edelman and Weber Shandwick Worldwide, took home the Platinum SABRE Award for the best public relations program of 2011, for its Pepsi Refresh campaign, which used social media to engage consumers in the company’s corporate social responsibility efforts. Burson-Marsteller took home the North American Agency of the Year trophy; Kekst and Company, which was named Specialist Agency of the Year in addition to its Strategic Agency of the Year award; and Text 100, which was named the Best Agency to Work For in North America. The Holmes Report’s SABRE competition for the public relations industry acknowledges PR campaigns that demonstrate creativity, integrity and effectiveness. All North American winners are listed here.