"This research demonstrates that social video significantly increases brand attention," claims London-based Unruly Media. Unruly offers a global platform for social video advertising, has three US offices, and delivered such video campaigns as Old Spice’s “Man Your Man Could Smell Like” campaign and Coke’s “Happiness” series. Unruly commissioned research firm Decipher to study results across such consumer brands as Heineken, Coca-Cola and Energizer Batteries. The survey among 18-34 year olds investigated the impact of recommendation on brand metrics to determine social ad effectiveness.
Among the findings:
- Viewers are more likely to enjoy a video when it has been recommended than when encountered through browsing (14% higher enjoyment)
- Viewers are more likely to recall a brand name when the social video has been recommended than when encountered through browsing (7% higher recall)
- Viewers are more likely to engage with an ad’s messages when the social has been recommended than when encountered through browsing (10% higher brand association)
Who does the recommending? Certainly, peers in social media environments, but also authoritative bloggers and and news sources who covering advertiser content editorially: consider that all of that Super Bowl ad coverage by the news media (e.g., by CNN, which reported on Honda’s leaking its Ferris Beueller-themed ad).
Of course, what viewers do next after a recommendation is of key importance to advertisers. Decipher found that within three days of viewing social video—
- 49% purchased the advertised product
- 38% spoke to someone in person about the video
- 9% searched for the brand
- 4% searched for products of that type
If this sounds easy, recall that these results are based on videos that the viewers enjoyed, and which were recommended to the viewer. The source of brand awareness and purchasing influence is not on YouTube, rather, it rests where it always has: in an ad agency's creative department.
Facebook Ads: NYT Questions “Active Visitor” Figures
The New York Times read between the lines of Facebook’s IPO prospectus. As chief mergers and acquisitions reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin figures like 845 million monthly active users “should have an asterisk next to them.” Facebook counts among those 845 million monthly active users, and daily active users of 483 million, anyone who visits it’s Web or mobile site; but also, anyone who uses a Facebook “Like” or “Recommend” button in third-party sites, to share activity with Facebook friends.
How significant is that? Practically all significant online properties, including CNN.com, MSNBC.com, TheSmokingGun.com (pictured below) and ESPN.GO.com, include a “Like” or “Recommend” button alongside stories. So an “active user” may never leave the ESPN or CNN sites; theoretically, an active user may never visit Facebook, or see its featured ads.
Also counted among those active users: those click on the Facebook logo within a “Follow Us” bar, which typically includes an RSS feed logo, Twitter, Digg and email logos, among others.
The numbers climb. If the third-party site uses a Facebook ID for log-in (HuffingtonPost.com is one such site, and the feature is called “Facebook Connect”), and the user leaves a comment on a story in that site, he or she is counted as actively using Facebook. So, opined the CEO for equity research of Fusion IQ, those visitors “cannot be marketed to, they do not see advertising,” they simply used the extensive Facebook infrastructure.
However optimistic the unique-visitor figures, they are considerable anyway; and Facebook ads offer considerable cost-per-click savings of up to 45%, by some estimates. And a publicly-traded Facebook, with plans to become a news outlet as well, will necessarily become meticulously transparent in its traffic figures.
Upfront Digital: Sundance on YouTube | Jeep Crashes Funeral | H&M’s Facebook Furor
- Twitter will launch its enhanced brand ads on February 1, according to Business Insider. The Facebook-like functionality has been available to a few select brands, including Coca-Cola, but now will be generally available—at a pricetag of $25,000.
- ESPN and Jeep caught heat from Digiday, which named the network and automaker in its Bad Ad of the Week.”ESPN covered the memorial service of former Penn State head football Joe Paterno. A rich-media ad for Jeep had a Jeep Wrangler “crash through” the computer screen, as well as Paterno’s casket, which sat dead center.
- The Sundance Film Festival and YouTube have cut a deal to rent out Sundance titles, reports Streaming Media. Most Sundance titles will rent for $2.99 to $3.99 for a 48-hour rental--$1 or more cheaper than from Comcast. The Sundance Film Festival wrapped over the weekend.
- Consumer-goods maker Procter & Gamble will “throw caution to the digital wind,” reports AdExchanger. Chairman and CEO Bob McDonald in an earnings conference call said the company would eliminate 1,600 non-manufacturing jobs, and invest heavily in its digital marketing. "In the digital space, with things like Facebook and Google and others, we find that return on investment of the advertising when properly designed, when the big idea is there, can be much more efficient."
- Angry consumers used Facebook to storm the gates of clothing retailer H&M last week. They accused the company of lifting a designer’s ad idea, reports Adweek. The company has begun marketing goods with the simple tagline “You look nice today,” with a red heart shape. Atlanta artist Tori LaConsay created the tagline—complete with red heart—for a sign in her neighborhood, in 2008. She was unpaid for the sign. Supporters have since deluged H&M’s Facebook site with hate messages. H&M at first attempted to dismiss the similarities as a “coincidence,” but is now seeking a resolution with LaConsay.
Nielsen’s Top Online Video Destinations for December: Rich Ad Opportunities
Nielsen has released its tally of unique U.S. video viewers for December 2012. All told, 164.3 million viewers streamed more than 22 billion videos, and spend more than 5 hours each watching online video.
YouTube as ahead at more than 131 million unique viewers; but, Nielsen offered no insights as to how many viewers watched ad-sponsored content. Second-place VEVO, with 39.7 million unique viewers, is entirely ad supported.
A fairly untapped ad outlet is the CollegeHumor Network clocked 19,261 unique users. CollegeHumor is one of four CH Media properties, and touts itself as “The best way to reach the male 18-49 demographic.” Its strongest advertiser in January is Comedy Central, with tower ads for its Tosh 2.0 series.
Advertising to Millennials? Do It Digitally and Keep It Short, Says Study
“The 79 million Millennials in the U.S. have an estimated purchasing power of $170 billion dollars per year," said comScore Vice President Bert Miklosi. "Their comfort-level with the Internet and technology in general makes the digital medium an ideal platform for reaching these individuals.”
The digital market research firm has released its report Next-Generation Strategies for Advertising to Millennials. The report highlights results from the company’s study that identifies unique characteristics of the “Millennial generation” (persons born between 1981 and 2000, thus, 12-31 years of age). comScore examined Millennials’ responses to different types of advertising, including TV and digital, compared to older generations, and how marketers can most effectively target this demographic segment.
The medium is ideal, but the Millenial is generally more difficult to persuade via advertising than their older counterparts. This said Miklosi underscores “the importance of creative and messaging optimization in driving worthwhile returns from an investment in advertising to this segment.” Also true, to quote the report, “It is harder for advertising to achieve breakthrough and catch the attention of Millennials, who are notorious for multitasking and short attention spans.” In fact, their immediate recall is the lowest of any age group—at 43%, 9% lower than that of seniors. Still, their delayed recall was strongest among age groups, at 24%.
Courtesy comScore, Inc.
Other key findings:
- The defining characteristics of Millennials include their comfort-level with new technologies and cultural diversity, as well as being accustomed to on-demand access to entertainment, continual stimulation and extreme multitasking.
- Millennials tend to be less interested and more difficult to connect with, capture attention, impress, convince and entertain. Millennials also appear to be more price-sensitive, perhaps due to lower disposable incomes.
- Digital advertising performs better in relative terms among Millennials than does television advertising.
- Across generations including Millennials, the presence of key creative elements in advertising, coined by comScore as the Validated Drivers, were shown to relate strongly to successful advertising.
- Millennials are highly engaged with the content that they choose to view, within both television and digital environments. Engagement has been shown to amplify the effectiveness of advertising, so when targeting Millennials, it is important to utilize engaging content to help boost returns from investments in advertising.
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.
Research: Facebook Ads Offer 45% Cost-Per-Click Savings
Facebook enables advertisers to make “considerable savings” in online marketing, found TBG Digital (TBG) in its latest Global Facebook Advertising Report.
As a Facebook advertising firm, TBG is certainly vested in proving great results. But, it had its methodology and findings vetted by the UK’s University of Cambridge, and drew data from its own heavyweight client base, including JetBlue, CapitalOne, Dell and Heineken.
The report, which was based on 326 billion impressions in 205 countries, and from 256 TBG clients. It reveals these findings:
- Strong incentives for advertisers to stay within Facebook, with potential 45% reduction in cost-per-clicks (CPCs)
- Stabilizing Facebook growth in US created an increase in advertising costs
- Facebook earned 23% more in ad rates since Q1 2011
- Ad performance improved by 18% in 2011
- The top five Sectors comprised almost 70% of total impressions
- The financial sector accounted for more than 60% of impressions in offsite campaigns
- CPCs increased from Thanksgiving to Saturday December 17
TBG discovered reductions in CPCs for advertisers that run campaigns to recruit fans or that require users to install applications. Savings reached 45%, in contrast with those that direct traffic away from Facebook. That is a strong incentive for companies to build presence within Facebook. For example, financial services firms often direct users back to their own websites to complete a quotation or sign up, but tailored applications that perform the same functions within Facebook drives down advertising costs.
Cost per Thousand Impressions (CPM) rates, the other core cost comparator which indicates how much Facebook earns every time an advert is shown to a user, increased by 8% on average over Q4, for a total increase of 23% in 2011.
Click-Through Rates (CTRs) also increased by 18% during for the entire year2011. This, believes TBG, indicates that ad output is resonating with users more, and indicates a greater that Facebook advertisers have a better understanding and use of targeting methods like time of day, demographics and user interests.
TBG assessed 18 “bellwether industry sectors” for volume and effectiveness. The top five sectors, ranked by volume, were finance; retail; food and drink; games; and entertainment, which accounted for nearly 70% of total impressions on Facebook. TBG Digital CEO Simon Mansell commented that “Users are increasingly discerning about what they view on social media networks, so it is in all advertisers’ interests to ensure that their content resonates with their target audiences and fits with their usage habits. Food and drink recorded the highest CTRs, largely due to successful fanning campaigns in that sector.
Media Measurement an Illusion, Says Ad Research Foundation CEO
“What does it mean that Coke has 36 million Facebook followers?” blogged Advertising Research Foundation CEO Bob Barocci on the AdAge site. Barocci described the oft-heard complaint that digital metrics are hard to quantify; but he called the simpler days of ad metrics a myth. Twenty years ago, “a brand looked bigger to the consumer if you were in two media.” A company then might enjoy a good score on 24-hour aided recall, but even then, major advertisers were reluctant to trace market share gains to that recall. “No cause and effect then…as now.”
Now the CMO is tasked with dividing ad spend among far more numerous platforms, and dealing with their complexities. The global research director of Kraft Foods described the dilemma to brand advertisers as this: which five of 100 or more touch points that influence consumers should he buy? Mobile phones promise more exposures, but are also driving discounting; should a CMO thus avoid the burgeoning platform? In social media, is recall more or less valuable than likability? “With all the data we have these days, I think we should be finding answers to some of these questions,” wrote Barocci, “But we're not.”
Barocci credits Google with putting significant resources toward analytics, with initiatives like its Advertising Format Impact project to measure the impact of multiple video formats on multiple platforms. Barocci described the Foundation’s multisponsor Arrowhead Project, with a mission to answer the question “What ideas do people get from digital/social media when making a purchase?” The project focuses upon three test categories which vary in length of the consumer purchase process; consumer packaged goods, which are short-term; smart phones, being mid-term; and automobiles, a long-term decision. ARF will present its findings at its March Re:think conference.
Facebook: Our Ads are “Featured,” Not Sponsored
In a last-minute attempt at rebranding, Facebook has redubbed the advertisements that appear in its news feeds as “Featured,” not “Sponsored.” Facebook began placing the ads in the newsfeeds (which it labels a “Ticker”) on January 10. The typical ad calls for some interaction: a Slimfast ad, with Slimfast bottles pictured, asks the visitor to answer the poll question, “Do you like going to the gym?” with “Yes, love it,” “It’s OK,” or “Rather walk on hot coals.” The ads are also used for market research. A poll asks “The next time you purchase a computer, which brand of processor would you prefer?” with “AMD Only,” “Intel Only,” and combinations of the brands. Which company placed the ad/poll is impossible to tell.
As AdAge describes it, "featured" units are an incarnation of the earlier "sponsored stories" ad units that first appeared in January 2011. They appear on the right margin of a Facebook page to alert the visitor that a friend has "liked" or otherwise engaged with a brand. As a Facebook spokesperson told TechCrunch “We are using the term ‘featured’ because we want to make it clear to people that they’re seeing content from a Page or person they have chosen to connect to…we want to make it clear that marketers can only pay for stories to be featured in your News Feed if you have explicitly liked the Page,” or if a friend has.
Blogger Alicia Eler of ReadWriteWeb summed up the likely reaction: “Facebook users will certainly be pissed off about this change. But freemium comes with a price: Somewhat veiled adage for a user's Internet-addicted eyeballs.”
Research: Social Media No Substitute for Offline Ads
Offline channels still hold the reins in brand and product awareness, reports eMarketer, despite the talk of “viral marketing” and social media “influencers. eMarketer was quoting market research by AYTM, which found that 57.8% of US Facebook users had not any brand in a status updates as of October 2011. Similarly, 61.3% of Twitter users had never “tweeted” about a brand. Of those consumers who claimed to hear frequently about new brands, only 6.5% did so frequently, and 26% reported they never heard of new brands through social media.
Where they did hear about new brands, products and services: TV, radio, and offline print outlets. Sixteen percent did so “most frequently,” 34.9% did so often, 31.8% sometimes, 13% rarely, 4.2% never.