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In News

Social CRM: Top Three Business Benefits

June 22, 2018 No Comments

These days, it seems like an increasing number of people are using social media for one reason or another. Is your business taking the best advantage of social media to promote company products and services? No? Then, it’s time to take the best advantage of social media with the help of social customer relationship management tool.

Use social CRM tools for a better customer engagement, monitor and track the conversations of your customers’ and clients on social media platforms in real-time, respond quickly to customer complaints and queries, identify industry trends through real-time social monitoring, actively analyse the social media data to make well informed business decisions, as well as enhance your brand image.

Social CRM software is helpful for your business to provide personalized customer service in real-time as well as to improve customer loyalty. Moreover, the social CRM system fosters in developing strong customer relationships by enabling your business to track the right customer conversations in real-time on various social media platforms, as well as analyse what type of content your competitors are sharing on their social networking platforms.

Additionally, social media platforms offer several advantages to businesses of all sizes. Here are the top three business benefits of social CRM:

1. Builds Profitable Customer Relationships

Do you want your business to build a strong brand presence on social media? Do you want to reap maximum profits as well as high return on investments through social channels? Social CRM tool will help you reach all your business goals. It will enable you to reach a higher number of potential customers’ as well as to reap the maximum profits through effective tracking of clients, customers’, as well as your competitors’ social influences. By analysing the customers’ tastes and interest, the marketing team can produce relevant and engaging content, which can surely impress your customers’ and followers. Thus, the producing of highly impressive marketing content can enable your audience to instantly like your content, share it across their friends and family members on various social media channels, as well as the ability to foster healthy and profitable customer relationships.

2. Identify the Right Platforms

Obviously, it takes a lot of time and dedication to produce high-quality, engaging, and original content. However, if the produced content doesn’t reach the right social media channels; then all the hard work you put in generating the relevant content will go vanish. You can avoid this if you can invest your money in the right social CRM solution. It helps in identifying the right social media networking channel as per your business needs and requirements.

An appropriate social CRM tool will tell your company – which social channels are correct for your brand, where you can find the targeted audience, as well as at what time your potential audience groups are active on the social networking channels. All this information will help your business to produce the content on the right social channels and at the right time, which can aid in gaining more momentum on the various social platforms.

3. Boosts Your Business SEO Activities

Earlier, it was difficult for businesses to create the customer-centric content. However, with the help of social CRM software, businesses can easily analyse the digital footprints of customers’ as well as identify the targeted and potential audience groups. Using the solutions of social CRM software, businesses can have a comprehensive understanding of what their targeted audience is searching on social networking channels, their likes, and dislikes, as well as what type of content they are liking and sharing by analysing the type of keywords your customers’ are using to search for content on the various social platforms.

Using this information, businesses can create targeted, shareable, and engaging content that your followers and customers’ would find interesting. While generating the content, you can even add the specified keywords used by your audience so that they can easily find your business content in their relevant searches. If your generated content is truly engaging and valuable, then your customers’ will surely like and share the content across various social media channels, which can ultimately boost your website SEO. Moreover, if your content has a higher number of shares, likes, and comments it will send a positive signal to the Google that your content is highly impressive and original, which can enable your website to be top-ranked on the Google search engine results page.

So, what are you waiting for? Empower your business today with the right social CRM technology to grasp hold of the wonderful business opportunities present in the market today!

By Emma James

Sourced from Digital Doughnut

In News

Native Video study on open web highlights consumer shift

June 20, 2018 No Comments

By Dale Lovell

he power of video advertising may be well documented, but as consumer behaviour changes amid familiarity with video browsing on mobile devices, marketers who think the rules of engagement for digital video have already been written – and that there is a one size fits all approach – should think again.

The rise and effectiveness of native video on social media has been well researched to date. Engagement rates, reach, frequency and return on investment studies all show positive associations. But until now, there have been few studies showing the rise and performance of native video formats across the open web, specifically on premium publisher environments, where in-feed native video formats are becoming increasingly common.

We recently sought to fill that void through an analysis of more than 30 million in-feed video views run across our platform from January to April 2018. While we expected to be able to report findings on native video on the open web that were in line with the positive findings in social media, we didn’t expect that our findings would challenge the very notion of ‘what works’ in native video. But that’s precisely what happened.

Conventional wisdom in the video space, based on social data, has indicated that less is more when it comes to native video advertising, with many espousing that anything longer than 6 seconds in native video is simply too long. However, our findings would seem to contradict the perceived wisdom that mobile users have limited attention spans and are only interested in short video content.

According to our findings, smartphone users are more likely to spend time engaging with long-form video ads compared to 6-second ads when executed correctly. In fact, 72% of mobile users who have watched 6 seconds will continue to watch and engage with video up to 22 seconds. When native video reaches 15 to 22 seconds in length across premium publisher environments, mobile and tablet users that have watched this far are significantly more engaged than desktop users.

The evolution of our ‘mobile minds’

Perhaps it shouldn’t be all that surprising that people’s attention spans for native video seem to be growing longer. While the findings in our report represent the first of their kind in native video, there have been several studies undertaken around the attention of mobile phone users when it comes to reading. Over time, conclusions have shifted.

One study in 2010 found that reading on a mobile device was impaired when content was presented on a mobile-size screen versus a larger computer screen. But a similar study, undertaken six years later in 2016, showed different results. This study, conducted by the Nielsen Norman Group, concluded that there were no practical differences in the comprehension scores of participants, whether they were reading on a mobile device or a computer. In fact, the study found comprehension on mobile was about 3% higher than on a computer for content that was just over 400 words in length, and at an easier level to read.

Why the difference in results? It’s very possible that, over the period between 2010 and 2016 — the exact period during which smartphones became ubiquitous — we’ve all become more accustomed to reading on smaller screens. It’s reasonable to assume that the challenges the average person had reading on a small screen back in 2010 no longer apply now that people have adjusted to life on those smaller screens.

In a similar manner, it would appear that user behavior is changing around video consumption on mobile devices as well.

Well-held assumptions that less-is-more for video length and the broader worries about a crisis in user attention spans very well may prove to have been misplaced.

Creating compelling video content

As attention spans for native video lengthen, marketers would do well to reassess their best practices as it relates to creating content for mobile consumption. In particular, native video creators should think carefully about improving video performance during the key drop-off periods on a specific device.

For videos that will be consumed on mobile or tablet, videos should be edited to pack a punch in the first 6 seconds, in order to draw in users. The latest data suggests that the optimal length for native video content on mobile and tablet should be between 15 and 22 seconds. After 22 seconds, user interest does wane. If videos have to be longer, marketers should ensure that there are more-exciting sequences and enticing calls to action around 22 seconds, in order to maintain viewer interest up to 30 seconds.

If nothing else, these recent findings demonstrate that marketers must remain fluid in their understanding of how users engage with content on their devices. Behaviour is shifting, and yesterday’s best practices won’t necessarily apply tomorrow.

By Dale Lovell

Dale Lovell is co-founder of Adyoulike

Sourced from THE DRUM

In News

Sir John Hegarty: Creativity is receding from the world of marketing and the obsession with data is to blame

June 19, 2018 No Comments

By Sarah Vizard

Brands have become risk-averse and ads are boring, says advertising guru Sir John Hegarty. If the industry wants to survive it has got to lose its obsession with data and go back to its roots.

I’ve barely sat down in the office of Sir John Hegarty’s latest venture, startup incubator The Garage, before he is bemoaning everything that is wrong in the ad industry today. Across the table, he complains how creativity is “receding from the world of marketing” as it becomes data-driven, how marketing has forgotten to “engage with people’s imagination and soul” and how digital tech “hasn’t created the wealth it promised to”.

This, he argues, is the reason for lacklustre economic growth. Innovation, creativity and imagination have been sidelined in favour of data, cost-cutting and simply doing what the research says. That isn’t to say he doesn’t believe in data, just that it isn’t the “only thing”.

“Data is great at giving you information, giving you knowledge; but it doesn’t give you understanding and that is its great failing,” he explains.

“What we need is greater creativity and what we’re doing today is reducing the power of creativity. Marketing, I believe, is suffering because of that; you’re not getting imaginative ideas that capture people’s imagination.”

Hegarty knows a thing or two about creativity. He was a founding shareholder in Saatchi & Saatchi and co-founded TBWA London in 1973 before going on to start the agency that would bear his name, Bartle Bogle Hegarty (BBH), in 1982.

We presented this work and the main guy at Golden Wonder said ‘that’s the finest work I’ve seen’. JWT ended up winning the business. It’s a fucking lottery.

Sir John Hegarty

His work on Levi’s, Volkswagen and Audi is the stuff of legend, still regularly touted as some of the best and most creative advertising ever made. Yet ask him what he thinks are the best campaigns of recent years and he’s hard pushed. In fact, he says he can’t think of any that “absolutely stand out”, although he holds up Marmite, Netflix and Nike as examples of brands that are still doing “brilliant things”.

“I try not to look at advertising [anymore] because I think by and large it’s quite boring,” he says. “I’ve always thought great advertising elevates the status of [a brand] to such an extent that it becomes part of culture. That way you get greater fame, greater value, greater certainty and greater effectiveness.

“Marmite, it’s just a yeast spread, but do you ‘love it or hate it’? It’s become a part of culture.”

The focus on data, he suggests, is the root cause of the problem, making big brands risk averse and “boring”, too focused on saving money instead of generating growth. He uses the beer industry as an example, claiming companies such as Heineken created the opportunity for craft brewers because they lost their audience.

“I’ve watched very exciting companies become very boring because in the end they’ve got size and now they’re obsessed with their size and so they don’t think imaginatively,” he explains. “They put systems into the organisation that take creativity out because they don’t trust their own people, so instead they control them. By controlling them they reduce the power of creativity and consequently markets begin to suffer. Then they have to go out and buy companies that still think creatively, suck them in, and make them boring too.

Agencies must go ‘back to the future’

Despite Hegarty’s clear disdain for a data-driven philosophy, it seems unlikely the industry is about to shift focus. So what does Hegarty think agencies should do? His suggestion is quite radical: stop working with large organisations and only deal with those that want to think creatively.

“What we need is the great agencies to say, ‘we are only going to deal with people who want to think creatively’. To say, ‘we are driven by creativity because we think that’s the incredible tool for creating effectiveness’.

“[If I were starting an agency now] I would go back to the future. I would make it strategic and creative and I would insert media alongside it.”

Despite conducting hundreds of pitches throughout his career, he claims the process has “never worked” calling it “completely unscientific”.

Data is great at giving you information, giving you knowledge; but it doesn’t give you understanding and that is its great failing.

Sir John Hegarty

“You try to make it as scientific as you possibly can by having various criteria, but in the end, it’s faith. Do I believe these people, do I think they are people who can deliver success for me, do I think they’re committed to my business? The pitch process has always been a haphazard business, a bit of a nonsense,” he says.

To illustrate this he recalls pitching for the Golden Wonder account at TBWA. “The strategy was freshness and so we said the way you measure that with a crisp is the noise it makes, so noise is what we’re selling and we created a 48-sheet poster that had an empty packet of Golden Wonder and it said ‘Silence is Golden’. We presented this work and the main guy at Golden Wonder said ‘that’s the finest work I’ve seen’. JWT ended up winning the business. It’s a fucking lottery.”

The risk of digital landfill

With digital advertising eating up more and more of advertisers’ budgets, what does Hegarty make of its rise? While he welcomes digital as just “another opportunity to communicate” he has concerns about the business models and practices of the some of the digital players.

“[The big digital players] are unregulated, irresponsible, and we are just waking up that,” he says. “I view them as someone with unprecedented power that has managed to get away with using that power in an unregulated form. That’s going to have to stop, and it is now. We are beginning to see that with GDPR.”

But is it partly the ad industry’s fault digital media companies have been allowed to run riot? Hegarty has a theory.

“When you get these great tech advances and innovations, creative people stand back and say, ‘what the hell do I do with this?’. The tech becomes king and everyone bows down in the face of technology. But eventually technology runs out of innovation and then creative people come in,” he explains.

“Look at the Lumière brothers, who invented the moving camera; they gave up on it, they didn’t realise they had invented Hollywood.”

lightbulb innovation — Hegarty believes technology eventually runs out of innovation, which is when creative people take over.

He also questions the need for brands to be “always on”, describing it as an idea peddled by digital media firms to eat up marketers’ time and budgets.

“Who says [brands] have to be on all the time? It’s the digital companies telling you that. Wouldn’t it be better to be on three or four times a year and do something great each time. [Brands should] drive forward an overall idea that says ‘this is what we’re about’ but find different ways of articulating that throughout the year. Isn’t that the future, rather than a constant stream of digital landfill?”

What makes a great marketer

Hegarty has worked with a number of great marketers in his time, but asked to name one and the first person who comes to mind is Volkswagen’s John Meszaros. What made him great, explains Hegarty, is that he “went with his gut”.

“Whenever you showed him a piece of work he said to himself, ‘do I like it, do I think it’s great?’. He bought things on that basis and therefore he was the man responsible for that great campaign, ‘If only everything in life was as reliable as a Volkswagen’. He did Vorsprung Durch Technik [for Audi with BBH] even though the research said don’t do it. He felt you had to be daring, you had to be different.”

Returning to his theme of data, Hegarty proclaims it is this feeling that marketing risks losing. Every creative, he believes, should love their work and not worry so much about what the research says.

“We lack today people who love what it is that they do. They are very professional, they’re well trained, they read data, but they don’t love it.

“Today the reliance on data is destroying love and therefore [advertising] is losing its audience. And if we lose it we won’t have the economic growth we want. Why is it we’ve not got economic growth? We can’t just blame the financial world.”

Getting that creativity back is the key to ensuring the future of the ad industry, and that it is seen as a driver of company profits and economic growth, not just a nice to have.

“Creativity is the future. When we got a troubled brand we would go back to its roots – what made it, why was this brand so successful – and we tried to capture that again. It’s the same with advertising, when it was great what was it doing? We have to go back to that.”

Feature Image Credit: Illustration by Peter Strain

By Sarah Vizard

Sourced from Marketing Week

In News

Google to strengthen AdWords intelligence with Feefo partnership

June 14, 2018 No Comments

By John McCarthy

Google has partnered with online reviews company Feefo to bolster its AdWords network with the incomer’s review-based advertising expertise.

Feefo, which works with the likes of Next, Vauxhall, Expedia and Thomas Cook, will lean on its sentiment analysis tech to discover relevant advertising keywords from the thousands of brand reviews it processes. These can then be input into digital ads where it boasts ‘up to a three or four-fold increase in click-through-rates (CTR)’ against conventional means.

Adrian Blockus, head of channel sales for the UK and Ireland at Google, explained: “We’re pleased to have Feefo on board as a Google partner. Feefo has the product knowledge, advanced technology and insight needed, to create and optimise Google AdWords campaigns for their customers.”

The keywords drawn out by Feefo can also be used to spruce up brand copy and landing pages to reflect the language and sentiment used by consumers in their reviews.

Matt West, chief revenue officer of Feefo, added: “We use our unique insights to lend a powerfully persuasive new voice to adverts.

“We are focused on using the power of our smart innovative technology to extract the maximum possible value from consumer feedback on behalf of our clients, and remain committed to helping consumers make confident, informed decisions based on real reviews they can trust.”

Feature Image Credit: Google AdWords bolstered by Feefo

By John McCarthy

Sourced from THEDRUM

In News

How to maintain a healthy B2B marketing budget

June 8, 2018 No Comments

By Ruth Connor

Back in the land of B2C marketing, I could build a water-tight business case for TV using insight from Think Box, present a strong argument for redeveloping my e-commerce process by pointing to indisputable benchmarking data, and get under the skin of my target customers using a bucket-load of comms planning tools.

Best of all, I could prove the impact of my efforts to senior management.

“Just look at those numbers! No, seriously. Look. At. Those. Numbers.”

Before long I was up for a fresh challenge, so I jumped ship and embraced the B2B world.

Things were, shall we say, different.

My tried and tested methods didn’t land in the same way.

And it got worse.

The finance director said the B2B marketing budget was discretionary.

And if that wasn’t enough, the sales team got all the credit for the revenue generated.

10 years down the line and again things are different – only this time in a good way. I still use insight and benchmarking to inform my marketing planning where I can – but I’ve learned other ways to convince the board of the importance of investing in B2B.

Fingers crossed you never hear the dreaded words: “The B2B budget is discretionary.”

But if you do, these seven tips will help you present the case that a healthy B2B budget is a must-have, not a nice-to-have.

Get closer to your business

Marketing shouldn’t be a silo. Get to know the various levers in your business – the things that influence the outcomes your business is trying to achieve.

For example, the marketing budget is an important lever as it influences how many leads are generated. The pricing of your product and the effectiveness of your sales team will influence conversions. While your customer relationship management will impact how long customers stay with you and how much they spend.

Understanding these levers will help shape your marketing strategy – and improve its effectiveness.

Know the magic number to ask for

It’s hard knowing what a realistic B2B marketing budget looks like, so it’s useful having some credible research in your back pocket. The CMO Survey Highlights and Insights Report 2017 from Deloitte, Duke University and the American Marketing Association found organisations spend, on average, 7.9% of their revenue on marketing and 11% of their total company budget. While according to the Gartner CMO Spend Survey 2017-2018, the number’s higher – organisations dedicate 11.3% of their overall revenue to marketing.

Understand buyer-behaviour trends – and make sure your spend mirrors them

Then you can justify exactly how you plan to spend your budget. Online is making its presence felt across every phase of the B2B buying journey – according to a study by Earnest and Imperial College London, it accounts for 49% and 58% respectively of the ‘research’ and ‘purchase’ stages.

No surprise, then, that we’re seeing an increase in digital marketing spend.

Check what you’re doing matters to people other than you

Do your metrics turn the heads of people outside of marketing? That stuff you’re tracking and reporting on – is it in sync with broader business goals and key performance indicators? Truth is, your board probably doesn’t care about the same things you do. So make sure your KPIs demonstrate your marketing is having an impact on the stuff they do care about.

Incorporate alternative measurement models

It may seem counter-intuitive, but it’s not all about directly attributing sales to your marketing activity. Assists matter too. If your content marketing strategy aligns with your customer journey, you can use your marketing automation platform to see how the buyer engaged with it in the lead-up to the deal.

Be proud of your results – you worked hard for them

Don’t hide your numbers away. Make a visually striking dashboard or scorecard that makes it really easy for your board to understand what you’ve achieved. And don’t forget to highlight where your marketing successes align with the wider business goals.

Use the lingo being used right now

More and more we’re seeing the marketing department being relabelled the ‘growth department’. Who knows, maybe next year we’ll be relabelled as a chief growth officer. Or head of growth.

But that’s OK, because marketers are good at growth. We grow brand engagement. We grow customer bases. We grow revenue.

So choose your words wisely because sometimes it pays to use the latest buzz word.

By Ruth Connor

Ruth Connor is head of marketing at Earnest

Sourced from THEDRUM

In News

Only 1% of Brits say they’re more likely to use brands sponsoring the World Cup

May 24, 2018 No Comments

By John McCarthy

Oath has studied the viewing habits of World Cup fans to deliver ad insight to its clients, and in doing so, it learned about brand recognition levels in the UK – and a staggeringly low purchase intent.

In February, 7,294 respondents from UK, France, Brazil, Denmark, Germany, Sweden, Italy and Spain gave their views on sponsors. For Coca-Cola retention levels were at 45%, at McDonalds it was 41%, Adidas (33%), Visa (31%) and Budweiser (27%).

Brazilians were found to be the most passionate fans, but they were also the most brand-friendly. 35% said they would be much more interested in using a brand that sponsors the World Cup tournament, in the UK, this figure slips to just 1%

Furthermore, one in four (26%) people in the UK said they would not support any other team in the football tournament should their team leave the contest. Stepping aside from the data, Scots have a habit of supporting any team playing England. It was the subject of a Paddy Power ad at Euro 2016.

The study also uncapped consumption habits. Three in four (75%) viewers will be watching at home on TV, as opposed to just 1% on mobile, However, nearly one in four (23%) will leverage smartphones as part of a multi-screen experience.

On the features fans expect, 33% wanted on-demand replays, 18% were keen on 360° virtual reality stadium tours, and 15% wanted to see tabletop AR football.

Stuart Flint, vice president EMEA at Oath, said: “Brands only have a small window where they can grab consumers’ attention while games are on, so they need to look beyond matches and engage fans seeking out supplementary information including stats, replays and interactive experiences.

“While some British fans will switch off from TV once their team is out of the running, they’re still likely to be keeping tabs on contextually relevant content throughout the competition.”

37% in the UK claimed they won’t be engaged in World Cup tournament until the first game kicks off.

By John McCarthy

Sourced from THEDRUM

In News

How does Google earn money? | As simple as that.

May 11, 2018 No Comments

By George Fotiadis

We use Google products every day, may that be Google Maps, YouTube, Gmail, Android or simply Google Search. We have come to a point where it is actually really hard not to use at least one of these services even if we try and companies built to prove the opposite have failed miserably (RIP Cyanogen).

First question: where does the money come from?

But most of us have never actually paid for these services. How is this possible? Is it so easy for Google to create all of these things that they just give them for free? Of course not. It’s one of those cases that:

If you’re not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you are the product. — Andrew Lewis

So it’s not that you are not paying, it’s the way you’re paying. In Q4 2017 Google earned $31.91 billion, $27.27 of which are due to its ads business. That’s approximately 85.5% of all revenue. So the quick answer to our question is ads.

Next question: How?

Google’s ads business is divided into three main components: AdWords and AdSense, AdMob. AdWords is the software determining which ads will be presented in the Google webpage and AdSense publishes ads on other websites. For example if I own a cooking blog and I want to put some ads on it, I would just indicate the place where I want the ads to be and AdSense would do the rest. AdMob is the same as AdSense but for mobile applications.

-Ok that’s nice but I still don’t understand what’s my role into all of this.

The keyword is personalised!

For simplicity we’ll examine AdWords which is also Google’s biggest stream of income. What the search engine does first (and updates daily) is a process called web-crawling which is nothing more than creating a map of the web and honestly, it’s relatively easy; it just takes a lot of computers! So when you’re searching for a cheap hotel in Zurich (spoiler alert there aren’t any) you don’t actually search the whole web, Google only shows you the content that has already indexed and thinks that it’s relevant to what you’re searching for.

-How do they know what’s relevant? And how do they select which results or ads to show higher than others?

Aha! That’s the hard part, the part where you contribute.

The algorithm that took over 5 years to develop

To predict what you are searching for they use a machine learning algorithm that analyses your input applying natural language processing to really “understand” what you mean. Of course this algorithm has to be trained and besides content collected from the websites themselves, your data is what it’s trained with. Same applies for the normal results ordering. A simple example is that when you search for something and instantly click on the second result it shows them that it might be more relevant to your search query and might need to show up higher in a future search.

Where it gets really juicy is when it comes to showing and sorting ads. See, it’s not like in the TV where the enterprises have to pay a huge amount for their ad to be shown to everyone even if the majority of whom might not be interested in what they are selling. What Google offers and what makes it stand out of the competition is the ability to show personalised ads only to those people who actually care. My grandma might see 10 ads about the cool new “revolutionary” iPhone and she’s still not going to buy it but if you show the same ad to someone who is in the market for a new phone then it’s obviously a lot more effective.

Bid it to win it!

To decide which ads to show higher than others, besides the degree of relativeness, an ad auction is performed every time you search for something. The auction procedure is based on the Vickrey auction and called generalised second-price auction. I won’t get into the specifics and the math behind this, I will only mention that it’s a single round auction, the highest bidder wins but pays the second highest bid and it’s proved that the dominant strategy in a Vickrey auction is to bid the true value of your product (compared with a normal auction which happens in multiple rounds and the bid is the smallest possible).

Let’s take an example for clarification. Assume that me, Bob and Alice are hotel owners and we want to put an ad on Google. Also assume that we all have the same ad quality (we’ll get into that in a bit). If the suggested bid by Google is $1 and that’s the price that Bob and Alice bid but I bid $2 then I win, my ad will be shown first but I will pay $1 because that’s the second highest bid.

-Ok but frankly it doesn’t seem so different from the TV. I mean you pay for your ad to be shown but you have no idea if the user will actually notice it.

That’s why Google charges per click, you pay nothing as long as nobody clicks on your ad. And that’s where ad quality comes in, a variable determined by the number of clicks; more clicks equals better quality. This value is pivotal to the order of ad appearance and usually Google demotes bids for poor quality ads.

But at the end of the day you might ask, do all these justify the amount of money Google earns? Let’s do some quick math. There are approximately 450.000 searches for “cheap hotels” per month in the US and the suggested bid is $3.8. If half of those searches end up with a click to your ad then that’s $855,000 per month. And that’s only for one ad. Quite profitable I would say.

Conclusion

So to sum up, Google’s main income comes from its ads business and that’s heavily relied to data collected from its users. AdWords places ads on Google’s webpage while AdSense and AdMob show ads in collaborating websites and mobile apps respectively. The charges applied are per click and to determine the order that the ads appear an auction is performed between advertisers and the ad quality is also taken into account. And that’s how Google earns money, as simple as that.

By George Fotiadis

I’m a Computer Science student at EPFL interested in various topics like machine learning, applied data analysis and artificial intelligence to name a few. To learn more about me you can visit my personal website at gfotiadis.com.

If you liked this post you can follow me on Medium to get more stuff like this and if you REALLY liked it you can share it and #spreadItLikeMalware.

Sourced from Hackernoon

In News

Coca-Cola is breaking the agency model to experiment with crowd-sourced creative briefs

April 27, 2018 No Comments

By Katie Deighton

Coca-Cola’s latest experiment in opening short design briefs to the entire world illustrates its plans to no longer be seen as “a traditional advertiser” by appointing consumers – not agencies – as its co-creators.

The drinks giant’s head of digital, David Godsman, admitted at the Adobe Summit opening keynote that the digitally connected world is “somewhat unknown” to the brand. Nevertheless, 12 months ago it embarked on a five-year digital transformation programme, underscored by four key areas: operations, business, culture and experiences.

Surprisingly, Coca-Cola has filed its marketing and advertising operations into the latter category. Not only is Godsman asking his “traditional brand marketers to become experience makers”, but he’s earmarked the fans of Coca-Cola as vital to its content creation strategy.

David Godsman, chief digital officer, Coca-Cola

“Digital allows us to create unifying experiences which – regardless of language or place in the world – helps to bring them together,” he said. “Digital enables them to participate actively with us and co-create the experiences we bring to market

“We don’t see a world where we will continue as a traditional advertiser in that sense.”

James Sommerville, Coca-Cola’s vice president of global design, introduced one of the first forays into this strategy of consumers-as-creators. Coke x Adobe x You, which quietly launched last October on social media, comprised a succinct brief open to the entire internet, which read: ‘Create a work of art celebrating Coca-Cola, sport, movement, strength, and unity using Adobe Creative Cloud tools’.

“We thought: ‘What would happen if you just gave the world’s designers three or four simple tools and a short brief – so short that you could tweet it?’,” explained Sommerville.

The brief for Coke x Adobe x You

So far, the project has thrown up around 1,500 submissions, from trippy, fun animations to meticulous hand-drawn illustrations. All the designers were commissioned to feature the red Coca-Cola circle, while Adobe and Coca-Cola kept the Tokyo Olympics 2020 under wraps.

“If you scan these pages you’ll see the enthusiasm to work on our products and our brand,” said Sommerville, adding that the project “really is the start of our journey”.

The brand is arguably in need of a revived creative strategy. Diet Coke’s latest offerings have failed to capture the mass imagination that 1995’s ‘Diet Coke Break’ managed to, for instance, while ‘Because I Can’ was pretty much panned creatively.

It’s unlikely that Coca-Cola will eschew working with creative agencies for consumer creations altogether. Sommerville stressed that “we love our agencies partners, we need our agency partners”, but he also loves to “discover the hidden gems”. By that he means freelance artists such as Noma Bar, the graphic designers going viral, or “some guy working in Starbucks right now on a laptop”.

Noma Bar for Coca-Cola

But when conglomerate does come looking for agencies in the future, it may start knocking on other doors. Sommerville’s design lab is currently experimenting with prototypes such as a fountain that dispenses mobile data in lieu of soft drinks – the kind of project that will certainly require the expertise of creative technologists, but perhaps not those of traditional creatives.

“I really want to invite the creative community to reimagine the whole experience,” said the Atlanta-based, Huddersfield-born designer. “Everyone in this room, everyone on this planet, has the right to work with Coca-Cola.”

How does he plan on keeping those divergent, global ideas tied to a common brand idea? By looking back on the vast history of Coca-Cola.

“We have a little phrase called Kiss the Past Hello,” he explained. “A lot of people talk about failing fast – for us this is the Coca-Cola way of saying a very similar thing. Our past is so important to us. It educates us. The good, the bad, what worked, what didn’t.

“Those stories are the same, but the context has changed. We are about technology, we are about transformation and we are about talent. But ultimately for us the experience starts at the product – it’s the texture, it’s the touch of the glass, it’s the temperature.”

By Katie Deighton

Sourced from THEDRUM

In News

Most programmatic advertisers would pay more for better measurement

April 25, 2018 No Comments

By John Glenday

An impressive 90% of marketers would be willing to lay down ‘slightly or ‘significantly’ more investment in programmatic advertising if they could be guaranteed better measurement statistics, according to a new study conducted by Infectious Media.

The difficulties inherent to the measurement problem were brought into sharp relief by the fact that 66% of respondents reported that the issue was either ‘extremely’ or ‘very’ challenging with most advertisers still reliant on clicks to verify the success of their campaigns.

This has fueled demands for a root and branch reform of measurement with 53% all advertisers quizzed now actively seeking alternative solutions.

Martin Kelly, Infectious Media chief executive and co-founder, commented: “It’s clear from our study that advertisers are waking up to the fact that the measurement model most have relied on for their programmatic campaigns is broken and digital ad spend is being held back as a result.

“Advertisers are looking to agencies to show greater leadership on how the system can be improved. Unfortunately, most have been content with the easy option of spending advertisers’ money on cheap inventory that meets a given target on clicks, regardless of the risk of fraud or the limited ROI this delivers.”

The issue of data accountability has been brought to the fore in recent months with the ISBAand IPA both seeking to galvanise advertisers into action. One potential solution is the adoption of cross-media measurement with 90% of publishers, brands and agencies in favour.

By John Glenday

Sourced from THEDRUM

In News

Crash Course In SEO

April 23, 2018 No Comments

Sourced from Scholarship Media

I’m a senior in college getting ready to graduate with a degree in English. I’m extremely lucky because I’ve already been offered a job as a junior copywriter at a digital ad agency in Boston. Truth be told, I landed the interview thanks to my uncle, who worked there for years. It’s very exciting.

That being said, I’m also nervous about it because most of my academic experience is in classical literature and creative fiction. In fact, almost all of my best writing is captured in short stories. My roommate, who interned at a PR agency, said that writing for the web is much different.

As I began to do research, I realized she was right. Worse is that writing for the web seems way more technical than I expected, especially what everyone calls “SEO.” It’s obviously too late to take classes for these things. I don’t necessarily know that I’ll be writing for the web but it makes sense to know, right? How should I get started?

You shouldn’t be too worried, since you’ve already been offered a job. The agency is likely to provide you with all the coaching you need, but that shouldn’t stop you from doing research. Taking the initiative will definitely pay off.

The first thing to do is understand the basic difference between copywriting and content writing. As the author explains, copywriting is at its core about selling an idea or an experience directly related to a branded product or service. Content writing is about informing, educating, and/or educating users. Both forms of writing strive to motivate users toward action and/or influence their thought process. Working at a digital ad agency is likely to present opportunities to develop both skills.

Something else to consider is the impact of collaborating with clients for the first time. Whereas client interaction isn’t always necessary with content writing, it’s a major aspect of successful copywriting. An author at Forbes shared five tips for managing client expectations, which are almost universally applicable. The key takeaway is to rely on effective communication. Fortunately, professional copywriting means you’ll have plenty of chances to refine your communication skills.

It’s a wise decision to learn more about search engine optimization (SEO) since it remains an extremely important investment for businesses. And despite what you might have assumed, it’s not all that difficult to understand. A contributing author at Clutch.co succinctly covers the basics in his beginner’s guide to SEO. Everything boils down to website structure and backlink profile. In other words, how a website is designed and organized is just as important as who reads it and decides to cite it as a reliable source. The two are intrinsically related.

You’d be hard-pressed to find a person or group that couldn’t benefit from positive SEO. Thanks to the digital age, businesses can now tap into global talent. For instance, a growing startup based in Singapore could leverage SEO in Brisbane to help them establish a digital presence for a recently launched production facility. It’s possible that you could experience something similar while working at your own digital agency.

The last thing to remember is not to underestimate the value of creative writing. While short stories might seem irrelevant, you’d be surprised how well the experience can translate. Your copywriting career will depend on sharing ideas and people crave a compelling narrative.

Sourced from Scholarship Media