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The Weather Can Make People More Open to (or Ignore) Your Mobile Phone Ad

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Certain weather conditions get better consumer responses to mobile marketing efforts.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

Many factors impact digital marketing and online advertising strategy. And now, a new Chinese study provides insight to a growing trend among firms and big brands … weather-based advertising. According to the study, certain weather conditions get better consumer responses to mobile marketing efforts, Also, the tone of your ad content can either help or hurt your marketing efforts, depending on the current local weather.

In the U.S. this is far more advanced than in Europe. Over the pond, many major brands – including Burberry, Ace Hardware, Taco Bell, Delta Airlines, and Farmers Insurance – are currently leveraging weather-based promotions. More than 200 others have partnered with the Weather Channel Company for targeted advertising and promotions.

The study, “Sunny, Rainy, and Cloudy with a Chance of Mobile Promotion Effectiveness,” was conducted by boffins at Beihang University, Temple University, Fudan University, and Zhejiang University. The authors examined field experiment datasets with mobile platforms (SMS and APP) on two digital products (video-streaming and e-book reading) on over six million mobile users in 344 cities across China. They simultaneously tracked weather conditions at both daily and hourly rates across these cities, with a focus on sunny, cloudy and rainy weather.

The authors found that overall, consumer response to mobile promotions was 1.2 times higher and occurred 73 percent faster in sunny weather than in cloudy weather. However, during raining conditions, that response was .9 times lower and 59 percent slower than during cloudy weather. Better-than-yesterday weather and better-than-forecast weather engender more purchase responses. A good deviation from the expected rainy or cloudy weather with relatively rare events of sunshine significantly boosts purchase responses to mobile promotions. In addition, compared with a neutral tone, the negative tone of prevention ad content hurts the initial promotion boost induced by sunshine, but improves the initial promotion drop induced by rainfall.

The authors also ruled out the possibility that the results could arise purely because of different mobile usage behaviours during different weather conditions. Their results also took into account the effects of individual locations, temperature, humidity, visibility, air pressure, dew point, wind, and time of day.

“Obviously, although brand managers cannot control the mother-nature weather, our findings are non-trivial because they suggest that brands can leverage the relevant, local weather information in mobile promotions. Firms should use the prevention-tone ad copy on rainy days and the simple neutral-tone ad copy on sunny days to attain greater bang for the buck,” said Chenxi Li of Beihang University.

“Given that consumers nowadays are inundated with and annoyed by irrelevant ads on their personal mobile devices and small screens, for marketers, these findings imply new opportunities of customer data analytics for more effective weather-based mobile targeting,” added Xueming Luo of Temple University.

The full study can be found here.

 

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Twitter chief Jack Dorsey: ‘We’re doubling down on adtech’

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By Jennifer Faull.

witter’s co-founder and chief executive Jack Dorsey said he plans to “double down” on adtech investment, saying the company has learned lessons from past mistakes that could see it pivot towards forging partnerships with third parties rather than acquiring or building its own offering.

“Advertising is our business and technology is how we manifest that,” said Dorsey at the Cannes Lions festival today (21 June.) “We’re definitely not out of the adtech investment phase. We’re doubling down. Especially with the hire of Bruce [Falck]. He’s taken right to it.”

After an exhaustive search, Bruce Falck joined the company earlier this year as general manager of revenue product, reporting directly to Dorsey (previously he was the chief executive of adtech outfit Turn). That hire was very much seen as a push by Twitter to bring a advertisers a more targeted and measurable offering as well as stand up against the Google and Facebook, which control in excess of 70% of the market.

Falck joined having spent much of his career working for adtech businesses. Prior to his tenure at Turn, he served as chief operating officer at video ad company BrightRoll and developed display advertising products at Google.

According to reports, not confirmed by Twitter, it has since been reconsidering several of its advertising products, including the direct response business, parts of the Promoted Tweets product, and TellApart, the digital ad platform it acquired in 2015.

Speaking on what has went wrong in the past on the advertising side, Dorsey said that it simply “didn’t always prioritize [it] in the right way.”

“We acquired companies or platforms and didn’t give them the options that they needed or tie it together with everything else that we’re doing,” he said. “And that doesn’t set up the acquisition for success. So, we’re [now] being really deliberate in what we look at and why.”

He went on to say that moving forward it would look to “buy versus build” its adtech offering, although he did add that it may also look to pursue this strategy by partnering with third-party tie-ups.

“We’ve tended to build a lot in the company. When we started it was before there was a public cloud that we could use and that set the DNA of the company. But we need to change that mindset. We don’t need to build everything, but we also don’t need to acquire everything. We can go through third parties and just really focus on what our strengths are,” he said.

Rebuilding from the inside out

At the beginning of the year, Twitter set about on a rebuild of the company to “get back to basics” and redefine itself around one core mission – being “the best and fastest place to see what’s happening in the world and what people are talking about.”

In a three-pronged attack, it set about re-establishing its execution of the product (“we needed a lot more discipline”), better marketing to “tell the story of what Twitter is” and focusing “our energy on our strengths” on the users already had, rather than trying to attract more.

During this reset phase, it was forced to layoff nearly a tenth of its global workforce – around 350 people – which Dorsey said was one of his darkest periods at the company.

“It was heartbreaking,” he explained. “I remember the night before, I hand wrote thank you cards to everyone we were letting go. I was up until 2am although, unfortunately, there was mishap with mailing and we couldn’t get them to everyone on time. But it was really the toughest thing. It’s still so painful to think about and I wasn’t expecting to do anything like that in my life.”

However, he said it’s now seeing results from the changes. Twitter surprised analysts with a strong performance for the first quarter for the year, seeing a spike in both user growth and earning.

“It now gives us breathing room to take bigger steps and do some non-linear things,” he hinted. “We want to bring a whole lot more creativity back into the organization and more playfulness with what we’re focused on. I’m really excited about this year.”

For more news from Cannes Lions follow the dedicated news stream on The Drum website

Feature Image: Jack Dorsey, Twitter co-founder and chief executive, was speaking at Cannes Lions 2017

By Jennifer Faull

Jen Faull is deputy news editor at The Drum with a remit to cover the latest developments in the retail and FMCG sectors. Based in London, she has interviewed major business figures including top marketers from Mondelez, Unilever, Tesco, and Lidl.

Sourced from THE DRUM

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P&G’s media chief doubles down on bid to better balance targeted ads with mass-reach strategies amid $2bn marketing cuts

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By Seb Joseph.

Procter & Gamble (P&G) is working to get the right blend of precision with mass-reach in its marketing after previously admitting that it had targeted excessively online.

It doesn’t have to be an “either or” debate, opined Gerry D’Angelo, the global media director for the world’s largest advertiser at the Festival of Media in Rome this week (9 May).

“The approach I’m trying to instill here is to make sure we’re using all the technology to drive scale and reach and then once that’s in place we can use that muscle memory to build personalisation,” he said.

D’Angleo’s talking about building a better use of data and technology at the business, where its marketers have a more robust idea on how to get the most reach but also the right precision. Rather than pull swathes of media money from online platforms, the noises coming from P&G suggest its revamped approach will revolve around how to better buy reach. Part of this thinking would have likely guided P&G’s decision to redistribute its programmatic data duties earlier this month when it cut ties with AudienceScience.

“It’s not that personalisation is a bad thing,” assured D’Angelo as if to ward off concerns that he and his peers will start pulling reams of budget from the likes of Facebook and Google.

“We just need to make sure we don’t follow it out the window and end up talking to a fraction of our category buyers. As long as you can accommodate both of those concepts [personalisation and mass reach] simultaneously, which I think you can, then I think its absolutely acceptable to be able to talk o people and also talk to them in a highly targeted way.”

It’s a change in tack from P&G, which was one of a throng of advertisers to pump money into targeted ads that consequently sacrificed reach. The company’s top marketer Marc Pritchard admitted as much last year when he said “we targeted too much and went too narrow” on Facebook. Four years ago, the business was adamant, as many of its peers were, that this was the way to go. In 2013, it moved a third of its advertising budget online and then a year later slashed its spending by 14% and refocused on what it said at the time was an “optimised media mix” with more digital, mobile, search and social investments.

But businesses like P&G own brands built on mass media, with the type of recognition that has always chaffed against the hyper-targeted sensibilities of environments like Facebook. And with tougher cost pressures on the company’s marketers as seen by its plan to cut a whopping $2bn in marketing costs over the next five years, it may have to go back to the marketing sensibilities that defined the industry in order to continue to grow.

Nowhere is this need clearer than in P&G’s four-point plan to overhaul its investments around viewability, third party measurement, agency relationships and online ad fraud.

If Pritchard is going to lead by example on his view about the death of craft in advertising currently then he needs to disentangle the media supply chain and consequently tackle mass personalisation.

“There is a reality that personalisation can go too far,” said Matthew Heath, chairman and chief strategy officer at Lida. “Firstly you need brand salience and attraction – you can be as personal as you like but I still need to trust you and be interested in you in the first place. Secondly brands often need a dimension of discovery and serendipity, that disappears in the overly personalised world.”

By Seb Joseph

Sourced from THE DRUM

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Digital ad industry can’t grow without proper measurement

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By Emily Tan.

If the advertising industry doesn’t find a way to measure performance accurately and consistently, Proctor & Gamble’s threat to pull spend from digital advertising will be just the tip of the iceberg, warns Kantar Media.

According to a new international study by Kantar Media examining consumer and industry attitudes to advertising, there is a lack of consistent, comparable measures to understand the audience and gauge the effectiveness of advertising.

This is a “significant concern” for those working in the industry, said the report. “Unless consistent metrics across traditional and digital channels are developed, industry growth will be put at risk.”

The report, Dimension, was based on interviews with 5,213 adults, with access to the internet, across the UK (1,035), the US (1,014), China (1,067), France (1,000) and Brazil (1,097)

The study claims to have found that brands are still unable to consistently measure the impact and effectiveness of advertising from channel to channel, and from market to market.

This risks alienating consumers are 71% of respondents said they saw the ads over and over again, finding them too repetitive. “Over-targeting on digital platforms threatens to undermine brand marketing efforts,” said the report.

 

Digital ad industry can't grow without proper measurement

According to a new international study by Kantar Media examining consumer and industry attitudes to advertising, there is a lack of consistent, comparable measures to understand the audience and gauge the effectiveness of advertising.

This is a “significant concern” for those working in the industry, said the report. “Unless consistent metrics across traditional and digital channels are developed, industry growth will be put at risk.”

The report, Dimension, was based on interviews with 5,213 adults, with access to the internet, across the UK (1,035), the US (1,014), China (1,067), France (1,000) and Brazil (1,097)

The study claims to have found that brands are still unable to consistently measure the impact and effectiveness of advertising from channel to channel, and from market to market.

This risks alienating consumers are 71% of respondents said they saw the ads over and over again, finding them too repetitive. “Over-targeting on digital platforms threatens to undermine brand marketing efforts,” said the report.

The US feels the most over-targeted, with 76% of consumers saying they see the same ads repeatedly, followed by the UK with 74%. That figure is only 58% in China.

Both the UK (49%) and the US (48%) also feel more strongly than China (33%) that they frequently see online ads that are not relevant to them.

It also found that consumers prefer advertising on TV and print than they do about online formats. In the UK, about a third of respondents actively dislike online ads, versus only 13% on newspapers. The US shows similar figures and while China is less strong in its dislike of online ads (averaging around 20%), only 9% dislike newspaper ads.

“It’s a collective challenge for our industry: unless we work together to solve this problem, the growth of the sector will be hindered,” Andy Brown, chief executive and chairman of Kantar Media said. “So long as standards differ between markets and across media forms no one wins. Brands can’t track spend, agencies can’t deliver the best solutions for their clients, and consumers’ openness to marketing will diminish if the channels used to reach them are not used intelligently.”

Despite the negative headlines though, 68% of respondents either like or tolerate advertising, while 73% of consumers think advertisers are doing a better job of reaching them now than in the past.

However, these high numbers are swayed by strong results from China where 87% of consumers feel current advertising is outperforming that of the past. In the UK and US that figure is only 59% respectively.

By Emily Tan.

Sourced from campaign

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‘Something is going to have to change quickly,’ FT’s Elli Papadaki on programmatic transparency

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By Robert Andrews.

It is one of the leading lights among paid-for online news publishers, with 625,000 premium digital subscribers, but that isn’t stopping The Financial Times from making money from new-style advertising, too.

In fact, while the FT is typically known for selling big brand ads to luxury buyers, it is also taking advantage of programmatic technologies that promise greater efficiencies.

Doesn’t programmatic risk devaluing inventory for which a high-end publisher charges a pretty penny? Not at all, says the FT’s global head of programmatic, Elli Papadaki, who will be speaking at The Drum’s Programmatic Punch conference on 8 December.

Programmatic is changing, and the technology is often misunderstood. What does the term mean to you?

As a brand, we use programmatic to identify new audiences and convert them in to new customers for us, just like many other marketers are doing.

From my perspective in commercial, however, programmatic is a way to create efficiencies in the buying process. We use it as another route to inventory. We are not using it for remnant inventory.

We are trying to bridge the gap between direct and programmatic – we say to buyers, whether it is content, pure-play display or even video pre-roll, our relationship with our audience allows you to leverage data programmatically.

How has your use of programmatic evolved at the FT?

We started trading about three years ago in this place. Our approach was to say, part of our inventory will go in the open exchange. We quickly realised, though, that all that meant is having different price points – you’re half-insinuating the value of the inventory is less good. But, in our case, it really wasn’t.

As of this year, we started saying, we appreciate all the efficiencies … we do want to facilitate that for the buyers we work with. However, the commitment we make to the advertiser is exactly the same as that we do directly.

What is the role of advertising automation in a publisher so reliant on paid subscriptions?

Being premium subscription, we have access to first-party data, which is very hard to find. It means we sell out direct.

If you want to target a C-suite audience, you’re more than welcome – whether through direct or programmatic marketplace. The quality will be the same, we don’t differentiate.

We have a very premium product and people pay a premium price. So we tread a very fine line – we have to be conscious of dangers of serving inappropriate or irrelevant advertising.

This is why we’ve maintained our pricing on par with direct. The very nature of the pricing floors means it excludes certain ads from running on the site – more often than not, we know who we’re trading with. You’re seeing a rise in conversations where the buyer actually knows they are trading with us.

How do you think programmatic execution for the FT’s audience differs from that of other publishers?

We’re trying to shift the perception that programmatic is a different product – it isn’t. It’s a smart way to leverage on existing activities.

We’re trying to educate the buyers and brands we work with to explain … we don’t have separate programmatic teams – we have a single, unified sales team; they are vertical experts, selling by category, selling across portfolio – whether that be in magazine, paper, insert or digital.

The FT was a founder member of the Pangaea Alliance, publishers’ programmatic cooperative. What is the progress?

We launched a year-and-a-half-ago, and there have been additional publishers added to the ranks. We look at the audiences we’re all contributing and are looking for niches to add to the portfolio.

Brand safety and fraudulent inventory is still a problem when it comes to programmatic buying. For buyers, knowing they can run ads at scale in a brand-safe environment with audiences that are prequalified is quite important.

What’s missing from the programmatic ecosystem?

There is a lack of consolidation and transparency. We often find an obstacle is no standardisation. One technology vendor may say, ‘We require the buyer to have a DSP’, another won’t. Instantly, you have pockets of possibilities, which means multiple systems for the publisher to manage.

Something is going to have to change quite quickly. We increasingly hear frustration in the market – there will be increasing pressure for transparency.

We are seeing brands start to realise the complexity involved with programmatic. There will come a moment when brands evaluate whether to take it in-house. Some will start to do so, but resources will be required.

What changes will reshape programmatic in 2017?

The new European Union General Data Protection Regulation [GDPR] directive that’s coming in to place in the next year or so will be significant. Any business that deals with any organisation in the EU will need to comply. Considering that programmatic is an audience buy, this will throw a spanner in the works.

The fees and penalties if you breach the regulations are significantly higher than in the past. It will certainly force more businesses to take it seriously. If they do have data, they will have to prove they have users’ consent.

It is going to increase the pressure to make sure the quality of data is there and that there is permission from users and consent to use it. It will lead to everyone reconsidering who they work with.

By Robert Andrews

Sourced from The Drum

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