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In News

Adweek Announces Its First Advisory Board, Featuring 24 Top Marketing, Media and Technology Executives

February 21, 2018 No Comments

Adweek has called in the big guns for a huge collaboration which could be an example of how the rest of us will work in the future.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

Everyone in advertising knows Adweek, a bible for marketers. Adweek has published articles for the brand marketing ecosystem since 1979. Adweek’s coverage reaches an engaged audience of more than 6 million professionals across platforms including print, digital, events, podcasts, newsletters, social media and mobile apps.

Today, the publication announced the launch of the Adweek Advisory Board, made up of 24 of the most innovative and creative executives who are shaping the modern brand marketing ecosystem.

Adweek says they recognise the need to synthesise a diversity of opinions to maintain its position as a voice in the marketplace. “Our newly formed Advisory Board will provide us – and our audiences – with the thought leadership and expertise we all need to help navigate the complex and constantly shifting ecosystem of today’s marketing and media world,” said Adweek editorial director James Cooper. “Adweek’s ultimate goal each day is helping our readers stay ahead of the curve and do their jobs better.”

“I am excited to be partnering with Adweek and joining its Advisory Board,” said GE CMO Linda Boff. “With digital transformation built into our DNA, we are in an especially unique position to guide and advise Adweek and the business community it serves.”

The Advisory Board will meet regularly with Adweek’s senior editorial team at gatherings across the country to discuss the pressing issues of the day. Members will also be on hand to publish thought leadership columns, speak at Adweek events and provide Adweek with insight and analysis on an as-needed basis across all platforms.

“The times we operate in aren’t easy. The pressure to deliver is daunting for even the most experienced here,” said board member Colleen DeCourcy, chief creative officer for agency network Wieden + Kennedy. “When an organisation like Adweek consciously turns its efforts to developing our talent, I am all in. Collaboration feels like the thing we need right now. All boats rise with the tide.”

Adweek’s Advisory Board Members:

Marisa Thalberg, Global CMO, Taco Bell
Linda Boff, CMO, GE
Adrienne Lofton, SVP of Global Brand Management, Under Armour
Andrew Keller, Global Creative Director, Facebook Creative Shop
Cameron Clayton, GM of Watson Content and IoT, IBM
Jon Suarez-Davis, Chief Strategy Officer, Salesforce Marketing Cloud
Ben Lamm, CEO and Founder, Conversable and Hypergiant
Caroline Papadatos, SVP of Global Solutions, LoyaltyOne
Alicia Hatch, CMO, Deloitte Digital
Baiju Shah, Chief Strategy Officer, Accenture Interactive
Joel Stillerman, Chief Content Officer, Hulu
Colin Kinsella, CEO North America, Havas Media Group
Michelle Lee, Editor in Chief, Allure
Tiffany R. Warren, SVP and Chief Diversity Officer, Omnicom, and Founder and President, ADCOLOR
Susie Nam, COO, Droga5
David Sable, Global CEO, Y&R
Colleen DeCourcy, Chief Creative Officer, Wieden + Kennedy
Michael Dill, President and CEO, Match Marketing Group
Bonin Bough, Author and TV Host
Terrance Williams, CMO and President of Emerging Businesses, Nationwide
Kasha Cacy, CEO, UM U.S.
David Mondragon, CEO of Triton Automotive Group and Senior Partner, Motormindz
Linda Yaccarino, Chairman of Advertising and Client Partnerships, NBCUniversal
Nannette LaFond-Dufour, Global Chief Client Officer, McCann Worldgroup

To read further about Adweek’s Advisory Board initiative, click here

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In News

How to be heard over the noise in content marketing

February 20, 2018 No Comments

Posted by Impression

n the beginning, when online marketing was merely a twinkle in the eye of the internet, gaining online exposure for your brand was straightforward enough.

If you knew what you were doing, a little bit of social media and journalist outreach was an effective strategy to engage with your potential audience. However, as we witness an increase in audiences far and wide consuming the majority of news and content online, it’s fair to say that the landscape has grown up.

Today, social media, blogs and other news portals are oversaturated with content on content on content. It’s becoming increasingly hard to be heard as a brand. As large corporations clock on to the benefits of online marketing, they’re storming into the marketplace with gigantic marketing budgets, campaigns and agencies. Subsequently everything else is drowned out and gaining exposure online as small to medium sized business suddenly becomes impossible.

The content marketing revolution

“An abundance of content online means the quality is decreasing.” I have heard this so many times. I would disagree. Why do people assume scarcity equals value? What this actually means is that in order to stand out against the noise, marketers are having to create unique and remarkable content that is more targeted and relevant for its audience than ever. More content means more opportunities for better quality. It’s just harder to find, and create.

But how can we do this? Content marketing campaigns, of course. Over the last few years, we’ve seen an evolution of the news, whereby there’s a mix of creative campaigns frequenting the headlines in place of traditional media tactics. Whereas branded news and stories dominated the columns in the past, we’re now seeing a shift towards creative marketing campaigns across the news.

Coming from a more traditional PR background, I essentially see this as the digital version of the offline PR stunt. Some maverick somewhere decided that they’d take the principles of PR – coming up with something compelling that will gain virality – and they executed it online. The difference is that digital presents the opportunity to be even more interactive with its audience, leading to additional marketing tactics, data capture and surveys, for example.

Spice it up with an influencer

As more marketeers catch wind of this, it’s almost become to go-to and we’re dealing with the same content oversaturation problem again. Therefore, in order to run a successful and effective content marketing campaign, we need to implement some sneaky alternative tactics.

You may be experts in what you do, but your audience won’t necessarily know that. Let’s be honest, the likelihood is that your brand doesn’t currently hold enough weight on it’s own, causing your content marketing efforts to flop. You need additional authority, and that’s where using influencers comes in.

Start by reaching out to other higher profile businesses in relevant industries to see if they’d provide comment. This may sound like a difficult task, yet you’d be surprised. Business leaders generally support positive exposure for themselves as individuals as well as their brand, and will be more than happy to comply, seasoning your piece with that essential authority.

It’s easier than you think to reach out to high profile experts via public or decentralised social media platforms such as Reddit or Twitter. Gaining comments from experts in their field in this manner not only helps add the weight to gain exposure, but also aids in the share potential, as these influencers have a huge audience on social media.

Top Hopics

A easy way to ensure that people are going to talk about your topic is to make sure people are already talking about your topic. How? Before you start a content marketing campaign that’s relevant to your industry, think whether there are any ongoing controversial conversations, current trends or hot topics that you can piggyback to support your idea.

Sometimes this can be something as simple as national holidays, such as Christmas, Hanukkah or May the Fourth. On that note, pop media such as films and TV series’ gain a load of exposure during the times they are released and broadcast, so try to leech off that coverage as well.

A content marketing piece that is focused around current trends means outreach will also be easier, as you’ll already have a list of media and news outlets that are speaking about your topic ready to outreach with your content marketing piece.

Where shall I begin?

Tapping into influencers and trends is an opportunity to be creative. Sure, go ahead and try a combination of the above, but don’t be afraid of trying something totally off-piste.

One of the beauties of being a content marketer in a time of such an abundance of content is that it means there’s so many fantastic examples of successful creative pieces online already. Don’t just blindly carbon copy, but note the tactics used within these and don’t be afraid of taking inspiration from other ideas.

Reading industry relevant blogs, and using ideation tools such Buzzsumo and ‘Answer the public’ is recommended to get an idea of what already exists around certain topic areas.

I understand if you’re still wary of creating content that has had parallels to content that already has been covered. But don’t always try to be entirely novel in everything you do. Look at Wordsworth or Van Gogh; the best ideas come from inspiration from others, and there’s no reason why this can’t transfer into digital marketing too. I firmly believe that if something has had traction before then a new and innovative slant on, it will be picked up again.

Create something amazing that doesn’t shout louder over the noise, but is heard simply as it whispers it’s relevancy, as a unique and remarkable piece of content marketing.

By Jess Hawkes, Digital PR Specialist

Posted by Impression

Sourced from THEDRUM

In News

Ryanair CMO says there will be more to its marketing than just price in 2018

February 20, 2018 No Comments

By Jennifer Faull

nstead of price-focused ads, Ryanair’s marketing plans for the coming year will increasingly focus on customer service improvements and building its travel content business after investing in an in-house studio last year, according to its chief marketing officer.

Despite being hit with a slew of criticism last September after cancelling over 2,000 flights due to a staffing oversight, Ryanair announced today (5 February) that it had delivered a 12% rise in profits to €106m for the third quarter.

Though insistent that there was no lasting brand damage as a result, chief marketing officer Kenny Jacobs admitted to The Drum that the brand learned some tough lessons and plans to introduce a number of new customer service tools that will be talked up in its marketing efforts in the coming year.

“We needed to protect punctuality because it’s the second biggest reason that people choose Ryanair,” said Jacobs of the decision to ground over 25 aircraft. “It was challenging to get through but I think we done OK.”

According to YouGov brand tracking data, Ryanair’s Impression score (whether someone has a positive impression of the brand) dropped to -52 among the general public during that time.

Since then, things have begun to recover, though it still remains someway short of its pre-crisis levels, with its Impression score currently standing at -36.

Meanwhile, its Buzz score (whether someone has heard something positively or negative about the brand in the past two weeks) follows a similar trend. Its score dropped to -45 at its lowest point, though that has now improved to -18.

However, Ryanair remains at the bottom of the airline sector in terms of both Impression and Buzz.

Jacobs takes YouGov stats with a pinch of salt, putting more credence on its internal surveys of people who have travelled with the carrier. And according to those, 86% of the customers who flew with Ryanair in December were “satisfied”.

But that’s not to say the outrage of 300,000 passengers in the cancelled flights saga hasn’t had a longtail impact; as a direct result, Jacobs said more investment would be made into digitising customer serves to make the process of claiming compensation easier.

Bringing its previously outsourced compensations team in house, Ryanair claimed it will soon halve the time it takes to process claims to just 10 days while people will be able to access “clearer, simpler forms” to make a claim via the app.

“Those learnings from the last six months will be brought into the next year. We will invest in customer service in 2018.”

Jacobs has made no secret of the airline’s vision to be “the Amazon” of travel, and by that he means that like the e-commerce giant, he wants passengers to buy into more services, and buy more often.

According to its financial results, ‘ancillary revenue’ – the revenue generated from add on services like checked luggage, speedy boarding, reserved seating and more recently hotel bookings – grew 12%.

Like Amazon’s Prime, at the heart of Ryanair’s revenue generation plans is the MyRyanair app which now has 40 million members. Expanding the add-on services people access via the app in the coming year is priority and the next addition will be “connecting tickets”, sold in partnership with rival Aer Lingus. This means that if someone has an Aer Lingus flight from Dublin to London and a connecting flight to Paris they can check-in, along with their luggage, for the entire trip.

“We’re going back to basics of driving visits and monetising those visits into customers buying flights from us, and then buying more stuff from us. We’ve increased those conversations,” he said.

Ryanair claims to have achieved all of this with the lowest marketing spend compared to other major airliners. Since embarking on the long running ‘Always Getting Better’ programme, the most “efficient” metric for Jacobs on effectives is spend per passenger and he claims that Ryanair is spending sub €0.12 on advertising to each flier.

“If you contrast that with other low-cost airlines which are around €5 or legacy airlines which are around €10 then we’ve got the lowest,” he claimed.

The massively reduced cost is down to its reliance on email marketing, on which Jacobs would “spend on until the cows come home.”

“We now have a sophisticated programmatic approach to email. And when we announce a flash sale and we launch a social and follow up with a big email campaign it drives traffic like you wouldn’t believe,” he said.

“We don’t spend anything on PPC and take great pride in that. It’s quite something to be the world’s most visited airline platform with the most efficient marketing spend without spending anything on Google. That’s a rare achievement.”

And that doesn’t look likely to change in the coming year. But where it will be investing heavily is with content. Jacobs recently set up a six-strong in-house division of content marketers, supported by 10 freelancers, all producing everything from short videos to full destination guides which sits in an online hub.

“We’ve now got 1,000 pieces of bespoke content,” he said, saying its growth is currently being fuelled by customers uploading their own content, such as reviews of hotels.

“There’s a genuine space in the industry for every day destination guides for everyday people. Not everyone is a Conde Nast reader going to the Maldives; for every one of them there’s probably 100 that are deciding whether to go to Benidorm or Alicante,” Jacobs continued.

“That’s really what we’re pitching it at. Covering all the destinations we fly to and promoting the new destinations we add. It gives us another club in the bag, moving beyond talking about how we get you from A to B for a low price.”

This will soon be amplified in its above-the-line marketing. It launched its first campaign for Ryanair Rooms – also the first ever marketing activity that didn’t promote cheap flights – last month in the UK and Ireland, which is “working very well for bookings” and “will expand to other markets” imminently.

By Jennifer Faull

Sourced from THEDRUM

In News

Advertising in Fashion Magazines is Dead to us Now

February 19, 2018 No Comments

Now? Fashion brands are meeting with social media influencers directly.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

Hundreds of NY Fashion Week influencers were invited to a party specifically held to put them in front of brands that want some of the spotlight. The party was held by a company called Influence, which connects brands and influencers. Together, they create social campaigns that expand visibility and engage new audiences for brands. The influencer gets paid, and the brands get to reach audiences that they might not be able to access using other methods. Welcome to the “now” of fashion and brand marketing.

Influence is a sister company to the already-successful operation called Newswire. Newswire currently have an online portal that publishes thousands of press releases every day. Journalists and influencers can go straight to company news, by keyword or subject search. This means that they can get their news directly from the companies, rather than have the interaction brokered through a PR agency. This renders the traditional PR agency almost obsolete.

The way the PR industry is changing is similar to the way that fashion magazines are going. Teen magazines and fashion publications are no longer the huge, powerful entities that brokered deals between brands/fashion houses and their audiences. Now, it is the online fashion influencers who have huge sway with their fans, and brands can contact them directly. This circumvents the hugely expensive fashion magazines, whose circulations are falling dramatically.

As an example, a top YouTube fashion influencer is Chriselle Lim. Her channel is growing at a breakneck pace. Her videos reveal how to transform basic pieces of clothing into stylish apparel. Chriselle has support from global brands such as Target and Estee Lauder.

The change in the way brands and fashion are marketed has been incredibly rapid. Fashion magazines? Pah. Now Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube are the place to put brand marketing spend.

But back to the party. The event hosted hundreds of NY Fashion Week Influencers at Manhattan’s chic Sixty Soho Hotel. Influencers and brands from across the globe arrived to share in networking and developing opportunities for campaign partnerships that strengthen an Influencer’s channel and widen content reach for brands. The party was also used to promote Influence.com itself. And it worked, because here you are, reading about this new company.

Said Director of Influencer Marketing, Magnolia Sevenler, “Whether you are an influencer or marketer, the Influence by Newswire platform provides a community to build your campaigns.”

According to Sevenler, the platform has been well-received from both marketers and creators for its simplicity and reach. “It’s exciting to see all the positive feedback…as we enter a new era of marketing, where micro-influencers can be rewarded for their passions and brands can reach new untapped audiences.”

The company has plans to expand its network and add additional features to enhance users’ experience. And it is doing this all because the fashion magazine industry is destined for a papery grave. It’s time to move on, people, and bring your marketing spend with you.

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In News

How brands’ use of online celebrity influencers is maturing

February 16, 2018 No Comments

By Stephen Lepitak

The search by brand marketers for consumer engagement has led to the continued growth and funding of the social media influencer that has made millionaires of some vloggers and online celebrities the world over.

However, as these seemingly normal people have grown their fame, demand by brands for their audiences has similarly grown and the rules and regulations around their ability to promote products became a problem for marketing regulators. And in that time some have developed that relationship to become the face and voice of individual brands they truly connect with. Examples are endless, from Cole LaBrant and Mackenzie Davis to Maia Mitchell, who have used different platforms and shared their own life skills and insights to develop personal fan bases. And as Facebook changes its newsfeed algorithm to drive more personalised content to the fore, over media content, those organic relationships will become more coveted by advertisers.

According to research by blog discovery website Bloglovin’ 32% of marketers saw influencer campaigns as being essential to their strategies, with 41% admitting to seeing more success from their influencer campaigns over their traditional advertising.

“Brands are learning,” states Peter Willems, head of marketing activities and sponsorship for world footballing body, Uefa, while speaking on a panel organized by FCB Inferno about influencers and his experience of working with them through the launch of a new project alongside freestyle soccer skills channel, F2.

“Brands are more and more trying to put the objective first. We believe in data but we struggle a little bit with specific target groups, especially youngsters, and therefore one of the objectives of working with F2 was to grow our database within that specific target group. We believe at the moment that influencers can help us there.” he continues to explain, adding that sharing the objective with the influencers who are involved in the collaboration is now crucial too.

Willems also cites the comparison over the share prices of Adidas and main rival Nike as examples of how powerful the use of influencers can be in delivering sales, with Adidas having spent years now working with online personalities to achieve global growth and product awareness.

“For me, the biggest problem has to be how you measure success, which is still in its infancy to show what it can bring and what it can do,” Willems continues.

That problem around measuring return on investment is definitely to be an issue that brands entering this burgeoning sector face, agrees Laura Visick, head of social for FCB Inferno.

“There are soft and hard metrics that we can put in place such as reach and engagement which can be given to the influencers themselves to benchmark against their own content and to identify how things are resonating. One of the most important things is upfront identifying what the objective is and articulating what success looks like to ensure that everyone is on board.. there are a huge number of ways to work with influencers,” she explains of the clearly maturing marketing strategy, where one celebrity tweet is not seen as success in itself.

“The ASOS model is a good one. They are building a group of influencers that are engaging with and advocating the brand all of the time, and there are a few campaigns that we are seeing coming through that the moment that are very similar. They are building a group of ambassadors who are engaging with the brand and creating a very authentic relationship rather than a ‘one-hit-wonder’,” she continues, adding that that course helps create more robust measurements.

Using tools to help monitor and achieve return on investment is an obvious route. Verena Papik, director of marketing EMEA of Musical.ly, says it is important for brands to understand why each tool is being used and used to meet specific set goals and objectives.

She also advises that brands and influencers set objectives that see both succeed together.

“When brands and influencers really collaborate together, and they include a tool like Musical.ly, it is to add value to each other. Everyone is getting lost in setting goals and achieving data numbers, numbers of posts; but in reality is actually about adding value to each other,” she explains. “For a long term relationship you definitely have to understand what benefit the other party can actually bring to this partnership.”

Influencer, Bangs Carey-Campbell, fitness editor at Elle Magazine and blogger, advises that brands recognise the importance of not just paying online celebrities to pose with one-off products but to agree an ongoing strategy and to really follow through on the partnership for the most successful collaborations. She also advises that influencers understand the brand’s perspective rather than forcing their own ways of working fully, too.

“It’s about finding that middle ground when creating content. Especially if you are being paid to do that. You do have to understand from a brand’s perspective that they have a certain job description and certain markers that they have to achieve even if they are not 100% clear on them. It can be tough from the creative’s point of view as you have a way that you like to produce your content, but that’s why the brand got in touch with you. It can be tough to find that middle ground but as a creator, if that is the direction that you want to take your brand in, and you want to be more involved with other brands, you have got to be willing to meet in the middle somewhere. It’s not compromising your material. It’s finding a way to work together and find a way to be flexible,” she relays but later offers a reminder to brands that they are working and partnering with individual people, and not to forget that and treat them as a soulless commodity.

There is a long way still to go for the brand and influencer model, and the bubble has far from burst judging by the growing numbers offering their services and audiences to brands, however another piece of advice that all contributors agreed with was that influencers were more successful if they offered authentic insights and had achieved success in the fields their audiences held interests in. Otherwise it was likely that such influence would be fleeting and of little long-term commercial value in tandem.

By Stephen Lepitak

Sourced from THE DRUM

In News

Marketing Survey: Spontaneous Sex is the Best Kind

February 14, 2018 No Comments

Keep this in mind if you are marketing sexy products.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

What does a company that makes sex products do for their annual Valentine’s sales push? They do a survey, to find out how best to market to their customers. And here are the results.

Valentine’s Day, it seems, is starting to suck for everyone. Singles have made it their own anti-holiday, full of memes and proclamations about the commercialisation of the day. But what about couples? Is it all it’s really cracked up to be?

A company called K-Y undertook a survey to find out how to best market their sex products to customers. And it makes for depressing reading. What was once thought to be a romantic and sexy day has become an experience full of pressure and hype. Pressure to buy the right card, pick the sexiest lingerie and have the most mind-blowing sex of your life – and you only have one day to make it all happen.

According to the Love All 365 survey, half of Millennials feel they are missing out if they don’t have sex on Valentine’s Day, but more than 60% of them report that the sex doesn’t live up to the hype. That’s a lot of lead up for a big letdown.

The survey further illuminates the Valentine’s Day tension by revealing that while 82% of people are more likely to have sex with their partner on Valentine’s Day, 83% report that sex is best when it’s impulsive versus planned. Preparing for sex at Valentine’s Day is certainly a faux pas many couples are guilty of committing in spite of the fact that, as the statistics affirm, our preference is for spontaneity.

The good news is that 97% of couples report that having good sex with their partners makes them feel more connected.

“We don’t want couples saving their ‘sexy’ for special occasions, when great sex can and should happen any day of the year,” said Nadja Korner, Marketing Director of K-Y. “Good sex helps strengthen the relationship, so instead of putting all your romantic energy into nights like Valentine’s Day, surprise your partner with that special sexy something on an unexpected night. After all, the essence of pleasure is spontaneity.”

So if you are creating an advertising campaign using a sexy theme, keep the idea of spontaneous sex in mind. Especially if you are targeting Millennials. ■

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In News

Millennials Are Not All Alike (And They May Surprise You!)

February 9, 2018 No Comments

New research studying the millennials market has identified five unique subgroups.

A new research study from Zeldis Research Associates reveals surprising findings for marketers which belie the frequent mythology that Millennials are “all the same.”

Unlike many other market studies attempting to better understand Millennials as a single group, Zeldis researchers identified five Millennial segments based on income, attitudes, and other important factors. This “Seen One Millennial and You Haven’t Seen Them All” study is part of Zeldis’ ongoing investigation into how marketers can better reach and successfully engage this group.

“Despite a lot of the media coverage we hear, Millennials are not one homogenous group, unfortunately and incorrectly characterised by a few negative stereotypes such as lazy or entitled,” said Zeldis Executive Vice President Amy Rey. “Our research shows that there are important differences among Millennials. We wanted to dispel some of the myths and help marketers better understand the nuances that will help make Millennial-targeted outreach, products and messaging more effective.”

Five Identifiable Segments

Based on online interviews with 1000 Millennials aged 21-36, the Zeldis researchers identified five unique segments: Faithful Optimists (31% of the sample), Struggling Parents (23%), Secular Activists (22%) Tech-Savvy Independents (14%), and Pessimistic Conservatives (10%). Some of their findings include:

– Faithful Optimists, the largest segment, tend to be joyful, hardworking, dependable, and religious. They are more likely to be non-white and heterosexual.

– Struggling Parents tend to be pessimistic about their lives and about the country. They don’t pay much attention to politics or technology. They are more likely to be white women with children and tend to be less educated and from rural areas.

– Secular Activists are more likely to be politically liberal, and to be pessimistic about the country’s future. They tend to be single, childless, and secular and are more likely to be part of the LGBT community.

-Tech-Savvy Independents are more politically conservative but also environmentally conscious. Optimistic about the economy, this segment has a higher proportion of males and non-whites, and tends to be from urban locations.

– Pessimistic Conservatives, the smallest segment, are likely to be from suburban areas. They tend to be religious and politically conservative. Skewing male and non-white, they have high incomes but are pessimistic about their economic future.

Though holding some attitudes and beliefs in common with other segments, each group showed nuanced differences that the Zeldis researchers believe are important for companies to understand and apply when marketing their products.

The full results are available at ZeldisMillennialsStudy.com.

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In News

You Might be Paying too Much for ads on Google and Bing

February 8, 2018 No Comments

Before you dish out money to bid for a top-ranked ad position on a search engine, you may want to pause and make sure it’s actually going to pay off.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

New research out of Binghamton University, State University of New York suggests that instead of just spending to get that top spot, advertisers should be considering other factors as well to ensure they are getting the best results from their sponsored search advertising campaigns.

Sponsored search advertising involves paying search engines, like Google and Bing, to bid for placements on the search results pages for specific keywords and terms. The ads appear in sponsored sections, separate from the organic search results, on those pages.

“The common belief in sponsored search advertising is that you should buy the top ad position to get more clicks, because that will lead to more sales,” said Binghamton University Assistant Professor of Marketing Chang Hee Park. “But the fee for the top position could be larger than the expected sales you’d get off that top position.”

Park, with the help of Binghamton University Professor of Marketing Manoj Agarwal, analysed data collected from a search engine and created a model that can forecast the number of clicks advertisers could expect in sponsored search markets based on four factors:

Rank in the sponsored listings
Website quality
Brand equity
Selling proposition

The model gives advertisers a way to quantify the expected clicks they’d get by adjusting these four factors, while also taking into consideration how their competitors are managing these four factors. This could enable advertisers to find a perfect blend of the four factors to ensure they are getting the most out of what they are paying for their ad positions.

It may also indicate that they should be spending more money to bolster their brand or website rather than amplifying their offers in top ad positions.

“Using this model, you may find that paying less for a lower ad position while investing more in improving your website is more effective than spending all of that money strictly on securing top ad positions,” said Agarwal.

This applies especially if your competitor has a poorer-quality website, but is spending more than you on securing top ad positions.

Their model found that poor-quality advertisers that are ranked higher in ad positions drive consumers back to the search results page, leading consumers to then click on advertisers in lower ad positions to find what they are looking for.

In contrast, they also found that a highly-ranked good-quality advertiser results in significantly less clicks for all the advertisers ranked below them.

“It’s more likely that in the top position, all advertisers being equal, you’ll get more clicks. But depending on these four factors, as well as the quality of your competitors, you may find that you’ll get more clicks in the second or the third position,” said Park.

“Conceptually, this is not a new idea, but now the model can help determine this by accounting for multiple factors at play at the same time.”

Advertisers aren’t the only ones who can benefit from this research.

Park and Agarwal’s model found that simply reordering the listed advertisers could result in significant changes in overall click volume (the total number of clicks across all advertisers) for search engines.

“Because they often charge on a pay-per-click model, search engines can now simulate which ordering of advertisers in a sponsored search market results in the most overall clicks and, therefore, most revenue” said Park. “Search engines may want to consider charging advertisers in a way that gives the search engine more flexibility in determining the order in which the ads in sponsored sections are displayed.”

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In News

Understanding Facebook Emoticons Can Impact How You Advertise on Social Media

February 7, 2018 No Comments

Not all “likes” are equal.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

While the trusty “like” button is still the most popular way to signal approval for Facebook posts, a computer model may help users and businesses navigate the increasingly complicated way people are expressing how they feel on social media.

In a study, researchers developed a social emotion mining computer model that one day could be used to better predict people’s emotional reactions to Facebook posts, said Jason Zhang, a research assistant in Penn State’s College of Information Sciences and Technology. While Facebook once featured only one official emoticon reaction – the like button – the social media site added five more buttons – love, haha, wow, sad and angry – in early 2016.

“We want to understand the user’s reactions behind these clicks on the emoticons by modelling the problem as the ranking problem – given a Facebook post, can an algorithm predict the right ordering among six emoticons in terms of votes?” said Zhang. “But, what we found out was that existing solutions predict the user’s emotions and their rankings poorly in some times.”

Zhang added that merely counting clicks fails to acknowledge that some emoticons are less likely to be clicked than others, which is called the imbalance issue. For example, users tend to click the like button the most because it signals a positive interaction and it is also the default emoticon on Facebook.

“When we post something on Facebook, our friends tend to click the positive reactions, usually love, haha, or, simply, like, but they’ll seldom click angry,” said Zhang. “And this causes the severe imbalance issue.”

For social media managers and advertisers, who spend billions buying Facebook advertisements each year, this imbalance may skew their analysis on how their content is actually performing on Facebook, said Dongwon Lee, associate professor of information sciences and technology. The new model – which they call robust label ranking, or ROAR – could lead to better analytic packages for social media analysts and researchers.

“A lot of the commercial advertisements on Facebook are driven by likes,” said Lee. “Eventually, if we can predict these emoticons more accurately using six emoticons, we can build a better model that can discern more precise distribution of emotions in the social platforms with only one emoticon – like – such as on Facebook before 2016. This is a step in the direction of creating a model that could tell, for instance, that a Facebook posting made in 2015 with a million likes in fact consists only 80 percent likes and 20 percent angry. If such a precise understanding on social emotions is possible, that may impact how you advertise.”

The researchers used an AI technique called “supervised machine learning” to evaluate their newly-developed solution. In this study, the researchers trained the model using four Facebook post data sets including public posts from ordinary users, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, and showed that their solution significantly outperformed existing solutions. All four sets of data were analysed after Facebook introduced the six emoticons in 2016.

The researchers suggest future research may explore the multiple meanings for liking a post.

“Coming up with right taxonomy for the meanings of like is another step in the research,” said Lee. “When you click on the like button, you could really be signalling several emotions – maybe you agree with it, or you’re adding your support, or you just like it.”

And we as marketers know, the more you understand how your market feels, the better you can tailor your advertising to them.

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In Uncategorized

Buyer Behaviour: Love Trumps Budget When Your Customer is Buying Sentimental Items

February 6, 2018 No Comments

People will always pay more when being led by the heart and not the head.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

Brides and the bereaved beware: You, like many shoppers, may have a tendency to reject thriftiness when your purchase is a matter of the heart, according to a new study led by the University of Colorado Boulder.

People are reluctant to seek cost-saving options when buying what they consider sacred – such as engagement rings, cremation urns, or even desserts for a birthday party – for or to commemorate loved ones. The paper, published in Judgment and Decision Making, is the first to examine the implications of this phenomenon.

Even when they identify a less expensive alternative to be equally desirable, people choose the more expensive of two items. They also avoid searching for lower prices and negotiating better prices when the goods they’re buying are symbolic of love.

“People’s buying behaviour changes when they’re making purchases out of love because it feels wrong to engage in cost-saving measures,” said Peter McGraw, associate professor of marketing and psychology at CU. “People abandon cost-saving measures when it comes to sentimental buys because they want to avoid having to decide what is the right amount of money to spend on a loving relationship.”

The findings highlight how wedding, funeral and other industries can exploit consumers, said McGraw.

In one part of the study, which involved nearly 245 participants, the researchers asked attendees at a Boulder wedding show about their preference between two engagement rings. The attendees nearly always chose the more expensive ring when deciding between a more expensive ring with a bigger carat and a less expensive ring with a smaller carat.

“It’s important to be aware of this tendency not to seek cost savings because, over a lifetime, consumers make many purchases that are symbolic of love — whether for weddings, funerals, birthdays, and anniversaries,” said McGraw. “The loss of savings can really add up and put people in compromising financial situations.”

So how can we apply this to a marketing situation? If you are selling goods or services for sentimental events, play up the quality, not the price.

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