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Mobile Scroll Ads More Effective Than Pop-Up And Static Banner Ads

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A new experiment suggests that pop-up ads can have an adverse effect on consumers’ perceptions of the content.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

Scrolls ads, a newer style of advertisement designed for mobile screens, show signs of being more effective than older forms of digital advertising. This is according to a new experimental study conducted by The Media Insight Project, a collaboration between the American Press Institute and The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. This new research has significant implications for a news industry that is constantly searching for new revenue models to finance journalism.

(For the unitiated, a scroll ad is an interactive ad format which is adapted to the reading behavior of your visitors. The ad opens at the bottom right only when the visitor scrolls down. This ad format will close automatically or can closed directly from the visitor.)

An example is here:

“Banner and pop-up ads have been the standard way to advertise online for decades, though they have met consumer resistance, especially in mobile,” said Tom Rosenstiel, executive director of the American Press Institute. “Our research into online advertisements finds that formats designed more recently, and with mobile in mind, strike users as less intrusive and more pleasing. To our surprise, compared with ad formats designed for other web environments, scroll ads can also improve recall of the product being advertised and enhance trust in the article where the ad appears.”

These are some of the results of the online survey experiment conducted with 1,489 participants between November 9 and December 6, 2016, using AmeriSpeak, NORC’s nationally representative survey panel. The online panel interface allows respondents to see and respond to content presented to them digitally, something that is not possible with traditional phone surveys.

Key findings:

  • The experiment finds that people are more likely to recall the product accurately if it appears in a scroll ad than if it appears in either a pop-up or static ad. Indeed, 34 percent of users accurately recalled the product from the scroll ad versus 26 percent in static ads and 25 percent in pop-up ads. The differences were even more pronounced if you take just those people who say they noticed the ad at all. The majority of all respondents, 57 percent, fell into this group.
  • People are no more likely to notice pop-up ads than they are scroll ads (61 percent vs. 62 percent for scroll) and are less likely to recall the product in pop-up ads, just 41 percent versus 55 percent in scroll ads and 53 percent in static ads. Pop-up ads also have several negative effects. For instance, 61 percent of people say pop-up ads make the article more difficult to read (vs. 37 percent for scroll ads and 19 percent for static ads).
  • When readers are interested in the topic of the ad, they are more likely to express some positive evaluations of the article and engage with that article. Overall, people who are interested in the topic of the ad provide more positive evaluations of the article, including that it provides diverse points of view (28 percent vs. 19 percent) and that it is entertaining (32 percent vs. 25 percent). However, those interested in the subject of the ad are no more likely to say the article got the facts right, had a professional appearance, that it was easy to find important information, or that the information was trustworthy.

“Scroll ads should play an even bigger role in online advertising because they appear to be more effective on a range of metrics than pop-up ads and static banners,” said Trevor Tompson, director of The AP-NORC Center. “These ads optimised for mobile produce benefits to the advertiser and the news outlet compared to older styles of digital advertising.”

 

 

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The Most Exciting Social Media Platforms Among Teens

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Musical.ly is currently the place for your influencer marketing money.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

A new survey of teenagers age 13-17 finds that teens have shifted their favoured social media platforms to Instagram and Snapchat. But the most exciting breakthrough is that of Musical.ly.

A survey taken by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research in the USA found that:

  • 76 percent of teens age 13-17 use Instagram.
  • 75 percent of teens use Snapchat.
  • 66 percent of teens use Facebook, down from 71 percent of teens using the site in 2015.
  • 47 percent of teens use Twitter.
  • Fewer than 30 percent of teens use Tumblr, Twitch, or LinkedIn.

Strangely, however, there is one contender that fails to be mentioned: Musical.ly, which is roaring into popularity, especially in Europe. And there are great opportunities for marketers to reach that ever-elusive teen and tween market.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjf8tvnaIQs

 

Musical.ly was founded by friends Alex Zhu and Luyu Yang. They decided to target the US teenage market, as this market is characterised for being an early adopter of new trends. The main idea was to create a platform that incorporates music and video in a social network. The first version of musical.ly was officially launched in August 2014.

In 2015, the app began to attract millions of users and in July 2015, musical.ly climbed up to the number 1 position in the iOS App Store, becoming the most-downloaded free app in over 30 countries, including the US, Canada, UK, Germany, Brazil, Philippines, and Japan. In July 2016, musical.ly reached 90 million downloads, with over 12 million new videos posted every day.

So how does it work? To put it simply, “musers” lip-sync to their favourite tunes, by themselves or with a friend, and share it. That’s actually the main thrust of it. But the opportunities for marketers are strong. In June 2016, Coca-Cola launched its #ShareACoke campaign on musical.ly, which introduced musical.ly’s “User-Generated Ads” model.

Kids were making some seriously cool little ads for Coke.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LgMzMl9OFA

The hashtags that are popular on this social network usually make reference to bits of pop culture and trends among the internet world.

So, marketers, if you want to reach tweens and teens, it is definitely worth your while to check out Musical.ly. It has fast become a Go-To destination for influencer marketing. The app is still finding a way to monetise its platform.This means that they are a little more loose with restrictions or requirements in place for branded content, advertising, and influencer marketing campaigns. You never know, it might just be the perfect spot to place your influencer-marketing budget.

 

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Paying Online Community Members to Write Product Reviews Backfires Badly

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Just let people do their thing, you’ll have more success.

Online user reviews have become an essential tool for consumers who increasingly rely on them to evaluate products and services before purchase. The business models of online review platforms such as Yelp and TripAdvisor, and e-commerce sites such as Amazon and Expedia critically depend on them. Should such sites pay users to encourage them to write reviews?

According to a forthcoming study in the INFORMS journal Marketing Science, a leading academic marketing journal, that is a bad idea. Paying users suppresses the number of reviews on social platforms, especially among those users who are socially well-connected and likely to be more influential.

The study is authored by Yacheng Sun of University of Colorado, and Xiaojing Dong and Shelby McIntyre of Santa Clara University. The authors examine user response from a sample of customers following the introduction of a monetary payment program for user reviews by a social shopping platform in China.

The payment was roughly the equivalent of 25 cents per review in credit for purchases from sellers affiliated with the platform. To the company’s surprise, the number of user reviews declined by over 30 percent in the month after the payment program was introduced, relative to the month before. “The familiar “Law of Supply,” that implies supply increases in response to higher prices, does not seem to hold true when it comes to paying for reviews on a social platform,” said Sun.

The paper explores why reviews drop in response to the monetary payments. The authors conjecture that the drop in reviews could be the result of community members’ concerns that their honest reviews – motivated by an intrinsic motive to either help others with relevant information or to present themselves as knowledgeable about the product or service – may now be interpreted by the community as simply driven by the less honourable extrinsic motivation of making money. If this were true, the drop in user reviews would be greater among users who had more friends on the social network, who could potentially misinterpret the user’s motivation for writing reviews.

The authors empirically test their conjecture by comparing the change in reviewing behaviour among “socialites” (more than five friends on network) against “loners” (no friends on network) after the introduction of the payment scheme. Indeed, the reviews from socialites drop 85 percent, from just over 0.4 reviews a month to just under 0.06 reviews a month. In contrast, the loners who had little to lose in terms of social capital increase their reviews from close to zero to about 0.03 per month. The increase in reviews from the loners however does little to offset the massive drop among the socialites, who are the heavy contributors overall. Hence the aggregate drop of 30 percent.

“Nobody wants to be seen as a paid shill for brands, so the users with more friends and followers, who were likely more influential and wrote more originally, are the ones who stop writing. A real double-whammy,” said Dong.

“Our results support the approach of industry leaders like Yelp or Amazon, who do not compensate for reviews. In fact, they tap into the intrinsic motive for social recognition through status badges for frequent contributors,” said McIntyre. “There may be still ‘under the radar’ ways to pay only the less socially active users for their reviews, but such targeting can be risky as the heavy reviewers may perceive it to be unfair and therefore stop writing reviews, if and when they learn about it.”

The complete paper is available here. 

 

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A Big Smile May Not be Effective in Online Marketing Ads

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Be careful with the size of your smile.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

A new study that includes a University of Kansas researcher has found that the level of smile intensity in marketing photos influences how consumers perceive the marketer’s competence and warmth, which can lead to different results depending on the context.

“We found that broad smiles lead people to be perceived as warmer but less competent,” said Jessica Li, a KU assistant professor of marketing in the School of Business. “We ask how that can influence consumer behaviour and in what situations might marketers want to smile more broadly.”

The study by Li and her co-authors was published online recently and will be in the January issue of the Journal of Consumer Research, one of the leading journals on marketing academic research.

Participants in the study viewed images of marketing photos that depicted the marketer either smiling broadly or only slightly. The researchers found that in advertisements for services that carry higher risk, consumers were more likely to assign competence to marketers that smiled only slightly rather than more broadly, which was associated with warmth but not necessarily competence.
Credit :Journal of Consumer Research

 

The researchers conducted experiments in which respondents viewed marketing images that included marketers with either broad or slight smiles. Also, they conducted a content analysis of postings on a crowdfunding website, Kickstarter.com, where people commonly seek donations for causes or business ventures.

Past marketing and psychological research has focused on smiles leading consumers to perceive people as being friendly and viewed in a more positive light. However, Li said the research team’s new study shows that is true but that there can be a trade-off in how a smile might elicit action from a consumer.

Li said one consideration is the context of the service the marketer is providing and whether or not there is potential risk associated with it.

The intensity of someone’s smile in a marketing image elicits two fundamental dimensions of social judgements – warmth and competence, the researchers found.

Li said broader smiles that tend to elicit more warmth seem to be more effective in promotional ads for a service that would carry less risk. But photos with a slight smile did better in marketing scenarios where services were higher risk, such as a medical procedure, legal representation or investment in a startup company.

“If I see an ad with a heart surgeon who smiles really broadly at me, I might think she is really warm, but not choose her to be my doctor because she seems less competent than a surgeon with a slight smile,” Li said. “If the risk is really low, such as going to the store to get a new shirt, then the competence of the salesperson isn’t as important and I respond more positively to the broad smile.”

In their analysis of Kickstarter.com, when the page creator’s profile photo exhibited a broad smile that tended to elicit perceptions of warmth, the total amount of money pledged decreased by more than 50 percent, and the average contribution per backer was 30 percent less than when the creator’s photo included only a slight smile.

“Project creators with a slight smile are perceived as more competent,” Li said. “More people wanted to donate to their project because they believe this competent person is able to deliver the product.”

However, a more intense smile does appear to elicit more buzz on social media or other low-cost behaviours. Profile photos with a broader smile received twice as many Facebook shares than someone with a slight smile.

“It’s intuitive that if you seem to be friendly but not competent, people will want to help you in low-cost ways but not necessarily be willing to give you a lot of money,” she said.

The study could be valuable for marketers as they strategise on how to best elicit a response for their products. “Warmth and competence are such important judgements,” Li said. “We want to make sure we are giving people the right signal.”

 

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Marketing to millennials: Should brands spend money?

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By Shawn Lim

As social media increasingly becomes the tool of choice for millennials, is it sensible for brands and marketers to base their marketing strategy around user-generated content on these platforms and not invest any money into their strategy?

According to Rohit Sharma, founder and chief executive of Pokkt, a mobile video advertising and app monetisation platform for game developers, he tells The Drum that even though the millennial generation is extremely plugged into social, many companies are plunging headfirst into social without understanding that social simply cannot function as a standalone strategy as it must be incorporated as part of an integrated strategy.

“It is akin to functioning with tunnel vision, or with blinkers on – you end up overlooking other channels that could deliver greater reach, engagement, and which ultimately drive the bottom line,” he adds.

Sharma believes that social is prized for how easily it lends itself to native and while there are channels that might do this just as well, or even better. For example, he says by engaging the user in a mini-game within a game, in-game advertising is the perfect example of native, with a far higher guarantee that the user will actually see and interact with content, instead of simply scrolling past as they might do on a social feed. “Furthermore, the nature of the games in question often allow for short, predictable breaks – easy spaces for advertisers to communicate their message without being annoying or interruptive,” he adds.

However, there are some brands who buck the trend by putting their trust into social media. Take GlampingCity for example, a company that combines glamour and camping for people who want a hotel-style accommodation, but with the feel of outdoor camping.

Its entry into Singapore was initially met with scepticism, but the trend slowly caught on when the company started posting picturesque photos on its Instagram page, taken by its staff and local social media influencers that it collaborates with.

Aside from its Instagram page and a website, GlampingCity does not have any budget allocated for ad spend and marketing strategy, according to founder Ryan Lam, adding that glamping caught on fast in Singapore through word of mouth and social media because people were posting about their experiences with it.

Lam, who was speaking to The Drum on the sidelines of the 2017 ACI Asia Business Summit in Singapore, also reveals that 50% of the photos on the company’s Instagram page is from his own team. “This business is very new, so we have not approached anyone (influencer) yet, all of our collaborations and partnerships, it all came naturally. I spent zero dollars on marketing. I only spent on logistics. The publicity came naturally.”

“I don’t plan to pay influencers, the genuine ones, maybe, not those that are looking to do it for their own benefit,” he adds.

Bart Mroz, co-founder and CEO of Sumo Heavy, a ecommerce consulting company, tells The Drum that he agrees with GlampingCity’s social media heavy strategy as he feels that social should be a main priority for the production, distribution and syndication of content when it comes to marketing to millennials as they are changing the ways brands market.

Brands like Sephora and Nike, have also been successful in marketing to millennials by using Instagram to post visually stunning photos that clearly reflects brand identity and draws users in, according to Mroz, noting that Nike has become the 19th most followed account and the fifth most used hashtag, while Sephora has increased its engagement rate and now boasts nearly 13 million followers.

Mroz however, adds that in order to effectively use social media, brands still need to put money into these platforms. “You won’t see the needle move much if you don’t invest. Marketers need to shift their spending from traditional channels like TV, print, and PPC to social media. For example, Facebook and Instagram are both strong channels because of their high engagement rates, robust targeting options, and popularity with this demographic.”

Noting that 41% of millennials use Facebook every day, which makes it still the number one marketing channel, and that Instagram and Snapchat are catching up because the platforms are very different in style and have features that attracting more millennials, Mroz says: “Therefore, brands should still focus on Facebook, but pay much more attention to platforms like Instagram and Snapchat to better engage with this target audience in the long-run.”

Feature Image: Ryan Lam, founder of GlampingCity. Photo by: Institute on Consumer Insights

By Shawn Lim

Shawn Lim is a reporter at The Drum, covering industry news around the Asia Pacific region with a focus on Singapore and Southeast Asia. Based in Singapore, he has worked across photography, video and online, covering a range of subjects including current affairs and sports.

Before Game of Thrones, he was a huge Breaking Bad fan. He does CrossFit and yoga to stay healthy.

Sourced from THEDRUM

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Millennial Chinese Become The Biggest Group of Online Shoppers for Luxury Brands

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By Nicole Buckler

Singles Day, held in China, is a day where Chinese shoppers go mental, buying themselves all sorts of nice stuff. This is all in aid of cheering themselves up while living the single life. The day is now the biggest day for e-commerce sales in the world.

The celebration for Singles Day held on 11/11 used to celebrate people who were proud to be single. So about those 1s in the date – obviously, single means “1.” But also, the four 1s evoke “bare branches,” the Chinese expression for the unattached. So the day became an anti-Valentine’s day of sorts. It was a self-love day. It was nice. Ahh.

But since the day started out, a lot has happened. There are now lots of single dudes in China. And, they are slowly getting richer. They have Yuan to burn and no one to spend it on but themselves. But let’s not forget the Chinese women too. They are now richer, taking their time to marry, and certainly love a good spend-up. And, if these women can afford it, it is the day where luxury brands get a solid burst of credit card love.

Even up until the Noughties, Singles Day used to be a small celebration. Then Billionaire Jack Ma of Alibaba came along (Alibaba is the Amazon.com of China.) Ma decided that he would do huge promotions around the day and plug it as an online shopping fiesta. And it worked. It is now the biggest online sales event in the world.

People who have gone on to marry have kept buying themselves stuff on Singles Day, jealous of singles and their self-spoiling. Singles Day is now a 24-hour-period where just about every demographic goes utterly mental with their credit cards. And if we don’t adopt it in Europe I was be very distressed. It sounds awesome.

While Alibaba was the first to link Singles’ Day to a shopping craze, plenty of rivals have joined in. Xiu.com is a Chinese luxury e-commerce platform. It just released its sales report for this year’s Singles Day.

So much to buy, so little time…

Here are the sales stats generated via Xiu.com:

Online shoppers born after 1990 have become the leading consumer group in China

Online shoppers aged between 25 and 30 (born between 1987 and 1992) took up the biggest share of Xiu.com’s total sales on this year’s November 11. Purchasing behaviours vary significantly across age groups. Citing a few examples: the favourite fashion brand among women shoppers born in the 2000s was The Kooples, an emerging French street fashion brand featuring a Brit-pop style that, to date, had not yet proven popular in China.

Shoppers born in the 1990s preferred Dolce & Gabbana. Burberry was the top-selling fashion brand among women born in the 1970s and 1980s.

Giuseppe Zanotti was the best-selling shoe brand among male shoppers born in the 1990s and 2000s, while men born in the 1980s preferred Gucci. Men born in the 1960s and 1970s opted overwhelmingly for Prada. Surprisingly, Chanel was the favoured brand among male shoppers born in the 1950s.

Burberry remains the country’s favourite brand

The top selling brands overall were Burberry, Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Prada, Dolce & Gabbana and Chanel.

However, obvious differences existed between different cities. In Beijing, Moncler was the bestselling brand, while in Shanghai, Hermes, which was barely mentioned in other cities, proved to be the best seller. Philipp Plein was favored by Shenzhen buyers, while Emporio Armani sold best in Chongqing.

Male buyers spend more in fashion field

This year saw a huge increase in the average sale among men for fashion items, outspending the women. Male shoppers preferred the casual style of Armani Jeans and the avant-garde fashion style of Philipp Plein, while women remained with traditional luxury brands represented by Valentino, Dior and Chanel.

Beijing is where most of the shoppers are

Beijing ranked first on Xiu.com’s list of the top 20 Chinese cities in terms of sales during the one-day event, followed by Shanghai, Shenzhen and Chengdu.

The overall results showed that while there were more luxury-item shoppers in the bigger cities, people from smaller towns spent more per person, although there were fewer of them. So this seems to show that there is more money in bigger cities, which seems to be true of every country in the world.

If we can learn anything from this, it is that European luxury brands are killing it in China. And, that we must institute Singles Day here at once, people. Let’s get on it!

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How to Avoid the Biggest Digital Marketing Mistakes

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Mistakes are part of digital marketing. What’s important, however, is making sure you’re avoiding preventable mistakes that could kill your campaign.

When it comes to digital marketing, mistakes are all but guaranteed to happen. After all, marketing your company is very much a process of trial and error.

The key, however, is minimising the impact of these mistakes and avoiding those you shouldn’t be making in the first place. Of course, this is much easier said than done, especially for businesses, many of whom still practice and believe in many traditional marketing techniques.

Not that there’s anything wrong with keeping things classic, but there’s no denying that traditional marketing – even “traditional guerrilla marketing”– is sometimes completely different from internet marketing.

And this is where mistakes often happen. Writing for Inc., Neil Patel notes, “These mistakes cost money, traffic opportunity, and growth. Unfortunately, marketers make these mistakes because they fail to truly understand how to leverage their skills and improve their approach.”

Digital marketing requires a significant investment in terms of time and resources. The last thing you want to do is to waste your efforts doing things that are taking your online presence farther away from your goals.

Here are some of the most common digital marketing mistakes your company might be guilty of making.

Marketing Without any Goals

If you’re writing on your blog or posting on social media without any real goals, you might as well as be wandering around aimlessly on the internet. One of the most common mistakes many digital marketers make is not setting any goals before launching their campaign.

Goals are critical for evaluating the success of your digital marketing efforts, whether it’s in the context of sales, sign ups (for newsletters), messages, or phone calls.

“Goal setting is the backbone of marketing. Goals help us prove how effective we are, keep us focused and push us to succeed,” says Amber Klein of Hive Digital Strategy. “And while we know how important goals are to measure our success, more than 80% of small business owners do not keep track of their business goals.”

With no goals, you have no direction. With no direction, you have no way of knowing your campaign is successful. And if you don’t have benchmarks for success/failure, what’s the point of marketing your business?

You Don’t Know Who Your Audience Is

Marketing your small business on the internet is one thing, but all you are doing is wasting time and resources if you do not know whom you’re reaching out to.

It’s not enough to just say “potential clients,” because that could mean anyone.

Even if you’re creating insightful killer content, you’re only setting yourself up to fail if you’re not promoting your content to the right audience at the right time. Chances are your niche is already saturated with content, making it difficult to stand out.

The trick is figuring out just whom you want to market to.

“Identifying your target audience is the first step in any type of marketing endeavour,” says Neil Patel in a Forbes write-up. “Tragically, it’s also easy to overlook. Don’t make this mistake. Study your audience, and much of your marketing will take care of itself.”

The most basic way to understand your audience is by creating buyer personas – semi-fictional representations of your ideal customer/client, complete with personal descriptions as well as behaviours.

You’re Not Putting Your Customers First

Many marketing teams make the mistake of boxing themselves inside echo chambers, where all they do is strategise and plan about things they like, but not so much the things their customers actually do.

This rookie mistake is something you can easily avoid if you focus your entire campaign on putting your customers first.

At its core, digital marketing is about doing the following:

  • Attracting
  • Engaging
  • Educating
  • Nurturing
  • Converting
  • Retaining

And naturally, all these things involve your customers. The experience you provide must be tailored to their needs and preferences, which fortunately you can know through data analytics and engagement evaluation. To put it simply, the customer must always come first.

You’re Not Being Social on Social Media

While there are certainly many businesses building a presence on social media, many of them use platforms like Facebook and Twitter not so much to engage their audience, but as a way to simply promote their firms with ad-like content.

This is not what social media is about. Yes, you can broadcast information about yourself, but this should not be your priority. Social media is a way to be social—to interact and engage your audience with genuine dialogue.

In other words, you need to respond to your audience and not just post something and leave them alone in the comments section. Your community will come to respect you more if you genuinely want to build a relationship with them, which can only be a good thing for your firm in the long run.

Conclusion

In summary, the 4 most common mistakes digital marketers make are ignoring the importance of setting goals, failing to understand your audience, not putting your customers first, and misusing social media.

Although it would seem these are ‘no brainer’ mistakes, you would be surprised just how many marketers, even those with quite a bit of experience under their belt, are guilty of making them.

 

Author: Qamar Zaman a Dallas based website conversion expert.

 

 

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Want Your Band to be Famous? Then Get Your Music on Video Games

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There’s a whole genre of music that has grown inside the world of gaming. Many now-famous bands got their mainstream breakthrough thanks to this process. So if you have a band, you need to read this.

By Nicole Buckler

The symbiotic relationship between music and video games is now so established that a games studio called Bugbear Entertainment is searching for bands to submit music to them. The winning tunes will be played inside their latest racing game: Wreckfest.

Bugbear Entertainment specialises in action driving. They have been making car games for sixteen years, starting with Rally Trophy. They are best known for the critically acclaimed demolition racing series FlatOut (2004-2007, PC, PS2, Xbox, Xbox 360) and street racing title Ridge Racer Unbounded (2013, PC, PS3, Xbox 360).

As of yesterday, Bugbear are calling for bands everywhere to send in their tunes to accompany gamers while they race and smash the crap out of each other in their latest game. The winning prize is $3,500 and there are nine runner-up prizes of $1,000 per track. But it is not the money that’s the real prize: it is exposure to their gamers that is the real coup. There are hundreds and thousands of them.

The winning music will be featured on games released on Playstation 4, Xbox One and PC. Bands featured in previous Bugbear releases have included upcoming indie bands and household names like Megadeth, Rob Zombie, Fall Out Boy, Audioslave and Skrillex.

So if you have a band, get on it. You can apply here.

Want to check out the competition? You can listen to the other entries here.

This innovative approach to sourcing music is evidence of a growing realisation amongst game designers, that there are thousands of unheard of bands out there. According to Bugbear, “They just need the right chance to have their music heard internationally, and by the right demographic to get to that critical mass of fans to push them to the next level of popularity.”

For more established bands like Megadeth, putting their music inside high-selling video games offers a symbiotic relationship. Gaming studios can promote Megadeth music to their gamers, and Megadeth’s fans might be more open to buying games that have their favourite tunes in it. It’s a match made in cross-promotion heaven.

Bugbear is very interested in getting the sound right for their games, which is why they are letting their gamers cast their votes on the tracks they want to hear while playing the game. Happy customers, more sales. Well, in theory, anyway.

Music has always been a vital part of the gaming experience. The aim of Wreckfest is to create an immersive experience for the player, one where the in-game radio feeds the road rage in all of us. While you can blast your tunes out on your REAL car radio, you can’t smash the crap out of other drivers while doing so. But, in Wreckfest, you can. What’s not to like? Smashing other people up and decent tunes? It’s win-win.

The Wreckfest title will be published soon by THQ Nordic. While it is not yet for sale, you can have a little preview play of it here.

Drivers…start your engines.

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Could the generation lost to the art of branding building be saved by the oldest medium in the world?

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By Guy Phillipson

For a medium that commands over 50% of total UK ad spend, online advertising is but a babe in the firmament of media.

At the age of just 22 – despite its many well-documented growing pains – digital media has become by far the biggest line item on marketers’ media plans, largely due to its targeting and accountability credentials.

Let’s compare and contrast with outdoor advertising – we’re talking the oldest medium in the world here. The ancient Egyptians used papyrus to make sales messages on wall posters; and political campaigns have even been found in the ruins of Pompeii. Wind forward to the 1790s and the invention of lithography was the launchpad for mass produced billboards, and by the 1860s the first outdoor advertising trading companies were formed.

Unlike the rest of the print sector today, outdoor advertising revenue has been unaffected by the unrelenting rise of online advertising. In fact, it’s going through a digital renaissance which I believe will spur healthy growth in the sector, and put a shot in the arm of classic brand advertising, which has undoubtedly suffered at the hands of online performance media.

There are two key reasons for the current decline in brand advertising

The first dates back to the recession. In 2009 – when a whopping £2bn was wiped off the nation’s collective media plans – search advertising was the only format to grow (by 9% if my memory serves me correctly). Every scrap of spend came under the FD’s microscope, and while traditional display media suffered double-digit cuts, the easily trackable ROI from search powered its stellar growth to command the £5bn is does today.

The second major reason is generational. Media planners are nearly all millennials (at iCrossing the average age is 31), and they live and breathe mobile and social media. So with increased sales and measurable results at the centre of every client brief, the candy of online performance marketing increasingly trumps the classic branding approach.

The question is, have these two dynamics combined to create a whole generation lost to the art of brand building?

Back in 1986, at the age of 26, I became the assistant advertising manager at (now long gone) Visionhire. In those days, dear readers, half the living room tellies and nearly all the VCRs were rented. I’d read ‘Ogilvy on Advertising’, which extolled the virtues of brand and response techniques, then largely confined to coupons in the press, nascent direct marketing and promotion at point of sale – all known as ‘below the line’ techniques. All the big money went ‘above the line’, which offered two commercial TV channels, a huge audience for the press, plus some radio and outdoor. Media fragmentation wasn’t a thing in those days. Hence the long, boozy agency lunches.

But we learnt to totally respect the branding cycle – how long it took to plan, produce and execute a campaign. And how long it would take to build awareness, consideration and purchase intent; usually several months, which was also the typical timescale for the squeaky-bum presentation from Millward Brown who delivered our Awareness Index (AI) scores on the doors, against direct competitors.

Digital Out Of Home will inspire today’s young planners

Being ever the optimist, I don’t truly believe the wonderful art and science of brand building will be lost on today’s millennial marketers and media planners. I happen to believe that the oldest medium – now reborn as Digital Out Of Home (DOOH) will be a catalyst for growth in brand advertising, offering many of the accountable attributes of online display media and hardly any of the current brand safety and ad verification challenges.

Here I’d like to congratulate JCDecaux, who filled the Hansom Hall at St Pancras for their impressive Digital UpFronts presentation this month. First off – credit to JCD for repositioning their brand alongside the big pureplays and setting out their DOOH stall for the buyers, now that it accounts for nearly half of all outdoor revenue. And it’s growing at +30%.

The story is compelling.

98% of the population sees an out of home ad each week, and for millennials it’s easily number one for reach and time spent, according to IPA Touchpoints. As a subset, DOOH offers 49% UK reach with 1.3bn weekly viewed impressions.

That little word ‘viewed’ is music to the marketer’s ears. Digital outdoor is brand safe, there’s no ad fraud, and there’s no such thing as a non-viewable impression. And, they say, 99.5% of those impressions are generated by just four different aspect ratios, all offering video and animation in nice, large formats.

But the kids want programmatic! Step forward the JCDecaux SmartBRICS self-serve planning and buying platform which currently caters for half of the UK’s DOOH estate. Planners can set parameters down to street and frame level, complete with day-parts, numbers of impressions and ratings. They can even ad rules connected to the weather, or deliver moderated tweets as part of the creative. And post campaign, your viewed impressions report is independently verified by PwC.

Now if the delights of DOOH don’t reignite the branding buds of today’s marketers and planners, I’ll eat my best socks. It’s certainly inspired iCrossing’s media strategist, Lauretta Wood who seeks programmatic perfection by joining outdoor with mobile. Growth over the next few years is easy to predict, and the prospect of high visibility, high reach, location-based video ads is surely a no brainer for the contemporary advertiser.

Just imagine the enhanced effect when you sprinkle a bit of mobile and data over the creative for the perfect match between the oldest and the newest media? We’ll see more high profile award winners like the BA #Lookup campaign at Piccadilly Circus.

Then the generation lost to planet brand will surely come back in in to land.

By Guy Phillipson

Guy Phillipson is the chairman of iCrossing UK and the former CEO of the Internet Advertising Bureau UK.

Sourced from THEDRUM

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We are at “Peak Micro-Influencer” When a Hotel Company Hires a Bad Grandma to Attract New Customers

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An Insta-grandma called “Baddie Winkle” says she has been stealing your man since 1928.

By Nicole Buckler

Hotels.com have got together with a bad-ass granny who calls herself “Baddie Winkle” to encourage people to go travelling (staying in their hotels, of course). Using the hashtag #BadAssBucketList you can follow her adventures and even contribute yourself to the hashtag should you be a granny looking to feel up some prime young beef. I’m only in my 40s and I’m ready to join the squad.

Don’t touch, Weinstein

Baddie is promoting Hotels.com Rewards program, which gives players a one-night freebee in a hotel for every 10 stayed. She says, “I have always wanted to party in London, go to the Moulin Rouge in Paris and watch cheeky volleyball players do their thing on a beach in Brazil!” Now as a micro-influencer, she can unlock the “Perve Level: Brazilian” and other treasures on hotel.com’s dime. Which is nice work if you can get it. All the Insta-grandma has to do is to flit around a number of hotels, staying there and showing fans what she gets up to inside them. Baddie wrote on her Instagram page last week; “I’m international baby!”

International indeed. The 89-year-old microinfluencer even has her own celebrity fans, including Miley Cyrus, Khloe Kardashian and Nicole Richie. Perhaps they will be watching with glee as she mixes rooftop cocktails in NYC, rubs shoulders with NFL players, and helicopters over The Grand Canyon. It’s a tough life, but someone’s Nana has to do it.

Hmmm… slutty but hot.

It’s not just the rather wealthy grandparent market hotel.com are going for. According to the astonishing results of a recent survey, one in five people under 30 have confessed that their travel plans are inspired by their favourite oldies. Who knew that oldies could be travel inspirators? The marketing people at Hotels.com knew. Oh hell yes, they knew.

Damn she’s bad.

Baddie is bringing her granddaughter along on the trip, and this seems to fit in with accusations that millennials are a bunch of home-loving family-stalking squares. The previously-mentioned survey shows that 40 percent of millennials would prefer to complete their bucket lists with their parents or grandparents – that’s more than celebs (11 percent), siblings (28 percent) or on their own (25 percent).

What the….?

One in eight confessed that their gran (or nana) was cooler than them and travelled more than them. I am ashamed of millennials. Stop protesting over stupid crap and go and see the world you wasters!

Squad goals: Polyamory

And for those of us in marketing? Let’s remember that the best micro-influencers might be someone you haven’t considered before. Like grannies in leather dresses. Who are on their way to steal your man. Now would be a good time to panic.

 

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