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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.

 

By Jeff Beer.

The social network hits Cannes with new features for creative marketers to use on its Creative Hub platform.

In 2016, Facebook took in about $27 billion in ad revenue, second in the world only to Google’s monstrous $79 billion, and more than double the globe’s third-biggest advertising earner Comcast. So it’s understandable why the social network is an influential presence at the 2017 Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity.

The company is hosting a whole host of panel talks, discussion sessions, and more, between its own beachside speakers series, and execs like Sheryl Sandberg talking about how creative mobile advertising work can help brands build communities around their mission and products.

But behind the obligatory show of the Cannes Lions stage, Facebook is also taking the opportunity to unveil new tools for marketers to use on its platform, and talk to both agencies and brands about where to go from here.

“This year in Cannes one area of focus will be how marketing is becoming more agile,” says Carolyn Everson, Facebook’s VP of Global Marketing Solutions. “To move at the speed of the consumer and drive results, marketers must test, learn and iterate much more rapidly than they have in the past, and it’s our job to work across the industry, to build tools and solutions that will help marketers succeed in today’s mobile world.”

Last year at the festival, Facebook unveiled Creative Hub, an online platform for agencies and brands to more easily create ads for Facebook and Instagram. This week they’re launching two new features for Creative Hub around a more efficient way to test and distribute the ads created on the platform.

Agencies have praised working with the Creative Hub, so these new tools should only improve their ability to create and distribute ads. JWT New York executive creative director Ben James says the Creative Hub has completely changing the way they present work to clients. “Because of this tool, I think we’re going to see creative work from agencies speeding up dramatically when they understand and use this tool. We were shocked at how we could so easily share work straight to our phones. We just can’t educate people about this fast enough.” 

Droga5 strategist Adam Van Dyke says these tools help them stay as up-to-date as possible on the ever-changing social media landscape. “The Facebook Creative Hub is a valuable tool that provides creative inspiration, helps us to understand the intricacies of each ad format, and allows us to easily mock up work for presentations,” says Van Dyke.

The first new Creative Hub feature will give marketers a snapshot of video results, insights advertisers need to optimize their ads based on real metrics, to make sure it’s perfect for the mobile feed. The second major development is the ability to create and deliver your ad, all from directly within Creative Hub, cutting out the time and, often, extra formatting of ads when being sent between creative agencies and media agencies or other partners. Both touch on Everson’s themes of agility and speed.

Graham Mudd, director of product marketing at Facebook says these tools not only help their marketing partners, but also Facebook itself make its ad system more efficient.

“The new tools allow a creative agency to test a campaign or work, then once it decides it’s good to go, allows it to bundle it up and pass it to the media agency who puts the budget behind it and executes the buy,” says Mudd. “Underlying this is that a connection has been made between the creative assets, the creative agency, the media agency and the advertiser, can now all be associated together in our systems, which we’re hoping will allow us to continue to build functionality that continues to connect these  areas of the (advertising) ecosystem.”

The theme of agility and speed continues in the company’s annual Creative and Client Council meeting, which puts two of Facebook’s advisory councils in one room to discuss industry issues both generally and how Facebook can help address them.

Facebook Creative Shop chief creative officer Mark D’Arcy says the meeting will involve new idea presentations, a look at the year that was, and a lot of discussion around the need for more collaboration between the clients and agencies of the world. In that sense it’s continuing a conversation D’Arcy spoke about here last year.

“We spend a lot of time in our industry talking about what we make–and Cannes is a perfect example of that–and I think one of the big conversations we want to have is around how we build, and the agility of how we build, and the way in which the creative process needs to look at other ways to come together,” he says. “How do we work at a greater velocity? How do we approach diversity? How do we approach collaborative credit? These are questions that come up in our industry around the globe. So we talk a lot about providing forums for these questions to be addressed.”

By Jeff Beer

Jeff Beer is a staff editor at Fast Company, covering advertising, marketing, and brand creativity. He lives in Toronto. More

Sourced from Fast Company

Sourced from Retail TouchPoints

Despite producing a lower conversion rate than their desktop counterparts, direct response mobile campaigns on Facebook actually provide a 72% higher return on ad spend (ROAS), according to data from Rakuten Marketing.

On average, Facebook mobile ads generate:

  • 63% higher click-through rates than desktop;

  • 33% lower conversion rates than desktop; and

  • A 70% lower cost-per-click rate than desktop.

So while consumers are more likely to click on a Facebook ad on mobile but are less likely to convert, the much cheaper cost-per-click rate means retailers can optimize their marketing and advertising strategies within the social network and prioritize mobile investments.

Bob Buch, SVP of Social at Rakuten Marketing, noted that while the ROAS results initially surprised him due to the latency of the mobile experience compared to the desktop, cheaper mobile advertising costs combined with 1.03 billion daily mobile Facebook users gave plenty of reason for mobile’s prosperity.

“It’s basic supply and demand…seemingly everyone uses Facebook on their mobile phone,” Buch said in an interview with Retail TouchPoints. “The people that are accessing Facebook on desktop are becoming a rarer breed, even though there’s still a lot of them.”

Advertising on Facebook mobile costs less than the desktop option, he added. “If you are spending less to reach those people [via mobile] and to get those clicks, then even if the conversion rate is lower, the overall return on ad spend is going to be higher,” said Buch.

Social Ads Bring In 192% More Revenue Than Expected

The survey also revealed discrepancies between Facebook conversion tracking and web analytics tools, which are costing advertisers insights into as much as 192% more attributable revenue and the higher ROAS for mobile.

While the discrepancies between Facebook conversion tracking and web analytics platform are significant for mobile, they are minimal for desktop, at only 3% on average. While one might think that the inherent challenges associated with cross-device measurement accounts for the disproportionately high discrepancy on mobile, this is not the case.

So why should retailers believe Facebook’s tracking data? For one, Facebook conversion tracking captures all interactions after the shopper clicks through the advertisement, but many standard web analytics tools typically only capture the last interaction the user had before clicking through.

Additionally, web analytics platforms that rely on tracking cookies cannot accurately measure cross-device conversions, since shoppers can block them on desktop and mobile. If shoppers block cookies online, it becomes nearly impossible to measure conversions and attributable revenue for cross-device campaigns.

Sourced from Retail TouchPoints