Triton Digital Blog
Posted in In Case You Missed It, Uncategorized on 02/28/2011 02:03 pm by mwalter
Why Digital Ads Are the Way to Reach U.S. Hispanics U.S. Hispanics have about a trillion dollars in purchasing power—and they’re far more likely than the general population to buy something after seeing an online ad.
By Courtney Rubin
U.S. Hispanics are 58 percent more likely to click on search ads than the general population, says a new study from Google and global research firm OTX. In general, U.S Hispanics are more likely to remember online ads—especially video ads—when shopping. And three out of five bought something after seeing online ads while they did research—22 percent more than the national average.
The research comes on the heels of a separate study in December from consumer and media research firm Scarborough Research, which found mobile phone usage is increasing faster among U.S. Hispanics than the total population.
Scarborough found the percentage of Hispanic adults who use a cell phone has jumped 26 percent since 2005, versus 18 percent for all adults. Smartphone growth among Hispanics is also outpacing that of the general population: 19 percent of Hispanic adults live in a household that owns one or more smartphones, versus 5 percent in 2005. Just under a quarter (23 percent) of the general population live in households with smartphones, up from 9 percent in 2005.
U.S. Hispanics also are more likely to use their mobile phones for more than just making calls. They text at greater rates than average: 64 percent compared to 56 percent. They’re also more likely to use their phones to download music (22 percent compared to 15 percent); play games (19 percent versus 15 percent), and tap into social networks (12 percent compared to 10 percent).
The U.S. Hispanic market is so important that Google has put a special team in place to help advertisers connect with the market, one of Google’s fastest growing. “There are 46 million U.S. Hispanics, 30 million of who are online,” Google Mexico general manager John Farrell told MediaPost. “They have about a trillion dollars in purchasing power, making it a customer segment marketers can’t ignore.”
“We’ve discovered that the digital world is the one that influences Latinos most at the time they make buying decisions and it’s something that advertisers should take more into account,” Mark Lopez, head of Google’s new U.S. Hispanic unit, told Spanish news agency Efe last week.
He added: “It’s true that we Latinos have a broader family nucleus and group of friends and perhaps that’s why we make more use of the social alternatives offered by the Web.” According to U.S. Census Bureau figures released in December, Hispanics under 20 years old make up a quarter of the total youth in the U.S. Hispanics are expected to make up a quarter of the total U.S. population by 2050.
Study: Nine In 10 Marketers Going Mobile In 2011
By Mark Walsh – MediaPost 1-31-11
The vast majority of marketers–88%–plan to pursue mobile marketing this year, according to a new survey by the Association of National Advertisers in partnership with the MMA. Further, 75% will increase spending on mobile marketing efforts, by an average of 59% compared to a year ago.
The survey found that nearly two-thirds (62%) of advertisers used some form of mobile marketing on behalf of brands in 2010. The study doesn’t specify exactly how much marketers plan to spend in mobile this year, but growth rates always look higher starting from a small base.
Patrick Moorhead, mobile lead at Draftfcb, told MediaPost late last year that more client budgets for mobile had increased to the range of $100,000 to $200,000 in 2010, from under $50,000 in 2009. Forrester last week issued a report predicting mobile ad spending will top $1 billion this year.
The main take away from the ANA-MMA study would simply be that nearly nine in 10 marketers plan to at least stick a toe in the mobile waters this year.
The five most common types of mobile investments companies are making so far are in mobile Web sites, apps, SMS, display ads and search, according to the new survey. What do brands like about mobile? That it offers portable Web access, the ability to deliver promotions to consumers on-the-go, and convenience for “immediate consumer support/sales.” Somehow, that sounds like an oxymoron.
On the down side, marketers cited a familiar list of drawbacks associated with mobile — including a lack of standard metrics, a lack of understanding about mobile by key executives at the company, and an inability to prove ROI. To date, only 19% of those surveyed say their companies have created a new internal group to manage mobile marketing. Responsibility usually falls to the digital marketing team.
The survey was conducted between September and October 2010. After determining the projected rate of mobile adoption by marketers in 2011, the study asked 97 respondents–all client-side marketers drawn mainly from the ANA’s membership–about their experience with, and views on, the emerging medium
Report: Facebook Ad Performance Is Abysmal
Average click-through rate was 0.051 percent in 2010
Adweek By mike Shields 1-31-11
Facebook’s advertising business is soaring. Yet the performance of the average Facebook ad is abysmal. At least that’s according to a new report issued by the analytics firm Webtrends that recently examined 11,000 different Facebook ad campaigns which totaled 4.5 billion impressions. Webtrends found that in 2009 the average click-through rate on Facebook was 0.063 percent. That figure slipped to 0.051 percent in 2010.
Because of that decline, CPMs on Facebook have crept upward, going from 17 cents in 2009 to 25 cents last year.
The only ad categories that were able to crack 0.1 percent click-through rates were “tabloids and blogs” (0.165 percent) and “media and entertainment” (0.154 percent). The worst performing ad category on Facebook, per Webtrends, was healthcare, which generated 0.011 percent click-through rates and an average cost-per-click of $1.27.
However, Facebook’s CPMs are still relatively low in the grand scheme of things (consider that video ads on Hulu can sometimes fetch $50 CPMs). And while many advertisers turn to Facebook to drive traffic or sell products, many traditional brands use the site for its social value, not its propensity to drive clicks.
Yet even “social ads”—at least as defined by Webtrends—are only effective for so long. “Out of the ads we measured, we found that interest-targeted ads began to burn out after three to five days,” reads the report. “Eventually the rotting CTR leads to Facebook deactivating the ad, and it’s back to the drawing board.”
Regardless, advertisers continue to flock to Facebook. According to eMarketer, ad spending on Facebook will reach $2.19 billion in the U.S. in 2011 and close to $4 billion worldwide.
Major Video Ad Networks Serve More Ads in December
Clickz By jack Marshall 2-2-11
Following its acquisition of ScanScout in November, video ad network Tremor Media more than doubled the number of ads it served to U.S. users in December, according to data from comScore.
Meanwhile, rival networks ADAP.TV and BrightRoll also enjoyed substantial growth, growing the number of ads they served by more than 200,000 impressions each.
ComScore estimates Tremor served 1.02 billion ad impressions in December, representing 114 percent growth compared with the 477 million it served in November. The network also grew its reach from 22.4 percent of U.S. users to 28.6 percent during the same period.
As a result of that growth, the gap between Tremor and market leader Hulu has narrowed significantly in terms of the volume of ads served by each.
U.S. Smartphone Penetration Up 60 Percent in Q4 2010
Click Z By Jack Marshall 2-9-11
The number of smartphone users in the U.S. rose 60 percent in the three months ending December 2010 versus the same period in 2009, according to data from comScore.
The measurement firm estimates 63.2 million people in the U.S. owned a smartphone device during that time, compared with around 38.7 million in the final three months of 2009.
Meanwhile, the mobile operating system space is increasingly becoming a two horse race, with Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android proving the only two platforms to achieve growth in Q4, on a quarter-over-quarter basis.
Market leader RIM experienced substantial declines in that period, losing market share of 5.7 percentage points, while Google enjoyed growth of 7.3 percentage points – overtaking Apple and placing its overall market share at almost 29 percent. Despite the launch of its Windows Phone 7 operating system in mid-October, Microsoft lost 1.5 percentage points of market share, while Palm also suffered a 0.5 percentage point loss.
If Android continues its growth in adoption at its current rate, it’s on track to become the dominant smartphone OS by the end of March, according to comScore’s figures.
Mobile Is A Must For Reaching U.S. Hispanics
MediaPost 2-10-11 By Lee Vann
We know Hispanics love cell phones, especially smartphones. But now several recent studies have confirmed that marketers looking to reach Hispanics should consider mobile as the primary tactic. Below is a recap of these studies as well as examples of some great Hispanic mobile websites.
Google recently released a report, “Four Truths about U.S. Hispanic Consumers,” that should be an eye-opener for anyone interested in reaching the nation’s largest minority group. Among the reports’ findings:
- 93% of U.S. Hispanics use a mobile phone regularly
- 45% of U.S. Hispanic mobile phone users have smartphones compared to 34% of general market
- 87% of U.S. Hispanic mobile phone users have contract plans and only 8% have pre-paid plans
February 2011 data from The Nielsen Company is consistent with Google’s findings; this data also shows that 45% of Hispanic mobile users have smartphones, the highest among all ethnic groups, including Whites.
If that data is not convincing enough about the importance of reaching Hispanics through mobile devices, Scarborough Research released a study in December of 2010 that shows Hispanics are extremely active mobile users. Of note:
- 64% of U.S. Hispanic mobile users text message vs. 56% of general market
- 22% of U.S. Hispanic mobile users download or listen to music vs. 15% of general market
- 12% of U.S. Hispanic mobile users use social networks on their mobile vs. 10% of general market
E-Mail Usage Plummets as Teens Turn to Mobile, Social Networking
Clickz 2-11-12
E-mail is out, social networking is in, and all the advertising in the world can’t topple Google, according to the ComScore 2010 U.S. Digital Year in Review.
The report, which was released on Monday, provides a snapshot of usage trends across the digital space. Perhaps most noteworthy was the shift in e-mail usage, particularly among young people. Total Web-based e-mail use was down eight percent last year, led by a walloping 59 percent drop among 12 to 17 year olds. The second biggest drop was among 25 to 34 year olds (18 percent) and third biggest was among 45 to 54 year olds (12 percent). The only age category to increase its use of e-mail in 2010 was 55 to 64 year olds (up 22 percent), which the report attributed to continuing Internet adoption among that age group.
Communications channels” such as mobile and social networks, said Andrew Lipsman, spokesperson for the Reston, VA-based research firm, which are siphoning off e-mail users. However, those channels are primarily affecting social communication, he said, accounting for the much larger drop-off among those under 17.
Social networking continued its rise as the dominant Internet activity, with nine out of every 10 Internet users visiting a social networking site each month in 2010. “Social networking sites accounted for 12 percent of all time spent online in 2010 with the average Internet user spending more than 4.5 hours on these sites each month,” the report read. Women continued to spend more of their Web browsing time on such sites (17 percent) than men did (12 percent).
Facebook was still the 800-pound gorilla in the social networking space, adding millions of users and accounting for 10 percent of all U.S. page views for the year. Three out of every 10 Internet sessions included a visit to the site. Despite MySpace’s very public struggles – its audience declined 27 percent and total time spent on the site declined by half – the News Corp. property held on to the number two spot.
Tumblr was a surprise success among social networking sites in 2010, upping its monthly visitors to 6.7 million, an increase of 168 percent. Formspring.me also caught on with young users, growing over 1000 percent for the year and attracting 5.3 million visitors in December.
Lipsman attributed Tumblr’s success to its unique balance of blogging and social networking. “It seems to tap into a couple of trends in terms of social media,” he said. “And I think the simplicity of it is starting to catch on.”
In the search category, despite the continued marketing onslaught of Microsoft’s Bing, Google maintained its share of about 66 percent. Yahoo sites maintained their distant second of about 16 percent despite a minor drop of about 1 percent, and Microsoft sites came in third with 12 percent, a two percent increase over 2009.
Google also dominated “powered by” searches, Web searches conducted at third-party entities that carry the branding of major search engines. Google owned 24 percent of searches on the “powered by” market, whereas Bing owned 6.2 percent. Last year was the first time ComScore tracked the “powered by” market.
Location-Based Marketing To Diners To ‘Explode’
MediaPost 2-14-11 by Karlene Lukovitz
Restaurants’ use of location-based marketing to promote to and drive consumers to a particular restaurant while they are mobile will “explode” in 2011, predicts research provider Packaged Facts.
As consumers’ uptake of location-based services continues to mushroom, with check-in services such as Foursquare, Gowalla, Facebook Places, Twitter geolocation and competitors “not only becoming ubiquitous, but also more sophisticated,” context-aware restaurant advertising will take off “sharply” this year, the report notes.
Indeed, to date, Starbucks routinely shows by far the largest volumes of Foursquare check-ins among major retailers, with McDonald’s generally in second place and Chipotle and Burger King within the top 10, show the weekly Foursquare check-in stats published by Advertising Age.
Not only are smartphone as well as overall cell phone penetration levels skyrocketing, one in five (21%) consumers who consider going out to restaurants “part of their lifestyles” already uses cell phones or other portable devices to place orders, and nearly four in 10 adult consumers use social media platforms to learn about restaurants, according to a PF consumer survey conducted last October. (This is complemented by data from Nielsen showing that 25% of smartphone users and 14% of feature phone owners report using a dining/restaurant app during the past 30 days.)
And in case there was any doubt as to why restaurant brands are so eager to harness social media, PF points out that the scale of Facebook interaction — including via its own Places location-based app — not only enables restaurant brands to imprint themselves on consumers and make relevant, well-timed offers, it is a critical means of building a pool of consumers for purposes of ramping up location-based advertising and promotions.
According to the report, Starbucks has more than 1,700 Facebook friends per restaurant unit, and Facebook users are over 70% more likely than average to visit Starbucks. Chains with more than 1,500 friends per unit include Buffalo Wild Wings, The Cheesecake Factory and Chick-fil-A.
Chipotle Mexican Grill has nearly 1,200 Facebook friends per unit. Engaged Facebook users are nearly 70% more likely than average to patronize this chain, and “hyper-engaged” users are more than 85% more likely.
Meanwhile, Twitter and its geolocation service are offering restaurants a significant opportunity to reach a younger, more urban, multicultural audience, because of its particular popularity among Hispanic, African-American and Asian populations, PF’s analysts point out. Twitter has also proven a critical tool for attracting patrons for urban food trucks and mobile foodservice units — which are increasingly common among big brands, as well as independents.
Mobile devices and technology are also driving rapid restaurant adoption of in-restaurant, point-of-sale promotions and auto payment systems. PF predicts that a growing number of large QSRs will be testing phone-based payment systems by year’s end, and will also increasingly tie mobile payments to loyalty programs (which in turn enhance ability to make future, transaction-informed mobile offers).
“The restaurant industry is in the midst of being shaped by the convergence of the mobile, always connected, consumer; location-based and context-aware technological innovation; and mobile payments — all of which are already demonstrating the potential to redefine how to cultivate restaurant guest loyalty, incentivize dining occasions and better tailor marketing messages,” sums up Packaged Facts publisher Don Montuori.
Seniors Slowly Shift to Digital
Emarketer 2-16-11
In 2010, seniors ages 65 and older made up 13% of the US population. By 2030, when baby boomers will have aged into the cohort, the US Census Bureau predicts nearly one in five Americans will be seniors—a marketing target that should not be ignored.
eMarketer estimates that as of 2011, less than half of this population will be online. But internet penetration will increase steadily as more tech-savvy boomers become seniors. By 2015, eMarketer forecasts, there will be over 26 million senior internet users in the US.
“TV, newspapers and radio continue to dominate seniors’ regular media habits,” said Mike Froggatt, eMarketer research analyst and author of the new report “Demographic Profile—Seniors.” “However, internet penetration is expected to rise among seniors and the overall online senior population will increase dramatically, making this an important growth demographic for marketers.”
Mobile phone penetration is significantly higher, though seniors still prefer landlines: 77% said they were a necessity, vs. 29% who said the same of wireless phones, according to Pew Research Center. Nearly seven in 10 Americans ages 65 and older will have a mobile phone this year, vs. 75.5% overall, eMarketer estimates.
Seniors who own cellphones are far less likely than younger age groups to send text messages. They also have lower adoption rates when it comes to the mobile internet and smartphones, but falling prices and carrier subsidies should make both more appealing in the future.
Also growing in appeal are social networking sites. Seniors, like those in other age groups, mainly use social networks for connecting with friends and family. Between 2008 and 2010, social networking increased nearly sixfold among seniors, from 4.7% to 28%. eMarketer forecasts social network penetration will rise from 31% of senior internet users this year to 36% by 2013.
“Social networks are gaining traction slowly among older users,” said Froggatt. “For now, online seniors’ main activities are email and searches for useful and age-appropriate topics. Marketers targeting seniors online will have the most success with email marketing and targeted search and display ads around popular topics such as politics, health information, financial services and travel.”
Pandora Claims 30 Million+ Monthly Listeners as IPO Approaches
Wired By Eliot Van Buskirk, evolver.fm 2-18-11
Tim Westergren demonstrates Pandora in the car to the author at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last month.
Pandora announced last month that it has registered over 80 million users since chief strategy officer Tim Westergren, founded the company slightly over a decade ago. That’s a lot of people, considering that Pandora is only available in the United States, and that would be more than a quarter of the population.
But how many of those accounts are active? In other words, how many of the people who have ever registered for Pandora still listen to it?
Pandora spokeswoman Deborah Roth told Evolver.fm that as of January 2011, over 30 million people were “active users” of Pandora, meaning that they listen to it on one platform or another at least once per month.
On one hand, this means that the majority of the 80 million people who Pandora claims have registered have stopped listening.
On the other, it means that approximately one out of every ten Americans is a regular Pandora user (or perhaps slightly less, given that some listen from elsewhere), and that’s counting those without internet access. By that measure, 30 million monthly users is quite a high number indeed.
Having weathered a royalty battle that nearly drove Pandora out of business — in part by convincing over 1.7 million of its users to contact their congressional representatives — the company now prepares for an IPO valued at up to $100 million, even as profitability remains somewhat elusive.
Pandora notes in its S-1 form to potential investors that even though the post-protest royalty rates are sustainable, or at least close to it, they increase proportionally with the company’s user base. This creates a challenge for its sustained expansion, which is how Pandora says it expects to return profits for investors:
“A key element of our strategy is to aggressively increase the number of listeners and listener hours to increase our market penetration. However, as our number of listener hours increases, the royalties we pay for content acquisition also increase. We have not in the past generated, and may not in the future generate, sufficient revenue from the sale of advertising and subscriptions to offset such royalty expenses.”
Pandora has been profitable in at least one quarter to date, and smartphone adoption has been kind to the company, doubling its audience according to Westergren. He sees the car as the next frontier for Pandora’s continued expansion into the mainstream. And the cash infusion Pandora is about to receive should be enough to power that expansion past the smartphone, to the television, car, and for all we know, the refrigerator and toaster.
As the company’s S-1 form indicates, there’s no guarantee that Pandora will achieve permanent profitability, but it has already succeeded in another sense. By attracting over 30 million regular users who listened for over five billion hours last quarter, this digital music company has paid copyright holders, including artists, over $100 million since 2007, proving that it’s possible to make interactive radio pay — for someone, at least.
Digital Coupon Users Are An Upscale Market
2-23-11 MediaPost
According to the Coupons.com Digital Coupons Trends Report for 2010, more than $1.2 billion in digital coupons savings was issued in 2010, representing a 41% growth over the year before. Digital coupons dramatically outpaced the growth of their newspaper counterparts compared to coupons distributed in newspapers of 7%.
Steven Boal, CEO of Coupons.com, says that “… more and more consumers are making digital coupons a part of their shopping routine… across the entire digital domain, including the Web, social media, consumer electronics, mobile phones, etcetera… (and) brand marketers are increasingly engaging with consumers via digital offers… ”
Recent data shows that users of digital coupons have higher household incomes and are better educated than users of newspaper coupons and the general population overall, dispelling the perceived low-brow stigma of couponing.
The consumer who prints digital coupons has an average household income of $105,000, 26% higher income level than the U.S. average. 36% of those who use digital coupons have a college degree, compared to 28% of those who use newspaper coupons and 26% of the general populace, Adults with household income of over $100,000 are twice as likely to have redeemed coupons printed from an online source than adults with household income less than $35,000. Also, adults with college degrees are almost twice as likely to have used coupons in the prior six months as those who didn’t graduate from high school.
Cereal was by far the most popular coupon category in 2010, followed by Yogurt.
The South is big on savings: more than one-third of the top 20 frugal cities are in the Southern region of the United States. For the second year in a row, Atlanta takes the top spot on the Most Frugal U.S. Cities list for 2010, according to the report. On average, regular users of Coupons.com in Atlanta printed or saved to a loyalty card more than $1000.00 dollars in coupon savings from the site in 2010, almost twice the amount of savings in 2009.
Coupon access via mobile device varies by city regardless of their position on the overall Most Frugal Cities List. Savers in Oklahoma City, New Orleans, Las Vegas and Philadelphia are quick to look to their mobile device to maximize savings and advance on the On-the-Go list relative to their position on the Most Frugal U.S. Cities list, while Minneapolis, Cleveland and Seattle were lower on the On-the-Go list relative to their position on the Most Frugal U.S. Cities list.
Representing over 16% of the U.S. population, more than 49 million American consumers are now using online coupons, up from 45 million in 2009. Of the 49 million online coupon users, 14.8 million have not read or looked into the Sunday newspaper within the prior six months, a 13% increase over 13.1 million in 2008.
Weak economic conditions have been a primary factor driving the use of coupons overall. U.S. consumers appear to have an insatiable desire for deals and savings, as is evident by the increased popularity of the broad range of saving offers, such as digital coupons, daily deals, flash buying and online coupon codes. Research consistently shows that even when economic conditions improve, 8 out of 10 U.S. adults plan to continue to engage in couponing activities, concludes the report.
Posted in Social Media, Webinar on 02/24/2011 04:50 pm by Jim Kerr
As part of the development of Triton’s various social media initiatives, we’ve had ongoing discussions directly with Facebook over ways Triton can help radio maximize their use of that important social network. In the course of those discussions, we realized that it would be worthwhile for radio to have a solid grounding in the broad array of tools that Facebook provides to media companies to better utilize its site. Our friends at Facebook agreed, and I’m proud to announce that Facebook director of media partnerships Nick Grudin will join me in a webinar on March 2 at 10 AM pacific time to discuss maximizing your station’s use of Facebook.
Nick will specifically discuss the core functions and tools that Facebook provides to media companies, along with some examples of well-done integrations. I will dig deeper into what a media company can do with Facebook using their advanced development tools and the other things that Triton has been building into things like streaming players, websites, and loyalty databases.
I hope you join me. You can register for the webinar here: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/361806248
Posted in In Case You Missed It on 01/31/2011 01:25 pm by mwalter
Online Ad Spending Set to Break Records
eMarketer 1-3-11 After 2009’s downslide, US online ad spending in 2010 will rise by 13.9%, reaching a record $25.8 billion. And in that same vein, internet ad spending will hit new peaks in each of the following four years, passing $30 billion in 2012 and breaking the $40 billion barrier in 2014.
The more granular quarter-by-quarter picture shows a record spend of $6.42 billion in Q3 2010, as reported by the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers (IAB-PwC), followed by a new record of $7.25 billion in Q4, according to eMarketer projections. “A spending peak in Q4 is likely, primarily because Q4 has been the biggest quarter for US online ad spending every year but one since 1999,” said David Hallerman, eMarketer principal analyst and author of the new report, “US Ad Spending: Online Outshines Other Media.”
Such spending will bring double-digit growth to online advertising for five consecutive years. The internet is the only major ad medium that will experience annual spending increases so high.
“With multiple ways to go online and with more activities once they get there, people spend more time online,” said Hallerman. “Simply put, marketers increasingly know that to reach their target audience, they need to advertise more online.”
Online advertising is recovering more rapidly than the overall economy, as evidenced by online’s gain in share of GDP. Internet ad spendings contribution to the GDP increased by 10% or more every quarter from Q3 2003 through Q1 2008. Then came the recession, and both online ad spending and the national GDP declined. However, in Q3 2010, online ad spendings share of the GDP rose by 11.66% year over year.
By contrast, total media ad spending is less robust. Ad dollars toward all major media will increase by only small amounts from 2010 through 2014, with an average annual growth rate of 2.9%.
Untapped Potential for Mobile Loyalty Programs
Emarketer 1-4-11 Interest is high, but few brands take loyalty to mobile devices- As smartphones and the mobile internet increase penetration among Americans, shoppers are relying more on their phones while out and about to get product, store and price information to help them make decisions. Loyalty programs can also be tied to mobile, giving customers an easy way to access points and coupons—and retailers an easy way to capture customer data.
When Zoomerang surveyed US mobile phone owners on behalf of mobile marketing firm Hipcricket in October 2010, more than a third of respondents said they would be interested in a mobile loyalty program from a trusted brand. But just 9% were already participating in such a program.
There was even greater interest in a loyalty program members could join via a brand’s page on a mobile social networking application like Facebook. But a majority of respondents said their favorite brands did not market to them at all on their mobile phone, suggesting companies may be leaving valuable opportunities on the table. Shoppers already involved in mobile loyalty programs were highly satisfied: 90% said they had gotten value from being a member.
Overall, interest in mobile loyalty programs was about the same as Hipcricket found in 2009, but respondents’ desire for mobile coupons had gone up over the same period. Nearly two in five US mobile phone owners were at least somewhat interested in receiving mobile coupons, up from 18% the year before. And nearly half were at least somewhat likely to redeem them, a rise of 3 percentage points.
A September 2010 survey of US shoppers by the In-Store Marketing Institute found a similar level of interest, with 34% of respondents interested in mobile coupons—likely somewhat lower because the survey included consumers who were not mobile users. That poll also found a third of shoppers were interested in mobile coupons that could be sent to their loyalty card, and half wanted coupons that could be sent to their loyalty card in general.
ANA: Multicultural Digital Investment Increasing
MediaPost by Karlene Lukovitz 1-5-11 More than half (56%) of marketers responding to a recent online survey confirmed that their companies are increasing their investments in digital media platforms for multicultural marketing purposes, reports the Association of National Advertisers (ANA).
The online survey was conducted last July through September among client-side marketer members who were either personally involved in or knowledgeable about their organizations’ multicultural marketing efforts. Among the 90 respondents, 74% work in organizations that are primarily B-to-C, 63% work in organizations with annual revenue exceeding $10 billion (mean revenue was $31.7 billion), and 52% work in organizations with advertising budgets greater than $200 million.
About one-third (35%) of respondents reported that their companies are maintaining existing levels of spending on digital media platforms, and just 9% reported reducing such spending.
The percentages reporting spending more, the same and less on multicultural media as a whole were very similar (56%, 31% and 13%, respectively). The average spending increase reported for newer multicultural media was 11%, versus 9% for all multicultural media.
The survey adds to the growing evidence of newer platforms’ effectiveness for reaching and engaging in meaningful ways with multicultural consumers, noted ANA president and CEO Bob Liodice.
Still, multicultural marketers may not be spending enough on newer media (perhaps in part reflecting insufficient overall multicultural spending by many brands, points out ANA). Multicultural marketers reported allocating 6.6% of multicultural media budgets, on average, to newer media, whereas a 2009 ANA general-market survey showed 15.6% of those budgets, on average, being allocated to newer media.
Asked which newer platforms are used by their companies, 80% of multicultural marketers cited ads on third-party Web sites. Search engine marketing/paid keywords and email were next most-cited (72% and 70%, respectively), followed by search engine optimization (64%), mobile and social networks (each 59%), viral videos (55%) and video on demand (34%).
Virtually all of these usage levels have increased significantly over the past three years, with social networks showing the greatest increase (up 43 points, from 16%). However, the newer-media usage rates for general marketing purposes found in 2009 are still significantly higher than the rates reported for multicultural marketing purposes, across platforms, with one major exception: 59% of the multicultural marketers reported using mobile to reach multicultural consumers, versus 32% of marketers who reported using mobile to reach the general market in the 2009 ANA survey.
The reported usage patterns for newer media by multicultural marketers don’t necessarily directly parallel their effectiveness assessments. SEM and SEO were the newer media judged most effective by these respondents (cited as effective by 60% and 58%, respectively). These were followed by the organization’s own Web site (54%), video on demand (53%) and ads on third-party Web sites (50%). The top three metrics used for assessing newer platforms’ effectiveness are positive word-of-mouth (73%), purchase (70%) and “would recommend/forward to a friend” (63%).
Respondents confirmed that budgets for multicultural markets using digital platforms are allocated or shifted from multiple sources, including the media/marketing communications budgets for both multicultural and general markets and (to a lesser extent) incremental budgets.
Key barriers to employing or considering newer platforms in multicultural marketing include “loss of brand control” and “difficulty in getting multiple agencies to collaborate effectively on integration” (each cited by one-quarter of respondents), “senior management pushback” (21%) and “reluctance to move funds from tried-and-true practices of the past” (21%).
Nearly Half U.S. Users View Video Ad in November
Clickz By Jack Marshall 1-5-11 Online video advertising continues to reach more U.S. users, with almost half viewing an ad during November, according to data from comScore. The measurement firm estimates 48.6 percent of users were exposed to a video ad over the course of the month, compared with 45.5 percent in October.
As Google continues to roll ad products out across YouTube, its growing the volume of ads it’s serving also. Google sites streamed 241 million video ads in November, representing significant growth over the 170.5 million served in October. The company’s reach also grew from 13.9 percent to 16.3 percent over the same period.
Study: Mobile Ad Metrics Still Outpace Online
MediaPost 1-7-11 by Mark Walsh Mobile advertising continues to perform well compared to online advertising, according to the latest ad effectiveness study from digital marketing research firm InsightExpress. From November 2007 to December 2010, mobile has posted better results than online across key measures including aided and unaided awareness, ad awareness, message association, brand favorability and purchase intent.
Mobile shows double or triple the percentage of online ad effectiveness in each of the metrics. Mobile ad awareness is 23% compared to 8% online, for example, while purchase intent for mobile is 11% versus 3% online. But the InsightExpress report notes that the gap between the two digital media has decreased compared to last year as online campaigns increased effectiveness in the last year.
Comparisons of each of the last three years show mobile ad awareness jumping to 31% in the late 2009-2010 period after averaging 15% during the prior two years. Message association — the ability to match a given message with an advertiser — also saw a significant spike, doubling to 20% in 2010 from about 10% the previous two years. The other metrics remained roughly stable. The bump in ad awareness could stem from the rise in rich media advertising in mobile and the proliferation of smartphones, where high-impact interactive ads are targeted.
InsightExpress said the consistency or increase in each metric shows that mobile is maintaining effectiveness even as it becomes more established. With their larger screens and broader functionality, it’s not surprising that smartphones would generate higher ad awareness than regular phones (39% compared to 28%). But the results in other measures such as aided and unaided awareness and purchase intent are roughly the same between smartphones and feature phones.
Aided awareness, for example, is 17% on smartphones compared to 13% on feature phones, and the split on purchase intent is 15% to 12%. The figures may reflect the blurring distinction between smartphones and other phones, which may lack an operating system but have added larger screens and other physical features associated with smartphones.
When it comes to industry categories, entertainment showed strong results across the mobile ad effectiveness norms, followed by endemic segments like telecom and technology. Entertainment had the highest ad awareness of any of the eight industry categories tracked in the study, at 41%, followed by CPG (32%), technology (29%) and retail (27%).
Telecom far outpaced other industry ad verticals in message association and purchase intent. So 28% of people were able to connect an ad with a telecom brand compared to 13% in retail, the next-closest category. And 21% planned to purchase a product after seeing a telecom-related ad, followed by travel (12%), technology (10%) and retail (7%). Selling phones on phones seems to work.
Group Deals: The Advent of A New Marketing Norm
1/11/11 by Gordon Borrell Maybe you haven’t noticed, but media companies have changed their strategy of charging for advertising. If it continues, the business model for media might change forever.
In short, the allure of group deals has allowed local businesses to offload the risk of advertising onto the media company. Advertising has become “free,” and the media company gets paid only when a sale is made. It’s a wet dream for a lot of newspapers in the automotive and real estate categories: Imagine getting a 10% commission when a dealership sold a $25,000 car, a 1% commission when an agent sold a $250,000 house.
If this continues – and I bet it will for quite some time – it will transform media companies into marketing partners. The very sound of that gives the average ad-sales person the fantods.
I have no doubt this trend will accelerate in 2010 as more media companies get sucked into advertising for free, betting they’ll make their money on the sale. The numbers continue to spiral skyward. In fact, in 2010, somewhere in the neighborhood of 37 billion coupons were made available online (“dropped” to use the old terminology). This is a 54% increase from the 24 billion we tracked in 2009. That’s huge.
The face value of those coupons also saw an uptick – about 21% by our estimates. The face value of an online coupon went from $2.80 to $3.40. When you consider all the Groupon-like two-for-one deals out there for $25 or even $50 apiece, that per-coupon average may seem way off. But Groupon represents only about 10% of last year’s $1 billion online couponing marketplace. Still, online coupons hold a face value that’s twice that of the average coupon. For coupons that come in the mail or packaged in your Sunday newspaper, the face value is slightly more than $1.50.
So the bandwagon rolls on. Everybody’s getting in the two-for-one, half-price group deals. In the past few days, Local.com announced the acquisition of a group-deals program, and Triton Media announced a partnership with Deal Current to offer something to radio stations. I typed in “group deals” on Google News just now and got a few dozen results – from an airport shuttle company launching a deals program on its own website to a Kansas University architecture alum bringing his self-developed “deals” program to three Kansas cities.
Group deals, half-price and two-for-one offers are here to stay. It’s a distinct shift of risk from the advertiser to the media company that I doubt will be reversed. Advertisers are less willing to write a check for a flight of commercials or a double-truck ad in the newspaper, hoping it will drive sales. They seem more willing to give up a portion of the sale to the media company – meaning they’re not willing to gamble on potential sales anymore.
They don’t represent the death of advertising as we know it, but it certainly feels like the advent of a new marketing norm.
Groupon’s $6 Billion Secret: Follow Facebook
Clickz 1-12-11 by Christopher Heine Ever since Groupon pointed a very serious suitor – Google – off its front porch, many industry watchers have wondered how the two-year-old start-up earned the $6 billion offer in the first place. And they’ve asked whether the daily deals company can sustain its incredible growth rate. It has picked up at least 15 million U.S. e-mail subscribers via mainly online advertising and now totals 50 million worldwide, thanks to various acquisitions.
ClickZ reached out to numerous veterans of local promotions, daily deals, and online coupons – categories Groupon is generally presumed to occupy – for comment on the company’s noisy entrance and its value proposition.
Matt Wise is CEO of ePrize and previously held the same post at Q Interactive, parent company of 15-year-old digital coupons pioneer CoolSavings. While deals platforms like Woot, Jellyfish, and the U.K.’s iBood have been around for years, Wise explained, their arrival in the marketplace was relatively ill-timed. Put another way, they didn’t launch at the height of Facebook’s revolutionary social media impact on the broader culture.
“The advent of social networking created an environment in which the ability to share a discount became vastly easier,” Wise said. “And the Facebook phenomenon to a large degree really enabled that. What if Groupon came up two years earlier? You know, the marketplace just wasn’t as ready or as accepting then of shared and group efforts… The model, quite frankly, is not that different from many of the buying platforms that were out there.”
Wise characterized Groupon as “tangential competition;” his agency helps brands with interactive promotions. Still, he spoke candidly of Groupon’s ascent, saying its rapid growth was “absolutely surprising” to players in the discount/savings niche.
“We are all a bit envious of the success, I think,” he said. “They just landed on that perfect mix of how we interact with the consumer and the consumer being ready for this medium. They just got there at the right time, and that’s great for them.”
Matt Wisk, president of 10-year-old online loyalty company MyPoints, said Groupon should be commended. “What Groupon has done that’s healthy for the whole deals space in general is opened the online component to a local market,” he said. When asked about the nature of its business model, Wisk replied, “What they’ve done is take a very familiar e-mail communications channel and made it a social graph multiplier.”
Groupon’s Growth Will Likely Continue How much more can Groupon grow? The question is on everyone’s lips at the moment.
The Chicago-based firm just yesterday completed a $950 million round of funding and has already ramped up acquisitions of international group-buying players. Today, it revealed it has purchased SoSasta (India), Groupoer (Israel), and Twango (South America) and will rebrand them Groupon India, Groupon Israel, and Groupon South Africa, respectively. And, AdAge.com reported on Monday that the daily deals marketer had purchased pre-game ad slots for the Super Bowl and would have bought an in-game spot if they hadn’t already sold out.
While LivingSocial is largely recognized as Groupon’s chief competition, the ever-growing number of companies in this sector raises the issue of saturation. Townhog, kgbdeals, WhitePages-owned DealPop, Bloomspot, StuffBuff, Dealster, SocialBuy, and HomeRun offer similar platforms. And the low barrier to entry means more players will probably emerge. Facebook has a still-nascent deals platform, and geo-social brands such as Foursquare and Scvngr are likely candidates.
Bryant Shea, VP of innovation at digital agency Isobar, predicts those competitors will eventually consolidate. “People don’t want five different check-in services,” he said. “And they don’t want five coupon services.”
Wise from ePrize said market saturation will not become an issue for Groupon in the near future. “People have said that it’s a fad… But if you take a larger step back and look at the success of couponing in America, there’s without a doubt an enormous appetite in the American psyche to get a discount and to get a deal. It’s a multi-billion-dollar industry.”
Mike Hess is a marketing research executive for ad agency Carat USA and held a similar role with Knowledge Networks/PDI, which has utilized a coupon testing model for brands since 1984. He cites PDI research that found 25 percent of consumers like to use coupons when they shop. Since there are 114 million households in the U.S., PDI’s numbers suggest Groupon could almost double American subscribers alone to 28.5 million.
“There really is a [coupon] segment of people out there,” he said. “We found that half of that 25 percent wanted to use coupons so they could buy brands they otherwise could not afford. They wanted to buy good brands, and the coupon made up the spending gap. And the other half wanted to use coupons to feel good. When they get the receipt, they want to look at that line that says they saved ‘X’ dollars.”
Groupon and its competitors specialize in deep savings of 40 to 70 percent, and they play up such savings in their offer copy. Indeed, they attempt to leverage each psychological motivation to use coupons mentioned by Hess.
Debate About Groupon’s Business Model Continues – But even if consumers continue to embrace Groupon, questions persist about the value proposition to marketers. For instance, Rice University research last fall found that the group-buying platform was unprofitable for one-third of the businesses that tried it.
According to Groupon, participating merchants retrieve 50 to 70 percent of the face value of their deals. And it contends that even if the customer never comes back after the campaign, the retailer has a reasonable shot at breaking even or turning a profit as customers typically spend 50 to 60 percent more than the deal’s value. Out of 3,000 merchant clients polled by Groupon in 2010, 95 percent stated they wanted to work with the group-buying platform again or would recommend it to another business.
At the same time, Roni Madden, a regional sales director for restaurants e-mail service provider Fishbowl Marketing, said the platform was extremely risky for clients in her niche.
“From the restaurant point of view, the consumers who use Groupons – that’s all they ever use,” she said. “I know the idea is to get customers to fall in love with you so they do come back. But it doesn’t always work that way. For restaurants, it especially doesn’t work that way.”
Groupon does appear poised to try to make its offers more hyper-local, perhaps by zip code or neighborhood instead of merely city-by-city. Madden said such a development would improve the plight of restaurants, which would like to see campaigns engender more customer loyalty rather than attracting serial discount scavengers.
“Hyper-local will not erase the problem, but it will lessen it,” she said. “It would make it better under some circumstances, absolutely.”
On a business level, Ken Treske, chief operating and marketing officer for Dotomi, said the key to Groupon’s future viability is scale. He said that if the company can go from 15 million U.S. subscribers to 30 million, it would be tough to compete with domestically for companies like LivingSocial or Townhog.
“The [digital] coupon is an incredible hook to building an audience, which you end up knowing a lot about due to purchase behavior,” Treske said. “I do have questions about the sustainability of their model, offering 50 percent discounts where Groupon takes half and then the local business takes the other half. Will clients get tired of that? I don’t know. But if they do continue to grow rapidly, I think they’ll go from being a coupon company to a CRM provider, for lack of a better term. And everything is driven by eyeballs. They are racing to get big. And if they can get big enough, they will have a sustainable business model.”
And again, if Groupon continues its meteoric rise, it probably owes the likes of Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, and other social media pioneers a huge debt of gratitude. “Consumers are vastly more willing to do something like this than they were just five years ago,” Wise of ePrize said.
Only 8% of Grocery Shoppers Want Location-Based Coupons
Clickz 1-12-11 by Christopher Heine Just 8 percent of 1,546 consumers surveyed in the United Kingdom said they want to receive a mobile coupon while they are in a supermarket, according to research by U.K.-based company Evolution Insights. Conversely, 51 percent said they were fine with receiving mobile coupons before entering the grocery store.
So could location-based mobile coupons be akin to pop-up ads that have annoyed viewers since the dawn of the Internet? James Johnson, lead analyst for Evolution Insights’ study, cautioned marketers for consumer packaged goods on that front.
“The rise of GPS-enabled smart phones brings opportunities to target shoppers with marketing based upon their actual location,” Johnson said. “But do grocery shoppers really want to be interrupted with the latest coupons and deals on their mobile when they walk past or enter the supermarket?”
Meanwhile, the study’s results are a bit sobering for mobile coupon marketers compared to one released last month by Briabe Media and MocoSpace, which surveyed 12,533 U.S. consumers. Their research found that 30 percent of survey respondents said they expected to use mobile coupons during the holiday season. And 14 percent said they typically use mobile coupons.
Who Looks for News Online and on TV?
1-13-11eMarketer Television has long been the primary source of news for all Americans, but for the first time, young adults have changed that trend. Consumers ages 18 to 29 now say that the internet is their primary source of national and international news, according to The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press.
Overall, the internet remains in the No. 2 position behind television, though several factors will continue to propel it to the top spot. For one, the internet offers an infinitely more diverse array of viewpoints than any other form of media. Additionally, that content is always-on and, therefore, always available at the demand of the consumer. The growth of broadband is also resulting in the rise of the internet as not just a text-based medium, but a complete multimedia platform.
Newspapers have suffered the heaviest decline in influence due to the internet, but television has been steadily eroding as well, most notably for Americans ages 49 and under. This is likely because of their increasing use of online video.
By contrast, for seniors 65 and over—who are much less likely to use the internet in general, let alone video—newspapers and television have remained the dominant news sources.
Radio has remained resilient as a news source, cited consistently by about 15% of the population during the past 5 years. However, even radio may not continue to be so immune going forward. Data for 18- to 29-year-olds shows a slight decline as this generation is much more comfortable using the internet for obtaining all forms of media—text, video and audio.
Age is not the only factor affecting where people are most likely to get their news. Blacks are much more likely to cite television as their primary source than the general population. Income and education also play a role. Those with a high school education or less and those making less than $30,000 a year were heavily reliant on TV for their news.
Aside from functioning as a critical piece of democracy, online news sites also offer attractive audiences for marketers—young, educated and wealthy. As the internet continues to slowly increase penetration, and broadband adoption inches up, this early adopter profile will give way and its influence will spread far and wide among the entire population.
Web Use Figures from 2010
By Rob Young 1-14-11 Search Engine Journal If you pull everything in a computer far back enough, what you’ll wind up with is nothing more than a sequence of numbers — zeros and ones, specifically, that create everything we see online and offline. These numbers are certainly vital to the world of the web, but there are also plenty of other figures that arise which bear some recognition. Here are a few of the most important web and search engine figures of 2010.
- There are now an estimated 255 million websites on the web. 21.4 million of these were added in 2010 alone.
- Domain name purchases increased by 7%. There are now 202 million top-level domains, of which 88.8 million are .com.
- Web servers saw growth across the board, including Google’s GWS sites, which saw 5.8% growth in 2010. More significantly, Apache servers increased by 39.1% while Lighttpd grew by 55.7%.
- Total internet use increased by 14%, to 1.97 billion internet users around the world. The leaders are Asia (825.1 million) and Europe (475.1 million), with North America coming in third (266.2 million).
- Social media saw an especially significant boom in all sectors. There are currently 152 million blogs around the world,100 million new Twitter accounts from 2010 alone, 600 million people on Facebook (including 250 million new users), and a greater portion of these are coming from outside the U.S. (70% of Facebook users are now non-U.S. accounts).
- Web communication has gone hyper, with 25 billion tweets being sent, alongside 107 trillion emails. Of course, 89.1% of those emails (99.3 trillion) were spam messages.
- Users watched 730 billion YouTube videos last year, with plenty of selections to choose from, as YouTube saw 18 million hours of new videos uploaded.
All facts and figures come from Royal Pingdom and associated groups (a full list of partners is available at the provided link)
Media Buyers To Wall Street: Online Will Be Up 11% in ‘11, Mobile To Break Billion Mark
MediaPost 1-18-11 By Joe Mandese Online media buyers expect their budgets to expand 11% during 2011, according to a survey conducted by the equities research team at Deutsche Bank. The survey, which was conducted recently among 31 media buyers representing more than $5 billion in annual online ad spending, indicated that budgets should continue to expand at “double digits over the foreseeable future” for both paid search and display ads, and that other emerging digital media platforms such as mobile, social and group buying communities should also “ramp nicely” supporting the overall growth of digital media advertising budgets.
The Deutsche team, led by lead Internet analyst Jeetil Patel, said the outlook should hold at least through 2015, and that based on the outlook it is recommending four Internet stocks to investors: Google, InterActiveCorp, comScore and MediaMind.
“As has been the theme over the past few years, online advertising would continue to grow, gaining share from traditional media,” the analysts said in the report sent to investors late Monday. Noting that traditional print media appears to be “most vulnerable” from the reallocation of advertising budgets to online and digital media, the Deutsche team projected that mobile advertising would likely become a “billion dollar segment” in 2011, more than doubling its 2010 base.
“Advertisers are increasingly dedicating separate budgets for mobile, indicating that mobile ad spend is slowly moving out of the ‘experimentation’ phase,” the analysts said.
“Online media buyers are keeping tabs on new themes within online advertising such as radio, social, mobile and group buying,” they continued. “As these new business strategies flourish online, it does appear that online advertising growth would remain robust for the foreseeable future. While currently a limited number of players (ad networks and publishers) have the critical mass with these emerging ad formats, we do anticipate these categories to evolve into much bigger opportunities, likely expediting the share gains from offline ad spending. Just as important, online data analytics remains an important area of focus for media buyers in their daily online toolset.”
Who Recalls the Most Mobile Ads?
emarketer 1-21-11 Mobile users are becoming more accepting of ads on their devices, and as of December 2010 more than a third remember seeing them. Overall, mobile marketing agency Briabe Media and mobile social network MocoSpace found that 37% of those polled recalled seeing specific advertisements on their mobile phone. The advertisers most commonly remembered included wireless carriers, major retailers and handset manufacturers.
There was little difference in mobile ad recall between men and women, with females just 1 percentage point more likely to say they remembered a mobile ad.
Age played a slightly bigger role in mobile ad recall, with respondents over 30 in the lead at 39% recall. Teens were 2 points behind.
Breaking responses down by race and ethnicity revealed the greatest differences in recall, with black mobile internet users coming in first. They were 5 percentage points more likely than Asian and white respondents and 7 points more likely than Hispanics to remember ads on their mobile phone.
An earlier survey conducted by Luth Research for the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) found somewhat higher overall ad recall, with 58% of mobile phone owners claiming they remembered seeing a mobile ad in the past month. Another 29% of respondents recalled between one and five advertisements. Among those who recalled mobile ads, 39% had taken some kind of action, and 43% of those who interacted with an ad ended up making a purchase. The most commonly recalled ads were for consumer goods, mobile content, and movies and entertainment.
Forecast: mobile ad spending to reach $1 billion in 2011.
Inside Radio 1-27-11 Forrester Research says this will be the year that marketer spending on mobile campaigns hits the $1 billion mark. But the firm suggests the dollars going to mobile may be coming from existing digital budgets, as consumers shift activities from their desktop to smartphones. “Marketers will take advantage of the growing audience, targeting it better through location and behavior, as well as using richer media formats, such as video,” Forrester predicts.
Analysts say the biggest shift in 2011 is more people will get smartphones, and even people who don’t use them for everything will consume more mobile media. Their recommendation for advertisers also has implications for radio. There’s a debate about which platform is superior: applications or the mobile web. Forrester says the question’s a waste of time — companies should offer both.
Posted in Coupons, Daily Deals, Triton Loyalty on 01/19/2011 10:32 am by mwalter
The Daily Deals craze, made popular by Groupon, is an evolving and significant revenue opportunity for local media companies. In fact, the relationship that exists between local media companies and their respective audiences is a key component to capitalizing on this concept.
Join us for one of these informative sessions to learn more about the opportunity and how Triton Loyalty can help you capitalize on it.
Triton Daily Deals is the lowest cost solution of its kind and leaves you and your advertiser with 95% of the revenue to split among yourselves (after credit card fees). During this seminar, we will not only demonstrate Triton’s Daily Deal solution, but also offer our POV on how the Daily Deals market is likely to change in the near future.
This session is appropriate for GMs, GSMs, DOS, Digital Sales Managers and anyone who wants to learn more about how the Daily Deals business model works.
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Jan 27th, 3 to 4 p.m. EST https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/637274928
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Posted in Conference, Jim Kerr on 01/07/2011 04:18 am by Jim Kerr
I really didn’t come to CES to see all the neat new tablet computers or to check out the latest 4G smartphones. While these are cool and definitely fill the hype bucket, their relevance to media is not nearly as revolutionary as the hype would have you believe. They are distribution points, most of which are replicating existing distribution points. As such, they present no real new challenges for radio. This goes for the plethora of dashboard and in-car announcements, too. We all knew that the Internet would be in cars soon, and that the wave is crashing now should be no surprise. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Conference, Jim Kerr on 01/06/2011 03:42 pm by Jim Kerr
At the Tech Policy Summit I’m watching the panelists filled with optimism while shaking their heads over an industry that seems locked into old models. Ted Cohen was particularly eloquent in discussing how the existing stakeholders–from the stagehands union to the labels themselves–need to understand that they can still make a lot of money, but they need to do it differently.
Sadly, the consensus was that the solution was for the artists to take control over their careers in a way that disintermediates the label. Examples given included OK Go and Amanda Palmer. It’s sad because they all also felt that the artists appreciated the labels in doing all the dirty work, but now they just can’t rely on them to do it under the new models.
One key point was that giving away music for free is a critical business strategy that the labels don’t understand. Manager of the band Metric quoted by Martin Atkins: “The music that we give away the most is the music that sells the most.” Atkins added: “You don’t have a problem when fans want free music. You have a problem when fans don’t want free music.”
Posted in Conference, Jim Kerr on 01/06/2011 02:31 pm by Jim Kerr
I’m attending a panel on smart phones and tablets, and the sentiment is very relevant to media. Overall, the panelists, which include people from Intel, Yahoo, and Nvidia, see that the key factor for consumers is cross-device syncing and consistency. In short, a media company has to provide a familiar and consistent experience no matter what the device. As one panelist said–it’s not the app, it’s the ecosystem.
This led to the natural question about achieving this: Apps coded to individual platforms and devices versus web apps coded via HTML 5. The sentiment was very much that the current state of app stores will be disrupted with a flood of Web apps. One panelist put it this way: Apple wants device apps and Google wants web apps. Both will continue, but the relevance of web apps will explode.
For media companies, this means that you need to rethink your mobile strategy as a standalone piece and reconsider it as a holistic consumer experience across tablets, laptops, desktops, TVs, and–yes–radios.
Posted in Conference, Jim Kerr on 01/06/2011 02:00 pm by Jim Kerr
After arriving this morning from Dallas, I’ll be live blogging from the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. This is an important year for radio and media at this conference. We have a dizzying array of new devices and distribution outlets. I’ll be examining these types of things over the next few days.
I’ll be posting longer in depth pieces here, while you’ll find short observations via my Twitter stream at jim_kerr and other thoughts via my Facebook account.
Feel free ton friend me at digitaljk on Facebook. Bandwidth is a real challenge at CES, but I’ll do my
best!
Posted in In Case You Missed It on 12/27/2010 01:18 pm by mwalter
Survey Shows Radio Ads Not Ignored As Much As Others
All Access 11-30-10
Radio came in 4th — and that’s a good thing in a recent ADWEEK/HARRIS poll. Discussing advertising, the poll asked “Which of these do you tend to ignore or disregard the most?”
The respondents picked Internet Banner Ads as “most ignored,” with 43% choosing that form of advertising. “Internet search engine ads” was 2nd, with 20%, 14% choosing TV ads and just 7% picking radio’s advertising as something they tune out.
“Despite having come of age with the Internet, the survey’s 18-34-year-olds were about as likely as their elders to pick banner ads as the genre they ignore the most (42% made that choice),” wrote ADWEEK. “Likewise, 21% of the 18-34s said search-engine ads are the genre they’re likeliest to ignore.
While advertisers might think of the 55-plusers as a comparatively docile TV audience, that age group had the highest proportion of respondents picking TV ads as the kind they ignore the most. Twenty percent of the 55-plusers made that choice, vs. 9% of the 18-34s, 13% of the 35-44s and 14% of the 45-54s.”
BIA/Kelsey Updates 5-Year Forecast
Radio Ink 11-30-10
BIA/Kelsey revises its estimate for radio-industry revenue in light of strong political spending, the improving economy, and increased automotive advertising, and is now projecting that radio will end 2010 with $14 billion in over-the-air revenue, up 5 percent from 2009.
The new quarterly “Investing in Radio Market Report” also predicts 9 percent or greater revenue gains for the year in a number of top markets, including Boston, Philadelphia, Denver, Miami, and Tampa.
“The radio industry has proven it remains an important component of the advertising mix by reaching local audience in all demographic ranges,” BIA/Kelsey VP Mark Fratrik, Ph.D., said. “We might be a long way from pre-recession over-the-air revenue numbers, but broadcasters are supplementing those revenues by taking steps to change the landscape by attracting advertisers through online and mobile, and also by extending their signals to attract new listeners.”
The updates five-year forecast projects over-the-air revenue of $14.5 billion in 2011, $15.2 billion in 2012, $15.8 billion in 2013, and $16.4 billion in 2014.
Media Exposure: Format Makes A Difference
Radio Ink 11-30-10
The new “National Radio Format Report” from the Media Audit found that listeners to different music formats have varying degrees of exposure to other media. The findings, says the researcher, “suggest that those looking to bolster radio advertising revenue should take note that not all radio formats compete against other media, such as TV, newspaper, outdoor, and the Internet in the same manner.”
Looking at Internet exposure, Media Audit found that:
- Dance CHR listeners spend the most time online each day — 4.5 hours. Forty-eight percent of Dance CHR listeners are between 18 and 24, and those listeners spend an average of five hours, 45 minutes a day online.
- Listeners to Hispanic radio spend the least amount of time online every day, an average of three hours. But they spend more time with radio — two hours and 45 minutes, 15 percent more than the average for all U.S. adults.
- Urban AC listeners spend the most time watching TV, 4.5 hours, compared to 3.5 hours for the average U.S. adult. Public radio listeners spend just two hours, 40 minutes a day with TV.
- Rock and Sports listeners get the most exposure to outdoor ads, based on the time they spend in the car. Rock listeners are in the car for an average of one hour, seven minutes each day, 27 percent higher than the average for U.S. consumers overall, while Sports listeners drive for an hour and 10 minutes each day.
- When respondents were asked to name a single station they listen to “most often,” News/Talk was the leader, followed by public radio, Country, CHR, Sports, Hispanic, Urban AC, AC, Classic Rock, Rock, and Dance CHR.
The Media Audit conducted its surveys in 80 cities, talking to more than 113,000 respondents between January 2009 and March 2010.
2011 Trends: Future of Online Ad Buys – Developments in real-time bidding and audience targeting
11-30-10 eMarketer
Real-time bidding, which heated up the display ad market in 2010, will continue to gain share in 2011 and become an increasingly significant force for advertisers, publishers and ad networks.
For this type of ad buy, marketers bid on impressions based on the site, the location of the ad, the number of impressions desired and any potential cookie data they can use for retargeting or other segmentation. Publishers “auction off” ad inventory in real time, automatically looking at the bids made by advertisers for various ad slots and which ad should be served based on the user currently visiting the page.
For advertisers, real-time bidding helps them buy audience instead of inventory. For publishers, the process of real-time bidding promises the greatest possible revenue on their remnant inventory, bringing it closer to premium pricing. This in turn means real-time bidding will also have an effect on the position of ad networks, which publishers often turn to in order to fill remnant inventory. Currently, according to Q3 2010 research from STRATA, more than four in five US ad agencies buy online ads through networks, while fewer than half buy direct from publishers.
“The display advertising market is showing continued intense growth, with a projected 14% increase in 2011,” said David Hallerman, eMarketer principal analyst. “That gain will be partially due to real-time bidding, which will make monetizing more pages easier for publishers. Furthermore, the growth of real-time bidding is also partially due to brand marketers’ increased interest in buying display advertising.”
In addition to choosing between buying from ad networks and publishers, advertisers will increasingly be faced with another choice. On one side is classic ad targeting based on a site’s content, or the characteristics of its visitors, and on the other side is the idea that audiences matter but sites don’t, that marketers should follow their target audience wherever they go.
The techniques marketers use for ad targeting can, depending on circumstances, be employed either to advertise on particular sites or reach audiences across multiple sites. For instance, demographic data—the targeting used by the largest share of respondents in a Collective survey—can be used to identify the best way to advertise in either method.
In many ways, the battle between targeting tactics is a battle between web publishers and advertising networks about who owns the data. And from the marketer perspective, the battle affects whether their ad targeting is more effective at particular sites with particular demographic groups, or whether it’s more effective when advertisers buy specific audiences found across multiple sites.
For more information on marketing developments expected next year, stay tuned for the forthcoming eMarketer report “11 Trends for 2011.”
2011 Trends: Census Highlights Demographic Shifts
11-29-10 emarketer
Future growth in the digital population will come from minority audiences The overall growth of the online population in the US is stagnating, and most future growth will come from increases in minority audiences including Hispanics, blacks, seniors and children.
- Hispanics are the fastest-growing segment of the US population, and eMarketer expects the Hispanic online population to grow by nearly 10 million people between 2010 and 2014.
- Next year, eMarketer forecasts 32.2 million Hispanics, or 62.9% of the US Hispanic population, will be online. The results of the 2010 census could push those estimates up even further.
While the bureau has consistently projected strong growth within minority populations through 2050, the new figures for all races may change more than the bureau projected. The census’s open-ended questions on racial and ethnic background—including a write-in answer for filers who did not feel their background could be explained by a single check-box answer—caused much confusion and comment. It is still unclear how respondents identified themselves and their families.
The black internet user population is somewhat smaller but also on the rise. eMarketer forecasts nearly 26 million blacks will go online at least monthly in 2011, for a penetration rate of 66.9%. By 2014, 72.3% of blacks will be online.
Marketers who are beginning to up their budgets as they put the recession behind them will do well to remember that minority groups are only increasing in importance online. Advertisers must remember they make up an ever-greater portion of the audience of all media, but spending on Spanish-language and African-American media is also a must. According to research from the Association of National Advertisers, more than half of US marketers would be increasing multicultural spending on both traditional and newer media.
“These audiences appreciate genuine efforts by marketers to understand them and communicate messages that resonate, which means more than including a demographically diverse cast in a mainstream television commercial or high-gloss magazine ad,” said Lisa E. Phillips, senior analyst at eMarketer. “Brands that ignore the multicultural audience will find themselves ignored by a powerful segment of the population.”
Online Ad Spend Continues Double-Digit Growth
emarketer 12-3-10
Large brand marketers and SMBs are major contributors to ongoing increases The economy may be on an upward trajectory, but continued caution among advertisers will lead to a continued shift toward online advertising, eMarketer forecasts.
eMarketer projects a 10.5% increase in US online ad spending next year, followed by double-digit growth every year through 2014 when spending will reach $40.5 billion.
“It may seem ironic, but marketers’ economic concerns are leading them to spend more for online advertising,” said David Hallerman, principal analyst at eMarketer. “This trend reflects how most forms of internet advertising are now seen as more of a ‘sure thing’ than most traditional media.”
“In addition, marketers of all sizes increasingly acknowledge the internet’s central place in people’s lives by devoting larger shares of their ad budgets to digital,” Hallerman said. “We see this when big brand marketers spend more for online video advertising, and again when small and midsize businesses spend more for banner ads and search.”
Online video advertising will remain the fastest-growing format throughout the period, while search will continue to get the most dollars.
Increases in online spending will far outpace those for total media spending, which will inch up by 1.2% next year after rising 3% in 2010. In 2014, eMarketer estimates total media ad spending will be $188.5 billion, up from $168.5 billion this year.
“The slight upticks in 2010, 2012 and 2014 reflect the now unlimited political ad spending by corporations,” said Hallerman. “Some of those dollars will be migrating online, although TV will remain by far the biggest political ad spending recipient.”
Faster growth online will help propel digital from 15.3% of total US ad spending in 2010 to 21.5% by 2014.
“The digital ad business is increasingly just the ad business, without separate silos for interactive media,” Hallerman said.
Survey: Mobile Subscribers Want More From Brands
Radio Ink 12-7-10
The third annual Hipcricket Mobile Marketing Survey found that while 57% of consumers would be interested in opting in to a brand’s loyalty club via a mobile social-networking application such as Facebook, some 80% said that they still have not been marketed to by their favorite brands via their mobile device.
The research found that 90% of those who had participated in a mobile loyalty club gained value from being a part of the club. However, interest and participation in mobile loyalty clubs remained steady from the last survey, at 35% and 9% respectively, representing a significant untapped opportunity for brands.
There’s also growing interest in mobile coupons, with 38% stating that they’re at least somewhat interested in receiving mobile coupons (up from 18% in 2009) and 46% stating that they’re at least somewhat likely to redeem those coupons (up from 43% in 2009).
Hipcricket’s survey found that mobile Web usage has increased significantly, with 70% of users accessing it at least once per day; that figure was just 21% in 2009. Of the mobile Web users surveyed, 53% noted that they have visited a retailer’s site on their mobile phone; 60% agree that the mobile Web is a useful source of information (up from 51% in 2009); 28% are at least somewhat likely to use their mobile device while shopping this holiday season; and 30% have interacted with a brand through their mobile device.
“The results of this year’s annual mobile marketing survey showed impressive growth in usage of the mobile Web and interest in mobile social networks,” said Hipcricket President/COO Eric Harber. “This further supports our view that consumers are eager to interact with brands on their mobile devices.”
4G will be a slow-developing “marketing mess” – but will benefit Pandora and Slacker.
Radio-Info.com 12-13-10
4G – quantum-faster wireless connection to the Internet – will initially boost the Internet radio services much more than the ballyhooed mobile video sector, says the Boston-based Yankee Group. It says that in 2011, “mobile video won’t be the killer 4G app everyone expects.” Yankee Group analyst Jason Armitage says “without today’s constraints on mobile bandwidth, we see consumers increasing their use of music services such as Pandora and Slacker – which can be enjoyed while consumers do other mobile activities such as driving or walking – more than their video consumption.” For Armitage, it’s a question of time – “Mobile video use isn’t just constrained by bandwidth [like today’s 3G and the subscription costs], but also by how much undivided attention mobile consumers can spend on video.” Meanwhile, prepare for a “marketing mess” – Yankee Group says “As operators slap the ‘4G’ moniker on everything from WiMAX and LTE [Long Term Evolution, due from vendors such as Verizon and AT&T] to HSPA+ [Evolved High Speed Packet Access], confusion will abound.” Not all 4G is really 4G. But it’s all worth paying attention to, since increasingly, that’s how radio will be delivered, from Pandora to iHeartRadio to AM/FM streamers. Download the report on 4G here.
AdweekMedia Digital Forecast 2011
Adweek 12-13-10 By Katy Bachman
The digital media universe is marked by constant change—and even more constant disruption. Companies like Google, Apple and Microsoft are looking to shake up the 60-year-old TV business. Microsoft is after Google’s search throne. Apple has convinced millions to carry around paper-size computers with no keyboards, after convincing millions more to carry around even smaller pocket-size computers that occasionally make phone calls. Even online advertising, while growing, is being thrown into turmoil by the rise of exchanges, data resellers and Wall Street-like trading desks.
While search advertising remains the backbone of that industry, the display market has roared back in 2010, and should continue to show strength, though all is not perfect even there.
“Interactive advertising will continue to be healthy next year,” says Howard Bass, senior partner at Ernst & Young. “But there are many initiatives under way to [better] understand the value being delivered.” In other words, big traditional brands are still figuring the Web out. And the landscape, loaded with middlemen, is only getting more complex. “Internet advertising is building its credibility,” says Bass. “Right now, it’s a confusing space.”
SOCIAL MEDIA’S MASSIVE GROWTH
- Nearly one in four page views in the U.S., or 24.2 percent, took place on Facebook.com in 2010 as of November, per Hitwise.
- That’s 3.8 times the volume of the No. 2 site, YouTube.com, which generated 6.39 percent.
- Last March, Facebook surpassed Google in traffic volume, found Hitwise. Since then, Facebook’s page views have surged by 60 percent.
- Facebook’s U.S. revenue projection: $835 billion in 2010, $1,060 billion in 2011—a 112 percent surge (eMarketer).
- Facebook reached 151.1 million unique users in October (comScore).
- Twitter.com reached 25.1 million in October-though millions more via other applications.
CONNECTED TVs
- Three million U.S. broadband households plan to purchase an Internet-connected TV during the 2010 holiday shopping season, according to research conducted by Parks Associates. (The data below is also from Parks Associates.)
- Nearly a quarter of U.S. broadband households already own at least one connected TV device.
- By the end of 2010, over 40 million U.S. consumers will have a broadband-connected game console.
- More than 8 million will have a PC-to-TV connection.
- More than 5 million will have a connected Blu-ray player.
- More than 4 million will have a networked digital video player like Apple TV or Roku.
“The $70 billion question is how TV services are impacted by the rise of connected TV devices,” says Parks Associates’ Scherf. “One very important evolutionary path will be the cable provider’s use of connected TV devices to supplement and in some places replace their current pace of set-top box deployment. That’s a key trend to watch in 2011.”
Forrester: Time Spent on Internet Is Equal to TV
Adweek 12-13-10 By: Brian Morrissey
There’s one graph every digital business uses: It shows the huge gap between the percentage of consumer time spent on the Internet and that of marketer budgets spent on online ads. Forrester Research is giving them new ammunition.
A new consumer survey from the researcher found that for the first year, the amount of time U.S. households spent watching TV and using the Internet is equal at 13 hours. This comes on the heels of research showing that younger consumers (18-30) already spent more time on the Web than watching TV. Now, people 31-44 are also spending more time online than with TV.
The figures are at the heart of a running debate about ad-budget allocation. One side is the proposition that marketer priorities are seriously out of whack, because their budgets don’t match up to consumer behavior. Venture capitalist Mary Meeker calls this a “$50 billion opportunity.” Another school of thought is that TV remains by far more important to brand building than the typical Internet options of display ads and search links.
Forrester takes pains to note it’s not predicting the demise of TV. In fact, the amount of time spent watching TV has remained stable over the past five years. During that same time, however, time spent on the Web has risen 121 percent. The biggest losers in comparison to the Web are: radio (down 15 percent), newspapers (down 26 percent) and magazines (down 18 percent).
One important note: While the time spent figures are equal, over a third of the hours on the Web are for work purposes, while TV is nearly exclusively a leisure activity.
Unsurprisingly, Forrester found e-commerce and social media the major drivers of growth over the last three years. E-commerce use rose from 37 percent to 60 percent, while social media went from 15 percent to 35 percent.
BIA/Kelsey Local Media Forecast Highlights
BIA 12-7-2010
- $133B in local ad spend in 2010
- Predicting flat local ad spend in 2011 but rising by about 3%/year over the next three years
- Interactive is 7% of local media revenues v. 8.3% for print yellow pages. TV will continue to be a big chunk with 19%.
- Local digital media = $20B in 2010 and will grow about 17%/year
- In 2009 32% of SMB intended to build a page on a social network.
- In 2010, 48% of SMBs have created a Facebook Page
U.S. Mobile Ad Spend Up 138 Percent in 2010
Clickz 12-14-10 By Jack Marshall
Spending on mobile advertising in the U.S. will reach $877.2 million this year, up 138 percent from the $368 million spent in 2009, according to estimates from market intelligence firm IDC.
Despite the hype surrounding the rivalry between Google and Apple in the mobile ad space, the former attracted the majority of spending through the channel, thanks primarily to its offerings in the mobile search space. Google attracted 59 percent of overall mobile ad spend, IDC estimates, compared with a market share of 8.4 percent for Apple, and 6.8 percent for third place provider Millennial Media.
In the mobile display ad space specifically, however, Google has been far from dominant in 2010. IDC estimates Google and Apple attracted a 19 percent share of spend each, followed closely by Millennial Media with a 15.4 percent share. The firm says it expects Google to outpace Apple in display ad sales in 2011, however, as a result of the fact that sales of Android handsets will outpace those of Apple devices.
In terms of overall spend in 2011, IDC predicts a year-over-year growth rate of 120 percent, which would see overall mobile ad revenues reach almost $2 billion for the year.
Online Ads Pull Ahead of Newspapers
12-20-10 WSJ By RUSSELL ADAMS
This year, for the first time, advertisers will have spent more on Internet ads than on print newspaper ads, according to new estimates from eMarketer. The digital-marketing research firm says U.S. spending on online ads will hit $25.8 billion, surpassing the $22.8 billion spent on print ads in newspapers.
The eclipse has been on the horizon for years as consumers have migrated en masse to the Internet, where there are many more options for news, and where newspaper publishers can’t charge nearly as much for ads as they can in print. So even while the total audience for many newspapers has grown, they have been unable to stem revenue declines.
“It’s something we’ve seen coming for a long time, but this is a tipping point,” says Geoff Ramsey, the chief executive of eMarketer.
It isn’t just that newspapers are facing fiercer competition from the Web. Recently released findings by Forrester Research show that U.S. consumers, on average, now spend as much time online as they do watching television. But they aren’t spending less time in front of their TVs. What they are doing less of is listening to the radio and reading newspapers and magazines offline, Forrester says.
While total ad spending in the U.S. is expected to rise 3% this year to $168.5 billion, eMarketer estimates spending on print ads in newspapers will decline 8.2% in 2010, to be followed by a 6% decline in 2011.
Scarborough Looks At Mobile Among U.S. Hispanics
RadioInk 12-20-10
Scarborough Research’s new “Hispanic Multi-Market Study,” which looks at adults 18+ in 34 of the largest U.S. Hispanic markets, found that the percentage of Hispanic adults who use a cellular phone has grown 26 percent since 2006, compared to 18 percent growth among all adults. That puts Hispanic cellular use at 82 percent, about even with 84 percent among adults overall.
Sixty-four percent of Hispanics with a cellphone use it to text message, compared to 56 percent of all cellular users, and Hispanics are also more likely to download or listen to music on a wireless device (22 percent vs. 15 percent of wireless users overall), play games (19 percent vs. 15 percent), and access social networking (12 percent vs. 10 percent).
Smartphone growth is also outpacing the general population: Nineteen percent of Hispanic adults live in a household with at least one smartphone, up from 5 percent in 2005, while 23 percent of the population overall has a smartphone in the house, up from 9 percent in 2007.
“The rise of smartphones and apps is redefining mobile marketing,” Scarborough VP/Advertiser & Marketing Services Alisa Joseph said. “As this industry continues its rapid evolution, the importance of Hispanics as mobile marketing targets will only continue to expand.”
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