Retargeting works - Twitter is opening up its inventory

At first we sold digital advertisements at a fixed CMP (Cost Per Thousand) rate. Than as more companies developed ecommerce platforms, we all started looking at clicks/ click through rates (CTR) and conversions.

Under pressure from marketers to drive campaign efficiency higher, we got smarter and applied technology to narrow in on the clients' target market. By location (IP address), time, database information (such as email client logins) and more recently by demonstrated behaviour.

Enter retargeting. We started serving ads with products and services that people have just researched and in-market for. We blatantly re-messaged them and, surprise surprise, people noticed it. Outrage ensued. Battles over privacy meant regulation (in some countries) over cookie usage, alerts and messaging.

The storm (more or less) settled and Facebook allowed retargeting about a year ago. Now, a little over three years since they opened advertising up for the first time, and Twitter is prepping an online ad exchange to rival Facebook's. Twitter Exchange, 'TWX' or thereabout. (Abbreviation is speculation only!)

Why? Because retargeting works. And it works extremely well in driving conversions.

Twitter, great plans!

And Twitter- do allow dynamically served creative messaging (opposed to static ones, like those currently on Facebook). That's one way to ensure a stronger (>200%) CTR, as well as better conversion rates. And Twitter, that right there is what it's all about.

What does your Facebook profile photo say about you?

It gives away your cultural background, as revealed by a recent study, based on whether the photo is zoomed in or out.

Naming and shaming bad parking in Russia

Advertising at its best. Here is a creative campaign used by a Russian online newspaper, The Village, encouraging people to take a photo of illegally parked vehicles and post these online, to name and shame. The aim is to change cultural perspective around the illegal parking and make it socially unacceptable. All the while getting people to emotionally connect and engage with The Village brand. Sharp.

 

Introducing the Google+ project: Real-life sharing, rethought for the web

Clever idea, straight from the Google blog:

Visualising Friendships – Facebook

‘When the data is the social graph of 500 million people, there are a lot of lenses through which you can view it. One that piqued my curiosity was the locality of friendship. I was interested in seeing how geography and political borders affected where people lived relative to their friends. I wanted a visualization that would show which cities had a lot of friendships between them.’ (Paul Butler, intern on Facebook’s data infrastructure team)

The result? The result:

Thanks to Political Calculations for posting it.

The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet | Magazine

A thought provoking article on Wired. Quotes don’t do justice to it, it’s got to be read in full…

Over the past few years, one of the most important shifts in the digital world has been the move from the wide-open Web to semiclosed platforms that use the Internet for transport but not the browser for display. It’s driven primarily by the rise of the iPhone model of mobile computing, and it’s a world Google can’t crawl, one where HTML doesn’t rule.

According to Compete, a Web analytics company, the top 10 Web sites accounted for 31 percent of US pageviews in 2001, 40 percent in 2006, and about 75 percent in 2010. “Big sucks the traffic out of small,”

And because Google so dominated the Web, that meant building an alternative to the Web. Enter Facebook. The site began as a free but closed system. Google was forbidden to search through its servers. (…) And then, at some critical-mass point, not just in terms of registration numbers but of sheer time spent, of habituation and loyalty, Facebook became a parallel world to the Web.

The Web almost perversely discouraged the kind of systematized, coordinated, focused attention upon which brands are built — the prime, or at least most lucrative, function of media.

The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet | Magazine

Last week’s ‘yin & yang’ of social networking

On one side there is the immensely successful Facebook, with rapidly increasing ad revenues – and on the other side there is Bebo, sold by AOL for a mere $10m (USD) whereas it was purchased for $850m two years ago.  Bebo was the pioneer of social networking in many respects, such as deep ad integration with video, widgets and engagement marketing. I’m wondering what plans the hopeful buyers have to get the balance sheet back on track – which in the name of healthy competition I hope they do? Whatever they may decide to do, first and foremost they will need to win over the audience. As before a social networking site can be commercialised it needs to reach critical mass.
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Facebook & Microsoft

When Microsoft purchased a 1.6% stake in Facebook late in 2007, some applauded but there were more who criticised. Mainly the price rather than the two companies linking up. Microsoft paid a whopping $240M for the 1.6% stake.

However, a couple of years on and it looks like, it may just have been worth it. According to eMarketer, Facebook is closing the revenue gap with the Portals and is predicted to make between $1-2 billion (USD) this year. (Compare that to the big 4 US Portals in the chart below.)

If they they reach the upper limit of that prediction, 1.6% will equal to $32m share of (although not profit, but) revenue. However, at the pace Facebook has been growing revenues in the last couple of years, that investment may just pay for itself sooner than many anticipated…

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Small Biz Lead Gen Surges with Social - eMarketer

In the old days mass advertising was only available to cashed up companies and large firms. But with the fragmentation of audiences, and the internet’s low barriers of entry, the ‘market power theory of advertising’ is now turned upside down.
The low cost of technology that’s needed to enter the online world (blogs, social network, tagging, etc.) created and continues to create a flat market (see chart). We often speak about ‘empowered consumers’. Yes, consumers are empowered, but so are small businesses.

For companies, one way to take advantage of this internet created flat market is to shift focus from outbound or push marketing, to inbound or pull marketing and make it easy for potential customers to find businesses online. To achieve this, small businesses need a company website first and foremost. Furthermore, valuable additions are a blog, social network presence (Facebook, Orkut, MySpace), and a regularly updated Twitter feed.

Some of the key advantages of online presence and ‘inbound marketing’ are that it:
- brings more leads for less money
- builds audience engagement and a following
- generates trust (if a company is not online these days, people’s attitude is: ‘what have they got to hide?’)
- increases SEO ranking (company appears higher on search engine results).

If a company is easier to be found, that will ultimately mean more leads. In fact, both Twittering and blogging were shown to double leads, and more leads mean more customers.

Small Biz Lead Gen Surges with Social - eMarketer