Connected Advertising Blog

Comscore: Microsoft tops time spent, 3.9B hours

According to Comscore’s time spent share study, Mirosoft experienced 43% YOY growth in the number of hours spent on its properties worldwide. At 3,920MM hours, MS tops the next runner up (Google) by over 56%. Given the nature of these two companies, this differential should not be too surprising. Google has many contacts at smaller durations, MS fewer contacts at longer engagements.

What is telling is the differential between MS and Yahoo!;  about 242% more time spent. While Yahoo! is doing well in the US with 11.2% of total time spent vs. 8.6% for MS, Yahoo! is falling short globally, where the real growth will be seen. Combine the standing with the 14% decline to total hours on Yahoo! properties, and Yahoo! has a real problem to overcome. If Yahoo! is trading on engagement, this is going to be a problem. Yahoo! is going to need to give the global market place reason to care.

Not surprisingly, Facebook has seen phenomenal growth of 193% jumping from 474MM  from 1,387MM hours.

Mobile Ads – not just for ring tones

Quattro Wirelss released its assessment of mobile Brand advertising, and we have some strong CTR performance coming from well targeted advertising.

As seen in the chart, CPG is indexing over 250 (2.5x better than the average mobile CTR), followed by strong performance from Communities, finance, dating and food.

By way of explanation, Quattro Wireless says

On the mobile platform, these marketers are often using ads to drive a response (click to coupons or recipes or find out information about rates and loans).

In addition to looking at CTR, the assessment of CPMs show a very wide range, driven in part by the level of targeting being used.

As in online advertising, the creative execution also has an impact on the performance. Animated ads had a 71% lift in CTR over the average mobile ad, and 63% over static banner ads.

The Quattro Wireless study provides good directional (and intuitive) information. Well targeted, relevant call to action, attention grabbing advertising improves performance. The question for advertisers remains, can you provide all these and do so at a CPM that makes sense? Of course, this depends on your objectives.

AdMob Mobile Handset usage report

AdMob Handset Usage report shows strong growth in touch screen  & wi-fi enable devices.

The report also highlights the rapid growth in usage of mobile
Web sites and applications on new devices in the past year... 
In September 2009, the list of the top 10 devices includes
five with touchscreens, six with Wi-Fi capabilities, and
six with application stores. These devices are  responsible
for a much higher percentage of mobile usage than their
share of handsets sold. However, feature phones like the
Samsung R450 and Motorola RAZR  V3 still represent 60
percent of ad requests in the US. The strong mobile Web usage on
these feature phones is likely driven by unlimited data plans.

Keeping in mind the last sentence, expect the 60% of ad request from feature phones to drop quickly over the next 1 -2 years as these contracts expire.

The general push to smart phone, touch screens with Wi-Fi capabilities continues. As this moves forwards, developers should be pushing mobile web enable functionality. Apps play a strong roll in the current environment as users are not happy with the mobile web experience. A bit like AOL circa 1997 vs the internet. As mobile web standards grow to support better functionality, and developers learn to use these tools to make the experience better, there will be less need for dedicated apps. They won’t go away, but there will be more room for mobile web tools.

I don’t how long this will take, but I believe it will migrate from mobile-app centric to mobile-web centric functionality before too long.

Some mobile web development perspectives: W3.org/mobile. wapreview.com, John Blossom.

Google, the more things change…

Open Call Access

It amazes me to see how quickly forward looking companies like Google resort to backward looking  defenses to avoid regulation. By trying to pretend that regulations should be applied as if technology and business models of today were more like those of 1980, Google is trying to avoid being governed by the same rules as other companies providing telecom service.

Common Carrier Laws provide for open access and are in place to ensure that providers of services (telephone in this case), allow consumers unfettered use at a reasonable rate. AT&T is using this law to petition the FCC to make Google open it’s Google Voice service, allowing users to call all numbers. Currently, Google blocks the calling of some numbers based on local carrier charges (in those areas) to Google. Their justification is not unreasonable on the surface. You can see their post here.
In part…

“Google Voice’s goal is to provide consumers with free or low-cost access to as many advanced communications features as possible. In order to do this, Google Voice does restrict certain outbound calls from our Web platform to these high-priced destinations. But despite AT&T’s efforts to blur the distinctions between Google Voice and traditional phone service, there are many significant differences:
•    Unlike traditional carriers, Google Voice is a free, Web-based software application, and so not subject to common carrier laws.
•    Google Voice is not intended to be a replacement for traditional phone service — in fact, you need an existing land or wireless line in order to use it. Importantly, users are still able to make outbound calls on any other phone device.
•    Google Voice is currently invitation-only, serving a limited number of users.”

ATT is arguing that Google should be forced to behave like a carrier based on Common Carrier laws.

“whether a carrier is a common carrier . . . does not depend upon whether its charter declares it to be such . . . but upon what it does.” US v. Brooklyn Eastern District Terminal, 249 US 296 (1919).

While the distinction Google makes may seem appropriate, I only have to look back over the past year to see the impact of parsing words rather than recognizing intent.

In the financial service markets, one of the common paths around regulation was the ability to declare a company as one form of institution and being subject to the regulations thereof, while conducting activities that are clearly that of a different industry, and avoiding those regulations. As President Obama rightly stated, we need to regulated activities regardless of the companies by which they are conducted.

If you want to provide phone service, you should be regulated by the same rules as any telecom. While Google is providing this service “Free” and to a “limited number of users,” we cannot view this for the short term. As they further said, “Google Voice’s goal is to provide consumers with free or low-cost access to as many advanced communications features as possible.” This implies growth in the intended offerings. I would further argue that, since Google is a for profit firm, “free” is not the same as unprofitable (at least in theory). The Google model is to create services which increase its audience, thereby also increase its value to advertisers. The mode of monetizing the service should not be the measure of the applied regulation, the service itself is the subject.

The rules are for the services provided, not the type of company providing them. I hope we can transfer knowledge gained in the financial services mess to other areas of our regulation.

It is also a shame when companies that show such vision in the development of unique business models and application of technology fall back on the same old-company legal tactics.

AT&T’s prompting has moved lawmakers and the FCC to take some steps in this debate.

Search keywords & copy.

When I was in a large agency years back, we were told by researchers that consumers were healthier, conscientious about their weight, and eating better. Yet, when you looked at IRI scanner data from the supper markets, chips, cookies and candies did not take a hit. In fact, they were out pacing other food categories.

An article in Vovici reminds us that we have to be vigilant in our attention to what the consumer does as well as what they say they do. The example is the mp3 player. Engineers think gigabytes of storage, consumers think number of songs. Who’s right?

Well, both. When we look at search queries, consumers don’t search for “500 song mp3 players,”  they search for “4GB mp3 players”. But, when you look at the qualitative research, according the the article, consumers are thinking of song capacity.

Though traditional search tactics tell us to match ad text closely to query strings, we need to be more sophisticated. A user may query in GBs, but read ad copy in “song counts” for mp3 players. Perhaps they have been trained to think one way and speak another. Or perhaps, we are really missing an opportunity.

Either way, understanding the qualitative data of consumer thinking, and the quantitative data of consumer behavior, can lead to unique and better converting combinations of keywords and ad copy.

Social Media research… beware sweeping statements.

To me, social media is an important part of consumer communications. But, with all things new, we need to avoid getting caught up in the hype. If we are focused on those who use social media, then we obviously need to base our decisions on what we know about them from our experiences and research. Where I have a concern is when we make broad, market wide strategic statements based on research that applies to a specific tactic (such as social). As we dive deeper into these specific tactics, particularly hot ones, we run the risk of magnifying research numbers beyond their true size and implication.

A recent release from Nielsen, if not read carefully, can create just such a scenario. In part, it reads…

…  “search” as the dominant form of Internet navigation or, how we get to where we we’re going on the web. However, as with most forms of evolution, change is constant, and over the past two years search navigation has appeared to shift to social media…

and

We continue to see that social media has not only changed the way consumers communicate and gather on the Web, but also impacted content discovery and navigation in a big way.

These are two very broad statements. Taken at face value, one might assume that we should shift a large share of resources away from search (for example) and into Social media.

[Nielsen divided respondents into three groups: Searchers (37%), Portalists (34%) and Socializers (18%).]

User Content usage

A more accurate depiction of the data would be to state that,  for Socializers  15% said that blogs are a trusted source of information online. Or,  Socializers ( 18%) who think blogs are a trusted sources (15% of the 18%) make up 2.7% of those surveyed.

To be fair, blogs were also sited as trusted sources of information for about 9% of Portalist and 6% of Searchers, or a about of 8% of those surveyed.

Taking a look at the survey graphs, you can see that the number for “facebook or Twitter” as trusted sources is even lower… among all groups.

Okay, enough with the percentages of percentages, the bottom line is read the detail of any survey, research or statement… about any media.

My final take on this is about the methodology. The survey method is a fine, valid way to get input from consumers or users. However, two points: First, the results that were quantified are based on the source the users “started” with. It does not speak to the overlap of sources used. So, even among those 18% that are heavy Socializers, there is nothing in the stated research results to suggest that they are not using other sources. Often, there is overlap between primary and secondary source usage, but there is nothing here to let us know either way. Second, be leery of self reported behavior. Again, not invalid, but needs to be backed by other data (observed). A good, recent perspective from Vovici.

I am not knocking social media. I believe in it as a way to keep up with the general perceptions of consumers, a way to provide feedback and develop more meaningful contact points. But, marketers need to engage social with their eyes wide open. Look at all numbers from a critical perspective.

Mike Volpe on social media marketing

Mike Volpe had a great post on Social media marketing lead gen. What he did, and more importantly, what he produced. Now, we all have different challenges when it comes to how we can use social media. There may be some very direct actions you can take. But, if you get nothing else out of his piece, remember and live this quote:

Social media marketing is not a campaign, it is a marketing lifestyle

Search Share… nothing has changed.

Market Share report from Net Appliance is being quoted as showing google getting eighty percent of the search share.

However, before anyone starts quoting these things, they should be aware of the methodology.

The first skew is that the measurement is not of search, but of visitors to specific sites that happen to deploy NetApps tools. Knowing nothing substantive about these site, we cannot assume the visitors are truly representative of the search engine users.

Additionally, how the sites market themselves also makes a difference. With 76% actively marketing in PPC, the strategies they employ have a great influence on the profile of the searchers.

Additional estimates about the website population:

76% participate in pay per click programs to drive traffic to their sites.

43% are commerce sites

18% are corporate sites

10% are content sites

29% classify themselves as other (includes gov, org, search engine marketers etc..)

Nothing NetApps is doing is wrong. My concern is with media outlets that cover them without, at the very least, articulating the methodology of the data gathering.

InformationWeek quoted the results. Then, PCWorld sited InformationWeek. InformationWeek also quoted another share measurement report that was based on a similar type of set up. However, this company kept talking about “hits.” Not sure, but in our area, hits as we define them (every element on a rendered page is a ‘hit’) has no real meaning. Perhaps it does, but without clarification, we cannot assume so.

Finally, Danny Sullivan pointed out several years ago at SEW (sorry, I couldn’t find the link), search share shifts are not terribly important until they demonstrate a clear trend that also crosses a threshold. So, seeing Google move from the 40-50% share range to the 50-60% range share and then 60%+ share, this is meaningful.  A -0.2% move in share (Bing) is not only insignificant, it is not worthy of space in any column…Unless the headline reads, “FLASH… nothing’s changed”.

Brands are… not so bad: Twitter tweets

People only talk about a product or company when they have a complaint, or at least that was the common wisdom. A study done by Jim Jansen, associate professor of information science and technology, IST doctoral student Mimi Zhang, undergraduate student Kate Sobel and Twitter chief scientist Abdur Chowdhury appears to tell us things are different. At least on Twitter.

According to Jensen

“A lot of the brand comments were positive,” he said. “There are some good products out there, or at least products that people are happy with.”

With 20% of the tweets requesting or providing information about products, we re-affirm the importance of engaging with people in the social media space. But, something to emphasize is that consumers are talking to consumers about their experiences. So, if you are going into the social space, you have to be genuine.

By keeping true in your off-line actions to the message, persona… brand, that you are promoting online, you reap the benefits;  positive input for other consumers. In the reverse, they can have some really tough words (classified as ‘wretched’) . eMarketer has a summary of the numbers.

Dispaly Ads: I won’t click, and don’t want a reason to. – John Q Public

Showing the continuing the challenge of display advertising that I wrote about a few months ago, ComScore, along with Starcom, release another study last month. Back then, about 16% of the users made up 80% of the clicks; now less than 10% do. 84% don’t click at all.

I find this trend interesting in light of a newly released study,”Americans Reject Tailored Advertising and Three Activities that Enable It” from the University of Pennsylvania – Annenberg School for Communication, in which 66% of respondents did NOT want ads that were specifically targeted to their interests.

There is an obvious challenge here. Users don’t like our display ad messages, and are not comfortable with the technology that can help us make them better. All is not entirely lost, as a significant portion are influenced by ads, as they are followed up by searches or direct-to-site navigation. But, much of the technology that lets us see that, is the very technology that consumers would rather we not use.