Research Operations Manager Scott Kresge talks about the unique aspects of operating on a global scale September 4, 2009
Posted by markblei in : Staff posts , add a commentWith a degree in computer science as well as cognitive psychology, I’ve always enjoyed pushing around large collections of data particularly when they involve human behavior and demographics.
When I go to the office I live the vicarious life of a virtual tourist. Rather than stepping off a plane or a ship and being immersed in a different culture, I am exposed to a cacophony of out-of-context snapshots of other cultures every work day.
One of my first eye opening experiences in managing Global Operations was a study being run in China. I was keeping an eye on the recruitment levels as it went infield just out of curiosity. The number of survey respondents exploded instantly and grew at speeds that we would never see in the U.S. My first thought was to shut the survey down. Surely we were breaking some agreement with the publishers by commandeering all the available advertising real estate and then inviting every single visitor to take a survey. I naively envisioned 1.3 billion Chinese poised over their keyboards happily waiting to pounce on the next available survey.
Mercifully, one of my counterparts in Beijing explained what I was seeing. It’s not uncommon in China for even some the largest of portal sites to “lease out” their entire site to a single entity or a small group. For all practical purposes, you own all branding rights and advertising real estate on the site. There’s a catch of course. You can only “own” it for a few days at most. Imagine owning all the advertising real estate and data collection rights on a site like Yahoo.com or AOL.com…even for just a few hours.
Here are a few examples of some of those out-of-context, cultural snapshots. I’ve identified them by language since country borders are becoming less and less meaningful in the brave new internet landscape.
Chinese – Seeing this survey throws me every time I see it. This survey involves one of the largest American entertainment icons and is instantly recognizable by probably 99+% of Americans and here it’s mixed with a language that I imagine less than 1% of Americans can decipher. I find it pleasantly disorienting.
Russian – I was born into an era when the Soviet Union was planting nuclear missiles on Cuba and Nikita Khrushchev was saying “We will bury you!” (apparently speaking figuratively to capitalism in general). Now I’m helping to execute a study to determine how well the marketing efforts of one the largest American chip manufacturers are going in Russia.
Arabic – Written Arabic is a visually beautiful language. Of course, I wouldn’t even recognize it as a language of any kind if someone didn’t tell me it was so. In addition to the translation issue, Arabic has the additional technical challenge of being written and read from right to left.
I’ve presented three glimpses of data collection across three very different regions and cultures. To paraphrase a saying; the more things change, the more they remain the same. I won’t bore you with numerical results but you can take comfort from the fact that out of this cultural chaos comes one global truth: If you expose people from any culture to enough advertising, it’s going to affect their attitudes and behaviors
I’ll leave it to the advertisers and the philosophers to decide if this is a good thing or a bad thing.
- Scott Kresge
Research Operations Manager – Global
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New Free White Paper ! BRAND VALUE OF RICH MEDIA AND VIDEO ADS June 30, 2009
Posted by Mark Blei in : white paper , add a commentA new report, co-authored by DoubleClick and Dynamic Logic, is available free on our website at at:
http://www.dynamiclogic.com/na/research/whitepapers/docs/DL_DoubleClick_June09.pdf
For every online display campaign, advertisers must decide what ad formats to use for best results. To help, DoubleClick teamed up with Dynamic Logic to study the impact of ad format selection on branding goals. In the joint report titled “The Brand Value of Rich Media and Video Ads,” we compare the branding strengths of four common display advertising formats:
- Image – GIF or JPG ads
- Simple Flash – Ads with a short animation and single click-through link
- Rich Media with Video - Ads capable of responding to user interaction, such as mouseovers, keyboard inputs, or clicks without a click-through, that also contain video
- Rich Media without Video – Ads capable of responding to user interaction, such as mouseovers, keyboard inputs, or clicks without a click-through, that do not contain video
The report provides detailed information on how each of these formats impacts aided brand awareness, online ad awareness, message association, brand favorability and purchase intent. For example, study findings show that, on average:
- Rich Media formats are the most successful at driving purchase intent
- Rich Media without Video is unique among the formats in its ability to positively impact all five brand metrics
- Simple Flash is the least effective of the ad formats studied
- For brand favorability, aided brand awareness and purchase intent metrics, Rich Media with Video provides a statistically significant improvement over Simple Flash at a 90% confidence level
The report concludes with a cheat sheet to help guide your ad format decisions and suggests best practices for achieving branding goals. We hope you enjoy this and it helps you. Please feel free to contact us directly with any questions at 212-844-3700 and tell the person answering the phone that you read about it on our Blog!
Fox in the Henhouse: Should You Trust Your Agency with Analytics? June 17, 2009
Posted by Mark Blei in : Uncategorized , add a commentADOTAS — Advertising agencies—and especially digital agencies—are among the most fascinating companies in the world. They are staffed (most of the time) by whip-smart, sometimes arrogant, fun, creative, young, attractive people.
Doesn’t it always seem like the good-looking smarty-pants you knew in high school ended up working at an agency? Sometimes, maybe when you’re slogging through yet another column of analytics numbers or trying to figure out how to make your analytics tool recognize a measure it wasn’t born to measure—admit it—you get a little jealous. Those agency people are probably skateboarding down the hall right now, coming up with a new way to make oven-cleaner cooler than Lady Gaga.
Agencies are soaking in the suds of what everybody now calls “spin.” You know—lemons become lemonade. Pigs can fly. And ho-hum conversion numbers can be made to seem either “not that relevant” or hidden behind a pitch for new creative. Agencies are amazingly good at taking things that are not so wonderful and making them seem like just the thing you wanted.
All of which is precisely why you can’t let your agency perform your analytics work.
Read the rest of this great adotas article BY CLICKING HERE
Social Media Metrics Vary Based on the Community February 5, 2009
Posted by Mark Blei in : Uncategorized , add a commentFor many marketers, metrics are a stumbling block when it comes to social media. Like snowflakes, no two communities are the same. Whether you’re using social media to connect with employees—like McDonald’s—or consumers makes a big difference in how you judge their success. E-Centric recently talked with David Carter, CTO and co-founder of Awareness and Mike Lewis, vice president of marketing of the Waltham, MA-based company about the best ways to gauge the effectiveness of an online community. Awareness recently introduced a prefab, ready-to-deploy, online community building solution.
Read The Rest—>Social Media Metrics Vary Based on the Community
Digital Britain report: Broadband for all by 2012 January 29, 2009
Posted by Mark Blei in : Uncategorized , add a commentLONDON – In its Digital Britain report issued today the Government has set out its aim to develop a universal broadband service by 2012, which it called vital for Britain, one that offers nationwide broadband speeds of up to 2mb per second and includes wireless coverage.
In the Digital Britain interim report, the Government stressed the importance of ensuring “that being digital is within the grasp of everyone”
Subject to further analysis, the government believes that a speed of 2mb per second is the most realistic option for a universal service, when factoring in costs, capability and the connection of the absolute number of homes.
The Government intends to develop detailed proposals for the design and operation of a new, more broadly-based scheme to fund the Universal Service Commitment, including who should contribute and its governance and accountability structures.
It plans to encourage the development of public service champions of universal take up and intends to appoint a digital inclusion champion and expert taskforce to drive the Government’s work on digital inclusion.
It is intended that the champion “will provide a clear channel of communication between central and local government, industry, third and public sectors, and the client group, to ensure all available expertise and resource is harnessed in pursuit of a shared understanding of digital inclusion”.
Read The Rest——> Digital Britain report: Broadbarend for all by 2012
Traditional Media Use Stabilizes as Online Rises January 29, 2009
Posted by Mark Blei in : Uncategorized , add a commentOnline shopping and social networking jumped while TV news was flat.
Traditional media usage by Internet users in the US remained largely steady in 2008 after falling in 2007, judging by respondents to a Ketchum and USC Annenberg Strategic Public Relations Center survey conducted in late 2008. For instance, less than two-thirds of respondents said they watched major network TV news, about the same as in 2007 but down from the 71% who said so in 2006. Traditional media use leveled off while use of shopping and social networking Websites rose sharply, increasing their attraction for marketers. Shopping sites, for example, more than doubled in popularity to be visited by 35% of Internet users in 2008. Ketchum and USC Annenberg also noted 44% of shopping site visitors read consumer reviews and comments, expanding the sites’ influence.
Read The Rest—>Traditional Media Use Stabilizes as Online Rises
Survey: Ad Execs Target Discovery, ESPN January 14, 2009
Posted by Mark Blei in : Uncategorized , add a commentNEW YORK A new Beta Research survey of advertising executives suggests that clients may be spending more of their 2009 marketing dollars on cable networks like Discovery Channel and ESPN.
After polling 225 ad professionals — of which 150 were identified as agency players while the remaining 75 were culled from the client ranks — Beta found that 45 percent of respondents said they would increase their ad spending on Discovery this year, while 44 percent predicted they’d invest in more ESPN.
TBS was the third most-cited cable network in the Beta study, as 40 percent of those quizzed indicated that they would pick up more of the Turner network’s inventory in ’09. Food Network took fourth (39 percent), while top-rated USA Network finished just behind the Scripps flagship (38 percent).
Read The Rest—>Survey: Ad Execs Target Discovery, ESPN
Sorrell Feels the Heat December 9, 2008
Posted by Mark Blei in : Uncategorized , add a commentAuto, retail and travel ad budgets under ‘intense pressure,’ WPP chief tells UBS conference
Dec 8, 2008
NEW YORK WPP Group CEO Martin Sorrell, speaking at the UBS Global Media and Communications Conference today, reiterated concerns about the advertising marketplace next year given the recession and massive fluctuations in the stock market.
“I do think that the financial markets, which always go down or go up before the real world — of which we are part — will recover … by the middle of next year,” Sorrell said. “The real world, I don’t think will change for the better until 2010. And it will be helped by the fact that comparatives are going to be against a down market.”
Such comments echoed remarks Sorrell made last month in a video interview with Adweek.
Asked by an industry analyst how automotive and retail clients in particular are budgeting their marketing dollars for next year, Sorrell said all client categories are pressured, though auto, retail and travel are under “intense pressure.” Automotive business supplies about 10 percent of WPP’s global revenue and Ford is its No. 1 client.
“Every piece of evidence we find to be produced shows that those [clients] that cut in these times suffer and the costs of getting back to where they were are greater than if they continued to invest. But easier said” than done, said Sorrell, addressing a ballroom full of Wall Street analysts at the Grand Hyatt in New York.
Read The Rest—> Sorrell Feels the Heat
Display Ads Put Searchers in a Branded State of Mind December 5, 2008
Posted by Mark Blei in : Uncategorized , add a commentA Specific Media study finds the presence of display advertising significantly affects click-through and search style across both paid and organic searches.
In the “travel and tourism” category, display advertising engendered a 274% lift on both paid and organic search. A 260% lift was seen on searches in the realm of “health,” while “personal finance” saw a 206% increase, writes MarketingVOX.
“Automotive” and “news and media” enjoyed a 144% search lift, while “property and real estate” demonstrated 125%.
“Consumer packaged goods” saw the slightest increase — 22%. And in “retail,” display advertising drew just a 69% lift in search.
Findings suggested consumers exposed to display ads are more likely to search for brand terms (like “BMW”) and segment terms (like “635 CSi”) than unexposed ones, according to Specific Media.
The research tracked 60 Specific Media campaigns, then integrated its findings with 12 months of “ad effectiveness” data backed by comScore, MediaPost writes.
Read The Rest—>Display Ads Put Searchers in a Branded State of Mind
No Improvement on Horizon for ‘Standard’ Online Advertising December 5, 2008
Posted by Mark Blei in : Uncategorized , add a commentA slow-to-no growth forecast in the US for “standard” components of the interactive advertising market – such as banner, display and pop-up ads – is not cyclical and shows no signs of improving quickly, even if the nation’s economy starts to move upward and out of recession, according to a forecast report from Borrell Associates.
Though the report projects that overall 2009 spending on traditional, offline media will decline 1.4%, and spending on interactive will increase 7.2 %, it notes that these figures do not tell the whole story.
In fact, 2009 will be the first year since the start of century in which banners, pop-ups, and interactive display advertising overall will show little or no growth, and may likely decline.
For local interactive media, the big slowdown began a year earlier than Borell initially anticipated, magnified and accelerated by the credit crisis. The spending levels by local advertisers – which grew at a frenetic 47% this year – are expected to slow to a paltry 8% in 2009.
Read The Rest—>No Improvement on Horizon for ‘Standard’ Online Advertising
