ad:tech San Francisco: iPads & Tablets – The Role of Advertising
Session Description: Consumers can’t get their hands on tablets quickly enough. Apple had already sold 8.5 million iPads by the end of 2010, comprising 88 percent of the tablet market and it’s on track to sell nearly 20 million this year, while CES 2011 showed us that manufacturers like Samsung, Motorola and Dell are jumping into the business with both feet. Publishers, including GQ , and media outlets such as Newscorp have prioritized getting content (and ads) to these new devices. But what is the consumer mindset of iPad and tablet users? What types of ads will they engage with and which will they avoid? Most of all, how can a brand stake a claim in one of the hottest sectors of digital marketing?
This session took place Tuesday, April 12, 2011. The speakers:
- Andrew Solmssen, Managing Director, Possible Worldwide (Moderator)
- David Gill, VP of Mobile Media, The Nielsen Company
- Shira Bogart, Creative Director, AKQA
- Michael Fischer, CMO, Coldwell Banker
Being a new tablet user as of March, I really appreciated this session. It was insightful into such an innovative device from a marketing and advertising standpoint. I liked that there were a lot of good actionable things learned in this session.
Bullet Point Review!
- Sales of tablets went up 245% in 2011.
- 11 tablets are scheduled to come out this year.
- Apple gets #1 & #2 in the marketplace, other tablets have a lot of work ahead to get market share.
- Price point is going to be key.
- 7 Habits of Highly Effective Applications
- Be sure it fits with the brand story. The app really hits home with messaging (Comcast/Xfinity).
- Make it special. Make sure there’s a lot of “finger candy”… there has to be a reason it works better on a tablet than on a PC. There has to be some value of interface for interfaces’ sake.
- Make it extensible. HTML5 is the way almost all apps will be built, including for phones. Building in HTML5 means you can make apps cross platform. Crackle.com is a good example.
- But don’t forget about performance. 10 million downloads in 10 days of Angry Birds Rio tie in.
- Make it useful. No one will download an overblown ad.
- Give it away. Are you selling a product or marketing a product?
- Test & learn. Remember that successful digital properties started small. Most of Twitter’s features happened because Twitter recognized what people just naturally started doing. Listen to your users.
- The “Old Fashioned” magazine experience has been popular on the iPad.
- There are 8 essentials to be learned along the way:
- Start small.
- Understand that mobile is iterative.
- Have a promotional strategy.
- Size the opportunity.
- Keep a light in the window.
- Establish a technology “middle”.
- Own the code.
- Don’t forget the tags (both analytics and advertising).
- Key Takeaways
- Get in the game.
- Iterate & re-imagine constantly.
- Lock down your processes quickly – tech, content, work flow – so you’re not doing a series of one-offs.
- Fit content to the device experience.
- Be rigorously platform agnostic.
- Manage expectations.
ad:tech San Francisco: The New Power Brokers – Apple, Facebook, Google, Twitter & Beyond
Session Description: Whether you’re launching a company, marketing a product or just keeping your head above water, it’s likely that you’re increasingly forced to plot your strategy around today’s new power brokers—Google, Facebook, Apple and Twitter. Does the relative hegemony and power of these companies create a stable, predictable environment for the rest of us, or are we continually guessing what the next chess move will do to our plans? In this highly interactive and thought-provoking segment, Upstream Group CEO Doug Weaver brings together experts from the capital markets, industry journalism and agency leadership to explore the impact of these companies on M&A, marketing and advertising. Are these players permanent fixtures, or are there new power brokers waiting in the wings? And what do you need to know to make the very best decisions in the months ahead?
This session took place Tuesday, April 12, 2011. The speakers:
- Doug Weaver, Founder & CEO, Upstream Group (Moderator)
- Shawn Carolan, Managing Director, Menlo Ventures
- Scott Symonds, General Manager Media, AKQA
- Molly Wood, Executive Editor, CNET.com
I enjoyed the discussion, though I wish there had been more actionable items.
Bullet Point Review!
- Only 10% of Twitter accounts follow more than 50 people.
- What is a tweet worth as opposed to a Facebook news update?
- This curve is pretty similar to any participatory medium.
- 1 in 4 twitter users are African-American, which is sort of the mirrored opposite of Facebook.
- Does Amazon belong on this list instead?
- Already selling more digital books than printed books.
- Many start-ups use their services for storage, hosting, etc.
- $36 billion in ecommerce in 2010
- Who is empowered? They’re more about empowering themselves, not other sellers or users.
- They’ve all built really nice walled gardens. Does that make the web less relevant & by association, Google less relevant?
- When you solve problems, you grow the market.
- You still find all these walled gardens through Google.
- Google is tying bonuses to social media strategy (up to 25%).
- The personal recommendation is the absolute social currency of web 3.0.
- Google should let Groupon and Facebook have their games & get really good at search.
- Is the web less relevant with Facebook around?
- “Control, distribution, & delivery of content is the next battleground.” – Molly Wood
- Clients are more willing to go where good content & readers are instead of the more traditional media outlets.
- NBC/Comcast is just one example of vertical integration where one party own a both the content & the pipe.
- Kinect has reinvigorated some new life into Microsoft.
- Yahoo might have some life left in them.
- AOL? Made some good hires and good acquisitions & trying hard, especially with local & patch, but it remains to be seen.
- Who may end up being a power broker in 5-10 years? Apple may not be as people go towards open source, Facebook & Google may be, but ones aggregating content will be ones to watch. Lots of potential with foursquare. Blogging may overturn.
ad:tech San Francisco: Social Gaming – Today’s Fad or Tomorrow’s Killer Strategy?
Session Description: Social Gaming represents half of all Facebook users and one of every two visits to Social Networks on average. Fad or vital to any marketer’s strategy going forward? You decide. To help, we’ll look at Social Gaming by the numbers in the US and around the world. An expert line-up of speakers will share insights about social gaming dynamics, success stories and best practices. A special focus on global market development from regions where mobile is the dominant platform will give a hint at the future of Social Gaming in the US. Check into this session to participate in the gamification of your marketing strategy.
This session took place Tuesday, April 12, 2011. The speakers:
- Mark Silva, Senior VP, Emerging Platforms Real Branding / Anthem Worldwide (Moderator)
- Jimmy Kim, Founder and CEO, NexoNova Studio
- Kim Kyaw, Senior Media Strategist, Toyota Motor Sales
- Tim Chang, Partner, Norwest Venture Partners
I was a bit disappointed about this session. I expected more actionable items, or at least a US slant. The panel took more of a “what’s happening in Asia” angle, so in truth, I ended up leaving a few minutes early.
Bullet Point Review!
- It’s got the reach of television and the engagement of games.
- Over half of Facebook users play social games.
- It’s bigger than the population of England.
- It’s bigger than the number of users of email.
- Zynga is by far the largest social gaming company.
- Playdom was acquired by Disney.
- Social gaming is a “Rich get Richer” phenomenon that grows aggressively.
- Zynga launched CityVille and got 100 million users in under 8 weeks.
- Social game advertising is not for amateurs.
- Advertising is less than 10% of revenues & social games monetize only 1-5% of users.
- Seek fit & utility, not just reach & demographics.
- Social gaming is more about getting together with friends than the game itself.
- There are various levels of commitment to advertising in games:
- Branded virtual goods.
- Branded game mechanics.
- New branded game mechanics.
- Multiple channel integrated campaign.
- When 7-11 did the tie-ins of their generic products with the Zynga games, they saw an incredible increase in business, repeat customers, frequency of current customers coming in, etc.
- There are many cultural factors for social gaming growth.
- In-game advertising hasn’t worked in the past because it wasn’t adding any value to users.
- When considering branding virtual goods, consider decorative vs. ability.
- Mobile is the new hope for social gaming.
- Fighting for distribution power, talent, and new revenue streams.
- CPE is cost per engagement. Some companies can track this. The user watches the ad, answers a question, and earns a new item from the game.
- “If content is king, then distribution power is god almighty” – @Timechange
- Cross promote games to other game users.
Performance Marketing Leadership Summit 2011 Recap
Once again, on the eve of ad:tech SF, OfferVault put on another afternoon Performance Marketing Leadership Summit. Last year’s topic was compliance, whereas this year’s summit focused on growth, transparency, and improving CPA networks everywhere. The 2011 summit was graciously sponsored by CPA Detective, LashBack, LinkTrust, EFFECTUS, & HasOffers.
While I didn’t explicitly learn much myself from this summit as it was definitely geared towards CPA networks, there was a lot of good information for those folks I’d like to share with you. Here are some highlights of information I took from the afternoon’s speakers:
Darin Namken
Founder & President of Bulldog Media Group, Inc.
- Why Diversify?
- Create value & enhance margins.
- Stability & structural positioning.
- Do you have the resources?
- Management.
- Technology (in house, other).
- Cash Flow.
- Infrastructure.
- You have to do something special in the market.
- You may need to diversify just to survive.
- Where to diversify?
- Verticals/products.
- Do you own your own products?
- Do you have your own technology?
- Internal development.
- Partnership.
- Strategic alliances.
- Joint ventures.
- Verticals/products.
- You’ve got to have a good database, not just emails but information about these people. That’s where the real value is.
- You’ve got to be able to work well with others.
- Reciprocating traffic works well.
- Pay day loans have higher traffic, as do prepaid cards and rewards programs.
- You must have a stable strategy to survive.
- What direction to diversify?
- Analyze, evaluate, and plan strategy.
- Future areas of diversification:
- Major players of influence (Google, Facebook, Apple, Groupon, others).
- What’s the next generation?
- What are the trends? (Chase them or plan for them).
- The economy has created more reasons to look farther into true performance. Who’s checking out your backside?
- Who’s aiming for what current teens will be looking for?
- Spending marketing dollars doesn’t mean a lot of you don’t know what the ROI on that money is.
Panel 1: Diversification Strategies
Darin Namken (Bulldog Media Group, Inc.), Chad French (PeerFly), James Murphy (BurstDirect), Bob Regular (Kitara Media), & Curtis Fullmer (AdKnowledge)
- Is it enough to just be a network?
- There’s not much barrier of entry.
- The relationships are what set the networks apart from each other.
- It’s more about conversion & yield than the type of offers. it starts with the offer but it can’t overcome traffic sources.
- It’ll be tough if you don’t have the right mix of affiliates and offers (e.g. Gaming affiliates but pet product offers).
- Understand where the publishers are getting their traffic from.
- Most networks don’t have a good handle of where the traffic is coming from. Which leads to the bigger question – as long as you’re not dealing with risque sites, does it even matter?
- Go with what you know. There’s no one path. Go from there and then expand.
- What are you solving? Are you solving anything? If you want to grow, you need to ask “What are you solving?” or are you just opportunistic? If you’re not solving something the relationship can’t last very long. It’s all a supporting mechanism to fixing the problem.
- Remember that you don’t have to be all things to all people. Build your identity and have a solid foundation to build it upon.
- Where is a bad idea to diversify into? Chasing trends too heavily is dangerous, like with re-bills. Focusing on a trend too much means you’ll go down when the trends go down. Don’t act like an affiliate. Haves multiple eggs in multiple baskets. Facebook fan page marketing is tricky these days, hard incentives tricky,
- What traffic is ok? All traffic is fine. You want everything in between. All traffic has a value, but it needs to be transparent. Understand the transparency of where your offers are running. If you know that, then you can calibrate your offer to suit the traffic being driven. Take those factors into consideration & you’ll get better yield. Bad traffic isn’t necessarily fraud, just mismatched traffic to the offer. There’s a place for incentives, but it takes focus, time and understanding. What you ultimately have is a user with no intent & no interest in your end offer. If you don’t understand how to create the intent, stay far far away.
- What do you need for resources & focus to pull a true diversification off? Make sure your core competency is solid to support the side stuff.
- How do you measure if something is worth getting into? In our industry you don’t have to be 1st, there’s still a lot of room. How does it fit into your core strategy? Evaluate what’s the dollar value you could potentially build that business or division to? I there a growing market there? If the answer to any of those things is no, consider moving on. Don’t chase, identify if it’ll help what you do. If you can’t do it very well & be superior at it, run away. Know when to cut your losses. (i.e. affilicert, affiliate certification that OfferVault was attempting to do). Be mature as a company & don’t look at it as a monetary thing.
- How do you diversify the traffic flow to different kinds of offers in one network? Make sure to understand the performance metrics, it becomes an education thing, be transparent, educate the affiliates on the performance of other offers. Just ask if they have traffic for those kinds of offers. How many times can you tell your publishers to “trust me!”? If they had an answer, they’d probably not share it lol. Get them to believe in the offer & why it’ll work for them. Look at the whole marketing funnel. Don’t kill your credibility by pushing something you’re not sure will work. Educate them that it’s in their best interest as well for them to diversify because advertisers can back out on offers in the blink of an eye for various reasons.
- Should you be a network without an in-house media team? It helps. The easiest way to get knowledge on traffic and performance is it do it yourself.
- Do you consider who your ultimate client is? Advertiser or publisher? Does that come into play on how you diversify? Consider the end user, if they don’t want to participate in these offers, the advertisers wont have the money to write the checks. There needs to be a balance. If you work direct with the merchants, you can look at things as more of a partnership with affiliates.
- Do you have issues where an advertiser is asking for full transparency (double verify) and how do you work with that? You give it to them. if they demand a certain quality and you want to work with them, you have to give it to them & meet that quality or the alarm bells start ringing. The money flows downhill. The increase in transparency is coming to more verticals and more industries. It goes back to relationships, if you build these good relationships then transparency is second nature. Why hide? It’s a two way street.
- Do many publishers say they won’t run 3rd party ad tags & want to hard code everything? If they’re that resistant, you have to ask yourself if they’re worth the time to work with or career to.
- International a great way to diversify? Is it? It’s key to future growth, but you’ve got to be prepared for the challenges of fraud, compliance, policy issues. Canada & UK fairly easy to get into, but do it in a very stepped, focused way. Consider your offers if they appropriate for international traffic as is, are there any TOAs that prohibit the international traffic, etc. Do you have the resources for that kind of expansion.
- What industry trend or issue keeps you up at night? There’s a constant battle with shady publishers & compliance. Regulation from the government. How are government departments interpreting the regulations. The government of Google & Facebook & their control over the Internet & their policy changes. The inability to integrate technologies & lack of standards.
Ryan Pamplin
CEO, Ryactive
- Patented technology, open sources, propriety
- Apparently affiliate marketing is patented (Patent# US 6804660) filed in 2001, granted in 2004. Probably without merit, companies getting sued. Mid level networks (ShareASale, Blue Phoenix).
- Going to trial 4/17/2012.
- ShareASale has filed a counter suit against essociates trying to invalidate the patent.
- In house, proprietary tracking solution instead of licensing direct track or LinkTrust or another vendor. All the networks mostly with propriety tech have much higher network revenue (i.e. Neverblue) They all started with their own solutions.
- Benefits of in house platform:
- Less reliance upon third party tech products.
- Increased value for investors and shareholders.
- Ability to quickly adapt to changes in the industry.
- Data portability and security.
- More control over your user experience.
- Differentiates your network from the thousands of other networks all using identical software.
- Benefits of an outsourced platform:
- Quick time to market with lower up front costs.
- Software that continues to be developed and improved on their dime.
- Predictable start-up and operating costs.
- Is Open Source the future?
- Tracking202/Prosper202 is open source, and became the industry standard tracking software for affiliates.
- WordPress is open sources and 13% of websites on the internet are powered by WordPress.
- Stop reinventing the wheel!
- Every network is reinventing or licensing the wheel.
- Instead, a group of networks could sponsor the creation of open source software.
- A network is more than software, it’s about people, offers, and relationships.
- Imagine if the resources going into development of the dozens of proprietary networks and the monthly fees for licensing were allocated to building a single universal platform.
- Noteworthy tech solutions:
- If you can reduce the size of your landing pages, offers and/or redirects you will make more money.
- Cloud is virtually infinite scalability.
- No need to overbuild gory intransigent with cloud.
- Software required to automatically scale.
- Pay just for what you use.
- Increases your risk of downturn, not necessarily so with applications that don’t need scalability.
- Dedicated, fine grain control over hardware.
- Dedicated server is likely to be more reliable.
- Model is proven and relied upon but 90% of Fortune 500 companies have it.
- Wouldn’t put whole business on cloud.
- ServerBeach (offshoot of rack space).
- Backup your servers everyday.
- Create scripts to automatically upload from your servers backups to your local FTP email you files, and/or another website.
- Your data is the core of your business, and if you’re not already you need to take measures to ensure you keep it safe.
- Auto backup with Tivoli.
- WordPress is free and open sources, with tens of thousands of templates available. It’s secured and trusted by millions with extreme flexibility. Websites can be developed in hours not weeks.
- Joomla powers 1 in 37 websites on the internet, not many of which are blogs. It’s slightly more complicated to learn, but great for split testing with thousands of themes available.
- Drupal powers millions of sites, including MTV, Lifetime Television, Yahoo, and more higher volume sites. It’s considered the best framework but is most complicated to learn of the open source CMS out there.
- Braintree is a great eCommerce solution that powers sites like LivingSocial, Bright Cove, 37 Signals, Open Table, and more. It’s easy to integrate.
- Visual website optimizer is $49 per month but worth it; it’s like Google Website Optimizer on steroids.
- Be sure to include trust symbols on your website – 100% satisfaction guaranteed logo, privacy seal, SSL certificate, Verisign, McAfee, etc. Avoid less trustworthy things, like GoDaddy right now.
Panel 2: Technology Insights
Ryan Pamplin (Ryactive), Matt Frary (SmarterChaos.com). Lucas Brown (HasOffers), Beto Paredes (Offered Launch Media, LLC), & Jay Moore (BigDeal.com)
- HasOffers goal is more people in the industry. They’re doing a lot to increase data redundancy.
- If you can build something better than anyone else, go for it, but if not, don’t bother. It’s not about if you do it in house or outsource it, it’s do I have go do it in house?
- How can you innovate on a closed platform if you can’t integrate a new technology? Open API is the suggested way.
- HasOffers rather on the spot.
- Innovation is driven by need.
- Cookies vs. Server side calls? You’ve got to make sure you don’t violate Apples rules. Cookies are becoming outdated. It’s inevitable that cookies will be going away. There’s also an element of educating people on the new tracking methods.
- Larger networks are also looking at the tracking solutions with the working group.
- The banks are guilty of screwing the whole merchant services thing up. A lot are just white label stuff.
- By removing inefficiencies, within the existing infrastructures, you’re going go make more money.
- You may find more of the advertisers having moe control on their programs mandated by the networks.
- Make sure your advertisers know how to do things, like tracking a sub ID. What’s lacking is a true integration. The education for the advertisers on the technology that’s available is also lacking.
- It’s not about the technology sometimes, it’s about the willingness to apply it.
- Its not unreasonable to want to know who you’re doing business with. The way things are with affiliates being in the dark is not going go persist. People are going to be changing the way things are done in favor of transparency.
- All industry panels lead to transparency. We all talk about it, but who does it? Advertisers do it, and unfortunately they’re going around the networks and collapsing the value chain. They’re the ones on the hook with the government.
- If the networks used their tech for good, instead of just protecting their own interests, then there’s more money for everyone.
- It’s the business ethics behind the technology that’s going go drive the industry.
- Any tech you’re excited about or think it’s a game changer? Blue Cava (allows you to ID a user all over the net without cookies or server side tracking, browser fingerprinting with ip). Any tech tracking people across devices or without cookies, across platforms, etc. Excited about online to offline to online tracking like pay per call. Anything that’s going go move towards a more sustainable affiliate marketing industry.
- Privacy is dead, if you’re putting all your info out there on Facebook & whatnot, FTC requires everyone offer a way to opt out. Overall it’s going to improve the consumer experience. Theres a lot of opportunities to give people a chance to opt in. The more important privacy issues surrounding ID theft are being addressed.
- Full transparency isn’t necessarily the way, but we want to know who the affiliate is generally speaking & have a way to contact them.
1st Affiliate Summit Day SF Recap
The first ever Affiliate Summit Day Meet Up happened on Tuesday. I’ve had a lot of time to digest, and it was definitely a great time. Knowing ahead of time that my best method of transportation into San Francisco would be BART, I was relieved to see that the meet up location was just 2 short blocks from the BART station. I was delighted to wander up to Kate O’Briens to see the familiar faces of Julie Vazquez, Lisa Picarille, and Murray Newlands congregating outside the bar.
Inside, more affiliate marketers! More familiar faces guided me through the crowd to point out where our nerdy group was assembled, but also, more patrons belonging to the group generally referred to as the “public”. I really enjoyed talking to a few new folks, and was especially flattered when someone approached me, already knowing my name, and proceeded to thank me for the knowledge I shared during our Get Noticed Fast presentation at Affiliate Summit East 2009 in New York. How nice!
Scheduled to speak was Murray Newlands about site monetiztion, however due to some unexpected limitations of the bar (noise, other patrons, space, etc) the presentation was scrapped. Hopefully Murray will just shift his presentation to next month’s meet up!
All in all, it was great. A little rough, but hey it was the first one! Huge thanks to Lisa Picarille for organizing the event – I’m sure it was NOT an easy task! In case you live under a rock & haven’t heard, Affiliate Summit Day is going to happen once a month on the last Tuesday of each month. You can follow the fun and track where your local meet up is happening on Meetup.com
Affiliate Marketing Fanatics 52: Interviewing Warren Whitlock
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Affiliate Marketing Fanatics – A couple of hyper-caffeinated affiliate marketers (Mike Buechele) and (Trisha Lyn Fawver) talk about all things Affiliate Marketing. From blogging to branding, social media to search, video and more!
You’ve come to love it – our interviews! Once again, Skyping in for Mike is Jen Goode, Doodler-in-Charge at JGoode Designs. This go-round we’re interviewing speakers at the upcoming PubCon South 2011 at the Norris Executive Conference Center in Austin, TX. Today we’re chatting with Warren Whitlock about his origins in internet marketing & his panel.
You may have noticed a distinct lack of a 51st episode of AMF. This is because, due to unforeseen recording difficulties caused by the recent updates to Skype, the episode wasn’t fully recorded, so we’re re-recording it with our guest later this week, so it’ll be posted out of order. Deal with it! Until then, for a juicy 29 minutes we like to call Episode 52, we discuss:
- Warren’s start in traditional advertising & stint in selling office equipment.
- Such a positive outlook on life, Warren has!
- Twitter Marketing : Customer Service and Loyalty Marketing – Warren will be speaking along side Michael Dorausch of Planet Chiropractic, Dan Zarrella of HubSpot.com, and Arnie Kuenn of Vertical Measures.
- You can listen to Warren’s podcasts on Blog Talk Radio. Search for Warren Whitlock.
- Connect with Warren on Twitter: @WarrenWhitlock.
- Find my amazing co-host Jen Goode on Twitter and at JGoode Designs!
Find us on Twitter: @AMF_Podcast, @MikeBuechele & @TrishaLyn. Like us on Facebook! Be old fashioned and just leave us a comment!
Special thanks to GeekCast.fm for hosting Affiliate Marketing Fanatics!
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