ad:tech San Francisco: Why HTML5 Matters
Session Description: The way consumers interact with the Web is changing. The impetus for this change is twofold—the appearance of a variety of new devices and increasing broadband penetration—both of which let you deliver richer content in a variety of new ways. The needs of the Web consumer have shifted dramatically in the last decade, especially within the past year. Much of that change comes from the new HTML5 spec that we all hear about, but not everyone quite understands. However, HTML5 has tremendous advantages for marketers as it represents the largest shift in Web standards in the last 15 years. HTML5 enables a richer experience for mobile, video and a myriad of other channels that can help revolutionize your marketing strategies. Adam Broitman, Partner and Ringleader of Circ.us, will do a deep dive into the numerous marketing and advertising implications of HMTL5 and the various things you need to know to prepare yourself for the next generation of the Web.
This session took place Wednesday, April 13, 2011. The speakers:
- Adam Broitman, Partner and Ringleader of Circ.us
This session blew me away! Having taught myself HTML years ago, this got me super jazzed and excited to start learning HTML5 and getting some more tools in my toolbox.
Bullet Point Review!
- Why HTML5 Matters.
- Standards are safe.
- Consumers are familiar with standards.
- Web standards can save you money.
- Web standard content is easier to find in Google.
- Broadband growth 2001-2009 ^ 63.5%.
- 31.5% YoY growth total video streams.
- YouTube 8.4 billion total streams, 2:23 average time on site.
- Some current browsers don’t support this new web interaction.
- The way we use the Internet had changed, but the nature of HTML hasn’t.
- The app will not save us.
- We need standards, not 1000s of app stores.
- Kind of a bridge.
- People have to spend more money for all platforms and it slows things down.
- The future of the web? (AOL) unable to grow within the walled garden, had to open up.
- 20% of people use a free app the next day after download, only 5% after 30 days.
- HTML5 is a set of standards.
- HTML5 is the new.. HTML.
- Important elements:
- The canvas.
- More creative things can be done.
- Geolocation.
- You don’t need to build a specific app to access the gps info.
- Browser now becomes location aware.
- Audio & video.
- <video>…</video>
- It’s not perfect… Yet.
- Miro video converter.
- Local storage.
- Google got rid of Gears in favor of HTML5.
- Drag & drop.
- Forms.
- Input types.
- New semantics.
- More meta tags actually describe content & make it more easily found in searches.
- It’s still the wild west of html5 compliant web browsers.
- Html5test.com to see if your browser is compliant.
ad:tech San Francisco: Advanced Affiliate Optimization
Session Description: Affiliate marketing best practices are not “one size fits all.” Optimization tactics that work for online retailers could prove disastrous for subscription marketers (and vice versa). This session examines popular affiliate strategies from both the retail and subscription marketing perspectives to identify how both types of marketers can grow sales/subs, manage quality, protect their brand and ultimately get the most from this channel. Learn from Peter Figueredo’s, Co-Founder and Brainstorm Chaser of Netx, 11 years of experience running successful affiliate and search campaigns for large retail and subscription advertisers.
This session took place Wednesday, April 13, 2011. The speakers:
- Peter Figueredo, Founding Partner and Brainstorm Chaser, Netx (Moderator)
- Vinny Lingham, CEO, Yola.com
And you thought I was done posing about ad:tech? Pshaw! I really enjoyed this session because it gave me great actionable items to help improve and better understand the For Me To Coupon leads program I manage!
Bullet Point Review!
- Retail Programs
- Product focused
- Paradox of choice
- New customers
- Short term ROI
- Minimize returns
- Subscription/Service Programs
- Service focused
- Fear of commitment
- Wants qualified customers
- Long term ROI
- Minimize churn
- Advanced Techniques for Retail
- Product driven: Shopping comparison, coupon, loyalty (Peter suggested brands create orphan coupon page to rank higher than affiliates on brand + coupon).
- Paradox of choice: feed optimization, advanced creative.
- New customers: new customer bounty, recruit new & growing affiliates.
- Short term ROI: offers to increase AOV, only pay more to get more (don’t just give higher commissions, negotiate what kind of placement you’re getting).
- Minimize returns: commissions on shipped, reverse returns.
- Advanced Techniques for Subscription
- Service focused: review sites, vertical content sites, blogs.
- Fear of commitment: affiliate education (one sheets, webinars, networking, etc), consumer education.
- Qualified customers: manage consumer incentives, clear consumer messaging (you know the lifetime value, so you can offer a higher bounty).
- Long term ROI: sites with a loyal user base, track retention by affiliate.
- Minimize churn: retention based commissions, retention rate bonus.
- Key takeaways
- Retail: optimize your feed.
- Subscription: optimize on retention.
- Subscription: educate your affiliates.
- Yola Case Study
- Focus on purchasing actions, not sign ups.
- Run promos for multiple year subscriptions.
- Test different discounts on promos.
- Keep promos fresh by varying messaging & theme, keep discounts constant.
- Align creatives with affiliate pay our structure.
Points brought up during the Q&A
Drive engagement with top tier affiliates. Look at the research. Look at how they prefer to be engaged & engage them that way.- Do you provide materials an influencing person can take to a meeting to convince the decision maker? One sheet, stats, other educational materials.
ad:tech San Francisco: Affiliate Marketing – The Big Challenges
Session Description: As the affiliate marketing industry grows, it continues to encounter challenges on multiple fronts. One front burner issue for brands and advertisers remains affiliate legislation. From New York to California to Texas, the nuances of tax collection in each state are still being worked out and, in many cases, litigated. With this vital issue still in flux, what are brands and marketers doing to move forward? How can advertisers keep track of the state-by-state laws, and how can they develop strategies for today and for the future? Trademark legislation is also a key issue for affiliate marketing and we’ll explore how brands walk the fine line between protecting their brand and getting wider exposure. Finally, we’ll tackle how affiliate legislation in various states will impact all online retailers.
This session took place Wednesday, April 13, 2011. The speakers:
- Carolyn Tang Kmet, Director of Affiliate Marketing, Groupon (Moderator)
- Angel Djambazov, OPM, KEEN Footwear
- Rebecca Madigan, Executive Director, Performance Marketing Association
- Brian Looney, Senior Director of Business Development, CitizenHawk, Inc.
- Seana Montgomery, Senior Paralegal, McAfee
Impression comment
Bullet Point Review!
- Affiliate marketing has become a legitimate marketing channel.
- Ad Tax, aka Amazon Tax
- Lots of spin going on from the pro side.
- No physical presence – not required to collect sales tax.
- Reality is that there’s no money involved
- What does it mean for merchants?
- If you have an affiliate program in states where this passes, you must now collect sales tax for all purchases made into the state, Or
- Terminate affiliates (obviously the feared option).
- What happens when it passes?
- 25-35% loss of income to affiliates.
- Lay offs, downsizing, some companies may close entirely.
- People move out-of-state.
- Income tax decreases.
- Legislation has been beaten back 25 times.
- Passed in 5 states.
- 8 states in play in 2011.
- Brand Protection is Important.
- Typosquatting relies on typos in URLs.
- Bad spelling is as prevalent as the common cold.
- Typing too fast, fat fingers, old keyboards that stick, small keyboards on mobile devices.
- More than 20% of all Internet traffic is typed in.
- 15-30% of the time the URLs are misspelled.
- Companies often classify this as a legal issue instead of a marketing or traffic issue.
- Defending yourself against a typosquatter is expensive when you get lawyers involved.
- URDP – uniform domain name dispute resolution policy.
- Trademark infringement considered anything confusingly similar. Typos don’t count but content does. $1500 to file a complaint in court.
- You’re not filing against the domain name, you’re filing against the domain owners.
- Turn trademark enforcement into a profit center.
- Laws are international, but more enforceable on .com & .net.
- Marketing channels are business tools. Each should be employed for a specific purpose.
- You’re obligated to police your brand – your trademark can get canceled if you don’t prove you’re actively policing infringements.
- Learning from KEEN Footwear.
- Be sure your affiliates understand what affiliate marketing is.
- Affiliate publisher joined, tried selling his own brand of shoes thinking affiliate meant an endorsement similarly to the definition of “affiliate” in the TV world. Eventually showed up at the corporate offices demanding Keen CEO do more to leverage their partnership in trying to sell is shoe related product.
- Not all publishers understand what the channel is. Educate them.
- Be sure to clearly define all legal aspects.
- 20% of your affiliates are driving the majority of the revenue.
- What can you do to measure impact of amazon tax:
- Monitor legislation in states crucial to your success.
- Join the PMA to help.
- Stay informed through geekcast.fm, ReveNews.com, PMA blog.
- Create a contingency plans with a different payment or advertising model to not loose these valuable partners.
- Garbage can bills popping up including more junk trying to get out-of-state retailers to collect sales tax. Just says “don’t do business in our state”.
ad:tech San Francisco: Affiliate Marketing Innovations for Brands and Advertisers
Session Description: Affiliate marketers are the most adept at harnessing new technologies in their marketing efforts. As a result, the industry has evolved faster than most marketing channels. During the past decade, affiliate marketing has grown from basic text links and banner ads to geo-targeted mobile campaigns and social media swarms. In this session, we’ll delve into how brands can leverage their affiliate channel to multiply reach and the number of consumer touch points. What market factors have driven the rapid growth so far in affiliate marketing? Has the increase been consumer-driven or technology-driven? And what sort of changes will come next? Join us as we find out.
This session took place Wednesday, April 13, 2011. The speakers:
- Carolyn Tang Kmet, Director of Affiliate Marketing, Groupon (Moderator)
- J.J. McCarthy, Sr. Manager Internet Marketing, eBay
- Alicia Navarro, Co-Founder & CEO, Skimlinks
This was a great session. It gave some insight on the beginnings of Affiliate Marketing that even I didn’t know. It was also chock full of interesting tidbits and insight gained from eBay & Skimlinks’ experiences.
Bullet Point Review!
- Affiliate marketing really started in 1886 with Avon ladies.
- People didn’t realize sites were interactive at the dawn of the internet.
- Consumers are responsive to free and discounted offer.
- Approving of animation.
- Consumers lost interest in flashy stuff, needed to find relevance.
- Groupon basing the ads not on the content, but the consumers location.
- Consumers felt their privacy invaded by contextual ads.
- Key to delivering content is relevance to individual consumer.
- Recognize where services are needed.
- RFID helped Walmart improved out of stock by 16% and improved restock efficiency by 60%.
- Staples reduced out of stock by 21%.
- Harrahs used RFID in chips – knew where to send cocktail waitresses or pit bosses according to the concentration of where the chips were located on the casino floor.
- Market fragmentation: broadcast to the individual instead of to the masses.
- Groupon has added incentives for users to share deals via Facebook and Twitter.
- Affiliate marketing has become device agnostic.
- We’re constantly wired.
- Convergence used go just be a phone, but now it’s a PDA, camera, Internet, television, & more.
- eBay been actively marketing in affiliate space since 2000.
- eBay partner network launched 2008.
- >100k websites actively driving traffic.
- Unlike all other marketing channels, success in affiliate marketing is predicated on competing for affiliates mind share & loyalty.
- Success is a function of reputation, ease of use, & earnings f(ree).
- Invest significantly in reputation.
- Being successful isn’t always about tech innovation, it’s also about cultural innovation.
- QCP: quality click pricing. Volume isn’t a proxy for value. Would rather have quality. De-averages the CPC.
- Build world class tools.
- Do-it-Yourself Affiliate Marketing is more costly than the revenue.
- Integrate with the affiliate networks.
- Apply to individual merchant programs.
- Create deep link syntax.
- Hard code into site.
- Maintain links.
- Access multiple reporting interfaces.
- Optimize.
- Publishers don’t think of themselves as marketers, so appeal to them with that angle.
- Perhaps affiliate marketing should be affiliate linkage.
- The closer funnel (converto.com)
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.
