Adotas

With gTLDs, Global Branding Starts with a Name

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 14:00 GMT

ADOTAS – It’s no longer important how and where the business names that later became candidates for trademarks, then domain names and now possibly gTLD (generic top-level domain) candidates, originated. The fact is that the majority are simply not performing as well as originally thought. The passage of time can be very cruel; last-century naming based on yesterday's models has little value in these times, whenferocious digital cyber branding driven models are deciding global consumption patterns.

The ICANN gTLDs global debate is only assisting the world in better understanding the landscape of global naming complexities and what critical roles names play in marketing domination of any idea. If ICANN to manage a billion domain names, plus several thousand GTLDs after multiple rounds in coming years, it must accept its full mandate as spelled out in its own name, “Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers.”

To clarify the element, a famous or not so famous trademark, or a big or not so big brand, in reality is a name and a name alone, and that name has to present itself stripped naked to be checked against other names in question. It must prove to have inherent qualities and worthiness for protection.

However, a local or regional layer of trademark protection that may have served the owners well in the past may not work in this global race of the future for name domination, with wide open jurisdictions and where the elasticity of a name must prove its worthiness for such protection. A gTLD naming is always a global naming issue that must face global naming complexities.

Applying the basic rules of corporate nomenclature

A “best name” will only prove to be a liability if it fails in its registration as a trademark, and therefore it will restrict global expansion.

Trademark professionals may differ on this, as they are proponents of aggressive trademark registration aimed for “crush and destroy” and buy out any opposition in far-flung jurisdictions. There are many success stories, but most of the time thousands end up with exhausted budgets and wasted years.

The big branding and global advertising agencies also take a similar approach. They will take any name and create a global brand with a lasting impression. There are many success stories, but tens of thousands are short-lived. Names only stay on top of the mind until the expensive fireworks come out.

As we approach the global borderless future of multi-billion online users, global trademark registrability is the basic test to discover the limitations of a name. Diluted names cost a fortune in maintenance to stay alive.

It may be proven that 95 percent of names in business have such problems — however, it seems that these disfunctionalities provide fertile ground for the trademark and global advertising agencies.

What’s so difficult for the boardrooms to figure out?

Neither the world's best MBA programs nor the CMOs have any specialized understanding of these global naming complexities, despite that the global advertising expenditures pushing these name identities are over 500 billion yearly (more explained here).

Why, suddenly, has the entire advertising trade declared war on ICANN? Why are weak, diluted names only referred to as “big brands,” and not as helpless, injured names on life support? Why should ICANN have to bear the brunt of “bad-name management” in the name of big-brand-owners' revolt, and why isn’t the truth about unspoken disfunctionalities of mega-brand identities being discussed in the open?

According to a study by my firm, ABC Namebank, there are “100 top diluted names” that are being widely used by some 100 million businesses around the world. The sheer number defies logic. Such issues are gradually being discussed in open forums.

Well-protected brands all over the world are protected because their name identity possess special qualities therefore worthy of such status. Panasonic, Rolex and Microsoft have little to worry about over names like UnitedThis and UnitedThat. The “do not sell list” suggested by CRIDO is still the best way to prove the extent of already-existing naming fiascoes.

However, ICANN should welcome any kind of defensive registration for a reasonable fee and, upon submission of the name in need of defensive registration, respond with a professional Name Evaluation Report (NER). Such custom reports will assess marketing suitability and usability of the name, based on global implications, with authoritative analysis and recommendations.

The applicant will have three options: continue, start a procedure to partially or fully change the name, or abandon the idea altogether.

Such NERs should not be confused with the trademark lawyer’s letter of “registrability opinion,” always an important tool to start the process, but always confined to trademark law and never expanded into marketing or creative suitability issues. Similarly, advertising, re-branding or renaming graphic design-based exercises are locked in a campaign-based mentality.

The NER process addresses diverse aspects of global naming complexities, and if there's consensus to modification or creative solutions, global naming complexities and trademark acceptability rules are readily incorporated. Historically, business naming was never meant to be a wildly creative exercise, but rather a somber and tactical maneuver of corporate nomenclature rules.

Here are the three top questions:

Is ICANN becoming the global trademark clearing house to gradually clear up this naming chaos? How will this all work out?

Will global advertising agencies stop defending diluted names or damaged brands as “mega-brands?” Who will take the name-game blame?

Will the global trademark profession accept traditional trademark procedures are in serious need of fixing? Who will accept any radical changes?

Here are three suggestions:

ICANN should take the lead in this global debate, because it’s already managing 220 million domain names and about to open a new gateway for super-name identities. Any global name clearance house will be a logical extension of these services and further support the gTLD-type programs. ICANN has to assume charge of one billion-plus domain names in the near future.

The globally accepted trademark classification system that allows the same name to be applied and protected in different types of businesses does not work on global cyber-branding platforms. Therefore, brand-new knowledge must be induced in corporate boardrooms to tackle global naming issues in a very different light.

Advertising and branding all over the world will have to face up to naming as a distinct, critical component of global cyber-branding, and not as a small component of a big ad campaign. There are amazing opportunities in this thinking at this critical junction.

The trademark profession must adjust to new changes and acquire deeper understanding of global naming issues and rules of corporate nomenclature. There are great opportunities in TM portfolio adjustments.

For the first time in last 50 years, global naming complexities are being addressed head-on in a wide-open global debate, where all relevant parties are engaged. This is all due to the technological progression of the internet and billions of online users proving to be natural catalysts. The world has changed, and some traditional thinking has to go.

Google AdMob Axes Minimum Bids, Targeting Fees

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 12:29 GMT

ADOTAS - As of Feb. 15, Google will change its bidding model for cost-per-click (CPC) mobile ads, adapting what product manager Chrix Finne described in a blog post yesterday as “an AdWords-style auction, where the winning price is determined by the quality of the ad and the other bids on that impression; the price we charge will never exceed the advertiser’s bid.” These changes to Google's AdMob mobile advertising platform will eliminate existing minimum bid requirements and targeting fees. Finne went on to explain this means advertisers could receive cheaper clicks, depending on the inventory in question, and that “high-quality ads will be rewarded with an improved chance at winning the auction” per the law of supply and demand.

These changes put AdMob in a more competitive position among other ad marketplaces (TapJoy announced $0.10 minimum bid last week) and allows even more new advertisers to jump on board the platform.

Nothing is scheduled to change for campaigns that are not CPC.

Rethinking the Online Advertising Ecosystem, Part One: Independent Publishers

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 16:40 GMT

ADOTAS – The online advertising market is booming. The display market in particular is likely to have hit $9 billion in the fourth quarter of 2011 – a growth spurt that even on a steep chart looks like a right angle. That’s the good news. The bad news, from a publisher perspective, is that much of that spend is consolidated by a relatively small number of companies (Facebook, Yahoo!, AOL, Google, and Microsoft). This condensing ad spend runs counter to what the internet is about and why we as consumers spend so much of our time immersed in it.

What does this mean for high-quality, independent, niche and professional publishers that make up the majority of the web? Why are those publishers, authors, creators and curators of some of the best authentic, informational and entertaining content struggling for their fair share of the economics? It’s one of those things that’s simple to understand conceptually, and yet difficult to solve both at the same time.

The way things work today: Publishers that can afford it have their own sales team who call on ad agencies and occasionally the marketers of brands themselves. They sell the “promise” of the publication – its quality, level of reader engagement, demographics and perhaps even psychographics of the audience. They offer the ability to run unique and custom ad placements that have high “sex appeal” to the buyers of these placements. The sales teams’ success rate remains relatively low, and they end up selling somewhere between 20 percent and 40 percent of the inventory on the site(s). Similarly, because site rep firms are really an extension or replacement for a captivesales team, their sell-through range is the same, and certainly not more.

So what does the publisher do? He or she makes a difficult decision to relinquish control over “the asset,” and leverages 3rd parties to help monetize the rest – which ranges between 60% and 80% of inventory leftunsold on the site (some refer to this as “remnant”).

Therein lies the rub. This unsold, or remnant, inventory is no longer being presented in a compelling way to a marketer. Instead, it’s sold to the performance advertiser who cares more about clicks and conversions than they do the impact, engagement, informational, or entertainment value of the site. They don’t care about the reader. They care about the consumer potential of the reader and whether or not this consumertakes some sort of performance-tracked action. The result: lower CPMs and potential for crappy creative in the ads trying to juice a reaction from the reader.

Over the past year or so, the level of sophistication of audience targeting has gotten much better. Teams of quant folks have developed unique ways to collect, segment and refine data on the audience to better target ads and track their efficacy. CPMs have risen modestly, but not because marketers are any more connected to the brand promise of the publishers’ content — they instead employ a more sophisticated way to target a performance ad.

This gap between the brand buyer and the performance buyer leaves a lot of slack in the market. Why is it that a publisher or their representatives can articulate the promise of the content and the engagement of the reader to lock in a high CPM from a willing advertiser? Marketers are happy to pay $10, $15, or even $20-plus CPMs for guaranteed placement in and around high quality content. Why then does this enormous bifurcation occur when it comes to unsold inventory? After all, it’s the same site, the same content, and even perhaps the same reader. Drastically lower CPMs for this unsold inventory make most publishers nuts. They’re lucky to get a buck, if not $0.50 CPMs, which isn’t sustainable, for so many reasons.

So what can be done about it? Brand marketers still love great content and value reader engagement. Performance advertisers love conversions. And publishers just want to do what they do best which is to create and curate awesome and engaging content. All this can continue to happen with tools that help publishers regain control over the economics of their assets. Tools and services to help are fast coming to market.

Analysts, investors and entrepreneurs like to point out that the amount of attention and time spent online outstrips the amount of money marketers dedicate and spend on this medium. It’s the solutions that are lacking, not the intent or interest. The uniqueness of formats, brand safety, guarantees of placement, and contextual alignment are what’s missing from the audience buying promise. All of these are opportunities to be solved and smart publishers are well on their way to figuring this out.

The use of sophisticated audience profiles to deliver more targeted advertising is not going back in the bottle. And the ability to sell the brand promise of the publisher still takes skill. It’s the connection of those two things that take this bifurcated economic pattern and convert it into a continuum ranging from high impact brand placements to direct-response conversion performance. With emerging controls coming to market, independent high-quality publishers can recapture their rightful share of the economic pie.

Case Study: Social Ad Effectiveness

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 16:22 GMT

ADOTAS – Yesterday, social video advertising platform Unruly Media released a case study around a survey the company had conducted, one that aimed to answer a core question about social sharing and its ramifications for brands and advertisers: If someone recommends a piece of content to someone he or she knows, will that person like that content more than some similar piece of content they might've come across via a search or happenstance? In a word, yes, according to the survey's results. In the survey, 14 percent more people said they enjoyed a video recommended to them than they did a video they found by browsing or discovery. Not only that, but recommendation caused the number of people who didn't enjoy a video to drop by 41 percent. Enjoyment also drove up brand association, purchase intent, brand favorability and brand recall.

Unruly's survey was focused on the age 18 to 34 demographic, a key age range for social media usage. It looked at responses to video advertisements from Heineken, Coca-Cola, Cornetto (Unilever) and Energizer. These are, said Unruly EMEA managing director Phil Townend in a phone conversation yesterday, “not products you generally buy online, unless you do all your grocery shopping online.” Unruly asked viewers on video ads in social media how they'd gotten there, then asked further questions.

Townend said he was surprised by the way this demographic — especially people on the younger end of it — understood their social relationships online. “The next generation doesn't differentiate the real and the virtual,” he said. “I've got my connections on Facebook in one bucket, and my real-life connections in another bucket,” he explained, while younger people tended to lump all their connections into one group. And he was surprised to discover what a large number of 18-to-24-year-old women preferred to hang out online than in person. “They're thinking, ‘If I'm on a social platform, I can be with all of my friends — physically, I have to pick and choose two or three,'” Townend explained.

But nonetheless, “word of mouth is the most powerful tool,” Townend said. “Social video creates conversations. Our assumption was that these conversations would be digital, [but] two of four people struck up a real-life conversation.”

Here's an excerpt of the case study, which you can download in its entirety here:

Social Ad Effectiveness: An Unruly White Paper

Do social video recommendations significantly impact traditional brand metrics? An independent study using survey data collected from July – November 2011 to determine the impact of social recommendations on traditional brand metrics. Recommendations are shown to directly increase brand recall and association, as well as video enjoyment. Viewers who enjoy video content are shown to have higher brand favourability and purchase intent.

Executive Summary

This Social Ad Effectiveness paper reports the results of a survey of online video viewers across Unruly’s social video platform for four social video campaigns from top FMCG brands Guinness, Coca-Cola, Cornetto and Energizer from July to November 2011. This research was commissioned and organised in conjunction with the brands’ agency partners Carat, Vizeum, Mindshare and MEC. The survey investigated the impact of recommendation on brand metrics amongst 18-34 year olds to determine social ad effectiveness, finding that social recommendations dramatically increased ad performance. In particular:

• Video enjoyment increased purchase intent by 97% and brand association by 139%
• Enjoyment of the video rose by 14% amongst viewers who had viewed following a recommendation
• Brand recall and brand association rose 7% amongst viewers who had been recommended the video versus viewers who found it by browsing

Research Overview

The explosion of social networking has opened up a massive opportunity for advertisers to open a dialogue with their audiences, particularly via video campaigns that make brand ambassadors of opinion leaders in social spaces. Social video advertising has grown rapidly, more than doubling in size every year since 2009, and direct engagement metrics are strong: Unruly has delivered over 1.34 billion social video views, with an average 1.95% of viewers clicking through for more information, and 0.94% sharing the video. However, there is little granularity around the extent to which social advertising impacts traditional brand metrics. This study sets out to understand the effect of recommendations in online video advertising, determining to what extent social recommendations affect brand metrics such as recall, favourability, message association and purchase intent. It finds that recommendations impact video enjoyment, and so also considers the effect of video enjoyment on the key brand metrics above.

Key Findings

Video Enjoyment

Viewers enjoy recommended videos more than non-recommended videos: there was a 14% increase in the number of people who enjoyed the video following a recommendation versus those who had discovered it by browsing. Moreover, a recommendation reduced the number of people who did not enjoy the video by 41%.

Viewer enjoyment of branded video is important because it has a direct impact on key brand metrics. Viewers who enjoyed the video they watched demonstrated 139% higher brand association, 97% higher purchase intent, 35% higher brand favourability, and 14% higher brand recall than their counterparts who did not enjoy the video.

…

Conclusion

This research demonstrates that social video significantly increases brand attention. The power of social video lies in the recommendation to view content. This recommendation comes not only from peers in social media environments, but also from authoritative blogs and news sources covering advertiser content editorially. The impact of the recommendation on consumers is considerable:
• Viewers are more likely to enjoy a video when it has been recommended than when encountered through browsing (14% higher enjoyment)
• Viewers are more likely to recall a brand name when the social video has been recommended than when encountered through browsing (7% higher recall)
• Viewers are more likely to engage with an ad’s messages when the social has been recommended than when encountered through browsing (10% higher brand association)

Ultimately enjoyment of the video correlated positively with all tested brand metrics in the sales funnel, including brand favourability and final purchase intent.

Click here for the full case study.

Video: “Build an SEO Foundation” Excerpt

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 12:30 GMT

ADOTAS – This morning, Grovo.com, the website devoted to educating users about online issues and providing tutorials on how to make the most of the web, released its latest Grovo Expert Series, a 40-minute video in which EliteSEM director of SEO Zach Ciperski explains what SEO is and how it can be implemented. The full video delves into website optimization for SEO, keyword usage, link building, SEO for social media or for mobile, and the user experience, among other topics. The Grovo crew has shared an excerpt with ADOTAS readers — below, check out Ciperski's explanation of onsite SEO optimization. He offers tips, but ultimately points out there are no set rules. Here's that chapter:

And, for good measure, here's the trailer for the series:

Covering the Digital Buy: Super Bowl Winners and Losers

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 11:45 GMT

ADOTAS - Last year, when I blogged about the 2011 Super Bowl Commercials, I thought it was a fresh take on one of the biggest days for brand advertisers at the time. However, while the digital world continues to evolve at breakneck speed, many of the big brands seem to still be missing many of the basics around: 1. covering their digital buys; 2. leveraging the multi-screen experience; and 3. building your audience. These actions were basic best practices that I kept in mind as I sat at the judges' table with so many other Americans watching 2012 Super Bowl commercials.

Cover Your Digital Buy: Winners

As expected, mobile assets have undergone a dramatic makeover in the past year. There were few examples of advertisers' sites that were not optimized for mobile or tablets, which is a big shift from last year. Many more advertisers than last year also spent the money to cover their search traffic.

Automotive companies did the best overall.
1. Chevrolet – The 2011 Biggest Winner did it again.
2. Chrysler – Most talked about ad, and covered their buy.
3. VW – One of the funniest commercials, and covered their buy.
4. Audi, Lexus, BMW and Hyundai – All succeeded in covering their buy.
5. TaxAct – Surprisingly, they bought a television commercial and not only covered their buy, but appeared on many other brand terms, including Doritos (since they did not buy their brand). They were a great example of one brand poaching another company’s weakness to cover their own branded terms.
6. Cars.com – They bought their own commercial, successfully drafted off the other brands and bought strategically.

The winners in the automotive category made the smart move to consume multiple positions with search ads. As you can see below, Chrysler buys out their brand term in position one, links to YouTube channel to re-watch the commercial in position two, and then links to dealers in position three.

A few of the other car companies linked to geotargeted dealers in positions two and three, which was also a clever move.

Cover Your Digital Buy: Losers

Several advertisers did not spend the short money to buy even their brand terms on Google. The list is a who’s who in the big world of brands that failed this year:

Coca-Cola
Budweiser
Doritos (Pepsi)
Pepsi, which bid, but not high enough to be displayed at top of page
Movies including Battleship and The Avengers
Old Navy not buying Corporado, the faux brand featured in their commercial
Beckham and H&M
Oikos – yes, the Greek yogurt company
Carl’s Jr.
Jack in the Box
Bud Light (bought Bud Light Platinum, but not their brand term)
Career Builder

Again, brands are spending at least $2 million for the spot, and buying the companion ads on search for even a few hours cannot cost more than $25,000. Another trend was many brands did not cover the product name. So Cadillac had an ad on their brand, but not on Cadillac ATS, which was the product promoted in their Super Bowl commercial. This adds up to failure.

Cover Your Digital Buy – Biggest Loser: Infiniti

I saved the worst for last, and it needs a special mention. Copy editors take note: While Infiniti covered their branded search terms, they used a bad URL, so consumers clicking on their search term went to a dead page.

Leveraging Multi-screen Experience

As a judge, I can’t give a trophy to companies that just showed up, but there were really no winners in this category. There were many attempts at extending the television viewing experience onto a second screen, but advertisers are still simply not getting it. Advertisers must create compelling content that extends beyond TV, leveraging an engagement model in which consumers bond with and advocate for their brands. For me – and most consumers I know – to entice me to stop watching football and grabbing snacks, the experience has to be compelling. Few advertisers did more than provide a URL — I only saw nine hashtags and eight mentions of Facebook. This year there really were not any clear cut winners, but these companies tried:

GoDaddy – they at least give us a reason to go to their site; however, we all know how this story ends, so not that compelling.
Pepsi – they did integration with Shazam, but I’m still not convinced that this is the best application to integrate the screens. I tried a few times, but in a crowded room it’s impossible to make everyone stop talking while one Shazams an ad.
Chevrolet – The ad didn’t drive me to their site, but I went out of curiosity, where there were some cool YouTube assets.

Building Your Audience

Again, here there were few if any clear winners. Most big brands are just trying to increase awareness, but the beauty of digital marketing is the ability to build an audience. When you want to create some buzz or awareness around a new product, digital marketing campaigns have already collected an audience to target. Based on this concept, advertisers could have used these tactics to get more digital bang for their big bucks:

Drive Facebook fans – why not make the call to action to “like us on Facebook”? If the spend is $2 million and that call to action adds 200,000 fans, there is a clear and measurable data point. Then when the brand is ready to follow up with a promotion, there is a built-in audience.
Re-marketing pool – another easy win is to drive consumers to your site for a giveaway. Yes, this old trick still works. Collect email addresses, and by simply placing a re-marketing pixel on the site, brands can now re-market to this audience via targeted display ads. For companies like Pepsi that own so many brands, this would be a natural fit.

So there you have it: another great game under our belts, Eli now has more Super Bowl titles than his more famous brother, and the digital world continues to evolve. I truly believe that next year a few advertisers will crack the multi-screen angle and we will see all of our digital devices starting to work in concert.

How Social Targeting Can Lead to Discovery

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 16:02 GMT

ADOTAS – Every brand has a defined target audience. And, especially with the social web, you might think you know where that audience is congregating.

But, as every fisherman knows, your targets are constantly moving. They were in one place yesterday, another today, and they’ll be in yet another tomorrow. And when you find them, you want to be the only fisherman reeling them in.

What if you had special radar that would tell you where your prize fish – or, for our purposes, your target audience — is right now, at this very moment?

You do. It’s called social targeting. Let’s say your target audience consists of young adult males who like rap music. You could place your ads – along with all your competitors – to reach young adults who engaged with or liked Facebook fan pages for rap music. Or you can discover that the current ebb of the social conversation has moved your target audience into active discussions about the NBA.

Why? Perhaps an NBA star is recording a rap track. What’s most important, though, is that right now, in real time, you can outmaneuver the competition by reacting immediately and being the first to advertise on basketball-oriented pages.

Social targeting refers to the use of social signals and trends that allow you to identify and purchase highly relevant ad inventory. It utilizes the implicit signals shared by users (if you talk about rap music with your friends, you must like rap music) and then uses the ebbs and flows of social conversation to target fast-emerging groups of highly engaged users.

Let’s compare social targeting with the alternative, static targeting, which is most often used by brands today. With static targeting, you use pre-defined audience assumptions to purchase social ad inventory. You rely on a limited set of explicitly defined assumptions (perhaps your Facebook profile says you like rap, but you also listen to rock). And you never change it. Your audience changes interest, and you stay static.

Unlike with social targeting, static targeting fails to take into account current moods and discussions – which, of course, is exactly what social media is all about. And it fails to account for undiscovered interests of your target audience.

Social targeting is all about discovery, as things happen – of both audiences and engagement. Brands can discover untapped pockets of untapped audiences, and they can discover and connect with users when they are most engaged around a specific topic – and most apt to be open to your brand’s message.

That’s a great discovery.

Infographic: HootSuite Analyses Social Media Impact of Super Bowl Ads

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 15:31 GMT

ADOTAS - So, it's the Tuesday after the Super Bowl, and here's what we already know: We know huge numbers of people were hooked up to multiple screens –TVs, laptops, smartphones, tablets — and were interacting online with each other and with brands and their ad campaigns throughout the game. We could tell how loudly brands were proclaiming their messages — but which of those ad campaigns captured the attention of viewers enough for folks at home to share conversations about the ads on social media? HootSuite's in a good position to answer that question. With the company's experience demonstrating to brands the opportunities of social media and analyzing how those social campaigns have proceeded, its crew has weighed the social media campaigns 20 major brands conducted around their Super Bowl ads. HootSuite looked at the most visible U.S. social media sites — Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ (“We're trying to be the Switzerland of social media, from a platform perspective,” HootSuite CMO Ben Watson said in a phone conversation today) — and weighed those 20 campaigns with several criteria: sheer numbers of mentions, integration across multiple platforms, sentiment, and also factors that might've detracted from the brand's message. “Is there a live component?” Watson asked, explaining the study's methods. “Is there a consistent stream of activity? Is there interactivity? Is it creative, and does it build on brand assets? How are they marketing that integration?”

To HootSuite, Coca Cola came out on top. Watson pointed out that having the iconic Coca Cola polar bears commenting on the game on Coke's Facebook page (not to mention the ease with which web users were directed to the Facebook page) led to a social campaign that users responded to and was inventive at the same time. It was the kind of campaign, Watson said, where “you just leave [the browser] open — you don't just open it and close it a few times.” Also way up near the top of the list was H&M's campaign, for which David Beckham proved extremely popular. “Beckham's crushing it,” Watson said, “scoring millions in terms of impression counts, We're not even talking about Tweet counts. He was in three trending topics on Twitter.” Intense public interest over time was important to the study, Watson pointed out — the Chrysler ad featuring Clint Eastwood generated a flurry of interest, but it petered out quickly. Other campaigns were marked down for poor behavior. “Are you begging? Are you spamming users?” Watson asked. He mentioned how one brand was “called out” by sending direct messages to Twitter users, which those users saw as invasive (the DM box is seen by many Tweeters as a particularly personal forum). And Sketchers' ad featured greyhound racing, and viewers “petitioned within 15 minutes to take it down.” That's a demerit, obviously. The study played out over a 24-hour period, so HootSuite was able to look at both the lead-up to and the aftermath of the Super Bowl itself.

Watson explained the study required a lot of human interpretation to make sense of the kinds of messages present. “It's still a hamster-driven exercise,” he said. “We're actually reading the content” while running analytics, “weighting types of engagement, thinking about sentiment. I'd be very wary of a 100 percent automated system.”

Here's that infographic (click to enlarge):

Video: “The Future of Engagement” Looks at Audi's #solongvampires Campaign

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 13:18 GMT

ADOTAS – Now that we're all sifting through the data and trying to figure out which of the ads that aired during the Super Bowl really made an impact with viewers, marketing consultant Murray Newlands is back with another episode of his video series, The Future of Engagement, talking about the Audi ad campaign spread through social media. The, ad touting Audi's new LED headlights, features a group of vampires partying in the woods, until they're suddenly decimated by the glow of an oncoming Audi's lights. Audi created the tag #solongvampires, hoping to capture the imagination of Twitter users, and Newlands explains how that trend spread — not just on Twitter, but on Facebook and through the car company's efforts to drive readers to USA Today's website to vote it their favorite ad from this year's Super Bowl. As of this morning, the ad had 4.8 million views on YouTube, so the campaign's doing something right.

Three Best Practices for Increasing Subscriber Engagement

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 12:33 GMT

GRAPHICMAIL – There's lots of hype surrounding email engagement, yet everyone has a different opinion on what that really means. In practice, we can only influence people while they're engaged with us, but engagement doesn’t happen automatically or overnight. It takes time and work, and it's a slightly different process for each kind of business.

Engaged subscribers usually represent a small percentage of a list, but they do have the most value to a brand. This makes cultivating engagement a worthwhile pursuit.

Here are three tips for increasing subscriber engagement in bulk email marketing campaigns:

1) Roll out the welcome wagon: Engage subscribers from the start. Welcome new subscribers with a helpful, eye-catching email to connect them with your brand from the first click. It can be hard to get newcomers to engage with you and respond in the way long-term subscribers do, so it’s necessary to reach out to them specifically. That’s where automation through triggered emails and personalization comes in.

Set the right precedent for a long-term relationship with every new subscriber by developing a welcoming system. Be supportive of newcomers by offering them additional customer support or maybe even extra incentives. Consider having a newsletter series specifically aimed at teaching them the ins and outs of your company. If they lose interest, you lose money, so don’t give them the opportunity to by engaging them from the start.

2) Track and understand user actions: To increase customer engagement, you first need to understand what interests them and why. In email marketing campaigns, this means understanding the actions your subscribers take on and from your newsletter.

Begin by defining an engagement score. Combine key metrics such as opens, click-throughs, comments on your newsletter, friend referrals, time spent on your site, visitation frequency and end-goal actions such as downloads and product or service purchases. Also, consider measuring interaction with your support and marketing materials, including downloadable product sheets, promotion participation and access to help centers.

3) The engagement ideal and how to achieve it: To truly be considered an engaged subscriber, there's a logical order of progress that must take place. The individual must first receive your email, open it, view your message as something relevant to them, begin to interact with your brand and then repeatedly purchase from you.

The important thing to grasp is that sales and engagement are two different metrics. Anyone can easily make a single purchase from you, but if they don't come back and buy again, enough wasn’t done to engage them and turn them into a long-term customer. Talk to your subscribers individually. In addition to using their first name or other demographic elements, consider integrating personalized upsell opportunities into your transactional emails based on how they interacted with other bulk email campaigns.

Engagement is what keeps a business alive. The vast majority of your sales will come from engaged customers. The more engaged customers you have, the more sales you'll make.