Inline, Online, Off

From IRCs to Ads, Catalina Coupons Gets Into Display

Almost every CPG media strategy I’ve worked on has Catalina baked in as a mainstay line item. And as per Advertising Age, the checkout coupon king is about to get into digital ad buying, giving themselves an additional line item or two on many a media plan. 

According to the article, Catalina has a partnership with Nielsen, and it is fueling the targeting system, called BuyerVision, by pairing individual purchase data from Catalina loyalty programs with Nielsen’s online and TV-audience measurement panels.

By creating their own demand-side platform, Catalina is taking ownership of a massive chunk of many shopper marketing programs, both in-store and online. It’s safe to say there are probably a few ad people shifting uncomfortably in their seats right about now. 

Magazine App-athy Among Publishers and Users

To know me is to know my deep love of print magazines. I’ve worked in digital for donkeys years and I follow and high-five news of digital subscriptions but to be honest, the magazines on my iPad just sit there, holding their breath and waiting for me to fire them up but I never do. Instead, my coffee table remains anchored by a stack of glossies and I am satiated by the hefty thud of a March or September issue, fragrance samples torn and wafting from their pages until they land in the recycling. 

It’s partly this paramour that puts me on the sidelines when conversations of web vs app arise. But separately, I don’t need to have conversations about HTML5 that much anymore, now there are more people far more passionate and adept at handling that part of the business. But from a consumer habit/culture and business/advertising standpoint, I remain fascinated.

While Advertisers Want More Data On Tablet Readership, according to the MIT Technology Review, “the future of media on mobile devices isn’t with applications but with the Web.” The article goes on to discuss Why Publishers Don’t Like Apps, revealing profit margins and rationale behind many magazines nixing their apps altogether. But the comments section gets really good, especially a point made by Bart S. (sorry, the anchor tag doesn’t seem to link directly to that comment but you’re one click away). He writes:

“The problem is a lot simpler than you’ve described: the publishers haven’t delivered a product that is truly designed for tablets that people actually want to use.

“Digital magazines don’t feel like real print products, yet I’m expected to pay for something that doesn’t feel like a real digital product. It’s the worst of both worlds.”

There’s a lot more to his comment that I think sits at the crux of the issue and I would hope his sentiments are being considered by UEX and creative teams in-house at publishers. Right now their editorial content is at risk of being completely overshadowed by the creative being driven by advertisers and you don’t buy the magazines for the ads. Well, not really. 

Times Square Live Stream: Maybe It’s Maybelline

My friends over at Aerva worked with Russian interactive agency Grape to create this interactive DOOH display that connects Russian fans of Maybelline via Facebook and Vkontakte (Russia’s most popular social network) to a massive live media billboard in the heart of New York City. 

It’s not the most innovative use of UGC and digital display but I like the idea of connecting people between cities via billboards, a la portals to our connected lives. 

Time To Talk About That Paid Social Media Bucket?

When you see the words ‘social media’ and ‘campaign’ in the same sentence, more often than not, you can ensure there’s an expectation of volume. Usually it’s from the client-side but sometimes it’s from the C-suite at the agency. The rub for most practitioners, especially those who came up from online community or various forms of WOM and non-conventional marketing (street, experiential, guerilla), is that social media plans rarely center on a volume driver; that’s what advertising does.

But as Jeremiah Owyang tweeted this morning, “This may shock you: The difference between “Social” and “Advertising” isn’t a lot.” He linked to his recent findings: Trend: Social Media Agencies Turn to Advertising, which I highly recommend you read, whether you sit in the agency or on the client side.

So, I’ve seen this happen for a few reasons: 

• The social media group inside a traditional shop has to grow, in order to that they need to be profitable. Social media is harder to quantify so beyond just being able to show that the expertise is attracting new and bigger accounts because they’re able to do more interesting and much deeper brand-building, they are strong-armed into showing “results.”
• Clients want results; good numbers to put in decks to show their bosses. Awareness is a numbers game to them — it’s about breadth rather than a depth — so the social media groups wind up pulling volume levers with money to make for a good campaign deck. 
• Social media specialists tend to be nimble, very ‘can-do,’ inherently aware of and adept at finding emerging adspend opportunities. A few bucks here, a few there, on some emerging social or blog network can really make that CPC or CPM look incredible. And it’s the last place the traditional buyers would look.
• Buying ads on social networks and out to online communities can be a lot quicker than getting approved credit, setting limited spends, doing all the IOs and paperwork involved in more traditional buying. (And we haven’t even talked about the creative.) Load up a credit card, write or rewrite the creative nuanced for what works in the space, and in a matter of hours your campaign can be humming. 

Once the social media shop or group has a few of these wins, there’s no way they’re going to hand those duties back to the media buyers. Right now, they’re heroes in the eyes of their bosses and clients — and in many respects, rightly so. They’ve innovated, they’re thinking differently, they’re using budgets wisely. Total rockstars. 

Rockstars win more projects and accounts and they get to hire more people and this allows many of them to do more of the work they love doing —and were there to do in the first place (“earned” and “owned” social media). 

In a perfect scenario, the social media smarties would just work with the buyers, set-up a subset of the media planning and buying group to hone and focus their skills on emerging (social) opportunities, and do away with this whole notion of “paid social media.” 

We Need to Set Some Human Interface Guidelines

yes and yes dbreunig:

Select Gizmodo articles from the past 3 days:

• “Super Creepy Stalker App Puts Names and Faces of ‘Girls Around Me’ on a Map”
• “This Super Face-Scanning Software Thinks It Can Guess Your Age”
• “Here’s a Website That Lets Sad Guys Pay Girls to Do Girlfriendish Things for Them”
• “Posters That React to Being Kissed Are the Worst Posters”

reblogged from dbreunig