Category Archives: advertising

Jun 22 Comments comments
advertising, iPhone apps, mobile, social media

iPhones dominate Australian mobile internet

As an early adopter of the iPhone, I’ve noted its enthusiastic uptake in Australia. Looking on the streets and in meetings, it seems to be the dominant phone, at least in Sydney. Recent statistics prove this, showing the iPhone and iPod touch is dominant operating system - 93% of phones or mobile devices accessing the internet in Australia and NZ are iPhone iOS.

93% of phones accessing the internet in Australia are iPhones

93% of phones accessing the internet in Australia are iPhones

Yet this statistic globally tells a completely different story. iPhone and iPod touch (the newly defined iOS 4 platform) are at 60% of the mobile devices accessing the internet.

Global iPhone/iOS penetration is at 60%

Global iPhone/iOS penetration is at 60%

Is Australia & NZ heavy iPhone penetration because Blackberry and other smart phones didn’t have much mainstream uptake prior to iPhone release? Or is it because Australians are the heaviest users of social networks and social usage continues as the fastest growing mobile category? Either way, the statistics point to a massive behavioural change with mobile devices - phones are barely used for telephone calls, they are more data devices and the internet is in people’s pocket.

There are some other interesting statistics (this time global and just iPhone/iPod touch related)

  1. 225,000 applications in the iTunes app store
  2. 5 billion application downloads from iTunes store
  3. 73% of iPhone users have at least one 3rd party app
  4. 70 is the average number of applications on an iPhone
  5. There will be 100 million iOS 4 devices by July 2010

This is the mobile landscape that the iAd platform is releasing into, although  the iPad will be unable to see iAds until the iPad upgrade to iOS 4 likely to be September 2010.

iAd may transform digital display advertising in the same way that iPhone transformed phones, and with the app developers getting 60% of the revenue to fund further free/cheap application development. What the hope for iAd is to bring emotion & interactivity via content to digital platforms with no “hijacking” or need to leave or be directed out of the apps themselves. This in itself may bring a level of trust back to the digital space, where click through rates have been declining year on year. The question then will be: will the “emotionally engaging” iAds lift the rest of the digital display ad industry?

UPDATE: For all those who are questioning references Apple’s statistics, here’s a great summary of global smartphone statistics from AdMob:

AdMob Mobile Metrics - May 2010 - Highlights

View more presentations from AdMob Inc.
Apr 19 Comments comments
advertising, brand engagement, collaboration, mash-ups, social media

Who owns social content?

Rubik's cube

Creative Commons License photo credit: Mecookie

How quickly the social landscape changes. A year ago, I was working on a digital campaign that featured user generated content at its core - the majority of the content for the site was going to be photo uploads from individual users, mashed up with the clients’ products to create a hybrid UGC/product site. It wasn’t called a “social” campaign because it was being run on a microsite, (rather than social channels) but the issues it faced are symptomatic all user generated content/mashup/crowdsourced [social content] campaigns. The legal issues centred around using other brands’ logos or other brands’ products in association with the campaign brand. The client was very nervous around getting sued by Apple, say, if an iPhone was uploaded by a user. The site is not live anymore, and didn’t get much traction -a combination of death by a thousand lawyers’ cuts and “Flashsturbation”

A year later,  most clients are now active in social media - they are asking for Facebook apps, one of them has even replaced their corporate website with a Facebook Page and many of them are even using Twitter, personally if not for their brands. The legal/creative issues for user generated content have not gone away - the clients lawyers are still saying “no” to many creative, social content campaign ideas.

It goes like this:

  1. Creative team pitch in a cool, engaging user generated/social content,  game/application/tactical campaign
  2. Client loves it
  3. Digital producers spec it out, and it all looks like its all systems go.
  4. Then it gets run past the lawyers
  5. Lawyers say no
  6. Campaign gets killed or its “Back to the drawing board”

Social Media Club Sydney (SMCSYD) event on Monday 19th April 2010 will be exploring this very topical issue, what constitutes “ownership” in the era of the social web. I’m really interested to hear from Professor Brian Fitzgerald - Professor of Intellectual Property and Innovation, Queensland University of Technology. He will be representing Creative Commons Australia (ccAustralia) is the Australian derivative project of the international Creative Commons project. There have been a some notable Australian success stories with Creative Commons, for example the Flickr crowd source tagging project by the Powerhouse Museum.

Representing the lawyers (and IP holders and brands!) will be Stephen von Muenster – principal, vonMuenster solicitors & attorneys, advisor on copyright and content ownership issues to advertising agencies and brands. He’ll be answering the tough questions like “How do you avoid getting sued in another country?”

Of course what’s a fate worse than getting sued in another country? No-one being interested enough in the brand or the user generated competition to be bothered putting in hours of effort for a prize. So instead, the agencies make “fake user generated content” e.g. Doritos e.g. Best Job in the World to start the ball rolling, or in the case of the Toyota Yaris social campaign, put the nails in the coffin. [where Saatchi & Saatchi asked their supplier to create an ad to pump up lacklustre entries, so they could be assured of winning]

Spammers it seems are into this social content piece to artificially boost Google rankings. Ars Technica reported recently that UGC has even become a spamming technique, saying that 95% of user generated content is spam or malware or both.

Given the cavalier attitude to copyright and intellectual property on the web, and the trendiness of mashups and UGC, the era of social content is proving to be a fairly treacherous minefield for the brands or agencies who are naive or  insular.

UPDATE: Read Jye Smith’s summary of the event, which includes the very informative Slideshare presentations

Mar 15 Comments comments
advertising, brand engagement, mobile, social media, social networking

Australians increasing social media use is led by Facebook

Australias most popular social media websites March 2010

Australia's most popular social media websites March 2010

Nielsen reports today via Nielsen’s 2010 Social Media Report, that there are now 9 million Australians interacting on regularly on social networking sites with Facebook dominating - more than 83% of social networkers naming Facebook as their main social networking platform, up from 72% in 2008 and 34% in 2007.

Overall, Facebook is Australia’s most popular social network with 75% of online Australians having ever visited, and via time spent per month (more than 8 hours per month which is seven and a half more hours than its closest rival site YouTube)

Nielsen see the growth in Smartphone ownership in Australia to 43% of online Australians assisting the growth in mobile social networking. Of the pool of social networkers, 26% are participating via mobile.

Twitter is used increasingly a mobile social network in Australia, with half of its mobile users visiting the site daily. In comparison, Facebook saw 36% of its mobile users visit the site, whilst 22 percent of MySpace users and 16 percent of YouTube users were making daily visits. Twitter’s usage in Australia grew more than 400% in 2009 and 14% of Australians have followed companies or organisations on Twitter (up from 5% in 2008)

The chart below shows the fastest growing social media activities from 2009.

Fastest growing social media activities in Australia 2009

Fastest growing social media activities in Australia 2009

Interacting with brands in social networks overall is at 38% in 2009 up 15 points year on year. This translates to nearly two in five online Australians are now interacting with companies via social sites, and shows Australians are open to engaging with brands and companies online.

Melanie Ingrey, Research Director for Nielsen’s online business, sees social networks having big impact on brands:

“The opportunities for brands and companies to tap into the social media phenomenon are really just beginning to emerge and to date we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg. Incredibly, nearly nine in ten Australian Internet users (86%) are looking to their fellow Internet users for opinions and information about products, services and brands, and Australians’ engagement with online word of mouth communication is going to increase in coming years as social media plays an increasingly important role in consumer decision making.”

I find these stats support what we see everyday as social media marketers - that consumers are looking to make two-way connections to brands. Consumers are looking for brand interaction, in the places they spend the most amount of time, which increasingly is in social spaces. The challenge for marketers in the coming era of social commerce is in becoming a genuine social brand, and to be open to conversation, feedback, and to integrate social marketing into all the other marketing channels.

What do you see as the coming challenges for social brands?

Jan 24 Comments comments
advertising, iPhone apps, social media

Browsing websites - now there’s an app for that

Get Sticky iPhone app

Get Sticky iPhone app

My friends at Sticky Advertising have been busy launching Get Sticky iPhone app with a little help from the guys at MotherApp.

It’s basically the Get Sticky blogsite for your iPhone. It allows you to stay up to date with all the latest Inbound Marketing news and tips plus their weekly industry website ratings…all from your iPhone. You can download it here and its free. I like the feature where you can favourite the articles you thought were most important.

Get Sticky joins Mashable’s iPhone app , The Guardian’s iPhone apps and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s iPhone app - where the emphasis is on getting news in a simplified browsing format for the iPhone. With this blog, I cheat and use the WP-Touch Wordpress plugin to achieve the same type of iPhone app user experience. It also supports Blackberry, Android and Palm, and speeds up the load times. Check it out on your iPhone/smartphone to see for yourself.

I’m interested to hear from iPhone users which  iPhone apps you use to browse specific websites - and whether you stop accessing those sites in Safari browser when there’s an app available.

Jan 10 Comments comments
advertising, brand engagement, mash-ups, social media, television

Social mashup goes mainstream: Pepsi Hit Refresh

Pepsi Australia Hit Refresh social mashup

Pepsi Australia Hit Refresh social mashup

Earlier this week, Pepsi Australia’s Hit Refresh social media and heavyweight outdoor campaign started it’s promotions activation phase, via a Twitter treasure hunt and the engagement so far has been extremely high. This is a campaign I’ve been working on since late 2009, and I’ve really enjoyed seeing social brand advocacy in action at a grass roots level in the Gen Y and Gen Z demographic. Particularly on Facebook, Fans of the page are spontaneously sharing their love of Pepsi, requesting the treasure hunt come to their city, and enjoying the MTV TV spots.

There are a few points about this campaign that makes it distinctive in both the social media and advertising landscape in Australia:

  1. The Hit Refresh site acts as a social aggregator so removes any barriers to entry. Being on Twitter is not a requirement to follow or participate in the treasure hunt (winners get a $250 Refresh card to spend as they choose). Instead, they can watch the clues turn up on the Twitter section of the website, or watch the clues turn up on the Tweets tab of the PepsiAustralia Facebook Page
  2. The site is a mashup of social APIs. It uses the Twitter API  but filters it via specific hashtags to only show treasure hunt clues. Hit Refresh site also uses Twitpic’s API, filtered via hashtag to show only those tagged as #refreshwin. It makes it easy to follow only clues, and winners. The Google Maps API displays the region for each of the daily hunts.
  3. There is a hashtag structure related to the geography of the Twitter treasure hunt, so those who are advanced Twitter users can set up a search specific to the city they’re wanting to follow clues on, e.g #refreshsyd, related to Sydney specific clues #refreshmelb, on the days the hunt is on in Melbourne
  4. The Twitter followers are a range of those who follow because of the treasure hunt and those who are interested in the campaign from a social marketing point of view.
  5. Twitter’s being seen/used as the channel for the clues and treasure hunt specific interactions, whilst Facebook is being seen/used as a more general brand engagement, conversational channel.

A lot of overall campaign feedback, some negative some positive, can be read on the comments on the mUmbrella and Campaign Brief posts, most of them focus on either the creative, or the mechanic. What’s been missed is the bigger picture: that we finally have the Australian region of a global brand embracing social media, for one of the heaviest weight outdoor campaigns in Australia’s history. It’s one of the first times a multi-channel social media campaign has hit the advertising mainstream in Australia.

Australia is the first PepsiCo International market to launch the new look Pepsi trademark across the four Pepsi brand, but the Hit Refresh campaign is a year behind the US in terms of re-brand launch. In the US, the new look Pepsi was launched a year ago during the American Presidential inauguration. A year on, the latest US campaign - Pepsi Refresh Project launches 1 February 2010. It’s already generating huge interest and buzz, by allocating funds normally earmarked for Superbowl advertising to giving away millions of dollars in grants each month to fund great ideas. The Refresh Project concept may or may not be used in the Australian market, but either way Hit Refresh is a significant step forward for the maturity of social media in the region.

Pepsi Australia has chosen its social channel names carefully: PepsiAustralia is used on Facebook and Twitter, a recognition of the benefits of social media not just being short-term tactical campaign support, but as part of a long-term “always on” brand strategy.

I’m interested to hear your opinions of the social aspect of the campaign, please share your thoughts.

Dec 06 Comments comments
advertising, brand engagement, film, social media, television

Why filmmakers should care about social media

Why should you care about social?

I gave this presentation at the 17th Annual World Congress for Science and Factual Producers in Melbourne on 4th December. The audience was mainly documentary and science filmmakers from around the world who came to find out about social media and what it could do for them. The majority of the story/speech is in the Slideshare notes so have a good look if you’re interested in

Many thanks to Daryl Karp from Film Australia for giving me the opportunity to speak at such a prestigious event, along with fellow panelists, Guy Gadney from the Project Factory and Simon Goodrich from Portable Content The audience seemed to get a lot out of the session which was called “What the Hell is Social Media (and Why You Should Care?)”

The common theme from questions? How can busy filmmakers find the time to socialize their content? My answer: its important enough to sacrifice other activity, and 1 -2 hours a day is a fairly small commitment that can be shared between a few people.

Oct 12 Comments comments
advertising, brand engagement, social media, social networking

what are the rules of social media?

Parking Public Tour, Brooklyn, NY
Creative Commons License photo credit: grifray

Its so easy to get caught up in “shoulds” especially with social media. I firmly believe that social is what you make it - the only rules of social media are conversation and participation.

UPDATE: One can extrapolate that there are rules of polite conversation and participation,  social media accountability is one way of putting it. As Anne McCrossan commented, its about “‘blatant integrity’. The social web is a great opportunity for us to up our game about social behaviour.  [link here]

So it bothers me when people try to tell others what to do - without any understanding of how social media works at either a social media marketing level or a personal relationship level.  A friend who runs a very successful business was contacted via email recently as he’d been held up as a “How not to use twitter” case study at a marketing event.

The person who emailed said this:

I’m sitting in an Internet Marketing seminar in Sydney at the moment, and you and your business have just been presented as an example of what NOT to do online.

I’ll keep this short and do hope you get the point:

If you have people decide to follow you on Twitter from your [business] website, they are probably looking forward to receiving tips [on your business services].  Chances are pretty good they are not interested in hearing about football or “pregnant chicks at Ikea” or “hiding the sausage”.

Thought you would want to know you have just been held up to ridicule in front of some 300 people at this event.  (The event is being repeated tomorrow in Sydney and twice this week in Melbourne.)  Guess the good news is there’s 300 people who have heard of you and your business who probably didn’t know of you til now.  Bad news is, it wasn’t a good news story.

Here’s a suggestion:  Get a separate Twitter account for your business.

While the person who emails this may or may not have had good intentions, there are a bunch of reasons why they are just completely wrong and inappropriate in judging at all. I’ll start with their Twitter profile:

  1. The person who wrote the email lists themselves as “guru”. They’ve tweeted a total of 30 times. Their Mr Tweet statistics really show up how little they use the channel they are a so called expert on. Their Twitter stream is full of the same plug for their website - over and over. There is no conversation at all. No surprises that the “guru” has so few followers.
  2. There have been countless blog posts on the way Twitter is cutting down the barriers to creating conversation and injecting personality into faceless corporates. Yet this self-proclaimed “guru” is telling my friend not to have any personality at all, and not to be a conversationalist, be human, and crack jokes.
  3. The marketing presentation that held up my friend’s Twitter stream for ridicule also took the tweets completely out of context. They only showed one side of the conversation - they did not show what the @replies were replies to. And they did not clarify that @replies are only seen by those who also follow those who are being conversed with, that the tweets would never be seen by everyone.
  4. Its great how these professional speaker circuit type seem to forget, when it suits their argument, that twitter is an opt in social medium. So the people who follow my friend, are his clients and peers, and if they don’t like what they are presented with, its a very simple thing to unfollow him.
  5. In my friends business, he deals with and talks to people on a very personal level -  for up to two hours at a time. If his clients don’t like him, same deal as Twitter - they don’t go back. In fact, Twitter allows for people to see who he is and the type of personality that he has and has done a lot to build his business since its inception. So his twitter account represents him and his business - faithfully. My friend, also believes in honesty in communication, rather than some corporate, bland sanitised push marketing message.
  6. My friend has picked up a lot of business by being himself on Twitter. He’s had blog posts written about his inimitable style and great busines. He’s picked up a lot of followers who love his fun attitude to life, his jokes and he’s become a real Twitter personality. That same personality has translated to genuine brand authenticity, both online and offline, and he’s built significant relationships using social media by being real. I could write a detailed post on how he’s used social media effectively to build a social brand and social business. In fact - using the same examples given by the emailer, I could write the exact opposite case study about how my friend  -  “How to use Twitter effectively to build a social brand”
  7. And to finish, I’d like to compare and contrast the “gurus” 30 tweets to my friends 10,000 plus tweets and my friends Mr Tweet statistics

I like to say there are no failures in social media - only failure to participate. And for all those so called “gurus” who say Twitter is not for marketing or not for being yourself or not for being honest, or not for being human - they are clearly wrong. Because there are millions of people on Twitter who are using it the way they want and making Twitter what they want it and need it to be.

Oct 05 Comments comments
advertising, brand engagement, social media

the cornerstones of social strategy

DSC_2605.JPG
Creative Commons License photo credit: imgdive

I’ve been working on a number of social media campaigns lately, some really long term and some short term. What do they have in common?

  • Defining social objectives
  • Social media monitoring
  • Channel strategy
  • Content strategy

The combination varies from client to client but its really important to have these cornerstones to help build a  social media conversation.

What I’d like to add to this list is a retention strategy. Particularly for the short term campaigns. What happens to the Fans of the neglected Facebook Pages? They find out their brand is just not that into them. I wonder about the effort that goes into building up a community if you’re just going to leave it behind.

This is intended an introduction to social strategy, I’m going to cover off each of the cornerstones in the following posts so stay tuned. In the meantime, is there any time you’ve been let down by a social media campaign that left you in the lurch when it ended abruptly? Did you feel differently toward the brand as a consequence?

Aug 26 Comments comments
advertising, brand engagement, social media

Are you marketing to your ego?

bulbust
Creative Commons License photo credit: Modified Enzyme

David Meerman Scott will be at the next Social Media Club Sydney (SMCSYD) event to talk about how marketers can “understand social personas and stop wasting money and resources”

David has many case studies on his blog and his book World Wide Rave, but the post that leapt out at me takes it one step earlier in the process referring to the marketplace being the outside world and not your office.

His question to all of us marketing in the new social era:

1. Do you market to your ego? Or to the external marketplace?
2. Focus on your buyers, not your bosses.
3. The marketplace is the outside world, not your comfortable office

Many large companies and those that have huge market share are guilty of these sins, whether one or all three. Smaller companies and those who live in smaller countries and market globally are the much more focused on external marketplaces because they need customers for survival. In the coming era of social commerce, the companies marketing to their own egos/bosses/offices will whither and die.

So before we even consider social personas we need to consider whether we are focusing on buyers rather than pleasing internal stakeholders. The next stage is finding where those buyers are, and engaging with them in the social channels and the ways they like being communicated to.

I’m looking forward to finding out what David’s recommendations are for understanding social personas. If you can get to Melbourne, he’s running a Social Media Masterclass

Aug 03 Comments comments
advertising, social media, social networking

How Facebook privacy is being eroded for advertising

Facebook signup continues to grow at exponential rates across the globe. In three months since April 2009, they’ve added another 50 million users If you’re looking for stats on Facebook’s infiltration into individual countries, the CheckFacebook site provides these revealing stats about Australia:

  • More than 6 million users
  • 36.65% of Australian internet users are on Facebook
  • Slightly more females to males
  • 18-24 year olds still the largest demographic
  • 25-34 year olds second largest demographic
Australian Facebook statistics

Australian Facebook statistics

With advertisers hungry to target internet users by demographic, Facebook is now busy cashing in on its rich rivers of private data. At the same time as growing the user base exponentially, Facebook globally is heading to make $500 million dollars on advertising in 2009, and are fast tracking their ad APIs.

Allfacebook.com reports:

the API is expected to allow advertisers to calculate expected CPMs and CPCs on advertisements as well as make changes to ads on the fly. Facebook hadn’t let advertisers modify ads until recently but it’s a highly demanded feature especially from those advertisers that are running large ad campaigns.

It’s the 3rd Party APIs that have caused Facebook to serve up a photo of a married woman in a singles ad. A few weeks ago Facebooks privacy policy stated:

Facebook occasionally pairs advertisements with relevant social actions from a user’s friends to create Facebook Ads. Facebook Ads make advertisements more interesting and more tailored to you and your friends. These respect all privacy rules.

Most Facebook users would not know where to change the settings so they don’t turn up in ads. I changed my own privacy settings a couple of weeks ago, but when I went back tonight, this is what greeted me

Privacy pop-up trying to address Facebook photo ad serving issues

Privacy pop-up trying to address Facebook photo ad serving issues

The Facebook blog covers the “rumors” of the issue with the 3rd party ad serving, and the Facebook ads privacy policy has been re-written to cover the changes.

Probably not enough transparency about what’s really going on. So what does this mean for users and advertisers?

  • Everyone prefers targeted ads that are more relevant to them, but using people’s faces in cheap ads is a big no-no.
  • Facebook should admit to misuses of the 3rd party advertising API rather than deny them as “misleading rumours”.
  • Facebook is likely to be fast-tracking the advertising API, but at the same time should ensure the advertisers don’t abuse the platform, as they’ve admitted had been done previously.
  • Facebook should look after their users. Because their revenue is dependent on the incredibly private and powerful demographic data which enables precise ad targeting, probably not seen since the early days of the web. If users abandon the platform, there goes the revenue.
  • Facebook Users need to stay aware of the constant changes to the platform, and read the fine print carefully to make sure they are comfortable with what they are sharing, particularly with their own photos.

The question is whether the sheer size of Facebook’s user base will protect it from any issue. The tell will be whether the rate of signup of new users will slow down, or whether Facebook will continue to take over the world.

Either way, here’s hoping the ad targeting gets better in the long run. There are just so many home liposuction ads I can give the “thumbs down” to.

Update:

“Unless authorized by us, your ads may not display user data — such as users’ names or profile photos — whether that data was obtained from Facebook or otherwise.“

Hopefully, the self-policing policy will stop these issues. It’s worth monitoring to see how effective it is.