Facebook has added a feature within their Lookalike Audiences tool that helps businesses reach target customers in new countries who are similar to their existing ones. With the tool, a business can upload a list of leads or their current customers and Facebook will find potential similar leads. Prior to today, this was not available cross-country.
With the Lookalike Audiences tool, marketers can find potential customers to target their Facebook ads, now to many countries, based on:
People who like your Page
Custom Audiences derived from email or phone numbers
Custom Audiences created from website or app data
Similar location
Age
Gender
Interests
Facebook sees this as primarily a mobile advertising opportunity, where the majority of its ad revenue now comes from. According to an August 2016 eMarketer report, by 2018 there will be an estimated 2.3 billion people worldwide accessing the Internet via mobile devices. Facebook is one of the few platforms on earth that can market to almost all of these people, excluding Communist China. Although, Mark Zuckerberg is not giving up on China, having started his personal quest to learn Mandarin Chinese in 2010.
“On mobile, and on Facebook, people engage with the things that matter to them, even in other countries,” posts Facebook. “More than 1 billion people on Facebook are connected to at least one business in a foreign country, and 1.57 billion people visit Facebook monthly on mobile. In the US, 60% of people on Facebook are connected to a business in a foreign country.”
Facebook has also added extended location targeting capabilities, where advertisers can expand their website conversion or mobile app install targeting objectives to a worldwide region or trade zone. Facebook says it will “optimize delivery to the countries with the greatest return.”
They have added training tools as well to help businesses get started with global marketing including webinars and a handbook.
Google announced today new features in their Adwords product, campaign groups and performance targets, both intended to make it easier for you to track and forecast the performance of your marketing campaigns.
Campaign Groups
The new campaign groups feature allows you to group all of your Google ad campaigns including search, shopping, display and YouTube all into one campaign, making them easier to track and improve. Google is envisioning marketers using this grouping to track marketing themes across their network of ad opportunities.
They gave an example of a theoretical campaign called “Holiday Launch” where you can easily link your YouTube advertising stats with your ecommerce and search data.
Performance Targets
The performance targets feature improves on your ability within Adwords to set goals and track clicks and conversions by campaign group. Combining performance targets with the new campaign groups feature lets you set target clicks and conversions across Google’s network of marketing platforms.
“Tell us how many clicks or conversions you want to receive, how much you want to spend, and what average CPC or CPA you wish to maintain,” noted Jon Diorio, Product Manager of Google AdWords. “We’ll then automatically show you a single view of how your campaign group is performing against those goals, and what we think you’ll likely achieve by the end of the campaign period.”
Diorio said that these feature will not alter how Google serves your ads or optimize your campaigns, but simply offers advertisers better evaluation tools.
Google let some advertisers try the new features prior to their public release today. “Previously I needed to export all my campaigns into a spreadsheet, group them together, and create a pivot table simply to see how they are performing,” said Oleg Monakhov, Senior Lead Generation Manager at Wrike. “With campaign groups & performance targets, we can much more easily see how our groups are performing relative to our goals, all from within the AdWords interface.”
Front-line employees are the employees that are the first to deal with customers such as the cashier, those working on the service floor or anyone dealing with customers face to face in the store, phone or email. It’s the first level of dealing with the customer at the lowest level in the organization.
Motivate, Don’t Educate
I think education is really focused on imparting knowledge. With front-line employees knowledge isn’t enough, you need to be showing them how to use that knowledge and showing them how to understand their own feelings and their own emotions. The motivational part is actually about getting them confident with the tools and the techniques so they feel more motivated to want to go out and do a good job.
A lot of front-line employees really have difficulty with the challenges of front-line service. And when they do they sort of turtle up and shell in and you want to bring them out of that and give them that confidence.
Customer Service Versus Customer Experience
Customer experience is the entire journey, the entire experience a customer has with the organization. Customer experience involves a marketing piece they may get or an email, it’s not just a point in time. Customer service in the traditional lens is a part of customer experience. It’s more about that one to one interaction and helping to serve you in the moment.
But that may not be the entire experience. Let’s say I’m working at a bookstore and I’m behind the counter, the customer service would be while I’m helping you. Customer experience may be were the isles cleaned, were they neat and organized? All of that feeds the experience or as we talked about the customer journey.
Mentality and Mindset
Mentality and mindset is what I really wish I knew and understood when I was young and on the front-lines. Not only understanding the customers mindset but what makes them tick and why they do what they do. Also my own mindset, why am I taking something personally, why can’t I depersonalize the situation, why am I getting upset when I don’t need to be? So many front-line people, they’re not experienced in the world or in business in a lot of cases and they don’t have these skills and this lens on how we all think.
We Still Have Caveman Brains
If you look at it from the standpoint of experience, what does every experience have in common? The are all filtered through this imperfect organ called the human brain, so it behooves us to understand how that human brain works. The good news is that we live in the golden age of psychology. We’ve learned more about neuroscience and what makes humans tick in the last few decades than we have probably ever known before. The bad news is what we have learned is that we are all basically irrational. Our mind is designed to take shortcuts.
If you look at sociology, society, digital technology, all of these things have evolved very rapidly, but our brains have evolved pretty slowly. We still have, unfortunately, caveman brains which are designed to make snap judgements to survive. These snap judgements aren’t that firm when it comes to customer experience.
Making Our Caveman Brains Work For Us
Here’s how you can apply these principals to customer experience. We’ve all heard of first impressions and their is a ton of research on first impressions and they all basically say the same thing. No matter what the study is, first impressions happen subconsciously and they happen very quickly.
There is another principal called confirmation bias and that is the principal that we all want to be right, which is why politics is so much fun. What we do is ignore the evidence that tells us we’re wrong and we accept the evidence that tells us we are right. When you combine those two things that’s an important factor when you are designing a customer experience. You take a first impression and you combine that with confirmation bias and what do you have? You have a bad first impression and you are already in the hole.
The human brain is trying to tell them that that first impression and what they already believe is correct. Similarly, there is something called negativity bias which is why the evening news always leads with something like ‘your microwave is going to kill you’. We are attuned to negative information, we are always looking to what’s a threat. We give more credence to negative information than to positive information, meaning if you give a bad experience it is going to be weighted heavier than a positive experience.
What I find fascinating from a customer experience standpoint is that you can use all these psychological principals and evaluate each touch point, each place where you come in contact with a customer and say how are we violating them, how are we prepared if we set those off? How are we prepared to deal with that or our team trained for that?
The Customer is the Customer
Customers can not only be wrong, they can be nuts and mean at times, all kinds of different things. The problem with the traditional concept of ‘the customer is always right’ is that the principal behind it got lost and the phrase carried over. That was from a time that their wasn’t customer service and they were trying to teach people that the customer is valuable, their opinion is valuable.
We try to look at it as the customer is the customer. That means that you and the customer are not on the same level. It’s called customer service and we are there to serve the customer. They are our focus and they are not there to give to us. They should be decent of course and there are some lines they shouldn’t cross, but big picture, it’s customer service and we’re there to serve.
We know what a customer is in modern times and if you are a customer centric organization, what you are doing, your actions, your processes, your systems should all be revolving around the customer.
SnapChat will soon offer behavioral targeting options to its advertisers, according to an eMarketer report referenced by BusinessInsider. SnapChat Director of Revenue Operations, Clement Xue, said in the report that SnapChat was going to launch behavioral targeting capabilities by the end of September.
Per BI, SnapChat will initially based all of its behavioral targeting on what a user does within the app and not aggregate data from other sources. Unlike most social media apps such as Facebook and Twitter, SnapChat only is available on mobile devices, making cookie data inaccessible for them because cookies don’t work on certain devices and browsers and don’t function at all within mobile apps. Other social apps which have a desktop presence can use cookies to add to their behavioral data by following a user around as they go to various websites.
The behavioral data likely to be offered will be based on who a user follows, especially industry specific interests, such as a certain type of music entertainer. Record labels could then use that data to reach a more likely consumer of a singers music they represent. Advertisers already have data from SnapChat related to the age, gender and geo location of users, so behavioral data will simply add to the mix.
In order to make their behavioral data more robust SnapChat will have to obtain web browsing data which they have already made the first moves toward by introducing a “Login with SnapChat” button on its recently acquired Bitmoji Keyboard app.
This could be the beginning of SnapChat becoming another login option, similar to the Google or Facebook login’s seen all around the web and apps. This would give SnapChat a tremendous amount of behavioral data beyond the small amount that is usable based on in-app follows.
SnapChat Continues to Grow Amazingly Fast
A new report by eMarketer, “Snapchat Advertising: A Roadmap for US Brand Marketers and Digital Agency Executives,” predicts continued huge growth for SnapChat. SnapChat sees itself as a photo app combined with social connectivity and its mostly young user base certainly agrees. “We’re like a camera company,” said Bryan Kim, manager of Snapchat’s strategy group. “And we encourage creativity, which is why there are so many creative tools on our platform—doodles, geofilters, stickers and lenses.”
The eMarketer report “projects 58.6 million US consumers will use Snapchat at least once per month in 2016.” This equates to 28.3% of US smartphone users and 18.1% of the entire US population, which is nearly double the use estimated only 2 years ago. eMarketer is predicting that this kind of growth will continue over the next 4 years.
Pinterest rolls out Promoted Video, available only on mobile devices, to make them an even better marketing platform for brands. The trend toward video advertising with social media platforms and the internet in general continues with this Pinterest announcement. According to business intelligence firm L2, Marketers are projected to spend $12.82 billion on internet video advertising by 2018, which is up from $7.7 billion spent in 2015. All of the other major social platforms, Facebook, YouTube, SnapChat, Instagram and Twitter have already launched video ad platforms. It’s about time for Pinterest to jump in, especially considering its focus on ecommerce.
Pinterest, being a very visual medium and already brand focused seems to be a perfect match for video advertising. “Over 100 million people around the world come to Pinterest every month to discover ideas to try,” said Pinterest Product Manager Mike Bidgoli in a post. “One of the best tools for bringing those ideas to life is video, so it’s no surprise this format has been popular on Pinterest. In the last year alone, we’ve seen a 60% increase in videos on Pinterest featuring everything from workouts and home projects to hair & beauty tutorials. That’s why we’re excited to roll out Promoted Video.”
Bidgoli noted that of the 100 million monthly Pinterest visitors, 55% use the platform to find or shop for products, according to the 2016 Internet Trends Report. Only 12% of people view other social media platforms as places for ecommerce. Pinterest clearly sees its future revenue source coming from video advertising.
Pinterest has tied Promoted Video with its Featured Pins product in order to differentiate itself from other social platforms that are focused on just views. “While other platforms primarily offer video views, we’ve coupled Promoted Video with featured Pins below the video,” said Bidgoli. “Now the 67% of people who say videos on Pinterest inspire them to take action can experience your brand and then simply click below to do more with your products and services.”
Pinterest won’t auto-play their video ads in a users feed, it will first play a Cinematic Pin format that they already have to give users a silent teaser of the marketing video. Once people tap on the Pin the full video will open up and automatically start playing with sound. Businesses can run video ads as long as 5 minutes, infomercial style. It will be interesting to see if Pinterest is actually planning on the long-form video marketing concept because of its proven success on TV of driving actual sales. For instance, a person perusing cooking posts could be presented with the Copper Chef ad. Well it convert as good as it does on TV? If it does Pinterest will have discovered a marketing gold mine.
According to Bidgoli, Pinterest will charge marketers based on impressions of the preview Pin on a CPM basis and not just for after click video views. Advertisers will see both the impression numbers for their teaser gif video views, the number of clicks the teaser Pin received, the number of times their full video was viewed at least partially and breakdowns on how far people watched the video (25%, 50%, 75%, 100%) and how many clicks the Featured Pin under the video received.
A Millward Brown study commissioned by Pinterest found that Old El Paso Promoted Video ads were 4x more memorable than a non-video ad. At launch, Pinterest has partnered with bareMInerals, PURINA, kate spade, Lionsgate and BEHR to proved the value of Promoted Video. “We’ve run several campaigns with Pinterest and consider video a natural evolution on how we want to connect with our Pinterest audience,” said Meredith Schaffner, Marketing Manager, Old El Paso. “Our customers come to Pinterest with high intent and the ability to show a recipe and our products through video is a unique opportunity to drive higher performance.”
Video Advertising Trend Toward Social
At Fortune‘s Most Powerful Women International Summit in London, Nicola Mendelsohn, VP EMEA at Facebook, predicted that the Facebook newsfeed will be all video in 5 years. “It will definitely be mobile. It will probably be all video,” Mendelsohn said. “I just think if we look, we already are seeing a year on year decline in text. We’re seeing a massive increase as I’ve said on both pictures and video. So yeah, if I was having a bet, I would say video, video, video.”
During Facebook’s July 2016 earning call, Facebook executives predicted their future will be video, “We see a world that is video first, with video at the heart of all of our apps and services,” said Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerburg. “”Over the past six months we have been particularly focused on Live video. Live represents a new way to share what’s happening in more immediate and creative ways.”
2016 has been the year of not only more spending on video ads, but a movement of dollars from TV to internet video, following consumers wherever they are. In May for instance, Magna Global, which buys ads for Johnson & Johnson, Coca-Cola, Fiat and others announced at NewFront that they have agreed to buy $250 million in video ads from YouTube. But that’s not the story, it’s that Magna is shifting these ad dollars from its clients TV budgets.
Also at the NewFronts, YouTube announced a new way for marketers to take advantage of suddenly viral videos called Breakout Videos, which is part of Google Preferred allowing advertisers to reach the top 5% of videos created by YouTube stars. YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki stated, “This will allow marketers to feature their brands alongside the next big thing”.
Video is also becoming big on Twitter where tweets have incredibly increased by over 50% since the start of 2016!
Twitter announced the launch of Promoted #Stickers as a new marketing tool for brands. Twitter launched #Stickers for users back in June for those wanting to add some fun to their tweets.
“Starting today, brands can create and promote custom stickers for anyone on Twitter to use,” posted Twitter’s Head of Product, Brand & Video Ads, Ilya Brown. “A brand’s stickers will be featured in the #Stickers library and offer a form of creative expression that makes a person’s photos more fun and engaging. Promoted #Stickers represents a huge opportunity for brands to drive brand affinity and raise awareness of their message at scale.”
“Brands can design four or eight stickers — like accessories and other props — for users to add to their own photos,” says Brown. “Photos with a brand’s stickers are shared with all of a user’s followers, allowing brands to be featured by their fans in a truly authentic way. #Stickers act as a visual hashtag, meaning that photos with your brand’s sticker will be connected and discoverable to anyone who taps your brand’s sticker. This allows a brand to see and engage with the people who are using their stickers in creative ways.”
Brown says that Pepsi will be Twitter’s exclusive launch partner of their Promoted #Stickers, creating and sharing around 50 unique stickers across 10 of their markets. They are hoping to jumpstart their global PepsiMoji campaign into a fan-driven viral marketing push. Pepsi will not only be pushing their campaign, but also will help educate Twitter users on how to use their #Stickers. It’s unknown what Pepsi paid Twitter, if anything, to be their first Promoted #Stickers advertising partner.
The proprietary Pepsi emoji designs were created, according to Pepis, “to help consumers around the world “Say it With Pepsi” and will bring the program to life like never before by combining two of the most popular means of visual communication – emojis and photos.”
“#Stickers have been hugely popular with consumers, and we are thrilled to now include brands in that conversation, starting with Pepsi,” said Adam Bain, chief operating officer at Twitter, @adambain. “Now, people around the world can all share their universal passion for Pepsi and make the brand come alive in a powerful new way on Twitter.”
“The ‘Say It With Pepsi’ campaign has helped consumers around the world express themselves using our proprietary set of Pepsi emojis and we’re truly taking it to the next level with this partnership with Twitter,” said Brad Jakeman, president PepsiCo Global Beverage Group, @bradjakeman. “By allowing people to add our emojis directly to their photos, we’re giving fans a whole new way to engage. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a picture with Pepsi stickers can really spark a conversation.”
In a recent CXweek event, Twitter Sr. Product Marketing Manager Jeff Lesser gave an interesting talk about how to use Twitter to improve customer service.
“At Twitter we like to think that we have the best platform for doing customer service,” Lesser commented. “The reason we are so invested in brands doing great customer service on Twitter is because it’s something we have seen evolve naturally on the platform.”
What makes Twitter unique for creating a great customer experience and for doing great customer service are these 4 unique attributes:
Twitter is Public
“Brands really love the public nature of Twitter because whenever they do great customer service, that’s available for millions of people to see,” said Lesser. “Users love the public nature of our platform as well, because they can hold brands accountable to providing a great experience for them. If they tweet and the brand doesn’t respond that doesn’t look great for the brand.”
Twitter is Conversational
“The conversational nature of Twitter makes us really unique as well and creates a great customer service experience,” says Lesser. “Normally when you are going to do customer service you have to find the right number to call or you have to find the email of the brand and on Twitter that’s not the case. You can just go to Twitter and send out a tweet and get a response. The really amazing thing is that response may be from the brand or it may be from an expert or another user on the platform that saw your tweet and wanted to help out. The conversational nature of the platform means that anyone can jump in and converse and create a really great experience and help you resolve your issues.”
Twitter is Realtime
“The realtime nature of our platform is what sets us apart,” noted Lesser. “If you’ve ever waited on hold for 40 minutes to get help from a brand, you know how important it is to have realtime access to customer service. What makes it really unique beyond just being realtime is the asynchronous nature of our platform so a user I can send a tweet and get a response but I don’t have to give up my day to get help. If it takes me 30 minutes to write back to that response, that’s totally okay. This realtime asynchronous nature of Twitter creates a really great customer experience for people who want to engage with brands. For brands it creates a high satisfaction experience for their customers.”
Twitter is Distributed
“As a brand when I create this really great experience it’s available for million on Twitter to see, but it’s also available for billions of people outside of the walls of Twitter to see because our content can be embedded into news articles and websites and mobile apps,” said Lesser. “When you take the power of that distributed aspect of our platform you get the ability to turn your customer service into really great marketing.”
Twitter is an Effective Brand Strategy for Customer Service
Twitter users have created customer opportunities on the platform because it simplifies the communication process for them. Brands saw that customers wanted to communicate with them and have built their customer service around that. Lesser says that literally 80% of all customer service requests are happening on Twitter. He says that “connecting with a brand on Twitter is near ubiquitous.”
In a study Twitter conducted they found that customer service satisfaction increased when a brand used Twitter and that there were increased revenue opportunities too. “There is a 19% opportunity for greater customer satisfaction for those that are best in class in doing customer service on Twitter in addition to an 18% increase in opportunities for revenue,” said Lesser. “This is though effective up-selling, cross-selling and a reduction in churn that is all being. Finally, there is an 80% decrease in the cost of resolution.”
“Businesses that are doing customer service on Twitter are able to get a satisfaction rating much higher than on other channels,” said Lesser. “We did a survey of people who reached out to airlines and what we found was that people who tweeted out to airlines and got a response had much higher satisfaction than people who tweeted out to an airline and didn’t get a response. Nearly an entire point more of customer satisfaction. These people actually had more satisfaction than people who had engaged on other channels. When we take into consideration that many of these people didn’t actually get resolution they simply received a response and had nearly 10% higher satisfaction, the ability to increase customer satisfaction and create a really great customer experience on Twitter is much higher than on other channels.”
Twitter also thinks that this increased satisfaction can be an opportunity to increase revenues. In the study Twitter found that if an airline responded within 6 minutes to a tweet customers would be willing to spend $20 more for that in the future.
“Many people say that customer service is the new marketing, and on Twitter that’s true,” said Lesser. “Twitter is 1:1 with an audience.”
Facebook is using technology to blend ads into their HTML, making ads indistinguishable to their content in order to prevent ad blocking. This only works when viewing the full HTML version of Facebook, not their mobile version or their mobile app.
In a rather soft sell approach, they mixed adding more intuitive and granular controls for Facebook users with the very bold step of blocking the ad blockers. Facebook is actually changing how ads appear in the code, giving ad blockers nothing to block.
“First, we’re expanding the tools we give people to control their advertising experience,” Andrew Bosworth, VP, Ads & Business Platform for Facebook announced. “Second, we’re providing an update on our approach to ad blocking on Facebook. As we offer people more powerful controls, we’ll also begin showing ads on Facebook desktop for people who currently use ad blocking software.”
Many users of ad blocking software may not be happy that ads are now appearing, but Facebook is counting on their new Ad Preference controls combined with their typically more relevant ads to counter this sentiment. After all, Facebook has an immense database on everything we do and say on their platform, they ought to be able to serve ads that appeal to our interests.
“For the past few years at Facebook we’ve worked to better understand people’s concerns with online ads,” says Bosworth. “What we’ve heard is that people don’t like to see ads that are irrelevant to them or that disrupt or break their experience. People also want to have control over the kinds of ads they see.” He says that Facebook ads “complement, rather than detract” from your online experience.
Facebook Refuses to Pay Ransom
“Some ad blocking companies accept money in exchange for showing ads that they previously blocked — a practice that is at best confusing to people and that reduces the funding needed to support the journalism and other free services that we enjoy on the web,” said Bosworth in slamming ad blocking extortionists. “Facebook is one of those free services, and ads support our mission of giving people the power to share and making the world more open and connected.”
One bit of news, Facebook has actually been approached by ad blocking companies according to Bosworth to pay what some consider a ransom in exchange for not blocking users who have installed their ad blocking software. “Rather than paying ad blocking companies to unblock the ads we show — as some of these companies have invited us to do in the past — we’re putting control in people’s hands with our updated ad preferences and our other advertising controls.”
“The truth is that adblocking is really a bunch of profiteers that are holding our industry for ransom,” explained Anna Hickey, Managing Director Maxus UK at the 2016 Shift conference. “What’s actually going on is they are going into our publishers and demanding a significant proportion of their revenues in order to be included in a white list.”
Finally, a major publishing platform is fighting back and this just may turn the tide against these ad blocking profiteers.
How Facebook is Blocking Ad Blockers
Unlike most publishers who rely on third-party ad serving companies where the ad code is relatively easy to identify and thus block, Facebook controls the serving of ads. It is making changes to its code so that its ads are indistinguishable between its other content. Facebook is able to bypass the ad blockers because they are doing everything in house. The content and ads get served at the same time and wrapped in the same tags so ad blockers don’t have a chance to filter them out.
It must have faced technical challenges because otherwise it would have done this much earlier.
For smaller publishers, there are a new batch of companies that have risen up to help them block the blockers. They include Secret Media, PageFair, Admiral, BlockAdblock, Yavli and Sourcepoint. Some of these companies have raised millions of dollars in the venture markets.
Facebooks adds Granular Ad Controls for Users
Using the carrot and stick approach, Facebook also announced more granular ad controls for users. They have improved Ad Preferences so that users can select not to view certain types of ads or ads from specific businesses.
“If you don’t want to see ads about a certain interest like travel or cats, you can remove the interest from your ad preferences,” says Bosworth. “We also heard that people want to be able to stop seeing ads from businesses or organizations who have added them to their customer lists, and so we are adding tools that allow people to do this.”
“These improvements are designed to give people even more control over how their data informs the ads they see,” he added.
Adblocking is a Serious Issue
Adblocking blocks 26% of all ads according to a recent IAB Report, and Facebook is a member of the IAB. However, over 41% of Millennials are blocking ads and those are the majority of Facebook users.
I hate the ad-block profiteers,” Randall Rothenberg told the audience at the opening keynote of the 2016 IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. Rothenberg is President & CEO at Interactive Advertising Bureau.
“The ad-block profiteers are building for-profit companies whose business models are premised on impeding the movement of commercial, political, and public-service communication between and among producers and consumers,” says Rothenberg. “They offer to lift their toll gates for those wealthy enough to pay them off, or who submit to their demands that they constrict their freedom of speech to fit the shackles of their revenue schemes.”
For more information on the state of ad blockers and how publishers are fighting back, read the report, Ad-pocalypse Now? I Think Not!
“Ad-pocalypse Now? I Think Not!” exclaimed Steve Chester, Director of Data and Industry Programmes at the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB UK). Adblocking is the cause of huge headaches for internet publishers, gaming companies and advertisers.
It’s a huge problem and many in the industry think that it’s immoral, illegal, anti free speech and is killing journalism. Some also point to one positive that was spawned by adblocking, making sites leaner and more enjoyable to the consumer. Adblocking has forced publishers and advertisers, however unfairly, to own up to their own faults.
This report is designed to bring perspective to the rise of adblockers and how they are impacting the internet ecosystem and what the future is likely to bring.
Some in the industry are exasperated that we continue to let adblockers have such a negative impact on publishing and advertising.
“The reason it has to happen is just like video didn’t kill the radio star and just like Netflix hasn’t killed live TV and just like Napster never killed music, adblocking will not be allowed to kill journalism,” stated Anna Hickey, Managing Director Maxus UK at the 2016 Shift conference. “Journalism is too important to us culturally and economically and we all have our part to play in making sure that it survives.”
“Why did we lose track of user experience?” asks IAB President Randall Rothenberg. “For much of the past decade, the digital ad industry, aided and abetted by venture capitalists with no long-term stake in the viability of media and marketing businesses, have been in a headlong rush to subvert industry standards, hoping they can own the single business model that can lock in proprietary advantage and lock out competitors in the $600 billion global ad industry.”
As Much as 40% of Ads Are Blocked
“Where is it heading and will it actually be more of a storm in a teacup when we look back on this or is it the beginning of a major reform of the advertising ecosystem?” asked Rufus Olins, CEO at Newsworks, a UK based marketing body for national newspapers. “Adblocking is a key topic for this industry and it continues to develop as an issue not just in the UK but around the world.”
A March 2016 IAB/YouGov study on the state of ad blocking in the U.K. shows that 22% of British adults currently use adblocking software, up from 18% in their Oct. 2015 study. According to “The Cost of Ad Blocking” 2015 report by PageFair and Adobe (PDF), 16% of the US online population blocked ads during Q2 2015, which is just slightly less than in the UK, and at this point in August 2016 is likely the same or higher than the UK.
An IAB study in 2014 paints a much grimmer picture, concluding that over a third of US users, and 41% of Millennials, had installed ad-blocking software. The main reason people was a concern that advertising could infect their computers or smartphones with viruses. However, more than two-thirds also believed that advertising slowed interrupted their online experience and slowed them down.
40% THINK They’re Using an Ad Blocker, 26% Actually Are
According to a July 2016 IAB report, “Ad Blocking: Who Blocks Ads, Why and How to Win Them Back” (PDF), the actual number of consumers blocking ads is 26%. Many people think they are using adblock software when they are simply blocking popups.
This recent IAB report says that most adblock users are men 18-34 years old and that these same men make up the 15% of smart phone users that block ads.
Of consumers not blocking ads, 20% are past adblockers that were motivated by publishers who are blocking their content from them. The study also found that 17% of users not blocking ads may do so in the future.
So, why do people block ads? The study concluded the obvious, that consumers using ad blockers, want uninterrupted, quick browsing and a streamlined user experience. There is a perception that sites are easier to navigate without ads. This is also true for mobile phone users with adblockers.
The most annoying ads; Ads that block content, long video ads before short videos, ads that follow down the page as the user scrolls and auto-start ads. The main difference between people who use adblockers and those that don’t is that they are simply less tolerant of ads.
Adblocking Costs $12.1 Billion Now and by 2020 it will be $27 Billion
According to The Drum News adblocking will cost US publishers $12.1 billion in lost display ad revenues. Optimal.com predicts that this will is 23.8% of total earnings.
A new study from Juniper Research estimates that online publishers will lose over $27 billion by 2020, which will account for almost 10% of the total digital advertising market.
Is Adblocking Stealing?
Rufus Olins hosted a session on adblocking at the 2016 Shift Conference in London. The session looked at where adblocking would be in 5 years and how it would impact online publishing and advertising and whether or not adblocking would put us all out of a job, as Piers North put it.
North equates adblocking to literally stealing, the same as someone breaking into his house and taking property. “As we speak there are tens of thousands of people coming into our properties and consuming our content and there is no value exchange, absolutely none,” said North. “Should I be worried about that? Can I do anything about it? Is it worth me doing anything about it?”
“Adblocking continues to grow and if we do nothing about it, it will continue eating into our audiences and therefore taking away revenues from publishers and also take away audience from agencies and brands,” North said.
Adblockers Are Profiteers Holding Us For Ransom
“Adblocking has reached a tipping point,” said Hickey. “We know this because, bizarrely enough, adblocking was featured in an episode of South Park recently, which is very odd. Adblocking is literally being written about in hundreds and thousands of articles, but the thing that i think is not being spoken about enough is the truth behind this trend. The truth is that adblocking is really a bunch of profiteers that are holding our industry for ransom.”
“What’s actually going on is they are going into our publishers and demanding a significant proportion of their revenues in order to be included in a white list,” she said. “It simply is not acceptable. The reality is that if you play that scenario out of the next 4-5 years, it causes the death of journalism, because journalism is funded by advertising.”
“Most important, the publishers are starting to take action already,” says Hickey. “They are starting to deal with adblocking in a way that suites their audience. What I believe will happen next and is absolutely critical, is that the publishing industry will come together and act collectively to tackle the racketeers. Probably it will get legal quite soon which means it will get messy before it gets better.”
“Many of their business models are undoubtedly illegal,” says Rothenberg. “Already, Shine’s model of ISP-level ad-blocking has been cited by regulators as a probable violation of net neutrality principles.”
Is adblocking really about censorship? “This is why I hate the ad-block profiteers,” Randall Rothenberg told the audience at the opening keynote of the 2016 IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. Rothenberg is President & CEO at Interactive Advertising Bureau. “Now, you may be aware of a kerfuffle that began about 10 days ago, when an unethical, immoral, mendacious coven of techie wannabes at a for-profit German company called AdBlock-Plus took to the digisphere to complain over and over that IAB had “disinvited” them to this convention. That, of course, is as much a lie as the others they routinely try to tell the world.”
Rothenberg continued. “We had never invited them in the first place. They registered for this event online. When we found out, we cancelled the registration and reversed their credit card billing. Why? For the simple reason that they are stealing from publishers, subverting freedom of the press, operating a business model predicated on censorship of content, and ultimately forcing consumers to pay more money for less – and less diverse – information.”
“AdBlock-Plus is: an old-fashioned extortion racket, gussied up in the flowery but false language of contemporary consumerism,” says Rothenberg. ”
“I’m far from the first person to notice this,” he said. “Writing up an interview with AdBlock-Plus’s leaders more than two years ago in Salon, Andrew Leonardsaid: “It still sounds to me like something that bears more than a passing resemblance to a protection racket. Pay up, or we’ll break your windows! Pay up, or millions of Adblock Plus users will never see any of your ads.”
“Surveys repeatedly show that upwards of 75% of consumers prefer ad-supported Internet sites where the content is free over ad-free sites where they would pay fees for content,” Rothenberg said. “Fewer than 10% of consumers want to pay for content. By driving digital publishers, including some of the most prestigious news organizations in the world, to impose fees on consumers in order to continue to support their business and content-development objectives, the ad-block profiteers are subverting the will of consumers.”
The Bad News is AdBlock-Plus is Not Alone
IAB President Randall Rothenberg noted that for-profit adblockers have become the “darlings of the venture capital industry and angel investors” and include otherwise mainstream advertising technology and publishing companies.
There’s Shine, an Israeli startup that sells adblocking software for mobile phone networks so that they can block ads at the network level. Shine is backed by Horizons Ventures which backed Spotify and Facebook.
Then there’s Brave, that was launched by former Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich. Rothenberg says that “his business model not only strips advertisements from publishers’ pages – it replaces them with his own for-profit ads.”
“The ad-block profiteers are building for-profit companies whose business models are premised on impeding the movement of commercial, political, and public-service communication between and among producers and consumers,” says Rothenberg. “They offer to lift their toll gates for those wealthy enough to pay them off, or who submit to their demands that they constrict their freedom of speech to fit the shackles of their revenue schemes.”
Can Consumers Be Persuaded to Stop Using Adblockers?
Can adblocking kill the free internet? “It’s inconceivable, I think, that we would simply just allow this threat from adblocking to continue without actually having a strategy,” says IAB UK’s Steve Chester. “It’s something which we will have to develop. I don’t underestimate that it’s potentially an existential threat.”
The IAB study looked at how many people would turn off adblocking if requested to by a site as a condition to view content. Of those that are using adblocking software, 64% have seen notices on a website requesting that they turn off their adblocker. Over half (54%) said that they would sometimes temporarily switch off the software if it was the only way to access the content. For 18-24 year olds, 73% are willing to turn off adblocking.
The IAB study showed that 20% of people who have tried an adblocker no longer use one. The main reason is because of changing to a new device but the second most popular reason, not being able to access content, gives hope to publishers and advertisers that they can eventually change the mindset of people.
“The IAB believes that an ad funded internet is essential for providing revenue to publishers so they can continue to make their content, services and applications widely available at little, or no cost,” stated IAB UK’s CEO, Guy Phillipson. “We believe ad blocking undermines this approach and could mean consumers have to pay for content they currently get for free.”
“Part of the solution to tackle adblocking lies in making consumers more aware of the consequences, which seems like it’s starting to filter through,” Phillipson added. “If they realize it means they can’t access content or that to do so requires paying for it, then they might stop using ad blockers. It requires reinforcing this “trade-off” message – ads help to fund the content they enjoy for free.”
“More and more publishers are initiating what IAB calls “detection-notice-choice-and constraint” regimes,” says Rothenberg. “They are installing scripts that enable them to see when consumers coming to their sites have ad-blockers installed; they are providing notice to consumers about that and about publishers’ business models, which largely require advertising to support otherwise free content.”
“They are offering consumers choices – to turn off their ad-blockers, to pay a subscription fee, or another alternative,” he added. “And absent one of those choices, the publishers are constraining consumers’ access to content, reinforcing the immense value of what they deliver.”
Less Ads Would Be Blocked if Ads Weren’t So Annoying
The IAB study found that 45% of people would be less likely to use an adblocker if ads didn’t interfere with a page. In other words, people are tired of bloated Flash ads or sites that block content with popups or interstitials and the use of adblockers are simply a logical response to them. If there were less ads, 29% would be motivated to not use an adblocker and 12% would consider this if the ads were more relevant.
Adblocking has had some positive impacts on publishing by motivating publishers to stop serving annoying ads like pop-ups and interstitials. “We are organically moving towards formats that are more acceptable,” Piers North, the Strategic Director of Trinity Mirror Solutions told the Shift audience. “Yet having said that, if you look at the mobile experience, in-specials and pop-ups have had a resurgence. Adblocking is accelerating the need for us to get our house in order to make sure that the ad experience is as good as possible.” He noted that pop-ups and interstitials are a short-term play and that if you continue to do that you are going to kill your audience.
A Better Ad Experience
“If you provide website visitors with choice, and that’s what we advocate at the IAB and that’s where we see the industry going,” North said. “We’ve created the idea of lean standards or lean ads which are much leaner. We are looking to create a charter around that, so we are asking businesses, no matter where you sit, the buy side, sell side, intermediary to sign onto this charter as best practices.”
“LEAN stands for advertising and ad operations that are light, encrypted, AdChoices-supporting, and non-invasive,” says Rothenberg. “We believe LEAN will be as important to the future of the digital advertising industry as the first IAB Universal Ad Package was to its creation.”
Rothenberg says the the IAB intends to make LEAN the foundation of their activities for the foreseeable future. “And among our very first goals is introducing a public LEAN scoring system by which all publishers, all advertisers, and all agencies will be able to measure their activities against rational, reasonable, and consumer-friendly performance benchmarks,” he said.
“LEAN is the basis for a sustainable advertising ecosystem. We firmly believe that a combination of LEAN advertising and media, and publisher implementation of detection-notice-choice-and-constraint, will limit the impact of ad-blocking.”
“We want to actually give people a choice at the point of access,” says North. “You can come into this property and have a range of choices. It might be pay for this content, accept the ad experience, but it will be a better ad experience, or it might be some other form of payment like micro-payments or even a survey in exchange for access to content.”
“I think in 5 years ad blocking will continue to exist, but it will be on the fringes because we will have gotten our house in order, delivering a great ad experience and giving people choice,” he said. “I also think that we will move more toward native advertising in order to avoid adblockers. Remember, adblocking doesn’t kill all forms of advertising.”
“As agencies we are already taking significant steps to add value back into that consumer journey,” Hickey said. “Let’s face it, things like programmatic, launched a few years ago, some of it was done really badly, so we understand that younger people have had really bad advertising journeys and were incredibly annoying. Really good agencies are getting really good at adding value back into that whole journey and also getting much better at the nuts and bolts behind it.”
“The major driving force behind adoption of blockers is because users feel that advertisements are intrusive and detrimental to the user experience,” says Sam Barker, an analyst for Juniper Research and author of the May 2016 study ‘Digital Advertisers Vs the Ad Blockers’. “To make the browsing experience user friendly, advertisers need to find ways to serve ads that do not obstruct the objective of the user. Ad formats such as interstitials and pop-up ads are seen as very intrusive but, on the other hand, native advertisements work very well.”
Adblocking is a Brutal Countermeasure
“I’m not to make any predictions about adblocking, and nor should you, at least not with confidence,” says Ian Lesley, author and brand strategist at the Shift adblocking session. “Ten years ago everyone knew that TV advertising was dead and DVR’s meant that ad skipping was about to become the norm.”
“Skip to 2016, last years spend on interactive TV broke the $5 billion barrier for the first time,” said Lesley. “The question is why didn’t we see this coming or rather why didn’t we see it not coming? Simple, we fixated on the technology and we forgot about the human.”
“TV or print ads don’t take much time,” he said. “They don’t require anyone to think or make a choice or do anything. The cost of ignoring them is zero and when they are good, they are really good. Forgetting about the human is a perennial problem. Five years ago everybody knew that digital data meant that we could send people relevant information instead of this terrible flimflam called brand image. Clever us. Lucky consumers.”
“What’s the reality? Humans care about all sorts of things, but most of them most of the time do not care about brands,” stated Lesley. “I know it’s a bitter pill to swallow, but it’s why the dream of interactivity, engagement and brand conversations has all but died and it’s why people will reach for the ad blockers if the ads continue to be so insanely annoying.”
“Here’s another thing about humans, they make terrible predictions,” commented Lesley. “I’ve almost given up on prediction but not quite. I will predict that unless online advertising changes its form radically in the next five years humans are going to send it the way of interactive TV.”
“The point is that adblocking is an equal and opposite reaction to the brutally bad nature of online advertising,” says Lesley. “This is not a platform that has found its form. There was a moment when TV advertising discovered that you could do stuff with a 30 second ad that was really great and entertaining. People found ways to make that a very rich experience. That hasn’t happened yet with online advertising.”
“The experience of online ads is not pleasant and it actually gets in the way of them enjoying what they want to enjoy,” Lesley said. “So there is a distinct possibility that they will reach for a brutal countermeasure. Unless we get better at doing online advertising, creating things that people enjoy or at least can passively disregard and passively absorb when they want to then I’m afraid the adblockers will march on.”
At least 419 million people (22% of the world’s 1.9bn smartphone users) are blocking ads on the mobile web.
Both mobile web and in-app ads can now be blocked.
As of March 2016 an estimated 408 million people are actively using mobile adblocking browsers (i.e., a mobile browser that blocks ads by default).
As of March 2016 there are 159 million users of mobile adblocking browsers in China, 122 million in India, and 38 million in Indonesia.
As of March 2016 in Europe and North America there were 14 million monthly active users of mobile adblocking browsers.
A further 4.9 million content blocking and in-app adblocking apps were downloaded from the app stores in Europe and North America since September 2014.
“Although consumer adoption of mobile level ad blockers is lower than the desktop market, Juniper Research believes that adoption is set to witness a sizable increase,” said Juniper Research analyst Sam Barker. “Drivers of this include Apples inclusion of ad blocking compatibility with Safari and increasing consumer awareness.”
He adds, that much like desktop browsers, mobile ad blockers are not able to block all types of advertising:
Internet Search and Display Adverts will be blocked, however like the desktop space, native adverts are not able to be blocked.
Video Display Adverts are able to be blocked, except if the video is channelled through a mobile application.
The possibility of blocking in-app advertising has been explored, however when speaking to players in the market many feel the practice to be morally unethical or the technical challenges too costly.
“In comparison to the desktop space, the mobile ad blocking market is still fairly nascent,” said Barker. “Since the announcement from Apple in September 2015 that iOS’s native browser would be able to support ad blocking applications there has been a rise in the number of users adopting the technology.
Sites are Fighting Back Against Adblockers
Forbes has taken an aggressive approach to adblocking, revealing that of those blocked, 44% of them turned off their ad blockers in order to access their content. Forbes is continuing to test other strategies including a version of the IAB Lean Ads concept.
According to Digiday, Slate has been using messaging to try and persuade users to turn off ad blockers and to sign up for their premium low ad content plans.
Wired says that 20% of their traffic comes from people using adblockers and in response to that they have restricted access to those using them. They offer 2 options to site visitors with adblockers:
You can simply add WIRED.com to your ad blocker’s whitelist, so you view ads. When you do, we will keep the ads as “polite” as we can, and you will only see standard display advertising.
You can subscribe to a brand-new Ad-Free version of WIRED.com. For $1 a week, you will get complete access to our content, with no display advertising or ad tracking.
Bloomberg has taken a different approach, cleaning up their site and adding more white space. “Everyone’s screaming and yelling, so let’s not scream and yell — let’s do the opposite,” Chris Briseno, digital creative director at Bloomberg LP, told Digiday.
Native advertising, sponsored content or branded news (all the same) is booming and with some online publishers it’s now their main source of revenue.
It’s important to note that native advertisingis notcontent marketing. Content marketing is a content strategy by brands where typically, they own the content, such as their blogs or content on a product website. Native advertising is sponsored content, more typically created by the publisher to be in alignment with an audience that the advertiser wants to reach. I think where the confusion happens is when an advertiser creates biased and conversion oriented content that is placed on websites for a fee. To me, that’s content marketing more than native advertising because content marketing has evolved to be measured by conversions, while native advertising looks at other metrics.
Fractl and Moz conducted a survey of more than 30 content marketing agencies and obtained cost data from more than 600 digital publishers and determined that “content marketing has a better overall return on investment.”
“Readers are necessarily less engaged with advertising vs. editorial content, and metrics show lower share rates, lower engagement rates, lower view counts, etc. in most cases,” said Kelsey Libert, partner and vp of marketing at Fractl. “You can’t simply push through a mediocre, thinly veiled advertorial. Content marketing puts the brand and the consumer on equal footing, and in the process necessitates the brand elevate the content they are creating. When done correctly, the result is a true match between brand and content consumer, where the content created has true value, and spreads based on the merit of the content. Through this, content can enjoy true virality in a way that is nearly impossible with Native ads.”
“The fact that people find it necessary to pit one form against the other is a little bemusing,” said Cas McCullough, Founder at Writally PTY LTD, in a comment on Adweek. “When used together, good content and native ads are very powerful. On their own they don’t get the same ROI. Our case studies prove this consistently, so we’ll stick with an integrated approach.”
Sites such a Buzzfeed and Vice have built their entire business model around native advertising. Slate says that it now relies on native advertising for nearly 50% of its revenue. According to Digiday Slate trained its 10-person sales team on a its new native ad product called Slate Custom, and also hired Jim Lehnhoff, the former head of Gawker Media’s native advertising strategy. The goal with Slate Custom is to make native ads that are aligned to Slate’s “edtorial DNA.”
“The differences between five years ago and now, in client expectations, are enormous,” said Keith Hernandez, the president of Slate, in a New York Times article on native. “Creating something that’s delightful and that’ll make someone stop and click and share…that’s really hard. But doing the easy thing is not fun.”
The Atlantic’s Hayley Romer, their Publisher, expects “native campaigns to drive 70 percent of its ad revenue this year, up from 60 percent in 2015.”
“We know that our audience is engaging really deeply with our native content on our site,” she was quoted as saying in a NiemanLab article.
The 2016 Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report, the largest study of its kind, based on more than 50,000 people in 26 countries, was released recently (PDF) and shows the rise of sponsored content. Here’s a chart from the Report:
The report noted that with existing models of online advertising increasingly broken, publishers have been trying alternatives such as “branded and sponsored content.” Sponsored content still has numerous legal and political obstacles, with labeling “sponsored” still an area of confusion. Geographically, the US and Canada are most accepting, while Germany and Korea branded content faces tremendous consumer confusion and resistance.
The New York Times has created a 100-person native ad unit, T Brand Studio, in a huge push for native advertising revenue. The Times is openly declaring “sponsored content to be an important part of their strategy.”.
The motivation for publishers in looking for a new monetization model for their digital properties is the continued weakness of online display advertising.
“Display still has a place, but we believe that the digital advertising of the future will be dominated by stories conceived by advertisers, clearly labelled so they can be distinguished from newsroom journalism, but consumed alongside that journalism on their own merits,” said New York Times CEO Mark Thompson in a commentary in the above report. “This is a more compelling and creative vision of digital advertising than conventional digital display, and it requires new skills, talents, and technologies, and substantial fresh investment. Audience scale and global reach will still count, but the audience which publishers will need to find will not be super-light users, the one-and-dones who spend a few seconds on many different sites, but truly engaged readers and viewers who are prepared to devote real time to content of real quality and relevance.”
Thompson is adamant that the editorial and commercial sides must work as one. “Editorial and commercial leaders need to work together on integrated strategies which combine editorial mission and standards, user experience, innovations in data, technology and creative design, and radically new approaches to monetization,” he said. “Not five different strategies, not even ‘aligned’ editorial and commercial strategies, but a single shared way forward.”
Sponsored content does not have to be biased content, but instead can be content that is paid for by an advertiser, because that advertiser wants to reach the type of people that read a particular content subject area.
Interestingly, a study (PDF) by the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) and Edelman in June 2015 uncovered that consumer perceptions of sponsored content isn’t all negative.
Roughly 45% of those seeing sponsored content related to business or entertainment recognized the value-add.
The IAB study says that brand relevance, authority, and trust are the most important factors to driving consumer interest in sponsored content across all media. “Make the ads and product more on target… also give info [on] how to enhance the experience with the latest and best products,” commented one consumer interviewed in the study.
The value (or lack of value) for the advertiser is that the credibility of the site hosting the sponsored content is largely transferred to the advertiser.
Sherrill Mane, formerly of the IAB and currently Head of MAdTech Strategy, and Steve Rubel, Chief Content Strategist for Edelman recommend these steps for publishers that intend to incorporated sponsored content:
Control the experience and be prepared to walk away from advertisers who aren’t relevant/trusted
Encourage aligned brand marketers to work together in a more authoritative manner
Go the distance when it comes to transparency/disclosures
According to research by eMarketer, Facebook will receive 67.9% of all social media advertising revenue in 2016. The study predicts that Facebook will generate $22.37 billion in net ad revenues this year, up 30% from 2015 revenue of $17.08 billion. eMarketer says that 70% of this years revenue ($12.08 billion) will come from outside of the US.
“Facebook is seeing momentum across its ad business,” said eMarketer principal analyst Debra Aho Williamson. “On the branding side, video ads are becoming more and more popular for marketers whose objective is broad awareness. And products like Dynamic Ads, which let advertisers upload their product catalog to Facebook and then deliver relevant targeted ads, are proving highly effective for marketers that want to drive lower-funnel activities, such as purchases.”
eMarketer notes that this revenue growth is due entirely to ads on Facebook itself and that Facebook has not yet added monetization to Messenger, which it has been transitioning to a stand-alone app for the last couple of years. In June, Facebook announced that they mobile users would soon not be able to use Facebook Messenger without downloading the separate Messenger app.
Just last week, Facebook announced that Messenger is now being used by over 1 billion people, which matches the number of users that WhatsApp had as of February 2016, according to Statista.
“Messenger is gaining traction among marketers that want to experiment with chat bots,” said Williamson. “These are very early days for conducting business activities on Messenger, however, and it remains unclear just how important it will be as a marketing vehicle.”
Facebook has also not brought serious monetization to WhatsApp, which it purchased for $22 billion in 2014, or to Instagram, which it paid $1 billion for in 2012.
It’s very likely that once Facebook finds a way to monetize WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram their social revenues will significantly accelerate.
Another significant source of future ad revenue for Facebook are video ads, which Facebook may actually see as its future primary source of revenue. At Fortune‘s Most Powerful Women International Summit in London this past June, Nicola Mendelsohn, VP EMEA at Facebook, predicted that the Facebook newsfeed will be all video in 5 years. “It will definitely be mobile. It will probably be all video,” Mendelsohn said. “I just think if we look, we already are seeing a year on year decline in text. We’re seeing a massive increase as I’ve said on both pictures and video. So yeah, if I was having a bet, I would say video, video, video.”
Mark Zuckerberg recently conducted the first live video conversation with ALL Facebook users. “A few weeks ago I started off trying to do an internal live Q&A and I found it was so much more fun and engaging and I could see peoples comments as I was going,” Zuckerberg told millions that were live watching. “So rather than just having a few hundred or a few thousand people in a room we could do this here and we could have tens or hundreds of thousands of people participating in a town hall Q&A together all across the world.”
Facebook knows that video is remarkably effective for brand marketing. Remember the Chewbacca Mom video? Well, you might not remember that was originally a Facebook Live video and benefited Kohl’s immensely. Facebook and all of its social and messaging platforms are ripe for video advertising, and when Facebook goes all in with video, even TV networks won’t be able to compete with both its reach and its ability to micro target audiences.
Googles Paul Muret, VP, Display, video & Analytics at Google, says that Google’s research shows that the average mobile site takes 19 seconds to load. If however, through optimization you can get your site to load within 5 seconds or less, Google estimates that you can earn twice as much revenue than those at the 19 second average.
“Think about that for a minute,” said Muret in a post on the DoubleClick Publisher Blog this week. “That’s a long time! Not only is this frustrating for users but it’s also a huge missed opportunity for publishers.”
A web surfers sensitivity to website speed have gone up significantly in the last few years. In a recent study of google.com search, the Google team found that every four hundred millisecond delay in delivering search results resulted in a half point drop in overall search volume. “It’s about the time it takes to blink and on mobile the situation is even more important,” commented Muret in a talk at the DoubleClick Leadership Summit earlier this week. “Creating a great user experience necessarily means making it super fast, but an alarming 77% percent of publishers today, their web pages take more than 10 seconds to load, and the average is actually 19 seconds.”
AMP for Ads
Google’s main initiative to make the mobile web faster is a the Accelerated Mobile Pages Project (AMP), launched last Fall, which is an open sourced global community of publishers and other tech companies. Google’s analysis shows that mobile web pages that use AMP HTML load four times faster and use 10 times less data on average than non-AMP mobile web pages. Over 145 million AMP pages have been created so far from 640,000 demands. Google sees AMP as a first step because it only covers publisher content, but not the ads, which means opening a web page still involves “much slower loading javascript bundles.”
At the DoubleClick conference Muret announced AMP for Ads, a new initiative to incorporate AMP technology into the ads themselves in order to make the entire mobile experience faster. In an example that Paul Muret gave the Washington Post, which is an early adopter of AMP and AMP for Ads, instead of the ad taking 4 seconds longer to load than the publishers content, with AMP for Ads it loads seamlessly at the same time as the mobile page content.
AMP for Landing Pages
Google announced “AMP for Landing Pages” to make the click-through fast as well. This much speedier experience is likely to significantly increase conversions for mobile marketers.
“Making experiences fast is the first step, but they also need to be really well integrated into their environments into the context that they sit in,” said Muret. “If ads are not integrated well it can lead to ad blindness, or worse, annoyance and ad blocking. As an industry we need to come together and think about creating better ads for all of our users.”
Muret believes that good integration starts with native advertising. He said that we need the ads to really fit into the context of experience.
DoubleClick Bid Manager (DBM)
If you are a DoubleClick user this will be of interest to you, Muret announced programmatic native in DoubleClick Bid Manager (DBM) which “brings the power of native to all advertisers to be able to run programmatically at scale across all their campaigns instead of delivering arbitrary of rectangles of content all over the place.” He said that advertiser’s can create asset bundles that can include headlines, images, and colors that are “dynamically fit to the form and function of the page it’s on.” This should make for a much more integrated experience which Google hopes will result in less ad blindness, less blocking and more clicks!
Google’s DoubleClick also wants to make sure that there is enough inventory for these dynamic programmatic ads. That’s why Muret also announced that DoubleClick was expanding their support for native and Double-Click for Publishers to include ALL app and web content and ALL deal types, programmatic and reservations. What this means for DoubleClick is that they now offer full coverage of the massive shift to native advertising.
Muret noted that DoubleClick’s new technology, in a test with eBay, caused a 3 times increase in user engagement compare to eBay’s normal non-native ads.
Programmatic Video
Video is the future of internet advertising without a doubt, and of course DoubleClick and Google are on top of this trend. Muret said that an amazing 85% of “Ad Age Top 100 Advertisers” have already bought programmatic video ads on DoubleClick Bid Manager. More importantly, they are seeing a 550% increase in programmatic video revenue from TV & media companies year over year.
Google, like many other tech media companies, is at the forefront of the video advertising revolution that has been long predicted, but is now finally happening. One of the key trends is multi-device viewing which Google sees as an opportunity to deliver video ads in even more places while users seamlessly move back and forth between different content formats.
“Over 90% of people use multiple devices sequentially to accomplish a task,”said Meghan Lee, Agency Development Manager for Google AdWords. “Adwords advertisers are used to a very simple and clear way of measurement and they have that same expectation on mobile.”
Outstream Video
Muret also announced a new product from DoubleClick, Outstream Video, which is for non-video content. “For advertisers this means getting additional reach with the power of sight, sound and motion,” Muret told the conference audience. “For publishers this means tapping into TV budgets and driving yield even when the the content is more traditional.”
Outstream Video ads are served outside of a video player, often between paragraphs of text, typically without sound. According to Google, interstitials, native, and in-feed are types of outstream video. An example of outstream video ads is the autoplay silent video on Facebook, for instance.
VR & AR Ads
Google is also very aware of another massive disruption and opportunity in digital advertising, Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality. Research by Digi-Capital predicts that VR and AR will be a $150 billion industry by 2020. The study forecasts that AR (augmented reality), a less intense experience, will take the lion’s share around $120 billion and VR $30 billion.
Virtual Reality is a technology that can be very disruptive in that it has the potential to impact how we live and what we do and from a marketers perspective it opens up a whole new world.
“Obviously virtual reality and augmented reality are coming are are here and are being incorporated,” said Muret. “Rest assured we are going to be your partner in delivering those experiences as we get those built into our advertising system.”
“The promise of VR is what the industry calls “presence”—the feeling that you’re really somewhere else,” commmented Aaron Luber, who is in charge of Google and YouTube partnerships.
TrueView Discovery Ads
A prelude to true VR and AR is already here, 360-degree TrueView ads, which Muret announced they are now making them available to all advertisers. YouTube is king of 360-degree videos, of which uploads of 360-degree videos are growing and have doubled over the past three months, according to Luber.
Google announced, just yesterday, that they were changing the name of “TrueView in-display ads” to “TrueView Discovery Ads.” They didn’t stop with just the name change though, they also made significant enhancements to the product, TrueView Discovery Ads will now appear on mobile search results.
They’ve also made TrueView Discovery Ads more relevant on search results pages and are being used across the full inventory of YouTube videos, which Google says has increased ad click-through by 11%.
With TrueView Discovery Ads, your videos can be discovered across YouTube, YouTube search results, video watch pages and on the YouTube homepage, no matter what device you’re on,” commented Josh Rubel, Head of Brand Product Strategy at YouTube, in a promo video for TrueView. “Users initiate the ad by simply clicking your video, which takes them right to your videos watch page. By bringing the user to your channel environment, the level of engagement and activity… subscribes, shares, and additional views is impressive.”
“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half,” said marketing pioneer John Wanamaker in the early 1900’s. That is why CRM software was invented and why it is used by every serious marketer. In today’s “Big Data” World, enterprises are making not just marketing decisions, but almost ALL decisions based on data analytics.
“Big Data holds the potential to describe target customers with an accuracy and level of detail unfathomable only a decade ago,” said Jean Spencer on the SalesForce blog, who is a Product Marketing Manager at Microsoft and was previously the content marketing manager at Kapost. “While old-school marketing efforts were limited to things like tracking returns on direct mail campaigns, or number of subscribers to newsletters, modern marketers can have data on people’s exercise habits, digital clicking behavior, time spent on various sites, purchasing history, personal preferences based on social media postings, time awake, time spent in the car, caloric intake, and almost anything else you can imagine.”
SalesForce is at the epicenter of data, marketing and sales. They offer this overview of the concept:
Using Data To Make Better Marketing Decisions
A report by the Aberdeen Group says that 44 percent of executives are dissatisfied with the analytic capabilities available to them and that they often make critical decisions based on inaccurate or inadequate data. That was in 2014 and fortunately CRM has improved dramatically since then and executives are now typically integrating CRM solutions into their marketing platforms.
“No longer do we rely on conclusions based on vague and imprecise relationships such as “we advertised last week and sales increased so it must have worked” or the common one that I’ve heard many times, “the objective was awareness and clearly many people are now aware of us”, said Gerald Chait who is Director/CEO of Marketing By Objectives. “In today’s world, this just does not cut it anymore.”
Chait added in a blog post, “Gone are the days when we would define roughly segmented target audiences and place an ad hoping someone would purchase something. Today’s marketing enables us to identify who to work with to make a sale, right down to the individual level. What’s more, we can personalize and customize our advertising and messaging to each specific person, no matter how many people there are. We can even customise and personalize website pages depending on who’s viewing them.”
It’s often referred to as predictive marketing, gathering data to learn what is working and what isn’t using precise analytical strategies and technologies in order to finely tune your marketing.
“Predictive marketing is the application of predictive technology to the entire marketing process, across the entire buyer’s journey, and across every channel of communication,” says Eli Snyder, Associate Technology Director of Strategy at Intelligent Demand. “It means not only having predictive insight into the future through predictive analytics, but also using that insight to make better decisions about who and how to engage, and then build better content, campaigns and programs.”
“In order to execute your marketing strategy in the most effective way, you’ll need your business management platform (or CRM) and marketing automation tools to work together seamlessly; using one to generate leads, and the other to maintain them, so you can get a complete picture of your business,” said Mark Sokol who is the VP of Product Marketing and Branding at ConnectWise.
The Intersection of Marketing & CRM is Leads
CRM and marketing are now tightly integrated in order to make marketing more efficient and and successful. “In the past, the marketing campaign stops here in the CRM software system and the rest is carried out externally,” said Denise Holland, VP & Senior Analyst of Genesys Advisory in the CRMsearch blog. “In today’s world, the right customer relationship management system can create the message, compile your target list, distribute your messaging pursuant to an automated schedule, capture the replies and inquiries from these marketing placements, route them to the right sales person or department, track the sale opportunity progress, record the successful sale event and calculate the campaign ROI.”
“This CRM system can also advise the best time to call or email your customers, what type of messaging will illicit the best response, if your customer is really serious or just shopping around, how you can improve your products and services, and what new products and services your R&D department should focus on next,” he says.
“CRM has one common component to help you make marketing decisions, Leads, says Joe CRM on the PowerObjects blog. “Lead data allows you to gauge how healthy your marketing is, what works and what doesn’t, and lets you understand lead quality. In today’s post, we’ll provide some lead data sources from CRM you can use to help make marketing decisions.”
Joe at PowerObjects says you need to know where your leads are coming from. “Some examples of lead sources include outbound cold calls, email, chat, website form submission, and events,” he said. “Keeping the lead source simple lets you use a different field, source campaign, to describe the lead source in more detail as needed.”
He says that knowing where leads come from drives marketing decisions such as:
Number of employees needed for the inside sales team
Budget disbursement for paid advertising
Landing page success
P&L for events attended
Create a Data-Driven Culture
“To cultivate a data-driven culture within your organization, it’s important to remember that without data, you’re simply another person with an opinion,” commented MeetMe CTO Jonah Harris on the NGDATA blog. “All too often, with valuable data and insights in hand, people remain invested in their own hunches and intuition.”
“Transitioning to a genuine data-driven culture is a challenge for many organizations, but one of the ideal first steps is to start leveraging the data your business has to guide evidence-based decision making,” added Vaclav Shatillo of Business Intelligence at Clutch. “When data reinforces or, better yet, contradicts the gut feeling, the conversation around the importance of a data-driven approach is bound to begin.”
At what frequency the data is needed to make actionable decision, and
How to package the data so it can be easily digested, analyzed and reacted to.
Find other great advice from a variety of experts quoted about how to create a data-driven culture here.
Darren Catalano, the CEO of HelioCampus offers some great tips on building a data-driven culture that can be applied to any business:
Data is Marketing Gold
“Data isn’t an overwhelming set of facts and figures,” said Megan Totka is the Marketing Director for ChamberofCommerce.com. “It’s marketing gold. It shows you what your customers want and how to get your customers to buy from you.”
Joe CRM says that the “data you receive from leads that turn into opportunities and then end up as customers is a goldmine.” He says, “This data alone can give your company direction and help you find your niche. That’s why when you use your closed as won accounts it should be for a macro view of your marketing processes. This is the data executives want to see from marketing because it helps prove ROI or that the money spent was worthwhile.”
Data that can power your successful marketing strategy is sometimes found in places that you don’t expect. “New marketing technology, measurement platforms and other advances have greatly expanded the sources that marketers can sift through for nuggets of information,” said Eva Rohrmann, the director of solutions and customer lifecycle marketing for PR Newswire. ”
Rohrmann says that the “most useful data that will turn strategic, positioning and tactical efforts into gold oftentimes is hiding right under your nose: with other teams within your organization.” She believes that ideas and data are “streaming” from many directions, “from sales to product to customer support.”
“Every team within your organization has a treasure trove of actionable marketing intelligence waiting to be discovered,” she says.
The marketing landscape is changing and that should make every CMO’s job easier because they are using justifiable logic instead of just gut intuition. In order for a company to reach their maximum sales potential they must utilize data-driven CRM strategies.
“Marketing is currently undergoing a metamorphosis from a once qualitatively measured art towards a quantitatively driven science,” said Eamonn O’Raghallaigh, the Managing Director of Digital Strategy. on the company’s blog. “This paradigm shift will indeed lead to significant impacts on the competitive landscape; with the bias towards companies who adopt and embrace a data-centric culture within their organization.”
Virtual Reality is in its infancy but will very shortly have a major impact on everyone, especially marketers. Every major tech company is focused on Virtual Reality and because of that the technology has rapidly improved over the last couple of years. Last year Facebook paid $2 billion for crowd-funded Oculus Rift in order to enter the space running. Other players include Sony, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, HTC, Nokia, Intel, IBM, Samsung, Qualcomm and hundreds more.
According to research by Digi-Capital augmented reality and Virtual Reality are predicted to be a $150 billion industry by 2020. The study forecasts that AR (augmented reality), a less intense experience, will take the lion’s share around $120 billion and VR $30 billion.
Virtual Reality headset shipments will approach 30 million by 2020, driven by video & gaming according to a September 2015 Juniper Research study, “Virtual Reality: Market Dynamics & Future Prospects 2015-2020.” The study predicts that the technology is poised to transform the entertainment industry including gaming and video over the next few years, while offering the potential to quickly expand into other markets such as industrial and healthcare. Report co-author Joe Crabtree commented, “The recent attention to and investment into Virtual Reality is helping to revitalize the industry and with major brand commercial launches imminent, there is huge potential for rapid market expansion.”
Google is actually doing something very low tech in order to increase public interest in VR, sending people Google Cardboard viewers. As Google says, it’s a VR experience starting with a simple viewer anyone can build or buy.
“Every single video on YouTube can be viewed in VR, making it the world’s largest library of VR content,” wrote Aaron Luber who is in charge of Google and YouTube partnerships in a think with Google report. “This is giving many people all over the world their first taste of VR, and mainstream interest is growing; global search interest for Virtual Reality on Google has grown by nearly 4X in the last year.”
Virtual Reality is a technology that can be very disruptive in that it has the potential to impact how we live and what we do and from a marketers perspective it opens up a whole new world. “The technology has the potential to change our daily lives—from how we communicate to how we spend our leisure time,” said Luber. “It’s early days, but it’s already happening, and now is the time for brands and creators to understand what it all means.”
The Future With Virtual Reality
“The promise of VR is what the industry calls “presence”—the feeling that you’re really somewhere else,” said Luber. “VR cameras like Jump can capture the entire experience of a place—every corner, every angle. In the not-so-distant future, cameras like these will be capturing experiences all over the world.” Google’s Jump is a camera rig consisting of 16 camera modules in a circular array that are optimized to work with the Jump assembler, which is a powerful computer that turns 16 pieces of video into stereoscopic VR video.
Luber explains that VR creates a time machine like experience where what you record now can be played back in the future and it will seem like you were there. For families, VR recordings of your daughters 4th birthday or your own wedding will let you relive the events, bringing much more emotional impact than traditional video.
This is why advertisers are so interested in VR. Emotion sells products much more than utility and that reality positions Virtual Reality as a game changer in the advertising industry.
“At Google, Cardboard was our first step toward this future,” says Luber. “Soon, our VR platform Daydream will enable even more powerful, mobile, high-quality experiences with a headset that’s comfortable at an accessible price. We’re also building mobile apps for VR like Google Play, Maps, and YouTube.”
YouTube is actually a great place to view many 360-degree videos where viewers can see the video from every angle just by swiping or moving the phone or tablet around—no headset required. Luber says that uploads of 360-degree videos are growing and have doubled over the past three months. He says that brands are also using 360-degree video with ads and to film events. “BMW used this technology for an ad featuring a 360-degree car race,” says Luber. “The “School of Rock” musical created a 360-degree music video. AT&T simulated a car crash to drive home its phone safety message.”
YouTube even categorizes 360-degree videos so you can conveniently browse through them.
The Power of VR in Telling a Story
“And this makes filmmakers– a lot of them are credible ones that have been around for a while– makes them freak out, like this is horrible, this is dangerous,” said Jessica Brillhart, the principal filmmaker for Google VR in a talk at Google I/O 2016. “But let’s just breathe for a second. Have we lost complete control? Or maybe it just lives somewhere else in this. Us humans have a knack for following what calls attention to itself, no matter where it is, no matter where it goes.”
“One of the fascinating challenges in these relatively early days of Virtual Realty is how to tell actual stories,” says a post on the Wevr blog. “The most common comparison so far has been to live theater, where an audience watches events unfold with no real time direction to focus their attention. It’s an aspect that allows for a new kind of experience, yet also seems to frustrate many experienced story tellers.”
Wevr is a company that believes “virtual reality has the power to alter people’s lives more than any other medium to date with the potential to deliver memories that stick.”
Brillhart says that “our control as creators is in this understanding of the potential experiences a world contains so that we can prepare for this, prepare for how someone might engage with the space.” She said that a videographer or directors craft is about responding to all “potential experiences”. She added that “our jobs as creators is not to preciously craft something that someone may never look at and then forget the rest of it, but instead to guide visitors through a crafted universe.”
Connor Hair, Award winning VR Director and Co-Founder of the VR production company Perception Square, talked about how he used VR to tell a story. “One of the reasons I went with the 180 degree view for the VR segments was that I wanted to maintain some of the control you have as a filmmaker,” Hair said. “To craft it like you would a film and directed the audiences attention and not worrying about what is behind them. It also enabled me to stand behind the camera and direct actors as I would in a film.”
After working as a cinematographer on six feature length projects, Hair changed his focus toward directing virtual reality experiences. In 2015 he directed two short films for virtual reality, “Real” and “En Pointe“. His bio states that he “is constantly experimenting with emerging technology and has a passion for telling stories in unique and innovative ways.” Watch out Steven Spielberg!
Real 2D Version – The 3D VR experience will soon be released as an app for the Oculus Rift:
En Pointe – 360 VR Short Film – Selected as a Winner of Samsung’s “There in 60 seconds” VR contest.
Storytelling with VR and 360-degree video is “an incredibly powerful tool to create empathy,” said Luber. “When a viewer feels like they are there, they have a greater sense of the situation. Messages become more impactful.”
Brands Can’t Wait for VR
Nothing tickles the fancy of brands more than learning of a new way to create personal, powerful and impactful marketing messages. Brands are learning more about VR everyday through research and by understanding the technology and its potential and some are already using it.
Cadillac is creating virtual showrooms where customers will find VR headsets and no cars. These high-tech showrooms will save tons of money because dealers won’t have to purchase inventory according to a WSJ.com article. “They can still sell the same volume,” said Will Churchill, owner of Frank Kent Cadillac in Fort Worth, Texas, and head of Cadillac’s dealer council. “They don’t have to stock the 15 cars and hope that they have the right one…the data shows they probably don’t.”
Time Warner and Nielsen are actually partnering up to study the emotional impact of Virtual Reality. “Given the increasing role that VR is going to play with our content and even with our advertisers in the future, I think that alone gives us an interesting opportunity to partner with Nielsen and an unparalleled opportunity to integrate both the biometrics part of research and also the neuroscience piece to help us understand how consumers are really engaging with the VR experience,” Kristen O’Hara, Time Warner’s CMO for global media told Adweek.
VR Can Be Very Powerful For Marketers
VR can be powerful for marketers. “Virtual Reality is not a media experience. When it’s done well, it’s an actual experience,” Stanford University, Professor Jeremy Bailenson said. “In general, our findings show that VR causes more behavior change, causes more engagement, causes more influence than other types of traditional media.”
“I think what our clients and I think this lab is going to be able to do very well is separate the sort of ‘wow factor’ of VR from really full-on engagement with content and advertising,” Carl Marci told Adweek. Marci is the Chief Neuroscientist, Nielsen Consumer Neuroscience at Nielsen Company. “How do you tell stories in a VR environment? How do you make someone who’s engaged in a totally surrounded and immersive environment go from a beginning, middle and end? How do you introduce characters?”
The New York Times actually has a VR app, which puts viewers into news events around the world. “Go underwater or on the campaign trail,” says the NYT promot. “Experience life through the eyes of a refugee or explore previously unseen worlds. Experience stories reported by award-winning journalists, all told in an immersive, 360-degree video experience.”
“For the brand and user the intimacy of VR is really dramatic,” GE’s CMO Linda Boff told The Guardian. “It’s a tool to tell a powerful story in a way that’s much more personal and up close than we’d normally be able to.”
Brands are also looking forward to technological leaps that are in works such as haptic technology which recreates the sense of touch by applying forces, vibrations, or motions for the user to experience. Apple famously includes haptic technology in its current versions of the iPhone, for example.
“You can see brands creating room-scale simulations where consumers will interact with branded content,” Anthony Batt told the Guardian. Batt is co-founder of the Virtual Reality firm Wevr. “For example, Airbnb could create sims for real rental properties so users could experience what it would feel like to stay there.”
Marketing has become the the breeding ground for Virtual Reality technology. “You have to start experimenting,” says Boff. “Marketing may be a proving ground, but if we can take this tech and make it a business application, that’s huge.”
Ominous Warning
A person named Zeigeist commented on an article about VR and delivered this ominous warning: “Way before the movie the Matrix was created, I realized that our concept of reality is entirely controlled by our ability to receive stimuli through our senses. If you are able to control the input a person receives, without their awareness that the input source was generated by something other than the expected “real world”, the person would never know.”
Of course, we aren’t expecting the Matrix to actually happen, but Virtual Reality technology and application are just getting started. Who knows what the future holds.
A LinkedIn study recently took a look a Millennials in an attempt to erase the stereotype that they are lazy, entitled and unemployed. “Given the massive amounts of news coverage (44,000 articles and counting), it seems like everyone is desperate to understand my generation,” said Alexandra Rynne who contributed to LinkedIn’s Millennial Playbook (PDF). “Thankfully, we don’t have to rely on stereotypes or sensationalism to find out.”
LinkedIn Marketing Solutions looked at the data of the 87 million millennials found on LinkedIn to gain some very interesting insights on who Millennials really are and whether they are still living in their parents basement or not. 🙂 There are over 2 billion Millennials on Earth, 85 million of those in the U.S., and worldwide have $1 trillion in purchasing power according a LinkedIn post. The Millennial Generation is roughly defined as people reaching young adulthood around the year 2000.
Michelle Lynn, EVP, Managing Director, Carat Consumer Insights, and Doug Ray, Carat’s US CEO & Global President offered new research illustrating that Millennials are not a homogenous group. Marketers should not be targeting Millennials as a whole, since they’re only reaching 42% of their total.
TrendNetters have a median age of 27 and make up 42% of all Millennials and align most closely to the general stereotype of Millenials: Digital extroverts who are easy to find and market to because they live their lives online
AlterNatives have a median age of 24 and make up 23% of all Millennials (consisting mostly of males), are introverts and extremely elusive
LYFPreneurs have a median age of 28 and make up 19% of all Millennials, consisting mostly of females who are extremely ambitious.
BetaBlazers have a median age of 25 and make up 16% of Millennials and are an extremely forward-thinking group.
“I was pleasantly surprised to see how many of my generation are investing time on LinkedIn,” said Rynne. “There are 87 million millennials on LinkedIn worldwide, and 11 million are classified as “decision makers.” Not only that, millennials represent 30% of long-form publishers on LinkedIn, even though we’re less than 25% of total members.” In other words, millennials are already making an impact on society.
“There’s no denying millennials are chasing great,” Rynne added while coining a new term. “Some of us want the thrill of recognition. Some just want to make the world a better place. Some just can’t resist pushing the boundaries of what’s possible.”
Marketers are confused on how to “advertise” to Millennials because the generation is not like their parents. They grew up with the internet, free content, social media, ad blockers and fast forwarding through commercials. “How do we help a struggling brand that was born before the internet existed, adapt to this new economy?”, asked Sanjay Nazerali in a blog post. Nazerali is the London based Global Chief Strategy Officer of the Dentsu Aegis Network. “One answer is to make marketing useful. Endless studies of so-called Millennials show that consumers expect brands to make a contribution to their lives. In this context, a brand could try to create a useful service, rather than an ad, to drive its marketing. In doing so, trust becomes less elusive: we’re not asking consumers to have faith in us, we’re asking them simply to experience our utility.”
Millennials see themselves as very different from previous generations, with many thinking they can change the world, and marketers should pay attention to this perception. “We are not a generation of suits and ties, but rather creators and entrepreneurs,” said Page Williams, who is a Senior Manager of Member Marketing & Communications, Social Media at LinkedIn. When asked which brand is killing it with Millennials she noted that Nike is “coming out strong with their women’s apparel line and global strategy and with the launch of their first YouTube series, they are reimagining how to reach this audience in a way that aligns with the audience’s lifestyle.”
According to the Millennial Playbook study, by 2020, Millennials (18-34) will make up 50% of the workforce… and they are working now too. Over 2.7 million are working in sales, 2 million are software developers, and over 800,000 are entrepreneurs owning their own businesses.
Millennials switch jobs more than any previous generation. LinkedIn surveyed 5,000+ Millennials across the world to find out how and why Millennials switch jobs and the number one reason Millennials change jobs “is to advance their careers (67%), followed by compensation (60%) and the desire for more challenging work and roles that are a better fit for their skills and interests (51%).”
“Pick a fast-growing market that you’re excited about and go work for the smartest people that you can find in that market,” said Jon Lombardo, Agency Team, Creative and Brand Strategy Lead at LinkedIn. “You will benefit by learning from leading thinkers, you will build a valuable long-term network, and you will be positioned for a career of growth in a strong market.”
The study concludes that the top-performing Millennials are Social Millennials. “Your personal brand is your responsibility,” noted Mel Carson, CEO & Principal Strategy Consultant at Delightful Communications, who was interviewed for the study. “Never before has there been more of an opportunity to use technology, social media, and common sense to tell your professional story, stand up, and stand out in an increasingly crowded digital space.”
Alex Mann, Digital Strategist at Tweak, advises Millennials to be authentic, helpful and relevant when posting on social media as a personal growth and career advancement strategy. “That can be said for a soda as much as it can be for a human being,” he says.
