Monthly Archives: September 2015

Next to Now: First Week of Fall (Official)

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According to the calendar, autumn began this week. We can feel the turn in the air even though the work pace has been fall-fast for weeks now. A lot has shifted in advertising this month—between Chrome dropping support for Flash and iOS9 enabling ad blockers—and as usual we’re keeping an eye on what’s about to change even as we’re working to sell great books in the here and now. These links represent some of the highlights we’ve read this week.

 

“THE WOMEN’S MAGAZINE FOR THE NEW GENERATION”

CJR on The Skimm, Broadly, and Refinery29:

“They’re paying more attention to news and politics, especially on women’s and social issues, but packaged with the right amount of edge (Broadly), twee (Refinery29), and Sex and the City references (The Skimm) to be taken seriously by the savvy millennial woman.”

#content

 

INSTAGRAM POSTING TIPS

AdWeek gives an hour by hour breakdown of what people post by time of day. The study finds that early morning is the best time to post. Other findings:

“The most popular hashtags were #TBT (throwback Thursday) and #WCW (woman crush Wednesday) . . . And millennial women between 25 and 40 years old are the best “micro-influencers,” the company concluded in its research, which—in addition to the larger study—examined the Instagram activities of 2,000 adult females.”

#social #instagram

 

VIDEO TIPS

Because we all need to start thinking like videographers, HubSpot offers three ideas for rethinking your video content: (1) Make it shorter, (2) Make it serial, (3) Make it real (they use the buzzword “disruptive”).

#video

 

BOOMERS DISLIKE MOBILE ADS

A new study suggests that the Baby Boom Generation is not a fan of mobile ads:

“Baby boomers…had a highly negative response to mobile ads. They were less than half as likely as millennials to say they would accept ads in return for something of value.”

#mobile

 

SNAPCHAT MARKETING DEVELOPMENTS

Evidence that the Snapchat experiments are working is in: brands as different as the NFL, Burberry and Goldman Sachs are expanding their presences on the app.

#social #snapchat

 

 

THE VALUE OF “OLD MEDIA” IN A NEW MEDIA WORLD

We don’t normally link to Shelf Awareness because we assume that a vast majority of our audience regularly read it.  But it’s worth underscoring this Shelf Awareness report from Carolyn Reidy’s talk at BISG on meta data:

“[Although most readers spend an inordinate amount of time online,] it’s still very much old media such as TV, radio and certain print outlets that drive sales for new titles, even if a consumer is looking at the online version of that media.”

This is a point that’s worth reflecting on when considering your media buy: Where are your readers online and offline, and what are their most trusted sources for information?

#oldmedia

 

 

SEX AND VIOLENCE A TURN OFF?

A new study suggests sex and violence not only do not sell, but may actually decrease the effectiveness of the ad. It sounds like a convincing study. Yet, oddly, this Business Insider article about the study is filled with examples of sex ads?

#creative

 

 

NEWS OF THE ADBLOCKOLYPSE

THE AD BLOCKER WHO HAD A CHANGE OF HEART

This report has been everywhere in the news for good reason. The maker of the most popular ad blocking app on the App Store, had a change of heart and stopped selling his popular app. Here’s why:

“Ad blockers come with an important asterisk: While they do benefit a ton of people in major ways, they also hurt some, including many who don’t deserve the hit.”

MILLENNIALS MORE LIKELY TO BLOCK ADS

There’s a reason native ads and working directly with social stars on Instagram and Vine are on the rise for reaching Millennials:

“Research suggests that a solid majority of internet users ages 18 to 34 are now blocking ads when they view digital content”

“JP MORGAN: EVERYONE NEEDS TO CHILL OUT ABOUT AD BLOCKING”

. . . So reads the headline of a Business Insider story on a JP Morgan report on ad blocking, that doesn’t see much of an affect (yet):

“So far, ad blockers on iOS 9 are only able to block ads on the Safari browser. JPMorgan notes that ad blocking apps have “impressively” made their way to the top of the app charts, but Safari’s share is just ~4% on desktop and ~23% on tablet and mobile, according to StatCounter.”

#adblocking

 

 

Next to Now: The Fall Sprint

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January may mark the start of the calendar year, but for everything else — including book publishing and advertising — the real starting gun seems to go off the day after Labor Day. Which is a good time to remember that when you’re moving at full speed you better have an eye on the road ahead:

 

MOBILE PREPAREDNESS FOR TV CAMPAIGNS

If you’re paying for TV ads, make sure you’re paying attention to mobile media at the same time, especially if you’re running ads on a live event:

“Digital research is a natural activity to pair with commercials when so many people are already using a second screen besides the television.”

#mobile #social #tv

 

ALEX CHEE ON ELENA FERRANTE AND SOCIAL MEDIA

A terrific writer who is prominent  on social media discusses the improbable success Ferrante’s found in part by opting out. It’s all good, but we admit that this caught our eye:

“When I see ads from publishers now on book blogs, I still mourn the old reviews.”

#social

 

FACEBOOK BOWS TO PRESSURE ON ADS

Facebook announces changes the ad industry has been calling for: the option of buying 100% video viewability (as opposed to counting partial views), and introducing third party measurement of ad performance

#social #video #tracking

 

MORE ON AD BLOCKING

A smart piece from the Verge about the angst in the industry around ad blocking:

“You might think the conversation about ad blocking is about the user experience of news, but what we’re really talking about is money and power in Silicon Valley. And titanic battles between large companies with lots of money and power tend to have a lot of collateral damage.”

#adblocking

 

CLUETRAIN AUTHOR SAYS AD TECH DOESN’T HAVE A CLUE

The coauthor of the Cluetrain Manifesto, Doc Searls, argues against trends of personalization and targeting and for old fashioned values of good product, service, and honest brand awareness

#adtech #data #targeting

 

THE RISE OF THE HUMANIST SANS SERIF

Bloomberg takes a look at changes in logo fonts of tech companies, and investigates what that says about the evolution of tech strategy.

#design

 

IS LIVE STREAMING THE NEXT CRUCIAL MARKETING PLATFORM?

This article for ClickZ suggests it is.

#livestream

 

AL ROKER, “RIGHT NOW I’M PERISCOPING YOU . . . “

“. . . and boom: 40 . . . 50 people. Bam.” Ad Week talks to Al Roker about live streaming, video apps, and why he thinks people should watch video horizontally (even if they won’t).

#livestream

 

GO HAWKEYES!

The presidential campaign in Iowa saw its first geo-filter ads: Ted Cruz in advance of the Iowa-Iowa State game.

#social #snapchat #geotarget

 

U.S. READERS (EVEN THOSE WHO PREFER PRINT) ARE ON THE MOBILE WEB

But you knew that. Here are the latest numbers to back it up: 

“One direct consequence of widespread smartphone and tablet use is vastly extended mobile internet access. About 60% of North America’s residents—more than 215 million people, eMarketer projects—will use a mobile phone to access the web in 2015.”

#mobile

 

WHAT’S YOUR READER’S MOOD: DISCOVER, LEARN, TRY, OR BUY?

When it comes to the marketing funnel, book advertising usually leans heavily toward discovery, but the whole route to purchase is important to keep in mind. What are readers looking to do when they see your ad: are they looking to discover a book? learn more about something? ready to buy? eMarketer shares a chart from the CMO Club that outlines the different platforms US and European marketers find best for the different stages of the customer journey.  

#marketingfunnel

 

MYSPACE?!?

New owners Specific Media are trying to convince us that MySpace still has legs. Here’s their argument:

“In March, measurement firm comScore reported that between December 2013 and December 2014, MySpace had grown traffic in the US by 469%, making it a bigger property than Snapchat and Vice. ComScore said the “surprising renaissance” was thanks to MySpace’s pivot to music and video content.”

#social #myspace #again?

 

DIFFERENT GENERATIONS SHARE DIFFERENTLY

This infographic from Accenture shows levels of social platform sharing and brand trust across different social networks, broken out by age. What family and friends share ranks much higher than what brands share. Facebook and print newspapers are the most trusted platforms for paid messages; Snapchat and blogs are the least.  

#social

 

 

IS DARK SOCIAL A GOOD PLACE TO ADVERTISE?

Yes, says Whisper. Coke, Fox, and MTV seem to agree.  

#social

 

DOES PROGRAMMATIC HAVE A COST ADVANTAGE OVER PRINT?

Not necessarily, says this article for Ad Age:

“Programmatic ad tech involves not just the ad inventory at the end, but a trail of fees and costs along the way to pay for expensive engineers and traders, data-management platforms, research and development and more. It adds up to make programmatic buying more expensive than ordering print ad pages or TV commercials through insertion orders and other routine methods.”

Applicability warning: This is an article about campaigns that range from the seven figure to the nine figure. At the levels that book publishers typically run, the fees and costs are less onerous, but it’s still important to keep in mind.   

#programmatic

 

VIDEO AD ROI

We’ve linked a lot to performance numbers for video ads in Next to Now over the months. But it’s worth remember that they are also more expensive to produce. It’s this discrepancy that leads many marketers to worry about ROI and video ads.

#video

 

REACHING YOUNG (BUT NOT *TOO* YOUNG) USERS ON SNAPCHAT

Jim Beam is using Snapchat to market it’s apple-flavored bourbon. While Snapchat does not allow much targeting — and this is on purpose — they offer enough age targeting to allow the bourbon maker to advertise only to users 21 and over. There’s still plenty of market there, since Snapchat’s 21-and-over audience represents 82 percent of its total user base.

#social

 

PODCASTS REMAIN HOT

Book publishers aren’t the only advertisers waking up to the power of podcast advertising.

#podcasts

Next to Now: Bird on a Wire Edition

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This week’s links are dedicated to the idea that, whatever its form—voice, image, written word, or metadata—the art of advertising is the art of communication.

 

THE BANNER LIVES

According to programmatic powerhouse AppNexus, ads seen on desktop computers still see the majority of ad impressions compared with mobile. The positives to the platform — especially marketer familiarity and having a bigger canvas to work on — mean it’s still the go-to platform for most digital ad campaigns. On a side note, the journalist for ClickZ reports one of the desktop advantages being its click-through rate, “relatively robust with 0.043 percent CTR.” That may be the average click-through rate throughout all desktop banner advertising, but our benchmark CTR is 0.1 percent.

#desktop

 

EVIL GENIUS

What do you do if your handful of four star reviews is a little short of decent authoritative reviewers? Here’s one way you could go:  “A promo for the new Tom Hardy movie hid a negative 2-star review in plain sight.” We don’t condone this behavior! It’s clever, for sure, but a kind of one-off clever that puts a serious dent in your legitimacy with reviewers and consumers.

#creative

 

LONGER INSTAGRAM VIDEO

Instagram ups its maximum video length from :15 to :30, and allows posting in landscape mode as well as portrait. Whether longer video leads to better performance is another question.

#video #social

 

INSTAGRAM V. FACEBOOK

An early look at Instagram ad performance from Salesforce: Compared to Facebook, Instagram delivers fewer impressions but a higher click-through rate.

#social #performance

 

THE COMING ADBLOCKOPOLYPSE?

Will Apple’s mobile ad blocking block native ads as well as banners? This question is all the rage in advertising circles. We are sanguine about any potential changes. The best advertising proceeds by adaptability and curiosity, not panic.  

#native

 

THE FIGHT AGAINST THE ADBLOCKOPOLYPSE

Google is “punishing” (Business Insider’s word) YouTube viewers who use ad blocking software by not allowing them to skip pre-roll ads. Here’s some free advice: If you’re creating ads that feel like punishment to watch, you’re doing it wrong.

#creative

 

 

Next to Now: Labor Day Weekend Edition

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INSTAGRAM ADS PERFORMING WELL

While the minimum spend to work with Instagram directly is still too pricey for book publishers, those larger brands currently working with the platform are reporting highly efficient campaigns.

“For now, Instagram is still a premium ad space, according to marketing experts. Salesforce says Instagram ads get almost double the click through rate of Facebook, 1.5 percent compared to 0.84 percent.”

The good news is that we can access Instagram through beta programs with such partners as AdRoll.

#social #instagram #retargeting

 

INDUSTRY VARIATIONS IN MOBILE V. DESKTOP

While the pace of change is definitely tilted in the direction of mobile, different industries still see a majority of email opens on desktop devices:

“In the business products and services industry, for example, 73% of emails were still opened on the desktop—and the tablet open share was just half the average. Publishers, media and entertainment companies and travel firms all had slightly higher-than-average open shares on the desktop, while publishers and travel firms reported clearly lower-than-average open shares on mobile phones.”

#email

 

“FACEBOOK BEATS PINTEREST AS FOODIE’S GO-TO SOCIAL PLATFORM”:

“Foodies in the U.S. are particularly active on social media, especially on Instagram. Here’s a few of the U.S. stats that should be intriguing to food marketers:

  • 90 percent of American foodies use Facebook.

  • 36 percent of them visit Pinterest.

  • 73 percent scroll through Instagram (a big leap from 17 percent worldwide).”

On the other hand:

“Benjamin Bourinat, director of public relations and social media at Sopexa, explained that while Pinterest claims a low percentage of users, people come back repeatedly to the site and app. ‘What’s interesting about Pinterest is [that it’s] very niche—the level of engagement is high because loyalty is just stronger on Pinterest,’ he said.”

#social #food

 

WECHAT OPENS AD PLATFORM ANOTHER NOTCH WIDER

WeChat recently opened their “Sponsored Moments” platform to wider advertising. As the minimum spend drops from roughly $800,000 to about $31,000, the platform is now within the range of a large book advertising budget. The service does not have the U.S. presence that would make it useful to American publishers, but it’s a good development for the future of messaging as an advertising medium

#messaging

 

FACEBOOK AD PERFORMANCE UPDATE

New Facebook stats were recently announced, including average CTR, CPM, and CPC across the platform for Q2 2013 and 2014. Spoiler alert, everything’s going up: .36% CTR, $1.95 CPM, and $0.55 CPC for Q2 2014.  

#social

 

REACHING GAMERS ON YOUTUBE

YouTube NOW aggregates 25,000 gamer channels. It’s a huge market, especially good for reaching young males. But it’s not only about young males, which Kimberly-Clark makes clear, targeting women with a :30 spot for Kotex.

#video #gaming

 

NEW FACEBOOK AD UNITS

Animated .gifs come to Facebook . . . for Wendy’s and Coke, anyway. The good news is that this kind of test heralds the opening of the platform to gifs from other advertisers relatively soon.  

#visual

 

NEW MOBILE MESSAGING AND SOCIAL MEDIA STATS

Pew has released a new survey of mobile messaging and social media. Some key figures:

  • 36% of mobile users use messaging apps such as WeChat or Kik (49% of ages 18-29)
  • 17% of mobile users use messaging apps in which messages instantly disappear (as in Snapchat) — 41% of ages 18-29
  • 59% of Instagram users visit the site daily (70% Facebook, 27% for Pinterest and 22% for LinkedIn)
  • 62% of all American adults use Facebook (66% of male internet users, 77% of female internet users)

#mobile #messaging #social

 

NYT DIGITAL SUBSCRIBERS UP

The New York Times reaches 1MM digital subscribers.

#digital #news

 

NYT NEWSLETTER NEWS

New York Times gets 20% open rate in newsletters. How? Highly curated by trusted editors plus a seriously engaged opt-in audience. It’s why we love them.

#email

 

GOOGLE’S BEST PRACTICES FOR BANNER CREATIVE

Google released a pretty good  primer on banner ad creative.

#creative

 

SLOW JOURNALISM IS IN OUR WHEELHOUSE

Nieman reports on the value of slow journalism (that’s our specialty, book people) in the age of instant information.

#news

 

PROGRAMMATIC VIDEO DEVELOPMENTS

Hulu is experimenting with opening their video ad platform to programmatic buying.

#video #programmatic

 

IS INSTAGRAM CHANGING HOW AGENCIES APPROACH CREATIVE?

Spoiler alert: Yes, creative is getting much less spontaneous in look and feel. Our favorite quote comes from Chris Corley, group creative director at VML in Kansas City:

“I think we do have the obligation to sell, but we also have an obligation to not pollute the world with garbage.”

Fair enough.

#social #creative