Monthly Archives: October 2015

NEXT TO NOW: HALLOWEEN EDITION

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The scariest  thing to advertisers this Halloween might just be ad blocking software. Never fear, we know how to make sure your ads are seen. Between new ad units, native options, social outreach, and possible deals with ad blockers, we’re always looking to stay ahead of the trends—and always on the lookout for the most effective ways to let readers know about great books. Here’s some of what we’ve been reading about this week:

AN OLIVE BRANCH FROM AD BLOCKERS?

One of the leading ad blocking apps, Adblock Plus, is offering websites and advertising agencies the opportunity to whitelist certain sites and ad-types. While representatives from the Washington Post and MediaCom are attending a meeting with Adblock Plus to discuss the plans, Jason Kint, CEO of Digital Content Next, a publishing trade organization with members from The New York Times, Vox Media and Condé Nast, declined the offer. Here’s why:

“I would look at these reports on [Adblock Plus’ parent company] Eyeo’s business model and their focus on consumers much differently if they were 100 percent open about it. If Adblock Plus publicly stated which companies were paying them for whitelisting ads and the terms under which this was happening, then my level of trust would increase dramatically.”

#adtech #adblocking #media

 

YELP PHASING OUT DISPLAY ADVERTISING

…and phasing in native advertising.

#native #media

 

NEXT STOP SMELLOVISION?

Stoli Vodka is using haptic technology to give their mobile ads a tactile edge: you can feel a buzz when the women in the ad makes a vodka in a shaker (and, less appetizing, when a dog pees).

#adtech #creative

 

IS FLIPBOARD IN TROUBLE?

Whether it’s due to the natural aging process of a formerly hot start-up that’s getting on in years, or the competition from Apple’s News app and others, this Bloomberg article points to some problems Flipboard is having. (On the upside for advertisers, ad rates are coming down!).

#adtech #flipboard #media

 

A BUYER’S GUIDE TO SOCIAL NETWORKS

AdWeek outlines the basic differentiators for ad buyers between the eight major social networks from large (Facebook) to small (Whisper).

#social #facebook #twitter #instagram #media

 

FACEBOOK LEAD ADS OPEN UP TO ALL ADVERTISERS

Lead ads make it easy to customize information you’re getting from Facebook users: whether it’s letting them sign up for emails, events, webinars or more.  

#social #adtech #newunit #media

 

THE NEW YORK TIMES LAB SAYS THE FUTURE OF NEWS IS NOT THE ARTICLE

They are experimenting with ways “to leverage the knowledge that is inside every article.”

#futureofnews via Only Dead Fish – 

#nyt #futureofnews

 

DOES FACEBOOK HAVE AN AD MEASUREMENT PROBLEM?

Group M’s Rob Norman thinks online video has a ways to go before it can compete with TV:

“Both Google’s YouTube and Facebook boast incredible video numbers. Yet for all the ad dollars flowing to both platforms, they won’t start to get a piece of TV budgets until there’s a common way to measure the effectiveness of video ads, which are often viewed fleetingly and with the sound off, against a TV commercial exposure.”

#video #social #facebook #media

 

INSTAGRAM’S BOOMERANG

Instagram enables animated .gifs backwards and forwards with Boomerang.

#social #instagram #creative

 

 

Next to Now: New Colors Edition

Next to Now

 

TWITTER INTRODUCES NEW NATIVE VIDEO AD OPTION

The new products are coming fast and furious under newly (re)minted CEO Jack Dorsey.

#social #video #twitter

 

YOUTUBE TAKES ON APPLE MUSIC AND SPOTIFY

YouTube unveiled its new music app, “Red,” this week. It’s entering a very competitive field. Will it succeed? Digiday says “it’s no slam dunk.”

#youtube #streaming #audio

 

MICHAEL WOLF’S “TECH AND MEDIA OUTLOOK 2016”

Michael Wolf’s “Tech and Media Outlook 2016” presentation from a WSJ conference is filled with good intel on the state of digital in the near future. Book publishers look away from slide 7 (share of reading in an average day), but there’s a lot to recommend it. For instance:

  • For insight into how many are using which platforms (and why YouTube is in a good position with “Red” to take on Apple Music and Spotify), see slides 13 and, especially, 42-47. 
  • For evidence that AM/FM radio still has more listeners than streaming, see slide 40.
  • To find out what makes podcasts upwardly mobile, see slides 54-57

#adtech #data

 

APPLE TRIES TO CUT DOWN ON MISTAKEN CLICKS

While some advertisers are objecting to Apple’s moves to cut down on accidental clicks, we applaud them. To help our clients and the books we are advertising, we need to have the most accurate numbers possible. It’s short-sighted to build your business on false numbers mistakenly inflating campaign performance.

#adtech #adblocking

FLIPBOARD OPENS UP PROPRIETARY DATA TO ADVERTISERS

The new “Interest Graph Targeting” feature allows advertisers to target much more specifically:

“Where advertisers could target broad categories such as sports or travel, they’ll now be able to choose from 34,000 different keywords or topics for targeting. The data involved includes reader behavior, social data and Flipboard’s Topic Engine tool, which can decipher the content of articles.”

As Ad Age mentions, the move comes amid increased competition in the news space, with Apple News, Twitter Moments, and Facebook’s Instant Articles making bold strides in news curation.

#news #targeting #flipboard

 

MOVING BOOK COVERS

Some of those classic book covers look pretty groovy when you  animate them. Check out this fun digital update to print art.  

 

FACEBOOK CAROUSEL ADS SEE GREAT PERFORMANCE

Facebook’s new carousel ads are performing 10x better than standard FB ads. But there is a useful caveat:

“’Carousels are a major push for Facebook,’ said Don Mathis, CEO of Kinetic Social, which helps brands market across social channels like Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram and Twitter. ‘The pricing is competitive and the performances are stellar. But we don’t know if that continues forever, because it’s a new product, and they tend to get good adoption in the early days.’”

#social #facebook #data

 

Next to Now: The Structure of Innovation

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This week, the articles that caught our eye were about innovation in targeting and storytelling.

 

ONLINE VIDEO: IT’S NOT JUST MILLENNIALS

Once predominantly the province of Millennials, online video watching has now stretched to include Gen X as well:

“The average consumer between the ages of 16 and 45 watches 204 minutes of video a day, split equally between TV and online. Forty-five minutes of the average online viewing time is done on a smartphone, while desktop accounts for 37 minutes and tablet for 20 minutes.”

#video

 

FEWER ADS MEANS BETTER ENGAGEMENT 

This article in Digiday argues that the Atlantic’s recent redesign has upped ad performance by lessening the amount of content (including ads) on the homepage. It’s certainly worth paying more to be the only ad on a relevant page. If that’s the future of the ad-supported Web, we’re all for it.

#adtech #engagement

 

MARKETING WITH SHAZAM

ClickZ reports on the use of Shazam in print and TV ads for such retailers as Target.

“For about a decade now, marketers have been racking their brains trying to figure out the best way to link traditional ads with the Web. URLs came first, then hashtags and a call to action to visit Twitter. And while these tactics have certainly managed to boost engagement and interaction online, they don’t necessarily deliver the rich digital experience brands hope to provide.”

The article briefly mentions HarperCollins as well, which uses Shazam to link to Web content in their books (and, we’d add, has experimented with using it in ads as well). The jury’s out on whether the Shazam experiments will help enrich user experience or simply prove more popular with marketers than consumers. However it plays out, the ways physical products are linking up with information on the Web continues to be one of the most exciting frontiers of marketing innovation. We are pleased to see HarperCollins’s Shazam program gain wider recognition with the nomination in the “Marketing Campaign” category for the UK’s FutureBook Awards.

#shazam #adtech #futurebook

 

COSMO WINS 3MM VIEWS A DAY ON SNAPCHAT

Cosmo is showing how it’s done on the Snapchat “Discover” feature, growing their audience from 1.8 MM a day to over 3MM.

“Kate Lewis [VP and editorial director of digital at Cosmo] also said that people share Cosmo content in large numbers, which is an activity that is not typically associated with Snapchat, because sharing and retweeting are not common there. That may be changing, though. Cosmo’s Discover stories are shared up to 1.2 million times daily, Lewis said.”

 

#cosmo #snapchat #social

 

NEW GE CMO ON STORYTELLING

Buried in this article on storytelling and marketing is a GE program with Wattpad to sponsor new Sci Fi writing by the Wattpad community based on old GE materials. We know that fan fiction is often a consequence of a popular series such as Twilight and Harry Potter, but could sponsored fan fiction work as a marketing tool?

#storytelling #social #fanfiction #wattpad

 

INSTAGRAM AND EMAIL—TWO GREAT MARKETING TOOLS THAT WORK GREAT TOGETHER

This HubSpot article advocates bringing “inspirational” Instagram posts into the email marketing experience. Interesting stats from this article:

  • In 2015 more than 200 billion emails will be sent every day. 57% of those will come from brands (what’s the point when consumers just abandon email altogether because it’s too spammy?)
  • Instagram delivers 58% more engagement per post than Facebook and 120% more per post than Twitter
  • 4 fo 5 Instagram users give brands permission to share their images

#social #email #instagram

ARE EMAIL ADDRESSES THE NEW COOKIE?

Emails have remained a secret weapon for marketing departments for years. As this ClickZ article puts it,

“While only 20 percent of the people (and email marketing’s audience is overwhelmingly people, not bots) open the email you send them, that 20 percent does so happily. They click and convert enough to make your tiny and underfunded email marketing department punch way above its weight.”

But now Google’s Custom Match, Facebook’s Custom Audiences, and Twitter’s Tailored Audiences allows you to upload email addresses to their systems and use them to target ads specifically to opt-in audiences you know will be interested in your book. This kind of targeting is also available through programmatic campaigns with such partners as AdRoll and Turn.

#email #programmatic

Next to Now: Fall Harvest Edition

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Just in time for the fall harvest, a host of new ad units are announced from Twitter and Snapchat . . .
TWITTER’S NEW “MOMENTS” FEATURE A PLAY FOR MORE ADS

Watch for “Promoted Moments” in the next few days. The ad opportunity will only be as successful as the platform that offers it. 

#social #twitter

PRE-ROLL ADS COMING TO VIDEOS ON TWITTER

More new features are coming from Twitter all the time, including video pre-roll. Publishing partners get 70% of the revenue:

“So far, 200 publishers, sports leagues and television networks have signed up to run the ads in their videos via Twitter Amplify, including the WWE, MTV, Vox Media, Aol and HGTV.”

#social #twitter

GROWTH OF TIME SPENT ON MOBILE DEVICES SLOWS

But maybe that’s because we’re already on them all the time.

#mobile

ON THE BENEFIT OF SEEING THE COMPLICATIONS

In Fusion, Alexis Madrigal offers a nuanced take on “The Deception that Lurks in Our Data-Driven World” that’s especially relevant for advertisers in the age of data:

“Take the ad-supported digital media ecosystem. The idea is brilliant: capture data on people all over the web and then use what you know to show them relevant ads, ads they want to see. Not only that, but because it’s all tracked, unlike broadcast or print media, an advertiser can measure what they’re getting more precisely. And certainly the digital advertising market has grown, taking share from most other forms of media . . . But scratch the surface, like Businessweek recently did, and the problems are obvious. A large percentage of the traffic to many stories and videos consists of software pretending to be human.”

#data

SNAPCHAT TURNS SELFIES INTO ADS

For a cool $750,000, Snapchat will turn its new selfie “lenses” into an ad for your book:

“The Financial Times reports that the Venice, Calif.-based player is starting to sell sponsored “lenses” in the coming months. This will add to a new feature the app rolled out two weeks ago, which adds graphics like big eyes to photos and vomiting rainbows to videos. The one-day ad unit will reportedly cost $750,000 for big-ticket holidays like Halloween and Christmas and $450,000 the rest of the year.”

#social #snapchat

THE RISE OF DYNAMIC AND PERSONALIZED CREATIVE

Advertising is increasingly taking advantage of personalized creative to boost engagement—whether it’s making sure the creative reflects the time of day, the location, or the user’s age:

“Among agencies that did use data for dynamic creative, demographic data was the most common type employed for the purpose, with 58.4% of respondents claiming to use it. More than half (55.3%) of respondents said they apply location API. Time and weather data were also used fairly frequently.”

#data

Next to Now: Advertising Week Edition

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Today is the final day of the 2015 Advertising Week, so the studies and new ad product announcements have been coming in fast and furious. Here is a selection of the news that we think will help book publishers reach their marketing goals in the coming year.

 

YOUTUBE ADS BECOME SHOPPABLE

YouTube is rolling out an ad product that makes any video shoppable—not just videos that you produce, upload and control, but those from other sources as well. This is a great opportunity to drive sales whether it’s directly to a retailer or to a page that offers several retail options.

#video #youtube #direct

 

PANDORA V. SPOTIFY

The two streaming services have proven to be very strong venues for advertising books. While they are similar in many ways, their differences are at least as important when planning your ad campaigns. When considering one service versus the other for an ad campaign, this article in Adweek is a good place to start:

“Pandora’s radio-like service is based on data—including email addresses, ages and gender— collected from 250 million registered users . . . 85 percent of listening is done on mobile, which is used as a major selling point in convincing brands to buy more smartphone and tablet-size promos. Unlike Pandora’s model, Spotify is an on-demand service that lets music fans listen to playlists or a series of songs . . . 50 percent of Spotify’s streams come from users physically pressing play.”

#streaming #pandora #spotify

 

ARE GAMING CONSOLES THE NEW CABLE TV?

Adweek says yes:

“Just as cell phones evolved into smart mobile devices capable of replacing laptops and desktop computers, gaming consoles have a chance to make cable boxes obsolete. In-console consumption habits have jumped in recent years, per Nielsen. On Xbox One, 51 percent of users watched video on-demand in 2014, up from only 26 percent of Xbox 360 users back in 2010. Likewise, 42 percent of PS4 gamers used streaming subscription services like Netflix and Hulu compared to just 23 percent of Playstation 3 users back in 2010.”

 

#gaming #targeting

 

REACHING MOMS WITH VIDEO

Google makes the case that YouTube is a great way to reach moms, especially through how-to and DIY videos:

“83% of moms search for answers to their questions online. And of those, three in five turn to online video in particular.”

#video #moms

 

BEN EVANS ON ADVERTISING ECOSYSTEMS

This 16z podcast features a fascinating conversation between Chris Dixon and Ben Evans about the advertising ecosystem: they touch on payment systems, first-rate journalism bundled with 3rd-rate ad products, user identity, and native advertising (“ads that people actually like”), and how ads have increasingly become unbundled from content.

#advertising #native

 

 

COMSCORE MOBILE REPORT HIGHLIGHTS

Highlights include:

  • All forms of usage are growing: desktop (+16%), mobile app (+90%), and mobile Web (+53%).
  • Mobile now represents 62% of all digital time spent.
  • App usage time skews toward smartphones for Millennials and tablets for older demos.
  • Mobile audience growth is being driven by mobile Web properties which are bigger and growing faster than apps.
  • Millennials mobile usage time is devoted to social, video, music, and communications.
  • Mobile ads work: they cause brand lift 2-3x greater than that of desktop ads

#mobile #data

 

IAB UPDATES AD GUIDELINES

Reflecting the industry shift away from Flash and toward HTML5, the Interactive Advertising Bureau has updated industry guidelines for the first time since 2013.

#creative #HTML5 #IAB

 

EXPAND YOUR LINKEDIN AUDIENCE

HubSpot has a simple step-by-step instructions on how to extend the reach of your LinkedIn posts with a sponsored post.

#social #linkedin

 

GOOGLE NOW ALLOWS YOU TO TARGET WITH EMAIL ADDRESSES

Google announces “Custom Match” which allows you to use email addresses you have have collected to target users through the Google ad network. Perhaps even better, Google also now allows you to use this first-party data to reach similar audiences (or “look-alikes”), who match the characteristics of readers who have signed up to learn more from you . . . but who themselves may not have heard of your book.

#retargeting #lookalikes #google

 

CINNABON GOES AFTER ORGANIC SNAPCHAT GROWTH

Cinnabon is using its marketing strength on Twitter and Instagram to grow its Snapchat presence (and reach the channel’s coveted Millennials) without paying for Snapchat ads;

“To help build a dialogue with teens going into the new effort, the brand hired two popular Snapchat creators—Danny Berk and Evan Garber—to take over its account and then ask fans to submit pictures of sweets last week. Within a couple of days, the brand gained 2,000 Snapchat followers.”

#social #snapchat #organicgrowth

 

CTR BENCHMARKS

We are often asked what average click-through rates are, and the truth is the number changes constantly depending on the year, the format, and the category. That said, Verso display ad campaigns tend to average at least a .10% CTR. An April 2015 report from Google suggests that we’re beating the industry average by a good forty percent.

#data

 

TARGET DISPLAY ADS TO OPT-IN CUSTOMERS

Verso partner AdRoll announces integration with Mail Chimp to allow you to use your opt-in email lists to target users with display ads.

#email #display

 

STREAMING IS GREAT FOR CUSTOMERS, BUT NOT SO GREAT FOR THE BOTTOM LINE

Books and Music are often too easily conflated, but it’s impossible to miss the fact that the same week that saw Oyster collapse, a new study reveals that vinyl LPs bring in more money than Spotify, YouTube, and Vevo combined.

#streaming

 

AN ARGUMENT AGAINST 3RD PARTY DATA COMPANIES

Cory Doctorow outlines some of the issues that have led to the growth of ad blocking and the three-way battle for control between Web publishers, advertisers, and users, and pointing the way to a possible solution.

#adblocking