Archive for the 'Marketing Metastasis' Category
Tuesday, November 8th, 2011
Visa’s Fools
“Follow the flattery.” That is former Village Voice ad critic Leslie Savan’s sage counsel to would-be critics of advertising. As Savan knows, ego-stroking is one of the core tactics of big businesses’ efforts to manipulate our off-the-job behaviors.
Enter, on cue, Visa’s new Facebook “app,” the Visa Memory Mapper. The users of this scheme take vacations and, during or after, upload photos of their trips, add captions explaining the photos, and then select music and formats to turn the photos and captions into a “movie” about the vacation in question. All, purportedly, in the name of recording memories.
One might begin to sense the rat here when one reflects upon the true relationship between cameras, Facebooking, and experiences of uncommon or new locales. Which is likely to yield better memories — immersing oneself in a place with perhaps a few quick photos taken, or having a camera glued to one’s nose for a serious share of time in a spot? What possible place does Facebook have in the process?
The JWT Intelligence (yes, an arm of that JWT) blog clarifies the real logic:
Where travelers of old shared (and bragged about) their activities upon returning home, today’s hyper-connected and mobile-enabled vacationers enjoy the instant gratification of doing so on social networks in real time. These updates amplify the travel experience, providing the opportunity to broadcast how cool (or privileged, worldly, etc.) the traveler is, boosting the person’s social currency. Indeed, one-third of respondents in JWT’s U.K. and U.S. survey agreed that “Sharing my travel activities makes me stand out from everyone else’s activities in my social network.” Visa is smartly tapping into this new social currency by facilitating online boasting for its customers.
And, of course, the raison d’etre of this latest encouragement and exploitation of human vanity in our increasingly atomized (and therefore increasingly vain) society lies 100 percent in the realm of marketing research. Promo Magazine reports:
“What’s interesting about the social space is that you can measure the different elements of performance, not only from an impression, but also from paid media and now earned media, or the sharing of what people are doing with their friends,” Alex Craddock, head of North America Marketing for Visa Inc., said. “When you look at that as a success metric, you get a good sense of how the social space can be for you. There is so much data there, and with the triangulation of these findings you actually can be very well informed about how a campaign is forming in real time.”
Thursday, November 3rd, 2011
Brand Safety
The besieged swath of the internet that facilitates democratic communication has forced corporate marketers to start speaking more openly about something that’s always been at the heart of big businesses’ media sponsorship: brand safety.
Here is one insider’s explanation of brand safety:
With the advent of contextual display advertising [on the internet], a host of new advertising opportunities opened up for marketers across every industry. Whether contextualization is done at the site level (i.e. ESPN.com is about sports) or at the page level (i.e. automotive content on CNN.com), the ability to target ads around content—in addition to demographic and behavioral profiles—is pretty powerful stuff. But with these big opportunities comes an equal amount of risk. Imagine an automotive ad next to a news story about a horrific car crash or an ad for a vacation package next to tsunami news coverage of the same destination. We see it in contextual search as well as display. It’s enough to make any brand marketer anxious about any sort of online advertising.
A “brand-safe” environment, of course, is one in which the placer of the advertisement doesn’t have to worry about such horrific outcomes.
Firms like LucidMedia now provide their corporate clients the following services:
RESTON, Va.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–LucidMedia, a leading online advertising demand-side platform (DSP), today announced that it has deployed the industry’s first preemptive brand safety capabilities, enabling advertisers and agencies to detect and anticipate inappropriate content on a real-time basis and in advance of purchasing media for display advertising campaigns. The preemptive brand protection capabilities have been proven throughout a decade of research and development with the company’s patented ClickSense contextual advertising technology.
“Preemptive protection for brand advertisers is hard to do, but we believe it’s absolutely critical for advertisers and agencies to have this capability, especially for traditional big brands to more fully trust and embrace online advertising while increasing efficiency.”
LucidMedia’s preemptive brand protection capabilities differ significantly from “traditional” post-campaign brand safety analysis by using the company’s patented technology to pre-screen online advertising inventory. This involves tens of thousands of designated categories for detecting impression content with potentially objectionable concepts. Each advertiser can set criteria, or sensitivity levels, around specific categories ranging from adult entertainment to alcohol, drugs, war, hate, profanity and thousands of others. LucidMedia’s technology uses proprietary content markers to detect inappropriate impressions in advance that an advertiser may want to block partially or across the board based on their sensitivity levels and specific needs. Using LucidMedia DSP, agencies and advertisers can very quickly determine if a potential page is safe based on the advertisers’ criteria and sensitivity levels.
As they work to secure ad environments, the new brand safety firms think in terms not just of preemption, but also sanitization:
Real brand safety, meaning a demonstrably safe environment for brand advertisers to promote their message online, comes from sanitizing the ad space before the ad is served. Of course pre-impression analysis for relevance, performance and safety is very difficult to do so it’s the least prevalent form out there. Evaluating billions of impressions a day for relevance takes a robust platform and deep integration with all of the real-time bid aggregation points. But it pays huge dividends in both safety and efficiency by guaranteeing quality impressions and eliminating the need for pass-backs. With truly preemptive brand safety you only buy what is safe with no waste in the equation.
All this, of course, has always been a central part of corporate media sponsorship. Yet, prior to the opening of the democratic band of the internet, its discussion was mostly confined to closed-door interpersonal interactions between sponsors and broadcasters.
Now, the heightened “risk” embodied in the existence of a realm of unrestricted, non-commercial media communication compels big business marketers to tip their hand more publicly than before about the pre-conditions for sponsorships and ad placement.
It isn’t hard to reckon the impact on the freedom and quality of information of the long and continuing history of overclass efforts at preemptive brand safety and media sanitization.
Tuesday, April 26th, 2011
Progress of the Corporate Spies
Here are a few recent items on the most predictable of all human events, the growth of big business marketing.
An ex-Yahoo spy gone “independent” reports this in Ad Age:
Well, thanks to the rise of data and audience buying, there’s a relatively new offering now available to marketers called search retargeting. Search retargeting is the ability to target display ads based on user search history. This allows marketers to show advertisements to the right “in market” consumers and entice users who are already looking to buy a specific product or use a service. This combination of search and display results in the acquisition of new customers and drives targeted awareness across all sites.
With this in mind, other “news” is rather easy to reckon:
For Facebook users, the free ride is over.
For years, the privately held company founded by Mark Zuckerberg in a Harvard dorm room put little effort into ad sales, focusing instead on making its service irresistible to users. It worked. Today more than 600 million people have Facebook accounts. The average user spends seven hours a month posting photos, chatting with friends, swapping news links and sending birthday greetings to classmates.
Now the Palo Alto company is looking to cash in on this mother lode of personal information by helping advertisers pinpoint exactly whom they want to reach. This is no idle boast. Facebook doesn’t have to guess who its users are or what they like. Facebook knows, because members volunteer this information freely — and frequently — in their profiles, status updates, wall posts, messages and “likes.”
It’s now tracking this activity, shooting online ads to users based on their demographics, interests, even what they say to friends on the site — sometimes within minutes of them typing a key word or phrase.
Facebook’s ability to pinpoint paying customers has dazzled some small-business owners, including Chris Meyer. Over the last 18 months, the Minneapolis wedding photographer had Facebook aim his ads specifically at female users who divulged the following information about themselves on the social networking site: college graduates, aged 24 to 30, who had just gotten engaged and lived within a 50-mile radius of Minneapolis.
Meyer says his $1,700 ad buy generated $110,000 in sales.
“I could not have built my business without Facebook,” he said.
And, as always, the whole enterprise rests on exploited emotions and false promises:
The researchers found that spending a lot of time online was not linked to having a larger number of “offline” friends. Moreover, the relationships of people who socialized online weren’t any closer or stronger than people who didn’t socialize online.
And on this:
The social media giant Facebook, for example, has nine third-party data centers in the US, with plans to build a tenth in Oregon. Current estimates are that Facebook uses 60,000 servers to help its more than 500 million members reconnect with people they didn’t even like in high school.
The company’s data centers range from from 10,000 square feet to more than 35,000 square feet, and their energy use is enormous. The average leased data center uses between 2.25 megawatts of power and 6 megawatts of power. This could provide electricity for one month to somewhere between 1,730 and 4,615 homes.
Google is thought to have 36 data centers.
Tuesday, March 15th, 2011
TV as Spyware
Been a while since I reported on the corporate capitalists’ progress in turning home television equipment into marketing spyware. As always, the progress is rapid.
Rentrak Corporation, headquartered in the same city as TCT, describes its work thus:
Rentrak is the television ratings database currency that measures local television and cable channels at a granular level in 210 markets across the United States. The service incorporates data from over 17 million televisions and is the only fully integrated system of detailed satellite, telco and cable TV viewing data commercially available that combines TV viewing information with consumer segmentation systems so advertisers can effectively reach their true consumer targets.
Big Brother was an amateur.
Tuesday, December 21st, 2010
Tune In, Drop Out
Those wily “consumers.” Despite overclass needs, ordinary people strongly and clearly oppose “behavioral targeting,” i.e. use of the internet for spying by big business marketers. Even when the question is loaded in favor of the overclass by inclusion of language about corporate marketing making websites free, 61 percent still say “no” to the practice.
Of course, from the overclass perspective, behavioral targeting is exactly and precisely the main reason the internet exists. Real-time tracking of individuals’ reactions, preferences, and behaviors has always been a core goal of the ever-expanding practice of marketing research.
Hence, popular preferences are simply unacceptable:
Marketers defending behavioral targeting have argued in part that the public might not understand how much this advertising fuels free websites. “Because there’s been so much scare-mongering, people have been frightened about behavioral advertising,” said John Montgomery, chief operating officer of GroupM Interaction, a unit of WPP. “People are now equating it to something more pernicious.”
Consumers need to realize that the growth and innovation in online advertising, which increasingly relies on behavioral targeting, underpins the free web that consumers want, Mr. Montgomery said [to Advertising Age magazine].
This shit ain’t stopping, in other words.
Meanwhile, if you are so inclined, take a look at this little band-aid, the marketing trade’s attempt at “self-policing.” It allows you to “opt out” of being behaviorally targeted by the handful of voluntary participants. In the process, it also reveals how laughable self-policing always is. My run of the tool showed that only 10 of the 59 firms that admit to using Firefox as a behavioral tracker allow me a successful opt-out through this avenue.
Monday, December 13th, 2010
Inbound Marketing
Corporate marketing knows no bounds, respects no limits, does not and cannot cease expanding.
The latest frontier? Call centers, which are rapidly taking on the task practitioners call “inbound marketing”:
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Next time you’re on the line with a call center complaining about a product not working properly, don’t be surprised if you’re not rushed off the phone in record speed. The interactions between consumers and call center reps are evolving from hurried griping sessions to extended sales pitches and consultation meetings.
In fact, more and more marketers are looking to turn their call centers into revenue generating centers, according to a new study by Portrait Software, a provider of customer interaction optimization software. A number of factors are driving this shift but none more significant than the challenge of reaching consumers when a growing number of them are opting out of direct mail and email and opting into do-not-call lists. The study shows that 69% of large business-to-consumer marketers view their call centers as “business critical revenue generators.”
And, of course, the whole effort is being scientifically managed:
Apparently, endeavors like Nationwide Insurance are already using such methods “to sell more through inbound service conversations than we do through traditional outbound direct marketing.”
So, when the public-sector spies talk about TIA, they are merely hoping to acquire the beginnings of what our “private-sector” royalists already enjoy.
