For most runners of this weekend’s New York City Marathon, just finishing is a massive accomplishment. But for a select few, winning is the aim. Those runners keep a blistering average pace of 4:46 minute miles; for most, that seems conceptually quick but, in reality, it’s hard to know exactly what that speed feels like. So Asics is bringing a mobile treadmill set at that pace, complete with a harness, to the streets of New York in a mobile advertising campaign. It’s a great premise, and has generated a large amount of shareable content on YouTube. Just another example of out-of-home installations gone right.
Category: Uncategorized
Facebook Mobile Ad Revenue Up 478%
In an impressive new statistical release by Facebook today confirmed that the social network hit $2.02 Billion in revenue. At the same time, monthly mobile active users increased to 874 million, a 45% increase year-over-year. Simultaneously, mobile revenue made up nearly half of Facebook’s total advertising revenue this quarter, an $882 Million business that accounts for 49% of Facebook’s ad revenue. These are almost staggering figures, made even more so by the fact that this mobile ad revenue represents a 478% year-over-year increase. So if any investors or advertisers had any doubts about Facebook’s mobile penetration or business, Mark Zuckerburg just proved them very, very wrong.
FAA Allows Devices Throughout Entire Flight
Read original story on Tech Crunch
Even though most of us have been accidentally, or intentionally, leaving our electronic devices on throughout our airline flights, it’s now entirely legal by FAA standards. It’s not universal though: the changes will differ airline to airline, so don’t expect to be able to keep watching that movie on every single flight. It’s worth noting that some airlines have even been offering wifi, so thinking about targeting flyers with specific ads might not be such a far-fetched concept in the near future.
YouTube Plans Spotify For Music Videos
Read original story on Billboard.
YouTube, the number one destination for music is preparing a premium on-demand music video service that looks a lot like Spotify. With both free and premium models, users get access to a breadth of music that is organized by album and artist in a way that makes it a more lean back experience than YouTube currently offers. Amidst serious competition from Spotify and Pandora and a precedent of free services, can YouTube breakthrough the clutter?
Piracy: It’s A Service Problem
It’s a simple question, really: Do people turn to piracy when the movies they want to watch are not available legally? It’s the premise of a new research site, Piracy Data, whose stated goal is to utilize data and statistical analysis to answer that question. Piracy Data uses TorrentFreak’s effective “Top 10 Most Pirated Movies of The Week” list , in addition to Can I Stream It, who provide an effective search engine for movies that are available for legal streaming, rental, or purchase on the Internet.
The results of this data, albeit only three weeks worth, are intriguing. Just over half – 53% – of the most pirated movies have been made available legally. Over that same three week period, only 20% of the top ten most pirated movies have been made available for digital rental. And if you wanted to stream even just one? No luck: not a single movie in this category can be streamed. Of the past week’s top ten, six were available for online purchase; thus if you want to somehow watch any of “White House Down,” “Elysium,” “The Mortal Instruments City of Bones,” or “2Guns,” pirating is your only option.
For what it’s worth, the MPAA has responded to the early press around Piracy Data in a Washington Post story, saying that, “Today there are more ways than ever to watch movies and TV shows legally online, and more are constantly being added. If a particular film isn’t available at a given moment, however, it does not justify stealing it from the creators and makers who worked hard to make it.” The founders of Piracy Data see it differently, however; they are of the opinion that instead of complaining about sites like Google showing infringing search results, the MPAA should take action and provide for more legal avenues to access the content that users are clamoring for.
The data, unfortunately for the MPAA, supports Piracy Data’s claims. Because recently released titles aren’t made available digitally soon after their theater release (say, within days instead of within weeks or months), users who don’t want to go out to theaters but still want to see the movies when they’re released often have no other option but to stream or download the films illegally. What’s more, since these movies are only available illegally, Google has very little option but to display the only search results that that, for example, “Stream Elysium” would return: illegal streams. Because there are no legal sources available to display, Google’s hands are tied.
It’s a circuitous problem: because films aren’t released digitally soon after their theater release, users who expect to be able to stream the content that they want are faced with no other options but to stream or download illegally. The Internet using populace wants to be able to stream video content across mediums, conveniently and immediately. The digital availability of all forms of media has fostered this attitude, but the film industry hasn’t really responded. Right now, most movies that are in theaters require lengthy waits, sometimes even months after their theater releases, before they’re available for legal streaming on the Internet.
Although it seems like this battle is set to go on for the foreseeable future, can we creatively think of a way out? I would argue that yes, we can, and that we can use two categories as case-studies: TV shows, and PC games. Looking to the former as a guide, it’s clear that users are more than willing to pay for quality content. This isn’t to say that Internet-savvy TV-show watchers are all innocent; Game of Thrones is the most-pirated show on the Internet, and it’s showing no signs of stopping.
At the same time, however, services like HBO Go and Netflix have helped to stem that tide. Netflix has 29.2 million paid subscribers, is rated as being worth double-digit-billions by Forbes and Google; their 2013 Q1 Revenue was $1 Billion, and they made a profit of $3 Billion. Indeed, more users than ever are flocking to the streaming service, now that it’s the exclusive place to watch Emmy-winning, original programming. Breaking Bad’s director, Vince Gilligan, even went as far as to thank Netflix for saving his show, which was slipping in the rankings and was cancelled in the UK before exploding online.
And as the show made its episodes available on Netflix rapidly, so too did viewers respond: in the weeks leading up to the final season, the pilot of the show was the most watched episode of Breaking Bad on the platform, as users tried to watch the whole series from start to finish in advance of the final season.
Perhaps the most telling statistic is that during peak Internet usage hours, 30% of all American Internet traffic is dedicated to Netflix. It’s not just Netflix, either. Streaming service Hulu has 4 million paid subscribers, and is available on over 120 million devices around the world. And at the same time, Amazon Instant Video, in combination with Amazon Prime, allows users to stream videos where they want, across devices and platforms; the service is undeniably on the up, particularly with those who use A.I.V. on physical devices like Apple TV and TiVo.
The point, here, is eloquently summarized by Kevin Spacey. Talking about his experience with House of Cards, he said, “Clearly the success of the Netflix model, releasing the entire season of House of Cards at once, proved one thing: the audience wants the control. They want the freedom. If they want to binge… we should let them binge…. And through this new form of distribution, we have demonstrated that we have learned the lesson that the music industry didn’t learn: give people what they want, when they want it, in the form they want it in, at a reasonable price and they’ll more likely pay for it rather than steal it.” To his point, the number of Netflix unpaid subscribers has rapidly dropped off since House of Card’s inception, from 1.7 to 1.1 million over the course of 2013, and according to a recent LSE dissertation, “unpaid forms of film consumption do not necessarily displace paid consumption forms, i.e. they do not always act as a substitute.”
It’s not just TV shows though. PC game piracy has also been affected by this concept, specifically upon the advent of Steam. For those that are unfamiliar with the service, Steam is a game distribution, game rights management, and multiplayer gaming platform developed by Valve Corporation in the interest of distributing games and other, related forms of media online. It’s distributed through a free software interface that allows users to sign into their accounts from the PC and access their games from the cloud.
The capabilities of Steam don’t end there, though. The medium allows users to log into their accounts on a friend’s computer, and access their game libraries from other devices. One account can only be logged into from one computer at a time, of course, but it’s a system that allows users to access gaming content where they want it, when they want it. And according to Forbes, who cited a Northeastern study, “the actual number of illicit digital copies of computer games accessed on BitTorrent is nowhere near as high as claimed, with only around 12.6 million unique peers worldwide sharing illicit copies of games.”
Forbes goes on to point out that, both at present and in the future, cloud-based gaming (in a not-so-subtle reference to Steam) is a deterrent to Piracy because of the structure of the platform and because the user is locked into the software system. Indeed, in a separate piece, Forbes cites Valve and Steam’s valuation as somewhere between $2 and $4 billion. At any given moment, there are, on average, 4.59 million users on the platform. And in an interesting case study, a game called The Witcher 2 sold around 35,000 physical copies and 10,000 digital copies, while on Steam the game was purchased over 200,000 times.
So what are the implications of these nebulous platforms and programs for the film Industry? The CEO of Steam, Gabe Newell, thinks that Piracy can be, at least in large part, curtailed by a change in philosophy. “Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem. For example, if a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate’s service is more valuable.” Internet-savvy users tend go agree. To cite the “Best” (or most up voted comment) in a Reddit thread on Piracy: “I used to pirate video games, then Steam came along and I stopped … I used to Pirate movies, then Netflix came along, and well, I still kind of pirate movies because I find the cinema to be a poor experience and don’t want to wait.” It’s almost a poetic response to Spacey’s thoughts on Netflix. If you give the people the quality content they want, when they want it, they’re happy to pay for it.
Of course, the logistics of movie distribution and industry standards are large obstacles, and Piracy will remain on the Internet; people still break the law on a regular basis even with the threat of the police and jail time. But if the film industry, or a third party for that matter, wants to get out ahead of Piracy, look no further than a Steam-meets-Netflix-like service for films and shows, with a robust ownership system and multi-device software platform that allows people to access their content when they want it, where they want it, on whatever screen they want it on. If the MPAA, and the film industry at large, decided to use their massive political and financial clout to develop such an affordable, sustainable system, the data from other, similar industries struck by piracy suggest that users would be ready and willing to pay for it.
Can TV Be The Mobile Cookie?
Most industry folks would agree that the Holy Grail of marketing is to create a) highly targeted advertising b) at scale. This is, however, no easy feat…
As we point out in the recently released Second Screen Fallacy report, the simultaneous usage of a mobile device while watching TV (a behavior true of most mobile users at this point) is the best means we have of personalizing the TV experience. But while mobile offers the best means of personalizing, TV continues to be the most effective medium for reaching audiences at scale.
Recognizing that “second screen” is a nebulous and often misleading term, in this case we are using it to represent a two-screen advertising strategy, regardless of which you would consider the “first” and “second” screens.
A recent Forbes article does a great job of describing what we might call a “marriage of convenience” between Twitter and TV networks and their hybrid offspring: Twitter Amplify, which enables complementary content to be served up to users on the second screen. But we have started to observe a different dynamic occurring between the two screens; TV content is now starting to be used to contextually target a user on mobile platforms.
Not only do marketers want to know who the users are, but also what mood they are in, and what interests they’ve recently indulged in (cooking, sports or X Factor?) so we can target them with right message at the right time, according to their specific mindset. Ultimately, TV provides rich behavioral insight for mobile targeting, and this dual screen dynamic is opening the doors to richer and more personalized mobile targeting, powered by hefty TV audience data.
In my previous life as a digital media planner, the daily banter with ad ops would include: “how many cookies do we have in the cookie jar,” because some of our campaigns were so targeted it would sometimes take weeks to gather enough cookies for a fully-fledged retargeting campaign. But TV is a ready-and-waiting, data-rich cookie pool which can now be activated, thanks to the “second screen” industry.
And so far, it is showing promise. AdTonik, a “second screen” startup, found that using TV as a “cookie” off which to retarget mobile ads has resulted in a reported 3-10x increase in mobile engagement (compared to straight-up mobile buying).
Meanwhile, at the Lab, we are starting to establish best practices in this nascent space. In partnership with Collective, we have conducted research (to be released soon) focusing on Collective’s cross-screen targeting capability, TVA. Our research demonstrates that re-messaging people sequentially (meaning within 10 to 40 minutes of TV exposure) across screens yields the highest ad breakthrough. We also found that using the same creative across the two screens is more effective than switching (at least until breakthrough has been achieved).
Another potential twist on this theme, from our resident broadcast visionary, Brian Hughes, is to reverse engineer the flow of data, using mobile as the “cookie” to make TV advertising more targeted and effective.
“Simulmedia, for example, already allows you to buy targeted local TV ads based on content people are watching,” he noted; “why can’t we use the richer data available via mobile to create more targeted TV ads?”
Exploring the Effectiveness of Branded Content
Forbes partnered with IPG Media Lab to conduct a unique study to explore the effectiveness of long-form branded content. 2,259 participants were recruited from relevant sections of the Forbes website, given a webpage to experience, followed by a post-exposure survey to measure branding impact. Participating brands included Chrysler, Woodford Reserve, and Charles Schwab.
Download the full report here: Effectiveness of Branded Content.Forbes
For press inquiries or to receive a high res version of this report, please email [email protected].
The State of the NFC Market
Today in New York City, the NFC & Mobile Money Summit kicked off with many talks of interest including a panel on the state of NFC. Organized by the GSMA, the same organization behind the annual Mobile World Congress, the event featured a couple dozen exhibitors as well as an engaging conference track.
The aforementioned NFC panel was well-attended, and featured speakers from three continents discussing their thoughts on where things stand with NFC. The bottom line, not to spoil the ending of this recap, is that we are still in the very early stages of the technology. All but one of the panelists was primarily payments-focused, and there’s a fair case to be made that this is a grounded perspective. But no one could boast enormous NFC adoption and a mature state of the technology just yet.
The first speaker was J.H. Kah of SK Planet, which is a recent spinoff of South Korea’s SK Telecom. It operates its own app store and payment infrastructure. It focuses on developing capabilities for mobile credit cards, mobile debit card and mobile transportation card. That said, he did acknowledge that in order for payments to take off, NFC had to be better integrated into people’s lives. SK Planet is working hard on the engineering challenges in particular of putting the secure element for NFC payments inside carrier-issued SIM cards, such that carriers can control mobile payments.
From Norway’s Telenor, Viktoria Erngard introduced the audience to the carrier’s new Valyou platform. The Valyou platform is a contactless payments mechanism launching in Oslo this week. Telenor ultimately hopes to leverage this sort of technology worldwide to their 150 million customers. Valyou is a mobile wallet at heart, tied at launch to the major Norwegian bank DNB, with more such banks to follow in the near future. Ms. Erngard urged the audience to have patience, as customer uptake of this technology worldwide may be slower than expected.
Mikhail Damiani of Blue Bite brought a marketing perspective into the mix. His company has been involved in many NFC-powered out-of-home campaigns. They did a Samsung campaign where device users could tap a bus shelter sign to download a free song or eBook. For the latest Star Trek movie, users could tap a poster in the movie theater and download longer-form exclusive trailer. In another interesting execution, this time for Toyota, users who tapped out-of-home signage in malls could launch an HTML5-based augmented reality experience.
Blue Bite has even attempted to upgrade the advertising experience of airport security bins. NFC tap points in these bins during one campaign launched ads for the Clear security program. They also rely on what they call an “mTag”. This is a combination of an NFC sticker with a QR Code, to accommodate those comfortable with either. As a baseline, Mr. Damiani recommends that for any NFC-based campaign, the best practice is for the payoff to be relevant to the context of the ad, valuable to the user, and exclusive.
The last speaker was Maxim Sidorov from Russian MNO VimpelCom. In June 2013, VimpelCom launched a PayPass pilot in partnership with AlphaBank and MasterCard. They are also rolling out a SIM-card based pilot of a mobile solution for the Moscow Metro. Their view of the NFC ecosystem encompasses SIM cards, handsets, POS terminals and payment sources. It is a very SIM-card-based, payments-centric perspective on NFC. Mr. Sidorov directly addressed the ongoing divide between telecoms and device-makers over where to store secure payment data for NFC transactions. He advocated for the carriers to manage this via the SIM card, since they know how to drive mass scale adoption of technologies and have the power to adopt and enforce standards. He lamented that competition between these points of view could damage the whole NFC space and delay wide adoption.
During the panel discussion, everyone agreed that their programs were all early-stage and there’s no big consumer uptake yet. Even Blue Bite acknowledged that in their “mTag”-based out-of-home signage, only 30-40% of interactions were NFC rather than QR-code based.
Interestingly, considering mobile and smartphones are the focus of the event, it was 74 minutes into the 90-minute session that Apple was first mentioned. The sense on the panel was that Apple hasn’t adopted NFC yet because consumers are not yet asking for it. One theory is that as transit systems adopt contactless payments, consumer demand may rise.
And thus, in summary, the space continues to inch along. There are lots of interesting innovations brewing, but the inflection point of consumer demand for NFC has not yet arrived. That said, it is exciting to think about all the possibilities that lie ahead once adoption does begin to scale.
The Second Screen Fallacy: What It All Really Means
The Second Screen Fallacy: What It All Really Means: This collaboration between the IPG Media Lab and MagnaGlobal examines the second screen phenomenon—where it’s been, where it’s going, and how marketers can take advantage of it to re-capture consumer attention.
Notes From a N00B: 10 Tech Startups That Stand Out From the Crowd
To say I’m no tech expert is an understatement. For a 23 year old, I’m surprisingly old guard. I carry around a notebook, read paperbacks, and leave voicemails. I must have been the last person of my generation with a 2G phone. I’m the girl whose friends made fun of her because she didn’t know what iOS is.
So how did I end up doing a work exchange at the IPG Media Lab, a company that thrives on learning about the newest technology and thinking about how it might affect the future of marketing?
I hail from GumboLive, a New Orleans based think tank that’s part of the IPG family. We can only be described as a creative experiment: a study in what happens when you collect 15 young people, with backgrounds as scattered as our hometowns, and get us thinking about brands. We work together to come up with out-of-the-box ideas that traditional agencies wouldn’t think of.
Hence the logic behind the work exchange (or, as I prefer to call it, “The Best Hostage Situation Ever!”). Send The IPG Media Lab’s Jack Pollock to New Orleans to teach GumboLive about new tech and learn about creative co-creation: send me here to learn about the future of marketing and offer a fresh perspective.
Fast-forward four weeks, and a big chunk of my time has been spent researching hordes of startups and pulling out the ones that seem the most compelling. My process is simple: I ask myself, “Would I use this?” based on the website and the description of the app. If I, the person who is the last to download that cool new app, am excited about a tech startup, that’s saying something.
I’ve finally whittled it down to the Top 10… and learned a lot about what’s trendy in the tech startup world along the way. (Hint: if your startup has to do with apps, don’t make your company name an app pun. Trust me, it’s played out.)
The Top 10:
Choicelr
What it is: A fun, social app that crowd sources the decision making process. You choose two options, add pictures, and people vote for their favorite.
Why it’s cool: It’s simple, visually compelling and easy to use. Because there are only two things to choose from, useless recommendations and debate are kept at a minimum. There’s a strong impetus for people to engage on the other end, too- it’s human nature to want to voice your opinion.
How it’s relevant to marketing: Quite simply, you can learn a lot about people based on the decisions they make. This is a whole new way of discerning people’s tastes, data that can lead to great targeted marketing. Moreover, brands could theoretically pose sponsored branded questions (e.g. “What flavor do you prefer?) to tap into the zeitgeist.
Vello
What it is: A way to send video messages, either individually or as a compilation made by friends, paired with a gift card.
Why it’s cool: Have you ever had a going away party where your friends leave you sappy, sentimental videos to remember them by? It really does tug at the heartstrings. This is a way of doing that, for any occasion, even if your friends are in different places. They can even send individual gift cards with the message.
How it’s relevant to marketing: This adds a whole new level of depth and personalization to the normally staid, cop-out present of a gift card. Plus, there may be future potential for adding optional branded enhancements to the messages (for example, a fun filter that you can lay over videos).
CrowdFlik
What it is: A mobile video app that aggregates all the video streams from an event and lets you contribute and edit them to your own liking. It then saves on your camera roll and gives you the option of sharing the video with friends.
Why it’s cool: It provides the opportunity to take all of your favorite videos from an event and edit them all together in the way that you think best captures the experience.
How it’s relevant to marketing: It’s a new, unique way of creating, compiling, editing and sharing content from an event. This takes User Generated Content to a whole new level – one that’s strikingly easy for brands to harness. For instance, if a brand sponsors a big festival, the CrowdFliks could be brought to you by a brand and have their logo on the corner of the video footage.
FoodieQuest
What it is: An app that gameifies food photography by recommending restaurants and pitting users’ pictures against one another in head-to-head competition.
Why it’s cool: It taps into a phenomenon that already exists- an inherently competitive one, at that. Trying new restaurants naturally resembles a scavenger hunt, and “food porn” is already a way for people to show off and attempt to best one another.
How it’s relevant to marketing: It presents more fun, subtle way of marketing to foodies, as well as a great opportunity for location-based advertising. It’s also an example of gamification that doesn’t seem forced, which is inspiring in its own right.
Tweekaboo
What it is: An interactive baby book for the digital era.
Why it’s cool: It’s a way to share every little moment of your baby growing up… but only with the people who want to see it, not every single one of your facebook friends.
How it relates to marketing: It’s a natural place for family brands to live. Advertising could even be based on the baby’s age (nursing pillows when they’re newborns, sippy cups as they get older, etc.)
Cube26
What it is: Mind boggling vision-tracking technology that senses if you’re looking away from the screen, leaving the room, etc. and reacts accordingly. For example, if you walk away and are watching a movie, it automatically pauses.
Why it’s cool: It has the potential of making interacting with screens even simpler and easily integrated into daily life.
How it relates to marketing: The Lab is keen eye tracking and body motion sensing tech, because it’s so related to how people consume media (and is potentially relevant to many brand’s future media buying strategies). If Cube26 lives up to its claims, it brings that technology directly into the home in a tangible, exciting way.
Lumi
http://www.playgroundenergy.com
What it is: Playgrounds that harnesses children’s energy to enhance the recess experience and encourage them to play even more.
Why it’s cool: There’s massive potential in using human energy to enrich an experience, engage people, and spark conversation. Also, playgrounds are such a fun space to… well… play in, design-wise.
How it’s relevant to marketing: While there might not be an obvious connection between playgrounds and marketing, there’s plenty to learn from the concept. Brands that want to differentiate themselves as forward thinking should consider integrating innovative design and/or harnessing human energy in future campaigns.
Eventwith
What it is: An app that lets you plan events with friends, delegate tasks, make checklists, etc.
Why it’s cool: This could streamline the process of planning small-scale get-togethers that require involvement from multiple people. It could help eliminate the plethora of irritating group texts, Facebook messages, etc. that crop up when attempting to plan things of this nature, sectoring all of that information into one place instead of clogging up the rest of your digital life.
How it’s relevant to marketing: Marketing could be tailored to the kind of event being planned. For example, for a bachelorette party there might be ads for liquor, silly gift ideas, performers, etc. Brands could even have sponsored party plans and suggestions for different kinds of events, like cocktail recipes and party planning tips from experts.
Choosly
What it is: A database of professional athletes and artists and what gear they use, specifically intended for creating a presence for online retailers in the form of widgets.
Why it’s cool: If you’re, say, a golfer shopping for a pair of new clubs, it’s helpful to see what your favorite professional athlete uses while making a decision.
How it’s relevant to marketing: Brands spend so much money on celebrity sponsorships and endorsements. This could be a way to use them to their fullest potential in the realm of online shopping.
ProxToMe
What it is: A social proximity-based cloud app that uses Facebook and dropbox to share messages, pictures, and files with people close to you, whether you know their information or not.
Why it’s cool: This could be useful in an infinite number of ways. You could share pictures from a party with everybody there, or a presentation with everybody in your office, simultaneously and without worrying about formatting.
How it’s relevant to marketing: Imagine hosting an event – anything from a concert to a film premier- and being able to send information that enhances the experience to everybody in the room at the same time. This could be an invaluable addition to experiential marketing. Both the person sending and those receiving must have the app in order for it to work, so brands avoid bothering people who are unwilling to engage while having unlimited access to those open to receiving new content.
