Facebook is expanding its custom audiences tools to let advertisers target based on information from third party sites like Datalogix, Epsilon, Acxiom, and BlueKai. This means a car company, for example, could target users on Facebook that have been ID-ed by third parties as being in the market to buy a new car. While privacy advocates will likely sound the emergency alarm, it’s an opportunity for big brands to increase efficiency and spend money on users likely to return the favor.
Tag: Social
Foursquare Partners With Visa And Mastercard
In a similar partnership to AMEX, Visa and Mastercard have teamed up with Foursquare to deliver check-in discounts applied directly to cardholders accounts. The recent deal benefits brands by offering easy redemption while generating buzz on the social platform. The move also creates a unique revenue stream for Foursquare who will be earning a fee for every transaction.
Oreo’s Winning Superbowl Tweet
A successful social media strategy relies on reacting to trends and staying nimble which is what made Oreo’s superbowl tweet a winner. Reacting to the blackout, Oreo promptly posted an ad with the slogan “you can still dunk in the dark”, resulting in 12,000 retweets. The key to their quick turnaround was having the creative agency and brand team in the same room on Sunday night.
The Problem With Pinterest
Image-based platform Pinterest can drive a lot of brand interest as users share upwards of 250 million photos a day, most of which include wedding dresses, sweets, makeup and more wedding dresses. Brands can also gain a lot of insights into their audience and which images are most engaging. But there’s a catch. Pinterest is a blackbox for marketers without a public API. As a result, an entire cottage industry has surfaced with companies like Pinfluencer and Triple Lift which crawl the site to collect some of this data. We anticipate brand tools coming to the site, but until then, you’re best bet is giving these guys a call.
Social Media Nostalgia: Timehop Partners With USA Today
Nostalgia can be an incredibly powerful experience, which is what makes Timehop so successful. The daily email service surfaces your social media activity from one year ago and now features companion stories from USA today to remind people of the major news events at the time. It’s a great way of repackaging USA Today’s content and making a personal connection with readers. Brands take notice!
Joining The Dots
I think sometimes we look at things in a lens that is too focused.
For many years we’ve looked and laughed at internet enabled fridges and tweeting plants but to make sense future thinking people have taken a step back and had the imagination to see the whole ecosystem of the connected home, a world where you can turn on your cooker from work, or check to see if you have left the garage door closed.
But I still think these use cases are rather pathetic, relatively fringe and certainly not providing enough value to make the $15k investment in an entirely connected home worthwhile.
But when you really take a step back, where you vision includes things that seem rather peripheral, you can begin then to join a lot of things together that show how amazing things could happen.
I don’t think we are far from a world where the world of advertising starts becoming less the use of creativity to get brands and consumers to connect and engage, but a world where creativity is used to allow brands to provide value to consumers. The process of agencies like the IPG Media lab will be to have the imagination but also the knowledge of fringe technology to join the dots together and to do so in the context of business and brands.
We are talking of a world of both creative business models and branded utility.
I think in less than 3 years a connected home will include a fridge that knows what products we like, what food we have, when it is about to turn bad, where we are going to be that week, who we may expect to have come and visit.
This may seem rather out there, but it’s a simple question of taking in some of the utility that apps like “Slice” provide now, advancing it a little, and then pulling data from your google calendar, location and other sources to help suggest solutions, or as we like to call it, the world of “anticipatory computing”
In a world like this, an online grocery company could subsidize the cost of your fridge by ensuring that it will only be able to order goods from their own site.
You may find that you never run out of milk because it’s ordered before it’s about to go bad or run out.
You may find ads for food products that sync with your fridge and tell you what else you need to order to make a suggested recipe and order it for you.
This is world far removed from the now, but not because the technology is so advanced, but because our attitude towards “advertising” shifts away from technology as an enabler of better brand messaging, but technology as an enabler of better brand solutions.
Vine Coming To Twitter?
After buying Vine in October, Twitter may now be supporting the short form video sharing startup. CEO Dick Costolo recently included their video functionality in a tweet.
Facebook Announces Graph Search
Facebook announced Graph Search at today’s press conference which will allows users to search their open graph across people, photos, interests and places. Unlike prior search functionality, Facebook’s new service allows you to combine “phrases” like querying friends in San Francisco who like coffee shops. The new feature will certainly change the discovery process, allowing people to more proactively seek information instead of waiting for posts in their newsfeed. It also provides another opportunity for users to uncover brands in Graph Search, particularly for brick and mortar locations (think “shoe stores friends have liked near Chicago”). Stay tuned for some of the ad opportunities for the new offering.
Mobile Accounts For 1/5 Facebook Ad Sales
It looks like Facebook is having more success monetizing mobile according to some figures from Kenshoo Social. According to the report, 1 in 5 dollars in ad spend goes toward mobile with a more costly CPC as well. Spend is predominantly on iOS tablets but Android dominates the smartphone market. Mobile display will satiate most brands for the time being, but expect the social Giant to deliver more mobile-specific ad products in the future. Check the one pager for the full results.
Keys To Real-Time Twitter Polling
Poptip’s real-time Twitter polling is utilized by some of today’s leading brands as a way to engage audiences and enable social TV tie-ins. With so much data coming in from responders, there is often a challenge of making these visualizations dynamic but not overwhelming. In the case of Poptip, the company is able to display the polling stats and cycle the responses of users based on influence and length of tweet. Can you think of any other ways you might present this data?
