PSST (2.0 opinions & trends) : contagious ideas blog edited by jérémy DUMONT + Andreea HIRICA POPA

Les pays émergents, le Royaume-Uni et la vidéo tirent la croissance de la publicité en ligne en 2012

2012 AdEx Benchmark Survey Launched at Interact Barcelona

http://www.interactcongress.eu/media/news/277/European-Online-Advertising-Market-Surpasses-24bn-euros-in-Value.html

IAB Europe’s annual AdEx Benchmark survey - the definitive guide to the state of the European online advertising market - was released today at IAB Europe’s Interact conference in Barcelona.

The AdEx Benchmark research revealed that online was the best performer in the advertising market with an overall growth of 11.5% in 2012. Europe continues its strong growth curve in both early adopter and emerging markets. Diversity of online advertising was a strong contributor to ongoing European growth in spite of continuing macroeconomic volatility.

Kimon Zorbas, CEO of IAB Europe, said that the trajectory was positive. “With a 15.3% growth in 2011 and continuing strong growth of 11.5% in 2012, our sector is bucking the trend in Europe. Display advertising has continued its renaissance, driven both by the recognition of online display as a branding medium and the explosion of the big data economy. Big data relies on the rich metrics delivered through the online medium.”

Continued strong migration of ad spends online, which followed media usage patterns, underpinned the overall strong growth. Demand for online video advertising increasingly acted as a major draw for brand advertisers growing by 50.6% in 2012, to nearly €661.9M. This is the first time in Europe that online video has grabbed double-digit display market share, jumping to 12.9%.

Mobile advertising also continued its surge, growing 78.3% to nearly €392M in total value. Mobile advertising now accounts for 5% of all online display spends in Europe.
The IAB Europe AdEx Benchmark study splits the online ad market into 3 top-level segments: Display, Classifieds and Directories and, Paid-for-Search. Growth in these online advertising formats has been underpinned by shifting uses of devices and changing consumption patterns.

In 2012, the Display Ad market experienced a like-for-like growth of 9.1%, with a total value of €7.8bn. Growth was mainly driven by mobile and online video. More reliable audience metrics, better campaign measurements, improved automation and simplification of purchasing online advertising space developed by industry, increased confidence amongst marketers in the online ad medium.

The 2012 market value of Classifieds and Directories was €4.5bn and was underpinned by strong redistribution of spends on classified from print to online. Continued consolidation in the sector enhanced the scale of classifieds sites, making them more attractive for advertisers. The strong legacy position of Classifieds and Directories in Scandinavia also continued to boost the European market. Outstanding performances were noted in Denmark - up 20% - and Sweden - up 23.9%.

Paid-For-Search experienced the strongest like-for-like growth of 15.5% - and had a market value of €11.9bn. Dynamic results from Russia, which grew a whopping 44.9% was an important influencing factor. However, even some of the largest and most mature Search markets in Europe, such as Germany and the UK continued to grow, helped by larger volumes of Search ads.  Increased ad spends from small advertisers and mobile search using smartphones and tablets were a significant contributor to this shift.

Daniel Knapp, Director Advertising Research at IHS Electronics and Media, and author of the research said,“ While the macroeconomic situation in Europe pointed to a challenging year for the media industry in 2012, online advertising tells a better story. Our study shows that growth engines are not just markets, which are developing from a low basis. Double-digit growth from mature online economies such as Scandinavia and the UK demonstrates that investment in technology, improved measurement and strategies to monetise the increasingly mobile consumer facilitate sustainable growth of online advertising."

The top 10 list remained the same, with the exception of Russia moving from 5th to 4th place, replacing Italy, which dropped down a place to 5th. Top Individual market growth was registered by Russia 34%, followed by Turkey with 30.4%.

Top 10 Rankings

1. UK – €6.6bn
2. DE – €4.6bn
3. France – €2.8bn
4. Russia – €1.5bn
5. Italy – €1.4bn
6. NL – €1.2bn
7. ES – €0.9bn
8. Sweden – €0.8bn
9. Norway – €0.6bn
10. Denmark – €0.6bn

Media please contact:
Bénédicte Blondel, Communications Manager, IAB Europe: communications@iabeurope.eu
Daniel Knapp, Director Advertising Research at IHS Electronics and Media: daniel.knapp@ihs.com

About IAB Europe’s AdEx Benchmark:
Compiled by IHS Screen Digest, the research covers the entire European region, from the mature markets of Western and Northern Europe to the emerging markets in Eastern and Southern Europe for the calendar year 2012.

Note to Editors:
*The figure would be 3.6% were online advertising to be included in ‘all media’. Source: IHS Screen Digest.
Display includes PC-based and mobile banners, rich media and video formats.
The data has been compiled by IAB Europe based on information provided by the national IAB offices around Europe. It is then processed and analyzed by IHS Screen Digest. The report includes market size and value information for the full membership of the IAB Europe in 2011 including Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Slovenia, Romania, Russia, Spain, Slovakia, Serbia, Turkey, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK. The data represents the calendar year 2011 January- December. This is the sixth edition of AdEx which began in the calendar year 2006.

About IHS Electronics and Media
IHS is a global information company with world-class experts in the pivotal areas shaping today’s business landscape: energy, economics, geopolitical risk, sustainability and supply chain management. We employ more than 5,500 people in more than 30 countries around the world.
Explanatory note on IAB Europe/IHS Electronics and Media Digest AdEx Benchmark figures
Each national IAB in Europe runs its own annual online advertising spending study and the IAB Europe AdEx figures are based on these results. As the methodology of the studies varies country by country, IAB Europe and IHS Screen Digest have defined methodology rules to represent the figures in such a way as to make them realistically comparable. This involves:

• Readjusting local figures to allow for harmonised representation. Readjustment rates are supplied by groups of local market experts
• Estimating/harmonising ad spend data for certain formats or segments in certain countries where local IAB studies do not include data or the definition or scope of a format is substantially different from IAB Europe standardised segments
• Where local data is collected in a currency other than Euros, the average exchange rate in 2010 has been used to convert this to Euros. To provide data for prior year growth rates, the prior year figures have also been re-calculated using the 2011 exchange rate in order to give transparency over the growth rate
• AdEx Benchmark focuses on four normalised segments: ‘Display’ (including mobile Display, rich media and video), ‘classifieds and directories’, ‘paid search’ and ‘other’ (including email but excluding email marketing).
• Figures quoted are gross figures (i.e. net invoiced value of the media, plus agency commission if any).

About IAB Europe
IAB Europe is the voice of digital business. Its mission is to protect, prove, promote and professionalise Europe's online advertising, media, market research and analytics industries. Together with its members – companies and national trade associations – IAB Europe represents over 5,500 organisations.
The member countries are: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, , Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine and United Kingdom. The corporate members include: AB Inbev, Adconion Media Group, Adition, Adobe, ADTECH, AGOF Services GmbH, AOL Advertising Europe, AudienceScience, BBC Advertising, CNN, CoAdvertise, comScore Europe, Creafi Online Media, Criteo, Deutsche Post, eBay International Advertising, Emediate, Evidon, Expedia Inc, Fox Interactive Media, Gemius, Goldbach Group, Google, GroupM, Hi-Media, Koan, Mediamind, Meetic, Microsoft Europe, Millward Brown, News Corporation, nugg.ad, Nielsen Online, OMD, Orange Advertising Network, PHD, Prisa, Proxistore, Publicitas Europe, Pubmatic, Quisma, Sanoma Digital, Selligent, Tradedoubler, Triton Digital, Truste, United Internet Media, ValueClick, Verisign, Viacom International Media Networks, Webtrekk, White & Case, Yahoo!, Yandex and Zanox. The associate members include: Advance International Media, Aegis Media, Banner, Clarins, Desigual, ePrivacyConsult, Exponential, Intelliad, Mediabrands, Meetrics, NextPerformance, Rocket Fuel, Rubicon and Turn Europe. www.iabeurope.eu

INCREASING SHARES FROM CONTENT MARKETING. How To Build Customer Focused Content Marketing Strategies.

 http://content.adjustyourset.tv/2013/05/content-targeting.html

Figure 1: A typical target audience network

The Theory

Arguably the strategy of marketing content [or for us growing video views] should be to captivate a products or services biggest energies or momentums, the type of energy only ever established by the most networked of content audiences who share and redistribute your content advantageously and cost effectively.

The best content marketing strategy for large audiences and viewers who share the most, as a recent paper by Aaron Rockett of the American University of Communication proved is by finding the heterogeneous people around your top audience. In other words finding the people 'different in kind' who have a shared interest with your customer e.g. acquaintances to acquaintances or even closer than that a mother to a daughter, a workmate to a workmate and so on (see figure 1: Your customer's network).

In his paper, Creating seed networks Aaron realised that close friends are homogeneous or 'people too similar in kind' and as a result less likely to share content or videos to a larger network because they themselves wouldn't want to be spammed or overly intruded by friends; this poses the greatest barrier to an advantageous natural sharing strategy and to opening up efficient content networks of sharers.

The public relations theorist Jame Grunig's agrees in principal (in his nested segmentation and situational theory diagram below and adapted for this post) that the most valuable content marketing strategy for building efficient audience networks of sharers is to look for multiple audience members that can identify and share content to your target audience for your behalf.

Figure 2: Grunig situational and segmentation theory

As Grunig explains in his diagram (above), the majority of people who participate regularly in your key target audiences life are likely to come from different life situations or segmentations that pose less barriers to sharing content than close friends and peers. The reconsideration therefore is that if you'd previously used content marketing to target demographics or psychographics then you have been neglecting an influencial audience of much greater sharers and targeting by only chasing homogeneous audiences or 'people similar in kind'.

The Solution

According to Rockett and Grunig, economical networks of shares to your key target audience extends way out and into multiple audience members that surround your target audience. This suggests that successful content marketing strategy has to identify and find obvious target audience prejudices, lifestyle challenges (see figure 3 below: Eriksons life stage psychosocial development table), social concerns or traditional product needs that any heterogeneous audience surrounding your target audience can identify your key customer within. To do this drives a faster rate of sharing, audience views, awareness and an economy-of-scale through virality.

Figure 3: Erikson's life stages of psychosocial development.

It is possible to identify a common successful content marketing strategy that therefore targets the heterogeneous (different in kind) networks by fully characterising your typical customer and their inner situations or segments of prejudices, challenges, concerns and target customer product needs  (figue 2) that girlfriends, boyfriends, cousins, workmates, close family, aquaintances, fans or followers (including brands) can appreciate, inform, entertain and persuade (Figure 4: A topical division of editorial) your target audience customer with.

This content marketing strategy increases the chances of sharing to your core audience by improving the overall heterogeneous's awareness and identification of your target audience and his/her essential associations to the product and their 'Brand-Me' voice and representation.

Figure 4: Topical division of editorial

By enabling many more people to identify your target audience easily within set of communication values and tonality you are effectively targeting a very large natural sharing network with a greater efficiency and rate of return. But you have to paint a very good picture of your target audience to other audiences of sharers and support overarching desire of sharing to bring the very worthy of content that is believed to surprise the people ultimately you are targeting. 


Sources:

www.american.edu/communication/a-rockett
http://nnlm.gov/evaluation/pub/bowes/ 

Labels: content audience strategy, marketing strategy for content, process of content marketing., targeted content marketing, video sharing

Source: http://content.adjustyourset.tv/2013/05/content-targeting.html#ixzz2S3WtcqXP

The effect of social media on markets. Could the global economy hinge on 140 characters? Twitter Speaks, Markets Listen, and Fears Rise

 

ttp://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/29/business/media/social-medias-effects-on-markets-concern-regulators.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times

Bart Chilton of the trading commission, which plans to discuss the effect of social media on markets.

That is the question the financial industry and government regulators are trying to answer after a Twitter hoax on Tuesday that claimed President Obama was injured in an explosion at the White House. That report caused the Dow Jones industrial average to drop temporarily by 150 points, erasing $136 billion in market value.

The markets recovered in minutes, but the episode has heightened concern among regulators about the combination of social media and high-frequency trading.

The vulnerability, in part, stems from the Securities and Exchange Commission’s decision this month to let companies and executives use social media sites like Twitter and Facebook to broadcast market-moving news.

High-frequency trading systems are designed to make trades based on keywords within milliseconds. The hoax message also went out on a new feature on Bloomberg’s financial data terminals that delivers select Twitter posts to hedge funds, investment banks and other users.

On Tuesday, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission plans to hold a public meeting in Washington with a couple of dozen high-frequency traders to discuss whether there should be additional safeguards to protect against the effects of social media on markets.

Even as markets rebounded on Tuesday, some investors lost money on the quick decline while others made money if they bet on a sharp drop.

“In 2010, we passed Dodd-Frank, the big financial reform bill, but nowhere in there do they mention high-speed trading or technology,” said Bart Chilton, a member of the trading commission. “That’s how quickly markets are morphing. Now, here we are three years later, woefully unprepared.”

The false report (“Breaking: Two Explosions in the White House and Barack Obama is injured”) was posted on Tuesday after Syrian hackers broke into The Associated Press’s Twitter feed.

Immediately, the mood shifted on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.

“It was nine, 10, 11 seconds and it was fast and then the question was ‘Why’?” said Andrew Frankel, co-president of the brokerage firm Stuart Frankel & Company.

He said traders realized shortly after that the post was a hoax since the television screens showing Bloomberg and CNBC had nothing about an explosion at the White House. Still, the episode recalled the 2010 “flash crash,” when an automated trading program caused the Dow to sink more than 600 points, and it left a deep skepticism of social media on the trading floor.

“You look at how quickly that happened and now everyone wants to release corporate earnings on Twitter,” Mr. Frankel said, in between calling out, “Sell!” to his team. He added: “The concern is ‘How do you know what’s right and what’s not? How do you know what’s hacked and what isn’t?’ ”

Spokesmen for Twitter and The A.P. declined to comment.

Even though Syrian hackers remain the prime suspects, the trading commission is now investigating 28 different futures contracts and specifically examining the five-minute period before and after The A.P.’s Twitter account was hacked. It is looking to see if there were anomalous trades, and investors who benefited from them.

“To think it was all lost because of this hack attack is very disconcerting,” Mr. Chilton of the commission said. “We would be irresponsible if we turned a blind eye to these debacles.”

The decision to allow market information on social media came after Reed Hastings, chief executive of Netflix, had posted on Facebook that the service had exceeded one billion hours of streamed video a month, sending its stock price up.

“We appreciate the value and prevalence of social media channels in contemporary market communications, and the commission supports companies seeking new ways to communicate,” the S.E.C. said on April 2.

Two days later, Bloomberg introduced a feature on its financial data terminals that incorporates a stream of relevant Twitter posts delivered to investors. All of Bloomberg’s more than 310,000 subscribers, who pay at least $20,000 a year for access to the terminals, now have access to those posts, which the company says are clearly identified as Twitter messages.

“The S.E.C.’s decision reflects the reality that we were dealing with in that this information is being distributed by companies and investors are consuming it and we needed to get it on the terminal,” said Brian Rooney, the company’s core product manager for news, adding, “We’re not in a world where people live in a vacuum.”

At the same time, the use of algorithms designed to peruse millions of sources of information like blogs and social media to analyze and execute trades is only becoming more widespread.

“The macro trend of finding patterns in words is something that will be used more and more,” said Paul Rowady, a senior analyst at Tabb Group, a capital markets research and consulting firm.

The incorporation of social media in these algorithms is relatively new and is therefore particularly susceptible to hacking.

“A Twitter feed is structured in a way that is machine-readable, and there’s a broad following so you get strong signals about topics,” Mr. Rowady said.

Hedge funds, investors and Wall Street banks are hiring companies to sift through the hoards of social media messages. DataSift, a company that filters real-time content on social media, started in 2011 and now has more than 20 financial services clients, including Bloomberg L.P.

DataSift’s computer programs siphon through posts to deliver only relevant information in two to three milliseconds.

“There’s a massive tidal wave of data we can clean up and process and deliver out back to clients,” said Rob Bailey, the company’s chief executive.

The A.P.’s account was the sixth prominent Twitter account to be hacked in recent months. Accounts for CBS, NPR and BBC were all hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army, a group based in Syria, which has been attacking the accounts of Western news outlets in retaliation for what it says is one-sided coverage of the Syrian civil war.

The attack on The A.P.’s Twitter account meant that its nearly two million followers quickly disseminated the false report. Security experts who have been tracking the Syrian Electronic Army now fear that the group has been emboldened.

“It wouldn’t be surprising, given the impact of this attack, for the S.E.A. to try this attack again,” said John Scott-Railton, a research fellow at the Citizen Lab, an organization at the University of Toronto that focuses on Internet security.

Experts in electronic trading cautioned that it was not only programmed trades but also human beings who played a part in the market drop on Tuesday.

“Hundreds of thousands of financial professionals would have seen this information with chaos ensuing,” said Rich Brown, global head of Elektron Analytics, a division of Thomson Reuters. “There’s no doubt in my mind that humans were reacting to this and it wasn’t just robots.”

But, he added: “The nature of electronic trading exacerbated the problem.”

Teens tune out TV, log on instead. Young people spend an average of 16.7 hours online a week

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/3078614/ns/technology_and_science-tech_and_gadgets/t/teens-tune-out-tv-log-instead/

Teens and young adults spend more time online than watching TV or talking on the phone, according to a new study from Yahoo! and ad agency Carat Interactive.

 

THE INTERNET HAS passed television in the amount of time spent a week, the Web portal and media firm found in a report called “Born to Be Wired” released Thursday. Young people, ages 13-24, spend an average of 16.7 hours a week online, excluding e-mail, compared to 13.6 hours watching TV. After TV viewing, they listened to radio for 12 hours, talked on the phone for 7.7 hours and spent six hours reading books and magazines for personal entertainment.

For young people, the Internet is the primary media choice. Being in “control” of how they surfed the Web and the ability to personalize their media content online is most appealing to them.

On a typical day, the average young person can be confronted with at least 200 cable channels, more than 5,000 consumer magazines, thousands of radio stations and millions of Web sites.

But young people don’t feel overwhelmed by the abundance of media choices available to them, the study, which polled more than 2,500 teens, found.

According to Yahoo!, which relies on advertising revenues, the media preferences of the “wired” generation are significant to consumer marketers who want to reach young people. Already a growing number of youth-oriented industries such as movie studios, video games and snack foods have embraced the Internet as an important marketing tool to reach their customers.

Moreoever, the Yahoo! study counters data from Nielsen Media Research, the leading audience measurement firm for the TV industry, that says the average person watches television an estimated 28 hours a week.

Yet Yahoo!’s findings match numerous other studies tracking the cyber-habits of young Americans.

Earlier this year an AOL survey said that U.S. teens spend an average of 12 hours a week online. The AOL study also found that nearly 81 percent of teens age 12 to 17 use the Internet for e- mail and almost 70 percent use instant messaging when they’re online.

In May, Pew Internet & American Life Research found that one-third of all American teens are online.

Pew director Lee Rainie says the Yahoo! research appears “credible,” adding that it’s not so much about the horse race of online usage versus the Internet, but how young people multi-task and consume a wide variety of media at the same time.

In a 2000 study, Pew found that one-third of young people said multi-tasking was a common activity.

In other words, teen life is about juggling numerous instant messages, answering e-mail and researching school papers, while watching TV and calling in to vote for their favorite “American Idol” contestant, all at the same time.

“The media permeates all they do except when they’re sleeping,” says Rainie. “Theirs is a multimedia life.”

Being Online Has Become So Common That Some People No Longer Identify It As Being Online

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20121022/18144920795/being-online-has-become-so-common-that-some-people-no-longer-identify-it-as-being-online.shtml

from the to-be-online-or-not-to-be-online dept

One thing we know for sure is that the internet has become a growing part of everyone's lives. People are connecting to the internet for a variety of everyday activities including watching tv and movies, listening to music, reading news and gaming. With the internet becoming so ubiquitous in people's lives, would it be a surprise to see that the number of people who identify such activities as "being online" is dropping?

That is exactly what Forrester Research has shown in its latest study on people's media habits. In a blog post, Forrester Analyst Gina Sverdlov points out that especially among younger internet using adults, being online is a fluid concept.

One of the biggest revelations in this year’s data was the change in attitude of consumers — particularly younger ones — toward the Internet. Since we started tracking this information in 1997, we have only seen the amount of time spent online increasing. But Forrester’s 2012 data shows that US online adults are now reporting a decline in the amount of time they spend using the Internet compared with 2011 and 2010.

What’s going on? Our analysis revealed that “being online” is becoming a fluid concept. Consumers no longer consider some of the online activities they perform to be activities related to “using the Internet.” In fact, given the various types of connected devices that US consumers own, many people are connected and logged on (automatically) at all times. The Internet has become such a normal part of their lives that consumers don’t register that they are using the Internet when they’re on Facebook, for example. It’s only when they are actively doing a specific task, like search, that they consider this to be time that they’re spending online.

You can see this trend in this graphic, along with falling trends in offline activities such as watching TV and reading newspapers among adults. As you can see, there is a drop in the amount of time people spend using the internet. However, as Forrester points out, that doesn't actually reflect people's true online activity. People are using more services and devices that are connected by default to the internet which doesn't resonate as online activity for many people. When people use smart phone applications, for instance, those applications may connect to the internet, but it is not a conscious "I am connecting to the internet" activity. It is just "I am checking Facebook/listening to Pandora/Watching Netflix/etc." With online connectivity as the default for the media choices people make, it would be expected that people would be less likely to consider that "online" behavior. As the rising generation grows up with such online-by-default choices, they will be even more likely to not consider it online activity.

What this means for those media companies that are showing a steady decline in the above graphic, and others not listed, is that if your services do not take advantage of the connected devices the current and rising generation own and use, then you might find yourself out of business. We see this happening now. Despite what some legacy industries might believe or want, that decline in offline activity is not going to reverse itself. The more the legacy industries fight that shift in consumer behavior, the faster they will find themselves irrelevant. The best thing for these industries to do is to embrace that fluid online concept and capture the attention of the rising generation.

How Your Branded Content Can Thrive on Tumblr

by Stephen Jeske 

http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/

A branded photo gif on Tumblr.

Tumblr is a microblogging platform and social media site that allows the sharing of all types of branded content including links, music, photos, quotes, text, and video.

Virtually everything on the platform can be customized to match a brand’s image, including colors, themes, and HTML coding.

Quantcast reports that the site is most popular with 18- to 34-year-olds, college-educated with no kids, earning up to $50,000 per year, and of Hispanic or Asian background. According to the same data, Tumblr generates high levels of engagement among its users, with 40 percent of visitors accounting for 85 percent of traffic.

Comscore confirms that Tumblr is the No. 2 social platform — right behind Facebook — in terms of visitor engagement. Moreover, Tumblr is highly popular among internet users and is ranked by Quantcast as one of the top 15 sites in the United States, making it an excellent platform for branded content efforts.

Creating and promoting Tumblr content

Despite Tumblr’s popularity, content marketers need to carefully consider certain issues prior to incorporating Tumblr into their content marketing strategy. Your target audience (or at least an economically viable segment) should already be using Tumblr in order to establish meaningful engagement. And though brands may be able to repurpose existing material for use on this platform, providing the type of content this audience wants is no easy task. But, as a general rule, visually appealing and easily consumed content performs best with this audience; thus, content formats that involve photography, design, and other creative endeavors typically do well.

Before building your branded content strategy for Tumblr, get a feeling for what works by visiting some popular Tumblr blogs. The 100 Best Tumblrs of All Time, 30 Must-See Tumblr Blogs, and The Best Tumblr Blogs of 2011 provide a good overview. You’ll notice content that is short and sweet generally works best. While there is quite a bit of original content on the platform, plenty of Tumblrs reblog other people’s content, often adding their own opinions to give it a unique perspective, which makes it an excellent vehicle for putting your brand’s spin on relevant, curated content that will appeal to your audience.

Beyond creating and curating content, brands will also need to promote their Tumblr blog throughout the Tumblr community (as well as across their other content outposts). Commenting, “liking,” and reblogging are three ways to gain exposure within the Tumblr community. Just like a regular blog, commenting builds relationships and provides a link back to your Tumblr blog, and “liking” and reblogging posts also put a link at the bottom of that post to your Tumblr blog (along with your profile photo). All three events allow other Tumblr visitors to discover your content. Tagging photos in your posts also helps visitors to find your blog when they conduct a Tumblr search.

In some respects, a Tumblr blog can also be promoted just as you would a traditional blog — such as by optimizing your posts for SEO by creating custom URLs, using the “alt” attribute on photos, optimizing page titles and meta-descriptions, and creating and submitting a site map to Google.

Successful branded content efforts on Tumblr

Newsweek

Newsweek was one of the first major media outlets to actively employ Tumblr in its marketing strategy. The publication typically posts just a handful of stories every day, in an easily digestible and Tumblr-friendly way. It appeals to a specific market segment of Newsweek’s audience that prefers consuming information in an alternative way.

This post, with over 46,000 notes, provides social proof that what they are doing works.

Whole Foods Market

Whole Foods Market customers aren’t just buying organic food; they’re buying a way of living. The company uses Tumblr as an extension of its online magazine Dark Rye, telling stories of regular people creating sustainable lifestyles. While the online magazine publishes monthly, the Tumblr blog operates on a daily schedule. A photo of a box of brassicas, a video on baking bread, and a quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald are just some of the curated content that can be found on this blog.

It’s an eclectic mix and it works, as shown by the more than 17,000 Tumblr visitors who “liked” this one post. What’s not to like about that? By repurposing existing content and curating other material, Whole Foods Market uses Tumblr to continually build its brand and reinforce its sustainable living persona.

Coca-Cola

Coca-Cola is a ubiquitous brand whose image is ingrained into the lives of virtually every North American. So pervasive is the Coke brand that there are professionals, organizations, websites, and events dedicated to Coca-Cola paraphernalia. Coca-Cola’s Tumblr blog is a virtual collection of all things Coke. It’s a mass of curated content containing animated gifs, artwork, photographs, and videos. Everything about the blog, including the colors and text, works in harmony to reinforce the company’s brand.

Although more than 19,000 visitor notes for this post are social proof that this works, it’s not easy to please the fickle. Many posts have only hundreds of likes, comments, or reblogs, while some have as few as a handful. Despite this, it serves as a great repository of Coke odds and ends, providing a wonderful attraction for the curious.

Carefully research Tumblr’s audience before committing to any branded content marketing strategy. Brands need to provide high-quality and visually oriented materials, either original or curated, in order to gain significant audience on this platform. Tastes of Tumblr visitors can be fickle, so allow sufficient time to properly measure results.

Looking for ideas on other innovative platforms to create and distribute branded content? Read the CMI Book, “Bold Brand,” by Josh Myles.

Cover image via Jetset Studios on Tumblr

Facebook's Lookalike Audiences Lets Advertisers Expand Targeting

http://mashable.com/2013/03/19/facebook-lookalike/

Todd Wasserman

Facebook on Tuesday offered advertisers another tool to target consumers on the platform with Lookalike Audiences, a feature that lets them reach users similar to those in their Custom Audience databases.

Launched in late 2012, Custom Audiences lets marketers use existing data like email addresses, phone numbers and user IDs to inform their Facebook strategy. As the name implies, Lookalike Audiences is a tool that alerts advertisers to similar consumers.

In a blog post heralding the new feature, Facebook noted that marketers can buy Custom and Lookalike audiences in conjunction with any ad buy.

"For instance, a business could choose to run an Offer to both people who they know have bought from them before, and to people who share similar attributes with those customers," the post explains. "Like with custom audiences, marketers can further refine lookalike audience targeting using Facebook’s standard interests and demographics targeting (i.e. a company could reach lookalikes with an Offer and use standard targeting to make sure that Offer only reaches lookalikes in Florida)."

The object is to try to lure new fans. However, marketers will only know certain details about the Lookalike Audiences, like their size.

Facebook says it won't share any personal info with advertisers. Facebook claims that such targeting increases ad efficacy. The company claims an unnamed online retail partner, for instance, has seen a 56% lower cost-per-fan acquisition cost and a 94% lower cost per checkout using Lookalikes in beta.

Facebook launched Lookalikes in beta in February. The product ties in with Facebook's goal of improving overall ad performance.

As CEO Mark Zuckerberg told analysts in January during the company's fourth-quarter earnings call, "There's a big opportunity in front of us to make every ad that we’re showing a lot better. The biggest ways we’re going to do this are by improving targeting and relevance so we can show everyone content that they care more about and by designing better ad products that aren't just about links and text and images. For targeting, I’m most excited about the work that we’re doing on Custom Audiences."

Mashable composite. Image via iStockphoto, OSTILL.

Shiv Singh, the Global Head of Digital, PepsiCo Beverages, addressed the delegates at GoaFest this year. In a session titled ‘Why No One Cares About

Shiv Singh, Global Digital Head – Beverages, PepsiCo

Marketing’, Singh outlined ideas that every marketer should keep in mind in the current climate. A big part of this session was the focus on digital media, and how and why a marketer needs to integrate the same in to his communication strategies. Storyboard’s Pavni Mittal caught up with Shiv Singh at GoaFest, and began by asking him about the same.

 

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Twitter Launches Keyword Targeting for Ads

What's This?

Todd Wasserman5 minutes ago

Twitter on Wednesday introduced keyword targeting for advertising, meaning that you may see Promoted Tweets based on stuff you have tweeted about.

In a blog post, Nipoon Malhotra, product manager for revenue at Twitter, gave the following example of how the program will work:

Let’s say a user tweets about enjoying the latest album from their favorite band, and it so happens that band is due to play a concert at a local venue. That venue could now run a geotargeted campaign using keywords for that band with a tweet containing a link to buy the tickets. That way, the user who tweeted about the new album may soon see that Promoted Tweet in their timeline letting them know tickets are for sale in their area.

The enhancement lets advertisers base their messaging on users' stated interests rather than demographic or geographic information. However, Twitter says that the change won't result in more ads in users' timelines. Malhotra also notes that in a limited trial with a few advertisers, including Walgreens and Microsoft Japan, keyword-based ads got higher-than-average engagement. Another advertiser, GoPro, saw engagement rates of has high as 11% with keyword-based targeting. Malhotra didn't disclose what the average engagement rate is for a Twitter campaign.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, Gunnar3000

Topics: Advertising, Business, Twitter

Made in Chelsea series 5 gets record ratings, 304,000 tweets

By Christopher Hooton

Made in Chelsea is proving more popular than ever (Picture: E4)

Made in Chelsea has achieved its highest viewing figures ever, bringing 808,000 viewers to E4 when the first episode of season 5 got underway last night, along with 304,000 posts on Twitter.

The record came in spite of it being the programme’s fifth series, with reality shows usually declining rather than increasing in viewers over time.

The figure means Made in Chelsea remains E4′s biggest non-scripted series (we use the term loosely).

The return of Spencer Matthews, Louise Thompson, Millie Mackintosh, Jamie Laing and more also saw the programme become the most tweeted-about of the night, with 304,000 tweets about the show being posted on Twitter, at one point peaking at 10,000 per minute.

The Made in Chelsea stars recently took part in a ‘seven deadly sins’ photoshoot (Picture: E4)

Made in Chelsea also took up eight of the worldwide trending topic spots.

How to monetise the connected experience ? Second screen approaches that have succeeded in generating additional revenues and enhancing the 30-second TV spot.

by Tony Duarte 

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Connected second screen experiences have enjoyed, or arguably suffered, a prolonged period of experimentation. No single slam dunk business model has disrupted the landscape, but there are several approaches that have succeeded in generating additional revenues and enhancing the 30-second TV spot. 

Since they are not ubiquitous, you may not be aware of these successes. Here I examine the barriers and opportunities for the connected experience in detail.

This blog elaborates on the latter, with some examples of great connected experiences that have been successfully monetised.

Sky Go 

There are opportunities for different players in this space to generate revenue or defend existing revenues from rivals. Sky Go is a great example of combining both.

Sky’s second screen app allows their customers to consume Sky content on a range of connected devices away from the main screen in the home, or on the move outside of the home.

This ‘TV Anywhere’ model allows Sky to generate additional incremental revenue through advertising on the second screen service and to increase its ARPU (additional revenue per user) through its Multiroom subscription option.

It also enhances customer retention by providing a valued additional service that leads to increased TV content consumption through Sky services. Non-Sky customers can also subscribe to Sky Go, or pay-to-view, without signing up for a dish installation.

This opens up opportunities in the 16million non-Sky homes.

Sky is committed to using its customer data to support a new addressable advertising product in 2013 which will use household level data to deliver relevant ads.

The personal nature of the second screen experience, be it on smartphone or tablet, where the consumer is signed-in to the service, allows for advertising to be targeted to the individual, rather than at the household level.

This should result in more effective advertising as consumers receive adverts they feel are relevant to them, which should lead to better advertising rates for the broadcaster.

Providing seamless ‘TV Anywhere’ services and addressable or targeted advertising is one approach for broadcasters to increment their advertising or subscription revenues, and defend against churn.

Another is to give consumers second screen experiences which enhance specific programmes or events and raise revenue incrementally through in-app advertising.

CBS’s Super Bowl 2013 companion

CBS’s Super Bowl 2013 companion (second screen) app provided consumers with features they desired. Five different camera angles viewers could choose from provided unique content for viewers watching the game on TV.

One was voted for by fans and changed throughout the game, another  - the “all 22” camera angle - allowed football fans to see the entire field of play for the first time, footage that previously had only been available to NFL teams after games.

A pause and replay feature allowed viewers to replay moments they wanted to see again, rather than only those chosen by the broadcaster. Providing detailed stats in the app gave fans access to a wealth of realtime stats that the main TV experience could not deliver.  

Showing all televised adverts and Beyonce’s half-time performance on the second screen provided content which viewers outside of the sports audience could also consume without being in the home sports TV ‘arena’.

These enhanced services attracted viewers to engage with the second screen application and allowed CBS to charge rates for second screen advertising estimated to be between the high six and low seven figures. It was expected to generate between $10 and $12m. 

New Look

In 2011, an ad funded programme (AFP), New Look’s Style The Nation ,successfully enhanced key brand metrics and generated purchases via an integrated second screen experience.

The live reality fashion show was commissioned for C4’s T4 weekend youth strand and was developed and delivered by TwoFour Productions, Monterosa Productions* and Mother.  

Though New Look product placement within the show had to be diluted with products from rivals, the second screen featured exclusively New Look items and rewarded increasing levels of engagement with increasing value discount vouchers.

Viewers were encouraged to put together themed outfits and submit them to the show for a live catwalk, as well as participating in a competition and voting for contestants on a weekly basis.

Using an interactive mannequin, viewers ‘tried on’ over 700,000 New Look items. They could also ‘Get The Look’ at specific moments in the show as the second screen app integrated with New Look’s ecommerce site, and deep links in the app allowed the purchase of any item.

Online purchasing was complemented by discount vouchers to drive in-store purchasing. The primary goal for this AFP was in fact not sales, but brand fame. After a six-week run key brand metrics were shown to have improved by up to 20% in independent research by SPA Future Thinking.

However, significant sales were generated.

Coca-Cola Chase

Returning to this year’s Super Bowl, 30-second TV spots were estimated to cost $3.75m. Coca-Cola extracted the maximum value from its spots by extending the adverts via an engaging second screen application.

The Coca-Cola Chase advert kicked-off with a slapstick race through the desert by Showgirls, Badlanders and Cowboys to win a giant bottle of Coke. Viewers were pointed to the CokeChase.com website, which was optimised for smartphones, and encouraged to back one team, and sabotage the others.

The silent second-screen clips were ideal for the football game focused viewer environment. The pay-off for participants was a final TV spot at the end of the game that showed the ending that won the most votes.

TV Anywhere services, enhanced second screen programme features and second screen extensions of TV ad spots are a few of the ways in which the connected experience is being successfully monetised.

* During my time as Head of Production for Monterosa at the time, I played a key role in the development and delivery of the TV format and second screen experience.

The show was developed in the light of Ofcom regulations changing to allow paid-for references to brands and services in programmes for the first time, i.e. product placement. There were some invaluable lessons learnt, so if you’d like to know more drop me a line at tony.duarte@fluxx.uk.com

Fluxx’s white paper explores other monetisation options already in practice, and points to future models for monetising the increasingly popular second screen.

Tony Duarte is senior media consultant at fluxx ltd and a guest blogger on Econsultancy. You can follow Tony on Google Plus or connect via LinkedIn.

Facebook Launches Partner Categories, 500+ Generic Profiles To Target Ads Better, With Data From Datalogix, Epsilon, Acxiom

http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/10/facebook-launches-partner-categories-500-profiles-to-target-ads-better-on-mobile-and-desktop-using-data-from-datalogix-epsilon-and-axciom

Ingrid Lunden

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Ingrid is a reporter for TechCrunch, joining February 2012, based out of London. She comes from paidContent.org, where she was a staff writer, and has in the past also written freelance regularly for other publications such as the Financial Times. Ingrid covers mobile, digital media, advertising and the spaces where these intersect. When it comes to work, she feels most... → Learn More

Wednesday, April 10th, 2013

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Facebook today is taking another step ahead in its ad targeting strategy, which serves users advertising based on their location and online purchasing and browsing histories. The social network is launching partner categories: some 500 “unique groups”, with more to come, which are descriptors (one example: “buyers of children’s cereals”) that match up with relevant people among Facebook’s 1 billion+ users. Facebook says that advertisers can “futher refine” the categories by using other targeting options it already offers.

As with Facebook’s other targeting ad-tech news, Datalogix, Epsilon and Acxiom will be among the companies providing data to power the service. Datalogix alone says it will be providing some 300 of these audience segments.

This is one of the first official products to come out of the partnership with these ad targeting data specialists, which were first tested in September 2012 and then officially announced in February. (Two other stories looking at how these partnerships are progressing are here and here.)

While Facebook has been rolling out some features in ads and in its user services by platform — for example, mobile-only and desktop-only — it’s perhaps a measure of how important this is to the company that it is being rolled out across both desktop and mobile ads today.

Targeting using data from the wider web is a big progression on Facebook’s existing advertising services. Facebook, of course, has been relying on user information to target ads on its site before this, but only relying data that has been picked up within Facebook itself (although that’s an area that is also expanding). Ad targeting techniques like the ones being introduced today are used on the wider web, so it is important for Facebook to have them as well if it wants to continue to pick up ever-larger parts of businesses’ online marketing budgets.

Facebook’s had one crucial client win this week in that vein: General Motors is back to testing out ads for Facebook after pulling its marketing there a year ago. Its recent acquisition of Atlas from Microsoft also fits into this bigger strategy of having an all-in-one platform for providing online advertising services to businesses.

As you can see from the screenshot of how it looks below, Partner Categories provides a number of relevant details for each category — but not any information about specific users. They include how many people are in a category — 14.8 million for kids’ cereal! — and some of the purchasing history that goes into them getting put into that group. That includes how often a product is bought over the last year, and details of where the information got sourced.

For users, there are the inevitable pros and cons. On the one hand, you will be seeing ads that, in theory, will be based on things you are interested in (if you could call Cap’n Crunch an interest, that is).

“Our ultimate goal is to make the ads people see on Facebook as relevant as the information they see from their friends,” Yvette Lui, director of global marketing solutions, global data & audience partnerships at Facebook, noted in a news release put out by Epsilon. “Targeting features like custom audiences and partner categories help make this possible. Our partnership with Epsilon gives marketers a more accurate and effective way to reach the right groups of real people, which makes for a better ad experience.”

But… on the other, it’s always slightly annoying and menacing when you’ve browsed online for, say, plane tickets to Guatemala — and perhaps even purchased them already — and yet continue to get served ads for related plane tickets everywhere else you visit on the web.

Indeed, while this gives advertisers a lot more detail about how, where and to whom to serve ads, what it does not do is ensure that those advertisers will necessarily be the most relevant matches for you. For example, it’s not a guarantee that the kids’ cereal buyer category will only be used by Kellogg’s or Quaker Oats. It might be a vitamin or toy company, or any kids product company, or any company selling things to parents, or really any company at all that may decide to serve an advert to that particular product category.

As with other targeting services on Facebook, a user can opt out of getting ads from specific advertisers, or from targeting altogether.

Crunchbase

• DATALOGIX
• EPSILON

Company: Datalogix

Website: datalogix.com

Launch Date: 2002

Funding: $15M

Datalogix is the leader at integrating database marketing and digital media. Their mission is to leverage the power of purchase-based audience targeting to drive measurable online and offline sales. Datalogix offers audience segmentation and integrated programs directly and through all leading digital media companies. Datalogix is based in Westminster, CO, with offices in New York, Boston and Chicago. Real Audiences. Real Results.

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Company: Epsilon

Website: epsilon.com

Launch Date: 1969

Epsilon is the global leader in delivering direct-to-customer connections that drive business performance. Epsilon’s integrated solutions leverage the power of rich transactional and demographic marketing data, strategic insights, analytics, award-winning creative and robust digital and database marketing technologies to connect brands with consumers both online and offline, increasing engagement to generate measurable marketing outcomes. Founded in 1969, Epsilon works with over 2,000 global clients and employs over 3,500 associates in 37 offices worldwide. For more information, visit http://www.epsilon.com,...

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Tags: facebook

Native advertising is one of the industry’s hot topics right now,

Native advertising is one of the industry’s hot topics right now, so we’re introducing this three-part series to delve into the phenomenon from the perspective of a technology company and premium ad network (Martini Media), an agency (Morpheus Media), and a SaaS platform (Flite).

Two of the biggest trends in the industry today are content marketing and native advertising. Native advertising features content-based ads that blend seamlessly into the design of a site, so much so that they appear to be part of the site rather than a sponsored external element.

A defining characteristic of a native ad is that it is user-controlled. These ad units shouldn’t expand or play or do anything else until the user deliberately takes action to expand or play them. Most importantly, however, native ads should also feature custom content. A perfect example of this is work being done by The Atlantic (all tragic incidents aside), Funny or Die and Forbes.

Content marketing puts brands in the publisher’s seat, giving them the opportunity to publish original material to establish thought leadership, become more accessible and appealing to consumers, or retain current clients in their respective vertical. Success in content marketing has been simplified with the rapid growth of social media and push-button publishing. A perfect example of how effective and simple this can be is American Express’s Open Forum, a vibrant community of small business owners sharing ideas and consuming top-quality, American Express-created content.

The introduction of the IAB rising stars -- particularly the Portrait -- has made it possible to marry native advertising and content marketing into a visually appealing, yet powerful ad unit. These three-module units can feature various interactive elements, social media feeds, original content, HD videos store locators -- all cleanly integrated into the publisher’s site design.

The engagement rate on these ad units has been high -- frequently in the double-digits, compared to older, static units. But they really lend themselves to that level of engagement. Picture, for example, a luxury auto ad that featured a high-def tour of the interior -- a social module that showed how many of your friends “like” this car, and an interactive module that allowed you to schedule a test drive. That’s a lot for a single standard ad unit to accomplish.

For brands, these units provide the opportunity to publish the original content they have worked so diligently to create. Beyond just the TV commercials and beautiful magazine stills, brands can publish social content to their Portrait ads. Burberry, Kate Spade and other leading brands have created gorgeous content on YouTube and Instagram, and they have vibrant, active communities on Facebook and other networks.

They can display user generated content, as well as their own “home grown” materials via the ads, and invite interaction – which can occur within the ad unit. You can pin, follow, like, share, whatever – without leaving the page.  

These are the things that are happening in native advertising today. It’s more than just Facebook ads and Sponsored Tweets -- premium, high-end publishers are introducing their own brand of native, and it’s super-friendly to advertisers. The advantage to the publisher is that they now have the opportunity to offer a premium ad on their premium site, demanding a premium price. As an example, a top-tier publisher like Conde Nast can enjoy all the perks of native advertising; specifically, a beautiful ad for a well-known luxury car that blends naturally into its site design and doesn’t detract from or compete with editorial content. Another advantage: publishers can reduce clutter and offer just a few slots per page without suffering a hit to revenue.

These new native ads, marrying content from both publishers and advertisers, can be an across-the-board win, inviting engagement and interaction from consumers. But with new standards and practices come new challenges. The next installment in this series will examine the trend from an agency perspective, providing insight into why native is so big with luxury brands, and the challenges this introduces for their agencies.

Defining the Ad Product

Native ad products gained momentum with the growth of social media, where sponsored content was placed seamlessly next to a user’s tweets or status updates. If you’re a publisher developing native ads, consider what makes your site unique. This can mean pulling in your site’s own content alongside branded content.

For example, Buzzfeed offers a native product that allows a sponsor to display entertaining content in a similar way to how editorial content is shown. The signature buttons -- LOL, FAIL, OMG, CUTE, etc. -- allow users to participate with the native ad in the same way they engage with the site at large.

Another example is Forbes, which is known for having great lists. It’s common to find content like The Best Companies to Work For or Forbes List: Top 10 Billionaires. For native ads, Forbes can leverage this type of content right in an ad unit, pairing it with a brand’s related message.

When defining your native ad product, build it with metrics in mind so you can A/B test how your native ads are performing. For example, a leading health information Web site used Flite to create five different formats to identify what would resonate best with the audience. This ultimately resulted in highly compelling and effective native ad units.

The benefit of using an ad platform in this case is that you can easily test and swap out functionality without bringing in developers. If you want to see if ads with Facebook or Twitter resonate more with your audience, or if you should include a video instead, an ad platform will facilitate that kind of innovation. By testing and iterating, you can refine your ad product before going all in.

What Do You Need to Build Native Ads?

Many native ads are content-driven, so advertisers need to provide assets beyond their usual media kit. As advertisers adjust to being able to push content marketing into paid media, publishers should encourage them to pull from resources like their own Web sites and social media. With native ads, entertaining and informative content such as stories, videos, slide shows, social feeds and articles can find new distribution opportunities in paid media.

For example, The Atlantic ran a very successful native ad on our platform for a leading IT services provider. The ad featured informative articles and videos about how cloud computing can fuel effective business growth. As consumers enjoyed the content, they were also likely to explore cloud computing options from the advertiser.

What Are Some Constraints to Native Advertising?  
Native ads take forethought to get right. Here are a few constraints and how to overcome them.

• Constraints from template: There is typically more flexibility with rich media creative than there is for native ad creative, since native ads have to more closely match the publisher site aesthetic. While some advertisers may want to run the same ads they run in other contexts, the benefit of running native ads is to offer an organic, seamless experience to the site.

• Questions of scale and resources for building custom ads: Once you determine your ad product, how do you build ads quickly? Using a platform that streamlines production can allow publishers to assemble ads with efficiency, justifying the additional work with even more additional revenue.

• Selling a differentiated ad product: Since native ad formats tend to be unique and specialized, publishers will face the challenges traditionally associated with marketing and selling any differentiated ad product. New pricing, marketing materials, pitches, case studies and training may be required. As with any innovation, if done right, publishers will reap rewards from a successful product.

• How to tell if a content-driven ad is successful: Advertisers may be unaccustomed to looking beyond the click-through. By defining metrics that give insight into content-rich ads like time-on-unit, publishers can help advertisers realize the ROI of native advertising.

What Are the Technological Parameters?

One reason why native ads are successful is because they are consistent with a site’s aesthetic. The limits on creative are fundamental to their success. By offering a more integrated advertising opportunity -- one that flows with the content of a publisher’s site, instead of blaring against it -- native ads are achieving encouraging results.

As a publisher, your native ad process needs to be set up thoughtfully so that it’s easy to create ads with brands and agencies. There are many different tools involved in creating native ad products: HTML 5, Javascript, Flash, Omniture to track metrics, another tool to surface metrics -- not to mention rewriting code every time you want to adjust functionality for your ad. Using a collection of spot solutions and manual processes can be time-consuming and prone to errors. A platform solution can be crucial here by offering a simple way to create templates and drag-and-drop features as you iterate on your ad products. This can help to streamline the ad creation process significantly.

Ad products serve the customer, and the customer is constantly evolving. Even after you have defined and launched an ad product, you should continually refine it. Native ad units -- like all ad products -- don’t last forever, so see what users are engaging in to make improvements. Just as advertisers continually optimize their creative during a campaign, publishers should frequently review native ad performance and look for ways to optimize.

Read more: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/197056/ad-creation-native-style.html#ixzz2PxeItnr3

This is part one of a three-part series on native ads.

Read more: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/196395/native-content-a-powerful-advertising-combinati.html#ixzz2Pxdo1zde

Facebook Opens Up Ad Targeting to Minivan-Driving, Baby Food-Buying Homemakers. Adds third-party audience segments from Acxiom, Datalogix, Epsilon By Tim Peterson

http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/facebook-opens-ad-targeting-minivan-driving-baby-food-buying-homemakers-148500

Photo: Getty Images

There was a time when advertisers could only find an audience for their Facebook ads based on users' Facebook-submitted information like gender, age and whether they like Pages about cooking. But over the past year Facebook has been expanding the data that can be used for ad targeting to include non-Facebook information like the sites someone visits outside of Facebook, loyalty program memberships and, more recently, the types of products they buy in a brick-and-mortar store.

 

In February, Facebook announced partnerships with third-party data providers including Acxiom, Datalogix and Epsilon, to let advertisers target people on Facebook using those companies' compiled audience segments, such as home improvement buyers or affluent baby boomers. Initially only marketers who were customers of those data providers could cross-reference their audience segments with Facebook’s user base, but Facebook today rolled out the segments as Partner Categories available through its self-serve Power Editor ad creation tool and through its ad API partners. This allows U.S. advertisers to layer in the 500-plus new segments in addition to the standard Facebook ad targeting criteria.

Now advertisers can create ad-targeting parameters such as "home owners who are retired, own a Ford pick-up truck, buy over-the-counter allergy relief medication and take cruises." They can also target "dentists who live alone, own a BMW and buy big-and-tall clothes and diet foods." Or “people who live in a million-dollar home housing four people including a military veteran.” Or “mortgage borrowing homemakers who own a minivan and buy baby food.”

A caveat: creating a highly filtered Venn diagram such as the ones mentioned above would likely work against an advertiser because they'd be too specific and counterintuitive for brands attracted to Facebook because of its billion-user scale.

The use of third-party data for ad targeting is obviously valuable since many advertisers would otherwise have little idea how to reach Ford truck owners other than to canvass actual neighborhoods. However not all third-party data can be trusted. Just because someone clicks on MotorTrend.com doesn't mean they’re in the market for a car. Facebook has brought some transparency to Partner Categories, letting advertisers using the Power Editor tool to click and see how a segment was compiled.

For example, Epsilon's group of 8,312,900 people who work in a small office is based on addresses classified as a small office that are sourced through purchase transaction data and "compiled sources." Datalogix’s group of 12,665,900 people who are most likely to buy golf and tennis products is based on purchase data from "people who have historically spent heavily in golf clubs, golf and tennis apparel, shoes and tennis rackets" as sourced across 1,200 U.S. online and physical retailers.

Get Lost in Paris’ Metro System With This Gorgeous 3-D Station Map

• By Valentina Palladino

Traffic “heat maps” show which stations have the most congestion.
Image courtesy Metropolitain.io

Regular maps of Paris’ large, incredibly intricate subway system can get overwhelming to look at very fast, but a gorgeous, interactive website makes it much easier on your eyes by rendering those maps through stunning 3-D graphics and commuting stats.

The service, Metropolitain.io, wasn’t a commissioned project, nor was it a specific client request — it was the side project of French tech startup Dataveyes. Since the studio’s birth in 2010, it’s done a number of data-centric projects for companies like Google, BorderCloud and l’Express, but Metropolitain.io gave the team members a chance to experiment to find the best way to take even the coldest data and create an inviting, user-centric visualization. They worked on it in between their other jobs; having no set deadline gave them the flexibility and enthusiasm to play around with different visualization techniques like map distortions and 3-D effects.

Not only was Metropolitain.io different because it was on Dataveyes’ own time frame, its design process was also completely unique from the studio’s regular projects. For starters, they didn’t bother with wireframes or other preplanning — instead, they went straight to prototyping the site. Using traffic datasets provided by public RATP (Autonomous Operator of Parisian Transports) reports and the API of another French startup called Isokron that shows estimated travel times, the team plunged into figuring out how what the data could show the public about the accessibility of the Paris metro system, and the best way for them to visualize it.

According to Francois Xavier Fringant, one of the designers at Dataveyes, they spent a lot of time squeezing out as much information as possible from the data, and playing with the site’s interface modeling.

“The design phase enabled us to make that data come to life, make it usable, in a way that’s both engaging and detailed,” Fringant says. “We tried to find the right balance between aesthetics and relevance, to design a visualization that would serve our users’ purposes.”

Metropolitain.io shows all 16 lines of the Paris metro system, and you can choose to view all the lines together or only selected lines, and in 2-D or 3-D. Selecting the “Time View” option lets you see how many stations are accessible from a specific point at a certain departing time, for every five-minute interval. But the “Crowd View” is arguably the more interesting of the two, turning the grid into a blotchy heat map to show traffic stats for every area and station of the metro. Using the map with Crowd View in 3-D mode lets you appreciate all the visual complexities of the data and the design. Click and drag to see the map at different angles, showing the train lines almost hovering over canyons of brightly colored traffic mountains. Select a specific station to see the number of people that traveled through it in 2011, with a line graph comparing it to all the other stations.

Every stop on all 16 of Paris’ metro lines can be navigated in 2-D or 3-D.
Image courtesy Metropolitain.io

Dataveyes plans to update the site once the newest datasets are released to the public. The studio also has plans to test Metropolitain.io on large touchscreens in the near future, provided the hardware is available. They would like to eventually partner with city metro stations to have Metropolitain.io displayed on interactive screens to serve the needs of metro users, which isn’t too much of a stretch considering New York City’s initiative to place 90 touchscreen kiosks with interactive maps in subway stations. If that were to happen, Paris commuters would not only be able to see estimated travel times between destinations, but they could also see the amount of traffic at each station.

The first showing of Metropolitain.io on a big screen will be at Paris’ Futur en Seine Festival in June, where Dataveyes will be exhibiting it in a gallery along with a few other digital projects.

With all the plans to expand Metropolitain.io, however, none of them involve optimizing the site for mobile use. Currently the site isn’t compatible for cellphones or tablets, and Fringant says that was a conscious UX choice, to make sure the project didn’t lose touch with the inspiration at its core — the idea of the “connected city” and how data can shape the way we interact with and view the city spaces we use every day.

“It is meant to be an immersive, reflective but enjoyable experience, and we hope it gets people to rethink the way they see the metro map, which is such an essential component of their daily life,” Fringant says. “Data helps uncover actual meaning on our activities, our habits and our environments. Visualization can connect the dots, make you comprehend information that sometimes you wouldn’t even see from ground level.”