Looking Forward and Back

So, in the last 8 years how much has really changed in your life?

Well, first of all if you had a baby who was born in 2005, that tiny little person is now in second grade and challenging your patience and your parenting skills daily. If you were just walking down the aisle, you are one year beyond your seven year itch. Congratulations if you won the bets others placed at your wedding! If you were just going to medical school, you are exhausted but finished and now facing years of loan payback. 

I was awestruck when I saw this picture on NBC's blog. I've blown it up so you can see it better despite its resolution challenges. I know that research supports the onslaught of the concentration of mobile technology use in the world, but this picture spoke a thousand words to me.

Did you know:

• More than half of U.S. mobile ad spending is local.
• Google’s gross annual revenue from mobile advertising is over US$2.5 billion per year. 
• Consumer reaction to mobile ads The MMA and Lightspeed Research (October 2010), in UK, France and Germany, 45 percent of consumers (especially younger people) noticed mobile advertising and of these, 29 percent responded to it. Of those that responded to the ads, the following went on to make a purchase: Germany 49 percent; UK 47 percent; and France 22 percent.Time sensitive special offers or discounts (especially coupons) were most likely to lead to purchase.
• People were most likely to purchase  content such as apps, music and games.



NBC News writes of its picture comparison of St. Peter's Square,
 "What a difference eight years makes."

Why your business needs a mobile-friendly site

Of those viewers in the US who react to seeing a mobile ad:
42 percent click on the mobile ad; 
35 percent visit the advertiser’s site; 
32 percent search for more information on their phone; 
49 percent make a purchase and 
27 percent call the business.
71 percent of smartphone users that see TV, press or online ad, do a mobile search for more information. (Source: US Consumer Mobile Movement survey April 2011)

Yet, surprisingly, despite  these conclusive findings, 79 percent of large online advertisers still do not have a mobile optimized site. (Source: Google/Kelsey 2010)

Want more proof that you should include mobile technology and an optimized mobile strategy in your marketing plans?

U.S. mobile ad spending will grow from US$790 million in 2010 to $4 billion in 2015. Local ad spend will grow from US $404 million to $2.8 billion.

• This makes locally targeted mobile ads 51 percent of overall U.S. mobile ad spending, growing to 70 percent by 2015.
• Mobile local advertising includes ads that target users in specific locations or contain location-specific calls to action. (Source: BIA/Kelsey June 2011)

Mobile local search volume is expected to surpass desktop local search for the first time in 2015, but advertisers will continue to invest more in desktop local search.

• In 2011 mobile users performed 19.7 billion local search queries compared with desktop users 54.9 billion local search queries. In 2015 there will be 85.9 billion mobile local search queries, compared with 84.0 billion queries. In 2011 mobile local search revenues were US$400 million, rising to $3.2 billion in 2016. During the same period, desktop local search revenues will grow from $5.7 billion to $10.2 billion.

 “While mobile local search volume will exceed its desktop equivalent, ad dollars will remain lower, because advertisers aren’t yet keeping pace with the growth of mobile local ad inventory, but we expect that to evolve.” (Source: BIA/Kelsey April 2012)

US expenditure on mobile advertising and marketing is estimated to be US$416 million in 2009; $743 million in 2010 and will be $1,102 in 2011. In 2010 mobile ad formats were dominated by messaging ($327 million), but display ($202 million) and search ($185 million) will catch up in 2012. Video lags at ($28 million). (Source: emarketer.com (October 2010)

These are some of the most credible sources in the industry! Apart from that, numbers don't lie. Expectation has been realized and if you haven't witnessed it first hand, scroll up again and look at that picture. Mobile technology is a venue where your brand can make an impression on global or local markets of all shapes and sizes. Seize the moment. Don't wait another eight years to enter the future now.

Algorithms Don't Feel, People Do

Reprinted from the Harvard Business Review Blog

Alan Schulman is Vice President, Chief Creative Officer of SapientNitro, NY.

 |  March 14, 2013

 There's a reason why creative people in advertising get out of bed in the morning. It's about making someone feel something — an emotion — in order to get them to act later. As we ponder a future of advertising bathed in delivering customized messages to each person, in their precise place on their every device at precisely the right moment, a word of caution: the medium is not the message. The message is still the message. Which means advertising is still very much about the brand messaging business, not just the reaching the consumer on any device business.

As a 30-year advertising practitioner, and a Chief Creative Officer of North America's now largest digital agency, I'm truly amazed at the sophistication of the technologies and platforms for delivering ads to virtually every device, from the smallest hand held screen to Walgreen's massive canvas in Times Square.
Vast amounts of Silicon Valley capital have accelerated our ability to deliver behaviorally targeted messages and videos that follow you from destination to destination and device to device. Publishers have even begun offering "in app" custom ad units specifically designed to match consumers' touchscreen desires. As an industry, we have an amazing set of providers and tools at our disposal that connects the consumer with the brand.

But as any smart advertising person will tell you, the creative message itself plays at least half the role in determining the effectiveness of any advertising component. It's the creative that will always tell an intriguing story, involve and hopefully, leave you inspired to act. This balance between medium and message has largely been lost, as we seem more seduced by the algorithms — the containers and software solutions for delivering messages to devices — than the evolution or effectiveness of them.

We are still very much in the ideas business. Despite how much more sophisticated the algorithms get at search, contextual and behavioral ad serving, advertising still has to move you. And that comes down to the kind of creative that makes you feel an emotion... not just "think" or push you into "lower funnel" activation as many marketers are so anxious to do.

This means drawing you in, getting you involved, and making you react emotionally, which is just as important on a hand-held device as it is in a 30-second TV spot. Creatively, this has been the challenge for the web banner, the video pre-roll, and even the next in-app-native touch-screen rich-media ad. These units may drive our impression-based ad-supported model, but they've yet to adequately prove the ability to make the consumer feel.

This emotional requisite often referred to as the "The Big Ideal" or "Higher Order Benefit" was once the holy grail of real advertising currency. These days, it seems emotional ideas have been replaced by sophisticated algorithms that can deliver near-real-time metrics and drive dynamic optimization of creative ad messages. These algorithms allow us to churn out countless versions of copy and banner executions for one campaign — changing layouts on the fly and cramming the call to action into an ad from beginning to end — in many cases before we've even gotten the consumer's attention.

Is this the future of advertising we are destined to produce? Turning the craft of brand storytelling into algorithm-driven copy factories?

The task we face as advertising practitioners is how to combine our efforts with media brethren to create seamless brand experiences and cascade them through new technologies and media platforms. In doing so, we serve a more involved, emotional system of messages on behalf of brands to the right people over time.
We have the technology. We have the talent. We have the ability to redefine the story to make one feel. We just need to remember that the medium isn't the message and no matter how seduced we are by the science of advertising, we must remember that algorithms don't feel, people do.

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Drop us a note today to discuss how we can help you realize your marketing goals online and offline.

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What is a Human Interest Story?

An Excerpt from Be the News: A Guide to Going Viral With Your Human Interest Story

Many news stories are focused on reporting the facts, especially those facts which involve money, sex, drugs or rock and roll. You might find this gets both boring and depressing after a while unless you have specific interest in the details.

While we might have a lot of interest in the election results, a cure for cancer, a food recall, or what tomorrow’s temperature will be in your fair city, news media may want to add local flavor or want to put a “face” on the news by covering a story or topic more in depth.  This is sometimes referred to as the story-behind-the-story, the “better half” of a story, or the sidebar.

The human interest story may look at a news item in a more personal, emotional way. This is accomplished by pressing the flesh with people who have been directly affected by it or creating a report on one or several people facing challenges that it may have uncovered. The mission of covering these stories is to grab us by our emotional shirt collars and make us think and form an opinion.

It’s rare to see a nightly newscast or a morning newspaper without at least one human interest story. Most have a standard location for them, in broadcast, it is often the last story told before signoff. 

A newspaper might be covering post-hurricane financial losses and have an article that deals with statistics regarding them. To push past the grind, they might have a sidebar article on a few people in the town that is rebuilding.  The main topic is the hurricane, but the underlying emotional piece is how it affected people, like you and me. It gives a whole new paradigm to understanding the losses and puts them in a feeling perspective – beyond the facts.

In contrast to a regular and objective news story, the rules of journalism are bit looser, dare I say, even slightly more subjective with human interest topics. In some cases the story is so intense that the reporter barely needs more than the facts as they are reported. Other times, the story needs to be reigned in. A slant is sometimes created and then the job of the human interest story is to add perspective rather than the opposite happening.  

If yours is a human interest story, it doesn’t have to be deeply stirring and emotional, just on-topic or perhaps more for light laughs (if that falls within your goal for going wide with it to begin with). This is especially true when news venues are leading with gory, crime laden flavored journalism.  Stories that meet neither of those end goals can make it into the news just as a diversion to the hard stuff to make it more palatable to the viewer. If the lighter material wasn’t there, readers and viewers would sooner turn the page or the channel to avoid the ugly news.

Great Tools to Track Your Footprints on the Internet

Excerpt from Author Lori Gertz's Be the News: A Guide to Going Viral With Your Human Interest Story

Are there good tools on the web for me to track mentions of my name, my company's brand, topics or subjects that I'm invested in? The following are just a few of the tools you can use to keep track of your imprint on the web.

 

Social Mention: Mentions of your Name on the Social Web
A great tool for searching the social Web, Social Mention offers a quick glance at mentions of your name on the Web. Just enter your name and switch between blogs, microblogs, bookmarks, comments, events, images, news or all of them at once. An RSS feed is available.

Pipl: Searching the Invisible Web
Pipl claims to search the Web to find documents, blog entries, photos, publicly available information that other search engines don't serve up. It's a great, fast search engine that I like; the only disadvantage is it offers no RSS feed.

Monitter: Tracking Twitter
Monitter is one of the coolest looking monitoring tools for Twitter and one of the most useful. Although most people are using Twitter's own search tool for search and alerts on Twitter, Monitter offers a little bit more. Giving you the option to search for three different keywords at once, Monitter is great if you want to keep your eye out for mentions of your name, your username and your company all at the same time. It also offers an RSS feed. Monitter also allows you to narrow the search to a particular geographic location, allowing you to find out what’s going on in a particular area of the world.

BoardTracker: The Ultimate Search Tool for Forums
BoardTracker is a forum search engine, message tracking and instant alert system offering relevant results quickly. It’s a great search tool for forums and message boards.

Google Alerts: The Big G
I couldn't end this post without mentioning Google Alerts, although likely most of you are familiar with it outside of what I’ve written here in this book. Although Microsoft and Yahoo have alert tools, I find that Google's offering beats them hands down. It offers e-mail and RSS alerts for any set of keywords including your name.

 

How to Create Your Own Media List

This resource page is an excerpt from Be the News: A Guide to Going Viral With Your Human Interest Story, a highly reviewed Amazon Bestseller! 5 Stars!!!! Buy Your Copy By Clicking Here!

1. Decide which media outlets you want to target. You probably wouldn't pitch a story about senior citizens to an alternative rock radio station. Choose the media that will have an interest in your story.

2. Go to the web site for each media outlet. Most have a "Contact Us" page, but do not send your story idea to a general contact email address.

3. Look for an editor, producer or reporter and find their email address. Often, you will find it on a profile page for the person, or on a page with a story they did. Tip: You may have greater success contacting an editor or producer than a reporter.

4. If you can't find an email address for a specific person, try using the organization's default email structure. Most companies use a standard format for employees at their company email addresses. For example, they might be first.last@media.com, or firstlast@media.com or firstinitallast@media.com. If you want to reach reporter Jim Smith, but can't find his email address, see what the structure is for other employees there. Then, use that structure for Jim. If the addresses you found were first.last@media.com, try jim.smith@media.com.

5. Consider buying a list of media contacts. There are sources where you can buy a list of media email addresses and other contact information. If you want to reach a lot of media outlets, or can't find contacts for the ones you want, buying a list might be the best way to go.

Good Tips to Remember

·         Keep your pitches short and to the point. Never deluge your contact.

·         Put all information in the body of an email. Never use attachments.

·         Never spam media outlets. Send personal pitches to each contact.