This week, we announced that Datran Media’s StormPost team and client, Oversee.net, won the DPAC award for Best Email Marketing Campaign for the LowFares.com Travel Portal campaign. We love smart, creative clients like Oversee.net. Read this to find out how we worked together to increase campaign results by over 200%.
Jan 05
This morning, Specific Media announced deployment of the Advertising Option Icon, a tool that empowers consumers to make informed choices about online privacy while working to enrich their Internet experience. The media advisory mentioned that Datran Media’s PreferenceCentral is powering deployment of the Icon. PreferenceCentral is the only platform that enables compliance with the self-regulatory principles of Online Behavioral Advertising (OBA) while providing consumers with choice over brands, instead of just ad networks. On Twitter? Follow @prefcentral to stay tuned.
Also, in NYC on January 20th? Register to attend the MediaBistro Digital Privacy Forum at the New Yorker Hotel and engage with us in person. PreferenceCentral is sponsoring the event. Excitingly, Future of Privacy Forum Director Jules Polonetsky will join me at the forum for a lively discussion with the audience that we are calling, Digital Privacy – Back to the Future: What Brand Marketers Should Know About Global Technology, Law and Legislation.
Join us to get up to speed on what should be doing now and tomorrow to align your advertising strategies and campaigns with the factors that will largely determine if your spend will help your company succeed or put it at great risk.
Dec 22
Across digital advertising, the last quarter of the year has been particularly eventful. With so much going on, it’s easy for things to slip by unnoticed. If you haven’t had a chance to step away from your own day-to-day responsibilities, here’s a quick recap.
1. As of this month, Randall Rothenberg is stepping down from his role as president of the Interactive Advertising Bureau and joining Time, Inc to serve as its chief digital officer. Congrats, R2!
2. It’s the year of social. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg was named Time magazine’s Person of the Year. Do you agree with the choice?
3. In other social media news, Twitter secured $200 million in funding.
4. Pondering social? So too is Patrick Vogt, our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. Read his recent Forbes article on Finding the Sweet Spot of Social Media and Multichannel Marketing.
5. What are brands and publishers like yours doing across email, social and mobile? The answer is a lot. Join us at the Direct Marketing Association/Email Experience Council’s 2011 Email Evolution Conference in February for a deep dive alongside your expert peers.
6. Thinking about audience measurement as it relates to the marketing efforts of the brand(s) you steward? You are not the only one. Both the American Association of Advertising Agencies (4A’s) and the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) are keenly focused on this topic and will speak to it at their annual events in 2011. Helping the 4A’s educate agencies at their annual event in Austin this March will be Scott Knoll, President of Datran Media’s Aperture measurement and targeting platform business. Don’t miss it.
7. In client news, congratulations to Lowfares.com, an Oversee.net business and our StormPost team, the recipients of this year’s DPAC Award for best email marketing campaign. The segmented campaign that earned the award is a true winner.
8. What other digital campaigns led the way? Check out the IAB MIXX winners. You will not be disappointed. After my second tenure judging, I remain very impressed with what brands like HBO, Unilever and Kraft are doing these days. They are setting a very high bar.
9. How to better empower and serve consumers is the “new black” topic across Capitol Hill, Madison Avenue and consumer advocacy circles. What does it all mean? For starters, it’s a good thing. Consumers will soon have more say around what advertisements they engage with and how. Everybody wins in this scenario. Want to learn more?
- PreferenceCentral’s Twitter 40 to Follow is a good, low pressure place to start.
- The Center for Democracy and Technology and Privacy Chat also conduct a weekly twitter session that attracts hundreds of individuals engaged in the dialog. To participate, search for #privchat each Tuesday at noon ET!
10. Holiday Reading List
- Fast Company’s Future of Advertising article from their November issue is a must read.
- Does privacy need to be redefined? Last week’s Privacy Chat posed this question, based on a recent New York Times’ article invoking an 1890 description of privacy as ‘the right to be let alone.’ Does this still ring true?”
Dec 13
Chief Privacy Officer Steven Vine took the stage at Digiday Target in Los Angeles this morning. The focus? Privacy and consumer empowerment. During the panel, Vine and experts from TRUSTe, SSP Blue and Better Advertising educated an audience thick with digital marketing stakeholders on what they need to know to:
1) Further empower and earn more trust from the consumers they strive to impress when marketing across channels and around the world.
2) Comply with current Online Behavioral Advertising (OBA) self-regulatory principles.
3) Better understand the Do-Not-Track debate sparked by the recent FTC privacy report.
4) Determine how the coalition of organizations and solution providers aligned as the Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA) can provide support.
5) Prepare for future changes across the intersection of business, technology and law.
If you are interested in accessing this content, watch this presentation on streaming video. Special thanks to Marissa Gluck, Founder & Managing Partner, Radar Research. Ms. Gluck did a fabulous job making sure the audience got more than they expected during such a short time frame.
Nov 18
Kodak’s Social Media Guru today announced a cool new promo featuring Rihanna. Now thru Nov 29 when shoppers buy a Kodak M590 camera on Amazon, they get Rihanna’s new album for FREE! http://kodak.ly/cKHoZu
Nov 05
For almost a decade the advertising industry has signaled the death of email. From CAN-SPAM laws earlier in the decade to the growing mainstream penetration of social media in recent years, everyone has counted email down for the count. But like Hulkamania in the 80’s, email just can’t be beat.
Email marketing is routinely cited for delivering strong results for a modest investment. In Datran Media’s 4th annual marketing survey, responders overwhelmingly selected email as the strongest performing channel, with search coming in a distant second. And while social media can now lay claim to the most time-consuming internet activity, email still remains the most active activity online.
According to a new report from TNS and reported in eMarketer, “users also are still significantly more likely to send and receive email messages on a daily basis than they are to do any other activity.” Not too bad for a channel that was supposed to be extinct.
Nov 02
According to a study of 100 news enthusiasts by the Online Publisher Association, 96% of the viewers noticed ads on a given webpage; 90% noticed the ads within the first 10 seconds. On average, the viewers fixed their full attention on the ads 15 separate times while on the webpage. In fact, ads on leading online news sites get as much of an emotional reaction from viewers as the news itself. Maybe that’s just the state of the news in today’s society and how desensitized we’ve become to all of it. Either way, it’s good news for advertisers.
The more attention that an ad receives, the higher the ROI should be for the advertiser. To have 15 individual views in one page visit means that the audience acknowledges the ad and also feels emotional connected. Online ads have the potential to increase the likelihood of an immediate or future sale because consumers do not feel that these ads are intrusive to their online browsing. The ads become a part of the experience which creates an optimal channel for an advertiser to connect with the audience.
Oct 20
There is no question that mobile marketing is a hot topic right now- especially now that it has finally hit mainstream in the United States. With 91% of Americans using mobile phones, according to the latest CTIA’s semi-annual US Wireless industry survey, the mobile market has significant scale and reach across the masses. And marketers, publishers, and agencies are starting to take notice.
According to US ad spending estimates by eMarketer, US mobile ad spending will be up 79% to reach $743 million, eMarketer forecasts. That growth will slow somewhat to still-dramatic double-digit rates as spending hits over $1.1 billion in 2011 and more than $2.5 billion by 2014.
In recent years, several key changes affected the market, providing businesses with the opportunity to launch a mobile marketing strategy. Those changes include the growing US and global mobile markets, specifically the increased adoption of smartphones. New solutions for delivering and receiving marketing messages across carriers has also made it easier for customers to read and share messages. What’s more, the price of data and text messaging plans has made consumers less sensitive to the cost of sending and receiving mobile communications.
Various forms of mobile marketing exist, including: SMS, MMS, Mobile Web, Apps, Mobile Ads, MMS, as well as other merging location based technologies. Out of all mobile communication channels, SMS is the most widely adopted consumer channel and the easiest to deploy. SMS is the largest mobile ad format, with spending of $327 million estimated for 2010 according to eMarkter.
Oct 11
Datran Media’s Chris Gaeblar wax poetic on the fine art of targeting…
My mother-in-law has a great expression. In the family we call it, “updating your prior.” What it means is that you always have to remember to update your prior view of things, because otherwise you are making false assumptions based on outdated information.
As marketers we often fall into the trap of neglecting to “update our prior.” We pick a demographic and a target profile, and we stick with it. This is natural byproduct of having studied and chased after a singular customer segment for many years. Over time, however, customer needs may have changed, and new prospects may have emerged unnoticed. Examples of this tendency include industries like automotive and electronics. In these markets brands have been targeting men forever, not realizing that the wife in the family may be the primary decision-makers for household purchase decisions. Unfortunately, a narrow focus on demographics can cause marketers to miss critical shifts in their audience profiles.
A recent study by Microsoft confirms this theory. The study shows that premium brands have been missing up to 50% of their best audience by relying too heavily on targeting only to the affluent. Purchase behavior turned out to be a more important indicator than affluence. In fact, 43% of online customers in Europe are premium buyers, yet this group is not affluent by any traditional measure.
So what are some of the other reasons marketers may be missing their targets?
1. Customers Are a Moving Target
Changing habits and overlapping interests and hobbies can sometimes be hard to correlate with buying behavior. While there is a preponderance of information available on the Web, many data providers offer a limited view of the user. With the right audience measurement tools, however, marketers can put the pieces together to create a coherent picture. A story in Ad Exchanger describes a marketer targeting home-based business users with children. In order to reach this demographic, he had to combine data for micro-business users, home-based users, and households with children from three separate data providers. Scaling audiences can be particularly difficult without the ability to normalize and aggregate audience profiles in one place. Using web-based tools to measure who is engaging with your messaging and who is responding to your offers will give you a better view of a larger potential customer pool.
2. Aiming at the Wrong Target
Products are often delivered to market with preconceived expectations about who the audience will be. When David Roberts, the CEO of PopCap launched a game called Bejeweled on Facebook, he fully expected the game to appeal to a young male audience. Instead, he was astounded to learn that 70% of the game players were women. The social aspect of the game was an attraction for young mothers who were stuck at home, and wanted to play and interact with friends and family. I’m not sure why anyone thought a game called Bejeweled would be a magnet for young males, but never mind. The company had to integrate this new view of its customers into its marketing strategy.
3. The Unintended Target
Toyota Scion was a car designed specifically to appeal to a youth segment with a focus on customizable features and a low price. The original target was young people, 20-25 years old, and Scion avoided the Toyota brand name because they felt it was too ‘old’. Toyota soon discovered that the Scion appealed simultaneously to both millennial upstarts and empty-nest boomers. Auto makers now are looking to replicate this model and design more Twin Peaks Cars. That is, cars that have two peaks in a line graph of the age distribution of the buyers.
So how can brands best identify and consistently maintain the right targeting?
The key to developing good market targets is to be clear on your segmentation strategy, and then market specifically to those targets. But don’t fall in love with a target profile, be flexible and ready to make changes based on updated data. Ideally, marketers should measure customers based on three yardsticks, behavioral, transactional, and demographic. Behavioral marketing allows brands to identify their highest value segments. Transactional data allows marketers to revisit their current customer profile to see if anything has changed. Demographic data makes it easy for brands to understand their audience and identify customers.
Marketers need to learn how to optimize marketing based on business intelligence gathered during the campaign. The real-time technology platforms that enable audience measurement and campaign management provide an advantage to the marketer. Those platforms, coupled with smart targeting techniques, create a new opportunity for greater scale and efficiency in online marketing. Marketers can discover new customers by using audience measurement that provides more insight into those responding to your message. In other words, sometimes you just need to update your prior.
Oct 05
If you’re planning to be on San Francisco for the DMA Conference, be sure to attend the essential session for email marketers – the email marketing workshop and certification program, sponsored by the Email Experience Council. This exciting and informative two-day workshop and certification program provides marketers with the education, best practices, strategies, and techniques they need to ensure that their email marketing programs achieve maximum success and are appropriately integrated into the multi-channel marketing mix today’s companies depend on for increased revenue and brand equity.
The workshop will be led by Datran Media’s brightest email marketing stars, Jason Oates and Todd Boullion, as well as other industry veterans from ReturnPath, Exact Target, and Eloqua . They will address a variety of topics ranging from email monetization to email compliance. Each workshop module breaks down into several parts and includes case studies and strategies that will help you achieve your marketing goals. Attendees that complete the two day workshop will receive a certificate of completion.
If you want to get a head start on any of the topics, you know, just to be sure you ace the certification, check out our whitepaper and webinar library that offers tips on all the topics convered during DMA.
For more information, visit the DMA Conference Web site. We hope to see you in San Francisco!
