It’s easy to take a prominent stance against proposed “Do Not Track” legislation. Like many online marketers I don’t yearn for regulation of the industry, believing it will stunt growth and hamper innovation. However, I also believe that anti-tracking legislation will not destroy online advertising.
Despite continuing pressure by public advocacy groups and members of Congress I don’t expect the United States to adopt anti-tracking legislation or regulations for several years — if ever.
The history of success of competition and regulations against certain forms of marketing and communications is mixed. The U.S. Postal Service has been around for almost 240 years and yet it is adapting (albeit slowly) to Web-based competition. And best of luck to those who try to “unsubscribe” from receiving targeted catalogs and direct mail, despite Federal unsubscribe regulations.
The passage of regulation meant to curb online behavioral marketing will require market adjustments. We’re already seeing that on a small scale after Microsoftintroduced default DNT settings in the newest version of its Internet Explorer browser. Despite claims by some that anti-tracking legislation will mean the end of online advertising I wouldn’t start shuttering ad agency doors just yet.
After the dust around this debate settles, I predict government regulators will come to several sensible conclusions: (more…)
By Keith Trivitt | @KeithTrivitt | Director, Marketing and Communications
Welcome to The Friday Five, curated reads about marketing, advertising and digital media from the team at @MediaWhizLLC. Read previous Friday Five posts here.
What’s Premium in the Post Homepage Era? | Digiday Search was first to put a serious dent in the primacy of the homepage. Now, with social and mobile gaining steam, publishers are left without the big, splashy homepage premium ad placements.
The fact is, most publishers see half or more of their traffic come in through the side door, whether through search, social or other means. That means publishers need to create new premium placements in a world where “every page is a home page.”
Coupon Sites Prove Attractive for Retailers Doing Affiliate Marketing| Internet Retailer When it comes to affiliate marketing, coupon sites have proven far more valuable than content and comparison shopping sites for Bake Me a Wish, an online retailer of cookies, cakes and brownies, says says Joseph Dornoff, the merchant’s vice president of marketing and operations.
Why Big Bird Remains Powerfully — and Globally — Significant| Harvard Business Review Big Bird has had a big presence in the collective conversation lately, thanks to mentions in the first two presidential debates. The outpouring of support for the giant yellow puppet that followed the first debate is a testament to his and Sesame Street’s continued relevance in people’s lives. Sesame Street, in fact, is a great case study of a brand that has managed to remain powerful over decades and across cultures.
Tweets Spawn Ad Campaigns| The Wall Street Journal Consumers’ tweets are starting to influence and find their way into brands’ traditional, online and TV ad campaigns. What impact will that have on how brands engage with consumers online and the efforts they take to develop digital consumer advocates via social media?
What Red Bull Can Teach Content Marketing | Digiday The marketing world woke up recently with Red Bull envy. At a time when brands talk of being publishers, Red Bull showed how this can be done on a grand scale: enabling Felix Baumgartner to complete a historic (and awfully cool) skydive from “the edge of space.” Red Bull’s bold sponsorship of Baumgartner’s historic jump shows a glimmer of the future of brand content marketing.
By Keith Trivitt | @KeithTrivitt | Director, Marketing and Communications
Welcome to The Friday Five, curated reads about marketing, advertising and digital media from the team at@MediaWhizLLC. Read previous Friday Five posts here.
Pinterest Fosters Unique Shopping Behaviors | eMarketer A new eMarketer report delves into the retail activity spurred by the latest social network to make headlines — Pinterest. The visually focused, aspirational site has grown tremendously, and it offers a lot of promise for retailers, assuming they can get users to link images with product offerings and purchases.
It’s easy to forget that Twitter isn’t a one-size-fits-all communications channel. What works for one brand isn’t necessarily the right strategy for another. That observation may seem obvious but tends to get lost amidst the various case studies of success that frequently capture marketers’ attention.
Every brand is distinctive. Its digital and social media marketing strategy needs to be customized in a way that matches its unique marketing needs and customer peculiarities.
I bring this up after reading a post in All Twitter last week by Percolate Brand Strategist Kunur Patel in which she advocates that brands tweet more often in order to acquire “millions of followers.” She uses @WholeFoods and its three-million-plus Twitter followers and multiple humorous and interesting tweets each day as a brand exemplifying that strategy.
Any brand can acquire thousands, if not millions of followers. But unless that effort fits within the ethos of the brand it has little value to its overall marketing strategy.
Tweeting all day for a brand like Whole Foods makes sense but it is not a holistic social media marketing strategy. Most brands do not benefit from tweeting that often. (more…)
By Keith Trivitt | @KeithTrivitt | Director, Marketing and Communications
Welcome to The Friday Five, curated reads about marketing, advertising and digital media from the team at@MediaWhizLLC. Read previous Friday Five posts here.
Everyone and their brother talks about “mobile first” being the brand and marketing strategy of the future. But what does it really mean, if anything? Publishers and marketers aren’t cutting back their investment in desktop experiences. Consumers’ love for TV remains strong and marketers are happy to oblige that love with lots of ads. As Digiday’s Jack Marshall reports, “mobile first” is little more than a marketing gimmick.
As the online marketing industry evolves, more money is entering thespace, leading to greater regulatory and consumer scrutiny. Digital marketing agencies and brand marketers need to be aware of the various legal and regulatory restrictions explicit in the industry, as well as those implicit guidelines that ensure online marketing’s integrity and value.
Consumers are finally adopting mobile payment systems and mobile wallets — if slowly. But what if they need something more: a seamless experience that takes their mobile wallet to their PC and back again?
Twitter: Huge Mobile Use Makes Us Ideal For Real-Time Marketing | CNET Twitter president of revenue Adam Bain and sales marketing chief Shane Steele shared statistics and anecdotes demonstrating that the service is an ideal place for brands to achieve better and more efficient advertising and marketing results. (more…)
MediaWhiz’s leaders are continually sought after as resources for opinions, advice and expertise, based on our deep understanding of industry trends, the needs of our customers and the broader marketplace in which we operate.
For the week of Oct. 1-5, 2012, MediaWhiz experts were quoted or featured on a variety of digital media news and trends, including debunking the myth that proposed Do Not Track legislation will kill online advertising and what Bruce Springsteen can teach marketers about success brand marketing in the digital age. | Read previous MediaWhiz In the News posts.
Reality check: The proposed Do Not Track legislation won’t kill online advertising. It may hamper innovation and cause financial hardship for businesses that thrive on online consumer-data tracking, but it won’t kill a $31 billion industry.
Not all see it this way, of course. 33Across CMO Allie Kline recently called on marketers to “fight [the] anti-tracking forces.” It’s a call to action growing with increasing alarm in the digital media and online publishing industries.
That argument, which my MediaWhiz colleagues and I respect, comes about 10 years too late. Some form of anti-tracking legislation is inevitable given the industry’s size and influence. How marketers, publishers and advertisers respond to this legislation will determine whether the industry retains its sizable influence on consumers’ purchasing habits. Read more … (more…)
MediaWhiz and its sister agency, Ryan Partnership, co-hosted a Social Media Week Chicago panel Sept. 28, 2012. The panel, titled, “What the Social Media Hype Cycle Means for Brands,” examined how the Social Media Hype Cycle impacts brand marketing, social media and social advertising.
The Social Media Hype Cycle is a term and theory Steve Goldner, senior director of social media at MediaWhiz and Ryan Partnership, developed to help explain the rise and fall of social media channels and networks and their business value to brands.
Welcome to The Friday Five, curated reads about marketing, advertising and digital media from the team at@MediaWhizLLC. Read previous Friday Five posts here.
It’s no secret that there are a lot of bad mobile ads out there. From poor creative to brands not realizing that a consumers’ tiny smartphone screen isn’t the best place to use detailed copy in an ad, the number of bad mobile ads seems outweigh the good ones. But as this Wall Street Journal article examines, those characteristics are starting to change. Marketers are learning more about how to work around the “fat finger effect” that afflicts smartphone users. And they are also tailoring their mobile ads specifically for users of different smartphones, rather than just scaling them to size.
Despite prognostications from naysayers suggesting otherwise, budgets for social media marketing are on the rise, with both B2B and B2C marketers proving they have generated leads and sales from their social outreach, according to eMarketer.
“CEOs should accept that social media is part of their job description.” That’s the prognosis of this Wall Street Journal analysis of Twitter use by Fortune 500 CEOs. Despite having been around for more than five years, some CEOs still don’t see the value of Twitter or are leery of using the social network. But in an era when consumers expect transparency from brands and their executives, those fears may be misplaced and potentially damaging to a company’s bottom line, reports The Wall Street Journal. (more…)
Steve Goldner, senior director of social media marketing at MediaWhiz and Ryan Partnership, sat down with me earlier this week to give a preview of the panel. Here’s what he had to say:
Welcome to The Friday Five, curated reads about marketing, advertising and digital media from the team at@MediaWhizLLC. Read previous Friday Five posts here.
With the mass of customer insight available to brands adding another weapon to a chief marketer’s arsenal, Marketing Week asks whether their job titles should reflect this. If you believe the surveys, the pressure to improve the return on the money invested in campaigns has combined with an explosion of data to squeeze creativity from the role of chief marketing officer and turn it into “chief data and marketing officer.”
Many brands, marketers and industry pundits contend that the great battle in social media is over mobile. The chant from tech giants, New York Times technology columnist Nick Bilton writes, is “mobile, mobile, mobile.” But there’s a greater evolutionary force at play: photos. From Facebook’s revamped Newsfeed that places an emphasis on photos to Twitter now commandeering users’ photo sharing via its own proprietary photo app, the battle isn’t just for the mobile Internet. The real battle is for photos on the entire Internet. (more…)
