Welcome to The Friday Five, curated reads about marketing, advertising and digital media from the team at @MediaWhizLLC. Read previous Friday Five posts here. 

The New Algorithm of Web Marketing | The New York Times
In digital advertising, that formula is being increasingly tested by fast-paced, algorithmic bidding systems that target individual consumers rather than the aggregate audience publishers serve up. In the world of “programmatic buying” technologies, context matters less than tracking those consumers wherever they go.

The Original Social Networker? Your Insurance Agent | Advertising Age
Here’s an interesting thought: your insurance agent may be the most natural social networker you know. Why not? As this Advertising Age op-ed notes, insurance agents were educating clients, investing in long-term relationships and growing their businesses through word-of-mouth referrals long before social, mobile and digital technologies existed.

Online Marketing At The Crossroads Of Nature And Nurture | CMO.com
I’m sure you have been a party to animated debates about nature vs. nurture in the context of psychology. But how about as it relates to customer behavior and marketing? Nature, as I understand it, is the behavior that occurs without coaching. Nurture equates to behaviors that are learned. As marketers, our work falls somewhere between these two–understanding natural shifts in consumer behavior and shaping behaviors to achieve our end goal: engaging and selling to consumers.

Facebook To Favor “Engaging” Comments | Mashable
In an effort to increase user engagement, Facebook is testing a new comments format on brand and subscriber pages, which highlights comments by popularity. “We are testing a new format for comments on Page posts,” Facebook said in a statement to Mashable. “As part of this test, the most engaging comments appear higher up. You will also be able to reply to individual comments as well as the original post.”

Ads Disguised as Content Mislead, Annoy | eMarketer
Content marketing is a hot topic among both business-to-consumer and business-to-business marketers, who are using it to generate brand awareness, create an impression of industry thought leadership and engender loyalty among current and future customers. But with the fluid nature of online ad formats and tactics, along with the ever-present problem of bad actors hoping for unearned clicks, some consumers may start pushing back at the blurry line between advertising and “real” content.

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Welcome to The Friday Five, curated reads about marketing, advertising and digital media from the team at @MediaWhizLLC. Read previous Friday Five posts here. 

Google Casts a Big Shadow on Smaller Web Sites | The New York Times
This article in The New York Times caused quite a bit of consternation among digital marketers. It reports that for many small businesses and websites that depend on their ranking in search results, Google’s secret — and frequently fluctuating — search algorithm can evoke a complex blend of admiration and fear.

In Sandy’s Wake: The Cost to Adland | Advertising Age
The effects of Hurricane Sandy will reverberate for weeks as marketers and agencies across more than a dozen states tally storm-related losses and make up for lost business days.

Is mobile-first becoming a cliché? | Mobile Marketer
Mobile-first is becoming a popular phrase that marketers have been using over the past few months. However, few have truly taken the key steps needed, and continue to see the medium as a great add-on instead of necessity.

Infographic: Purchases with a purpose | Direct Marketing News
More millennials are sticking it to the brand and favoring companies with strong environmental and ethical practices. According to The Cassandra Good Guide by The Intelligence Group, 45% of men and women between 14-to-34 years old claim that brands will need to incorporate socially and environmentally conscious practices to flourish in the future.

Social Gifting Platforms Aim to Make Gift-Giving Casual | Advertising Age
Marketers are still largely unconvinced how much social platforms (aside from Pinterest) can drive e-commerce, but now a Swedish startup and Facebook itself are trying to translate the instinct that moves people to post birthday greetings on their high school friends’ walls into the urge to buy them something.

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The post The Friday Five: Google Casts a Big Shadow on Small Businesses appeared first on MediaWhiz.

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.

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The post The Friday Five: Premium Display Advertising Under Threat appeared first on MediaWhiz.

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.

Mobile Payments Still Tiny, Set to Explode in Next Four Years | Advertising Age
The hype surrounding mobile payments seemingly knows no bounds. But the reality of consumer adoption of the emerging payments platform hasn’t quite caught up to the excitement, as our Daryl Colwell has noted before. Now, however, there is new research to suggest that mobile payments may finally be living up to their lofty hype as the ultimate bricks-and-mortar-meets-online-marketing platform. Research firm eMarketer estimates that the total transaction value for mobile payments in the U.S. will be $640 million this year, but that will grow to more than $62 billion in 2016 as a bigger segment of the population uses their phones to buy medium-ticket items, including fast-food restaurants.

Google Wants to Join the Party, Not Crash It | The New York Times

Have you ever hosted a party and found your guests wondering who stars in that new movie or play? Well, Google is here to help. It’s figuring out new, less intrusive ways to join the party — as varied as voice search, Internet-connected glasses and other wearable computers, or dining room tables outfitted with screens. What could these new innovations in real-time mean for the future of online advertising?

Advertising’s Bumpy Transition (And Why It Matters To You) | The Social CMO
Until advertisers start to value the focused, memorable, impactful opportunity they have in buying the right ads in the right place for the right audience, Web users are going to be stuck seeing a lot of irrelevant ads on sites that don’t respect their time and attention as much as they should.

E-mail is still going strong, studies show | Click Z
Social media and mobile may get more of marketers’ attention, but e-mail is still an important platform, studies show. More than 9 in 10 internet users have e-mail accounts, and 60% use them on a daily basis and e-mail can actually increase the effectiveness of other platforms, experts say. “For marketers trying to reach consumers, e-mail remains one of the best ways to find them,” this article notes.

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The post The Friday Five: The Pinterest-ization of Everything appeared first on MediaWhiz.

Welcome to The Friday Five, curated reads about marketing, advertising and digital media from the team at @MediaWhizLLC. Read previous Friday Five posts here. 

The ‘Mobile-First’ Fallacy | Digiday

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.

Attention Digital Agencies: You Need to Monitor These Regulatory Issues | DMNews

As the online marketing industry evolves, more money is entering the space, 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.

Mobile Wallets or Fully Digital Wallets? | eMarketer

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.

The Truth Behind Branding In The Digital Media Age | Six Pixels of Separation
The response to consumers being active with digital media has been to put more ads on the page, bigger ads, and page-blocking ads. This doesn’t make a better digital experience, it simply makes the ads more annoying. We have a ways to go in ensuring that digital advertising matches the user experience.

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You Know What’s Cool? A Billion Users | GigaOm

It’s official. Facebook clocked its one-billionth active user this week. CEO Mark Zucerkberg announced the historic figure in a characteristically brief blog post. Since its launch in 2004, Facebook users have produced 1.13 likes, 140.3 billion friend connections and uploaded 219 billion photos. Most astonishing is that 600 million people access Facebook via a mobile device, putting the company’s mobile advertising struggles into sharp focus.

‘Native Advertising’: The Slope Gets Slipperier | MediaPost

If marketers learned anything from this year’s Advertising Week it is that native ads — in-stream digital ads delivered in the same wrapper as the content they accompany — will be the hot topic of discussion — and controversy — in 2013. But as MediaPost columnist George Simpson writes, the announcement this week that NBC News will join the likes of Forbes.com in encouraging advertisers to develop advertorial content for its digital platforms that looks and reads like editorial pieces is a slippery slope, not only for the media brand but for the advertiser, too.

Are Marketers Truly Customer Centric? | DMNews

While 48 percent of respondents agree that their companies have “a relentless focus on building customer insights,” only 21 percent report that they have or will have a value score for each customer, according to a new study.

Don’t Buy the Do Not Track Hype | Digiday

Everywhere you look markerters are talking about proposed Do Not Track (DNT) legislation. The prevailing industry wisdom seems to be that any form of anti-tracking legislation will destroy online advertising. But as MediaWhiz’s Peter Klein argues in Digiday, that’s not the case. Rather than shutting down the industry, DNT would force marketers to be more creative in their campaigns by tapping into consumers’ expressed interests via data they provide to social networks and other digital platforms.

Want to Really Reach Your Friends on Facebook? That’ll Be $7, Please. | AllFacebook

The Facebook homepage may claim that the social network is free to join and use and always will be but reality is a little different. Facebook announced this week that if users really want their friends to see an important wall post or announcement all they need to do is cough up $7 per post to improve the news feed ranking of the post. It’s an extension of a promoted posts service that Facebook originally launched in New Zealand. Whether regular users are willing to pay for a service that used to be free, much like brands now pay to promote their posts on their brand pages, is not a foregone conclusion. As the U.K.’s Telegraph newspaper reports, almost all of the $7 per promoted post will be profit for Facebook.  

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Big Data Rewrites the CMO’s Role | Marketing Week

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.”

Source: Forbes.com

For Social Companies, a Battle to Own Photography | The New York Times

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.

Mobile Payments: Not Yet Ready for Primetime | MediaWhiz Blog

Despite their hype, mobile payments aren’t yet ready for mainstream consumer adoption says MediaWhiz’s Daryl Colwell. Brands and marketers love to tout mobile payments as “the next big thing. But the reality is that the “digital wallet” has yet to gain mainstream adoption for a simple reason: it’s often clunky to use. The hype of a consumer being able to effortlessly flash their smartphone in front of a checkout scanner is met by the reality of usability issues that are inherent in any new technology. To fully realize the massive potential of mobile payments, marketers must cut through the hype and fix two glaring problems: ease of use and the value proposition to consumers.

Why Ford’s CMO Has Content on His Mind | Digiday

Ford CMO Jim Farley says that over the last three years, it has learned that the role of marketer has changed, according to Digiday. Long about TV spots and informational content that tried to sell a consumer on some value, a marketer’s role is now about sparking conversations in social media that help build a brand’s affinity and value over the long term.

Twitter Tweaks Profile Page Layout to Permit More Customization | Advertising Age

Love it, hate it or just don’t care, the changes Twitter made this week to its profile pages undoubtedly presents new branding opportunities to marketers. Most prominent among those changes is the ability to let users — including brands — upload large “header” images and make their photos more prominent. As Altimeter Group Analyst Jeremiah Owyang noted, the new Twitter header means free “branding, advertising and marketing” opportunities that didn’t exist before. But how long until Twitter takes a revenue-generation step like Facebook and starts companies for marketing efforts that used to be free? 

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Bing Offers Own Version of ‘Pepsi Challenge’ Against Google: ‘Bing It On’ | Search Engine Land

Bing is breaking out its own version of the infamous “soda wars” between Coca-Cola at Pepsi in the 1980s. This week, it launched an ad campaign called “Bing It On” in which it asks people on the street to compare search results between its Bing search engine and Google. According to Search Engine Land, Microsoft claim’s that “people prefer Bing by 2:1 over Google.” Unfortunately for Microsoft, the stats on consumer use of Bing don’t reflect that comparison. More than 65 percent of Americans use Google as their regular search engine, according to SmartInsights.com, while Bing comes in third, behind Yahoo! Search, at just under 14 percent.

The Social Media Hype Cycle: Can It Bring Us to Our Socially Happy Place? | MediaWhiz Blog

“Facebook has failed” screamed the headlines all summer long, as Facebook’s stock continued to tumble amid mounting analyst, investor and advertiser concerns over the efficacy of Facebook’s ad platform. For Facebook, the concern present a troubling reality: it must evolve or die. The trick to keeping Facebook relevant to users and brands, according to Ryan Partnership’s Michael Velasco, will be to not only enhance the feeling that users have of the social network being indispensable to their daily lives, to extend that feeling to new areas and features that users find appealing. 

[RELATED: Join MediaWhiz on Sept. 28 for a Social Media Week Chicago panel exploring the “Social Media Hype Cycle.” Register here.]

Twitter Helps Advertisers Home In | E-Commerce Times

Twitter is helping advertisers fine-tune their targeting, and it could be a win-win-win proposition. “I, as a consumer, should be able to indicate that I am interested in … digital photography, and that would open a gate for specific information coming to me from relevant brands,” said Steve Goldner of MediaWhiz. “That would be the most powerful accomplishment for social advertising to date.”

How To: Recognize the Power of Brand Advocates | iMedia Connection

For years, public relations professionals have known of the power of brand advocacy. But in the digital age brand advocacy is evolving into the realm and responsibility of nearly every type of digital marketer. Whether you’re working on a search marketing campaign or overseeing a client’s display strategy, every marketer needs to understand and believe in brand advocacy.

Big Data Be Damned, The Web Still Needs a Human Touch | Pando Daily

Everybody and their brother, it seems like, is obsessed over “big data” and its impact on business. As companies and consumers continue to shift their activities to online-only experiences, will the data that flows in from that overwhelm companies or empower them to become more responsive to customers’ needs. Pando Daily’s Erin Griffith writes that the “excitement over big data right now is often just that: excitement.” What is needed to truly harness the power of big data is framing it in a way that utilizes a human element to ensure that nuances and customer insights aren’t lost.

Want to suggest links for next week’s issue? Tweet @MediaWhizLLC with the hashtag #FridayFive, or email ktrivitt@mediawhiz.com. 

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How a Brick-Shaped Heineken Bottle Almost Changed the World 50 Years Ago | Adweek

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