Posts tagged marketing

Banksy on Advertising Via Upworthy. Select to embiggen.

Banksy on Advertising

Via Upworthy. Select to embiggen.

Selling Data, Taking Things in Your Hands Edition A common truism says that if it’s free and on the Web, you’re not the customer but the product being sold. Also common is the following reaction: what can I do about that. The less common reaction: How can I get in on that? Try this one on as a thought experiment. Via Slate: In a world of privacy-invading smartphone apps and government-grade spyware, keeping personal data personal online can seem like a difficult task. But could you make money by choosing to give away logs of your most intimate data? Federico Zannier is trying to find out. Emails, chat logs, location data, browser history, screenshots—you name it, the New York-based software developer is selling it all.With a Kickstarter campaign launched earlier this month, Zannier, a 28-year-old Italian-born master’s student at NYU, is offering to hand over a day’s digital footprint for a measly $2. He says he “violated his own privacy” starting back in February for about 50 days straight, recording screenshots and webcam snaps of himself every 30 seconds and tracking his every footstep using GPS technology. He logged the address of each Web page he visited—storing some 3 million lines of text—and accumulated a massive trove of 21,124 webcam photos and 19,920 screen shots. Zannier’s aim, somewhat paradoxically, is to take ownership of his own data by selling it. He points out that we often hand over our private data unwittingly, given that few people take the time to read the terms and conditions of apps and online services. Companies rake in millions of dollars selling our information to marketing firms while we receive little in return. But Zannier’s Kickstarter is not just out to make a statement about online privacy—he plans to use the funds to create a browser extension and a smartphone app that he says will help others sell their own data. “If more people do the same, I’m thinking marketers could just pay us directly for our data,” he writes on his Kickstarter page. “It might sound crazy, but so is giving all our data away for free.” So, just as the Web often disrupts, let’s cut out the middle man. Image: It’s Free, But They Sell Your Information, via Telco 2.0.

Selling Data, Taking Things in Your Hands Edition

A common truism says that if it’s free and on the Web, you’re not the customer but the product being sold. Also common is the following reaction: what can I do about that. The less common reaction: How can I get in on that?

Try this one on as a thought experiment.

Via Slate:

In a world of privacy-invading smartphone apps and government-grade spyware, keeping personal data personal online can seem like a difficult task. But could you make money by choosing to give away logs of your most intimate data?

Federico Zannier is trying to find out. Emails, chat logs, location data, browser history, screenshots—you name it, the New York-based software developer is selling it all.With a Kickstarter campaign launched earlier this month, Zannier, a 28-year-old Italian-born master’s student at NYU, is offering to hand over a day’s digital footprint for a measly $2. He says he “violated his own privacy” starting back in February for about 50 days straight, recording screenshots and webcam snaps of himself every 30 seconds and tracking his every footstep using GPS technology. He logged the address of each Web page he visited—storing some 3 million lines of text—and accumulated a massive trove of 21,124 webcam photos and 19,920 screen shots.

Zannier’s aim, somewhat paradoxically, is to take ownership of his own data by selling it. He points out that we often hand over our private data unwittingly, given that few people take the time to read the terms and conditions of apps and online services. Companies rake in millions of dollars selling our information to marketing firms while we receive little in return. But Zannier’s Kickstarter is not just out to make a statement about online privacy—he plans to use the funds to create a browser extension and a smartphone app that he says will help others sell their own data. “If more people do the same, I’m thinking marketers could just pay us directly for our data,” he writes on his Kickstarter page. “It might sound crazy, but so is giving all our data away for free.”

So, just as the Web often disrupts, let’s cut out the middle man.

Image: It’s Free, But They Sell Your Information, via Telco 2.0.

Likes Don’t Save Lives

UNICEF Sweden has a new ad campaign reminding people that while social media Likes are nice, what they really need is money to fund their vaccination campaigns.

As The Verge points out, “Facebook likes aren’t treated as currency in other commercial venues, so they shouldn’t be equated with charitable donations.”

And via The Atlantic:

In the beginning, organizations wanted you to like the heck out of their Facebook pages. Why? You know, community-building, awareness-raising, general “engagement”-upping…

…But one thing clicking “like” doesn’t do is, say, get malaria nets to African villages or boost funding for charity groups. And now that Facebook is nearly 9 years old and Twitter is 7, we’re seeing the inevitable backlash against social-media “slacktivism.”

Back to The Verge:

The campaign, created by ad agency Forsman & Bodenfors, takes a rather bold stance against the awareness campaigns that often spread across Facebook and other social media platforms. UNICEF officials acknowledge that such efforts can help introduce issues to a wider audience, though they fear that for most users, the action stops with the click of a button. To further stress this point, UNICEF Sweden released a bold poster alongside the video clips, saying that every like it receives on Facebook will result in exactly zero vaccinations.

That’s not to say “slacktivists” are a bad thing. Liking, sharing and reblogging do serve their purpose in bringing issues to a wider audience. But then what?

Last year, The Atlantic notes, Zeynep Tufekci, a sociology professor and a fellow at the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society, had this to say:

What is called commonly called slacktivism is not at all about “slacking activists;” rather it is about non-activists taking symbolic action—often in spheres traditionally engaged only by activists or professionals (governments, NGOs, international institutions.). Since these so-called “slacktivists” were never activists to begin with, they are not in dereliction of their activist duties. On the contrary, they are acting, symbolically and in a small way, in a sphere that has traditionally been closed off to “the masses” in any meaningful fashion.

The goal then for those working in social media is to simultaneously help the “slacktivist” set help you by building out ambient awareness of an issue through the messaging you create, while also giving activists and more consistently loyal proponents direct calls to action be it donations, volunteerism, network building, etc.

Meantime, if you’re moved to Like a cause, consider volunteering your time and/or other resources to it as well.

The other two commercials in UNICEF’s campaign can be viewed at The Verge. — Michael

World Press Freedom Day, Redux

Additional imagery from Reporters Without Borders to go along with our earlier post.

Select to embiggen.

Blogs Rule, But Brands are Ignoring Them Technorati’s Media’s 2013 Digital Influencer Report is an important read for brand and marketing folk. In it, the authors write that consumers trust blogs more than social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest. The disconnect here is that brand marketers spend more time and resources on social networks, and vastly more dollars on display advertising, search and video. Via Technorati (PDF): Currently, the bulk of brands’ overall digital spend goes to display advertising, search and video, with spending on social, including influencer outreach, making up only 10 percent of their total digital spend. Within their social budget, more than half goes to Facebook, followed by YouTube and Twitter, with the remaining 11 percent of their social spend going to blogs and influencers… …In short, where brands are spending is not fully aligned with how and where consumers are seeing value and being influenced. This has much to do with an essential hurdle faced by most content creators: a lack of metrics and the fragmentation that leads to their complexity as a purchasable medium. The report’s authors argue that brands need to refocus their earned media strategies on direct engagement with influencers. Image: Detail of digital and social budgets from Technorati’s 2013 Digital Influencer Report (PDF).

Blogs Rule, But Brands are Ignoring Them

Technorati’s Media’s 2013 Digital Influencer Report is an important read for brand and marketing folk. In it, the authors write that consumers trust blogs more than social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest.

The disconnect here is that brand marketers spend more time and resources on social networks, and vastly more dollars on display advertising, search and video.

Via Technorati (PDF):

Currently, the bulk of brands’ overall digital spend goes to display advertising, search and video, with spending on social, including influencer outreach, making up only 10 percent of their total digital spend. Within their social budget, more than half goes to Facebook, followed by YouTube and Twitter, with the remaining 11 percent of their social spend going to blogs and influencers…

…In short, where brands are spending is not fully aligned with how and where consumers are seeing value and being influenced. This has much to do with an essential hurdle faced by most content creators: a lack of metrics and the fragmentation that leads to their complexity as a purchasable medium.

The report’s authors argue that brands need to refocus their earned media strategies on direct engagement with influencers.

Image: Detail of digital and social budgets from Technorati’s 2013 Digital Influencer Report (PDF).

Every Fucking Web Site The morning PSA. Designers, communicators, marketers and brand strategists: take note. Personal favorite under header number three: “Because we saw three buckets of shit content on our competitor’s front page and we’re god damned if we’re only gonna have two.” — Michael H/T: @lorakolodny 

Every Fucking Web Site

The morning PSA.

Designers, communicators, marketers and brand strategists: take note.

Personal favorite under header number three: “Because we saw three buckets of shit content on our competitor’s front page and we’re god damned if we’re only gonna have two.” — Michael

H/T: @lorakolodny 

If advertising is meant to be aspirational, these ads [in men’s magazines] are presenting a pretty sad version of what American men can aspire to be. And advertisers aren’t selling this hyper-masculine ideal to just any man: They’re specifically targeting the younger, poorer, less-educated guys in the supermarket aisle. In the latest issue of the journal Sex Roles, a trio of psychologists at the University of Manitoba analyzed the advertising images in a slate of magazines targeted at men, from Fortune to Field and Stream. They counted up the ads that depict men as violent, calloused, tough, dangerous, and sexually aggressive—what the researchers call “hyper-masculine”—then indexed them with the magazine’s target demographics. Hyper-masculine images, the researchers found, are more likely to be sold to adolescents, who find higher “peer group support” for manly-man behaviors. They’re also sold to working-class men, who are “embedded in enduring social and economic structures in which they experience powerlessness and lack of access to resources” like political power, social respect, and wealth, and so turn to more widely accessible measures of masculine worth—like “physical strength and aggression.
Amanda Hess, Slate. How Men’s Magazines Sell Masculinity to Young, Low-Income Men.

Why Every Company Needs a Journalist (for Marketing)

Soshable:

Every company who wants to reach the highest level of success in online marketing going forward needs to have someone acting as a journalist for the company. They needs someone who collects, writers, and distributes news and other information about the company, the industry, the customers, the local area – anything that has relevance from a marketing perspective. This hasn’t always been the case. Until very recently, a good SEO content writer would suffice as long as they had some skills to put together a nice press release every now and then. SEO content was all that you really needed to succeed.

Today and going forward, that’s no longer the case.

JD Rucker, Editor of Soshable, offers up four major arenas in which humans—namely journalists  who will interact, discuss, interview, hear and see on your behalf—do better than outsourced SEO content writers:

  1. Search Rankings
  2. Social Sharing
  3. Public Relations
  4. Humanized Businesses

FJP: Read the piece here. There is a part 2 coming. 

Branding is not about growing inequality but growing equality. In the old world there were a few big-name hotshot star journalists, and a lot of regular hacks pushing anonymous news. In future more and more journalists will be stars — some big stars shining all over, some smaller but maybe brighter stars twinkling to some important niche audience. And if a journalist has no twinkle whatsoever — then it’s time to find something else to do.

Saska Saarikoski, Brands, Stars and Regular Hacks — a changing relationship between news institutions and journalists (PDF).

Saarikoski, a former culture editor at Finland’s Helsingin Sanomat, conducted surveys and interviews with editors, publishers and reporters about the issues raised by the branding of journalists. The result is this recent report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.

Yes, Hobbit Coins Will Be Legal Tender in New Zealand In the strange but fun and true, via the Telegraph: Hobbit coins, featuring characters such as Bilbo Baggins and Gandalf the wizard, will be legal tender in the country, New Zealand Post said – although their face value will be only a fraction of the cost collectors will be expected to pay. The most expensive, made from one ounce (28.3 grams) of pure gold, costs more than 350 times its face value. It will set Tolkien enthusiasts back NZ$3,695 (£1890) but has a face value of just NZ$10 (£5). The cheapest is available for almost 30 times its face value – a NZ$1 (£0.50) coin retailing for NZ$29.90 (£15). The first in Peter Jackson’s upcoming Hobbit trilogy is being released in December. Image: The Bilbo Baggins $10 coin, via New Zealand Post Coins.

Yes, Hobbit Coins Will Be Legal Tender in New Zealand

In the strange but fun and true, via the Telegraph:

Hobbit coins, featuring characters such as Bilbo Baggins and Gandalf the wizard, will be legal tender in the country, New Zealand Post said – although their face value will be only a fraction of the cost collectors will be expected to pay.

The most expensive, made from one ounce (28.3 grams) of pure gold, costs more than 350 times its face value. It will set Tolkien enthusiasts back NZ$3,695 (£1890) but has a face value of just NZ$10 (£5).

The cheapest is available for almost 30 times its face value – a NZ$1 (£0.50) coin retailing for NZ$29.90 (£15).

The first in Peter Jackson’s upcoming Hobbit trilogy is being released in December.

Image: The Bilbo Baggins $10 coin, via New Zealand Post Coins.

A Chair is Like Facebook, or Vice Versa

So too doorbells, airplanes, bridges, ideas, music, dance floors, basketball, a great nation and… the universe.

Facebook releases its first commercial. 

Social Media is Bullshit So there’s this, written by BJ Mendelson and published by St. Martins Press. The premise of the book is that social media friends and followers “mean nothing to you and your business without old-fashioned, real-world connections.” Or, as the book site would have it: We live in a world where it’s far easier to make money telling people how to get rich using the Internet than it is to actually get rich using it. Which, I guess, would be fine if getting rich was the only metric one used for measuring their social media efforts. Otherwise, I haven’t heard anyone ever say that real-world connections are no longer needed. Just the opposite, that our digital social lives help expand our ability to make real world connections.  Anyway, I’ll be adding this to my reading list. I assume the argument is more sophisticated than little blurbs would have it. Besides, it’s always good to hear from a contrarian, even one who leverages his 770,000 Twitter followers to write a book and throw a snarky title on it. Hat tip to the marketing department on that one. Meantime, here’s an interview with him and Andrew Keen, another Internet contrarian, via Techcrunch. And here’s a free chapter from the book. — Michael Bonus: Trying to figure out your social media ROI? There’s a conference in New York for that.

Social Media is Bullshit

So there’s this, written by BJ Mendelson and published by St. Martins Press.

The premise of the book is that social media friends and followers “mean nothing to you and your business without old-fashioned, real-world connections.” Or, as the book site would have it:

We live in a world where it’s far easier to make money telling people how to get rich using the Internet than it is to actually get rich using it.

Which, I guess, would be fine if getting rich was the only metric one used for measuring their social media efforts.

Otherwise, I haven’t heard anyone ever say that real-world connections are no longer needed. Just the opposite, that our digital social lives help expand our ability to make real world connections. 

Anyway, I’ll be adding this to my reading list. I assume the argument is more sophisticated than little blurbs would have it. Besides, it’s always good to hear from a contrarian, even one who leverages his 770,000 Twitter followers to write a book and throw a snarky title on it. Hat tip to the marketing department on that one.

Meantime, here’s an interview with him and Andrew Keen, another Internet contrarian, via Techcrunch. And here’s a free chapter from the book. — Michael

Bonus: Trying to figure out your social media ROI? There’s a conference in New York for that.

Forget the Paywall, Consider the Surveywall

About 150 US news sites have some sort of paywall (give or take 150 or so). Some are hard, some are soft and some are in between.

All have been written about extensively.

But what if we looked at walls from an entirely different direction? Google’s done this with their Consumer Surveys. Instead of asking readers to pull out their wallets to access content, they’re asked to answer a single question. Think of it as a Surveywall.

Frédéric Filloux describes it like so:

Eighteen months ago — under non disclosure — Google showed publishers a new transaction system for inexpensive products such as newspaper articles. It worked like this: to gain access to a web site, the user is asked to participate to a short consumer research session. A single question, a set of images leading to a quick choice.

The solution is one that’s beautiful in its simplicity. Market research is an almost $30 billion industry. And while a lot of it is much more than having people answer surveys, a lot of it is people answering surveys.

So what if you target surveys to, say, readers of certain sections of The Miami Herald, or Wired, or Car and Driver. The researcher wins because it’s a lower cost solution than traditional outreach. The publisher wins because they’ve gained a revenue stream by running the surveys. The reader wins because her wallet stays in her pocket.

There are caveats, of course, which Frédéric outlines:

In theory, the mechanism finally solves the old quest for tiny, friction-free transactions: replace the paid-for zone with a survey-zone through which access is granted after answering a quick question. Needless to say, it can’t be recommended for all sites. We can’t reasonably expect a general news site, not to mention a business news one, to adopt such a scheme. It would immediately irritate the users and somehow taint the content.

I’m not so sure it’s unreasonable. Different, yes, but the entire digital enterprise and the economics behind it is different.

The solution though reminds me of reCAPTCHA, an initiative started at Carnegie Mellon and now run by Google to crowdsource book digitization by harnessing a few seconds of millions of users’ time by having them enter the text they see in a traditional CAPTCHA box (the first word is machine readable, the second isn’t and that’s the one that Google hopes you can decipher).

As Google explains:

About 200 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that’s not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into “reading” books.

In theory, the micro-surveys of a Surveywall would work similarly. With enough scale to conduct a full survey one question at a time, market researchers gain the insights they’re looking for. The publisher earns more for running the survey than it would get with traditional display advertising.

The question, as it always does, comes back to the reader.

Will she take a few seconds to answer a question, or think it intrusive, close the page and move on?

And that, most likely, comes back to the king of it all: just how valuable is the content that the publisher is providing? — Michael

There are two flavors of interest targeting. For broader reach, you can target more than 350 interest categories, ranging from Education to Home and Garden to Investing to Soccer, as shown in the screenshot below. As an example, if you were promoting a new animated film about dogs, you could select Animation (under Movies and Television), Cartoons (under Hobbies and Interests), and Dogs (under Pets).

If you want to target more precise sets of users, you can create custom segments by specifying certain @​usernames that are relevant to the product, event or initiative you are looking to promote. Custom segments let you reach users with similar interests to that @​username’s followers; they do not let you specifically target the followers of that @​username. If you’re promoting your indie band’s next tour, you can create a custom audience by adding @​usernames of related bands, thus targeting users with the same taste in music.

Twitter Advertising Blog, Interest targeting: Broaden your reach, reach the right audience

What does that mean? Twitter will use your personal browsing history, people you follow and any other data it has about your activity in order for advertisers to microtarget their ads to you.

H/T: Gizmodo.