Diffiniti News

Our head of insight and social media Rolf Olsen, gives us some insight into the work he has done in the area of social media evaluation and a general state of the nation on this growing channel.

1) Why measuring online buzz can be important (for some clients, not all)

There is undoubtedly lots of hype surrounding social media today, which is all too apparent when speaking to planners and clients alike. I have observed that many campaigns tend to focus on a tiny element of social media, such as twitter, Facebook and tracking and ignore the wider scope of opportunity which social media covers. My point is if you want to use Twitter, it should not be because Twitter could offer a valuable contact point in the context of an overarching strategy, such as customer service.

From our work we have defined six distinct opportunities for social media, which undoubtedly will increase over the coming years but gives us a strategic framework for now;

Social Media Objectives

2) Why you need to get it right (hence the need for a social media audit/research as a client decides whether to ‘opt in’ to this media channel)

The next pertinent question is what strategy applies to me? So often I see this process being lead from a narrow focus, without really understanding what challenges/opportunities which social media offers. 

As with all other types of media and approach, there are a number of steps that we take in order to obtain the insight required to formulate and effective social media strategy.  I have seen and tried numerous approaches in this area, most which seem to gravitate towards social media search system outputs and mostly quantitative in nature. My main issue with this approach is that it does not really give me enough strategic insight to really understand how people discuss brands and products and more importantly, what opportunities that this offers.

One way to enhance the strategic output is to add a layer of qualitative research into the mix. This brings us on to our next point.

3) Researching campaigns and consumers – understanding the “what’s” and also the “why’s”. Web analytics coupled with a more qualitative approach to buzz

We understand the importance of campaign measurement, but equally numbers and statistics do not provide the insight and actionability that media agencies need to answer the question ‘what do we need to do differently?’, especially within the context of an ongoing campaign.

Campaign metrics, and the output derived from buzz measurement tools such as Radian 6 can help us with scale, reach and volume (and to an extent softer measurements such as sentiment), however it could be argued that to truly understand how a brand, product or service is existing within the social media, we need to fuse this with a qualitative element, to understand not just what is occurring, but why.

4) What it can deliver (action-ability, typical objectives it can meet etc)

Personally, I am obsessed with actionable insight and strive to define metrics for social media which can help inform performance in this area.

Looking at the industry there seems to be a clear bias towards softer brand metrics in social media, which are useful and form a big part of the work I do in this area, much akin to traditional offline brand trackers.

It struck me that social media was closer to PR than media, which prompted me to look performance metrics which are utilised in that industry. Typically, PR agencies talk of AVE (advertising value equivalent), which is a simple calculation; Reach x CPM (cost of standard advertising in publication) x PR factor (based on premise that editorial coverage is more valuable than advertising) = AVE.  This formula was easy to replicate for online social media/PR activity, allowing me to measure ROI on our social media campaigns. This would naturally be in addition to the brand metrics!

While we are always looking at new ways to refine the value we deliver from this area, we now feel that we have a structured approach to social media, from insight generation to strategy to evaluation, which in my belief, has firmly established this area as a credible media component in the overall mix.

Defining metrics for social media

As we are in the “greatest [financial] crisis in more than 70 years” [i] return on investment is becomingly increasingly important for brands that choose to advertise. Directors and shareholders want to see a justification for their spend; they need their ads to stand out in the market thus taking the importance of creative to a new height. Here is how, we at Diffiniti, are approaching the argument.

We, in the Sky team, believe that no longer will standard media get your brand the share of voice they desire. Distinctive, original ideas need to be implemented to entice the consumer and give our clients a boost in what is undeniably a competitive market. Brainstorms between ourselves and creative agencies have led to some original creative ideas and placements, which really have captured audiences interest and produced some of our highest ever click through and interactions rates. From ingaming to Spotify audio, Facebook’s most successful fan page to an integrated HD education sponsorship Sky have adopted multiple new approaches to make sure they are the leaders in their market.

Sky’s first ingaming sponsorship was for the Sky Player Ashes campaign with Stick Cricket.

Sky Player Ashes campaign with Stick Cricket.

An advantage of ingaming advertising is that these games have an incredibly high number of users, all of whom are people who are already comfortable interacting online.  StickCricket provided us with an ideal audience fit for the campaign brief and by having our ads within the game it meant that users were consuming Sky adverts for playing times sometimes up to an hour. The effects of this  really came through in the clicks and sales this placement generated.

Sky Sports have recently demonstrated that by combining compelling video content with a Become a Fan reach block on one of the largest social media sites currently available, Facebook, a mass buzz and huge impact can be created. Within 5 days of the launch 272,503 new fans were added to the Sky Sports page with an Average Unique User Engagement Rate of 1.45%.

In a first for Spotify, which confirmed its UK users will surpass the two million mark this week despite only going free-to-all in February, the company will stream messages updating users on the current state of play, with clips from Sky Sports cricket commentatior David Lloyd, followed by the message: “However good it sounds, it’s even better when you see it live online on Sky Player”.

Spotify’s policy on ads ensure that all listeners have to play the whole advert before they can continue listening to their songs. This means that the users have to listen to our adverts which were supported by standard media and as they were told to “click to find out more” we saw our audio ads generate over 10,000 clicks at a CTR of 0.65%.

By pushing the boundaries and trying to be more innovative and creative with our media we have seen Skys awareness raised massively online and Sky have beaten “analysts’ expectations by adding 80,000 new satellite TV subscribers in Q1 2009”. Surely reason enough to prove to other brands they need to be spending in this market whilst continuing to allow creativity to infiltrate online media plans.

 A new iPhone release, the latest comments on a holiday destination, sometimes you need the latest information written and published in seconds. What if advertiser targeted the audience searching for recent information? Imagine if the Google search results contained all web-content and mixed content published only minutes ago. Google are trialling how they can get closer to making this a reality, in their new “next-generation” search engine update Caffeine.

Caffeine is a new update for Google’s search that brings Google closer to some of its rivals in speed and exceeds most in content coverage. It lists or indexes more pages and finds pages published minutes rather than half an hour ago.

Giving people what they search for first time is a Google objective. Larry Page one of the founders of Google admitted at the Zeitgeist conference in May said that he had “…  always thought we needed to index the web every second to allow real time search.” but developments have been relatively slow. Google fails to include pages that were published within the last 15 minutes consistently therefore users looking for fresh content are not going to use Google. Others relating to listing real-time content in a more timely and comprehensive manner are also addressed in the new update such as increasing the efficiency of the backend systems that index pages, which is required to keep reducing the indexing speed. Larry’s comments come as it’s competitors are already building real-time information users.

The recent announcement of Google to update its algorithm with its Caffeine release is suggesting it does see a threat to its core search algorithm from real time search engines and social media. “This update is primarily under the hood” states Matt Cutts who is quick to establish the fix it will add to its normally sluggish updates to its index. Many website owners have been frustrated in sitting in the Google Sandbox or new pages not being included in Google’s search index, Caffeine will change all this as well as include more recent, real time content published on the internet. 

Key points:

 -  Google is rewriting the architecture of its algorithm – changing the way that it crawls and indexes web pages.

-   Search results will be returned nearly twice as fast with Caffeine

-   The size of Google’s content network has increased.

-   With increased indexing speed and a larger network to crawl, Google hopes that search queries will return search results with a greater degree of accuracy than the current algorithm architecture allows.

The impact of this update  is yet to be seen, however possible outcomes could be:

-  Caffeine could rely more on keyword strings to produce more accurate results

-  Possibly a stronger weighting on domain authority and a greater understanding of synonyms

-  Universal Search results such as videos may also gain less exposure with Caffeine (appearing further down the SERPs). We believe this is temporary.

For now, Google will keep Caffeine in preview mode (test it here http://www2.sandbox.google.com.) and keep testing its impact. Matt Cutts suggested the possibility of rolling the full update out in one data centre before a national launch.

In its infancy, Behavioural targeting was hailed as a ‘Planner-slayer’: a power tool which could find the perfect audience for any campaign, leaving the online planner with very little to do.

The reality is that far from delivering instant success, Behavioural Targeting still requires thought, care and testing to make it work.

Off-the peg doesn’t fit everyone

Many sites and networks trade on the basis of a set of pre-built Behavioural segments, based on the target audiences they are most often briefed to reach. For example, Sport enthusiasts & Finance researchers. This enables the publisher to build up a great deal of data over time, ensuring the segment is robust. For some campaigns, these off-the peg segments closely match the target audience, and can represent good value.

For many, however, they are too broad. The rate mark-up on Behavioural targeting means that an ill-fitting segment will often bring in a higher Cost-per-Response than untargeted activity on the same site.

Building a successful bespoke segment is dependent on the Planner’s understanding of their objectives and target audience, and the Media owners knowledge of how their targeting technology works, and what it can realistically offer.

For example:  Narrowing a ‘Finance Researcher’ segment to target a specific financial product yielded a significant increase in both Click through rate, and conversion rate.

Tight tailoring inhibits growth

The problem with carefully tailored bespoke segments is that they are often very small, and while they can yield very efficient responses, the volume is likely to remain static – or even to shrink once the segment has been saturated.

Growing volume using Behavioural technology is just as hard as growing without it – the challenge is to find new audience groups who will respond to your campaign. Behavioural Targeting helps planners reach audiences, but does not tell them who they should be reaching.

For some campaigns, the best approach may be a ‘leap of faith’; running a broad campaign across a network equipped with Behavioural Targeting optimisation technology, which gradually builds a profile of the behaviours exhibited by people who have responded to the campaign, and targets people whose behaviour is similar.

With the right technology and expert campaign management, this approach can generate response that is both efficient and high volume, but there will always be a learning period – during which the Cost-per-Response may be frighteningly high.

While Behavioural Targeting technology is likely to continue to evolve and become more powerful it doesn’t look set to put anyone out of a job in the foreseeable future.

Can online publishers monetise online content. Rupert Murdoch is leading the charge will it happen or work?

A recent NMA article “News Corp to build online news consortium” is just one of many stories about how the online publishing community is trying to reverse engineer paid for content into an essentially free online content model.

Now that the print and TV market are not making the sorts of revenue they were in the past, and the online business model is not sufficient to sustain the companies without the offline revenues publishers are desperately trying to evaluate additional revenue opportunities

The micro charging model (e.g. charging a nominal amount for news content, video content etc), or a straight subscription model seem to be the two main choices that publishers are weighing up.

There seems to be a believe that because the likes of The Wall Street Journal and FT charge for certain online content means it is a simple matter of transferring this model to other publisher sites. What everyone seems to be forgetting, or at least not addressing, is these are essentially sites used and expensed by businessmen to make sure they are constantly up-to-date with the world’s financial and business news.

Is Joe Blogg’s going to pay to read news on times online when he can get it free from BBC or have it sourced by bloggers or aggregators? This is probably the question keeping publishers up at night. Also will the money they get from the payment model be offset by the loss of revenue from advertising when their user base falls off a cliff?

The truth is if major publishers decide to charge for their content they need to be joined up. This is why the below article is interesting as it seems that the visionaries from the offline media giants realise they need to be joined up in order to push this through. After all if News Int charge for its content and Telegraph and Guardian don’t what are the odds that rafts of users migrate to get their news from a free service?

No one will know the answer until it has been tested but all of the signs are that it will be happening, sooner rather than later, and only then will we see how the consumer reacts and whether the future is paid for online content or whether the voice of the people will push it to stay free.

In-game Advertising (IGA) is what it says on the tin – advertising within games. Those of you who have played computer games may or may not have noticed the advertising within them, but either way there are an ample number of advertising opportunities within these games, so much so that Barack Obama used IGA for his presidential election campaign to raise awareness around his site voteforchange.com.

Barack Obama advertising in XBOS 360 game – Burnout.

In this article we’re going to specifically look at advertising opportunities within the popular game – Pro Evolution Soccer, and the benefits for a brand to use IGA. It’s important to note that the article just discusses the option of IGA on platforms that are connected to the Internet.

The first key point to notice about Pro Evo 2009 is the target audience; some what obviously the main audience for this game is 16-34 males. It is becoming commonly accepted that this target group in particular is ditching TV for computer games and thus Pro Evo has a UK forecast of 1,921,500 users overall in 2009. On the surface this may only be getting the same number of uniques as a small portal or popular entertainment channel online, however one of the key USP’s for IGA is the brand engagement level. It has been said that in-game advertising is found to be more effective than TV marketing, delivering a 500% increase in brand consumer awareness (1).  Another factor to think about when discussing IGA is that these users actually want the ads to be within the game to add to the realistic effect of the game, thus a high proportion of users are in a much different mindset than most traditional methods of advertising.

So we have our target audience, we know how many consumers we’re hitting, we know they want to see the ads, we also have a 500% increase in brand awareness within IGA, but where can we actually advertise within pro evo, and how is it measured?

The basic premise of Pro Evo is a football game, which with its advanced technology is getting closer and closer to feeling like you’re controlling a real game of football. When we think about the advertising opportunities at a typical real life football game, these can be relayed easily into the computer game. This involves banners around the stadiums and training grounds sponsorship of the replays that are shown within the game and sponsorship of any overlays within the game

Banner within the game

Banner from a birdseye view

Replay Sponsorship

Sponsorship of overlays

Essentially IGA is bought on a similar buying model to brand activity online, on a cost per thousand impression (CPM) buy. The difference between IGA and a traditional CPM buy is you are only charged for an impression when it has been visible for a set amount of time (leading IGA advertisers Double Fusion say 10 seconds). This effectively cuts out a large amount of “wastage” which is every advertiser’s biggest nightmare to combat.

To briefly conclude: IGA is a growing market, it’s somewhat new in the marketplace, however reporting tools and research tools have now been developed so that an extensive amount of information can be relayed back to clients. I will discuss the types of information that can be researched in next months article.

(1)   Brand republic March 2009

(2)   Image 1, 1.2, 2 and 3 courtesy of DoubleFusion

(3)   Image 4 courtesy of uk.gamespot.com

As you might expect, following Darren Bent’s freak beach ball goal for Sunderland against Liverpool on Saturday, UK beach ball-related internet searches shot up.

As the chart below illustrates, the breadth of searches for the term ‘beach ball’ (which measures the number of different ways that people search for a topic) increased eight-fold last week

Profits were up 27% year on year for the three months to 30 September, with revenues up by 7% to $5.94bn (£3.64bn).

UK revenues were at $765m (£468m) over the quarter, accounting for 13% of its total. This was slightly down from the 14% of total revenues it represented a year ago.

Paid clicks were up by 14% year on year over the quarter and up 4% on the previous quarter, while average cost per clicks were down 6% year on year.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt said the results signified positivity within the market.

“Google had a strong quarter – we saw 7% year-over-year revenue growth despite the tough economic conditions,” he said. “While there is a lot of uncertainty about the pace of economic recovery, we believe the worst of the recession is behind us and now feel confident about investing heavily in our future.”

The news comes in the week that Google agreed a UK ad-sharing revenue deal with Channel 4 to include its long-form content for free on YouTube, as well as launching an auction-based ad model for YouTube videos for the first time (nma 15 October 2009).