Marketing

With video ads emerging as the most effective and engaging ad units available in the entire mobile ad ecosystem today, it comes as no surprise that one of the top mobile ad companies in the world is working overtime to expand its video ad proficiency and capabilities. On Wednesday, Millennial Media unveiled a comprehensive suite of new advertising products for marketers to harness the power of mobile video on smartphones and tablets. For example, advertisers can now add customizable features to their video that let consumers engage with the content in ways not possible in any other medium. “When you combine the rich storytelling of video with the interaction and engagement of mobile, the result is a powerful branding experience that really resonates with consumers,” explains Marcus Startzel, Chief Revenue Officer at Millennial Media. “We’ve heard from our key brand partners that there is a desire to go beyond simply repurposing video from other channels, so we built these new products so brands can strategically optimize their video content for mobile. All told, MM’s new Video Advertising Solutions involve nine different products and are designed for advertisers in all industries. These include: Video SYNC – The first ad unit of its kind, advertisers can wrap rich media around the video player and sync different animations with specific moments of the video to highlight and identify key messaging moments. For example, a film trailer could play, and at the introduction of each new character, a rich media animation would appear highlighting the actor or actress. Video TOGGLE – Optimized for tablets, a large video is surrounded by three additional videos underneath, with the option to toggle which video is highlighted. The ad unit offers brands the ability to drive extended and additional viewing, and present multiple messaging and topic options. Video TICKER – This ad unit allows marketers to display dynamically updated, time-specific information, such as sports scores, movie times, or Twitter feeds, directly into their video ad. To learn more about MM and what the mobile ad giant is up to in video, click here.

On Wednesday morning, Distimo announced the launch of Conversion Tracking, a free Software Development Kit (SDK) that offers app developers a “one-stop shop” to measure and analyze their app transaction value and the lifetime value of their app users. The app store market data and analytics leader says that Distimo Conversion Tracking directs consumers to the right app store, and enables developers to easily identify what country and traffic source their app users are coming from and what devices they are using. “Until today, there has been no product available for developer that combines both data from app stores as well as conversion tracking,” boasts Vincent Hoogsteder, CEO and co-founder of Distimo. “The highly accurate insight provided by Distimo Conversion Tracking into the lifetime value of their app users combined with data from their marketing campaigns across all possible app store revenue sources will ultimately help app developers accelerate their growth and make better business decisions,” he said in a written statement this morning. Available now, Distimo Conversion Tracking is free to use and supports iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Adobe AIR and PhoneGap. To learn more about cross-platform app distribution and conversion tracking, click here.

Troy Alstead, Starbucks’ chief financial officer and chief accounting officer, dropped a mobile bombshell at the Jefferies Global Consumer Conference this week. Mobile payments are fast-becoming a hot way to pay for a hot cup of joe at Starbucks. “Mobile payments not launched all that long ago represents greater than 10% now of our U.S. transactions,” Alstead revealed during the presentation. The Starbucks executive praises the mobile channel for its ability to drive the efficiencies, speed of service, and a lower cost transaction within the store. All of the growth Starbucks has experienced of late is “really empowered by what we do digitally,” Alstead added. “We had significant success in reaching our customers digitally, significant benefits both in terms of cost, but also the halo that comes from providing these opportunities around payment methods and loyalty to the customer,” he concluded. “Starbucks card in all it’s entirety and that means the physical card, but also mobile forms of card, store value card payments represents now greater than 30%, almost a third of transactions in our U.S. system. The loyalty program in the U.S. just introduced a couple of years ago represents now 25% and rapidly growing of our U.S. transaction.”

Identifying the Issue with Your PPC Account Have you ever caught yourself staring at data from AdWords, trying to find an explanation to why your conversions dropped x% month over month and y% year over year, and not even knowing where to start searching for an explanation? So many variables come into play on a daily basis in any given PPC account, how do you know what caused this decrease?  You could stare at a spreadsheet and create more pivot tables than you know what to do with, hoping you come across something that will give you a better understanding so that you can fix the problem. Or, you could utilize a simple Excel formula to point you in the right direction in about 2 minutes’ time. Yeah, I choose the latter option as well. So, what’s this secret formula I claim will make your life much easier? It’s called a Pearson correlation formula (or the Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient, for you statistics nerds).  It’s a formula that tells you if a correlation exists between two sets of numbers.  It won’t magically tell you what’s wrong with your PPC account, but it will tell you where to look so you can find the answer(s) you’re looking for. Mathematically, the Pearson formula is very freaking complicated if you don’t have an advanced understanding of statistics.  For those of you who are interested, here is the actual formula: What does that mean? If you want the technical explanation, ask a stats professor.  In layman’s terms, “r” is the indicator of whether or not two sets of data have any correlation, or dependence, with each other.  Luckily, this formula already exists in Excel and is much easier to type out than what you see above: “=PEARSON(array 1, array 2)”. Example Below is a sample of data for key PPC metrics using 14 weeks of PPC data: The conversions column is highlighted in red text because that is the metric being focused on.  You see some ups and downs, but you’re not exactly sure what’s causing this conversion trend.  So, instead of sifting through a dozen different reports looking for a needle in a haystack, simply perform a Pearson correlation formula for each metric and compare it to the conversion totals: Spend “r” =Pearson(A2:A15,F2:F15) = 0.16 Clicks “r” = Pearson(B2:B15,F2:F15) = 0.09 And so on… After applying this formula to each column, here are the results (highlighted in blue text at the bottom): The result of this formula will range from -1 to 1, where -1 equals a perfect inverse correlation, 1 equals a perfect correlation, and 0 equals absolutely no correlation.  As you can see, most of the metrics used for this comparison are close to 0, meaning there’s no strong correlation between the trend of that metric and the trend in conversions.  But the conversion rate has a result very close to 1, which means there’s a strong correlation. So, using this data, I can conclude the change in conversion total is dependent primarily on the change in conversion rate only, rather than the conversion rate combined with another key metric or another key metric entirely.  And if we think about what factors in a PPC account have the most direct impact on the conversion rate only, we can conclude we should take a closer look at our landing pages and on-site activity after an ad has been clicked, rather than other factors like keywords or ad copy. So, while using Pearson correlation formulas on data doesn’t give you the magic answer you’re looking for, the results can tell you where you should look to find it.  When you’re facing the possibility of browsing through report after report to give you direction, save yourself the time and start with this useful method instead.

One lender uses sophisticated algorithms--and any online dirt it can find about your company--to determine credit risk.The amount of stored digital information that companies, researchers, and others can mine is growing exponentially and is nearly impossible to fathom. In the book Big Data: A Revolution That Will Change How We Live, Work and Think authors Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier maintain that in 2013 the world's collection of data amounts to around 1,200 exabytes. "If it were placed on CD-ROMs and stacked up, they would stretch to the moon in five separate piles," say the authors. "The amount of stored information grows four times faster than the world economy, while the processing power of computers grows nine times faster."What does this have to do with you and your company? A great deal if you want to get a loan.The Big Data Back StoryEvery digital act you make is stored--think Tweets or Facebook likes or what you buy on Amazon or what you search for on Google not to mention your online bank account, your credit card transactions, and even where you are based on your cellular transmissions. An interested entity with the resources to do so can create profiles that pretty accurately portray who you are as a person.For small businesses it's the same thing. Your digital cash flow, whether or not you've had property foreclosed upon, what others are saying about your company online and more can be tracked, aggregated, and analyzed so that conclusions can be drawn.Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier talk about how the ability to analyze billions of data points instantly has huge implications for society. There are cool things like Google's ability to show in real time where the flu is breaking out based on the terms people use when they search the Internet. But big data also ushers forth not-so-great implications, such as the fact that privacy is pretty much dead in the water.Prediction is another side of big data, one that's either injurious or invaluable, depending on your perspective."[A]lgorithms will predict the likelihood that one will get a heart attack (and pay more for health insurance), default on a mortgage (and be denied a loan), or commit a crime (and perhaps get arrested in advance)," they write.Getting a Small Business Loan"Minority Report" and "Person of Interest" foreshadowings aside, one company says it's using big data to help small businesses.If you own a restaurant, auto repair shop, nail salon, dentist office, or any kind of Main Street small business, borrowing money from a bank can be tough. After the recession many of them largely stopped issuing small business loans so if you need money to buy equipment or inventory it means either taking out a personal loan based on your FICO score or using a credit card.There's another option, and one that's growing in popularity with both business owners who need a loan as well as big shot VCs who want in on the action.New York-based start-up On Deck looks at a company's digital footprint--things like bank transactions, public records, and social data such as the kinds and frequency of reviews on sites such as Google Places, FourSquare, or Citysearch--to figure out how much risk is involved in issuing a loan.According to On Deck CEO Noah Breslow, his 6-year-old company has delivered around $500 million in capital to thousands of Main Street businesses across hundreds of industry verticals."We've built a platform that aggregates all that data so in some cases we integrate with different providers of data and in other cases we go out and actually harvest that data itself from the Internet because it's publicly out there but you need to extract it, aggregate it, and get it into usable form," he says. "Then when a business owner applies, we collect as much data as possible on them from all these different sources and use that to make a very efficient lending decision usually within minutes after the customer applies."Such efficiency is one thing that

The first super hero blockbuster film of the summer, “Man of Steel,” brought in $128.7 million last weekend, eclipsing the box office receipts from “This Is the End,” which raked in $32.8 million. So how did moviegoers decide which summer hit to see over the weekend? Their smartphones. A new infographic from Tapjoy shows how today’s moviegoers are using their small screens to decide what to see on the big screen. In fact, 72% of people have now used their mobile device to help decide which movie to watch, TapJoy says. To learn more about the smartphone’s influence on the silver screen, check out the infographic below.

Most small business owners believe digital theft won't happen to them. They're wrong.Could your company be putting customers and employees at risk of identity theft? Most small business owners would answer no. They'd be wrong. "In general, we see a sense of invincibility among small business owners," says Matt Cullina, CEO of Identity Theft 911, which provides identity theft prevention and recovery services. "They know data breaches are happening, but they don't think it's going to happen to them."Of course, small business owners also face another challenge: With money tight, and simply keeping the doors open a top priority, many feel they can't afford to invest in data security even if they want to. That's a perfectly legitimate concern. But the good news is there are things small businesses can do to up their data security without much expense. Start with these four steps:1. Don't store more personal data about employees or customers than you need.Most companies view data as an asset, which it is. But it's also a liability, Cullina says. If your security is breached and an outsider gets access to your customers' or employees' data, every bit of personal information you have--names, addresses, birth dates, place of birth, and so on--makes it easier for a hacker to sneak into their online accounts."A lot of times we collect information just because we can," he says. "Don't take in sensitive data unless you absolutely need it to run the business. And have a destruction policy for when you don't need it anymore."2. Train employees to treat personal data appropriately.Though the risk of employees stealing or misusing data is something to watch for, the biggest cause of data breaches is simple error by people who meant no harm, Cullina says. "Simple training would have saved those companies a lot of embarrassment," he adds.The idea is to teach employees to treat customer and employee personal information as a valuable asset and protect it in much the same way they might protect your company's bank account access or trade secrets. "Make your employees stewards of that information," Cullina advises.3. Talk with vendors and contractors about how they protect your data."Any kind of support people--website designers, people who set up payment processing--all those connection points can create vulnerabilities," Cullina says. One small business he worked with suffered a devastating data breach in which all employee data was exposed, including Social Security numbers. When Identity Theft 911 staff analyzed the breach, they discovered that the company had outsourced its IT to a vendor who did not keep it secured by updating passwords and malware protection. Eventually, a hacker got inside the company's network."The IT provider said that they didn't know the small business wanted that updating service, which would have cost extra," Cullina says. You need to either let vendors know that you expect them to provide data security--or make sure to provide it yourself. If everyone thinks someone else is minding the store, bad things happen.4. Consider using encryption."Most data breach laws and regulations include best practices for managing data," Cullina says. "The No. 1 item--other than having firewalls in place--is encrypting data any time it leaves your company." In fact, he says, if you suffer a data breach but the data is encrypted, you likely won't have to go through the legally required notification to customers. "It's a key get-out-of-jail-free card," he says.Getting data encrypted may not be as hard as you think, he adds. In today's market, encryption vendors may be able to provide products that can simply be added to your email applications. "It's not as complicated or expensive as it used to be," he says.

Freespace is a experiment in civic hacking, inspired in no small part by Burning Man. But it’s attracting the attention of Fortune 500 companies eager to find ways bring more creativity and innovation into their work spaces and companies.

We all need to reinvent ourselves regularly. Here's how I suggest new grads--or anyone--go about it.On May 23, I had the honor of delivering the convocation keynote at my alma mater, San Jose State University, for the Department of Journalism and Mass Communications.Unlike most graduation speeches, mine wasn’t esoteric or philosophical. I didn’t tell the graduating seniors to follow their dreams. Nope. I told them what they--and their tuition-paying parents--really wanted to hear: how to get a job. I shared practical job and career strategies I’ve seen work thousands of times. The full transcript, and a video, of the speech is here.My tips aren’t just for college grads. We all need to regularly reinvent ourselves, no matter our industry or level of experience. Best of all, these tips come without a tuition fee.1. Go out on a limbIn my college senior seminar class, we prepared for the real world by writing a cover letter and resume for a hypothetical job. I found a marketing coordinator position that requested three to five years’ experience, but I’d only done a single summer internship. I sent my cover letter and resume anyway. Surprise! The company hired me part-time while I was still a senior, and then full-time after graduation. For my fellow students, it was a 15-point assignment. For me, it was the beginning of a career in Silicon Valley.The takeaway? Apply for everything. It costs nothing. Job descriptions are wish lists. And companies love people who are willing to put themselves out there. As former President Jimmy Carter says: “Go out on a limb. That’s where the fruit is.”2. Answer the frickin’ door!Two years ago, I was asked to speak at a Student Leadership Conference, and made an offer to the audience. If a student would give me his or her name, email and major, I’d match him or her with a professional mentor from my personal network. For free.One hundred students gave me their info. My team and I matched each student with professionals in similar career fields. We sent each student his or her mentor’s contact information and told them they were responsible for initiating contact. Out of 100 students, how many do you think followed up with their mentors?Zero.Everyone wanted the golden ticket-;but nobody bothered to unwrap the Wonka bar. How many golden tickets do you think you’ll get in your lifetime? It doesn’t matter how busy you are. Or how intimidated you may feel. When opportunity knocks, answer the frickin’ door!3. Make a sweet impressionMy son, Adam, attends college in Los Angeles and wants to break into the entertainment industry-;along with everyone else in L.A.In his freshman year, a Hollywood producer spoke to one of Adam’s classes. Afterward, Adam walked and chatted with her-;and learned they’d both worked at Baskin-Robbins and shared the same favorite ice cream flavor: peanut butter & chocolate.The producer promised to connect Adam with a friend who owned a Hollywood talent agency for dancers and choreographers. He emailed to follow up and she kindly made the introduction. Adam got the unpaid internship at the dance agency. But that’s not the best part of the story. After his first week at the internship, Adam bought a styrofoam ice chest, took a taxi to Baskin-Robbins, loaded the cooler with pints of peanut butter & chocolate ice cream, and delivered it to the producer’s office with a handwritten thank-you note. Total cost? About $50. Net value? Priceless.Adam’s unpaid internship is now paid, and the agency sent him to work in their Broadway office in New York for the summer. Even though he’s just finished his junior year, they’ve already offered him a full-time talent agent job when he graduates. People work with people they like, so pay attention and look for common threads with others. Then exceed expectations. That’s how you make a sweet impression-;to get that f

Nothing makes mobile marketing more effective and engaging than content and opportunities that offer real value. According to the findings of a new study conducted by Millward Brown in partnership with SessionM, mobile consumers are more receptive when brands offer value in exchange for their time. Although favorability toward mobile advertising was, on average, low, brands have the opportunity to break through by offering more tangible value in their marketing content. “Through the AdReaction Report we know that consumers want brands to provide valuable and rewarding ad experiences, and this study helped us break down exactly what that means,” admits Joline McGoldrick, Research Director at Dynamic Logic, Millward Brown’s digital practice. “The findings present marketers with a tremendous opportunity to deliver mobile ad experiences in line with consumers’ expectations, enabling them to effectively break through to mobile consumers.” Reward-based mobile advertising, the report shows, is “one answer to value exchange equation.” Other key findings from the report include: Rewarded audiences are over twice as likely to interact with brands. After seeing an in-app ad, 34 percent of rewarded users clicked or interacted with an ad, compared with only 15 percent of mobile users who had not participated in reward-based advertising. Receiving a reward expands a consumer’s consideration set. After seeing an in-app ad, 26 percent of rewarded users considered purchasing a brand, compared with 18 percent of mobile users who had not participated in reward-based advertising. Not all reward-based advertising is created equal. When using a reward-based advertising strategy, there are some things to keep in mind. Ninety-two percent of mobile users report it’s important they choose the reward they receive, and 68 percent of users prefer to know for certain they will get a reward, rather than be surprised. Users also prefer rewards that are tangible and have an element of choice in how they’re spent. “Mobile advertising experiences that create a more balanced consumer experience — ones that respect time and provide a useful outcome — open the door of receptivity and have a positive impact on the brand,” says Jayne Dow, Director of Qualitative Research and Digital Innovation at Firefly, Millward Brown’s global qualitative practice. “This simple truth has powerful implications in improving the perception and effectiveness of mobile advertising.”