The Social Path

A new metric for ad success: Keeping eyes away from apps.

This past Sunday, I once again had the pleasure of being the "voice of AdFreak" on Twitter, as I live-tweeted about the Super Bowl ads for Adweek's blog. (I also made occasional contributions to the magazine's Super Bowl liveblog itself, which you can read a transcript of here.)

Amid the frenzy of tweeting about ads in real time, I became hyperaware of how the game and its celebrated commercials kept or lost my attention. When the game grew dull, I was able to cram in more online updates. When a great ad surfaced, I stopped typing and stayed glued to the screen.

I wasn't alone, as you can see in the chart above from analytics service Flurry, which tracks data from more than 160,00 iOS and Android apps. The graph shows how many mobile apps were being opened during every second of the game.

For example, during downtime, smartphone users would fire up the Twitter or Facebook apps to see what friends were saying. When the game got intense (or Madonna took the stage), phones went dark and the TV took hold.

Certain ads obviously drew in viewers. I was one of the millions who couldn't look away from the mysterious movie trailer that ended up being for the board game-inspired "Battleship." Coke's polar bears kept people away from their phones, as well.

There's so much insight to be gleaned from this data, though mostly it just illustrates two points:

• Major television events have become national social experiences, giving us all something specific to talk about. Short of major world events, what else these days brings together so many diverse voices into the same conversation? Whether it's the Grammys or big game, TV's biggest moments are unparallaled in their ability to get people talking in real time.

• Attention comes at the cost of discussion. This creates a tough challenge for the entertainment industry. You want your TV show to be a nationally trending topic on Twitter while it's airing, but you also want viewers paying attention, right? A viewer's natural inclination will be the chat during commercial breaks, which means there's never been more pressure on advertisers to keep eyeballs on the screen and off the phone for just a few more seconds.

Which leads us to another fascinating implication of this data: We might be witnessing a new metric for TV ad performance. Most advertisers simply look at a program's audience size and claim the impressions as their own. But this chart clearly shows that attention waxes and wanes, even if the audience never leaves the room.

Will your favorite brand's next TV ad be enough to keep people engaged, or will audiences find their eyes drifting down to the dreaded second screen?

David Griner is the Director of Digital Content for Luckie and Company and contributing editor for Adweek’s blog, AdFreak.com. You can reach him by e-mail or on Twitter.

The Super Bowl Ad Awards: Honoring the most memorable commercials.

It's awards season and Super Bowl week, making it the perfect time to present our own honors for Super Bowl ads! In an effort to get the most out of their millions of dollars, companies go to great lengths to win the Super Bowl ad wars with most suggestive, adorable, heartfelt, and funny  commercials they can produce. Many of these are so good (or bad) that they stand head and shoulders above the rest in their respective categories. Join me as we honor the best the Super Bowl has to offer.

Most Innuendo-Packed Ad

Ahhh, the '70s. Arguably the first famous Super Bowl ad, this Noxema commercial starred the one and only Farrah Fawcett and possibly the most charismatic football player ever, Joe Namath. There's very little script, mostly just Farrah and Broadway Joe saying "creamed" over and over again. No obscenity, no skin, just enough creepy dialogue to give you the giggles. Simple, suggestive and effective. Go Daddy can only dream of being this brilliant.

The Most Annoying Trend Caused By A Super Bowl Ad

Admit it, you've said it. We've all said, and it was hilarious for roughly 15 minutes. Since it's been awhile since we've heard it, maybe it's poised for a comeback ... "WASSSSSSSSSUU..." Nope. Still annoying.

Ad Most Likely to Ruin A Company

What was once one of the largest athletic shoe retailers in America met a swift death thanks to one ill-fated Super Bowl ad. A short 11 months after this disastrous 1999 ad from Just For Feet, the company filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy and closed their last store in 2004.

Facebook officially kills Deals after downgrading Places. Will geotargeted mobile ads fill the gap?

UPDATE: Since we posted this Friday, Reuters and other news outlets have clarified that it is Facebook's Daily Deals offering (a la Groupon) that is now being phased out, not the Check-in Deals (a la Foursquare). It remains a bit unclear how Check-in Deals will continue or evolve, but since much of the commentary below is still valid, I've decided to leave the original post up:

Well, Facebook's short-lived attempt to compete with Foursquare in the check-in space is officially over.

As you might have heard, Facebook dropped the "check-in" aspect of Facebook Places from the social network's mobile app this week. Now Reuters is reporting that Facebook will be shutting down its related Deals product "in the coming weeks."

It's easy for all this to sound like a public defeat for Facebook — and it is, in the sense that they tarnished their brand by launching a lackluster check-in tool to begin with. The site also lost some goodwill from socially savvy marketers who tried using Facebook's check-in Deals, which were riddled with glitches. (In a recent campaign run by my team featuring Deals at 300 locations, the check-in offer went unclaimed due to glitches a staggering 95% of the time.)

But Facebook isn't giving up on location-based marketing. In fact, the site's leadership deserves credit for admitting they had a flawed product, pulling it, and choosing to focus on the next iteration of how location can be folded into online activity.

Here's a nice summary of the change, via MediaPost:

"This is not a retreat in any way," said Michael Nicholas, chief strategy officer at Aegis Group's Isobar. Rather, the move is essentially an "embedded tag strategy that's about getting more people to put more location data into Facebook." Instead of a single mobile feature where users have to manually check-in, he added, "they're putting location into everything."

The real question, of course, is how Facebook will allow marketers to make the most of this location data. My hunch is that it will be tied directly to the one marketing tactic that has been noticeably missing: mobile versions of Facebook ads.

Given that more than 50% of smartphone owners are checking Facebook at least daily, you can bet that Facebook wants to make money off this massive audience. Using location data to serve up geotargeted ads could be the perfect solution.

David Griner is the Director of Digital Content for Luckie and Company and contributing editor for Adweek’s blog, AdFreak.com. You can reach him by e-mail or on Twitter.

The Super Bowl: Now playing on three screens.

A diehard Green Bay fan will be watching the Super Bowl.  A commercial comes on.  After watching, another one airs, but this one doesn’t interest him, so he pulls out his mobile phone while walking to the kitchen to get another plate of wings, typing in a URL or becoming a “fan” of a product he just saw advertised. Then, he sends a text message to his buddy in Pittsburgh to share the experience, along with a healthy serving of trash talk.  In Pittsburgh, his buddy goes online and Googles the advertiser.  He find the website along with the Facebook site, Twitter, campaign sites, etc.

TV. Mobile. Text. Search. Web.

All while getting a plate of wings.  Welcome to Super Bowl XLV, a marketer’s Shangri-La.

It has been happening for years now, but in the current marketing environment we are seeing an emphasis on digital media on behalf of advertisers.  Examples like the scenario above are the reason marketers will be using their big-budget Super Bowl spots as a springboards to digital experiences in social, mobile  and Web.  Why?  Because this will create an ongoing and transferrable relationship with the brands which will extend far past the game.  Marketers know that in order to remain relevant, they need to create an experience that will include three screens - TV, mobile and PC.

So how will those watching the Super Bowl see evidence of this? It may be obvious to some but routine for others.  When watching ads this Sunday, they will find themselves being driven to destinations outside the norm.  They will be pausing their DVRs looking for hidden codes, texting numbers to enter sweepstakes, tweeting in order to effect the outcome of the next spot and telling their friends about it the whole time.  Marketers are relying on consumer behavior and their use of digital technologies to help tell a story that is seamlessly intertwined into the game experience.

But with all the great emerging ways to reach consumers, the one true thing marketers need to keep in mind is to be relevant.  Consumers are smarter than ever.  Developing a marketing architecture that manages to convey the right message in the right medium is the challenge, but the reward is creating an immersive campaign experience that feels as natural to the consumers as getting up from the couch for that second plate of wings.

Chris Zobel is Director of Digital Strategy at Luckie & Company. You can contact him by e-mail.

Photo credit: CarrieA on Flickr

Mobile is crushing online in ad effectiveness.

Here at Luckie, we recently invited mobile analyst Joy Liuzzo from Insight Express to come share her thoughts on trends and technology. While she had a lot of fascinating insight to share, here's a slide that really blew me away:

Essentially, this chart shows that — based on three years' worth of research data — mobile advertising is twice as effective as online advertising when it comes to ad awareness, and a whopping six times more effective in the "holy grail" category of purchase intent.

Later in the presentation, she sliced it even thinner, showing that for the retail sector specifically, mobile ads were 14 times more powerful than online in the area of aided awareness and 8 times more effective in purchase intent.

I was simply flabbergasted by these numbers, so I followed up with a brief Q&A asking Joy to help put these findings into context. Check out her responses after the jump:

Making sense of Twitter's new advertising crackdown.

In a long-winded and circuitous blog post today, Twitter’s COO announced that the social network is banning third-party services that insert ads into users’ streams.

The decision is a kick in the collective crotch for in-stream ad businesses like Ad.ly, 140 Proof (shown at right) and Sponsored Tweets, which pay users to post occasional commercial messages or partner with applications to drop ads into the tweet stream.

It’s also a sign that Twitter is getting serious — after a mere four years — about monetizing their own service instead of just watching while everyone else milks their cow. The relatively new, official ad service of Promoted Tweets will now have a lock on in-stream advertising.

What Twitter said:

I’ll spare you the 611-word introduction (kid you not) to Twitter COO Dick Costolo’s blog post and skip right to the key points:

“Aside from Promoted Tweets, we will not allow any third party to inject paid tweets into a timeline on any service that leverages the Twitter API. …

“Why are we prohibiting these kinds of ads? First, third party ad networks are not necessarily looking to preserve the unique user experience Twitter has created. They may optimize for either market share or short-term revenue at the expense of the long-term health of the Twitter platform. …

“Secondly, the basis for building a lasting advertising network that benefits users should be innovation, not near-term monetization. Twitter is uniquely dependent on and responsible for the long-term health and value of the platform. Accordingly, a necessary focus of Promoted Tweets is to explore ways to create value for our users.”

Personally, I find this to be a less compelling argument than if he had simply said, “It’s our service, we pay the bills, and we want to be the ones making money from it.” I think we'd all agree that's fair.

Who does this affect?

The biggest problem here isn’t Twitter’s decision; it’s the length of time it took for Twitter to make the decision. By taking a laissez-faire stance on advertising for so many years, Twitter’s execs tacitly gave companies and users the green light to create their own ad opportunities.

Had Twitter made this decision in 2008, it probably wouldn’t have hurt much of anybody. But this late in the game, it comes as a heavy hit to several businesses and takes away a modest revenue source from many users and app developers who’ve signed up to automatically distribute the ads.

All that said, it’s hard to get too upset about a decision that reduces the number of ads we have to see in a day. Also, the Twitter execs deserve credit for being otherwise accommodating to most businesses profiting off their service.

Even Sponsored Tweets, part of the Izea network of paid social media content, seems optimistic its advertisers and users can remain active on Twitter. As I was writing this post, Izea CEO Ted Murphy published his take on what kind of promotion is still kosher:

“You can still tweet about our sponsors. You can still promote your employer. You can still drive traffic to your blog. You can still share amazon affiliate links. You can still use your account to tweet out deals. You still have freedom to do what you like with your Twitter account, so long as you aren’t a spammer.”

Murphy hopes that turning off his service’s “direct publishing” feature will be enough to comply with Twitter’s new rules, though I’m not so sure. Ad service 140 Proof also has posted a quick response, which basically just says "no comment."

If you’re in the advertising field, now’s a good time to brush up on Twitter’s constantly evolving guidelines on commercial use.

It’s also a good time to start thinking about Twitter’s upcoming Annotations feature, which could help users interconnect more intricately than ever before. Costolo feels this addition alone will spark the creation of many new companies, ones which can hopefully live in peaceful co-existence with a Twitter that’s finally behaving more like a tech industry leader and less like a nonprofit.

David Griner is a social media strategist for Luckie and Company and contributing editor for Adweek’s blog, AdFreak.com. You can reach him by e-mail or on Twitter.