Five years from now brands could spend $10 million on promoted tweets during the Super Bowl, according to an industry observer.
But first, brands need to learn how to use Twitter and avoid Sunday night's Toyota disaster, in which the car maker ended up spamming people who used game-related hash tags.
Forget what all those ad executives tweeting on #brandbowl and #whartonfoa told you last night: There were 87 commercials during last night's Super Bowl, but very few of them failed to meaningfully connect their message to their social media platforms.
The ad execs praised the use of Twitter hashtags, even going as far as saying the hashtag was to 2012 what the URL was to 2000, one year after Victoria's Secret became the first ever firm to use a Super Bowl ad to connect viewers to its online media. But posting a hashtag in a commercial and getting viewers to take some sort of action that increases brand affinity are two different things, according to an anlysis released Monday by Resource Interactive.
Mark Zuckerberg says he has always been reluctant to make Facebook all about the ads and less about the user experience. This is surprising, however, coming from a freshly minted billionaire who owns more than 25% of his own company and holds more than 50% of the voting power.
"Mark has an evangelical approach to advertising," Martin Sorrell, chief executive of WPP Plc, the world's largest advertising agency told Reuters. "He sees Facebook as a vehicle to open up communication, not to monetize." Facebook's attitude toward advertising is finally changing. Users have started to notice, too. Today Facebook took that first step, claiming that sponsored stories for mobile will be coming "within weeks."
Twitter's sponsored tweets and sponsored hashtags are cropping up more often as the social network places a heavy focus on advertising. As with any new advertising offering, we'll learn how to use it effectively by watching the efforts of others. Advertising on a social network offers up opportunities for engagement that can't be found elsewhere, but that opportunity comes with significant risk.
Sponsored hashtags can blow up in your face, they can be stolen by a competitor and they can be surrounded by risky UGC. But they can also very quickly achieve some great attention for your brand. Choosing to advertise on Twitter is a risky move, ripe with opportunity and danger. It shouldn't be undertaken lightly or without serious thought.
We're all on the edge of our seats waiting for the Facebook IPO to drop. Thankfully, Kara Swisher over at AllThingsD reports that we can all hang out a bit (maybe), because the FB IPO isn't dropping until later today (probably). Phew.
The Wall Street Journal proper reports (no offense, AllThingsD) that Facebook probably makes most of its revenue from online advertising combined with cuts from game purchases. Before its public offering, Zynga reported $828.9 million in revenue through the third quarter. Facebook takes a 30% cut from games that live on its ecosystem. In this instance, Facebook collected about $350 million from Zynga. Facebook Credits are another revenue stream. Now there's even a a user loyalty incentive component.
As Facebook moves forward with its IPO, many are wondering just how much it makes from ads. Boston-based Nanigans, a Facebook ads API developer, reports 1600% growth in Facebook ad spending over the past year. This refers to the ad spend managed by Nanigans' software - not the entire Facebook ecosystem.
Today, ads are something we skip. They coat everything we watch, read and listen to like a sticky film, blinking and shouting and shocking us into paying attention. Their value is measured in "impressions," how many people's eyeballs scan past them, and on the Web, a click on an ad is the holy grail. That's what passes for "engagement."
Have you ever seen an ad that made you say, "My daughter would love this ad!" Cooliris builds ad technology that elicits that response. "Our vision is to make every single pixel in the ad interactive and living," says Aneesh Karve, product manager of Cooliris' ad technology, AdJitsu. So far, it has pushed mobile and desktop ads into three dimensions, creating ads you can go into and look around. Today, it's offering a first look at "high-interaction" ads, which unlock the laws of physics in touch-controlled ads.
Boston-based Nanigans, a firm specializing in the Facebook ads marketplace, recently released new data confirming a year-over-year jump in the Facebook ads marketplace this past holiday season. Facebook ads charged a higher cost-per-click (CPC), otherwise known as pay-per-click (PPC), which means that an advertiser pays each time a user clicks on the listing. This is especially interesting considering Facebook's latest incentive, which offers discounts for Facebook ads that keep users inside the network.
Perhaps not since "The Sweet Hereafter" has there ever been a more pivotal bus crash shown on TV or in the movies. Today Priceline begins a new ad campaign that shows the death of its William Shatner "Negotiator" character. For those of you that haven't seen "The Sweet Hereafter," a movie based on a Russell Banks story, it is worth renting just for Ian Holm's wonderful performance. But back to Priceline and Shatner.
U.S. advertisers spend nearly $40 billion a year for online advertisements, but 31% of their ads are never seen. That means $12.4 billion will be wasted on U.S. online ads this year. That's the average across all sites; on some sites, only 7% of the ads were "in-view," meaning 93% of them went unseen.
That sounds ominous for the health of Web content. But ad spending is up by over 20% this year. Online ad spending will exceed print magazine and newspaper ads for the first time this year. So, put another way, online ads in the U.S. are still worth enough to brands to waste $12 billion a year on them. But is all this waste necessary?
If Facebook had it their way, users would come to the site and stay. Ads would send users to other areas of the social network. No one would ever leave. So it comes as no surprise that Facebook's latest ad strategy focuses on subtle ways to keep users in the network.
In the second quarter of 2011, Facebook's advertising department offered an interesting incentive to advertisers: If your ad kept people on Facebook, it would cost you 29% less than an ad that sent users out to another website. For the fourth quarter of 2011, Facebook offered the same deal and pushed the number up to 45% off. Given that Facebook does as much as possible to keep you on the site, will it eventually become your one true social network?
