And The LA Judge Gives Them A 6.5

As much as I’ve liked watching Shaun White, Lindsey Vonn, Bode Miller, Shani Davis and Apolo Ohno flying around this past week, I’m enjoying something else even more. Teens and young adults are going to use the Olympics to be even more tightly integrated online and you better believe this is a different sense of integration than the one that existed just three months ago. Teens and young adults don’t ask the question ‘did you see that?’ They just say, ‘here watch this.’

Now the obvious reaction is that this will all mean a huge boost for mobile, but I beg to differ. It will mean a continued uptick in online video and a continued sense of discovery for this demographic online. That sense of discovery is extremely important for any demo. It’s what keeps a user coming back. When kids are coming to social media, MySpace, gaming sites, they keep finding new content. Finding new content leads to more intense engagement online. When we deliver an audience for a client, engagement has a lot to do with the strength of that audience. Teens and young adults can be defined as more specific targets, of course. But let’s look at the bigger picture. We’re talking about 19.9 million total teens online, according to MRI. That’s 97 percent of the total teen population. Even mobile can’t come close to that.

Now, before I leave the cast of characters I described up top, let me leave you with one other thought. I think the Olympics are a very different sporting event in terms of marketing approach. History has shown that outside of Michael Phelps, it’s very hard to make an athlete mean anything six months after the Games. Once again that plays into online marketing. Constantly updated content and constantly optimized targeting is necessary to reach the always fickle teen and young adult audience. Sure, they’ll text about Lindsey Vonn. And she is gorgeous. But tell me one thing, how many people watching Lindsey Vonn remember Picabo Street? She won Olympic ski gold in 1998. Better to try to attach your brand to the spirit and lifestyle that the Olympics have started to establish. The athletes are going to walk out of that stadium. They will live online.

How Pink Changed My Life!

When Pink got wet at the Grammy’s my life was changed forever. You probably saw it: The song, the sky thing, the water, the nudie suit. Well, the reason her performance changed my life is because I was watching this on TV and I couldn’t believe what I was seeing... so I grabbed my laptop, which recently has become a fixture in my TV room, in hopes of programming my own instant replay. My laptop was also by my side during the Super Bowl, and it was there, this past weekend, while my son and I watched the NBA All-Star Game.

This week we learned that 14 percent of home Super Bowl viewers, with Internet access, browsed the web at least once during the Big Game. Additionally, time spent on line for those multitaskers was up from 24 minutes last year to 29 minutes, with much of that concurrent time being spent on an integrated website or on a social network yammering about the event. Now as for me and my son, we reached for that laptop to socially yap. But we also looked at a ton of video. It has become clear to me that whether you look for video in the moment, while you watch TV, or look later, video, right now, is enjoying the kind of momentum typically reserved for the next big thing.

There are new numbers to support the fact that online video is now center stage. First and foremost, Fox Interactive served 125 million video streams in January, which is a huge number and among the highest total for a brand specific content group. Second, Nielsen recently announced the number of unique viewers of online video increased 5.2% year-over-year from 137.4 million unique viewers in January 2009 to 142.7 million in January 2010. Time per viewer on content streams is another very telling stat to me. It ranges from three minutes a day per user to almost ten minutes a day. That’s a huge deal to any sales and marketing team on the content side because it promises that average viewers are willing to not only open video content, they will stay engaged with them. ComScore has also checked in on this. Its Video Metrix service showed that U.S. Internet users viewed a record 14.3 billion online videos during January which is a 13 percent increase over December.

The online video opportunity is tried and true and is a welcome tool in all our sales kits. Online video will enjoy a phenomenal year in 2010 tied, in no small part, to enhanced integrated promotions from the TV networks and the popularity of social media. Having said that, I can't wait for the Academy Awards!

Targeting Effecting Spending Limits? Nah!

Some people remember the pre-internet days. Seems like ancient history when print and TV were battling it out for dollars. Back before there was an internet, I took a detour from publishing sales into publishing audience research. I learned a lot, even when the universe was so simple. And one of the things I learned is that sometimes you can ask a question that is completely useless because it predicts your answer.

Witness Forrester Consulting’s report last week called “Media Buying Goes Real Time.” I agree with the main premise of the report, which states that the rapid acceleration of online inventory is bringing new publishing business and pricing models into the forefront. I’m not so sure I agree with its prediction that marketers will embrace bid-based ad buying. I wholeheartedly agree that performance-based ads currently make up more than half of all online media buys, and marketers fluent in cost-per-click deals where ad placement depends on bid price are ready to optimize display ad buys. But here’s where I part ways based on my even limited knowledge of research: the report shows that more than 80 percent of marketers surveyed would spend more money online if they had better targeting available.

That’s like asking me if I would go to more Laker games if I had better seats. Sure I would, at least in answer to your question. But whether or not I could find the time is still up for grabs, right? One thing I am very confident about right now is that marketers have a complete set of targeting tools available. At least targeting is not a limiting factor. If you want to dive deep, I would say that the things holding back total online spend from brands are creative in nature, and still steeped in the old ways of traditional marketing. The ability to have more and better targeting has very little to do with spending limitations right now. The normally excellent research machine that is Forrester asked a self revealing question. No one who sells or markets digital content should find a lack of targeting a reasonable explanation for online budget cuts.

The Super Bowl? What About Super Targeting?

The news and watercooler talk these days are all about new devices and who’s gonna win the Super Bowl… and I love it! Talk of new Google Nexus' phones, Apple's iPad and offensive football strategies are finally more frequent chatter than Tiger Woods’ girlfriend gossip. But when it comes time for the real work, I think brand marketers need to admit that sexy screen technology is simply a new way to communicate their image in more places. It will not be an advertising game changer anytime soon. So all those predictions you read in December about 2010 being the year of the device - well, maybe they’re true if you're a techie. But if you're a marketer, January was back to the basics of integrated promotions and enhanced audience data opportunities.

Now about that Super Bowl offensive strategy part. That has some decidedly useful parallels for digital marketing, especially when you discuss them in the context of integrated promotions and data. The integrated promotions trend is decidedly retro. When brands first started to hone their internet strategies back in the late 90s they did so by using TV to drive people to the web. Everyone remembers Pepsi’s Super Bowl/Pepsistuff.com promotion in 2001. The strategy is the same today but the destination is now slightly different. In fact, the answer to the million-dollar question "how are brands going to use social media" has pretty much been answered by this year's Super Bowl planning. Brands are going to use TV to not just drive people online, but to drive consumers towards social media, and that's a big, new development. Audi, VW, Pizza Hut. Coke, and others are using Super Bowl spots as the foundation for deep, long-term online efforts.

VW provides a good example. It will debut the "Punch Dub" campaign in a 30-second ad during the third quarter of the game Sunday as well as online. The TV spot will show a variety of people in different driving situations playing “punch buggy” gently every time they see a VW on the road. An online version of "Punch Dub" (www.facebook.com/vw) will launch on Super Bowl Sunday and will engage people with the entire Volkswagen product family and encourage people to dole out virtual "slugs" to friends and family. Players will pick any one of thirteen Volkswagen vehicles, customize their punch and choose a Facebook friend. An online guide will help players develop and hone their punching techniques. The more friends you punch, the better your chances of winning a weekly prize (6-month leases on specific vehicles listed online) and the Grand Prize: a new Volkswagen CC.

Now let’s look at this from an offensive strategy perspective. By using mass media to drive people online, a brand like VW is like a high-powered offense at the beginning of its drive. Its playbook is wide-open and it’s trying to pick up as many yards as possible just like a brand is trying to engage as many customers as possible. When that branding initiative is used to drive people online what you have is a collection of people and corresponding data points that fit into what I call a CRM bucket. Brands are good at filling the CRM bucket when they want to be. They fill it with social media network members, opt-in email responders, promotional purchase data, and frequent site visitors. It’s relatively easy to sell to customers that have already declared a level of interest in a product. If a brand marketer fills that CRM bucket with good data, to target relevant ads to valuable customers, they have fulfilled an important corporate expectation. The problem is the CRM bucket fills easily, strains customer engagement, and taxes data management capabilities. It can be like a good drive that breaks down at the 50 yard line.

TV guys are expected to broadly target valuable customers at the top of the marketing funnel, especially during “the Big Game”… You can read all you want about Super Bowl ads, but the real story with Super Bowl ads is their connection to the transaction (on the field), as they help move millions of consumers (the football) towards the ultimate conversion (the end zone). On Super Bowl Sunday, we in the online world, are akin to football players who excel in the red zone… we are, after all, the people who are closest to the conversion. We are, often times, a click or two from a purchase or registration. Not only are we closest to the goal line, we -- more often than not -- have access to some kind of data that will enable us to move the ball and ultimately break the plain. People like me and the rest of my sales staff, we’re expected to leverage targeting and, from time-to-time, micro or supertargeting in order to get the job done.

So the million-dollar question, today, is… Is this movement toward targeting and supertargeting part of a comprehensive plan for a brand? There are a handful of demand side platforms that would like it to be, and I will tell you that DSPs are having a huge effect on the sales and marketing efforts in the digital space. It seems like there’s a new DSP every day. If you don’t know, DSPs are basically optimized display ad network and scalable targeting platforms, most of them are owned or associated with mega-digital players. LucidMedia’s ADvisor just launched a couple of weeks ago. It enters a field that includes the Yahoo and Google Ad Exchanges and countless others. Agencies are also on the field with new found Internet offerings, like Publicis Groupes’ VivaKi and IPG’s Cadreon.

Like the Fox Audience Network, DSPs introduce customers throughout the marketing funnel, but most importantly, at the bottom. That’s vital as brands want to reach their sales goals. In many respects, it’s akin to bringing in the short-yardage personnel at the goal line in football. It’s a different team of guys, their playbook might be less creative, but they’re extremely effective.

By the way: Colts 34-21. You read it here first.