The possibilities surrounding Instagram implementing a Vine-like video feature has the tech world abuzz today, after TechCrunch reported the popular mobile app’s parent, Facebook, would unveil the move on Thursday. For the marketing-minded, the development creates at least a couple of huge questions.

As digital video continues to gain momentum, will a steady stream of user-generated video become the impetus for Facebook implementing ads on Instagram? The online model is certainly proven with YouTube. And will Instagram videos kill Vine—just as it’s gaining traction with brands?

If ads are in the offing for Instagram, Dave Otten, CEO of LongTail Video said, the video formats will be unique to the social marketplace while going “well beyond the typical pre-roll that you see today.”

Instagram has more than 90 million users compared to 13 million for Vine, which is property of Facebook’s chief social rival, Twitter. While the Facebook-versus-Twitter battle lines are being drawn, marketers don’t believe Instagram videos will suck the life out of Vine.

“Both have their place within the social ecosystem,” Otten said. In fact, it may depend on what a users preferred network is for video.

“In the short-term, there is a place for both video platforms and usage will be determined by the user’s preferred network,” said Amanda Peters, iCrossing social lead. “Those who favor Twitter may continue to use Vine because Vine videos show up in-stream in a user’s Twitter feed. While people who spend more time on Facebook may be more likely to use Instagram video.

“Long-term, Instagram should be able to leverage its significantly larger install base for quick adoption of Instagram video and could ultimately surpass Vine,” Peters added. “But a lot will depend on whether Instagram’s video offering is unique and differentiating enough for users to care.”

While Vine is hot at the moment, social video platforms like Viddy and Vyclone are also surely watching Instagram’s moves closely.

“I think its main competitors will ultimately be Vine and Viddy,” explained Liz Eswein, co-founder of social marketing startup The Mobile Media Lab.

Brands will rapidly build an Instagram video presence, predicted Ali Rana, Millward Brown’s svp and head of its Emerging Media Lab, but Facebook will likely continue taking its time before introducing ads on the app. “Until Instagram video achieves mass consumer acceptance, explicit video advertising would be too disruptive to the consumer experience, especially given that there is currently no other paid advertising on the platform,” he said.

Marketers confirm Rana’s notion that brands are stoked about Instagram video possibilities.

“There is huge opportunity for monetization by enabling brands to reach consumers with video on Instagram,” said Michael Kelly, social media marketing lead for licorice maker Red Vines, which has experimented with Vine campaigns. “The success of Vine in getting brands using the app and number of consumers sharing those Vines suggests that there is definitely value in incorporating this type of short form, snackable video content in the marketing mix.”

Christine Whitemarsh, social media lead for automotive brand Turtle Wax, looks forward to the feature, stating she wants to implement it into her brand’s summer-long#WaxOnShirtOff effort. And count Whitemarsh in as a media buyer who would gladly test Instagram paid ads if they became available.

“We would be interested in exploring the advertising capabilities, their analytics platform/offering and how granular they can go from a targeting perspective,” she said. “We are intrigued to see real-time capabilities with respect to serving up an ad unit based on a specific hashtag, user or mention.”

Paul Alfieri, marketing vp at Turn, added that “advertisers will surely be interested in Facebook’s ability to bring Instagram video to its one-billion-plus global users.”

And they’ll surely look closely at what comes out of Facebook’s press conference this Thursday. The Menlo Park, Calif.-based digital giant declined comment. (Christopher Heine/ adweek.com)

-3 Ways Paid Social Ads Can Explode Your Content-

Content marketing –- creating and distributing relevant content to attract, acquire, and engage your target audience –- has become a popular marketing tactic over the past few years. But although most companies understand how to promote their content via their “owned” channels, such as their Facebook Page, their Twitter account or LinkedIn Company Page, many are missing out on the opportunity to get their content in front of a larger audience through paid social promotions.

For example, let’s say you’ve spent time and money developing a great new how-to video or article –- how do you make sure people see it? Promoting it via Facebook Promoted Posts will put it front and center for your fans. Or, what if you’ve received a positive write-up in your local paper? You can make sure your target customers see it by making a small Twitter ad buy targeted at local followers of that paper.

Positive product reviews, media coverage, blog posts and educational content like white papers and presentations can all have tremendous value for your business. Here are three paid social ad tools that can dramatically expand visibility for this content.

1. Facebook Promoted Posts

With Facebook Promoted Posts, businesses pay to have their regular posts appear higher (and more often) in the news feed, so there’s a better chance their audience will see them.

“Most small business owners don’t realize the impact of just spending a little bit of money to promote posts,” said Anthony Kirlew, Chief Strategist at AKA Internet Marketing. “With all of the noise in the Facebook newsfeeds as well as the EdgeRank factors, the message of most small business Facebook pages is unseen. For a very small amount of money, companies can get the lift that leads to the exposure they are seeking on Facebook.”

To promote a post on your Page, simply create the post and click “Promote” at the bottom of the post. You’ll be prompted to select your audience – either people who like your page, or people who like your page and their friends –- and to set a budget based on how many people you want to reach. Compelling graphics and headlines are important for driving maximum engagement with Promoted Posts, so even if you’re promoting someone else’s content (such as a story about your company in the local paper), consider including your own graphic and headline to make it pop.

Galen Ward, co-founder and CEO of real estate search engine Estately, used Facebook Promoted Posts to seed viral sharing of its fun blog post, “37 Things You Should Know Before Moving to Seattle.” Ward’s strategy was to go narrow with the post promotion, crafting a post that would appeal to Seattle sports fans, and then promoting it to people who have the Seahawks as one of the interests on Facebook.

According to Ward, the company spent just under $100 and got 8,500 Likes and tens of thousands of visitors to the web site.

“We paid under $3 CPM and got around a five percent click-through rate — so for under $100 we got our post in front of over 30,000 people,” said Ward. “Without Facebook, it would have travelled through our limited networks, but with Facebook ads we got it in front of virtually every person who might be interested in it. And because the content was engaging and in front of the right people, it sparked a ton of viral sharing.”

Ward says they are now experimenting with spending $10-20 to promote each of their blog posts and will up the spend for posts that perform well.

2. Twitter Promoted Tweets

Twitter recently launched a self-service capability for Promoted Tweets, which are regular tweets that you pay to promote to more people. Twitter allows you to target people by geography, interest or gender, and you only pay only when people click, retweet, favorite or reply to your tweet.

Twitter’s pricing system is based on bidding: you set the maximum amount you’re willing to spend per follow or click, and Twitter will give you suggestions for what you should bid to optimize your campaign. Twitter tools allow you to see how each of your tweets is performing; after a few days of running promoted tweets, check back in to gauge how the campaign is working and whether you need to adjust your bid.

Online music publication Prefix Magazine used Promoted Tweets to increase brand awareness and drive more high-quality readers to their site, prefixmag.com. The site saw an immediate 49% jump in visitor traffic from Twitter compared to the week before the Twitter ad campaign.

“When a tweet is resonating, I want to keep it resonating — to have that tweet snowball — and Twitter advertising makes that happen,”

“When a tweet is resonating, I want to keep it resonating — to have that tweet snowball — and Twitter advertising makes that happen,” said Prefix Magazine’s Publisher Dave Park.

Daniel Rothamel, founder of artist management companyTwo Plus Media offered free downloads of “The Wretched”, a mixtape by his client NomiS, via Promoted Tweets. The $50 campaign, which targeted users in the U.S. interested in Christian and Gospel music, resulted in 7,900 impressions and 105 engagements on the tweet.

“One of my biggest challenges with promoting new artists is cutting through the clutter to find the people who are already interested in the music my artists create,” said Rothamel. “Promoted Tweets helps me target these people more effectively, giving me a greater chance at successfully turning them into fans.”

3. LinkedIn Ads

To get your content in front of a business audience, consider LinkedIn Ads, which run on prominent pages on the LinkedIn.com website. Ads consist of a headline, a description (up to 75 characters of text), your name or company name, a small image and a URL. You can specify which LinkedIn members view your ads by selecting targeting criteria such as job title, job function, industry, geography, age, gender, company name, company size or even by a particular LinkedIn Group (such as “Corporate Real Estate”). Like with Twitter, you set a maximum budget and only pay for the clicks or impressions that you receive.

According to LinkedIn, the best-performing ads are relevant to the target audience and written with clear, compelling words. LinkedIn suggests that you highlight special offers, unique benefits, white papers, free trials or demos to get people’s attention, and include strong call-to-action phrases like Try, Download, Sign up or Request a Quote.

Internet marketing agency Cardinal Web Solutions used a LinkedIn ad featuring a company culture presentation to help generate interest in their job openings. According to founder and CEO Alex Membrillo, “The content included in the presentation has been very effective for attracting qualified candidates, and overall interest in our company has increased significantly.”

Marketing software company HubSpot is offering white papers and free educational resources via LinkedIn Ads to attract marketing professionals. The company says it first experimented with ad campaigns on social networks other than LinkedIn, but the campaigns did not yield satisfactory results.

“There’s a lot of distraction on other social networks,” said Dan Slagen, the company’s head of paid marketing. “People are there for reasons besides improving their businesses, or networking with other professionals. We need to connect with B2B companies that are focused on lead generation, which means LinkedIn is the place for us.

According to Slagen, HubSpot’s LinkedIn Ads generate a click-through rate that is 60 percent higher than its average across other social networks, with much higher quality leads.

“There’s no clutter on LinkedIn – members are there to do business,” he added.

Getting Started

Ready to get started but still not sure which channel makes the most sense for you?

HipLogiq CTO and cofounder Adam Root recommends that small businesses consider all three networks, but use them for different purposes.

“My strategy is to use Twitter to gain new users, Facebook to build a community and LinkedIn to generate leads for the sales team,” says Root. “My logic in choosing this strategy is that Twitter is a good medium for targeting moments and encouraging action, Facebook is a great medium for building long-term relationships and LinkedIn is a business network with high-profile agencies in its user base that I’d want as customers.” (Leyl Master Black/ Mashable.com)

-Pretty Much Everyone Is Doing Native Ads Now -

With more marketers eager to shift their messages away from dull display ads to more creative and effective digital formats, news organizations continue to embrace native advertising, if cautiously.

NBC News has experimented with native ads on some properties—including Breaking News, Today.com and CNBC—but not its flagship site, NBCNews.com.

That may be about to change.

“We’re still looking for the right content and the right advertiser—everyone’s open for it, but we’re not going to force it in,” said Peter Naylor, evp of digital media at NBC News Digital Group.

Following other news orgs, Naylor stressed that NBC has strict guidelines for native ads. He said, “The first rule is that there can’t be one user who doesn’t understand the difference between the editorial content and the advertiser content. The second rule is the editorial staff will never really be called upon to help create this content. Editorial will continue to create editorial—marketing and ad professionals will work on ad content.”

Even The Wall Street Journal has jumped on board. “We have sponsored streams of content and dedicated content pages that are very clearly identified as sponsored content,” noted Nina Lawrence, WSJ’s vp of global marketing, ad sales. “We want to avoid any confusion between Wall Street Journal content and a sponsor’s content.”

Other news operations are dipping a toe in the native waters while stopping short of going the full BuzzFeed route—that is, prominently serving up advertorials that closely (too closely for some) resemble editorial content.

CNN doesn’t run advertorials but recently featured a General Electric sponsorship on its Trends page that included an ad in the news stream. “CNN.com has clear guidelines that distinguish advertising from editorial content, and any sponsored content on our site is clearly denoted as such,” a spokesperson said in a statement. “Recognizing the needs of clients and demand from the marketplace, the CNN ad sales team works closely with clients to customize a brand’s campaign to contextually align with relevant content featured on the site without compromising those guidelines.”

For all the hoopla, Lisa Valentino, ESPN’s svp of multimedia sales, said native ads are nothing new, adding the brand has run them for a decade. “The term is getting buzz because some startups are doing native ads and trying to make them seem new again,” she said. “The reality is, there is opportunity to be much smarter about native ads, which is the approach we take.” An ad running inside a scorebox is an example of advertising living near editorial, she offered.

The marketplace has clearly spoken. Demand for native advertising is huge and doesn’t appear to be going away, according to agency executives.

Brands are “very interested” in it, pointed out Ben Winkler, chief digital officer at Omnicom’s OMD, and publishers “undoubtedly” take a hit if they don’t get in the game. “If a publisher doesn’t offer native advertising and our client only wants to buy native advertising, the publisher loses that buy,” Winkler said. In the short term, he added, there’s “no question” that dollars are being lost.

Audrey Siegel, president of TargetCast, agreed that wary publishers could be doing themselves damage. “Does a publisher have to do everything an advertiser asks? No,” she said. “But if your peer group has figured out a way to do this responsibly and you haven’t, it doesn’t make you look smarter or better; it makes you less forward thinking.” (David Taintor/ adweek.com)

-Introducing Mashable’s New Social Marketing Platform for Brands-

CANNES, FRANCE — Some of the most popular content online throughout the past year wasn’t created by publishers like Mashable, but by brands like Red Bull, Dove, P&G andOreo.

In response to this trend, we launched a new ad product at this year’s SXSW called Social Lift, which allows brands to amplify their social assets in the stream on Mashable’s website. Our very first Social Lift ad featured our good friend Grumpy Cat starring in a Vine created by Friskies. Since then, a diverse group of brands have utilized Mashable’s Social Lift to promote YouTube videos, Vine posts and other social media creations. Here’s how it works:

Tuesday at Cannes Lions, we’re revealing the next evolution of this product: Mashable Lift For Brand Partners, which will give agencies and brands the ability to publish social assets onMashable through a self-service interface. For launch, we’ve teamed up with two of the world’s most innovative agencies in the branded content space, DigitasLBi and VaynerMedia.

Over the next couple months, you’ll see content from these partners and their clients appearing in Social Lift units on Mashable. We’ll also be rolling out the platform to more brands and agencies after a limited beta period.

While we’re gratified to be working with our launch partners on Lift, helping brands become content creators has always been core to our business at Mashable. And over the last few years, our Branded Content team has worked with brands and agencies to create some of our most compelling features, from our Global Innovation Series presented by BMW to ourDream Job Series presented by Uniball. We’ve done such a good job that some of our branded content reaches a 50% higher engagement than organic stories on the site.

For our Social Lift platform to find success, we need brands and agencies to create social assets that our readers will love just as much. That’s why we’re also announcing expanded creative service capabilities through Brand Lab, a group within Mashable that includes talent from our branded content, technology, marketing and community teams. The goal is to help our brand partners create all different types of social media assets — from articles to videos to Vine posts to infographics — that our audience will enjoy and want to share with their networks.

The Brand Lab team will also be sharing some of our favorite work and commenting on the trends we think are critical to forward-thinking brands through a new blog,MashableBrandLab.com. You can follow them on Twitter at @BrandLab. For more details on today’s announcements, read the press release issued this morning. (Adam Ostrow/ mashable.com)

-Google is the Mobile Ad King, but Facebook, Twitter are Taking Notes-

Mobile ads have been christened as the holy grail for internet companies, and rightfully so. In a new study by eMarketer, Google is projected to rake in$8.9 billion in mobile ad revenue in 2013, claiming 56 percent of the mobile ad market.

While other companies like Facebook, Twitter and Pandora are quicklygrowing their mobile ad revenue as well, their share of the ad pie pales in comparison to Google, which earns one of every two dollars spent on mobile advertising.

According to the study, Facebook, which came in at a distant second to Google, is learning the ropes rather quickly by streamlining mobile ads into its interface though sponsored and targeted posts. Ad integration is becoming an integral and necessary trait of mobile ads that don’t take away from the mobile experience, but enhance it.

“Consumers have an intimate and personal relationship with their devices which are often highly customized with apps, skins and settings of their choosing,” Retail Prophet notes. “When our device is hijacked by an annoying or cumbersome piece of advertising, we hate it and the poor impression we have of the offending brand can linger.”

YouTube is basking in its mobile ad revenue, which have tripled in the last six months,according to Bloomberg. According to estimates from Wedge Partners Corp. analyst Martin Pyykkonen, YouTube could see up to $350 million in mobile ad revenue in the first quarter alone.  Lucas Watson, VP of Sales said, “The commercial business has exploded. It’s a huge part of our business, and we know that’s where it’s headed.”

Even more vital to mobile advertising is timing and relevance. Location-based ads are well-received by consumers as they can serve a purpose on-the-go. “It’s about serving relevant information to consumers based on where they are and what they’re doing. They should be welcomed bites of information or offers that seem completely congruent and welcomed in the moment ” said Retail Prophet.

As brands and agencies strive to reinvent their playbook, Time Inc. is testing an oversized mobile ad unit dubbed Double Snap, promoting the Toyota Avalon on the mobile sites of Sports Illustrated, Entertainment Weekly and People.

“We think we have cracked the code with this,” Solomon Masch, director of mobile sales and strategy at Time Inc. told AdWeek. He’s hoping the ad unit “is something that takes off,” by achieving a delicate balance between being “eye-catching but not overbearing.” (Sheila Shayon/ brandchannel.com)

- Marketers Have Found a Way to Use Vine -

Marketers pushing summer blockbusters are aggressively seeding Vine, Twitter’s nascent mobile app for six-second videos, into their social media fieldwork.

For instance, Regal Entertainment Group this week plans to promote Monsters University and World War Z (each opening Friday) with Vine, which, according to Twitter, has been downloaded by 13 million iPhone owners (it became available to Android users only a few weeks ago). The 572-location cinema chain will launch a similar initiative to support next week’s White House Down premiere.

It’s all about putting butts in seats using Vine’s pithy videos, then selling soda and candy (theater owners’ bread and butter) during the flicks.

“The limitations of six seconds can actually lift the storytelling,” explained Gabrielle Kessler, accounts manager for Something Massive, which manages social media for Regal. “You get to home in on those emotionally engaging moments that both marketers and filmmakers are after,” she said. “We are really encouraged with the engagement the app is producing so far.”

Regal is working with partners Coca-Cola and Red Vines licorice to reach consumers via Vine, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and other social nets. Kessler said the partners will amplify their “shared marketing goals through each others’ networks.”

Red Vines, part of American Licorice Co., has run roughly 20 Vine ads since Twitter debuted the app in late January, seeing click-through rates of as much as 3 percent. “It’s an interesting way to get people thinking about buying our licorice before they go to the movie,” said John Dempsey, a rep for the company.

The brand will also use Vine to foster awareness around the Independence Day holiday.

Noting the brief videos require more of a consumer’s attention than mere tweets or Instagram snaps, Dempsey said Vine “has brought our brand top of mind with people who hadn’t thought of us in years.” The company also believes Vine boosts sales.

Peanut Butter & Co. shares a Vine-based strategy for Fourth of July. The brand promises an “edible fireworks show” via the app with a buy-one-get-one-free coupon offer for jars of peanut butter. A similar effort in April produced 300,000 impressions and 6,000 coupon downloads, according to the company.

“With Fourth of July fireworks, there are opportunities to do fun things with peanut butter,” said Lee Zalben, president.

And with Vine, the summer fun could very well spread. (Christopher Heine/ adweek.com)

-How Do You Feel About This: AOL Enables Brands To Track Users’ Unconscious Emotions, In Real-Time-

In a move that ups the ante for real-time media measurement, AOL today will unveil a new platform that enables brands to measure not just whether people are exposed to or even see their content, but how they actually feel about it. The platform, which is being introduced by fledgling AOL branded entertainment unit Be On, utilizes users’ own webcams to read their facial expressions while watching a brand’s video content in order to understand what their unconscious feelings are while exposed to the brand’s messages.

The platform is being powered by Realeyes, a tech firm that has figured out an economical way of utilizing “computer vision to read faces and measure human emotion” via common webcams on users’ PCs, tablets and smartphones, and initially will only track the faces and emotions of users participating into opt-in consumer panels operated by CINT and Toluna, but Be On CEO René Rechtman says AOL is already considering ways it could deploy the technology to track the emotional sentiment of its general users who want to opt into it.

The initial goal, he says, is to improve engagement levels that users have with brands running video content on AOL, but over time he says it could be used to improve the overall user experience with any AOL or brand content.

“It has always been very clear that content that has a strong emotional component has a much greater engagement and consumer response. We always knew that, but we didn’t have the science to execute it,” Rechtman explains, adding: “Now we have the technology and the science to measure how content affects people emotionally.”

AOL’s program is the latest in a rapid progression of so-called neuromarketing research applications that have emerged over the past half dozen years as new forms of biometric measurement technologies have enabled neuroscientists to develop methods for measuring the unconscious responses that consumers have to media, advertising and other forms of marketing — even what people are feeling when they’re in stores looking at products and offers on shelves. Such neuromarketing initiatives have been a major focus on Madison Avenue, including the Advertising Research Foundation, which gave ample discussion to it during last week’s Audience Measurement conference in New York.

But coincidental developments in technology — especially the ubiquitous distribution of webcams in personal media devices — have created the opportunity to scale such tracking and to do it in real-time. Recently, Sticky, a company that Procter & Gamble encouraged to develop a method for using webcams to track users’ eye movements to verify whether consumers are actually looking at ads or other brand content, introduced a panel capable of measuring it among hundreds of thousands of users in real-time.

As significant as eye-tracking is, AOL’s Rechtman says emotional tracking is the next logical progression, because the goal of media content — especially the kind of “native” brand content AOL’s fledgling Be On unit is developing — is to influence the eyes that are on it. (Joe Mandese/ mediapost.com)

-EA Sports Leading the Way in Best Sports Sponsorship Activation Practices-

As dollars continue to pour into sports sponsorship, brands are looking for the best ways to connect to their fans in new and innovative ways. Increasingly, brands are seeking to connect the physical and digital components of their sponsorships. The goal of this is to get fans using social and digital media platforms while attending the games in order to further connect those people to the brand.

“Properly activated partnerships deliver Win-Win-Win opportunities for brands, properties, and fans,” Brian Gainor, Director of Strategy + Analytics at Freshwire and Founder of Partnership Activation said. “Properties who successfully activate their partnerships deliver ideas and solutions that are ownable, unique, social, brand-centric, targeted, extendable, and measurable.”

IEG released its Sponsorship Best Practices Report in January of this year, and it details some of the top examples of activation for campaigns during the 2012 year. The top campaigns recognized in the report were:

- AT&T/ESPN College Gameday
- General Motors/Live Nation
- EA Sports/Major League Soccer

All of these campaigns had focused digital and social media plans that actively engaged the fans before, during and after respective events. For brands, that is crucial. Sports are ephemeral, but emotions are not.

With that said, let’s look at a few of the best in-stadium activations that tie together physical and digital components of sponsorships.

Nike during the NCAA Tournament

With Adidas making a big splash with its colorful uniforms in this year’s NCAA basketball tournament, Nike needed to be in a position to activate its own brand even with the game featured an Adidas school. Throughout the NCAA Tournament, Nike released coordinated graphical messages on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. These graphics and messages corresponded with various marketing campaigns and terminology that were on Nike teams’ warm up shirts, merchandise, etc.

Check out some of Nike’s basketball graphics here: Nike Basketball Facebook Page

University of Kentucky Athletics

With nearly every fan that goes to a game or event now possessing a smart phone with a powerful camera, fans are now able to create content by themselves. Brands and teams alike are finding that it is very useful to both encourage and harness that self-created content as a way to promote themselves.

The University of Kentucky did a great job of this with a coordinated hashtag campaign on Instagram. The athletic department encouraged and promoted the use of specific hashtags to its fans in hopes of uniting all the self-created content. These hashtags were promoted at games with signs, videos, etc. as well as on the school’s own social media accounts.  What resulted was both a powerfully trending social campaign and also an incredible image database from the tagged pictures on Instagram.

#WeAreUK Youtube Video: 

Coca Cola Bracket Town

Coca Cola was an official sponsor of this year’s NCAA Tournament, and the brand did an excellent job of creating lasting fan memories with the creation of “Bracket Towns” across the country. These “towns” were fan engagement zones setup in cities where NCAA Regionals were being hosted. Coca Cola leveraged its use of the NCAA brand to associate itself with the action on the floor as well as the positive emotional association that fans have for the NCAA Tournament and March Madness in general.

Bracket Towns were coordinated events that were cross-promoted through digital, social and print mediums. The “towns” were billed as the pre and post party of the NCAA Tournament, and there were tons of games and prizes set up to lure fans to the area. Once there, fans could participate in various games while also being inundated with Coca Cola branded signage and information about the brand’s products and services. (Preston McClellan/ sporttechie.com)

The Japanese spend a lot of time commuting, and mobile devices are an essential part of the journey. Commuting accounts for 28 percent of mobile-device usage time in Japan, with social-media consuming a hefty chunk of it.

Nine months ago, nearly everyone on my daily commuter train was using Twitter, which now has 20 million users in Japan. But most of have since switched to the homegrown platform, Line, which was launched in 2011 by NHN Japan after the Tohoku earthquake. The name refers to the lines that formed outside of public phones after the disaster.

Driven by strong advertising support and celebrity endorsements, the app, which provides free IM and calling via smartphones, tablets and desktops, is now the world’s fastest-growing social network. It recently reached 50 million followers in just 399 days. In January 2013, Line’s total number of Japanese followers hit 40 million;  and a whopping 60 percent of Japanese women in their 20s and 30s, Line’s research shows, use the platform every day.

Line and its parent NHN (which also owns Naver, Korea’s largest search portal) have monetized the network by motivating users not only to follow brands but to take action, which has made Line incredibly attractive to marketers in retail. According to research commissioned by Line, more than half of female users follow official brands. In addition, 63 percent of all users read brand messages, 32 percent have used a coupon delivered via Line, and 27 percent have clicked on a link.

Japan’s “Line”

Unlike Facebook, however, advertisers can use the platform only if they pay. There is a fixed-rate card, and the number of messages is strictly controlled. For example, a four-week campaign with five messages will cost 8 million yen ($81,000), while a 12-week campaign offering 15 messages (at a maximum of two per week) will set you back 15 million yen ($151,000).

Brands can use messages to link to content or offer coupons, presents and prizes. There are additional charges if brands want to create sponsored stamps, a form of emoticons that are hugely popular in Manga-obsessed Japan. These are based on client creative but generated by Line. And marketers have major incentives to remain on Line for the long haul, as a decision to stop paying means a brand’s account is deleted and it loses not just followers but the content that was created.

None of this tight control has put off potential advertisers, which now include Coca-Cola, Lawson convenience stores and the Sukiya fast-food chain. When Matsumoto Kiyoshi, a drug store chain, needed to attract more customers aged 10-20, it offered a 10%-off  coupon via Line and, within five days, more than 10,000 people had used one – half of them in the target group. An additional 300,000 people also started following the brand on Line.

One of the most remarkable aspects of Line’s fast rise and its ad-funded business model is that so many businesses have bought into it so quickly. While consumers are quick to leap onto the next big thing, businesses in Japan are notoriously wary of new platforms. The constant search for first-mover advantage is simply not as ingrained in the marketing psyche as it is in Western countries.

As Line becomes more global, NHN will get the chance to see whether these characteristics apply outside of Asia. Early results appear promising: Line claims on its English-language website that it is the most downloaded app in more than 40 countries and available in 230 markets. Services such as avatar community Line Play have recently become available in English, and the app itself is available for iPhone, Android, Blackberry and Windows phones. In February, Line signed a deal with Nokia to make it available on Asha handsets across Asia. Line’s status as the biggest social network you’ve never heard off won’t last for long. (John Stampfel/ adage.com)

- Mobile Marketing Isn’t About Screens or Devices, It’s About Behavior -

Marketers can’t remember this often enough: Mobile is not one screen or two screens. Or three screens (smartphone, tablet, and e-reader). Or four (ultrabook). Or five (phablet). Or six (fill in the blank with whatever connected device consumers will be flocking to next.) Google Glass? The Apple iWatch? Mobile is a behavior. The only common thread uniting the vast and diverse mobile arena is that consumers are taking a connected device with them on the go.

Consumers move fluidly across devices and platforms, and brands must do the same with their messages  – not just by making sure that a banner ad is on both Android and iOS operating systems, but by being present across a variety of devices and taking advantage of the powerful features each has to offer. When brands don’t seize mobile media in this way, they create confusion or disappointment, as users discover a gap  between how they expect to interact with a brand and what the brand actually can do.

This mobile reality is very challenging to act upon. Until now, media have been defined largely by constraints of functionality and environment. Television is in the home. People sit back and watch its channels.  All channels have programs, and programs have commercial pods. The PC web brings together sight, sound, motion and interactivity, but people largely interact with it sitting still at a table, moving just a mouse. When it comes to mobile, on the other hand, functionalities are varied and the environment unconfined.

This complexity disrupts paradigms that marketers and agencies have relied on for decades. What does it mean to create  campaigns that canot be designed for a specific screen and viewing environment, but for users on the go? How does this circumstance change the creative process and the final product? What’s the right balance between reach and device-centric innovations? How does this varied and shifting landscape complicate measurement?

Some of the most forward-thinking creatives and mobile leaders have begun to answer these questions, creating campaigns and products that demonstrate “liquid creativity,” mobile creative that flows like a liquid across devices and fits flexibly into the distinct opportunities each has available. IAB is featuring these people and their accomplishments  at our June 18 session at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity entitled “Liquid Creativity: Secrets of the Mobile Superstars.”

But instances of “liquid creativity” are rare. Too many brands are treating the mobile marketplace as a unified whole, relying on lowest-common-denominator creative execution, the 300×250 banner. It’s an often useful classic IAB Standard Ad Unit, but in this situation the temptation is to just re-use PC-web creative on phones and tablets, thus discarding powerful attributes of mobile, such as  environmental awareness and intimate interactivity. This oversimplification is understandable: It saves money and increases audience size. But it compromises consumer engagement, brand-building potential and the value of mobile marketing itself. This practice begs the question: How much standardization is needed to make liquid creativity the norm, rather than the exception? What best practices can we define without stifling the creation of mobile marketing experiences that wow consumers?

Responsive design often comes up as an answer to liquid creativity. This is the idea that a web server can recognize the device in which it is supposed to render content, and make adjustments for qualities like screen size. But do we trust computers to make decisions about ad content? Do marketers still want to approve each permutation of an ad? Responsive design can disrupt long-held norms of digital advertising.

Another challenge posed by the liquidity of the mobile landscape and user behavior is measurement. In the PC world, attribution is already a challenge. Marketers grapple with figuring out, for example, if the search, video or display component was the catalyst for conversion. When you add in the many different types of mobile ads, the questions become even more complicated. Marketers would be best served with metrics that can cross platforms and apps. While we are making strides toward more measurability, this is a long-term goal.

Vast challenges face marketers who want to provide consumers with an array of robust experiences that capitalize on the capabilities of their most closely-held devices.  Budget is often a barrier, but we need more marketers testing these waters. Flexibility is an pportunity. Marketers need to approach mobile not by device, but by their individual objectives. Select the ideal combination of right time, right environment and right consumer, and then incorporate whichever device or devices best serve the intention. Let your goals lead your mobile campaigns. (Anna Bager/ adage.com)

- Fans Crush Brands When It Comes to YouTube -

YouTube is increasingly becoming the most influential social network, and the place where pop culture is born. In fact, according to Cisco’s new Visual Networking Index forecast,video usage is projected to outperform Facebook and Twitter by 2017. With the proliferation of video, we are seeing a transformation in how consumers interact with brands. Consumers are no longer just a passive audience; they are now passionate fans who are actively participating in driving value for brands.

And while there’s been lots of talk about brands acting as publishers, we’re increasingly finding that fans drive more value by creating videos about the brands and products that they love. Take CoverGirl, for example.

Of CoverGirl’s 251 million total views on YouTube, 249 million (or 99 percent) are fromfan-created videos, according to data compiled by Zefr. We see a similar trend with other leading brands: 92 percent of Oreo’s views and 99 percent of Revlon’s views come from fan content. Sometimes, original fan videos go viral, causing lots of other fans to create their own version of the original video. Swiffer’s commercial of a woman mopping her kitchen floor and breaking out into dance inspired a trend on YouTube. More than 150 people uploaded their own rendition of the “Swiffer dance.”

Swiffer fan views don’t just outnumber the actual brand views (10,451,334 vs. 225,220); they indicate a larger shift in the way consumers are interacting with brands and using YouTube.

We’re seeing fans take action in four distinct ways on a platform where they not only upload videos, but also comment live and experience instant shareability. First, fans tend to upload commercials that resonated with them. Examples range from a funny commercial like Old Spice to an exciting product release like an iPad or iPhone. These fans don’t just watch a commercial; they engage.

Another big trend we’ve seen is brand fans expressing themselves through the “unboxing” of items they love. What is unboxing? Think of videos of fans literally opening up the boxesof products they’ve just purchased. From high-tech consumer products to cars to toys, these videos serve as instant reviews, where instead of going to Amazon to read feedback, people now search YouTube to get even more.

YouTube is also the place consumers turn to find out how to use a product. Basically, YouTube has become the place for pre- and postpurchase conversations.

Some fans take things even further, creating original content based on brand enthusiasm. Whether it’s a Lego stop-motion animation or painting with a can of Coke, fans are showing their love for brands in unique ways.

Lastly, we see some brand fans capitalize on a pop culture moment. A recent example of this is when Charles Ramsey, who saved a captured Amanda Berry, mentioned McDonald’s during his press interview. Posts of the Ramsey video received more than 11 million views in less than 24 hours. Eighty percent of those views came from fan uploads (many of which specifically mentioned McDonald’s in the title of the video), and McDonald’s was mentioned in user comments more than 6,000 times across those videos.

McDonald’s reacted to the buzz by tweeting out support to Ramsey and giving him free burgers for a year, but imagine what else they could have done had they reached out to the super-fans that created the content that generated millions of views for them.

In order to best harness the fans and leverage these opportunities on YouTube, brands need to listen and respond. Listening means digging in to all of the real-time data associated with your brand on YouTube, and making sense of the noise. This will allow brands to discover who their superfans are, understand their global footprint and compare performance to their competitors.

Brands can use this intelligence to respond and better influence future marketing spends or work with fans to amplify messaging. These marketers can empower the fan base that was otherwise invisible by building relationships with them and teaming up with them and their respective networks. For example, Skittles did this by bringing on superfan Nathan Barnatt to create official Skittles videos. Barnatt’s work tallied more than 5 million views and 190,000 subscribers—more than the official Skittles channel itself.

YouTube is a platform that is ripe with data, passion and fans of brands. And it is now 1 billion people strong. Now, more than ever, is the time for brands to capture all that value. (Zach James/ adweek.com)

- P&G Partners With Zefr to Listen in on YouTube Fan Base -

All brands want to be content creators these days—and if their customers will create content for free, even better. But in the vast sea of YouTube videos, it’s not easy to keep track of all that fan-created fare.

Los Angeles-based Zefr claims to have a solution. Procter & Gamble’s CoverGirl and Pantene are the first brands to use BrandID, a software product designed to help advertisers find and listen to their most engaged and inspired customers—that is, people who actually make videos about or in response to their favorite products.

Surprisingly, there are a lot of these folks out there. Zefr was originally founded asMovieclips, helping traditional movie and TV companies identify and monetize fan-uploaded video content (like your buddy who’s constantly posting his favorite Anchorman quotes to YouTube). But the company believes it’s found a major new constituency for its tools and technology: brands. It tested BrandID with 10 pilot partners over the past few months, including several P&G products, and said it has uncovered a ton of fan-produced brand videos on YouTube.

“Brands continue to worry about earned media metrics,” said Zefr co-founder Zach James. “In the normal world, earned media is maybe 10 percent of a brands’ impressions. But we’ve found on YouTube it’s exactly the opposite. There are some brands where 99 percent of tier views are created by fans.”

For example, Zefr has unearthed a series of clips featuring consumers dancing while using Swiffers. In the cases of CoverGirl and Pantene, initially the companies plan to use BrandID to listen in on what consumers are saying. But James eventually sees advertisers making decisions on which media to buy or which spokespeople to employ based on YouTubers’ reactions. “We also might see brands pushing their superfans in things like contests and sweepstakes.”

Couldn’t YouTube, Buddy Media or another software company simply copy Zefr’s offering? James argues that while they might try, they’d be about two years behind. “Our product was tested with media companies for two years,” he said. “This involves real data scientists and algorithms. This is not cheap software.”

James and his team are headed to the annual ad festival next week in Cannes to pitch BrandID. (Mike Shields/ adweek.com)

Facebook’s introduction of hashtags paves the way for a lucrative stream of new advertising, but the company is not opening the program up to advertisers, at least not at this time.

Reps from the company confirmed that hashtags are off limits to marketers right now. However, there doesn’t appear to be any reason why Facebook would block hashtag buys in the future. Facebook is, however, encouraging marketers to use hashtags in advertising and arguing that Facebook will now amplify a hashtag’s influence. A rep stresses thought that “using them and buying them are different.”

For Twitter, hashtags can be hot properties, especially during big events like the Super Bowl, the Presidential Debates and various awards shows, when marketers like Oreo get to display their real-time marketing chops. However, Facebook’s use of hashtags is trickier since most posts on the network are private, not public.

Advertising Age speculates that hashtags might ultimately bolster Facebook’s Graph Search since hashtag mentions might provide a clearer expression of interest than Likes: “Likes are flawed signals, since users sometimes click on them arbitrarily or to satisfy a social obligation. But posting with a hashtag could be seen as a more tangible expression of affinity and could thus help to make graph search into a useful product.” (Todd Wasserman/ mashable.com)

- Myspace Promotes Relaunch With $20 Million Ad Campaign -

Myspace is back — and it’s spending a lot of money to make sure everyone knows it.

The once-dominant social network will begin airing its first commercials tonight to promote the public launch of the new and significantly redesigned Myspace, now under new management. The full unedited commercial, which you can watch above, is part of a $20 million ad campaign spanning broadcast, radio and digital platforms, according to a rep for the company.

It remains to be seen whether the company can change the public perception of Myspace. As the company’s new co-owner Chris Vanderhook noted in an earlier interview with Mashable, “There’s no fancy marketing campaign that will change that overnight.” (Seth Fiegerman/ mashable.com)

- NSA Scandal Sends Brands Scrambling to Defend Themselves as Users Question Privacy -

The government’s infringement on communicative freedom and privacy is hardly a new topic in America.

Starting in the late-1940s, the US underwent a period called the “Second Red Scare,” which gave birth to the era of “McCarthyism,” a time in America where many citizens feared their phone lines were being tapped. Today, heightened security over terrorist activity has caused the nation’s security divisions to implement such tactics yet again, though the digital age poses a much greater challenge to operations as the public shares more, but also knows more.

Privacy concerns have peaked as The Guardian recently published a series of reportsdocumenting questionable actions by the US National Security Agency. Late last week, The Guardian revealed its source— Edward Snowden, a former US intelligence operative who consciously leaked the NSA program called “PRISM.” According to CNN, PRISM is a top secret, on-going program that entitles the NSA “to extract the details of people’s online activities—including audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents and other materials.

Yet, unlike past federal privacy infringements, the PRISM scandal has implicated major brands including Verizon, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, AOL, Apple and Skype. While Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted a public note on Facebook claiming, “We hadn’t even heard of PRISM before yesterday,” and Google CEO Larry Page wrote an open letter sharing similar sentiments, other brands haven’t been nearly as forthright, although all have denied knowledge of the program.

Awareness was heightened last week when The Guardian reported that the NSA had demanded that Verizon provide particular phone call details from dates spanning April through July, 2012. Those claims were expanded to include inquiries into the online and telephone activities of millions of Americans, as Snowden produced a PRISM program slideshow with clear, visual markings implicating the brands.

Snowden, who remains in hiding, said, “The NSA has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost everything.  With this capability, the vast majority of human communications are automatically ingested without targeting. If I wanted to see your e-mails or your wife’s phone, all I have to do is use intercepts. I can get your e-mails, passwords, phone records, credit cards.”

With social companies like Facebook already the focus of ongoing privacy concerns, the mere association with a secret federal government agency does not bode well for brand reputation. Without a clean exoneration—or being officially granted the right to disclose the NSA’s requests—internet and communication brands will face an uphill battle regaining the trust of their once loyal customers.

Brands aren’t sitting idly by, though. As of Tuesday, the ACLU has filed suit against the Obama administration’s national security team over the unit’s collection of Verizon phone records.

“This dragnet program is surely one of the largest surveillance efforts ever launched by a democratic government against its own citizens,” said Jameel Jaffer, the ACLU deputy legal director, according to the Los Angeles Times. “It is the equivalent of requiring every American to file a daily report with the government of every location they visited, every person they talked to on the phone, the time of each call, and the length of every conversation.”

As a Verizon customer itself, the ACLU said that the surveillance programs “compromises sensitive information about its work” and prevent it from communicating freely, the newspaper reports.

While the ACLU was the first to take legal action, other implicated brands have made attempts to clear their name. To combat the bad press, Google and Facebook, and now Microsoft and Twitter, who was not originally among those named, have been taking active roles in their defense, with the brands requesting clearance from the NSA to disclose more details of the government agency’s inquiries into the brands’ data. By doing so, the brands hope to more clearly demonstrate how a users’ data is used or not used.

According to the Washington Post, Facebook’s general counsel Ted Ullyot asked the government to allow the company to disclose “information about the size and scope of national security requests.” Facebook would them publish the information in order to give users a “complete picture of the government requests we receive, and how we respond,” he said.

The Guardian notes that companies are not allowed to disclose the fact that they have been served a National Security Letter, which details the data request by the NSA. Such data is secretly collected and protected under FISA, or the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. While companies like Microsoft, Google and Twitter publish transparency reports that document NSA requests, the companies are barred from revealing requests that are protected under FISA.

“Permitting greater transparency on the aggregate volume and scope of national security requests, including Fisa orders, would help the community understand and debate these important issues,” Microsoft said in an emailed statement to Reuters.

But perhaps the most proactive “save face” campaign has been started by Mozilla, the non-profit parent of popular web browser Firefox, who has fired back at the NSA with a campaign calling for full disclosure of spying programs. According to the Los Angeles Times, Mozilla and “85 other organizations and companies” have teamed-up to launch the site StopWatching.US, “a campaign that encourages online users to email Congress with a prewritten letter demanding that the government unveil ‘the full extent of the NSA’s spying programs.’”

“Mozilla believes in an Internet where we do not have to fear that everything we do is being tracked, monitored and logged by either companies or governments,” the company wrote in ablog post. “And we believe in a government whose actions are visible, transparent and accountable.” (Ben Berkon/ brandchannel.com)

- In the News: Best Global Green Brands, Apple, Mozilla and more -

Interbrand announces the 2013 Best Global Green Brands report.

Apple hopes new campaign will solidify aging brand’s reputation of reliability.

Mozilla launches campaign against NSA spying.

Walgreen to pay $80 million to settle DEA prescription drug suit.

Altria Group launches MarkTen e-cigarette, but only in Indiana.

Cadillac hopes custom-built agency will help boost launch of new CTS.

Ernst & Young says digital entertainment revenue will surpass tradiitonal media by 2015.

Pfizer, Takeda reach $2.15 billion settlement with Teva, Sun Pharma.

P&G will host massive sampling event in New York City in hopes to build brand awareness.

Softbank raises offer for Sprint Nextel to $21.6 billion as Dish Network closes in.

Twitter and Everyday Health have partnered to issue public health alerts.

Vodafone approaches Kabel Deutschland to discuss takeover. (Alicia Ciccone/ brandchannel.com)

Branded content and entertainment should be simple: produce a content property inspired by a brand, and delight an audience with its entertainment value or usefulness. It works for brands like Red Bull and Unilever, just as it works for Netflix or ESPN.

In 2013, I’ve been the jury president at the Dubai Lynx International Festival of Creativity for its inaugural Branded Content and Entertainment category, and a jury member for the annual One Show Entertainment. Regardless of where the event occurred, both juries were challenged to answer the question: what is good branded content and entertainment?

Like Hollywood, with its guilds and unions establishing the criteria for how talent is paid and credited for work, we need to better define how branded content and entertainment is awarded and ultimately perceived within the industry. The following are questions we should ask to determine the work we should celebrate:

What’s the story? This is a category for work that traditional advertising, and its process, often can’t, or won’t make.  Does the content use a narrative structure, character development or offer an experience beyond advertising? Does it become sharable, and ultimately, an endurable property powered by the entertainment or utility value? Frank Rose, author of “The Art of Immersion,” summed it up well when he wrote, “content without story is just noise. Content without story and excitement is noise pollution.”

One area of debate is the role of technology, when coupled with story. Innovation is certainly important, if it enhances the audience experience. But technology does not make it more valuable, just as movies are not always better if presented in 3D. And agencies in their quest for hardware don’t help juries, submitting sixty-second broadcast spots as short films, or media sponsorships dressed up as original content.

Does it build an audience? When I was at UCLA, one of my instructors liked to remind us that “films” were made by students for class projects, while “movies” an audience paid to see on a Friday night.  Are we making movies?  Do we create an audience, and ultimately convert them into fans?  I’m not just talking Facebook likes, but inspiring fans to do something – buy a ticket, subscribe to a YouTube channel, show up in costume at a convention…whatever shows they actually care about the content.   We can measure its effectiveness, and if leads to customers. But first make something good enough to take up space on a customer’s iTunes, DVR or newsfeed.

What’s the deal? Premium content is about a value exchange.  People want it, and are willing to give something for it. How do we get it?  Does it employ a development or distribution model from outside advertising?  Getting a deal done with a programming exec for a TV series is a lot tougher than going through the ad-sales department.  We need to factor in the degree of difficulty for the work, especially when the content value is what creates the audience, instead of the media buy.

What is the role of the brand? How does the content originate from the brand idea?  Is it sustainable as a platform or property, and does it enable other marketing strategy, to ultimately build a media or entertainment brand?  Does the content build a brand franchise?

Macy’s “Yes Virginia” platform (which I¹ve had the privilege to work on) demonstrates this, most recently launching a royalty-free musical staged in schools across the country, creating a script and score, awarding $100,000 in production grants, and telling the story via YouTube videos from proud parents.  All of this emanates from the brand¹s annual holiday “Believe” campaign, which includes a CBS prime-time specia, and “Yes, Virginia” DVDs, books and merchandise sold in stores. It’s great content that consumers embrace, no different than if produced by Disney for a holiday film release.

Ultimately, we need to ask does the content make us feel something? Does it make us do something?  And does it do something different, than advertising?

If we can better answer these questions, the trophies we win in Cannes will mean as much to the people on Wilshire Boulevard, and Main Street, as they do on Madison Avenue. (Michael Wiese/ adage.com)

- McKinsey Finds Social Buzz Can Affect Sales — Negatively, Anyway -

Coca-Cola Co. may not have been able to find a direct sales impact from social-media buzz, but McKinsey & Co. has — on the negative side.

The consulting firm found bad buzz for an unnamed telecom client hurt signups by 8%, “offsetting their entire TV spend,” McKinsey principal Jonathan Gordan said in a presentation Monday at the Advertising Research Foundation’s Audience Measurement 8.0 conference in New York.

Mr. Gordon’s remarks come a little more than two months after a Coca-Cola Co. executive at another ARF conference said the packaged-goods giant could find no statistically significant sales impact – positive or negative – from online buzz after an extensive cross-media study.

The Coke executive, Eric Schmidt, senior manager of marketing strategy and insights, acknowledged problems divining the sentiment of online chatter. And that may be the difference. McKinsey’s Mr. Gordon, a former Procter & Gamble Co. brand manager, said the consulting firm initially couldn’t find any connection between social-media buzz and sales, either when looking at overall data changes or even by applying an algorithm to assign sentiment to the buzz.

But McKinsey found the relationship between negative buzz and a decline in sales when it “hand tabulated” sentiment in social-media comments, he said.

Complaints about the sign-up process and call-center workers at the telecom provider drove the negative sentiment, Mr. Gordon said. The experience, he said, convinced him, “When we get into this stuff and analyze it properly, it will drive insights.”

What assembled market researchers at the conference didn’t have to offer just yet were cases showing direct positive impact on sales from social media buzz, though several presentations did detail positive returns from digital advertising, including in social media.

In a “Social Media Deep Dive” panel discussion on June 10, executives of General Electric, Colgate-Palmolive Co., ADP and social-media agency 360i all laid out their cases for social media, but didn’t offer cases where any programs had produced measurable sales lifts.

“We’re incredibly enabled by our CMO and our group leader to get out and experiment,” said Andy Markowitz, director-global digital strategy at General Electric. “Our group has tremendous courage to go out and really not ask the questions of what’s the exact ROI, but use this as a storytelling mechanism to make GE more accessible. So for us, you want to make GE more personal, make GE a place where you see the people behind the story, that type of story is easy to tell, and social is the best way to tell those stories.”

The conference did produce research suggesting that social media drives viewership of TV programs, albeit modestly. A study to be presented by the Council for Research Excellence reported that 1.5% of survey respondents said social media drew them to existing TV shows and 6% said social media drew them to new shows. But other online media, TV promotions and offline communications played bigger roles. (adage.com)

- Report: Apple Ads Not Working Very Well -

Apple’s product-oriented ads have influenced the rest of the industry, but they haven’t resonated very well with consumers of late, according to one researcher.

Videos from Apple were shared 183,609 times over the last 12 months, according to Unruly Media. Comparatively, Samsung videos were shared 2.37 million times over the same period, while Microsoft ones were shared 1.36 million times.

That said, Apple’s rivals have spent much more. Apple spent $1 billion on advertising in fiscal 2012, compared to Microsoft’s $1.6 billion and Samsung’s $4.32 billion. (Google, which was not included in the study, spent $2 billion on ads in 2011.) As a result, shares among the three companies were as follows:

Samsung also attracted 70% of views over the period, versus 23% of views for Microsoft and 8% for Apple.

Microsoft’s strong foothold came on the heels of its “Child of the 90s” video, which boasts close to 37 million views at the time of writing.

Apple has not had a major new release since last October’s launch of the iPad mini. The new iOS 7, announced this week during the Worldwide Developers Conference, may prompt some new attention. The company has also hinted at some new product releases coming this fall.

Since product-oriented ads over the past year have failed to stem Apple’s erosion of market share in the smartphone category, the company may be changing tactics. A new ad, unveiled this week after WWDC, played up Apple’s West Coast roots with the theme song “Made in California.” Bloomberg reports that ads coming this summer will hew to the same theme. (Todd Wasserman/ mashable.com)

- 16 Common Mistakes Young Startups Make -

Are you working on a startup? If so, I hate to break it to you, but there’s a good chance it will fail. In fact, recent research shows that 75% of startups fail(based on a study of 2,000 startups that received VC funding from 2004 to 2010). Odds are, you won’t be a Brin, a Zuckerberg, a Systrom, a Karp or a Fake.

But hard as it may be, don’t let that statistic discourage you. Some startups are destined for failure. Perhaps the team is working on a product that really isn’t that great or useful. Maybe they’re trying to tackle too many problems at once. Or maybe the co-founders have a poisonous relationship that will hinder the company’s growth. Maybe they never thought about product-market fit. Whatever your company’s “fatal flaw” may be, you can likely avoid it in your own venture if you take some advice from people who’ve gone through the early startup phase before. Lucky for you, time-strapped entrepreneur, we’ve gathered some tips from the pros to help you avoid some of the most common, game-ending mistakes committed by young startups. Check out the tips below from founders, CEOs and investors alike.

1. Forgoing Simplicity

“Building a product is like packing a suitcase: Plan out what you think you need. Then remove half.” — Jonathan Wegener, Founder, Timehop andExitStrategy

“Young founders tend to complicate things too much, from structuring partnership agreements, financing, leases, etc. This is not a place to be creative; keep it simple, follow the norms and be transparent so everyone is on the same page.” — Jay Levy, Co-Founder, Zelkova Ventures and Uproot Wines

2. Waiting Too Long to Launch

“The biggest mistake I see is companies waiting too long to release the product. It’s easy to let the scope of what you’re building get out of hand. But equally importantly most startups build much more than they truly need to, but this is often only realized in hindsight. Whether your product is working or not, looking back it’s easy to see that you only really needed to build a small fraction of the stuff you built. Most features/options/buttons/settings/etc. simply aren’t crucial to success or failure, and for an early stage startup that means they were wastes of time — you could have done 10x more with that same amount of time and resources.” — Jonathan Wegener, Founder,Timehop and ExitStrategy

“Don’t underestimate the importance of Minimum Viable Design. Your first product will likely be just a little bit ugly, and that’s okay — it’s part of getting to market quickly and testing your idea in front of live customers. But don’t underestimate the importance of achieving a basic threshold of “this looks good (and reputable).” In my first company, people liked our product but were embarrassed to share it because the design and presentation was so poor. When we launched The Muse, the result was the opposite — nearly 25% of the people who visited our site shared it with someone else via social media!” —Kathryn Minshew, Founder/CEO, The Muse

3. Hiring Poorly

“Make sure that new hires understand your rate of innovation. You are small and agile, which means you have a high rate of innovation and growth, and with that comes work! Often times, that work eventually goes beyond your job description. At a small company, employees need to wear many hats, and they need to be prepared to wear many hats. If you don’t manage this expectation upon hiring, you will be managing employee issues six months down the line. Those issues will eat into your time, and time is money for a new CEO.” — Kellee Khalil, Founder/CEO, Lover.ly

“Someone told me recently, ‘Any time I’m talking to someone who doesn’t work for me already, I’m evaluating if I should try and hire them.’ Whether that’s someone you want to hire tomorrow or someone you’d like to work with in five years depends on your company, but every entrepreneur should always be recruiting.” — Ally Downey, Co-Founder, WeeSpring

“Some entrepreneurs think it’s a luxury to have accounting, finance, or other support functions, but it’s important not to be afraid of spending resources early on for administrative efficiency. If you don’t have someone to do that for you, you’ll end up spending all your time on things that aren’t critical to growing your company.” — Matt Salzberg, Founder and CEO, Blue Apron

4. Not Embracing Agility

“If you sat down and wrote out a pros and cons list comparing your startup to your corporate competitors, you’d probably find the big gorilla’s list of advantages more than daunting. But on your side of that chart should be words like ‘nimble,’ ‘flexible,’ ’speedy,’ and ‘free flowing.’ Many entrepreneurs seem to approach their startup like they would a quest to win the Super Bowl, with very defined steps leading to a pre-conceived single, solitary end goal. This doesn’t really work for a startup. While it’s vital to have goals and a clear vision, to survive and thrive you’ll have to keep an open mind and stay agile enough to follow the path where it leads.” — Jeff Jackel, CEO, BuzzMob

5. Guarding The “Big Idea”

“How many entrepreneurs’ opening words are about how ’stealth’ their project is, followed by a 10-page NDA to hear word one? I was totally guilty of this back in the day. For young entrepreneurs, especially non-technical founders like myself, it feels like our ‘big idea’ is all we have, and we want to guard it like a defenseless baby. We also want to believe that no one else out there in the world has thought of our little gem, and if they were to catch wind, everyone will pounce! Ha! First, whatever your idea is, rest assured it’s been thought of before. Secondly, an idea is by no means a business … it’s everything that comes next that makes a business happen. Execution. And no one else will execute the way you do. Third, you’re going to need help and guidance from people who know more and have been there before, so you better get comfortable sharing your ‘big idea.’” — Jeff Jackel, CEO, BuzzMob

6. Losing Focus

“I think many startups have difficulty finding a focus. As an entrepreneur, there’s a lot going on. You have countless decisions to make, and you have to keep moving quickly. Settling on a clear focus — your product, your audience, your strategy — is critical from day one. Of course, as you move forward, you must be willing to adapt. But remember to hold tight to that big idea as you go.” — Alexa von Tobel, Founder & CEO, LearnVest

“One thing I have learned building Grand St. is the value of intense focus. Trying to complete only a few things each week means doing an excellent job on all of them, whereas trying to do the 27 things I want to do usually results in mediocre or incomplete work. The same goes for the product itself — there’s a laundry list of features we want to add, but keeping the experience simple and uncluttered makes us really focus on what our users really want.” —Amanda Peyton, Co-Founder, Grand St.

“Founders of a young company will come up with hundreds of new ideas every day (I know my co-founders and I do). While most of these ideas are sure to be good ones, we’ve learned that we need to be thoughtful and selective about which to move forward with in order not to overwhelm ourselves and our employees. We all have limited time and resources, which is why we need to focus and prioritize.” — Matt Salzberg, Founder and CEO,Blue Apron

“At times we have sat on ideas for months, before testing them and finding out that they are runaway successes. At other times, we have exhausted ourselves trying out 100 different things, when none of them work. I watched a great video with Barbara Corcoran, called “How to get more customers, step 1.” What she describes is that many businesses, when they are looking for more customers, will try 100 different things, when they already have one thing that is working. As she puts it, this strategy leads to very few new customers and lots of exhaustion. She recommends that instead, founders look at what has been working and double or triple their efforts there.” — Adda Birnir, Co-Founder, Skillcrush

7. Assuming Virality

“A lot of new founders think, ‘If I build it, they will come.’ I have news for you: They’re not coming and you’re not going to ‘go viral.’ Services don’t spontaneously go viral. High virality is almost always the product of early and deliberate product design decisions. Spend some serious time thinking about how and why people are going to discover and share what you’re building.” —Jeremy Fisher, CEO, Days and Wander

8. Obsessing Over Funding

“I think a lot of young startups assume that fundraising is not only a necessary component of running a business but an important marker of success. We spent six months fundraising only to walk away once we had a term sheet in hand because we realized we were making enough money to sustain and grow the business on our own terms. Ultimately that felt like a much bigger marker of success than closing a round. If your business makes money, you may well be better off not fundraising, and in doing so, retain control and ownership of your business. And if your business doesn’t make money (or have a solid plan as to how it will), then perhaps there are some bigger issues to tackle before you start pitching investors.” — Claire Mazur, Co-Founder, Of a Kind

“Many young entrepreneurs think that raising VC money is a measure of success. There is a lot of money chasing bad ideas. The only thing that matters is building a viable, growing and profitable business.” — Brian Garrett, Co-Founder, StyleSaint and Venture Capitalist

9. Chasing Investors Instead of Befriending Investees

“A common mistake startups make in trying to meet investors is, counterintuitively, focusing too much on networking with actual investors. The best way to get a meeting with a VC is not by incessantly pursuing him or her, but rather by getting an intro from a founder that the VC has already invested in. Befriend funded entrepreneurs. Every VC will tell you that they will take meetings with 100% of the companies that their existing portfolio founders recommend. Don’t spend all your energy emailing and LinkedIn-ing VCs; instead, get to know founders who have been funded and win them over because their stamp of approval is one of the most valuable data points for an investor.” — Sam Teller, Managing Director, Launchpad LA

10. Dwelling on Things

“A lot of new founders tend to over-optimize every single decision, which makes it difficult to actually move forward with anything. One of the most important lessons my co-founders and I have learned is that sometimes the best course of action is to make a call and just move forward. As a young company, nothing is ever perfect, but if you believe in an idea or strategy, you just need to move forward and manage the logistics and risks as you go.” —Matt Salzberg, Founder and CEO, Blue Apron

11. Getting Distracted By Feedback

“A startup is not a newly democratic nation state: Not every decision needs to be made by the collective. While we love getting ideas from our team and have seen some stellar product development and user experience decisions generate from brainstorming and having an open office environment, we try not to let everything come to a vote. We hire smart and capable people to come up with an idea and execute it: Not to have to balance the opinions and feedback of everyone, all the time.” — Elizabeth Scherle, President & Co-Founder, Influenster

“You will have a ton of people constantly sharing their feedback and opinions of your business with you. It’s easy to get wrapped up in it and want to tweak things immediately. Keep in mind that people will give you feedback based off of their market knowledge and domain experience — it is your job to apply that knowledge to your company without losing sight of your vision.” —Allison Beal, Co-Founder & CEO, StyleSaint

12. Not Having the Right Co-Founder

“Starting a business is a lot like falling in love. At first, we tend to see the business and our partners at their best, full of promise, and can’t conceive that they will ever be anything but their best. But as in any relationship, eventually their flaws and their failings are clearly exposed. What I have learned is that we need to do a thorough SWOT analysis not only on the market opportunity, but also on our partners. Some faults we can accommodate, but sometimes our partners’ weaknesses in combination with our own constitute a deadly cocktail. A key aspect of our personal due diligence is then is assessing our partners, particularly learning how they react under stress.” — Whitney Johnson, Co-Founder, Rose Park Advisors

“Your early partners, co-founders, investors and hires are crucial to get right. While the ideal partner balances you or brings skills to the table you don’t have, the most important thing to look for is alignment of values. Do you fundamentally want similar things out of this endeavor? Are you willing to take more or less the same amount of risk? Are you comfortable with your prospective partner’s ethics and moral decision-making? I’ve seen the last one in particular cause a lot of heartbreak in early-stage companies.” —Kathryn Minshew, Founder/CEO, The Muse

13. Trying to Win Over Everyone

“Among the biggest mistakes I made when fundraising early on was trying to turn every nonbeliever into a diehard fan, working to convince everyone who pushed back that they were wrong about Greatist and about the space. What I quickly learned was that it was more productive to find the investors who already believed, who were already my fans, and capitalize on the potential for them to become my biggest champions. I think a lot of new entrepreneurs face situations like this, and the quicker that realization comes, the easier the fundraising process can be.” — Derek Flanzraich, Founder & CEO, Greatist

14. Not Listening to Current (or Future) Customers

“Every time I sit down with a customer, I learn something. And usually, it’s something that has a serious revenue-generating impact on my company. InRunning Lean, Ash Maurya says that you know when you have spoken to enough customers when you can start to predict what they will say. I have done dozens of interviews with customers, and it’s incredible. There are certain phrases that everyone uses. That stuff is business gold (or platinum). Every time we have been unsure about a product or direction and we have taken the time to talk to users, we have always walked away with the insight we needed to move forward. But keeping up that practice up is hard! Sometimes it feels so much easier just to sit at your desk, banging your head against a wall, trying to figure things out on your own.” — Adda Birnir, Co-Founder, Skillcrush

“One of the common mistakes young startups make is developing a product without enough input. As much as you’re executing on your vision and keeping things under wraps until launch, engaging potential customers early — even when it’s just a twinkle in the eye—- can help put you on the right path. It also helps validate the demand for your product. Others can help provide feedback on your differentiation or competition. The fact of the matter is, as a startup, you’re extremely strapped for time and resources. So, it’s that much more important to try to get close to the target around product-market fit and iterate from there. At Kiwi Crate, we spent quite a bit of time working with parents and kids to develop our product. Even today, we have kids come into our offices at least once a week to help test what we’re doing. It’s been invaluable for us.” — Sandra Oh Lin, Founder/CEO, Kiwi Crate

“Young startups can fall so deeply in love with their idea, they aren’t open to tweeks in the business. If you never get product-market fit, you’ll never really have a company (or you’ll struggle the whole time).” — Nicole Glaros, Managing Director, Techstars

15. Jumping to Decisions

“Don’t hire someone till you have interviewed at least ten people for that position. Don’t fall in love with anything, and stay objective. Get to know potential co-founders quite well before bringing them on to the team. In all the times I’ve seen companies fall apart due to co-founder issues, it was in young founders who didn’t clearly specify roles and expectations and really didn’t get to know each other.” — Jay Levy, Co-Founder, Zelkova Ventures and Uproot Wines

16. Not Maintaining Relationships

“Be consistent in your outreach with mentors and other key connectors in your network. Set a schedule for yourself and stick with it, whether it’s weekly for your inner circle, quarterly for acquaintances, or somewhere in between. Every time you consider putting off one of those updates, think about the headache of starting off an email with, ‘It’s been too long since we’ve caught up!’ and the effort it takes to re-build that relationship.” — Ally Downey, Co-Founder, WeeSpring (Lauren Drell/ mashable.com)

Much public hand-wringing and gnashing of teeth have been made of late on the subject of brand marketers targeting millennials and their appetite for the use of digital channels to connect with the demo.

Recently, former Condé Nast editor Bonnie Fuller, who now presides over an original content webloid called Hollywood Life, wrote an op-ed titled “Baby Boomer Marketers Misreading Millennials” in which she made a plea for marketers to fully embrace digital as the holy grail to “own” millennials, because “millennials spend a huge amount of their time online.” In related news, water is wet.

However obvious (and self-serving) Fuller’s observations are, the bigger issue is that her single-channel solution completely fails to take into account the defining media-behavioral characteristic of millennials: interconnectivity.

To “own” millennials, marketers will need to understand how they link with each other, with brands, with influencers, with media platforms and their devices. That starts with understanding millennials on a far deeper level than quoting Forrester stats on the time they spend on smartphones, tablets and laptops. Unraveling the complexity inherent in millennial behavior for our clients was the impetus for PHD’s Creative Collective, a partnership with the University of Georgia’s Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication that allows us frequent and deep insight into the evolving behavior of millennials.

Now in its third annual cycle, establishing a direct and ongoing connection to this group has afforded us a nuance in our understanding of millennial media behaviors not discernible in third- party research or industry reports. As the results of our most recent deep dive into the millennial media mind-set demonstrate, the group can’t be defined by any single medium, In fact, with an insatiable need to be connected and continually validated for their level of “insider” status, millennials are their own medium.

Consider the way they interact with celebrity spokespeople as one example. Our research showed that while millennials get starstruck like the rest of us, a celebrity endorsement that can truly influence their brand perception often involves nontraditional tastemakers like Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert—a concept that the Creative Collective dubbed “The Appeal of Similar Strangers.” These media figures stand out from simply “famous people” primarily because of their everyman relatability.

We saw also that millennials have distinct relationships with each of their devices. Here again, amount of time is less interesting than the role of each piece. Millennials see their laptops as retail portal and catalog, their toolbox, information curator and also their preferred device for viewing TV shows; their tablets as a luxury that falls somewhere between a downsized entertainment center and an iPhone on steroids; and their smartphones as a fifth limb and fail-safe antidote to FOMO (fear of missing out).

However, nothing proves the fallacy of the single-channel approach more than what we learned about millennials’ attitudes toward reading magazines and watching TV.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, the Creative Collective saw magazines reemerging among this group as the preferred “screen” for beauty categories and a luxury/reward. Similarly, the assumption that millennials don’t watch TV fails to take into account the fact that while marathoning/bingeing is big and getting bigger, Gen FOMO is drawn like a moth to the TV flame by big events, sports, premieres and finales­— proving once again there’s no such thing as “conventional wisdom” when targeting millennials.

Marketers are unlikely to score points with millennials by just shifting budgets to digital on their flowcharts. Rather, they need to view marketing to millennials more in terms of a symphonic orchestra, with themselves as the conductors.

If not, they’ll quickly be tuned out. (Craig Atkinson/ adweek.com)

- Pinterest Network Helps Brands Pin More Content -

Pingage, a Pinterest-focused marketing startup, has changed its name to Ahalogy and is announcing a pins-based platform called Content Network.

“We recommend 15 to 20 [Pinterest] pins per day,” Bob Gilbreath, president of Cincinnati-based Ahalogy, told Adweek. “When you talk to a brand about that, their jaw drops. Ninety-five percent of the brands we’ve spoken with don’t have that kind of content.”

Per Gilbreath, that’s where Content Network comes in. His company has partnered with100 content creators, such as The Motherhood and StyleCaster Media Group, which have opted in to the network and will get complimentary access to Ahalogy’s set of Pinterest tools, such as image editing and pin scheduling. In exchange, they agree to let a paying Content Network customer source the content creators’ pins and re-pin them on marketing clients’ Pinterest account.

And when Pinterest users click through a pin on Content Network, they see a “sponsored by” interstitial landing page that gives them the chance to follow that brand on the social site. “That interstitial helps close the loop on conversions of followers,” Gilbreath said.

Additionally, the network tracks re-pins and click data for brands. In terms of cost to marketers, the Ahalogy exec said, “It’s all on a paid-for-performance model. There’s no up-front costs, and there’s zero work the brand needs to do.”

Eight-month-old Ahalogy counts John Frieda, Casio, Con Agra and three Procter & Gamble brands as clients. Gilbreath’s company, which recently moved into a bigger space in the Queen City and has grown to 15 employees there while also opening a New York office, sounds like it might have channel-minded expansions in the offing as well.

“It’s a little bit of a secondary benefit in terms of our name change,” Gilbreath explained. “It, longer term, allows us to bring in some other platforms. But we are doubling down on Pinterest, I’d say. It’s really the first social media made for marketing.”

Lastly, his firm has raised $1.6 million in funding from CincyTech, North Coast Angels and Vine Street Ventures. (Christopher Heine/ adweek.com)

- Mobile Advertising is Cannibalizing Desktop Ad Budgets -

Mobile advertising is continuing to grow, but it’s doing so at the cost of desktop ad spending,according to a new study.

While research firm eMarketer predicts U.S. digital ad spending to grow 14% this year and reach $41.9 billion, much of that incremental growth ($7.7 billion) will be driven by spending on mobile, not desktop, ads. In fact, spending on desktop ads is expected to decrease after it hits its peak in 2014.

Desktop ad spend will reach its pinnacle in 2014 at $35.39 billion, after which it will steadily decline to $35.26 billion in 2015, $34.4 billion in 2016 and $32.51 in 2017, eMarketer projects.

“The growth of mobile advertising is slowing spending directed toward desktop ad formats faster than expected, according to new figures from eMarketer, raising the question of whether spending on desktop formats like search and banners will ever grow again,” eMarketer said in a statement.

Mobile advertising will continue to be a growth industry, however, going from $4.36 billion in 2012 to $7.65 this year, a 76% increase. Spending on mobile ads will increase through 2017 when marketers are expected to spend $27.98 billion on the category. (John McDermott/ adage.com)

-  NBA Teams Look High and Low for New Sources of Ad Dollars -

In a constant quest for cash, the NBA and sports teams in general have managed to slap their team names and logos on just about everything, bringing in revenue from countless apparel and gear deals, not to mention ticket sales, concessions and broadcast deals. Miami Heatgarden gnome, anyone?

Though, in a new bid for revenue, the NBA won’t be selling its own wares, but others. The league’s governing body has approved a deal that would open up advertising space on backboards and court itself, according to Sports Business Daily.

Just a year ago, it appeared that the NBA might approve advertising on team jerseys, but that idea was quickly tabled for the current ad deal, which could net teams anywhere from a couple hundred thousand to upwards of $2 million per year.

The new ad opportunity won’t have the polishd courts covered in logos à la a NASCAR jumpsuit, but instead will be limited to floor space directly in front of team benches. During national TV broadcasts, the ads would need to be removed from the new spaces.

While the 2014 season will be a test, teams are allowed to sign multi-year deals with advertisers that can be amended at the end of the season if the plan changes. As for ad dollars, one can assume that floor and hoop space on the home courts of the Miami Heat or Chicago Bulls will surely pull in top dollar.

“This will be a tremendous opportunity for our teams,” said Alex Martins, chief executive officer of the Orlando Magic, according to Sports Business Journal. “This platform to grow inventory of camera-visible signage will allow us all to continue to grow our business for our teams and players. I applaud the league for opening up this opportunity for our teams and our clients.” (Mark J. Miller/ brandchannel.com)

More than a year after selecting five mobile ad formats as part of its Rising Stars program, the Interactive Advertising Bureau on Monday released research showing that rich media units outperform standard mobile banners.

Among the key findings, the five Mobile Rising Stars ad formats overall generated nearly twice the interaction rate of banners, with higher recall for campaign brand name and message among survey participants. People also were quicker to respond to Rising Stars ads, thinking they were “better” overall than standard ads.

The IAB released the study results in connection with Mobile Rising Stars in its official Standard Ad Portfolio, which provides ad format specifications and includes the Rising Stars Display ads. The announcement was made at a trade conference.

While early adopters haven’t waited for units to become IAB standards, “we know from experience with the display Rising Stars that becoming so accelerates adoption,” said Peter Minnium, head of brand initiatives for the IAB.

With its new research, the IAB aims to provide further incentive for marketers to invest in the formats. For the study, conducted with comScocre and Vibrant Media, it looked at results from mobile ads running in Oreo’s “Cookies vs. Crème” marketing campaign based on responses from 1,600 adults aged 18-54 on iOS devices in March and April.

Users were shown a mock-up Web page with either one of the Mobile Rising Stars ads, a standard mobile banner, or no ad at all. Among the five Rising Stars units — Filmstrip, Slider, Adhesion Banner, Full Page Flex or Push — the test also included a variation of the Full Page ad featuring a Vibrant in-text ad component.

In terms of interaction, the IAB found that 9.3% of participants slid, swiped or tapped a Rising Stars ad compared to only 5.2% for traditional mobile banners. The time until the first interaction after seeing the rich media units was also faster, at 25 seconds to 33.6 seconds. The higher rate of engagement for the Rising Stars units also led to higher brand recall, 98.1% to 83%. Recall was slightly higher for all mobile ads on tablets (87.1%) than smartphones (80.3%)

In addition, people who interacted with those ads were also 23% more likely to recall the “Cookie vs. Crème“ campaign theme. Four of out five (81%) did so for Rising Stars ads compared to two-thirds of those who viewed banners.

Users also indicated a preference for the rich media ads. More than half thought the Rising Stars formats were more fun than standard ads and 60% of those who engaged with the former, thought they were more attention grabbing.

Since the Mobile Stars ads were announced in February 2012, Minnium said the Full Page Flex unit, which accommodates both portrait and landscape orientation, had seen especially wide adoption by advertisers and publishers.

Unlike the their display counterparts, he noted the Mobile Rising Stars enter an ad landscape “where the cement is still being poured.” eMarketer projects mobile advertising will rise nearly 80% this year to $7.9 billion in the U.S. Rich media, however, made up only 3% of the $36.6 million in U.S. Internet ad spending last year, according to the IAB. (Mark Walsh/ mediapost.com)

- Looking for Gay, Lesbian Consumers? Try Mobile Devices -

Marketers have been wish-washy at best when deciding whether or not to target the LGBT population. Take Target, for example, which rolled out a number of product lines last year aimed at the segment, but in the past had stumbled over mixed-messages on its LGBT position.

Now, with mobile use on the rise, marketers that don’t target LGBT consumers are missing out on one of the most active mobile user groups in the U.S., according to a study commissioned by Publicis Groupe’s Digitas.

Partnering with Community Marketing, the agency surveyed 1,595 lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender respondents over the age of 18 in the U.S. All owned mobile devices. The Human Rights Campaign endorsed the agency’s research.

Perhaps the first marketer that should boost its LGBT targeting efforts is Google, as the study found that 55% of LGBT mobile users own and use iPhones versus Android – “a reversal of general population findings.”

The study also showed that 56% of the respondents now use a mobile device over a laptop or desktop compared to a year ago, and it concluded that LGBT mobile users have a higher understanding and level of activity with mobile devices compared to general population users.

That level of understanding and activity is likely due to more experience. Digitas reported that 51% of the LGBT respondents have been using mobile devices for three years or more, which is twice as long as the general population. And the users spend twice as long on a mobile device compared to the general population.

So what are they using mobile devices for?

Coming Out
Well, for one thing: coming out in the first place. The study showed that mobile devices play a key role during important life moments. It showed that 35% of 18-24-year-olds used their mobile device during the coming-out process, and of the total respondents who said they used the devices during the coming out process, 70% said they used Facebook at the time.

Shopping
While the study demonstrated LGBT consumers’ ties to the devices during these meaningful moments, it also showed that mobile devices play an integral role in their shopping, travel and family planning processes. “Gay men and lesbians are twice as likely to use mobile shopping technology than their straight counterparts,” the agency reported. Of the respondents, 39% of gay men and 32% of lesbians use mobile scanners while shopping, and 32% of gay men and 29% of lesbians buy items on mobile devices.

Family
The study found that 49% of respondents with families used mobile devices to coordinate calendars and 47% used the devices to coordinate locations. Lesbian and gay parents are also more likely to outfit their kids with mobile devices; 85% of children under the age of 18 with LGBT parents own or have access to a mobile device, and 61% of the respondents said they purchase mobile games for their children.

Travel
“The LGBT mobile traveler is on average, more than twice as active compared to similar general population studies,” according to the report. It found that more than 20% of the respondents recently planned travel and purchased a hotel from their mobile devices. Of those users, 63% searched for restaurants; 59% updated Facebook; 51% checked a flight status; and 46% explored local activities. (Alexandra Bruell/ adage.com)

- Cross-Platform, ESPN Reaches Nearly 75% Of Men Per Month -

ESPN reached nearly three in four American men with its TV and digital properties in February. The data also shows the brand reached close to 60% of all adults.

The totals come to 85 million men (72%) and 136 million adults (57%). The data is from Project Blueprint, a five-screen measurement initiative that ESPN is undertaking along with Arbitron and comScore.

The data also showed that tablet users tend to be ESPN’s most rabid consumers, spending an average of 19-plus hours per month with content across multiple platforms — three times above average. The brand’s multiplatform consumers tend to watch more ESPN on TV.

In an average week, digital properties give ESPN a reach lift of 23% among men and 18% for adults over just the TV networks.

Looking to track consumption across TV, radio, PCs, smartphones and tablets, data comes from a variety of sources. For example, TV data emerges from comScore tracking 4.5 million set-top boxes, and Arbitron using its portable people meter (PPM) for out-of-home viewing. PC, smartphone and tablet consumption at a census level came from comScore.

Arbitron put together a panel from a subset of its PPM panel that captured the five platforms by melding TV-radio data from the PPMs with digital information from a software meter application.

Announced last year, ESPN plans to use Project Blueprint to gauge whether a five-platform measurement service could be used across the industry. As an upgraded model is in development, ESPN plans to release the initial findings at the Advertising Research Foundation conference Monday.

Artie Bulgrin, ESPN’s senior vice president of research and analytics, stated that Project Blueprint “will fill significant knowledge gaps about cross-platform usage with a level of precision that we have lacked until now.” (David Goetzi/ mediapost.com)

- The Six Companies Fueling An Online Ad Crisis -

As the controversy swirls over publishers selling advertisers bogus nonhuman traffic, many of the accused have screamed, “It wasn’t me! We bought bad traffic from somebody else!”

So, who are these traffic dealers? At Adweek’s request, close to a dozen industry experts—representing publishers, ad buyers, DSP and other ad tech execs—have identified six companies that they believe may be selling low-quality, potentially bot-generated traffic—starting at half a penny a click. They are AdOn, Adknowledge, eZanga, Jema Media, MGID and BlueLink Marketing.

One insider shared multiple URLs for bot-filled sites featuring AdOn as a traffic source. According to analytics generated by the firm SimilarWeb, eZanga and BlueLink are among the biggest referrers of traffic to Brightline Media’s InteriorComplex.com and CelebrityBabyCraze.com, as well as Bluefin Media’s GossipCenter—all bot-fueled sites identified in Adweek’s ongoing investigation. (It’s unclear whether these sites know where their traffic comes from.)

Harvard Business School professor Ben Edelman, who has tracked Web fraud for years, has cited Adknowledge for suspicious behavior in 21 different reports for his clients last year and six more this year. He’s flagged AdOn 10 times.

“Certainly AdOn, Adknowledge, Jema and eZanga sell plenty of non-user-initiated traffic, such as adware, popups, forced visits and the like,” he said. For most advertisers, this isn’t what they’re looking for. It’s the very opposite of targeted traffic.”

Edelman walked Adweek through an example of a site with ties to bots, Smartmomstyle.com, that received traffic from Jema and Adknowledge. In one case, the entire site’s home page, ads and all, was delivered to users within an iFrame—that is, the entire site was rendered invisibly as a user visited another site.

“Of course the advertisers and networks agreed to buy this traffic in anticipation of users being able to see the ads, click to visit advertisers’ sites, make purchases, etc.  None of that was possible here,” said Edelman.

Despite that example, the most infamous vendor of the bunch is AdOn, which last year was acquired by the British Web video firm Blinkx (which according to published reports has sold non-viewable ads in the past). “AdOn is just about the worst,” said one publisher victimized by bots.

“They are notorious for having the worst quality traffic in the industry,” said another publisher. “We worked with them very briefly several years back and dropped them immediately once we saw the overall quality. Just crazy traffic patterns, wildly inconsistent ad click rates, etc.”

Yet other vendors don’t have much better reps. “Adknowledge appears to be a total scam that is generating only fake impressions, whereas MGID is a legitimate blog network that seems to be juicing the numbers, maybe through leased bots,” said a DSP exec.

To be fair, Adknowledge does have its defenders. “They seem like a real company to me,” said one exchange buyer.

Adknowledge president Marco Ilardi emphasized that point exactly, noting that the firm has offices from New York to Shanghai. “We have 300 people and have invested millions in this business. We are not this company that is out there just trying to make a buck. In fact, we want to know about it if we have any traffic issues.”

Ilardi said that Adknowledge’s traffic can start at one-third of a cent but can run as high as 15 cents.

Meanwhile, MGID’s business operates a bit differently. The firm is known for providing referral traffic via a widget, albeit one that first redirects users to MGID’s own sites, then often sends them to completely irrelevant sites. Its come-ons include the promise that “We could supply your site with unlimited volumes of targeted traffic, so you will enlarge its audience even more and improve your ad revenue.”

One major exchange buyer claimed to have flagged MGID for suspicious behavior about a year ago and immediately stopped working with the company.

Naturally, MGID defended its practices. “Traffic that we send to websites consists of real Internet users who click on the content because they like it,” said a spokesperson.

Why do publishers need some much help getting extra traffic, anyhow? As one mid-sized site owner explained, advertisers won’t even entertain doing direct business with a Web company unless they reach a few million unique users. Those that don’t are forced to go the ad exchange route, where CPMs are sometimes painfully low. So many turn to buying traffic.

But buying quality traffic from a company like Google doesn’t pay off in bigger ad sales. So sites turn to cheap traffic vendors, even though they may not be sure where their traffic comes from. Even the “best” cheap traffic may come from links on domains based on misspelled URLs. “You’re marketing to morons, basically,” said a publishing exec.

There are numerous forms of bad traffic, according to insiders. Some of these vendors may sell pure bot traffic, or even hire humans in third-market countries to click on ads. Others bake entire websites into invisible 1×1 pixels that live on other sites. A few even mix good and bad traffic—a form of “impression laundering.”

Several of the companies Adweek’s team of experts has identified were tough to track down. For example, the majority of the email addresses on Jema’s website yielded bounce backs. Eventually, founder and CEO Jeff Long contacted Adweek, though he declined to name any of the company’s advertisers or publishers. “Our servers block non-human traffic,” he said. “I don’t really want to talk about our pricing. It’s not relevant.” According to Jema’s customers, it sells traffic for a tenth of a penny.

Others, once reached, vehemently defended their practices.

“Absolutely not,” said BlueLink CEO Declan Carney when asked if his company sells bot traffic. “We have a list of 8 million domains that we will not serve ads to. Does some get through? Absolutely it does. We try to minimize the percentage. We’ve got it down to 5 percent.”

Rich Kahn, CEO of eZanga, echoed Carney’s sentiments. Bots are a nuisance, but don’t define the business, he said. “I don’t care who you are,” he said. “Everybody in this business is touched by bot traffic at some point. And fraud isn’t unique today. Look at USA Today. More than half of its papers are delivered to hotel rooms, and people never pick up the paper.”

There’s plenty of debate in the industry over whether publishers who buy traffic from these vendors are really victims or at fault themselves. Or whether these companies are just fronts for even more shady players. Some wonder how you can blame an independent publisher for not understanding how ad networks work. But as one publisher put it, “Real publishers build an audience, they don’t buy it.”

Said another: “I’m fine with paying for traffic. I just want to reach humans, not R2D2 or C3PO.”

Edelman puts some of the burden on the publishers. “Clearly, Smartmomstyle knows it’s buying from Jema Media and Jema’s click fraud traffic and other low-quality traffic are well-known among traffic buyers. So I see plenty of cause to blame [sites like] Smartmomstyle as well as the traffic brokers.”

However, there’s a growing chorus of voices arguing that agencies and advertisers are complicit in this process. A buyer might even know that his client is running ads on lousy traffic and essentially juicing a brand’s performance metrics. “But how do you have that conversation about how bad a job you’ve been doing all along?” asked an exchange insider. (Mike Shields/ adweek.com)

The end of an era is approaching, but have no fear, sports apparel icon Nike won’t let its cash cow stray too far. It’s been reported that Nike and Tiger Woods are close to signing a new, multi-year deal that could likely see arguably the greatest player in golf remain an endorser of the brand for the rest of his career.

The storied partnership has been in place since Woods turned pro in 1996, signing on to a reported $40 million, five-year deal to wear the sporting brand’s apparel. While Woods didn’t start putting Nike’s golf equipment into play until 2000, the pair have successfully built a burgeoning brand for the retailer that extends to a whole line of Woods-branded apparel.

The new deal will keep Woods “emphatically at the top of the golf endorsement list, according to agent Mark Steinberg. “We’re down to the very, very short strokes right now,” Steinberg told ESPN. “I would expect we would come out with some sort of joint announcement when we get the paperwork signed. I hope this is viewed as a pretty bold statement.”

If the partnership between Woods and Nike is anything, it is indeed bold. Nike has stuck by Woods’ side for 17 years as his meteoric rise to sports stardom was briefly interrupted by a mess of personal drama when Woods was ousted by mistress after mistress for being unfaithful to then wife Elin Nordegren, who has two children with the star. The very public defamation that followed cost Woods several high-profile endorsement deals with Accenture, AT&T, Gatorade, Gillette, TAG Heuer and General Motors, however the relationship with Nike never waivered.

The brand continued to support its star while Woods’ career hit a low point in 2011, and even mustered up some drama of its own with a social media post that featured Woods and the tagline, “Winning takes care of everything.”

With Woods back on his A-game—in the last 12 months, he’s won six events and four of those have come in the eight PGA Tour starts he’s made this year—not to mention the fact that he has reclaimed his spot atop Forbes’ highest-paid athletes ranking, there’s no doubt that whatever the new deal is for, it will be quite epic. So epic, that it inspired a late-night talk show spoof. (Mark J. Miller/ brandchannel.com)

- Facebook To Eliminate Half Of Ad Units -

With its confusing array of ad options, similar formats and generically named ad products, Facebook has never been known as an easy place to advertise. To address that issue, the social network on Thursday said it planned to simplify its offerings by reducing its 27 ad formats to half that number in the next six months.

Facebook said the move comes as a result of feedback it’s heard from marketers about its ads to streamline its products. “While each product may be good on its own, we realized that many of them accomplish the same goals,” stated a blog post today by product manager Fidji Simo.

One of the immediate goals is to eliminate ad units that accomplish the same goals. That includes removing its Offers ads starting in July because Facebook said marketers have founding using a Page Post link ad is a better way to drive people to deals on their Web sites. It will also kill the Questions product for brands with Facebook Pages since “marketers can simply ask a question in a post and get answers in return.”

Separately, this fall Facebook plans to incorporate the endorsements from friends found in Sponsored Stories ads into other ad units to simplify buys. “In the future, for example, when you create a Page post photo ad, we will automatically add social context to boost performance and eliminate the extra step of creating Sponsored Stories,” the company explained.

That doesn’t mean it’s doing away with Sponsored Stories, but that now advertisers don’t necessarily “have to choose between adding social context to ads or running separate Sponsored Stories,” according to a Facebook spokesperson.

Starting later this month, Facebook also plans to make ads look more consistent by reducing the number of formats. It didn’t specify which formats would be phased out, but a spokesperson said one result would be that ads in the right-hand column of pages would look more like those appearing in the news feed.

“A consistent look and feel to our ads will also be a better overall experience for people on Facebook,” stated Facebook’s blog. That step also underscores the growing importance of mobile advertising for the company, which now makes up nearly a third of its total ad revenue.

Top Facebook ad partners, including Nanigans, SocialCode and Spruce Media, welcomed Facebook’s efforts to consolidate its ad options and improve the ad-buying process. (Mark Walsh/ Mediapost.com)

- Global Media Spend Forecast To Hit $2 Trillion In 2017 -

Worldwide media and entertainment revenues will continue to grow at a rapid pace, mostly thanks to digital media — smartphones, tablets and new media platforms.

Global worldwide media and entertainment will climb 38% by 2017 to $2.1 trillion, according to Pricewaterhouse Coopers, from the 2012 levels. This works out to a 5.6% annual compounded growth rate. In 2012, media/entertainment revenues were at $1.7 trillion.

The U.S. will continued to be the largest media market — growing 4.8% annually to reach $632 billion in 2017, up from the nearly $500 billion in 2012. One major reason for continued U.S media growth is digital media, which will account for 43% of all media spending in the U.S. — up from 31% in 2012.

Concerning U.S ad dollars, it is expected that ad revenue will rise at an 4.1% annual growth rate by 2017 from 2012, reaching $204 billion from $167 billion.

While the U.S will still be the biggest market, Latin America will be the fastest-growing over the next few years — increasing 10.6% in 2017 from 2012. The closely watched Asia-Pacific region will also climb at a strong pace — 6.5%.

Pricewaterhouse Coopers said next year, mobile Internet revenues will be at $259 billion, accounting for over 50% of total Internet access spending — which will overtake revenues from less-mobile computers/digital equipment via broadband.

A growing piece of mobile is mobile advertising revenues, which will climb at a 27% annual growth rate, getting to $27 billion in 2017 — about 15% of all Internet advertising revenues.

The study says the annual value of North America’s electronic home video market — both pay-TV and over-the-top (OTT) streaming services — will surpass box office value for the first time in 2017, landing at $14.8 billion in 2017 compared to box office $13.5 billion. (Wayne Friedman/ mediapost.com)

- Online Video Trumps TV In Engagement, Ad Shifts -

Some worldwide traditional TV ad spending — as well as display advertising — is shifting into new online media video campaigns.

According to a survey, 73% of respondents said online video spend had increased over the last 12 months.TV and display were cited as the two main sources for the new video money.

The data, drawn from 770 global marketers, comes from Be On, a new AOL-branded content division, between March and April.

Although TV is considered a key “awareness” producer, 78% of respondents in Europe and 58% globally said they could achieve greater engagement and scale with online video.

Over 80% point to audience and content targeting as main factors when planning a new branded video campaign. Better audience targeting (73%) and measurement (67%) were mentioned as key reasons for increasing online video spend in the future.

Overall, all video marketplaces were deemed satisfactory: 64% of those surveyed said they were satisfied with video services in today’s market. Another 84% believed the Internet is fundamentally becoming a strong brand medium. (Wayne Friedman/ mediapost.com)

WPP Group has signed a global strategic partnership with Twitter meant to let WPP take advantage of Twitter data to inform more effective campaigns and enhance ad targeting.

“As Twitter has grown, marketers are leveraging the platform for brand insights, relevant real-time messaging, and customer research,” Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said in the statement about the WPP deal today. “This partnership will benefit clients by pairing Twitter with WPP’s world-class analytics, targeting, and creative capabilities.”The pact comes soon after  WPP rival the Publicis Groupe announced a deal between its Starcom MediaVest network and Twitter, giving Starcom clients such as Procter & Gamble and Coca-Cola first dibs on premium Twitter inventory and new ad units still on the drawing board, among other elements.

The companies did not elaborate on how the new deal will work. WPP promised further announcements “regarding applications of the partnership will be made in the coming weeks and months.”

WPP CEO Martin Sorrell recently told the Harvard Business Review that Twitter is more “a PR medium” than an advertising vehicle and “reduces communication to superficialities and lacks depth.” Today he described Twitter “not only as a social platform, but also as a window into consumer attitudes and behavior in real time.”

“We are delighted to announce this very wide-ranging strategic partnership and to ensure that Twitter data is a key ingredient in many of our disciplines,” Mr. Sorrell said in the statement.

WPP said the deal will help develop GroupM client investments on Twitter, particularly in the U.S., Western Europe, Japan, Turkey, Mexico and Brazil. (BY: Emma Hall/adage.com)

- Successful Brand-Building Requires an Army of Advocates -

When you ask a CMO what it takes to build a successful brand, you’ll likely hear it goes far beyond frontline commitment. When asked in a recent Forrester survey what parts of the organization are critical to brand-building success, marketing leaders agreed unanimously that it’s “a companywide effort that requires employees in all departments to be brand ambassadors.”  Nearly all, 96%, believe that executive team commitment to brand-building is critical to success.

Yet while marketing leaders see the importance of enterprise-wide support in brand building efforts, the reality doesn’t reflect this belief.  For instance, while 88% of these marketing leaders consider it important to have a clearly defined brand promise to guide the organization, only 55% rate their organizations as consistently doing so. Just a third of respondents said that employees can articulate the brand promise or are empowered to deliver a great brand experience.

The September 2012 Global Marketing Leadership Online Survey included 67 marketing leaders: 61% from the United States, 24% from Europe, 12% from Asia Pacific, 1.5% from Russia, and 1.5% from Africa/Middle East.

So how can CMOs build an army of brand advocates across the organization? Adobe’s Karl Isaac, director of brand strategy, has noted that “when done right, brand becomes part of the culture of the organization, and what it stands for.” The brand must be embedded into the fabric of the enterprise.

It starts with establishing a clear North Star, defining the core essence of the brand that guides all  messages, actions, products and services. This should be concise, straightforward and inspiring, to ensure that all employees are heading in the same direction and understand their role in achieving a shared, singular mission. And the organization needs to nurture a brand culture that excites, educates and enrolls the entire organization to become brand advocates. To do so, marketing leaders must:

Excite employees with an inspiring brand experience. Kick off the brand advocacy initiative with an event that brings the brand to life for employees and makes them feel that they are a key part of the overall brand story. For instance, Starbucks knows that the in-store experience is a key differentiator for the brand and needs to ensure consistency, whether a customer is in Boston or Beijing. To do that, the chain invested $35 million to create an interactive brand lab to bring the brand experience to life for its frontline employees.

Educate advocates on the brand heritage and purpose. Immerse old and new employees alike in the brand to provide a full understanding of where the brand comes from, its promise and how customers get value from it. At IBM, every employee goes through two days of brand training. HP takes it one step further by creating a robust brand training program.

Enroll employees in the cause by connecting the brand to their specific jobs. This step makes the brand tangible to all employees, showing them what their role is in the brand experience. Pitney Bowes has done this by engaging a change-management consultant, The Storytellers, which worked with leaders to identify brand stories that captured the heritage and vision of the brand. This process continued with workshops across the enterprise during which employees worked in teams to identify their own stories that epitomized the brand values.

Appoint an internal advocate. The CMO does not need to go it alone. She should make it someone’s job to enlist brand champions across the organization. This leader can help build a groundswell of support for the brand story by rolling out the message to company leaders, departments and those with customer-facing roles.

Above all, CMOs must recognize that creating a culture of brand advocacy won’t happen overnight. It will require patience and persistence and deserves the same level of planning and commitment as an external brand-building effort. But CMOs who engage their entire organization in building their brand will see a world where customers benefit from a better, more consistent experience, which in turn, will ultimately help win the battle for mindshare and market share. (BY: Tracy Stokes/ adage.com)

- The World’s 50 Most Marketable 2013 -

(Link to list located at the end of the article)

The 50 athletes who appear in the following pages and the order in which they appear will be hotly debated and argued over. That is the one certainty of a list which, since the first edition in 2010, has ranked athletes by their marketing potential over a three-year period. The ranking is not scientific, although much data was used to put it together; it is a subjective rating, based on expert knowledge, extensive counsel from a range of global sources and just a touch of soothsaying. Cases were made for at least 50 other athletes before the final selection was locked in – others could, doubtless, come up with 50 entirely different names.

As in previous years, the central criteria that shaped the list were value for money, age, home market, charisma, willingness to be marketed and crossover appeal. The sporting calendar for the next three years was also closely examined: 2014 throws up, for instance, a winter Olympic Games and a Fifa World Cup, while there are two World Athletics Championships scheduled between now and 2015, by which time the build-up to Rio de Janeiro’s summer Olympics will be in full flow. Four athletes bound for Sochi make the list this year – the likely home hero Alex Ovechkin, ski queen Lindsey Vonn, South Korea’s darling Kim Yu-Na, and action man Shaun White – while the inclusion of American swimmer Missy Franklin for the first time is a reminder that Rio 2016 is beginning to loom on the horizon.

Overall, this year’s list features 19 different sports – or 20 if skateboarding and snowboarding, Shaun White’s disciplines of choice, are counted separately – with eight featuring in the top ten. The list is made up of athletes from 23 countries, with seven different nations in the top ten. There are more women, 14, in the list than ever before and there are 19 new entries in total. 14 athletes have risen from their 2012 ranking, while 16 have dropped. There is one non-mover.

Unsurprisingly, soccer is the most represented sport with nine and a half athletes – the half being the remarkable Ellyse Perry, who has played for Australia in soccer and cricket. There are four Premier League players in the list and two, Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi, from Spain’s La Liga.

Tennis has more players in the 50 than ever, including five representatives from the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) Tour – the most of any single league, series or tour. Formula One is represented by three current drivers, half of the six motorsport stars in the list. Five golfers, three men and two women, are included in the 50. Four National Basketball Association (NBA) players appear, while there are two representatives each from athletics, ice hockey and boxing.

Aside from Perry, the only other cricket representative is rising Indian star Virat Kohli. There is one athlete each from American football, swimming, baseball, snowboarding/skateboarding, cycling, skiing and mixed martial arts, as well as the first-ever representatives from ice skating and horse racing. For the first time, meanwhile, a 50 Most Marketable list includes a para-athlete, with Brazilian sprinter Alan Oliveiraa new entry on account of his nationality and the rising global profile of Paralympic sport.

Perhaps the most conspicuous omissions on this year’s list are Chinese athletes, following the departure of badminton star Lin Dan. Several were considered, in particular golfers Shanshan Feng (right) and Guan Tianlang and tennis star Li Na. Despite winning a Major last year 23-year old Feng, who plays on the LPGA Tour, was deemed to have less marketing potential than Yani Tseng and Stacy Lewis, the two LPGA players who made the final 50. Despite a remarkable performance at April’s Masters, 14-year old Guan was ultimately deemed too young to make the list – he will likely not even be starting college in three years’ time. Na, meanwhile, missed out when the value for money criteria was applied.

No other Chinese athlete, with the possible Olympics-related exception of hurdler Liu Xiang, has broken through on the global stage since the days of Yao Ming. Within basketball itself, a huge sport in China, it is now LeBron James and his NBA colleagues who dominate in the country rather than local stars. Indeed, although there is no Chinese national in the list, the country’s influence can still be seen on the 50: the likes ofTiger Woods and the soccer players in the list are all huge stars in China, where the appetite for western sports is vast. Outside China, meanwhile, Asia is represented by athletes from Taiwan, the Philippines, Japan and South Korea.

Another factor keenly debated as this year’s list was assembled was the extent to which team sports affect marketing potential. For several years, this list has not included any Spanish soccer players, a result of our belief that the Spain national team brand outstrips the stars that comprise it, in marketing terms at least. The German national soccer team has fallen into the same category this year. Several German soccer players were considered, including Mario Götze, Manuel Neuer and Mezut Özil, but it is the strength of the national brand that shines brightest just now in one of Europe’s mega-markets.

Perhaps more than any previous list, this has proved to be the year of the individual sports. There is, to cite but one example, only a single representative from the richest league on the planet, the National Football League (NFL), in the shape of Washington Redskins’ quarterback Robert Griffin III. This is perhaps a legacy of the past season’s Super Bowl not being dominated by a one-man team and the lack of quarterbacks, still by some distance the NFL’s most marketing-friendly position, at the top of this year’s draft.

The way basketball allows individual characters to shine on and off-court has been well documented in previous versions of this list and tennis and golf players are fixtures in the rankings, too, but there is a new marketability category evident on the 2013 list too: the sporting power couple. Four athletes on this list have formed two highly marketable pairings – Woods and Vonn having recently joined Rory McIlroy and Caroline Wozniacki – while at least two others in our 50 are enjoying highprofile relationships with other athletes – Alex Ovechkin with tennis star Maria Kirilenko and Danica Patrick with fellow Nascar driver Ricky Stenhouse Jr. The celebrity profile such relationships bring is another intriguing element of the marketing mix that makes this list tick. (BY: David Cushnan, James Emmett, Eoin Connolly, Ian McPherson and Michael Long/ Sportspromedia.com)

The World\’s 50 Most Marketable in 2013 (List)

-Verizon Shells Out for Big NFL Second-Screen Streaming Deal-

Sunday Night Football was the most-watched show on TV last year even though millions of fans were also able to stream the big game on their smartphones. Now the NFL is going a step further and will offer up Sunday afternoon games on smartphones as well.

The NFL’s new $1 billion, four-year deal with Verizon Wireless will help make this happen, expanding the number of games being streamed to smartphones from just the evening games on Sunday, Monday and Thursday to all of the games in a customer’s home market, the Wall Street Journal reports. The broadcasts will begin next year after Verizon’s current four-year, $720 million contract concludes.

“I can see viewers for NFL games on mobile continuing to double for the foreseeable future,” Lee Berke, a media consultant who has worked with Verizon Wireless, told the Journal. “At this point, nobody knows where the upper limit is, and that’s why these deals are being done. In the 1970s people predicted cable would reach an inflection point at 30 percent penetration, but now we’re at 80-90 percent with pay television.”

The NFL recently made other deals with broadcast partners Fox, CBS, NBC Universal and ESPN that allows them to broadcast home-market games onto devices other than TV, but not smartphones. The Daily Caller has it that the NFL offered it up to its broadcast partners, but none of them were willing to pay the $1 billion that Verizon Wireless would.

“This is about leveraging technology to try to make the fan experience better and to try to make the game better,” said Brian Rolapp, chief operating officer for NFL Media, the Journal reports. It doesn’t hurt that it lines the NFL’s coffers a little bit too.

The Verge points out that Verizon Wireless is paying a lot less than its TV broadcast brethren for similar content: “ESPN pays an average of $1.8 billion per year, while Fox and CBS both pay just over $1 billion per year.”

Verizon Wireless, of course, is hoping the NFL deal will draw some new customers and convince others to stay, while also giving the company some added advertising revenue on the NFL app itself. However, Verizon’s recent efforts to move customers to data plans may have some customers feeling cautious about watching a full-out NFL game on their phone. Over at Major League Baseball, which has been streaming games since 2009, more than 300,000 live streams are happening per day on mobile devices, the Journal reports. That’s a 43 percent increase over last year. (Mark J. Miller/ brandchannel.com)

Arbitron says data collection will take off in the first six months of 2013 for its cross-platform measurement project for ESPN. The initiative, announced last year, is being conducted along with comScore.

The radio measurement company noted the process in a government filing, where it also cited a separate deal with ESPN running through late 2014.

The Arbitron-comScore project calls for measurement of five screens –radio, TV, PCs, smartphones and tablets — where ESPN has a notable presence. Among the tools to be employed are TV set-top-box data from comScore and Arbitron’s portable people meter.

In the announcement, Arbitron and comScore said the plan is to develop a measurement service that would be available to all media companies and agencies.

Arbitron and ESPN signed a three-year deal in 2011 for Arbitron to measure NFL and college football games on TV and radio. Nielsen has a deal to acquire Arbitron, so the fate of the comScore partnership could be in question, since Nielsen competes with the company.

The ESPN projects are bringing in some subset of the $3.2 million Arbitron collected last year for cross-platform and Arbitron Mobile initiatives” (mediapost.com).

Report: StubHub bags Home Depot Center naming rights

Online ticketing platform StubHub has reportedly signed a multi-year deal for the naming rights to the Home Depot Center, the home of the Los Angeles Galaxy MLS side.

According to a report by SportsBusiness Daily’s Don Muret, the 27,000-seat stadium in Carson, California will be renamed the StubHub Center from 1st June.

The exact terms of the agreement were not released, however sources say the deal will run for six years and is worth significantly more annually than the US$7 million a year Home Depot paid since 2003.

According to Muret, StubHub was the only company AEG talked to for the stadium’s naming rights.

“This is the exclamation point on the efforts we’ve made over the last ten years to basically weave ourselves into the fabric of the sports and entertainment industry,” Danielle Maged, StubHub’s global head of partnerships and business development, told SportsBusiness Daily” (sportspromedia.com).

David Beckham pens much-anticipated Chinese deal

Paris Saint-Germain soccer star David Beckham has agreed a deal to become Chinese soccer’s first global ambassador.

The deal, agreed between Beckham’s representatives and the Chinese Football Association (CFA), the governing body of soccer in China, will see the ex-LA Galaxy and Real Madrid midfielder visit China in 2013 to promote Chinese soccer domestically and globally. In addition, Beckham’s role is intended to popularise the country’s domestic soccer competition, the Chinese Super League (CSL).

The agreement follows a ten-year partnership between CCTV-IMG, a joint venture between media giant IMG and Chinese state television network CCTV, and the CSL to capitalise on the popularity of soccer in China and develop the country’s domestic league commercially.

Contractual terms of Beckham’s agreement with the CFA were not announced, although unconfirmed reports surfaced in late February that it was worth UK£50 million (US$75.1 million).

“I am honoured to have been asked to play such an important role at this special time in Chinese football history,” Beckham said.

“I’m excited by the prospect of promoting the world’s greatest game to Chinese sports fans as I’ve seen firsthand the growing interest in football there” (sportspromedia.com).

Advocare takes Independence Bowl naming rights

‘Health and wellness’ company Advocare has extended its title sponsorship of college football’s Independence Bowl, renaming it the Advocare V100 Bowl.

Advocare have been title sponsors of the annual post-season game, contested between teams from the Atlantic Coast Conference (SEC) and the Southeastern Conference (SEC), since 2009. It was previously called the AdvoCare V100 Independence Bowl.

Based on the value of Advocare’s exisiting deal, this new agreement is estimated to be worth around US$1.5 million.

“With a new name and new logo, our dedication to this bowl game and the city of Shreveport-Bossier not only continues, but grows even stronger,” said AdvoCare president and chief executive Richard Wright.

“The new name helps enhance all of our efforts in making the AdvoCare V100 Bowl a Top 10 bowl game in the nation — a win for Shreveport-Bossier, AdvoCare and the universities who will play in the bowl each year” (sportspromedia.com).

Livestrong Unveils New Logo in Attempt to Move Beyond Lance

The Livestrong Foundation has unveiled a new logo as part of a rallying cry for members to continue to support the organization and help it emerge unscathed from the Armstrong doping scandal.

The updated logo — which was unveiled by Exec VP-Operations Andy Miller at the annual Livestrong “State of the Foundation” address Thursday — is a visual change that focuses on the “Foundation” rather than the man behind it, disgraced cyclist Lance Armstrong.

Livestrong said that the logo tweak follows a legal name change to the Livestrong Foundation. In his speech, Mr. Miller noted: “The change is subtle but it is substantive. The positioning of the bars suggests forward and dynamic movement.”

He added that the logo underscores the Livestrong ethos, and is a “natural next step” in the foundation’s evolution. “Thousands of people and many critical programs are the ‘Foundation’ beneath that ethos,” he said.

“We believe that while changing our mark is a small act, it’s a natural step in our evolution and a step towards becoming more us, more clear and doing more work” (adage.com).