But it's AOL's own properties the company aims to build up as a go-to premium buy for brand advertisers. Display revenue on AOL properties grew by 2 percent. The company is betting on premium ad formats such as its rich-media laden Project Devil units to entice brands to spend more. AOL reported that more than half of the advertisers who bought the ads in Q1 re-upped this past quarter.
Armstrong admitted that last year the company's focus was not data-driven, and stressed the firm's renewed mission to ensure that data - meaning results-related numbers proving the value of buying AOL's ad products - is at the heart of its sales approach. People cannot leave the building without data, said Armstrong.
Mobile and video ad revenue are key to future growth for AOL, said Armstrong, who said that last summer 75 percent of insertion orders included both platforms. Today, it's close to 100 percent, he said. The company reported that videos, video views, and video revenue rose at double-digit rates, though it did not break out revenues for video advertising.
LIVE! LIVE! LIVE! Atemporality/asynchronicity is a given/commoditized tech ability. Coverage and access to live experiences and events will only grow in importance. Demand Media gets it.
My hypothesis is that the "digital broadcast" scramble to buy/merge everything is defensive move mostly by the traditional telcos & ISP's. They see the upcoming disruption from Wifi/mesh networks that will erode their primary source of revenue from cellular data.
"Currently, Magna estimates that programmatic represents nearly two-thirds (62%) of the digital display advertising marketplace (online, social and mobile) and will grow to 82% by 2018.
"By 2018, only the most premium digital inventory (sponsorship, full episode video, non-standard formats) will still be transacted through traditional mechanisms," "
"Our research showed that our target group of ages 25 to 35 views life as a game...not fun and frivolous, but purposeful," said Sara Bamossy, strategic planning director for the Saatchi office. In search of a property, Toyota and the agency approached Hasbro to license the material for the campaign. Ms. Bamossy said the agency found that many in the target demographic grew up playing the board game and that [real] life for them is a constant media stream of information, but they love social games, they might invent a game at work, and it bonds them together."
Klout, a San Francisco-based company that attempts to quantify a social media user's reach, has used a chunk of its estimated $30 million in new funding to purchase the community-centric company Blockboard for an undisclosed sum.
Blockboard makes an iPhone application designed to connect neighbors through a mobile community bulletin board. The app is currently only available to users in San Francisco neighborhoods.
One thing the study also reinforces is just how much advertisers are betting on Facebook: according to comScore's analysis, more than 15 percent of all U.S. online display ads were "socially enabled," meaning they contained a message asking viewers to "like" or follow the brand or the campaign on Facebook. That's almost double the number of ads that contained those kinds of messages in November of last year, the report said. That kind of bet is what drove Salesforce to spend close to a billion dollars to buy Buddy Media, which specializes in managing Facebook pages and social campaigns.
List of 7 important social trends from the guys at The Next Web: Group buying, Q&A sites, mobile, Facebook Credits, branded content, Twitter monetizing, and Google to Keep on Failing.
One function, called LoveMail, allows musicians to record short audio messages to fans, a touch that the company, also called FanTrail, sees as more personal than artists' sometimes ghostwritten Twitter feeds. Another feature, LoveMeter, ranks fans' loyalty by measuring their activity in buying music and checking in at concerts.
Came across this randomly on Grooveshark. Free 1 year subscription to Grooveshark to each person who submits a video entry. So that's a minimum cost per acquisition of $6, plus whatever media buy they had to make within grooveshark (if at all).
I hope there's a hand sanitizer station posted nearby this interactive campaign. FirstBank launched an outdoor campaign at the Denver International Airport with one objective. "Tire your kids out so they sleep on the plane," reads a plexiglass rotating signboard. Below that are kid-sized handprints with instructions stating, "Have children place hand here." The signboard makes one revolution every 30 seconds. Who knows how many times a kid will walk around this signboard? See creative here and here. TDA Advertising & Design created the campaign and handled the media buy.
"Several companies have successfully built cooperative marketing structures online. Companies such as OwnerIQ, for example, enable online retailers like Crutchfield to retarget people who visit the web sites of electronics manufacturers, offering the flatscreen TVs they were just studying - at a discount. When it comes to driving brick-and-mortar sales from online, though, Facebook appears to offer the best solution yet. CPG brands gladly pay for retail circulars to help sell their products, and there's reason to believe they could buy Facebook advertising to drive consumers into retail locations.
One company with which we work, ShopLocal, puts a retailer's circular content into a database, including images and all the sale prices and details. In so doing it makes local data portable and extendable, so retailers can build online-only pages of the circular, or utilize QR codes to generate more content than exists in the print world."