Google is predicting more social and targeted display ads

New York times published and article about google's display ad prediction, which is really interesting because Google is still young in display advertising. Google.com has only text ads but Google started this year some display advertising at youtube.com

I actually agree with the predictions. We are right now mostly still in the ad life of 10 years ago, the ads got more rich and have some targeting but are still not there where they could be. Especially with all new social networks and the ability to target people better through behavior and location when they use their mobile device.
Mobile is still a child in comparison to desktop Internet, but we saw how fast the desktop Internet did grow, mobile will grow at least 2.5 times faster. And desktops or notebooks will have earlier or later GPS build in. The technology gets cheaper and cheaper and advertisers will drive manufactures to have this function or other location defining technology in all computers. It will not be driven by the consumer, but it will be market that the consumer believes manufactures do include (in their hardware) such technology because it makes the life easier.
Who does not want to sit at the notebook in Starbucks reading Facebook and posting on the wall how good the coffee is and have instantly the location posted with it (mobile devices can do this already). The advertising market will change extremely, as soon location technology is included in all type of computers. Right now if a consumer is using a desktop or notebook for Internet surfing many geo related targeted ads are a hit or miss, because the IP address does not give enough correct information.


Some parts of the NYT blog:
Neal Mohan, the vice president for product management responsible for Google’s display advertising products, and Barry Salzman, managing director of media and platforms for the Americas at Google, who runs display ad sales, envisioned a Web where the ads are more social, mobile and real-time — and a lot more profitable.

1. Google announced two new kinds of video ads for YouTube and predicted that half of display ads would include cost-per-view videos that viewers choose to watch. On YouTube, people will be able to skip video ads they don’t like after five seconds (and the advertiser won’t pay for those views) or choose which of three ads to watch.

2. Half of the audience will be viewing ads in real-time, Google predicted. That means changing elements of ads on the fly based on things like location, the viewer’s interests and the weather. Google demonstrated technology from Teracent, an advertising company it acquired, that changes a car ad depending on whether the viewer is in a sunny or rainy place, is a woman or a man, and prefers shopping or sports. The technology would allow “millions of possible permutations,” Mr. Salzman said.

3. Google has been talking for a while about mobile being a priority and predicted that cellphone screens would be the No. 1 screen for viewing the Web by 2015. In display advertising, that means using phones to bridge the gap between a magazine ad and an online ad. An app called Google Goggles already lets people take photos of things like a landmark to search for them on Google. Eventually, people will be able to take a cellphone photo of a print automobile ad, for instance, and see the car in 3-D, zoom in and visit the company’s Web site.

4. There are metrics more important than clicks. “Whatever the marketing goal is, you should be able to measure it,” Mr. Salzman said. In addition to measuring engagement with rich media ads and video views, other examples of new forms of advertising measurement include “sentiment analysis” that examines “the tone of consumer comments about a brand” and geo-based metrics will allow marketers to measure the increase in foot traffic or to their stores.

5. Three quarters of all ads will be socially enabled. “All users will be able to share an ad, comment on an ad and give feedback on an ad,” said Mr. Mohan. Instead of advertisers talking to consumers directly, Mr. Mohan envisioned “a two-way communication channel between a brand and its consumers.”

6. Rich media ads will comprise 50 percent of all campaigns. According to Mr. Salzman, “Static banner ads will become a thing of the past.” To illustrate his point, Mr. Salzman showed the audience the live video stream of the presentation as it was streamed to ad units on the Advertising Age Web site. He described it as a “meta media phenomenon.”

7. Display advertising will grow to be a $50 billion market.

When asked at the end of the presentation how these predictions would affect advertisers and agencies, Mr. Mohan and Mr. Salzman agreed that companies would have more time to focus on the creative aspects of their marketing campaigns. “The technology should just work,” Mr. Mohan said.


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Sound is the new click and touch

The world is changing and smart phones are helping a lot to change the world.
More and more applications for the iPhone and Androids are using sound for interaction instead of touching or clicking on banners.

Last night I watched one of my favorite shows "Eureka". During the show an ad came up to tell the audience to start their Shazam application to get exclusive videos from the show.
Shazam is an app which listen usually to music and gives the user the name of the song and author back. It is a pretty nice app, for people like me, who never know any songs. It is easy to use, you start the app hold the phone in front of a speaker and hit the button. 10 seconds later the info is on the phone screen.
This time, with Eureka, it gave me much more info back and worked perfect.







Pretty amazing how advertising is combining TV and smart phones and using sound for this.

If would have to put in a code or scan an image on the TV it would have been too much work, but starting an app without leaving the bed is perfect.

This is not the first time that an app is using sound to tricker certain things on your phone. The first time i saw, was with the Best Buy movie mode app. The app will translate the hilarious minions talking, when you run this app in selected 3D cinemas. The translation is text only that other movie visitors don't get disturbed.

Sony has for their 51 blue ray video an app which will give the user specials when watching the movie.

And then there is kickbucks. An app to collect points in stores. You can either get points by scanning barcodes or through sound.
The idea is that certain stores have multiple speakers installed in different places of store. The app will collect points, whenever the user is close to one of the speakers. The person might go to the dressing room and gets 50 points. These points can be redeemed through the app at the offered stores.



The idea with sound is great because it has better proximity than GPS. GPS is only as good as 20 meters and not working well in buildings. With sound you can get better results.
The application works impressive well, however you can fake the system if you have two iPhones. One is using iAnalyzer to record and play sound and the the other is running kickbucks. However it only works if you are in or close to the store.
But I was able to collect 1200 points instead of only 50 points.

Bottom line is, that companies are understanding that there is much more possibilities than just clicking on a screen or typing with keyboard to interact with customer or target audience.

The next iPhone will have a RFID reader which opens much more for the world, especially for retail stores.

The Internet stores started to take consumers away from brick and mortar stores. Smart phones and their apps will take the consumer away from the Internet stores but bring them back again to the b&m stores.

Smart phones are helping to combine online and offline into one new type of shopping experience.


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Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Spring Hill,United States

New Apple TV coming soon

More and more rumors are pointing to a new Apple TV sooner than I expected. In the mean time Apple is talking with TV companies to get a better deal on shows. Rather than a consumer is buying an episode for $1.99 to $2.99, Apple wants to have the price around $0.99 to rent an episode.
The new Apple TV is rumored to have iOS. Hopefully we can upgrade the older Apple TVs.
We have in our household two Apple TVs, but we seldom use them. Main reason is that we don't watch so much TV.
Another reason is the pricing model and that we have a DVR with our Dish Network. If i watch TV it is either a documentary or a serial like True Blood or Warehouse 13.
I record them with my DVR to avoid advertising. I use my Apple mostly to watch DVDs i had moved into iTunes.
Netflix is right now my favorite, i get the movie I want within 2 days and can stream some movies even instantly through my Wii.
Painful at Netflix are shows which have per DVD only 3 or 4 episodes. With my netflix account I can have only one DVD at time, it takes weeks till I have all episodes through netflix.
And i think this the reason Apple is trying to get shows cheaper into iTunes. With movies it is hard for Apple to compete with Netflix, they have much more movies available but shows might work.
Steve Jobs called once the Apple TV a hobby, and he is right, as long TV producers don't change their model, no set up box can compete with TV. I have right now 250 channels and a DVR, i can basically watch anything i want any time.
On the other hand Internet and set up boxes are putting pressure on the TV, as soon people can get almost the same amount of information and shows through set up boxes like Apple TV, then they might switch instead of paying a $100 something bill each month.
Advertising will and need to change for TV. It will be much more product placements than commercials. New technology allows to render any product via computer into movie or show.
Producers will get smarter in shooting shows to allow to change a product placement on the flow to be more time sensitive. I actually see a big market for start ups in this sector.
In a few years from now, we might not have classic commercials anymore, but commercials as a part of the show, totally integrated. When an user sees an item they like, they can click on it (with mouse or remote control). The TV goes then into split screen, the show stops and user can read more about the product or see a complete 60 second commercial with the ability to buy instantly the product. TV will not anymore just stream, the user can send information back, it gets much more interactive. Basically TV will be the internet of tomorrow. The only difference is that this Internet will be motions rather than flat text. The Internet will be a big movie. The speed will be there and the need is already here.



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Publix is starting to offer curbside delivery

Starting in September, Publix will offer curbside service in two test locations (Atlanta and Tampa).
Consumer can order their products online (all discounts apply) and then have a window of 30 minutes to pick up their products at Publix by driving to Publix and wait till an associate is bringing the goods out and load the car. The service will cost $7.99 plus the costs of the goods.
This another approach to get consumer to buy eatable goods over the Internet. Back in 2000 I used a service in Cologne (Germany) which delivered the food to my home, which was convenient because my apartment was on the 5th floor. I did not need to carry heavy water bottles. Then, the service was $20 and I was willing to pay. The service unfortunately died, most likely because the costs for the grocery store to deliver was too high. In 2007 is used D'Agostino in New York and I liked it. I did not mind to pay more to get my goods delivered. Unfortunately their online store did offer products which were not at the next D'Agostino to my house. Many times I got replacement products. I remember I did order a certain French Camembert and got instead a German Brie.
Especially in Germany ordering perishable goods online with home delivery makes sense. We all work during normal work hours, and in Germany are almost no stores where you can buy Sundays or during week after 8PM. It does make sense as well in cities like NY. Having a car is luxury, finding a parking spot to normal conditions is not possible. Carrying the goods through metro and through half of Manhattan is painful and more exercise than fun.

But I am not sure yet, why I need the service in cities where stores are open 7 days a week and parking is no issue. I might want to order online and pick up to avoid crowds and to find easier things I am looking for. For Publix it might be not the best idea, people who are shopping online want usually certain products, and if they are not available they want look for similar product, they go to another online store. Different in brick and mortar stores, once there, we buy different cereals if necessary to avoid to drive to another store and I think this is the biggest issue why we don't yet order every day products online. It is harder to find online the product than in stores because we don't know what we are looking for. Not always the product we want is available and then is the impulse buy. Many times we know 5 items we want to buy, but actually buy 10 items. In a brick and mortar store it is so easy. Just throw your items in the cart and be surprised about the bill at the end.
Online, we won't do so much impulse buying, first the product are not so nice displayed when browsing (there are no isle to walk buy) and second we see instantly how much we are going to spend, which reduces impulse buy.
Talking a item out of the basket when bill is too high is embarrassing, other people will see it at least the cashier. Deleting an item before checking out (online) does not hurt and nobody will see.

We will see how the curbside service from Publix will go.


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Location:W Laurel St,Tampa,United States

Twitter chance to get better in B2B

I am tweeting since a while and as a marketer I like to tweet. Tweeting is cool. But I did not yet really offer tweeting as a sales tool. This keeps me thinking. I know twitter is working on monetizing tweets, but if they would rethink their banner idea with something more simple but very effective.

I understand twitter was once created that you can send via SMS messages to your twitter account, but who is using this function? People who tweet have usually a smart phone and use a twitterrific or other twitter software.

As a person I like the idea that when I tweet all my followers can read all my tweets, but as a company I would like that not all tweets are reaching all followers.

A lot of my customers are using right now SMS service to send customizes short messages to their subscribers which are offering from coupons to samples almost everything. It is even a perfect geo targeting tool.

The problem is that the costs are pretty high, either having an SMS server or using a 3^rd party for this.

More and more phones are now twitter ready, means have build in twitter that user can get tweets as push notification without running a twitter application. Even apple will earlier than later include twitter in their mobile OS as standard.

Here is the idea

Twitter could offer businesses to open a business tweet account which allows tweeting to certain regions or followers with customized messages. I rather would prefer to pay for this service than using old fashion SMS advertising. Twitter could extend their  tweets with photos and video (without the need to use Twitcam, Virl, Twit C, Twitpic or any other of the 20 different image twit websites).

Would it not be cool to have an account and decide which tweet which person, group or region can read. Making this as a B2B model at twitter could be a very lucrative business model.

Maybe this does already exist, but if so I have problems to find documentation on it.

The next level would be for twitter to make deals with Panasonic, Sony, Philips etc to allow their internet enabled TVs and Cameras to show certain tweet users are following on the screen of TV or Camera.

Imagine you take pictures and suddenly you see a tweet that Nestle has a special offer just around the corner you took the image. Pretty sure it will come. Some cameras have already GPS or Wifi (like the Panasonic DMC-TZ05S camera http://www.buy.com/prod/panasonic-dmc-tz50s-lumix-9-megapixel-wifi-digital-camera-with-28mm/q/loc/33409/207960134.html )

View into the near future

Twitter will open customized targeted tweet. Company X opens a tweet, collect 100 of thousand followers. Company X does not need to know the name of the followers only where they are, what their interests are. But how does Company X know their interests? First they are following X, so they are somehow interested in their products; second X is looking at the twitter statistic (Omniture listen to me, another good way to make some business) which of the followers is following active the tweets, who is clicking on links in the tweets. X collects all this data for 3 to 5 months, and then starts targeted tweets. Or of X does not want to wait so long, X will send tweet with survey link to find out interests.

With this info, Company X tweets that right now their latest commercial is running on channel 13, but only followers who have twitter on their TV will see it. X tweets that that they have a photo contest in Paris, but only people who use twitter on their phone or camera in France will be able to read this tweet.

X tweets that there is a discount at the grocery store around the corner, but only people who are close to the grocery with twitter on their phone will be able to read it. The limit is the sky.

Would I as an advertiser pay for getting these features, oh yes.

Dear Twitter company, please think about enabling these features (if you need help with ideas let me know) and don’t focus too much on normal banner ads. Websites are not your competition, SMS brokers, SMS marketing companies are!!!

Get 50% of their business and you could make $15 Billion (http://www.mobilemarketingwatch.com/smsmms-remain-cornerstone-of-mobile-communication-revenues-reaching-233b-by-2014-5146/  )

OR dear twitter company, wait 5 years then all cell phones are only ip devices. All calls are going over the internet and SMS or MMS did disappear. ATT and Verizon are still there but selling only 3G, 4G or 5G contracts no voice contracts. Then you twitter will anyway control the market. Consumers don’t like always and in any situation complex banners, sometimes they just want poor info advertising.