We've already been reminded this morning that advertising people are not normal. Here's more proof from the world of social media—an infographic from San Francisco agency Heat comparing social-media usage among advertising professionals with that of the general public. It isn't pretty, unless you think the warm, lonely glow of a laptop's light on someone's face is a good look. See the infographic after the jump. Via Co.Create.
In explaining AOL’s disappointing display ad results in Q1, a surprising frank CEO Tim Armstrong offered several explanations. During Wednesday’s earnings call, Armstrong said, “we have had a display strategy that was probably off-tune.”
Armstrong later told Adweek, “The majority of our ad customers are running their display budgets off of KPIs (key performance measures like brand lift). We need to reconnect brands to KPIs. We’ve sort of needed to shift from an older display model to a newer display model, and that’s something we’re working through.”
Wait, did AOL corner the market on selling display advertising? To imply that AOL’s sales team hasn’t caught up with the market’s needs, or isn’t trained to sell in a modern fashion, is a rather stunning admission for Armstrong to make.
Did AOL in the past not actually sell display ads based on brand goals?
The online ad market continues to enjoy robust growth; eMarketer predicts that spending will surge by more than 23 percent this year. AOL’s shrinkage of 1 percent seems more of an indictment of the brand rather than attributable to an off-key sales strategy.
After all, Armstrong shook up AOL’s sales team last summer by bouncing former Google executive Jeff Levick and naming Ned Brody AOL’s new chief revenue officer. Then last December, Armstrong promoted former Miller exec Jim Norton to head of AOL sales. It’s fair to argue that this new team would be well equipped to attack the current ad market.
But maybe not. Some buyers agreed that AOL may still be stuck in selling sites and channels, not specific target audiences. “Tim’s a smart guy. I know him for a long time,” said Jeff Hinz, U.S. director of digital, MediaCom. “We’ve all been moving away from click-through rates. That metric doesn’t makes sense. That’s probably what Tim’s quotes can be attributed to. With AOL moving into digital upfronts, more video, they need to sell that in a very different fashion: ‘What is the brand’s end goal?’”
Hinz added that AOL also needs to prove its relevancy—both to brands and consumers. Lately, much of the news regarding AOL has been about activist hedge funds and fights with investors. That noise was the second excuse Armstrong offered for the rough Q1. But was that just an excuse?
It is if you are trying to send a message to the market that AOL is about building brands with quality content and high impact ad opportunities, argues Bryan Wiener, CEO of 360i. “AOL has high-reach, brand-friendly properties. Its problem is a problem of messaging. They could really use a summer of no drama.”
And how about some more high-impact ad units? Armstrong said he is urging his team to roll out more Project Devil ads, i.e. those singular, center-of-the-page magazine-esque placements the company debuted two years ago. Wiener for one, would like to see more.
But despite being in the market for a while, Devil has a few challenges. It’s still not available on all, or even most AOL properties. And not all buyers are as well-versed on the unit. When asked about Devil, Hinz said, “I’m not familiar with that.”
Senate Democrats aren't going to let a little distraction like the 2012 presidential election stop them from pushing for baseline legislation to protect consumers’ privacy online.
In a classic showdown between Democrats and the GOP during a Commerce Committee hearing on the need for privacy protections, Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) set a combative tone.
"Self-regulation is inherently one-sided. Consumers' rights always seem to lose out to the industry's needs," Rockefeller said in his opening remarks. "We should take up strong-consumer-focused privacy legislation this year."
The lone GOP member to show up, Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.), said he is still skeptical about privacy legislation, and worries that it could lead to "fewer online services and more paywalls. It's premature to talk about legislative fixes when we don't know to what extent a problem exists," he said.
Today's privacy hearing, the fifth held by the Committee since last year, was called to discuss the recommendations made by the Federal Trade Commission and the Commerce Department in privacy reports released earlier this year. Both reports called for some sort of baseline privacy protections for consumers, especially the Commerce Department, which called for a consumer privacy bill of rights.
So far, the Digital Advertising Alliance has kept new privacy laws at bay, rolling out a self-regulatory program that allows Internet users to opt-out of behaviorally targeted ads and making the commitment to launch a "Do Not Track" browser feature by the end of the year.
Although both initiatives received strong support from the FTC, it didn't seem to be enough for the Dems, who claim that self-regulation doesn't cover all the bases.
"Despite their good intentions, sometimes self-regulation efforts do not end up protecting consumers. Corporations are unlikely to regulate themselves out of profits. Why would the DAA have a major chance of succeeding?" Rockefeller asked FTC Chair Jon Leibowitz, one of the three witnesses who testified at the hearing. (Rockefeller last year introduced a Do Not Track bill.)
"I think [the DAA] has made meaningful progress. We think by the end of the year, one way or the other, there is going to be meaningful Do Not Track so consumers can opt out of third party advertisements," Leibowitz said.
The administration, represented by Cameron Kerry, general counsel for the Department of Commerce, does't want to leave consumer privacy to self-regulation. "Too much hangs on existing privacy policies. People don't have a choice about the contents in privacy policies. And there are companies out there that don't have privacy policies. The existing authority doesn't reach those," Kerry said.
It's no secret that moms are a tech-savvy bunch, but you might be surprised to learn exactly how they’re using their digital devices. According to a new survey from Meredith’s Parents Network, young moms are staying digitally connected everywhere no matter where they are—and we mean everywhere.
Meredith’s second Moms & Media survey, which questioned around 1,000 moms born between 1977 and 1994, found that 21 percent of mothers use their smartphones in the bathroom, while 12 percent admitted to using their phones during sex. Although there was (thankfully) no mention of how moms use their phones during those private moments, there’s a good chance that they were indulging in some retail therapy: 81 percent of moms said they mostly used their smartphones for shopping.
Speaking of TMI, when asked about their pet peeves on Facebook (of which eight in 10 moms are members), respondents said that their biggest annoyance was friends including too much personal information in their status updates. Other top peeves included friends sending too many status updates and too many requests to vote in contests or play games. Maybe that's because of their growing number of connections. A year ago, moms had an average of 151 Facebook friends. Now, they have 209. They're also getting fed up with the flood of information from companies’ Facebook accounts, with 55 percent saying they’ve defriended companies who sent too many messages and ads.
Clearly, millennial moms have pretty mixed feelings about the site—57 percent even called it a waste of time—but their Facebook love affair is far from over. Not only are eight out of 10 on the social network, a whopping 89 percent considered their time spent Facebooking to be their “me time.” (No word on whether that “me time” involves using a smartphone in the bathroom.)
Facebook dropped jaws in February when the company announced during its first marketing conference that the average news feed post is only seen by 16 percent of the eligible users. Then Facebook announced its Reach Generator product as a way for brands to make sure their Facebook messages can reach up to 75 percent of their fans within a month, but that product has only been available to a small number of marketers.
Now social advertising company Adaptly says it has an alternative product available to all brands right away: Evergreen.
Adaptly is one of a handful of companies to have emerged in recent years promising brands a more efficient way to advertise on social media sites without buying from the Facebooks and Twitters of the world directly. With Evergreen, the company is taking a different approach from Facebook's Reach Generator. Rather than repromote content within the Facebook News Feed, it takes content posted to a brand’s page and spins it into a paid ad on Facebook.
But not any brand post can be recycled as an ad; instead it will have to have generated a certain level of earned engagement. “If a piece of content is below the threshold of organic reach, we won’t let the advertiser put money behind it,” explained Nikhil Sethi, CEO and co-founder of Adaptly.
A study released by online ad management platform Marin Software earlier this week showed that advertisers’ Facebook budgets are shifting toward social ads (units that use the social graph to incorporate interactions such as likes and comments) over old-school display ads. Within the last 12 months, the share of Facebook ad budgets spent on social ads has grown from 5 percent to 23 percent, per Marin, and the company expects that share to hit almost 50 percent by the end of this year. As social ads such as Facebook’s Sponsored Stories and now Adaptly’s Evergreen grow in popularity, expect brands to put even more resources toward the way they use their Facebook pages.
“Social ads are for amplifying the organic engagement that you have with your page today,” said Matt Lawson, vp of marketing at Marin Software. “To get there you really need to drive engagement on your own page, so that means investing in more than advertising.”
Rather than pricing the unit on a CPM basis, Adaptly is tiering the price of Evergreen ads based on a brand’s fan count and the percentage of those fans reached. Sethi said the pricing structure is part of a migration away from “cost-per-something” and borrows from TV’s gross ratings points model.
Adaptly is rolling out Evergreen at first for Facebook with Kraft Foods signed on as the exclusive launch partner. But the company plans to extend the product to Twitter where organic reach for a tweet is less than 1 percent, Sethi said.
Coupled with the Evergreen launch, Adaptly also announced on Wednesday it’s secured $10.5 million in funding from Valhalla Partners, Time Warner Investments and Vivi Nevo as well as existing investors such as First Round Capital. Adaptly employs 50 people but only one salesperson, so Sethi said the new dollars will be put toward growing the sales team and expanding the firm’s footprint beyond its New York, San Francisco and London offices into Latin America and Asia-Pacific.
The rash of digital NewFront presentations over the past few weeks seems to indicate that there's money in Web video, there's serious money in TV and everybody in digital media wants more. Companies like YouTube and Hulu not only have the visitors, but also the cash to attract top talent and the desire to compete in the entertainment sphere.
Break Media’s Speakeasy, which launched this week, looks to do the same thing on perhaps a smaller scale. The show, which is hosted by comedian Paul F. Tompkins and features Hangover star Zach Galifianakis, is an example of an internally developed, cost-controlled Web foray. Speakeasy features Tompkins enjoying a drink with a single guest, such as Galifianakis or Modern Family's Ty Burrell. The show is tailored to Break Media’s MadeMan audience, focusing on highbrow male culture and making mixology and upscale bar culture a hallmark of the series.
Just days into the show's launch, creator Mitch Rotter (Break's svp of content and former Universal Music Group exec) contends that audience feedback has been solid, though he acknowledges that this sort of content is unchartered territory. “It’s not Field of Dreams,” Rotter said. “Just because we build it doesn’t mean they’ll come, but we have a huge online audience and the expertise in building quality online content.”
Speakeasy has experienced surprisingly few barriers to entry in the marketplace. The show was only conceived in early January and already has 13 episodes completed and an eight-week sponsorship with Bacardi. Each episode cost roughly $5,000 to produce.
While the numbers won’t tell the story on Speakeasy’s success for a few weeks, Rotter hopes more major studios will continue to experiment with original content. “I think studios look at the gamble that they make creating new content and hoping there is an audience. It makes a lot of sense to experiment and introduce concepts in a digital space as costs are lower, feedback is quick and you can get it out in front of a lot of people very fast,” he said.
AOL announced its first-quarter earnings this morning, and the numbers were a mixed bag. Overall revenue was up, but U.S. display advertising was down 1 percent—not good news in an online ad market that is booming. CEO Tim Armstrong spoke with Adweek about the results.
Adweek: During this morning’s earnings call, one of the things you mentioned regarding AOL’s display shortfall was that your strategy may be “off tune.” Can you elaborate?
Armstrong: Well, you’ve got to remember that in the past year or so we’ve changed all the brands around. We’ve spent a lot of time focused on our brands and setting them up for consumers. We haven’t spent as much time with our B2B strategy. The majority of our ad customers are running their display budgets off of KPIs (key performance measures like brand lift). We need to reconnect brands to KPIs. We’ve sort of needed to shift from an older display model to a newer display model, and that’s something we’re working through.
One thing a lot of people wonder about is Project Devil, your initiative to elevate display advertising by running one high-impact unit on a page instead of tons of banners all over a site. That would seem to be an easy way to boost display. So why don’t we see Devil ads on HuffPo, TechCrunch, all across AOL?
Armstrong: You’re going to get me in trouble because that’s one of my ideas. But our finance people might have to taser me. The truth is, we’ve run 54 Devil campaigns with 39 advertisers. We had 19 advertisers last quarter. We’re scaling fairly substantially. Our customers all want Devil; they’re willing to buy more of it. But the process and people need to change. We’ve changed the way we build our Web pages, but our customers need to change.
That sort of implies that buyers or brands aren’t set up do buy ads this way?
Armstrong: Well, that is why you see us trying to [train] agencies on using Pictela ads. They’re set up to buy other stuff. We’ve got 30-40 customers [who will tell you] they know Devil performs. But in some cases we literally need to set up a CMS system at agencies. All of them want to do it.
What about HuffPo? It was such a hot, fast-growing site when you bought it. It’s only grown in terms of content, profile. Are you getting the ad premiums for that site that you think you deserve?
Armstrong: HuffPo has gone through a lot of changes as well. There are now 67 sections. More video. It’s been growing like crazy. The sell-through is a little bit less than we want. But buyers are catching up.
Regarding video, the industry is coming off several weeks of high-profile NewFronts, including yours, where you introduced a lot of original series, premium content. Do you see a lot of dollars being committed now during the big TV buying season?
Armstrong: We’ve gotten a couple of things done already. We announced a partnership with Unilever. Video is just like Devil. The total will is there. It’s the way you move it. The challenge is agency structure, the metrics. But I think this is going to be a watershed year. There is a will, and a way.
Each month, YouGov polls people on their perception of more than 1,100 brands and assigns a Buzz score ranging from 100 to -100. The brand whose raw score rose the most in April was Google, which got loads of attention last month for its augmented reality glasses and the annual Google Doodle content. Other big gainers were Netflix, which rolled out 10 new episodes of Arrested Development; Sears, aided by its nude Kardashian sisters ad campaign; and Hyundai, which got a boost from its new global ad campaign.
Source: YouGov BrandIndex brand research service
Internet Week, a slate of showcases, conferences and workshops around New York City spanning the depth and breadth of the tech industry, kicks off May 14.
The annual gathering this year will include keynotes from such industry notables as Mitchell Baker, chairman of the Mozilla Foundation; Tumblr founder and CEO David Karp; and The New York Times journalist Brian Stelter. Additional speakers include Anomaly creative director Suzana Apelbaum; Hayley Barna, founder and co-CEO of Birchbox; Federated Media executive chairman John Battelle; Mashable founder and CEO Pete Cashmore; Jessica Coen, editor in chief of Jezebel; Machinima CEO and chairman Allen DeBevoise; Jane Hu, head of programming strategy at YouTube Next Lab; Andrew Madden, Google's head of magazines and news partnerships; and Jonah Peretti, CEO of BuzzFeed.
Beyond the headliners, there are a number of shorter- and longer-term programming options at this year's Internet Week. There's the OMMA Mobile Conference, which will be held all day May 14 at the Internet Week Theater on Mercer Street, the Streaming Media East summit will be held concurrently at the Hilton New York and The Digiday Conference will take place the same day at the W New York.
Other sessions of note include "the newsstand 2.0," online dating, game design, customer acquisition in emerging markets like China, the digital music industry, business blogging, mobile apps and women in tech.
Internet Week is also home to the CLIO Awards, which will be held from 6:30 to 10:30 p.m. May 15 at the American Museum of Natural History.
Instagram—a company whose acquisition by Facebook made major headlines recently—is partnering with Times Square for Internet Week to spotlight photographers in a first-ever Instagram photo exhibition.
For the full list of sessions and locations, check out the Internet Week calendar.
Yahoo's CEO resume circus keeps getting more ridiculous. But the real joke is the company's beleagured board of directors, say anaysts.
The Web portal announced on Tuesday (May 
that it has formed a special committee to review CEO Scott Thompson’s hiring in light of the raging controversy surrounding a false degree listed on his resume. Comprising the committee are newly minted board members Alfred Amoroso, John Hayes and Thomas McInerney. And according to AllthingsD.com, Patti Hart, the Yahoo director who vetted Thompson during his hiring process, is apparently leaving the company.
Despite all this drama in the air, whether Thompson’s on the chopping block at Yahoo remains to be seen. Investor analysts contend that Thompson benefits from having just joined the company and would help himself with a public mea culpa a la steroid-using former Yankee pitcher Andy Pettite, the former New York Yankee pitcher who owned up to using steroids and avoided the mass-haranguing suffered by Alex Rodriguez amongst others.
“If Scott delivers on [turning around Yahoo], nobody is going to question [his credentials],” said B. Riley analyst Sameet Sinha. And Colin Gillis, director of research and senior technology analyst at BGC Financial, said for Yahoo to lose another CEO after Carol Bartz’s firing last September would only prolong the company’s turnaround and allow competitors to take advantage of Yahoo being stuck in neutral.
However “if he can’t function with credibility, he has to be cut loose,” Gillis said. But it's the credibility of Yahoo’s board may be even more in question than Thompson.
“I think the biggest fault is with the board, seriously,” said Sinha. “They’ve been missing out on all these different red flags. Going back to them refusing the Microsoft deal, it’s been one thing after another: Jerry Yang coming back, the hiring of Carol Bartz and then the hiring of Scott.”
To review, it's been quite a four months since Thompson was hired; one would think the former PayPal exec must have punched a three-legged puppy in a past life for all the bad juju that’s befallen his short CEO tenure. First there was criticism that the former PayPal president was short on media/advertising experience. Then there was Yahoo’s proxy fight with its largest outside shareholder Third Point, which is looking to reshuffle the company’s board with its own nominees.
Then Yahoo sued Facebook over alleged patent violations, generating lots of Silicon Valley ire. Then Yahoo announced the layoffs of 2,000 employees. Now Thompson’s in the midst of what’s being termed “resume-gate.”
According to documents Yahoo filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on April 27, Thompson “holds a Bachelor’s degree in accounting and computer science from Stonehill College.” Problem is, he doesn’t. Yahoo shareholder Third Point revealed as much in a letter last week to Yahoo’s board in which its CEO Dan Loeb wrote that Thompson’s degree was in accounting, not computer science; Loeb confirmed as much with Thompson’s alma mater.On Thursday Yahoo confirmed that Thompson received a B.S. from Stonehill College in business administration with a major in accounting, chalking up the mention of computer science degree as an “inadvertent error.” Oof. Third Point responded by demanding details of the vetting process behind Thompson’s hiring.
That spotty history, amplified by the resume controversy, only fuels Third Point’s proxy fight with Yahoo. The company saw the departure of four board members this year, including Yang. Subsequently Third Point offered up four nominees—most notably among them was Loeb—but Yahoo counteroffered with two seats—excluding one for Loeb—which Third Point rejected. Yahoo has yet to set a date for its annual shareholders meeting during which investors will vote on Yahoo’s board, but in letters to investors the company has strictly adhered to its nominees and asked shareholders not to vote for Third Point’s candidates.
But now Yahoo must line up another candidate to replace director Hart, Minor by comparison but unfortunately timed to Thompson’s credential debacle, Third Point revealed taht Hart’s purported degree in marketing and economics from Illinois State University was instead a B.S. in business administration “with specialties in marketing and economics.”
Gillis said the latest controversy gives “more credibility to Third Point’s argument that the board is not as functional and efficient as it should be.” That puts Yahoo in the awkward position of deciding to revisit talks with the activist investor.
“If they give Third Point some concessions now,” Sinha said, “people will say, ‘Oh, he’s trying to shut up Loeb, so he’s giving him a board seat and concessions.’ But if he doesnt, then it continues to be an added distraction.”
