LBi

An LBi First… and Certainly Not a Last!

Posted by Rachel G September 20th, 2010

Molly M and I attended the 2010 SAMMY Awards in NYC on September 14^th on behalf of LBi and our client, Focus Features. The SAMMYs award excellence in Social Advertising, Media and Marketing and we were nominated for Best Branded Social Community for the multi-platform social media campaign for the May 2010 release of BABIES.

Going in, we weren’t sure we had this locked down – we had some tough competition! Up against us were Hasbro for their Trivial Pursuit campaign and T3 for their work with Windows Phone 7. As luck would have it, we took our seats next to one of our competitors and they made it clear that they were there to beat us! After a fairly tedious comedian, who made many-a social media pun, the award ceremony began. When BABIES was announced as the winner in our category, we ran up to the stage and thanked the judges and gave a short speech. We were gloating as we made our way back to the table, where the opposing agency team could barely muster up a, “congratulations.”

As we proudly looked at our award, we noticed that they accidentally engraved the wrong agency name in the glass. Despite the fact that we left without the physical award in hand (ours is currently being re-engraved), we are so proud to be the first recipients of an award for the LBi New York office!

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Are We Friends on MySpace?

Posted by Johnson L April 2nd, 2010

A few years ago I attended a breakfast hosted by Myspace. Called “Never Ending Friending,” the whole event aimed to emphasize the importance of word-of-mouth marketing, and the viral nature of advertising on social networks. After it was over I realized that I didn’t really learn that much, and that it was another session self-aggrandizement – PLUS the requisite sizzle reel!  Despite my distaste for these types of meetings, I’ll be the first to admit that MySpace had a right to talk – it was a sizable multiple bigger than any other social networking in existence, including a relatively nascent Facebook.

Flash forward a few years later, and it’s pretty obvious that the marketplace has changed. While MySpace used to be included on nearly every media strategy that was created, some clients now request that the site be avoided entirely – money is going to Facebook instead.  While a sponsored MySpace page used to be the crown jewel of a media program a few years ago, it’s now difficult to convince some clients to include MySpace on campaigns at all.  In response to Facebook’s dominance, Myspace has been spending time (and a lot of dollars) rebranding themselves as the ultimate entertainment portal, where social networking is taking more of a backseat to content. While this decision may make sense on paper, a lot of people in the industry see this as a bit of a cop out to MySpace’s fundamental philosophy of “Never Ending Friending.”

This isn’t to say that MySpace’s plan to make themselves an entertainment portal isn’t working, at least for the users.  A recent study released by Chitika (an ad network) showed that out of the major social networking sites, MySpace dominates in the sheer volume of outgoing links that are entertainment related (Facebook is a bit more balanced, while Twitter is all about breaking news).  Users are responding to the content that is getting featured on MySpace nowadays, and advertisers shouldn’t be so quick to count MySpace out just yet. 

To quote some clients, a few of us are left wondering, “Does MySpace matter anymore?”  At this point the answer is a mixed bag, depending on how you look at it – MySpace still has a long road ahead of them if they want to gain back the confidence of bygone advertisers.  The 30% layoff of their workforce that happened last summer didn’t bolster confidence, and the continual decline in users and time spent on the site doesn’t exactly help. 

With all the bad news it’s easy to forget that the site still has over 40 million users in the US alone, and the targeting that they offer is a lot better than what advertisers would be able to get on most other sites.  It’s a safe assumption that MySpace isn’t going anywhere anytime soon – even if the “Friending” aspect becomes a husk of what it used to be.

Tags: entertainment, Facebook, Johnson L, myspace, Social Media, social networking

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Can Apps be used to Drive Sales?

Posted by Lisa B March 15th, 2010

by Johnson Lee

Electronic Arts recently released some information on the performance of a Facebook app they had developed for Dante’s Inferno, a PS3/XBox 360 game. The game had been getting a lot of buzz after footage was shown at E3 last year – it’s loosely based on the classic that most of us had to read in college (though humanities was the bane of my existence), with large amounts of creative licensing (along with blood and gore) thrown into the mix. The game was met with okay reviews by the major gaming sites (6.5 from GameSpot, 7.5 from IGN), but seemed to do well enough in the sales department to probably warrant sequels. Though the literary followups to Dante’s Inferno are not exactly great pieces of source material for hack-and-slash action games, I’m sure EA will think of something – capitalism fuels creativity!

Based on EA’s data, the Dante’s Inferno Facebook app had a 2% sales conversion rate (out of every 100 users that installed the app, two then pre-ordered the game). The results are interesting since apps and widgets are usually considered to be branding and engagements tools, rather than a way to directly drive sales. EA also surveyed some users and found that 52% of the respondents actually said that they first learned about the game through the app. Though at first this might sound crazy due to the high volume of advertising that EA put behind the game (they even did a Superbowl spot!), surveys don’t lie – at the end of the day this probably speaks to the effectiveness that this tool had to spread virally on Facebook. EA also bought ads on Facebook that drove users to the app, so that might have been another way that people first learned about the game (the data released wasn’t that specific).

Though the app was a great success story for EA, the same wouldn’t necessarily be the case for all initiatives. The brand, the buzz around the product, and the online/offline advertising support that EA threw behind the launch all contribute to this particular success (not to mention that the app is a rip-off of Mafia Wars, which has a ginormous following already). Users actually had a reason to install and engage with this app because it offered large amounts of gameplay depth and interaction – on the other hand, an app or a widget that only has one or two pieces of video and nothing beyond that is kind of useless from an engagement standpoint. Based upon our past experience, the biggest hurdle for widgets and apps is that of adoption rates – users don’t pick up these things just because they’re there. Consequently, these tools shouldn’t be proposed just for the sake of creating an app or widget – a strong concept should be in place, along with the client’s willingness to provide media support. Apps and widgets that are developed but have no media support are pretty much just epik phayle [definition] – a really cool app is not going to do anything if nobody knows about it.

EA’s results do show that apps can be possibly utilized as effective sale-generating vehicles. Though apps shouldn’t be proposed with sales as the primary success metric anytime soon, it’s always nice to look at this kind of conversion data since it might result in a nice surprise. For the right client with the right kind of app, sales conversions may be a success metric to highlight in the future.

Tags: apps, Dante's Inferno, Electronic Arts, Facebook, Johnson L, PS3, XBox 360

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Fun with targeting

Posted by Nicole W March 6th, 2010

Target! Target! Target!

Google finally did it! For what feels like the first time since Search Engine Marketing emerged (many moons ago), Google has actually piqued my interest by providing TV and Film advertising clients with a truly “new” product…Nielsen Viewership Targeting.

Up until now, Google’s “new” advertising solutions often seemed like an aged product wrapped up in a shiny, new package. One example was the “ad widgets” which debuted a couple years ago. They were essentially Google’s answer to rich media. Yet by that time, we were seasoned pros when it came to planning and executing rich media ads. Similarly, Google’s recent ability to implement third party ad serving tags or behavioral targeting (which Google calls “user interest” targeting) simply generated one big ‘ol yawn.  These advertising technologies are so Web 1.0.

BUT now, in partnership with Nielsen, Google has introduced a truly interesting offering—Nielsen Viewership Targeting allows Google to cross reference offline TV viewing and movie going behaviors against sites within the Google Content Network. The panel was built specifically for the Media & Entertainment sales team at Google to bring more powerful solutions to their client base.

What we know is that their Nielsen Viewership Targeting theoretically messages to users across sites based on a fusion of the user’s offline and online media consumption. But how does this actually work? In short, Nielsen created for Google a single-respondent database that combines data from three very significant media panels:

1. Nielsen NetView online panel: its recruited panel which monitors all online behaviors such as site visitation and search behavior
2. Nielsen People Meter panel: TV set-top box data from which Nielsen derives TV ratings and viewing habits
3. Nielsen Moviegoer panel: Survey conducted quarterly that measures the panels’ movie-going habits, movie preferences, and other home entertainment-related behaviors.

Respondents from one survey are paired with respondents from another survey–The matching uses the common characteristics of the two which are usually demographic (household and persons characteristics), geographic, media-based and any other relevant information. And according to Nielsen, the theory supporting such “data fusion” is that the common characteristics can reliably predict the behavior of consumers.

And VOILA! By fusing these offline and online media panels, we can actually target users online who likely tuned in to, let’s say, American Idol on Fox, Gossip Girl on the CW, and Mean Girls during its TBS re-airing… Now that’s some offline viewing habits I can relate to (guilty pleasures abound) and so can many of our Entertainment clients.

Thankfully, this online targeting technology is anonymous so feel free to judge my cookies, but please don’t judge me….

You may be wondering, is this only relevant to the entertainment category? Don’t fret; Nielsen has been creating data fusion sets since 2006 and in addition to the TV/Internet and Moviegoer panels, Nielsen also fuses data with CPG verticals, Ailment panels and MRI data. According to Nielsen, the main reason for using data fusion is it requires no additional primary research.  The data fits into existing systems relatively easily; it is an accurate method of targeting in the absence of single source data; and it improves planning efficiency.

Happy targeting!

Tags: SEM, targeting

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