Tag Archives: Marketing and Advertising

December 6, 2012 · 10:18 am

Time Spent Apping

A piece came out in TechCrunch yesterday concerning the increased time people are spending in mobile apps.

Kicking Television

(Photo credit: dhammza)

According to their analysis time spent with mobile apps (127 minutes a day) has surpassed time spent on the web via a desktop (70 minutes) and is gaining on TV usage (168 minutes).  It’s an interesting comparison and the piece goes on to say the usual things about how mobile may be the future but it’s still an unknown business model for marketers and investors (except for the carriers – that business model seems to be pretty well-defined and pretty damn good!).

I have a few thoughts I’d like to share.  First, while the piece implies that TV is somehow threatened by this, the fact that TV use has not declined should demonstrate that it’s not going anywhere.  In fact, according to the data presented in the piece, TV usage has increased over the last two years.  What’s not clear from the piece is what is being consumed on the TV.  Does watching streaming video via Netflix on my TV count as TV?  I’m assuming this does include time-shifted TV which may or may not include watching the commercials that are a piece of commercial TV’s business model.

Second, as someone who rode a train two hours each day for many years, I can tell you that there is an awful lot of downtime.  For the last few of those years when I had a smartphone, I began to use some of my commuting time to do some of the things cited in the study – social networking, catch up on news, etc.  No streaming video then but I’m sure I’d be watching it now.  All of those minutes are incremental involvement with content (and the marketing that supports the content) I otherwise might have foregone.  It’s pretty easy to spend a few minutes of downtime at lunch on your mobile device.  I don’t see these numbers as negatives.

Finally, the piece does ask the right question which is how companies can capitalize on all of this mobile activity.  There is too little information  it’s too hard to scale, and the marketing model within apps is still not impactful.  The app world is way more fragmented than is the TV world or the worlds of other “mass” media.  Then again, the app world is only five years old (dating it to when the first iPhone came out).  The commercial web is still searching for a business model in many ways and it’s going on twenty.

It will be interesting to see how it all plays out.  What do you think?

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December 3, 2012 · 11:22 am

Caveat Venditor

We’ve all heard the Latin term “caveat emptor” – buyer beware. It’s a phrase used in commerce to indicate (at least in my non-legally trained mind) that the buyer needs to make sure of their purchase because they may not have any recourse to fix any issues later. This holds true unless the seller went out of their way to hide defects. Today, however, I want to flip that notion on its head and explain why sellers need to beware.

I read a report this morning from the folks at Pitney Bowes Software about the use by brands of social media.  While I’m not really surprised by the data I am kind of disappointed.  The poll of consumers found “that marketers need to be careful to make sure they are not overcommitting to social channels, and, moreover, that their actions on social media are aligned with consumer preferences.”  As eMarketer reported:

Adding to the need for marketers to approach social marketing somewhat cautiously, consumers have displayed time and again an indifference to—or at worst, annoyance at—marketing messages pushed at them on social media, instead preferring to use such platforms to engage in more conversational interactions. And it should come as no surprise that consumers were predisposed to marketing messages from brands and companies that they had already chosen to “follow” or “like.”

The annoyance rate of consumers who saw ads from brands they followed was 11%, but jumped to 24% for those confronted with social media marketing messages from brands they didn’t follow, showing that tolerance for unsolicited messages was noticeably lower.

The alarming thing is that another survey showed 57% of those who had seen a sponsored story on Facebook thought it appeared as content in a misleading way, while 45% thought the same about Promoted Tweets.  This sort of activity has a residual effect on consumers.  They don’t like being mislead and retain negative feelings about the brand that sent out the commercial message under the guise of a social interaction.

Every few days it seems I have a conversation with a marketer who wants to use a social channel as yet another megaphone the way we used to use older media.  The paradigm shift doesn’t seem to have happened yet in many marketers’ minds.  As the research shows, consumers know the difference and aren’t appreciative when brands misuse a social channel.  Sellers need to beware – the long-term effects will be a problem.

Make sense?  So what are you going to do about it?

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November 29, 2012 · 11:32 am

Until Someone Pokes Their Eye Out

With the holidays almost upon us, it’s getting to be the time when we all watch “A Christmas Story” for the umpteenth time.

A Christmas Story

A Christmas Story (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As a parent, one line that always sticks out is the “you’ll shoot your eye out” phrase since it echoes something I used to hear as a kid. That was more like “it’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye” but the meaning is similar.

There’s a business reason why I’m raising this as well. Many businesses routinely assign inexperienced staff to support their digital efforts. This happens particularly in the social space, where it’s easy to get caught up in the meme of the day. What’s a meme?  You know them – everything from LOLcats to “Mckayla Is Not Impressed” to “Binders Full Of Women.”  Some are short-lived, some endure.  Maybe it’s not that sort of activity but just someone trying to be proactive – there’s interest in something the company is doing, let’s foster it.  In either case, an employee trying to have the business engage with fans can do a great deal of damage, and it’s not just to a business’s reputation.

For example – let’s say your social admin decides to challenge your fans to a contest of some sort.  There are no written rules and one of the losers objects.  Lawsuit waiting to happen.  Let’s say another admin posts an image and encourages fans to do their own version.  Who vetted the theme (was it copyrighted someplace)?  Who approved the materials (do we have a license for the image as well as for any actors/others who are in the image)?  Or maybe you decided to use one of  the Cheezburger Network’s LOLcats sites to create a meme with an eye towards starting something viral. Did anyone make sure the materials you are using are free for commercial use or have been licensed for your specific purpose?

Any time we charge someone with speaking for our brand or our company we should hear the Mom in A Christmas Story.  You really can shoot out a lot more than your eye if you don’t understand the business and legal ramifications that are well beyond understanding the technology.  That’s when it stops being fun and games.  Any thoughts?

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