... an important part of the media landscape, especially as mobile-friendly "native ad formats" fuel growth in the market.

Here's an overview of some major players in the mobile advertising ecosystem:

• The lure of social media advertising is massive: As brands look across a fractured media landscape, social networks offer them an interesting proposition. Social networks have scale - enormous user bases and deep databases. They have high engagement - Americans were spending an average of 12 hours per month on social networks as of July 2012, with 18-24 year olds averaging 20 hours. And potentially, social media offers brands a uniquely captive audience for their content.
   
• Guaranteed placement is getting advertisers to pay up: Brands are paying to get their content or copy in front of a quantifiable audience, an increasingly rare feat in an era of scattered consumer attention. This desire for guaranteed attention also helps to explain social media's move away from traditional display ads — like Facebook's right-rail ads — and toward so-called "native ads" that surface in a user's stream, either as a Tweet or a Facebook post. A consensus seems to be forming around in-stream advertising as the most promising social advertising format.
  
• Social media advertising is set to explode: it is a young market and, so far, it represents only 1% to 10% of ad budgets for a wide majority of advertisers. There's significant opportunity for that share to grow. BIA/Kelsey recently published a study that offers one view - forecasting $11 billion of social ad spend in 2017, up from $4.7 billion last year. That estimate is large - but still seems pessimistic, because ...
   
• Increased mobile usage will be a huge driver of advertising growth: The BIA/Kelsey prediction calls for mobile to account for only $2.2 billion of that in 2017 - a 20% market share. This could easily be surpassed. Both Twitter and Facebook have passed the 50% mobile usage mark and, given the continued growth of mobile devices, it will only rise. Mobile accounted for 11% of Facebook's ad revenue last year even though it didn't release mobile ads until the tail end of the second quarter. By the fourth quarter, it was up to 23%. And now, Twitter is reporting that its mobile ad revenue regularly outpaces its desktop ad revenue. Social media advertising is therefore uniquely positioned to grab an increasing share of the fast growing mobile advertising market. 

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Factual data only is sourced from the original attributed article. The data is then enhanced by additional research and comment.

... Condé Nast, The Wall Street Journal and Univision presented ambitious slates of original programming to advertisers for the first time. 

Additionally, companies like Yahoo and Hulu, that already produce web content, announced greatly expanded offerings.

As a result, US viewers are being bombarded with an array of new internet programs — eleven from Yahoo, fourteen from AOL and a whopping thirty from Condé Nast, including one that will let viewers watch a Vogue editor, Hamish Bowles, as he shops around the world.

Advertisers and agencies, however, are less than enthused at the trend - expressing concern that audiences for individual shows will become even more fragmented and microscopic than they already are.

Says Group M's chief investment officer Rino Scanzoni of the new video offerings: “I don’t care how good your attention span is, I think it becomes all a blur.”

Karen Cahn, general manager of AOL’s online video arm, says the company monitors viewers' comments closely to see if they are uncomfortable with the video brand placements. “So far, so good,” she claims.

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... strong demand in China to offset weak sales in Europe.

According to Trolin, teledining has become popular with people who don't want to lose time traveling between megacities to eat with friends or business colleagues.

Teledining enables one group eating at a restaurant in one city to connect with friends in a different city via teleconferencing.

Another trend, currently peculiat to China, is young people's preference for voice messages rather than texting or e-mailing.

Says Trolin: "A voice message is more lively than a text and can be listened to at the recipient's convenience, while a call could come at an inappropriate moment. He himself has become accustomed to using his phone primarily to send and receive voice messages.

He declined to say what BMW will do to tap into these trends, but history shows that the automaker is willing to cater to Chinese tastes. 

An example of which is the preference of Chinese customers for long-wheelbase versions of mid-sized and compact sedans.

"Not because they are chauffeur driven but to offer more legroom to their friends and family members as a sign of high respect," explains Gerhard Steinie, director of the Shanghai studio of BMW Group's DesignWorks subsidiary.

Read the original unabridged AdAge.com article. 

Factual data only is sourced from the original attributed article. The data is then enhanced by additional research and comment.

... a product of the imagination.

But with $3.25 million in initial financing from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, change is afoot.

Mr Kaplan will join the Lear Center's director of research, Johanna Blakley, as a principal “investigator” for the new enterprise.

Kaplan spoke last week about the futility of counting page-views, “likes,” and retweets when trying to figure out whether an opinion piece, a documentary film or a television show actually moved anyone.

“Those measure how many people saw something,” he said. “That’s not the same as an outcome.”

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... “fifty percent of all ad impressions are never seen.”

Bander, who recently won the Advertising Research Foundation’s Great Mind Award for helping to develop the innovative media tracking technology, cites the aphorism coined by William Lever, the founder of Unilever: "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble is, I don't know which half."

“Now,” says Bander, “we know which half.”

Utilizing the webcams built into consumers' own computers and handheld devices, Bander says Sticky has already tracked ads actually seen, or not, among 350,000 consumers.

That figure approximates to 700,000 eyeballs, creating a new form of media currency that some of the biggest advertisers in the world - among them Procter & Gamble - have already begun to use.

Madison Avenue is pushing the online industry to adopt a new standard of “viewability” for advertising exposure, meaning an ad has to be viewable on a consumer’s screen -- not “below-the-fold” -- for at least one second to be credited as an ad exposure. Fifty percent of impressions are never seen.

“Viewability is nice, but viewability just means that an ad is within the viewable area of a screen,” notes Bander, adding: “It doesn’t mean a consumer is actually looking at your ad.”
 

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... convenient, efficacious or suifficiently high-quality to command a premium price.  

Opines Maureen Morrison, writing in today's Advertising Age: "Brands can no longer bide their time, fending off store's own-brand options while waiting and hoping for consumers' wallets to fatten.

"About 40% of the US population is still downtrodden, concerned or otherwise worried about their financial futures, according to IRI [Information Resources Inc] research.

"In addition to convincing consumers, brands may need to perform an even tougher trick: redefining their own definition of value to one that's additive.

"When not reduced to the question of price, value speaks directly to what benefits a product or service adds to a customer's life. Some smart brands get this and are using packaging, design, sourcing strategies and technologies to entice consumers to get them to open their wallet a bit more, even in these tough times."

Conversely, however, the classic example of a recessionary innovation that gets consumers to pay more, not less, is P&G's Tide Pods.

The repackaging of its detergent into one-pack-per-load pellets is a clear boon to the consumer because it eliminates messy measuring.

Research consducted by IRI concluded that P&G's Tide Pods been a breakout hit that rocketed to $500m in stateside sales in about one year.

Better yet, from P&G's viewpoint, the bundle of individual laundry detergent packages comes at a significant premium to liquid Tide - $18.99 for a 66-load container of Pods on Walgreens.com.

Read the original unabridged AdAge article.

Factual data only is sourced from the original attributed article. The data is then enhanced by additional research and comment.

... "the gap between you and the internet totally disappears".

"The computer is responsive in a manner that I've never experienced before. You can play multiple 4k YouTube videos without buffering. You can download files as large as one gigabyte during a TV commercial break. You just get more done."

So why is Google investing megabucks on Fiber? 

Says Walk: "When you play with it, the gap between you and internet totally disappears. The computer is responsive in a manner that I've never experienced before.

What's in it for Google? According to Mr Walk, Fiber will:

• Reset consumer expectations of what a connected home should feel like.
   
• Continue to drive down the cost of deployment and sign up customers for a very sticky (high LTV) service by being first to market.
   
• If existing ISPs follow - or even beat Google in some markets - Google still wins. Why? Because as I found out personally, when the internet is this fast you do one more search per session, watch one more video per session, send one more email per session.
   
• A connected population benefits Google. Period.

Read the original unabridged Business Insider article.

Factual data only is sourced from the original attributed article. The data is then enhanced by additional research and comment.

... although the report relates solely to the USA, the halcyon days of near-exponential growth for social media elsewhere in the western world are trending sharply downward.

The Experian data indicates that, proportionate to other online activities, the time US consumers spend on social media sites is actually in decline.

However the report qualifies that apparent decline: "Blindly chasing fans or followers has rightly lost credence as brands realise that social sharing and referring has the biggest impact. As a result, simpler and more effective tools to measure social sharing will allow brands to refocus on creating meaningful social media campaigns."

By contrast, time spent shopping online grew year-on-year. In fact, US consumers spent 9% of their web time shopping in 2012. After analyzing US browsing data for mobile devices, email accounted for the largest time spent on average.

Overall, email made up 23% of time spent on mobile devices during the first quarter of the year, while social networking accounted for 15% of consumers’ mobile time.

Consumption of news content also increased among US consumers who devoted 4% of their online time to news.

Although the data refers solely to the US market - the western world's largest - the report's implications are equally valid within the UK and European Union.

All pales into relative insignificance, however, alongside the Chinese  social media market vis a recent report from Forbes.com.

Read the original unabridged MediaPost article.

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... one-third of stores already have a registered dietician at retail level, while 86% employ them on a corporate basis.

The trend is another sign that consumers are demanding more from their food providers as the Obama administration's health-care system puts a premium on preventive care. Moreover, it represents an increasingly powerful constituency for the nation's food marketers to win over.

While dieticians' primary mission is to assist shoppers, they are also a major brand asset for stores, many appearing on local radio and TV shows.

The publicity serves as a boost for supermarkets as they look to stay relevant in the face of increased competition from major drugstore chains such as Walgreens and CVS which have increased their food offerings.

Says food-industry analyst Phil Lempert who runs supermarketguru.com: "Supermarkets have lost 15% share over the past ten years, so they need to stave off and differentiate their offerings from drug, dollar and warehouse stores."

Today there are 500 - 600 retail dieticians, a numbert Lempert predicts will at least double within two years. The demand is so strong that he recently launched the Retail Dieticians Business Alliance to educate dieticians on supermarket operations.

It's a trend European giants such as Tesco, Carrefour and Sainsbury are unlikely to ignore.

Read the original unabridged AdAge.com article.

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... the purchase or rental of video or audio content from an internet provider, such as cable television, video on demand or an IPTV video service like AT&T U-Verse.

OTTC specifically refers to content that arrives from a third party, for example Netflix, Hulu or MyTV, and is delivered to an end user device, leaving the internet service provider responsible solely for transporting IP packets.

Worldwide OTTC video revenue continues its sharp growth - with Netflix, Hulu, Apple, and Amazon driving the business.

According to ABI Research, the OTTC market - valued at $8 billion in 2012 - grew at a near 60% increase over the previous year. Continued rapid growth will push the market past $20 billion by 2015.

Much of this will occur as traditional entertainment content providers become more comfortable with new media distributors/platforms.

Comments ABI senior analyst Michael Inouye: “The shift to digital and OTT distribution is accelerating, particularly as content providers increasingly warm up to these channels.

ABI notes that the three biggest markets - North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific - enjoyed year-on-year growth in excess of 50% in 2012.

Read the original unabridged MediaPost article.

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