Category Archives: e-commerce

Picture This: Marketers Let Emojis Do the Talking

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couple holding hands

An illustration from Taco Bell’s Taco Emoji Engine

From my New York Times article:

The condom brand Durex has used World AIDS Day as a marketing hook for years, but for the most recent edition it tried something different: a condom emoji.

Durex said there was no icon that communicated a desire for safe sex, so it started a campaign to provide one on smartphone keyboards. The consortium that sets standards for characters and emojis has yet to approve it, but the mere fact that Durex started the campaign prompted 210 million mentions on Twitter and, by Durex’s estimates, drew 2.6 billion media impressions worldwide.

Such is the power of emojis. And more companies are taking notice.

“There’s a lot of brand demand for emojis,” said Ross Hoffman, senior director of global brand strategy at Twitter, which recently started offering custom emojis for companies to use in advertising. That is because some 92 percent of the online population now uses emojis, according to a study by Emogi, a start-up that uses them to let people indicate how they feel about particular ads. Swyft Media, which creates alternate phone keyboards featuring multiple emojis, says people send six billion of them a day.

Brands like emojis for several other reasons. For one, they reach ad-averse millennials, sailing past ad-blocking software. They are visual, which makes them a natural fit for popular messaging apps such as Snapchat and Instagram and also appeals to international audiences. And because they are meant to be shared, the brand images are distributed widely, free.

“All of a sudden, the brand is in this very personal conversation between friends and family,” said Evan Wray, the chief executive of Swyft Media.

Now, emojis are everywhere in marketing. …

Read the rest.

Webrooming: How Mobile Ads Are Driving Shoppers To Stores

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2015FamousFootwear_Holiday_Interior

Famous Footwear stores highlight highly searched products.

From my Forbes blog:

Showrooming, the practice of shopping in stores and then buying cheaper online, has long vexed physical retailers that fear they’re losing sales. No doubt they are, but a countervailing trend has been building for awhile now: webrooming, which is shopping online and then buying in the physical store.

That’s potentially a much larger opportunity because the vast majority of purchases still happen in physical stores. The holiday season that just began presents a particular opportunity for retailers that will grow as Christmas approaches and the time to order online before the big day grows short. But the benefits of getting people into stores, not just tapping online buy buttons, is more important regardless of the season, said eMarketer analyst Yoram Wurmser. “People are visiting fewer stores, so they buy more with each visit,” he said.

If getting people into stores to shop is an opportunity for retailers, it’s nothing less than a mandate for companies making coin from online ads. In particular, mobile ads, revenues from which are expected to surpass those of ads shown on desktop computers this year, are key as people increasingly use their phones to find products when and where they want–meaning here and now. “Smartphones have completely changed how we do holiday shopping,” Jason Spero, Google’s vice president of performance media, explained in an interview. “It’s now quick bites and micro-moments.”

No company stands to benefit more from proving its mobile ads work–or to suffer as much if it can’t–than Google, the world’s largest seller of ads. …

Read the rest of the story.

13 Questions For 2013 In The World Of Online Advertising

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questionsCross-posted at my Forbes.com blog The New Persuaders:

For the past few years, I’ve offered predictions here and on The New Persuaders for what’s likely to come in the next year. This year, I’m going to shake it up and throw out a few questions instead. I think I know the answers to some of them, but if many won’t be answered definitively by year-end, they remain top of mind for me and probably for many others in online media and advertising.

So in this, the first full week of the new year, here are some questions to which I hope to start finding answers:

* Will image advertising finally take off online? I have to believe that as people spend more and more time online instead of reading print publications and watching TV, brand marketers will want and need to reach them there with ads that are aimed at creating consideration for later purchases, not just eliciting an immediate sale like Google’s search ads and too many banner ads. We’re already starting to see signs of such advertising with the early success of Facebook’s Sponsored Stories, Twitter’s Promoted Tweets, and YouTube’s TrueView ads–not to mention the explosion of tablets, which provide a lean-back experience more compatible with image advertising. This won’t be a sudden change, since brand marketers and agencies don’t move quickly, but you can’t tell me there aren’t going to be increasingly compelling ways for brands to influence people online.

* Can advertisers and publishers make ads more personal without scaring people? That’s the $64 billion question, and it likely won’t get answered in full this year. It’s easy for headline-hungry politicians to make a big deal out of Facebook’s latest privacy gaffe or the Wall Street Journal’s or the New York Times’ latest scare story about an ad that followed somebody all over the Web. That’s especially so since Facebook really does push the privacy envelope too far at times, and too many advertisers idiotically chase one more sales conversion at the cost of scaring off hundreds of others or inviting onerous legislation. But making ads more useful to each individual person is not only crucial to online commerce, it’s potentially better for most consumers as well–seriously, I don’t need to see another ad for a fitness center or a new credit card, but that ad for Camper van Beethoven’s new CD had me in a split-second. The answer lies in these two words, everyone: transparency and choice.

* Will mobile advertising work? Well, some of it already does, to hear Google and Facebook tell it. And while those already devalued digital dimes so far turn to pennies when it comes to ads on smartphones and tablets, this still feels more like growing pains than a crisis in online advertising. Sure, the screens are small and people don’t like to be interrupted in their mobile cocoons. So a different kind of advertising is probably needed–clearly, banners don’t cut it on a four-inch screen. But the value to advertisers of knowing your location and maybe the apps you’re using, coupled with knowledge of what your friends like–all with permission, of course–is huge. That permission may be really tough to earn. But if advertisers can offer tangible value, perhaps in the form of useful services related to what you’re doing or looking for or shopping for–and isn’t that the ultimate native ad?–people may loosen their hold on that information.

I have a lot more questions, but I’ve got to stop before too much of 2013 is gone.

Check out more questions at the full post.

Sorry, Retailers–Cyber Monday’s Days Are Numbered

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Two cliches in one ad!

From my Forbes.com blog The New Persuaders:

Not long after Cyber Monday was invented in 2005 as an online alternative to Black Friday, I called it a “marketing myth” because it was actually not even close to a top holiday shopping day.

Then a funny thing happened–Cyber Monday, created by the National Retail Foundation’s Shop.org online unit, became a self-fulfilling prophecy as retailers jumped on the term and began offering special sales that day after the Thanksgiving holiday. By the following year, it had turned into a real phenomenon, at least for many retailers, and last year it became the heaviest shopping day ever to date. It might even happen again this year.

But now, even as many retailers have made Cyber Monday sales a stock part of their holiday strategy, I’m betting its days are numbered. Why?

* Early sales. Smart retailers noticed that before Cyber Monday, at least (and perhaps still), the period leading up to the big day actually were even more active shopping days. And in their never-ending attempt to get a step ahead of rivals, many retailers ran not just pre-Cyber Monday sales, but pre-Black Friday sales as early as the evening before Thanksgiving. Apparently they worked. They almost certainly will cannibalize Cyber Monday sales. …

Read the complete post at The New Persuaders.

Facebook’s New Gift Service: Nice, But Not Yet An E-Commerce Game Changer

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From my Forbes.com blog The New Persuaders:

Just in time for prime gift-giving holidays like Friday’s World Rabies Day (or if you prefer, Ask A Stupid Question Day), Facebook today launched a social gift service. It’s rolling out to only a select few for now.

I must be one of them, because I was able to send something to my wife to try it out. But in its current form, I doubt I’m going to use it much.

This isn’t the 2.0 version of the Facebook Gifts virtual-gift service that the company shut down two years ago, by the way. In fact, the new Gifts is built upon, and run by, the folks at Karma, the gift-giving service Facebook acquired in May.

It actually looks pretty good. And while I have ordered precisely one gift that obviously has not yet been delivered, so I can’t judge the entire gift-giving process, it worked quite smoothly. I clicked on my wife’s Timeline, clicked the gift button, and off I went to order her some caramels. She can even pick her own flavor–that’s pretty cool.

In this case, I obviously know her address, so one advantage of Facebook Gifts–not having to know or ask for someone’s address–is moot in my case. What’s more, I didn’t get an automatic reminder I might get if it were her birthday, so that bit of friction elimination wasn’t a factor for me either. But it’s fast and easy to send gifts to friends, and that’s great–not just for consumers, but for Facebook, which can use a service that brings in revenues not dependent upon its brand of advertising that many large marketers are still doubtful about.

So what isn’t great, at least for me?

* A lot of the most prominent gifts are pretty vanilla–teddy bears, spa appointments, flowers, cupcakes. Maybe they’re fine products. Maybe they’re the sort of thing most people give their friends. But for a service with a tagline “real friends, real gifts,” too many of these products seem just too impersonal. Products, especially gifts, are not necessarily fungible, and all the less so for close friends for whom you’re supposed to be getting something special. And if they’re not close friends–and let’s be honest, most people don’t have several hundred close friends–I probably won’t be sending them many gifts, from Facebook or anywhere else. …

Read the complete post at The New Persuaders.

Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg: “Now Is When We’re Going Big” in Ads

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When Sheryl Sandberg left Google to join Facebook as chief operating officer three years ago, many people thought the pairing with CEO Mark Zuckerberg was doomed. Sandberg, a then-38-year-old former chief of staff for Clinton Treasury Secretary Larry Summers before building Google’s ad operation to 4,000 people, was as gregarious and polished as 23-year-old Zuckerberg was awkward and nerdy.

But it wasn’t long before Sandberg became Zuckerberg’s most valuable friend, thanks to her Madison Avenue connections and her ability to articulate a vision of advertising for them. In an interview for my article on Facebook’s ad strategy, Sandberg expanded on that vision, outlining the company’s unique advertising opportunity in social ads driven by what she calls word-of-mouth marketing at scale. Here’s an edited version of that interview:

Q: You’ve said Facebook’s sweet spot is the top of the marketing funnel–that is, ads that create awareness and consideration of a brand, rather than direct marketing. Is that turning out to be true?

A: It’s demand generation. We’re not really demand fulfillment, when you’ve already figured it out what you’re going to buy–that’s search. We’re demand generation, before you know you want something, before you know you’re interested in something.

Continue reading →

You Are the Ad: Digging Into Facebook’s Advertising Strategy

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When I first  started looking closely at Facebook’s booming advertising business for an article that just appeared in MIT’s Technology Review, I was soon struck by an apparent disconnect. The social networking juggernaut clearly is gunning for big brand advertisers, hoping they will view its 600 million-plus audience as the next big ad opportunity beyond television.

Yet it appears that most of the ads on Facebook are actually from either small businesses or no-longer-small businesses (but not traditional brands) such as social games maker Zynga and daily deal service Groupon. What’s more, those ads seem more aimed at eliciting a direct response such as an email registration or a purchase on another Web site than they are aimed at branding, which is intended to implant a brand into consumers’ minds that might get triggered later when they’re ready to buy something. And between Google’s search ads and a gazillion display ad networks, online direct-response advertising is already a wee bit crowded–even if Facebook’s massive database of personal info holds a lot of appeal for targeting likely prospects.

In other words, it looks like most advertisers on Facebook aren’t yet using its ad platform for the very purpose it’s designed for: branding. Of course, it’s tough to complain about a company whose ad revenues are doubling, to an estimated $4 billion this year. But if Facebook is to fulfill the huge expectations of its investors, who are valuing Facebook at around $65 billion (give or take $10 billion or $15 billion depending on who’s counting), it needs to do more than provide just another way to drive a direct sale. It needs to capture–or create–a market out of the vast majority of ad spending overall that’s aimed at branding.

One way to do that is providing what Facebook has been doggedly pitching to Madison Avenue for years: ads with a social component, such as its recently introduced Sponsored Stories, in which people’s stated “likes” for a product or brand are turned into ads. These essentially are word-of-mouth marketing on steroids. David Fischer, Facebook’s vice president of advertising and global operations, lays out this possibility in detail in an interview I’ll post here shortly. Suffice to say, there’s certainly potential for brands to divert a significant portion of their television and print ad budgets–and a few are starting–but for a lot of brands and their agencies, that’s still on the come. For now, they seem more enamored of Facebook marketing tools such as Likes and Pages–which are free.

Another strategy is to create a new advertising market, as Google did with its search advertising. Search ads enabled very small businesses, as well as those with just an online presence, to place effective direct-response ads for a global audience for the first time. Likewise, Facebook could open up brand advertising to the business masses in a way no medium has yet done. That’s something Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg makes a good case for in my interview with her. Depending on how you define branding vs. direct-response, this may already constitute a good bit of Facebook’s advertising.

Either way, I came away understanding why investors seem so enamored of the company’s potential–but also why many people in the advertising business aren’t yet ready to place all their chips on Facebook.