Marketers Struggle With Social Media

Marketers are struggling to fully integrate social into their overarching marketing strategies, according to a new report from the Chief Marketing Officer Council.

Marketers are investing in social media. People are logging in and “liking” their favorite brands. But this is where the synergies begin to weaken, according to the CMO Council in “The Variance in the Social Brand Experience.”

Read more: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/164017/marketers-struggle-with-social-media.html

Yield Optimization of Display Advertising with Ad Exchange

In light of the growing market of Ad Exchanges for the real-time sale of advertising slots, publishers face new challenges in choosing between the allocation of contract-based reservation ads and spot market ads. In this setting, the publisher should take into account the tradeoff between short-term revenue from an Ad Exchange and quality of allocating reservation ads. In this paper, we formalize this combined optimization problem as a stochastic control problem and derive an efficient policy for online ad allocation in settings with general joint distribution over placement quality and exchange bids. We prove asymptotic optimality of this policy in terms of any trade-off between quality of delivered reservation ads and revenue from the exchange, and provide a rigorous bound for its convergence rate to the optimal policy. We also give experimental results on data derived from real publisher inventory, showing that our policy can achieve any pareto-optimal point on the quality vs. revenue curve. Finally, we study a parametric training-based algorithm in which instead of learning the dual variables from a sample data (as is done in non-parametric training-based algorithms), we learn the parameters of the distribution and construct those dual variables from the learned parameter values. We compare parametric and non-parametric ways to estimate from data both analytically and experimentally in the special case without the ad exchange, and show that though both methods converge to the optimal policy as the sample size grows, our parametric method converges faster, and thus performs better on smaller samples.

http://arxiv.org/abs/1102.2551

Google Gets AdMeld, Focus On Display Ads Via Publishers

Google received approval from the U.S. Department of Justice Friday to close the $400 million acquisition for AdMeld, which helps publishers sell display ad inventory at the best price. The deal also strengthens Google’s position to move beyond search and focus on display advertising through strong publisher relationships and what is now known as private ad exchanges.

http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/163427/google-gets-admeld-focus-on-display-ads-via-publi.html

Metacafe Promises Not To Use Flash Cookies For Tracking

Web video company Metacafe has settled a class-action privacy lawsuit by agreeing that it won’t use Flash cookies to recreate users’ deleted HTTP cookies. The company also promised to stop transmitting data about users’ video-viewing history to Scorecard Research.

http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/162977/metacafe-promises-not-to-use-flash-cookies-for-tra.html

The New Internet – It’s About Engagement.

The next big shift is now, and it’s not what you think: Facebook is the new Windows; Google must be sacrificed.

At TEDxSantaCruz, tech investor Roger McNamee presents 6 bold ways to prepare for the next internet.

What do you think?

New Internet

http://www.ted.com/talks/roger_mcnamee_six_ways_to_save_the_internet.html

Anatomy Of A Perfect Landing Page

During the Grind Mastermind East Ryan and I went into great detail about how to generating a ton of leads from Facebook and Cost Per View traffic in the bizopp and dating niches. I know our members were surprised when they saw some of our top landing pages we revealed but it is one important piece of information we gave about the way people “don’t” like being advertised to as well as the color combinations that trigger differ emotions that was the most critical component into generating leads very easily and having those people in turn promote your offers on a viral level (eg..recommending to friends).

FullStory On IMGRind.com

Clicks Don’t Generate Sales – Really?

In case there was any confusion, Nielsen reiterated this week that it has found virtually no relationship between clicks and brand metrics, or offline sales.

Hammering home the point, it just released a case study on a campaign for an unnamed household product, which attempted to demonstrate the disconnect between marketers’ short- and long-term campaign goals.

My comments on this: The take away message in my mind is that solid direct response campaigns are they way to go for brands. Drive your consumers to something they care about, not just your product.  Tie your product to what is important to a customer, give them a measurable call to action (coupons, free samples, etc), and watch your online campaigns ROI soar.

http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/162009/disconnect-nielsen-finds-no-relationship-between.html