Digital Media Planning - Insights & Opinions

Below is a really interesting article on digital media planning, with 10 slideshows providing insights and opinions on how to successfully plan digital media.

10 presentations to help you become a digital planning genius

Re-post of the article posted18 April by Jake Hird (original article here)

What makes a good online media planner?

Planning an online PR campaign doesn’t necessarily require the same skills as a paid search one, or developing a social media strategy may not need the same proficiencies as that of an email one.

However, I’m beginning to think that lateralisation is of major importance. Without becoming too technical, this is the concept of the functions between the left and right hemispheres of the brain: The left side is associated with analysis and logic, the right with creativity and context.

Using both sides of the brain is a major element to successful digital planning, especially given that there is a growing importance to understand how best to influence and engage users, whilst simultaneously being calculating and analytical.

That’s not to say either/or doesn’t have a place – I’m conscious that both the objectives and channels used have a bearing on this – but from a general perspective, the best of both will likely be more beneficial.

Below, I’ve dug out some thought-provoking presentations which I think help to support my current wobbly line of thinking around this. They’re also great in helping to isolate and understand any planning or strategic activity, from objective through to execution.

I’m sure this might kick off a decent debate, so I’d love to hear your thoughts and comments, if you have any.

Account Planning in Digital Age

What is media planning?

The brief in the post digital age

Why planners and creatives should become best friends

Planning Needs Some Planning

Seven Deadly Sins

AdAge Digital 2010 6 Foundations of Great Digital Creative

The Birth Of A Grand Strategist By Waqar Riaz

The future of advertising, a conversation

Digital Media Planning 2010

Learn, consolidate, grow

Organisations have forever struggled with growing pains and issues associated with rapid change. Changes in structure, culture and responsibilities can lead to difficulties in developing consistency and understanding organisational culture and processes, and can often result in problems with delivering a consistent product or service. To reduce the issues associated with rapid growth, a pragmatic approach that relies heavily on planning is recommended.

Parallels can be drawn with the rise and rise of digital media and the explosion in ways businesses can connect with their customers. A recent article from eMarketer notes that while small businesses are broadening their approach across more multiple digital marketing platforms, there is also an increasing dissatisfaction at the performance of these channels.

"Website, email and search were rated most effective for customer acquisition, but even these had dropped since the prior year."

However eMarketer asserts that this is likely due to the inexperience of using new channels as well as a lack of resource to properly manage them.

The solution then, it seems, it to take a pragmatic approach to these new digital channels, based on thorough planning, a solid basis for decisions and a measured approach to assessing performance.

At Carat, we take this approach when planning digital activities for our clients. Rather than jump headlong into tactics that have no long term direction, we thoroughly assess our clients' customers to understand their behaviour and motivations, understand what success for their business looks like and formulate a solution that addresses their issues and allows us to understand what is successful and what requires further thought.

The result - a consistent approach across channels relevant to the audience, that we know will deliver a solution that matches the business objectives.

While the temptation is rush and embrace every new technology as it emerges, sometimes stepping back and considering the reasons behind it can make for a much better result.

Nokia & Microsoft Partnership

“Today in London, these two companies announced plans for a broad strategic partnership that combines the respective strengths of the companies and builds a new global mobile ecosystem.

The partnership increases their scale, which will result in significant benefits for consumers, developers, mobile operators and businesses around the world.

While the specific details of the deal are being worked out, here’s a quick summary of what they are working towards:

• Nokia will adopt Windows Phone as its primary smartphone strategy, innovating on top of the platform in areas such as imaging, where Nokia is a market leader.

• Nokia will help drive and define the future of Windows Phone. Nokia will contribute its expertise on hardware design, language support, and help bring Windows Phone to a larger range of price points, market segments and geographies.

• Nokia and Microsoft will closely collaborate on development, joint marketing initiatives and a shared development roadmap to align on the future evolution of mobile products.

• Bing will power Nokia’s search services across Nokia devices and services, giving customers access to Bing’s next generation search capabilities. Microsoft adCenter will provide search advertising services on Nokia’s line of devices and services.

• Nokia Maps will be a core part of Microsoft’s mapping services. For example, Maps would be integrated with Microsoft’s Bing search engine and adCenter advertising platform to form a unique local search and advertising experience.”

Read more here

The Rise of Online Adspend

“The boom in online video, social and ‘performance’ marketing contributed to the 10% increase in online advertising spend during the first half of 2010, which saw UK marketers invest £1,968.6 million, lifting the medium to a record market share of 24.3%.
The return to double-digit growth for the internet mirrors the general recovery of the entire advertising industry, with total UK expenditure increasing 6.3% to £8.1 billion between January and June 2010.”

Read more here

New research from Aegis Media & Microsoft Advertising

“The global recession has affected the way consumers are shopping. More than ever they are looking for value and as a consequence, they are making further decisions and spending extra time shopping – with Asians leading the way. This was among the key findings in the Global Retail Index, a new study commissioned by Microsoft Advertising and Aegis Media, and undertaken independently by London-based Essential Research.
The study, arguably the most comprehensive retail research of its kind since the global recession, zeroed in on four key retail sectors – groceries, apparel, home electronics, and fast food. It polled 19,000 shoppers across 17 countries in the USA, Asia, Europe and Latin America.
Additionally, ethnographic studies were conducted in six markets representing these regions.

Most of the respondents (94 – 96%) across all four regions admitted that they were impacted by the recession. The study showed that this has consequently given rise to ‘value seeking’ shopping behavior, with consumers going to great lengths to find better value buys. Rather than taking a traditional approach when purchasing, post-recession value seekers are now looking for additional information from a variety of sources before they buy. And the main source for their research is the Internet.”

Read more here

Twitter Launches Redesign

Twitter has always been about getting a lot in a little. The constraint of 140 characters drives conciseness and lets you quickly discover and share what's happening. Yet, they've learned something since starting Twitter—life doesn't always fit into 140 characters or less.

Today, they are introducing a new, re-engineered Twitter.com that provides an easier, faster, and richer experience.

On the site, you’ll see the familiar timeline, yet underneath each Tweet is a handful of information, deeper context and even embedded media. Simply click on an individual Tweet and a details pane slides out on the right and reveals this content.

You can find out more about the enhancements on this information page. Here are some highlights:

•New design. The site has a cleaner timeline and a rich details pane that instantly adds more impact to individual Tweets while still maintaining the simplicity of the timeline. And, experience infinite scroll -- you no longer have to click “more” to view additional Tweets.

•Media. Now, it’s easy to see embedded photos and videos directly on Twitter, thanks to partnerships with Flickr, Twitgoo, TwitPic, TwitVid, and YouTube.

•Related content. When you click a Tweet, the details pane shows additional information related to the author or subject. Depending on the Tweet’s content, you may see: replies, other Tweets by that user, a map of where a geotagged Tweet was sent from, and more.

•Mini profiles. Click a username to see a mini profile without navigating from the page, which provides quick access to account information, including bio and recent Tweets.

These changes will roll out as a preview over the next several weeks starting with a very small percentage of registered accounts tonight. During the preview, you'll be able to switch back and forth so you have time to grow accustomed to the way things work. Eventually, everyone will have the updated version of Twitter.com.

Read more here

The Smartphone Invasion

“Last quarter it was reported on some pretty stellar growth numbers for Android in the global smartphone marketplace. Back then, Google's OS had a 9.6 percent slice of the pie, but today that's ballooned to a robust 17.2 percent, meaning that in terms of end-user sales over the last three months, Android has nearly matched RIM's BlackBerry sales. That's quite the feat when you consider that a year ago the latter was shifting ten times more units than the former. This extraordinary growth rate has narrowed down Symbian's lead at the top, in spite of Nokia's favorite OS actually shipping on more phones this year, while the big loser of the quarter has to be Windows Mobile, which contracted both in terms of market share and actual shipments.”

Read more here

TVNZ Heartland Exceeds Expectations

"TVNZ Heartland, New Zealand’s newest TV channel and first with 100% Kiwi content, has exceeded expectations with 21 percent of New Zealanders tuning into the channel since launch.

TVNZ launched TVNZ Heartland on the SKY pay TV platform on 1 June and in the past four weeks 834,400 New Zealanders have watched the channel.

Eric Kearley, TVNZ’s Head of Digital Channels and Digital Media, is delighted with the success of TVNZ’s first venture into pay TV.

“TVNZ Heartland is only 10 weeks old and is already drawing in one in five New Zealanders. That’s a fantastic result. It just highlights the fact that New Zealanders love local shows.”

Kearley believes that TVNZ Heartland is a reservoir of New Zealand television gold and something we can all be proud of.

“We’re delighted that we can celebrate the fantastic work of the New Zealand production industry by bringing New Zealanders the TV shows that they’ve grown up with, as well as more recent dramas and factual programming.

“The channel wouldn’t be possible without the support of our sponsors – Toyota, Mitre 10, The National Bank, Foodstuffs and our most recent addition Fonterra. It’s a channel that they can be proud to associate their iconic brands with.”
TVNZ Heartland is TVNZ’s fifth channel and demonstrates the evolution of TVNZ’s strategy of Inspiring New Zealanders on Every Screen.

“Launching a pay TV channel is a key step in our strategy to be New Zealand’s leading multi-platform media company, delivering excellent environments and audiences for advertisers, and quality content for New Zealand viewers.”

The launch of TVNZ Heartland is one of the strongest channel launches in the past five years.

TVNZ Heartland is found on SKY channel 017."

CARAT NEW ZEALAND HAS PARTNERED WITH JB HI-FI

Auckland, 22 July 2010: Carat New Zealand has partnered with audio/visual giant JB Hi-Fi without a formal pitch. Billings for the account are $1.5million.

Carat will handle the offline media buying, with digital being added to Carat’s responsibility at a future date.

Ryf Quail, General Manager of Carat New Zealand said, “We are excited to be working with a high growth client such as JB Hi-Fi. Carat’s focus of driving commercial advantage in media provided a great platform for us to improve their approach to buying media in this market and significantly improve JB Hi-Fi’s return on investment.”

Strong vs Weak Ties

"Recently a presentation from the research lead for Google’s social team, Paul Adams, has been spreading around the web. The presentation provides deeper insight into Google’s existing concept of “social” and could help us further understand what the company believes is weaknesses in Facebook’s armor as they prepared to launch a “Facebook killer“. There were a number of themes that were consistent throughout the presentation, all of which we’ve included below.

The overall theme of the presentation was consistent: we have multiple groups and within those groups there are individuals who we have strong ties with and many more who we have weak ties with. There are also even temporary ties, like the person at the restaurant who served you food last night. While getting the system right on this is extremely difficult, the strong vs. weak ties is something that Facebook has yet to enable users to control.

Instead, the strength of relationships on Facebook is determined algorithmically: the more we interact (and/or view) a person on the site, the more likely they’ll show up in our news feed. So far the only way Facebook has been able to empower users to control access to information is through friends lists, a feature that even Mark Zuckerberg has acknowledged is for “advanced” users of the site."

Read more here

The World Cup breaks Internet traffic level records

“World Cup fever pushed the Internet to a new record on Friday, according to measurements from Akamai.

Traffic to news sites globally started a steady climb about 6 a.m. Eastern time and peaked six hours later at noon, reaching nearly 12.1 million visitors per minute.

The traffic dipped going into the afternoon but stayed well above normal. The figures suggest that the Internet was most active during the Mexico-South Africa game and stayed heavy through the France-Uruguay game.

The day's traffic far exceeded the previous record of 8.5 million visitors per minute, which was set when Barack Obama won the U.S. presidential election in 2008.”

The article from CNET avaliable at this link

And go the All Whites!!

Introducing Promoted Tweets

“Since April, Twitter users have grown accustomed to Twitter’s first ad revenue play: Promoted Tweets. Today, the second phase of that strategy is starting to be tested: Promoted Trending Topics. The first such topic? Toy Story 3, promoted by Disney/Pixar.As you can see in the right hand toolbar of Twitter.com, at the bottom of the Trending Topics area there is now an 11th topic, “Toy Story 3.” Next to it is a big yellow box letting you know that it’s a promoted Trending Topic. Just as with Promoted Tweets, the functionality for these Promoted Trending Topics is the same as the regular Trending Topics — clicking on it takes you to a search results page to see what people are saying about Toy Story 3.

“As we have always said, we plan to test different advertising and promotional models in these early stages of our monetization efforts for both user and brand value. As part of this effort, we are testing trends clearly marked as “promoted” for an undefined period of time,” a Twitter representative tells us.”

See the original article here

What’s a fan worth?

“Social media is becoming widely adopted by businesses of all sizes, yet one of the biggest struggles has been calculating the ROI of these campaigns.  In response to this struggle, Syncapse, a global leader in digital consulting and measurement with a focus on social media, has released a report that dives deep into the data.

As part of their study, Syncapse surveyed 4,000 fans of twenty of the top brands on Facebook.  The brands included Nokia, BlackBerry, Victoria’s Secret, Adidas, Nike, Coca-Cola, Starbucks, Xbox, Axe, Playstation and McDonald’s.  The focus group was asked why they were fans of those brands and about their past and future purchasing behavior.  Syncapse then used these responses to estimate the monetary value of each fan over time. Below are the key findings of the report:

• The average value of a Facebook Fan is $136.38.

• Facebook Fans are 28% more likely than non-fans to continue using a specific brand.

• 68% of Facebook Fans indicate that they are highly likely to recommend a product they are a fan of to their friends.

• 81% of Facebook Fans report feelings a connection/empathy with the brand

It is important to note that the results also showed how the value of a fan can vary widely based on the fan’s participation.”

See here for the original article and for a copy of the full report click here

BP buys search terms

As BP continues to try to stop the oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico, the energy giant is also dealing with a public relations nightmare.

That's why the company is snapping up search phrases like "oil spill" and "oil spill claims" on Google (GOOG, Fortune 500) and Yahoo (YHOO, Fortune 500). The strategy, says a company spokeswoman, aims to "assist those who are most impacted and help them find the right forms and the right people quickly and effectively."

For instance, when a user searches "oil spill" on Google or Yahoo, there are millions of results -- but the first link on both search engines is a sponsored ad that leads to BP's "Gulf of Mexico response" page that provides resources and information about the spill.”

For more info see here

Apple shows off redesigned iPhone

“The revamped gadget has a stainless steel case, two cameras, improved display and is 24% thinner than the most recent version.

Apple boss Steve Jobs said the redesign was the "biggest leap" it had taken since the launch of the first iPhone.

But analysts said the phone's popularity could be dented by Apple's strict control over what owners can do with their gadget.

The gadget was revealed during the keynote speech at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco.”

See more here