Feb. 1-3 - Innovations in Automated Video for Marketing and E-Commerce – Miami, FL
Feb. 2 – BIMA - Decision 2012 (BIMA’s New State of the Industry Event) – Boston, MA
Feb. 5-8 – iMedia Brand Summit – Bonita Springs, FL
Feb. 6-8 – ePharma Summit – New York, NY
Feb. 6 – AMA – Health Care Marketing – San Francisco, CA
Feb. 9 – SFIMA – Marketing to the U.S. Hispanic Population - Miami, FL
Feb. 9 – SES Accelerator Conference - San Diego, CA
Feb. 15 – ANA – TV & Everything Video Forum – New York, NY
Feb. 15 – Real Time Trading Summit – New York, NY
Feb. 16 – DFWIMA – Future of Online Advertising (Lunch) – Dallas, TX
Feb. 21/22 – OMMA - Data/ Metrics – New York, NY
Feb. 21 – OnMedia NYC 2012 – New York, NY
Feb. 23 – ThinkLA – Interactive Awards Mixer – Santa Monica, CA
Feb. 24 – NWIAG - SearchFest 2012 – Portland, OR
Feb. 26-28 – IAB – Annual Leadership Meeting – Miami, FL
Feb. 27 – Mar. 1 - eTail Conference – Palm Desert, CA
Feb. 28 – Digiday Agency – Los Angeles, CA
Feb. 29 – AiMA – Mobile Wallet – Beyond the Money – Atlanta, GA
Feb. 29 – Mar. 1 – SMX West – San Jose, CA

As I realize that 90% of you already recognize the value of mobile and social media, I think it is fitting to bring up a recent update released by eMarketer regarding the adoption of social and mobile media.  Here is a quick snapshot of the findings:

• About two-thirds of web users, for example, will use social networks next year, and more than 90% of that group can be found on Facebook.

• Twitter will enjoy even higher growth, albeit from a small base. eMarketer  estimates that more than 24 million online adults will use the service next year, representing 10% of the overall adult population.

As for mobile stats, this graphic speaks for itself:

In my mind, the line between social and mobile is completely blurred as mobile users are checking into their Facebook, Twitter and Four Square applications on their mobile devices as well as at home and/or work.  As Mediaplex is on the forefront of these mediums, we are always keeping our eye out for those tools that will being value to our clients.  For Mediaplex, we work with clients who are running mobile campaigns on and off applications giving creative targeting capabilities to those who work “off app” on a mobile browser.  For those who run with various mobile ad networks, like Millennial, Admob, or GreyStripe (Mediaplex sister division) we can track those campaigns through Mediaplex as well.  This integration with all of your online ad channels into one centralized platform makes it easier to maximize your efficiency across all your media buys.

For brands looking to dip their town into mobile advertising, companies like GreyStripe make the transition very easy with formats that span the majority of smartphones and tablets and have the creative resources in-house to assure a smooth transition.   They are the largest brand focused network and will make sure that campaigns go off without a hitch (even building/optimizing mobile websites for some advertisers).  If you are interested check out www.greystripe.com

Regardless of what mobile medium advertisers use, I believe that mobile usage will only continue to expand and the ad formats for this will continue to become more innovative.  So if you want to “get into mobile”, mention it to your Mediaplex account manager or sales rep.

Campaign: Winter Savings
Format: Custom, Dynamic Messaging
Advertiser: Liftopia
Campaign Info: Liftopia maximizes their exposure to their amazing ski lift ticket deals through use of dynamic messaging and dynamic retargeting. Dynamic elements in the banner include the resort logo, savings amount, and landing page. Users who have visited Liftopia.com will see banners featuring the resorts in the state or region they last visited on Liftopia.com.

Click on the ad to see it in action:

According to eMarketer, the online spend of online advertising will near $40 billion (39.5 to be exact), about 6 billion more than total print ads (newspapers/magazines) but still trailing television at whopping $15 billion.

As online advertising penetrates marketer’s media plans, it is clear that online advertising will continue to dominate newspaper, radio, magazines, etc.  So it is important for marketers to understand how to best tackle the market of potential consumers.

Many advertisers are jumping on-board to be apart of the digital wave but get overwhelmed by the amount of point solutions that tout products to make life “easier”, but in reality, it just makes things worse.  If you have been contacted by a point solution touting their ‘expertise” on a particular aspect of online marketing, it is very important to understand what they are actually bringing to the table and if that ‘solution’ is already something you have access to.  Having a framework for what your business needs, wants, or looking to become will be important as you flirt with pushing more dollars into digital.

A number of point solution vendors will tout features like dynamic messaging, tag management, retargeting, DMP, DSP,  reporting, and/or optimization, when in reality all of those features already exist (baked in) in tools like MOJO.  To make matters worse, some of these point solutions don’t have the longevity, knowledge base, or experience to execute (may need heavy integrations), making trust and reliability an issue.  So research well!!

If you are interested in learning more about this topic or others contact your Mediaplex Account Manager or Sales at 1.877.402.PLEX (7539).

For those Mediaplex clients who are interested in training, here is an updated schedule of our webinars.  If you are interested in attending, please complete the registration form or contact your account manager.

Basic MOJO Adserver – Trafficking & Reports:

• 10:00 AM PST/1:00 PM EST Thursday, January 26, 2012
• 10:00 AM PST/1:00 PM EST Thursday, February 9, 2012
• 10:00 AM PST/1:00 PM EST Thursday, February 23, 2012
• 10:00 AM PST/1:00 PM EST Thursday, March 8, 2012
• 10:00 AM PST/1:00 PM EST Thursday, March 22, 2012

Advanced Training:

•  Trafficking Shortcuts – 10:00 AM PDT/1:00 PM EDT Thursday, January 19, 2012
•  Optimizer – 10:00 AM PST/1:00 PM EST Thursday, February 2, 2012
•  Performance Tracker – 10:00 AM PDT/1:00 PM EDT Thursday, February 26, 2012
•  XML Workbook- 10:00 AM PST/1:00 PM EST Thursday, March 1, 2012
•  Targeting (basics)- 10:00 AM PST/1:00 PM EST Thursday, March 15, 2012
•  Re-targeting (advanced) – 10:00 AM PST/1:00 PM EST Thursday, March 29, 2012

Campaign: Dead Sea Scrolls Life and Faith in Biblical Times
Format: Expandable
Advertiser: Discovery Time Square
Creative Agency: 343 Creative
Campaign Info: Discovery Time Square invites its audience to visit the Dead Sea Scrolls Exhibition through this expandable banner which features a fascinating journey through the Holy Land.

Click on the ad to see it in action:

Campaign: Born Ready for a Greater Challenge
Format: Polite, Video
Advertiser: Coast Guard
Creative Agency: LM&O Advertising
Campaign Info: Anybody with a passion for life is a candidate for the Coast Guard or Coast Guard Reserve. This in banner video takes you through the environmental passions of one man and how being in the Coast Guard fosters that passion.

Click on the ad to see it in action:

Every time the 13th day of the month falls on a Friday, a few things typically come to mind:  Horror Movies, Black Cats, Bad Luck and creepy unexplained ‘happenings’.   Not to mention that 2012 is considered the final year (end of the world) according to the Mayan calendar.

For those with a fear of the unknown, a helpful remedy is to get more informed, get more data, and evaluate your concerns.  It is helpful to know that black cats are no more likely cause bad luck as a striped cat, dog, or any other any other animal.  For this (and many other) reason, I am not superstitious nor believe in luck–only in opportunity!

The opportunity for online marketers starts with their access to data, best practices, and historical learnings over time.  Never before have marketers had the chance to access to faster (more consolidated) data.  The more usable the data, the much better the opportunity to glean best practices and learnings from online campaigns in a condensed period of time – Offering a huge benefit to new online advertisers!

Collecting and tracking online events is only half the battle  It is not only the data that online marketers collect that creates opportunity, but also what that marketer does with that data that allows advertisers to capitalize on that opportunity.

For example, once a marketer has learned something about a potential customer, it is important to act on that data with retargeting, optimization and testing.  (i.e. upsales, incentives, etc).

No one can predict the future, predict and act (reliably) on luck, or guarantee success, but online marketers can mitigate the unknown (or fear) with the right facts, data, and the technology.  Online advertising requires constant attention to details that can change the outcome of a campaign.

Mediaplex clients/prospects have a wealth of information at their fingertips not only with MOJO platform but with the account management support that can provide best practices to help eliminate uncertainty and fear of the unknown.

For those who haven’t experienced Mediaplex, give us a shout at  1.877.402.PLEX (7539)

See what other clients are saying about Mediaplex here

MOJO Adserver now allows you to set additional fields directly from the Campaign tab thereby improving the workflow of your advertising campaigns. Previously the Insertion Order link on the Campaign tab only allows for configuring the following 4 fields on the Insertion Order PDF: 

Clients can now reference and set the following fields:

For Mediaplex clients, feel free to contact your account manager or click the link to get a more detailed description of this enhancement CLICK HERE

As written by Tom Leadbetter of our UK office:

Are you one of those advertisers that use retargeters like Criteo and Struq to identify site visitors and to buy back clicks on a CPC?  We hope you’re doing well and getting some great results, however, we wanted to shed some light on how your data is being used which may change your mind on how much you’re actually paying for those results.

Google research data suggests that most advertiser site visitors will also have visited the sites of competitor advertisers.  Where competing advertisers are both using the same retargeter, this third party resource then has data on prospects that both competing advertisers want to reach.  This creates a competitive environment in which advertisers are compelled to bid-up to earn retargeted site visitor clicks; the bidding process maximises margins for the retargeter and squeezes margins for the advertisers.

If an advertiser does not use a retargeter, the cookies common to competitor advertisers can be reached more cheaply by those competitors.  However, the advertiser is no longer entirely reliant on the retargeter to reach their site visitors – there are now other ways (independent of retargeter vendors) that are becoming increasingly accessible and which offer attractive cost efficiencies, particularly to larger advertisers.

Transparency is hugely important for advertisers and for our industry – we encourage advertisers to insist on it to protect the interests of their individual businesses.  Why is this important? Transparency is a principle that encourages good growth as opposed to bad growth. The explosive growth of retargeter vendors is an example of bad growth -  a bubble that is bursting now that advertisers have started to figure out that intermediaries have been eating into advertiser margins purely because advertisers had unwittingly created a competitive landscape by giving away their customer and prospect data.  It was a lack of transparency that helped the industry grow before budget owners figured out the competitive dynamic and the value of their data.

Retargeting itself is not a bad thing and we encourage advertisers to explore all the different ways in which data can drive performance marketing. If retargeting is carried out with a third party advertisers should demand transparency and learn to value the true cost of giving away your data to third party vendors.  If done without retargeters then advertisers will want access to leading independent technology and experience, this is certainly a possibility for larger advertisers.  Advertisers who have a large share of their market have more to gain by not sharing data and can enjoy the benefits of increased margins at scale, however, smaller advertisers may find that they have no option but to use a retargeter as resource is a barrier.

As written by Tom Leadbetter of our UK Team:

Over the past few years, with the introduction of DSP’s, ad-exchanges and the resulting increase of display purchasing, advertisers have found that they can quickly spend a large amount of their media budget on millions of impressions. However, this bulk purchasing bodes the question of how much are these impressions worth? What is the quality of these customers and where do they lie in the purchasing funnel?

One breed of company found answers to this, enter the retargeters (Criteo, Struq, Adgenie etc.). By allowing a retargeter to drop multiple tags on your website, they can quickly identify those all-important customers who are interested in your product. The clever bit is then finding those customers again once they’ve left your website and are out and about surfing the World Wide Web.

Advertisers using these companies have drastically improved click-through rates, and consequently sales, as customers are being targeted with products they have shown an interest in.

So everyone wins, right? Actually, not necessarily; I have tried to dig a little deeper into the tech behind retargeters as there are a few points that advertisers should be aware of; namely CPA and I’ll follow it up with another blog post on keeping, or losing as the case may be, your competitive advantage.

As this is a Mediaplex blog, it’s of course paired with a quick summary of a solution which can dramatically decrease costs while maintaining the results seen with retargeting, (this is also known as the salesy bit).

Think about your CPA

When you look at your retargeting costs, they’re generally on a CPC, or in some cases you may have this on a post view CPA via your affiliate network. Now, as these customers have been to your website, your acquisition costs are going to be a lot lower. Thanks to your retargeting company, who are identifying users that have already been to your site, you are serving the most relevant advert to potential customers as they make their way through your purchasing funnel, but you need to remember that those users have already been to your website. Which begs the question: “How did they get to your website in the first place?”

As any marketer will tell you it is unlikely they simply found your website without some sort of marketing influence. You may have already generated that lead via your own marketing and are then buying back the conversion; you’re offering up your own data to a third party to then charge you for any results. Yes, it works, but you do need to sit down and think about the process to gauge whether it’s the right strategy for you or if you think these customers would have returned anyway.

Campaign: A New Time Celebration
Format: Custom, Social
Advertiser: Ashford
Campaign Info: Ashford chose this MTB unit to feature its finest brands and jewelry pieces. The main stage of the banner is a product carousel. The bottom three buttons open an overlay for users to find additional information, including customer reviews and a coupon. The scrolling marquee allows users to click out to brand specific products on Ashford’s website. Through custom metric tracking Ashford is able to understand which brand, product, and service has the highest user interaction rate.

Click on the ad to see it in action:

Happy New Year from Mediaplex and the ValueClick Family.

I will add more events as they become available

Jan 8-12 – Affiliate Summit West, Las Vegas, NV
Jan 9-11 – Digital Hollywood at CES, Las Vegas, NV
Jan 12 – BMA Chicago- Business Marketing, Chicago, IL
Jan 12 -  Gridley’s 11th Annual IDEA Conference, New York, NY
Jan 12 -  SFIMA Power Networking & Personal Branding, Pompano Beach, FL
Jan 12 – AMA Search Engine Optimization, San Diego, CA
Jan 11-13 -  Real Estate Connect, New York, NY
Jan 15-18 – National Retail Foundation, New York, NY
Jan 18 -  WAA Web Analytics Symposium, Los Angeles, CA
Jan 18-19 – AMA Social Media for B2B, Las Vegas, NV
Jan 19 – ThinkLA Thirsty Thursday, Hollywood, CA
Jan 25 – AiMA “Online Video“, Atlanta, GA
Jan 26 – PHIMA Football Happy Hour, Philadelphia, PA
Jan 26 – DFWIMA Political Advertising in a Digital World – Dallas, TX
Jan 26 – Digiday DPA Awards
Jan 30-31 – All Things D: Dive Into Media, Laguna Nigel, CA

Campaign: Live the Legend
Format: Custom, Expandable, Floating
Advertiser: Republic of Peru – Commission on the Promotion of Peru for export and tourism – PromPeru
Campaign Info: Peru Tourism Board makes a convincing argument why you should come and visit Peru and all of the spectacular sites through the MOJO Max unit. The 300×250 banner expands to a floating overlay which displays a beautiful slide show. Each image clicks out to a unique landing page, directing the user to more information about that particular destination in Peru.

Click on the ad to see it in action:

Campaign: Straight Up Gas
Format: Custom
Advertiser: ARCO Seattle
Campaign Info: In most Seattle locations, ARCO gas now accepts credit cards, which means the $0.45 debit fee is no longer applicable when you purchase gas. This social unit points users to their local Seattle ARCO gas station through the Google map overlay.

Click on the ad to see it in action:

Mediaplex offices will be closed on Friday, December 23rd and Monday, December 26th for the winter holiday. Mediaplex offices will resume normal operating hours on Tuesday, December 27th through Friday December 30th. Mediaplex offices will be closed on Monday, January 2nd in observance of New Year’s Day and resume normal operating hours on Tuesday, January 3rd.

Client Impact:
Access to MOJO Adserver, MOJO Mail, MOJO SEM and MOJO Reports will be available throughout the holidays.

Support requests sent to customersupport@mediaplex.com during the above holidays will be addressed on Tuesday, December 27th and Wednesday, January 3rd.

Campaign: Experience a Brilliant Run
Format: Custom, Polite, Video
Advertiser: Mizuno
Creative Agency: Media Two
Campaign Info: This in banner video ad allows you to see the brilliance of the Wave Rider 15 athletic shoe by Mizuno.

Click ad to see it in action:

Campaign: AAA Fall Travel
Format: Custom, Expandable
Advertiser: AAA
Creative Agency: Overdrive Interactive
Campaign Info: AAA paired up with their partner sites to promote special offers through this interactive expandable banner. Drag the camera over different areas of the expanded panel to view a close up of f the fun you can have on your next vacation!

Click on the ad to see it in action: