Brands Get Another Chance on Twitter with Enhanced Promoted Tweets
July 29, 2011
This week, Twitter announced on its blog that it’s rolling out an enhanced version of the promoted tweets program giving brands another chance to get in front of Twitter users. The question is how users will react to the new promoted tweets that will appear in their existing Twitter timelines with a small callout indicating the tweet is an ad as shown in the image below from Twitter.
The new promoted tweets feature is launching with 20 brands, including:
- Best Western
- Dell
- Gatorade
- Groupon
- HBO
- JetBlue
- LivingSocial
- Microsoft Xbox
- Red Bull
- Sephora
- Starbucks
- Sumitt Entertainment’s “50/50″
- TNT
- Virgin America
You’ll only see promoted tweets in your Twitter timeline from these brands if you already follow them on Twitter. If you follow these brands and they publish a promoted tweet, that tweet will appear at the top (or near the top) of your Twitter timeline (only on Twitter.com). The promoted tweet will scroll through your Twitter timeline like other tweets and you can remove it from your timeline with one click.
Twitter claims that the number of promoted tweets users see will be limited so as not to hurt the user experience. AdAge estimates that four or five ads could be displayed in a single session. Of course, Twitter is quick to point out that users will only see promoted tweets from brands they’re already following on Twitter, so they’ve already expressed interest in receiving updates from these brands. With that line of thinking, Twitter expects the brand promoted tweets to be well received.
Brands pay for promoted tweets through a bidding process where they bid on a per-engagement price and pay when Twitter users actually engage with the promoted tweet by retweeting it, replying to it, clicking on it, or favoriting it.
During the test period, non-profit organizations will also be able to publish promoted tweets. If you follow any of the following charitable organizations, you might see promoted tweets from them in your Twitter timeline in the near future:
- charity: water
- Make-A-Wish Foundation
- Room to Read
- The American Red Cross
- Water.org
There is no word on how long the promoted tweets test will last, but it will be interesting to see how Twitter users react to it. Will they stop following brands that publish promoted tweets? Will they be accepting of promoted tweets? Only time will tell.
What do you think of the enhanced promoted tweets for brands initiative on Twitter? Leave a comment and share your thoughts.
Image: Twitter
Sponsors Prepare with 1 Year until the 2012 London Olympics
July 28, 2011
July 27th marked the one-year to go date for the 2012 Summer Olympics in London. Sponsors are already dropping ads and highlighting their roles in the 2012 Games. According to MarketWeek, at least ten 2012 Olympics sponsors launched new ads and offers on July 27, 2011. The countdown to the Games has officially begun, and sponsors are ready to use that countdown as a form of tease marketing for their own brands.
Adidas is the official sportswear partner of the 2012 Olympic Games in London. A new promo spot debuted from Adidas to mark the 365-day countdown to the Games. The spot features Snoop Dogg, Warren G, and British Olympic athlete and world champion triple jumper Phillips Idowu in a 3-on-3 basketball game against three players from Great Britain Basketball. I’m not sure how Snoop Dogg ties into the Olympics and athleticism, but the spot is shown below. You can draw your own connections.
The London Olympic Games are still a year away, but the list of advertisers and sponsors, which is broken down into a variety of tiers according to BBC News, includes brands like:
- Adidas
- BMW
- BP
- British Airways
- BT
- EDF Energy
- Lloyds TSB
- Acer
- Atos Origin
- Coca-Cola
- Dow
- GE
- McDonald’s
- Omega
- Panasonic
- P&G
- Samsung
- Visa
- Holiday Inn
- Transport for London (TfL)
More advertisers and sponsors are sure to sign on before the 2012 Olympic Games arrive as will the number of Olympics-related ads that are sure to be produced. The question is will consumers hit Olympics saturation level before the 2012 Games arrive? Even brands that are not official sponsors of the 2012 Olympic Games are starting to launch tie-in promotions. In London, MarketWeek reports that the top newspapers are already running special Olympics features and Aviva, a British athletics sponsor (but not an Olympics sponsor) is running parallel advertising.
What do you think? With Olympics Games happening every two years rather than every four years as they did when most of us were children, the excitement seems to have waned in recent years. With people around the world having access to so many television channels, so much content, and so many sports at anytime, the “one year to go” message might not be as motivating as it was twenty years ago.
Leave a comment and share your thoughts. Is it too early to start flooding media with Olympics sponsorship messages or is it impossible to reach saturation level when it comes to Olympics fever?
Store Brands Still Going Strong
July 27, 2011
In December 2009, I wrote a post here on the Corporate Eye blog called Economic Considerations, Value and Store Brands Will Dominate Purchase Trends in 2010. Then in April 2010, I followed up with another post called 9 out of 10 Consumers Agree – Store Brands and National Brands Are Equal. Guess what? It’s time to talk about store brands again!
New research from Nielsen reveals that the U.S. recession of 2008-2009 drove huge growth for store brands as budget-conscious consumers from diverse demographics began to replace national brand purchases with store brand equivalents. It turns out, once consumers tried many of these store brands, they realized that the store brands are just as good (or very close) to the pricey national brands they’d been buying. According to Nielsen, U.S. store brand sales reached 22.3% market share in 2008 (nearly 2 share points higher than the previous year) and 23% in 2009.
Since then store brand sales have remained fairly flat. Turns out national brands took notice and ramped up their own marketing efforts to compete against the less expensive alternatives. However, a change in consumer perception definitely took place in the latter years of the first decade of the 21st century. No longer are store brands perceived as low quality and cheap knock-offs of national brand products. Today, store brands are a viable alternative in many categories.
The trick for store brands is convincing consumers to try them to see how comparable they really are to pricey national brands. Once consumers sample them and realize the quality is comparable, the trick is to convince them that they can trust that quality. They can expect the store brand to deliver the same quality every time the consumer purchases it. That’s a big hurdle for store brands to get over. If consumers can’t trust that a brand will meet their expectations for it every time, they’ll turn away from that brand in search of one that does consistently meet their expectations for it — even if that alternative is a more expensive national brand.
Nielsen offers a variety of strategy recommendations to grow store brands (follow the preceding link to read the complete list of suggestions). For example, invest in quality, keep prices affordable, and broaden the demographic appeal. In short, store brands shouldn’t be the brand consumers are embarrassed to buy. Changes in store brand perceptions and expectations have to be made in order for the masses to start buying them.
What do you think about the future of store brands? Leave a comment and share your thoughts.
Image: Flickr
Corporate Governance 2.5 A New Focus
July 25, 2011
It is time for a new corporate governance editorial focus. Why?
Corporate governance has a long history, perhaps beginning as far back as the 4th century BC, when the Chinese philosopher Mencius argued that it is acceptable to overthrow corrupt or unjust rulers, through the establishment of joint stock companies (perhaps as early as the 13th century, but certainly by the 17th century) and stock exchanges to facilitate the sale of stock, to the US Securities Act of 1933 – the first to regulate the securities markets, particularly with respect to disclosure – and the development of corporate governance codes in the 1990s. In 2002, in the US, the Enron collapse and other corporate scandals led to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act; and in 2009, the UK Walker Report recommendations were published, closely followed in 2010-11 by revisions to the UK corporate governance code, and the development of a stewardship code for institutional investors.
Still, two and half millennia of governance experience, and many regulatory and legal interventions seemed to do little to prevent the catastrophic 2008 world economic collapse. The reaction is dramatic…
“We are in the middle of the biggest revolution in corporate governance since the 1930s…
Richard Cellini, senior VP of business and legal affairs at Integrity Interactive Corp.
“After the Storm”, The Conference Board Review March / April 2009
This broad sweeping commentary is supplemented by others who focus on more specific items:
- Risk Management
“The crisis has also thrown up some massive failures in risk management. Even where companies had mandatory internal controls on reporting for the financial accounts, their executives did not fully grasp or clearly communicate the financial risks of many of the instruments they were betting on.”
Source: Corporate Governance-Lessons from the Financial Crisis OECD - Not Enough Regulation
“With (Brooksley) Born (former head of a regulatory unit who, in the late 1990s, warned about the risks associated with complex financial instruments) out of the way, the last two years of the Clinton administration were a heyday of deregulation. OTC derivatives were off limits. Banks were freed to make riskier investments. Wall Street was largely left to regulate itself.”
Source: The Warning, Public Broadcasting System - Too Much Regulation
“…, the U.S. government and quasi-governmental agencies have developed a near unfathomable maze of corporate performance reporting measures that have clearly helped, but are largely inadequate to safeguard corporations and improve the public trust. The end result is that investors, the public, and even management can’t evaluate the extent of their exposure regardless of the position outlined in much company information.”
Source: Beyond Transparency: Information Overload and a Model for Intelligibility
ROBERT L. LAUDAND DONALD H. SCHEPERS Business and Society Review 114:3 365–391 - Communications
“It’s time for CEOs and boards to understand how powerful customer and employee social interactions truly are, and how they are accelerated and enabled by online communications and cloud technologies. For boards to succeed, nothing less than a shift from traditional closed governance to open and socially aware independent directorship is required.”
Source: Talkin’ ’bouta Revolution. By: LIBERT, BARRY, POTTER, STEVEN, Institutional Investor, 00203580, Apr 2011, Vol. 45, Issue 3
This small sample of key issues in corporate governance is supplemented by many others such as executive compensation, lack of board oversight, ethics, internal controls and more. All point to a need to revisit corporate governance, so we will focus our posts on these topics and others around communicating corporate governance including–
- how to explain what corporate governance is
- discussing the difference between corporate governance and management
- best practices in corporate governance communications on websites
- how to explain relationships between board/senior management on the corporate website
- why leaders need to communicate and be visible
- ideas for explaining the corporate strategy and progress against that strategy.
Well there it is: our new corporate governance focus.
Let us know what you think. Comments Please: readers are encouraged to provide their thoughts on what they believe should be covered in future posts.
Teach a man to fish… | Renewing CSR 2/3
July 22, 2011
It seems almost crass to hitch yet another article to the Murdoch dark star, but a quote the other day really sums up what this post is about.
I can’t remember who it was .. Matthew Parris perhaps (former Tory MP), or possibly Nick Robinson (BBC Political Editor).
Either way, the quote ran something like this:
You have to remember this is all about power .. who has power over whom and why.
No other phrase could sum up what business-as-usual is all about quite as succinctly.
This is what is meant by office politics: the judicial exercising of power over others, and it is that which defines a business on the wider stage, not necessarily its commercial offering.
So let’s take this from the top.
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