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Susan Gunelius

Susan Gunelius

Online Advertising Traffic Fraud Best Practices Released by IAB

online advertising traffic fraud handcuffsOnline advertising has been plagued with bad press in recent years with traffic fraud and click fraud being some of the most talked about problems for online advertisers. This month, The Internet Advertising Bureau’s (IAB’s) Traffic of Good Intent Task Force released a new report titled “Traffic Fraud: Best Practices for Reducing Risk to Exposure.” The report explains the various types of traffic fraud as well as best practices to reduce traffic fraud for advertisers and ad buyers, for publishers, and for ad networks.

In a press release, the IAB Traffic of Good Intent Task Force is calling for all advertisers, ad buyers, networks, and publishers to work together to stop online advertising traffic fraud. Not only is it illegal, but it’s also costing advertisers a lot of money. Gavin O’Malley of MediaPost reports that Steve Sullivan, vice president of advertising technology at IAB, believes traffic fraud equates to a minimum to $6 billion to $7 billion wasted per year.

Fighting Online Advertising Traffic Fraud

To help brand advertisers fight traffic fraud, the IAB created the following questions to ask publishers. While it’s unlikely that small publishers will have all of the requested information, advertisers should speak up and demand that larger publishers provide it.

  • Do you have your audience measured by verifiable third party systems?
  • Do you have a clean record with third-party brand safety reports?
  • How do you determine which impressions are exposed to real humans?
  • How do you assure that ads are served as reported, and that URLS are visible to the advertiser?
  • How do you determine whether ads are auto-initiated or user-initiated?
  • Do you provide protection from malware?
  • Are impressions generated by malware redirecting to a site?

Far-Reaching Negative Effects of Online Advertising Traffic Fraud

Not only does online advertising traffic fraud mean wasted budget dollars for brand advertisers, but it also means skewed tracking data. Accurately analyzing the performance of online ads that have been compromised by click fraud is impossible, but most often, the advertiser doesn’t even know that the performance data should be questioned. Ultimately, future marketing strategies, tactics, and ad buys will be created based on this inaccurate data, which means the negative effects of online advertising traffic fraud are far-reaching and can last for a very long time.

You can visit the IAB website to view the complete traffic fraud report as well Digital Simplified, the IAB’s short overview of what online advertising traffic fraud is and why all stakeholders should take action to stop it.

Image: Foxumon

Secrets to Tapping into Your Brand Advocates

brand advocateWhenever I write a book or speak about branding, I emphasize the importance of building a band of brand advocates. These are your vocal brand loyalists. They want to talk about your brand and can give you more word-of-mouth marketing than your budget could ever buy. Brand advocates can come from a variety of audiences—your employees, your customers, industry experts, and any other stakeholder you can think of. However, not all brand loyalists are equal when it comes to brand advocacy. That’s where tapping into your band of brand advocates gets more challenging.

Thanks to social media, it’s easier than ever to find your brand advocates. Your first step should always be to find out where your target audience (in this case, your brand advocates) already spend time online. Join the conversation, but don’t self-promote. Brand advocacy is tied closely to the emotional connection that consumers feel with brands they love. Your job is to build a relationship that fosters the emotional connection to your brand. In time, you can share marketing messages (minimally) and even ask your brand advocates to help you spread those messages. However, you need to tread carefully so you don’t damage the relationship. Always make sure your audience feels valued rather than like a promotional conduit.

Craig Rosenberg of TOPO shared some more great secrets for tapping into your brand advocates with Derek Singleton of The B2B Marketing Mentor that should help you find the right people and boost participation. First, he identifies three types of people who should be at the top of your search list: socially active customers, peer problem solvers, and your best customers (the customers whose names you give to prospective customers who ask for references). To find them, monitor your social media communities and conversations as well as online brand mentions. You can also conduct online surveys to track customer satisfaction and identify particularly happy customers.

To encourage participation, Rosenberg suggests that you start with a small group of 25 to 50 advocates and limit how often you ask them to promote or share something for you. You should also diversify what you ask them to do. Make it easy and enjoyable for them to participate so it becomes a habit for them.

Finally, Rosenberg reminds marketers that it is absolutely essential to recognize your advocates. His company’s research data suggests that monetary rewards are not effective because they attract people who are looking for a deal rather than true brand advocates. Instead, he suggests that you reward your advocates with personal thank you notes, exclusive access or sneak peaks at products and services, badges or awards that recognize advocates as experts in their fields, or special invitations to meet with key company representatives, such as your CEO.

Your brand advocates are out there. They’re already talking about your brand and with a bit of encouragement and recognition, they’d be happy to talk about it even more. You just have to find them and foster the relationship. Thanks to the social web, it’s a task that has never been easier. What are you waiting for?

Image: Sigurd Decroos

Video Ad Sharing Has Increased 50 Times in Eight Years

video spiral film stripGood news for brand marketers—a new “Viral Spiral” interactive infographic from Unruly Media reports that sharing of video ads via social media has grown nearly 50 times in the past eight years. This is a trend that shows no signs of slowing down. In fact, the top 10 ads in 2013 were shared 28.8 million times, which is an increase of over 52% since 2012, and Unruly Media is currently tracking 500,000 shares of brand video content each day.

Unruly Media recognizes the 2010 Old Spice “The Man Your Man Could Be” ad as “the game-changer.” Since that ad debuted, shares of the top three branded videos have grown seven-fold. However, that Old Spice ad is not the most shared branded video of all time. That honor goes to Volkswagen’s “The Force” ad with 5.58 million shares, which debuted during the 2011 Super Bowl.

The growth in brand video sharing has changed the way advertisers do their jobs. In 2006, the “Evolution” ad from Dove was the third most shared ad of the year with 60,954 shares during that year. In 2013, the Dove “Real Beauty Sketches” ad was the most shared brand video of the year with 4.24 million shares (it’s also the third most shared video of all time). Combine those shares with the second and third most shared video ads in 2013 (“Hump Day” from GEICO and “Baby & Me” from Evian), and those three ads have been shared nearly 50 times more than the top three ads shared in 2006 (from 244,035 shares in 2006 to 11.6 million shares in 2013). In total, eight out of the top 20 most shared video ads of all time debuted in 2013 (40%).

Advertisers have learned a lot about creating videos that people want to share via social media in the past eight years. For example, Unruly Media reports that the average length for the top three most shared brand videos has increased by 178% since 2006 (from 35 seconds to 96 seconds).

Unruly Media has tracked 365 billion brand videos since 2006 using a combination of its own proprietary technology and social media APIs and used that data as the basis for its infographic. You can view the Viral Spiral below. Not only can you filter the results by year, number of shares, sector, and more, but you can also watch all of the video ads without leaving the interactive infographic.


Are you creating brand videos that people want to share with family and friends across the social web?

Image: Malgorzata Gluchowska

Tumblr Launches New Mobile Advertising Opportunity for Brands

Tumblr adsSince Yahoo! purchased Tumblr, there has been a big focus on monetizing the popular blogging platform. Earlier this year, Tumblr launched its first mobile advertising unit, Sponsored Mobile Posts, and now, brands can also purchase space through the new Sponsored Trending Blogs unit.

The new Sponsored Trending Blogs ad unit will appear in a popular area for mobile Tumblr users. CNET explains that Sponsored Trending Blogs, “will push advertisers’ Tumblr blogs in front of people checking out the Explore tab in the Tumblr for iOS and Android application.”

The Trending Blogs section of Tumblr debuted in July of this year and is a quick place for users to find popular, curated content from Tumblr’s editors. The Sponsored Trending Blogs will look just like non-sponsored content in the Explore tab of the Tumblr mobile app except for a dollar sign icon that will be used to disclose content has been paid for by a brand advertiser. Tumblr already uses this symbol to distinguish paid content, so the new native advertising of Sponsored Trending Blogs will be flagged similarly.

While Sponsored Trending Blogs won’t fully debut until January 2014, Tumblr has rolled out a soft launch with beta advertisers including Calvin Klein, Turner Broadcasting, Delta, Twentieth Century Fox, and Sony Pictures Entertainment. Currently, Sponsored Trending Blog ad units are being sold at a flat fee, and according to Mashable, they will be targeted geographically but not demographically or behaviorally.

Tumblr’s focus on monetizing its mobile traffic shouldn’t come as a surprise. In February, Tumblr CEO David Karp told Mashable that mobile traffic was expected to overtake desktop traffic before the end of 2013. The company has come a long way since 2010 when Karp told The L.A. Times that Tumblr was “opposed to advertising” because it “turns our stomachs.”

Taking a look at the story from Yahoo’s perspective, Tumblr was a huge acquisition that cost a lot of money. Tumblr needs to bring in big revenue. For Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer, failure is not an option.

Only time will tell if Tumblr users are willing to accept the various advertising units being rolled out. So far, results seem to be positive with ad units released previously. With over 153 million Tumblr blogs and over 100 million posts published on Tumblr each day, according to Venture Beat, Tumblr is certainly a place brands need to be.

Image: Josh James

Attention Brands: U.K. Is the Most Social Country in the World

united kingdom flagAccording to research compiled in an infographic by Offerpop, the United Kingdom has the highest proportion of social networkers in the world (52%). In fact, 95% of 16-20 year olds in the U.K. have logged into Facebook in the last month. However, social media penetration in the U.K. is highest in the 25-34 year old demographic, followed by the 18-24 year old and 35-44 year old demographics, respectively.

In the U.K., social media is a place where consumers actively engage with brands. Offerpop reports that 36% of U.K. consumers use social media to interact with brands. On Facebook, two Cadbury brand pages are included in the top three most liked Facebook Pages in the U.K., and on Twitter, Rockstar Games and Swedish House Mafia are the top two brands with over 1.5 million followers each (see the infographic below for details).

The Offerpop findings are in line with research conducted by eMarketer in February of this year, which predicted that 71% of U.K. adults will use social networks by the end of 2017. However, U.K. social media users are using Twitter, Facebooks, and other social sites for more than just interacting with each other. Separate research by video search website Blinkx released in August found that 43% of 18-24 year olds prefer to use social networks to look for content rather than using search engines like Google.

With so many people in the U.K. using social media, brands need to understand what type of content resonates with their audiences. A study conducted by Ipsos OTX and Ipsos Global @advisor in April found that 58% of U.K. social media users shared some kind of content via social media in the last month. The research report identified the following ranking of the types of content U.K. social media users share:

  • Photos = 36% of survey respondents
  • Links to articles = 22% of survey respondents
  • Links to other websites = 18% of survey respondents
  • Reposts from other people’s social media accounts = 18% of survey respondents
  • Something I like or recommend such as a product, service, book, movie, etc, = 15% of survey respondents
  • News items = 14% of survey respondents
  • Video clips = 11% of survey respondents
  • I haven’t shared anything in the past month = 42%

Back in August, The Daily Mail published an article reviewing the “meteoric rise of social networking in the U.K.” which included statistics from the Office for National Statistics and Eurostat. Bottom-line, Britons are prolific social media users, and while usage has grown quickly, it shouldn’t have come as a surprise to any brand manager when The Daily Mail reported in August that over half of all Britons were using social media. If you’re brand is available for purchase in the U.K., it needs a social media presence, because that is where your customers are.

You can see more details from the research compiled by Offerpop in the infographic below.

Social-Media-In-the-UK

Image: Chris Chidsey

Brands Get 12 Times More Views on YouTube from Earned Media than Owned Media

youtube home page logoResearch from Octoly tells us that owned media generates 25 million YouTube video views for brands, which is a drop in the bucket compared to the 300 million views that brands get from earned media. However, brands aren’t effectively tracking that earned media or using it to calculate return on investment.

Octoly researched 1,000 brands, 28 million videos, and 9 million YouTube channels, and found that 500 billion user-generated video views were not being tracked by brands.

On YouTube, earned media for brands comes primarily from user-generated content. These are the videos that customers create to show other people how to use a product, to review a product, and how to make the product (and the brand) their own with their own creativity. The popularity of videos by people who play Minecraft and other video games is just one example of significant earned media for brands.

Research has shown again and again that consumers are more likely to purchase brands after watching product videos created by other consumers. It’s critical that you encourage your audience to take control of your brand, make it their own, increase their emotional connection to it, and advocate it by allowing them to create their own content (including videos) related to your brand.

Octoly found that an average of 260 YouTube videos have been created per brand. Compare that to the average of 35,000 user-generated YouTube videos created per brand, and the potential reach or earned media is clearly something that not only should not be ignored but should be an important part of the overall brand strategy. For example, Octoly found that user-generated YouTube videos accounted for 99% of views for both LEGO and Apple, 95% of views for Call of Duty, and 85% of views for Coca-Cola.

According to Octoly’s brand ranking system, the earned media ranking of the top five brands on YouTube is as follows:

  1. Call of Duty: 8.9B Views, 324.8K Creators
  2. LEGO: 7.5B Views, 102.9K Creators
  3. Apple: 4.2B Views, 103.2K Creators
  4. Pixar: 3.4B Views, 18.6K Creators
  5. Ford: 2.8B Views, 201.8K Creators

Octoly’s top five earned media rankings by category are as follows:

  1. Gaming: 69.5B Views, 1.3M Creators
  2. Cosmetics and Beauty: 1.4B Views, 96.1K Creators
  3. Luxury Brands: 1.2B Views, 98.6K Creators
  4. Automotive: 31B Views, 1.5M Creators
  5. Tech: 13B Views, 533.1K Creators

You can see some of these statistics and more in the infographic below.

youtube for brands infographic

Are you effectively tracking and measuring user-generated content related to your brand on YouTube? If not, you’re missing a lot of data as well as significant opportunities.

Image: Andrew Perry