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Brands Spread the Love for Valentine’s Day Promotions

This year, brands are looking for new ways to connect with consumers and drive sales with unique Valentine’s Day promotions.  Many of these new marketing initiatives leverage social media as one would expect in 2011.

AT&T is a brand that stands out from the crowd this year in terms of launching modern and unique Valentine’s Day promotions.  AT&T put together a campaign called Shout Your Love from the Mountaintop that debuted just four days before the February 14th holiday. The tagline for the promotion was, “when you love someone, you want to tell the world. You want to shout it from the mountaintop.”

Customers were asked to share their messages of love on the AT&T Facebook page (shown above) and beginning at 8:00 a.m. (PST) on Valentine’s Day and ending in the evening the same day, “fully qualified Mountain Men yellers” read those messages of love on HTC Inspire 4G phones and shouted them for the world to hear.  The shouting aired on a live webcast and the submitted messages and Mountain Men videos appear on the AT&T Shout Your Love from the Mountaintop Facebook app (shown below) and on the Share AT&T YouTube channel.

Within the short four days of the campaign, nearly 10,000 people submitted messages of love.  Three days before Valentine’s Day, AT&T added a Twitter element to the campaign by asking users to use the Twitter hashtag #LoveShout to spread the word, and AT&T invested in Twitter promotion so the hashtag would be listed in the top trending topics.  To round out the online marketing promotion, banner ads and video ads were placed on a variety of top websites such as AOL and Yahoo!

I’m not sure if this campaign drove the ROI AT&T was hoping for, but it undoubtedly drove a positive brand buzz.  What do you think of this creative Valentine’s Day promotion by AT&T?  Leave a comment and share your thoughts.

comScore Releases 2010 U.S. Digital Year in Review Report

Each year, comScore releases a report that outlines what happened in the digital media industry in the prior year, so marketers can get an understanding of what’s been happening and leverage the opportunities created by those trends in the following year.  The complete report is available for free download and paints a positive picture of the digital media landscape that is very promising for 2011.

Some of the highlights from the report follow:

  • Ecommerce spending: Total U.S. ecommerce spending increased by 9% in 2010 over 2009.  Retail (non-travel) ecommerce spending jumped 10%, and travel ecommerce spending climbed 6% in 2010.
  • Social networking: In 2010, 9 out of every 10 U.S. Internet users visited a social networking site in a month.  The average Internet user spent more than 4 hours on social networking sites each month during 2010, and 1 out of every 8 minutes spent online by the U.S. Internet user audience is spent on Facebook.
  • Search market: The U.S. search market grew by 12% in 2010.  Specifically, unique searchers grew by 4%, and the number of search queries by searcher increased by 8%.
  • Display ads: Display ad impressions increased by 12% in 2010, and social networks accounted for more than 33% of those display ad impressions.  4.9 trillion display ads were served to the U.S. Internet audience in 2010.
  • Online video: The average U.S. Internet user streamed more than 201 online videos and spent more than 14 hours watching online video in 2010.  That’s a 12% increase over 2009.
  • Mobile market: 1 in 4 mobile customers used smartphones in 2010 with 3G usage going over 50%.  In 2010, 47% of mobile users are now “connected Internet media users (via browsers, applications, or downloaded content),” which is an 8% increase over the prior year.

Internet use continues to grow and the mobile market is growing at lightning speed.  Trends show that online video and mobile marketing are the big things for brands to target as well as social networking.  Is your brand represented in online video, mobile and social networking?  That’s where your customers are, and your brand needs to be there, too.  These trends aren’t going to reverse themselves in 2011, and they’re not unique to the U.S. consumer audience.

Image: stock.xchng

Mobile Marketing Matters in 2011

If there is one trend your brand needs to focus on in 2011, it’s mobile marketing.  However, mobile marketing with a local marketing twist will take that trend to the next level.

Yelp is a website that helps people find local businesses, review local businesses, and interact with other users.  If there was any question as to whether or not local targeting through mobile marketing matters, new statistics released by Yelp will put things into perspective for you.

According to Yelp, in December 2010, Yelp mobile app users called a local business every other second.  Keep in mind, that statistic only includes activities by users of the Yelp mobile app, not the website.

More data about Yelp mobile app usage as reported on the Yelp blog follows:

  • 3.2 million unique visitors used a Yelp mobile app.
  • 35% of all searches on Yelp.com came from a Yelp mobile app.
  • Every other second, a consumer generated directions to a local business.
  • A photo was uploaded every 30 seconds from a Yelp mobile app.

The Yelp website has been doing well, too.  Yelp reported the following data on the Yelp blog for January 2011:

  • More than 45 million unique visitors used Yelp.com to make a spending decision based on 15 million reviews on the site.
  • 50% of reviewed businesses on Yelp.com are in the shopping or restaurants categories.

There is no doubt that mobile marketing and geo-targeting are both huge opportunities for brands and businesses, and the popularity of sites like Yelp demonstrates the power of mobile, local and social media marketing when they’re combined.  This is a trend that’s not going away.  The final quarter of 2010 marked the first time in history that smart phone sales outpaced PC sales as reported by research group IDC.  During the final three months of 2010, consumer electronics manufacturers shipped 100.9 million smart phones.  PC shipments for the same time period reached just 92.1 million.

If mobile marketing and local marketing aren’t already a part of your brand’s marketing plan, then you need to bump them up to the top of your prioritization list.  Consumers are looking to their mobile devices to find the kind of local and social information they need to make purchase decisions.  Your brand needs to be there, too.

Image: stock.xchng

Volkswagen Gets Creative in Super Bowl Commercials

The biggest U.S. football game of the year, the Super Bowl, was played on Feburary 6, 2011, and this year, it broke all records to become the most watched television show of all time.  As always, the commercials that aired during the Super Bowl were highly anticipated and buzzed about during and after the broadcast.

Making a statement for the 21st century, Volkswagen debuted new commercials that added a new sense of creativity to a brand that had lost some of its style in recent years.  You can watch both commercials below to see how a brand that had grown a bit stale is trying to re-energize itself.

The first ad features the classic Star Wars music and Darth Vader character through the eyes of a child trying to harness the power of the force.

The second showcases a CGI beetle, representative of the new Volkswagen Beetle.

Volkswagen has been taking a number of positive steps in recent years to drive sales to new heights.  The new advertising creative seems to be a great complement to that effort.  If nothing else, it has certainly piqued some Super Bowl viewers’ interest in what the new Volkswagen Beetle will look like.

What do you think?  Will the new Volkswagen advertising push attract a new generation of customers to the Volkswagen brand?

Facebook Advertising Results Disappoint

Facebook is at the top of the list of websites that serve the most ads, but the results businesses are getting from those ads are disappointing.  A new report from Webtrends reveals that in 2010, the click-through rate for ads on Facebook was just 0.051%, which is down from 0.063% in 2009.

Fortunately for advertisers, the price of Facebook ads is still low relative to other online advertising opportunities.  In 2010, Facebook CPMs had risen to $0.25 from $0.17 in 2009 when click-through rates were slightly better.

The Webtrends study also reported that only two ad categories performed above the 0.1% click-through rate in 2010 — tabloids and blogs at 0.165% and media and entertainment at 0.154%.  Coming in last was the health care ad category with a click-through rate of 0.011% and a cost-per-click that averaged $1.27.

Considering that eMarketer has estimated that advertising on Facebook in 2011 will reach $2.19 billion in the United States and $4.05 billion globally, advertisers don’t seem to be overly concerned with the lackluster click-through rates.

Keep in mind, these statistics are about advertising on Facebook (i.e., those ads that appear on the right side of your screen when you’re logged into your Facebook account), not social media marketing and content marketing via Facebook profiles, pages, groups, and other activities.

I spoke at a conference about branding and social media to an audience of small business owners recently, and during that conference, I had the opportunity to speak with author and Google AdWords expert Perry Marshall about the difference between Google AdWords advertising for businesses of all sizes and Facebook advertising.  He made an interesting analogy that summed it up quite well.  Perry said that Google AdWords is like the Yellow Pages and Facebook is like the neighborhood coffee shop.  If advertisers look at the audiences for both Google AdWords and Facebook as well as the behaviors and demographics related to usage and expectations, they’d have better success at placing and creating ads to boost return on investment.

Perry’s company offers a handy quiz on IsFacebookForMe.com that helps brands evaluate their business, customers, and competition to determine if Facebook is an effective place to advertise.  Take the quiz and see what it tells you about your brand.  It might help you strategize how Facebook advertising should (or should not) fit into your overall marketing plan.

Image: stock.xchng