Crowd Sourced Marketing: The Internet is the World's Democracy

Democracy: Invented by Greece, Popularized by America, Perfected on the Web.

The internet is a virtual web of democracy that covers every nation and plagues even the most tight fisted administrations. It is the ultimate platform for equality. At the heart of its democratic fabric is crowd sourcing. Anyone, anywhere can contribute to or consume information, goods, or services from anyone else. This thinking is working its way into just about every industry there is. And advertising is no exception.

Websites like poptent.com  host a network of creative minds with willing video cameras, lighting equipment, storyboards, and computer savvy, all willing to make advertising content for your company. 

 All you have to do is submit your assignments and let the masses go to work. In return you will get polished, finished material that is web and broadcast ready. At last year's Crowd Conference in San Francisco, Photobucket VP of Marketing, David Toner, played a video spot that he had commissioned from Poptent. He said that he had purchased this, and four other video ads for 1/7th the price of a traditional advertising agency fee.


Crowd Conf 2012: Changing the Future of Work - David Toner (Photobucket) from CrowdsourcingDE on Vimeo.

This new model is cost effective and is beginning to be embraced by big name players. Poptent's first client was Nestle, but now that list includes the likes of General Mills, Coca-Cola, Procter and Gamble, American Express, LG, Vizio, FedEx, and many more. Crowd Sourcing may just be an integral part of the future of content creation. The question is, how will traditional agencies adapt?

Google Vs. Bing

Last year Google reported revenues from ad sales on the Google AdWord platform of over 43.6 billion dollars. Chicago based company AdGooroo released a study comparing the average Cost Per Click (CPC) spent in each of the six key online sectors that buy advertising. The amount these sectors are ponying up for a humble mouse click runs anywhere from $0.72 up to $3.51. Take a flat mathematical average of all these CPC’s ($1.83 per click) and divide them into the total amount spent on advertising last year (and pretending, for nicety’s sake, that all six industries buy equal amounts of advertising), and you get 23.8 billion mouse clicks that generated revenue for Google in 2012. Or in other words, every second Google sells 1,509 CPC advertisements to the tune of $2,765. Want to go one step further? Google tops the tech industry pay charts with a staggering mid-career median salary of $141,000, which means it takes Google ads just under one minute to pay their average employee’s yearly salary. Multiply that by 38,739 employees, and Google makes payroll for the entire company in just under 27 days. Even in February that doesn’t take all month. And all of this from CPC advertising.

Google has one major competitor for your CPC advertising dollars, Bing. So the question is, what does the competition have to offer?

To Bing, or not to Bing?

Is it better than Google? No. Not really. Consult the aforementioned AdGooroo study and you will see that Adwords trumps Bing in Click Through Rate (CTR) by anywhere form 2.4 to 5.2 times. The average ad impressions on Google’s platform is 22.5% more than on Bing. If you want your ad to end up on the First Search Engine Results Page (SERP), you’re better off with AdWords as well. Google gets 35.7% more of its advertisers on First SERP than Bing, and of advertisers who use both, only 6% reported they didn’t get First SERP with AdWords compared to 42% who did not land on the first results page with Bing. But these are secondary reasons Google outperforms Bing. The primary reason isn’t the quality of its advertising platform, it’s the simple fact that Google’s search engine commands 2/3 of the market share, while Bing only has 1/3. But look for a moment at the mobile marketplace. Google is the default search engine on all Apple mobile devices and Android devices. Where does that leave Bing?

So are there any good reasons to advertise with Bing? Sure, just run that question through an impartially selected web browser and you’ll get hits all over the web with long lists of reasons to Bing. For me, however, it all boils down to three simple reasons: cost, diversity, and early adoption.

1: Cost. Bing is cheaper, a lot cheaper. About 40% cheaper, in fact. So that’s obvious.

2: Diversity. Think of your advertising budget like a portfolio. You have to diversify. You don’t want all of your money in the stock market, so you buy bonds, annuities, gold and invest in great companies like AOL. That way, when things take a Ted Turner for the worse in one sector, you still afloat in all the others. Putting your entire ad spend in AdWords can be risky. Google plays it heavy handed when deciding which ads they like and which ads they don’t. And when they find an ad they don’t like, or, as was the case in December of ’09, 30,000 ads they don’t like, they simply delete them. How would your campaign fare if you woke up tomorrow and you no longer existed in Google? So spread the love.

3: Early Adoption. It’s not too late to be an early adopter of Bing’s Bing Ads platform. There aren’t nearly as many people advertising on Bing as on Google, which is why prices are so much lower. But all the data shows Bing on the rise. Bing is increasing spending on CPC 10% faster than Google and as a result it is growing much faster. Quarter-over-quarter Bing is stealing market share from Google. Which means what is cheap today because demand is low won’t be cheap tomorrow. Hearken back to the investment model. Want to buy Google stock? Good luck. It’ll cost you $893 per share. But if you’d been smart enough to buy Google stock in 2004 you could have practically stolen it at $85 per share. So don’t wait. Bing is growing and it’s getting better all the time. It’s also gaining traction in big places. For instance, Firefow recently switched its default search engine from Google to Bing. And in the smartphone/tablet market, Apple recently announced that when it releases iOS 7 this fall, it will use Bing to power Siri’s search functions. The trajectory is promising, the time is right.

So long for now, and happy Binging.

The Online Cookie Jar: The Cookies May Be Disappearing, But The Fingerprints Remain

Online privacy is a nasty question to dissect, mostly because it’s a term that is at odds with itself. We love going online, we hate being followed, but you can’t go online without someone knowing what you’re doing. Truth be told, for the average web surfer, the only ones who really care what you’re up to are people who want to sell you something. In fact, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau, some 80% of marketing campaigns use online behavioral monitoring to pinpoint their target audience. So yes, someone out there is paying money to know what sites you visit, what you clicked on, what you bought, what you skipped over, and so on. Anyone with any experience in web marketing knows this data is indespensible and isn’t likely to go away anytime soon. What is potentially going away soon is the mechanism for collecting this data.

For years it’s all been about the cookie. You hit up my site, I give you a cookie, that cookie follows you around and reports back to me. I compile the data on your activity and sell it off to whoever is interested so they can follow you around the net with more ads for that revealing euro swimsuit you "accidentally" clicked on. But cookies can expire. Or they can be blocked by the user. And they are not supported on mobile devices. This is where the new tech comes into play.

You can shake the jar without taking a cookie, but you can’t help leaving behind fingerprints.

Your computer or smart phone is unique. Websites can read the individual characteristics of your device to determine your identity much like forensics experts can read the lines and bowls of a print to nail a perp. A recent article in Forbes by Adam Tanner explains that digital fingerprinting takes the, “characteristics of a computer such as what plugins and software you have installed, the size of the screen, the time zone, fonts and other features of any particular machine,” and uses it know exactly who is visiting a website. What’s that, you say? You run the most popular operating system on the most popular platform with a fixed screen size so you think you won’t stand out? According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, if you use Flash or Java (and let’s face it, you do, everybody does), then there is a 94% chance that you are uniquely identifiable by your digital fingerprint.

And it goes deeper. Companies like AdStack sell a service that allows you to send out an email whose content upon opening can be changed in real time. What? Huh? So the initial email that lands in your inbox is essentially just a hollow frame, a place holder, without predetermined content. When you open the email, a host of behavior monitoring data is computed instantly to determine what you will see. A business could run different promotions based on availability of inventory. Or maybe there has been an important change in your web history from the time the email went out till the time you open it. No problem, the content is fluid.

This kind of tech is powerful, but try and read up on who is using it and you will soon find there aren’t many owning up to it. It bears quite a stigma, but is this justified? That’s a question worth asking. Let’s put it another way: You can’t have the web without being watched, and the watchers fuel the advertisers, who in turn keep much of the web free. The question, then, is do you prefer advertisements tailored to your behavior, or not? Here is a true story. I set my free Spotify account to “House on Pooh Corner” for my year old daughter. In less than an hour I heard an ad for provocative, hard core rap music, and two ads for Trojan condoms. I’ll take tailored content everytime.

Branding Biologique

New laser marketing regulations in the EU allow for laser tattooing of commercially available fruit. Gone are the "Super Food" Chiquita banana stickers that decorate the tweener generation's MacBooks. Too wasteful. These sticky labels requires wood, water, adhesive, and ink, hallmarks of an industry lagging in the tech curve. This new technology, developed by the intuitively named Spanish company, LaserFood, uses none of the above. They explain; “The Laser Mark System does not burn the surface of the fruit, instead removing a microscopically small area of fruit skin that discolors rather than burns the product without touching or harming cells in the skin surface." This opens up a whole realm of possibilities for visual marketing. 

Obviously, this is good news for the produce industry. Companies can set their design teams loose with creative license to pimp out pomegranate with indelible branding. But what are the ramifications? 

For one thing, it opens up the possibility for brand name produce. We all recognize a Chiquita banana, or a Dole pineapple, but that's about where brand recognition begins and ends in the produce aisle. Could this usher in a new age of boutique branding for peas and carrots? There is certainly demand in our culture, with the consumer's newfound culinary enlightenment, for quality goods. A grower or supplier who can associate his brand and branding with the do-good, social conscious, buy local ethos could sink his teeth, and his logo, into a healthy market share with a consumer base willing to pay a premium for high-end produce. 

Another boon? Advertising revenue. All of the heretofore unblemished fruit flesh could be sold to advertisers to promote their product. Sound atrocious? Consider this: would your 4 year-old eat zucchini or artichoke? Perhaps not. But what about Spider-Man spinach, or Batman bananas? Now you're talking. The potential is real. 

But could there be a backlash? Will people resent having advertisements emblazoned on their apples? I think so. The restaurant industry, for one, will not willingly toss a salad of "Your Logo Here" tomatoes for paying guests. And consumers who might not mind a tastefully branded tangerine might feel differently when fruit and veggies become ad space available to the highest bidder, as it undoubtedly will in an arena with no immediate regulation. 

But the technology is at our doorstep. The question is not if we adopt it, the question is who will do it smartest? The consumer will adapt and accept. The restaurant industry operates largely independently of commercial grocery stores and has enough collective buying power to ensure it gets what it wants. And who knows, maybe Applebee's wants and exclusive relationship with So&So produce, and won't mind tossing that tattooed tomato salad after all. The issue, then, is really one to be tackled by Marketing and Advertising teams, so a word to the food industry; brand your berries now while the market is fresh. 

Check out more here:

http://mobile.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/06/21/laser_food_etching_technology_turns_fruit_and_vegetables_into_works_of_art.html

http://www.designboom.com/technology/laser-tattoos-will-replace-sticky-labels-on-fresh-produce/