Monthly Archives: January 2012

Re-Targeting, Mobile Edition

In an App-centric mobile world it is hard for branded apps to make it onto phones. And achieving a download is only the first step in an uphill battle for brands that consists of an average app shelf life of 6 month, an average of 28 apps on an iPhone to compete against and the challenge of providing worthwhile content for return visits. Up until last week it was up to the brands to make sure their App was good enough to encourage revisits before it was sent sailing into the market. Now, Millennium Media has released a new mobile targeting tool for brands. Basically app re-targeting, a mobile banner can be served to users who have previously downloaded a specific app. Once this banner is tapped, it can deep dive into that app, a feature that has previously not been offered. Not only is the app re-targeting new, so is linking into apps. Previously apps have been one way gates capable of only driving traffic out.

There are definitely additional uses for this type of targeting. With Apps being extremely specified in their function, a very clear picture could be painted of a user’s interest and behavioral profile. For example, if you’ve downloaded a Frommer’s France Guidebook and Paris Subway Map, you’re prime for an Air France ad.

Check out the full article at:

http://www.mobilemarketingwatch.com/millennial-media-rolls-out-new-user-engagement-tool-for-mobile-apps-20644/

Apple’s Human Cost

For those of you who haven’t heard, the tech giant was in some pretty hot water this week as a result of a scathing article in the New York Times that highlighted Apple’s involvement in deplorable worker conditions overseas. It’s lengthy, but worth a read:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/26/business/ieconomy-apples-ipad-and-the-human-costs-for-workers-in-china.html?pagewanted=1

I’ve seen quite a few Facebook posts regarding this article over the past couple of days so decided to dive into Sysomos to gather some insight into the Social Media impact. Surprisingly, mentions of the article/incident accounted for only 2% of Apple’s overall chatter. Pretty tiny. The only shift that could be seen was neutral/negative sentiment shifting from 45% to 66% vs. previous weeks.

What does this tell us? Well, when you’re a company as big as Apple, even major stories like this can be eclipsed by general product chatter and fanboy reviews. Goes to show (depending on the brand involved), not everything has the impact or share-ability we assume it will in social media

 

 

Social Media & TV – The Golden Globes

Social Media and TV are a hot item right now. Rightly so, as more and more companies are cracking the code on how these two mediums relate from an insights point of view.

Check out companies like Networked Insights and Blufin Labs, wicked technology going on here.

As a fun exercise, let’s take a huge television event like last nights Golden Globes. A simple search using our social media tools shows the most talked about people or topics as it relates to this event. This is a quick and easy way to define the impact of a particular show and more specifically, who or what was causing the discussion. Pretty powerful stuff.

But I think the most important thing to note here is that Madonna and her gross arms didn’t even come remotely close to making the cut…I for one, am shocked.

TV’s big digital disruption

Bit of a lame post to say hey just go read this here, but go read this here.

It ‘s worth it because this is what is coming at us. 5 years? probably less in Canada. The hole in the argument is that it is primarily cable set top boxes gathering the data. I doubt it; I think Rogers and Bell want to have caps on data because they realize that given the choice between cable and online, they will choose online.

Apple TV installed at home.

I was one of the millions of Canadians that joined the consumer electronic madness for boxing day, which actually started at 8pm Christmas Eve. We now have a few new devices that are signs of our IP fuelled media household. First up was a new receiver that picks up a plethora of internet radio, none of which will be used. Hey I bought the thing for more watts per channel and a bunch of HDMI inputs. The main thing was to hook this up to Apple TV. Now I have 5 video inputs, Wii, DVD, VCR, Broadcast and iTunes all being properly upsampled to 1080p where necessary.I always thought Blueray was a dead end cash grab.

AppleTV is really nice.The interface is great, it set up in an instant and the whole end to end ecosystem for renting, buying already existed. The problem is choice – too much. It is impossible to get 5 people to agree on any one thing so rather than standing in the video store perplexed, we sat in the basement going through preview after preview and then over to Youtube. Future predictions on how this will impact our media habits? Even less broadcast tv, more gaming and more time spent in the DVD/VCR bargain bins (upsampling works really well) and a higher iTunes bill every month.