In a post made by Google’s “Inside AdWords” blog, the launch of AdWords’ enhanced campaigns was revealed. The ever sophisticated mobile campaign, that businesses have spent valuable hours crafting to a point of success, is no longer available. It is replaced by a proposed model of efficiency and control.

Here is a summary of the key changes that will be made, with the pros and cons behind them:

1. Ability to Bid on Multiple Devices

Before the revelation of what is to be “enhanced campaigns”, advertisers were required to create numerous campaigns to account for the various mobile targeting criteria. Campaigns would have to be separated by geography (usually city) followed by device, and for each possible combination a new campaign would have to be created.

Pro: Less campaigns to manage!  Ads now have a bid weighting based on the device; gone are the days of device specific campaigns. To put some context around it, let’s say you’re a pizza store in the middle of town. Rather than bid one flat rate for all users clicking, Google now grants you the ability to bid much higher for the user that is 5 feet away, rather than 5 miles away.

Con: Given that the targeting ability behind the campaign is still a little cloudy the biggest pitfall arises when targeting specific tablet devices. While we will be able to see the performance of devices in reporting, Google has removed the ability to optimize for these devices.

2. Smarter Ads

Instead of targeting a user based on their search, the smarter ad targeting allows advertisers to target and direct users based on the context and device of their search.

Pro: “A national retailer with both physical locations and a website can show ads with click-to-call and location extensions for people searching on their smartphones, while showing an ad for their e-commerce website to people searching on a PC — all within a single campaign”. -Google

Con: All of the market research and segmentation that went into crafting the individual mobile campaigns will cease to become relevant. Given the inability for the granular targeting towards mobile devices, they would all have to be combined into one campaign and the strategic approach revamped. For some this could be years of work that will become obsolete.

3. Advanced Reporting Features

Advertisers will now be given the ability to track app downloads and click-to-call extensions in their AdWords reports.

Pro: More in depth reporting that allows advertisers to measure the true effectiveness of their campaigns.

Con: Beyond the time it will take the advertiser to migrate campaigns for click-to-call tracking, this feature doesn’t have much of a drawback.

The mandatory upgrade to enhanced campaigns will be made during the summer of 2013. As of now, the enhanced campaigns upgrade will be rolled out to advertisers as an optional upgrade over the next few weeks.

As a Google AdWords certified agency we are happy to connect and help you with your search marketing needs. Our experts can assist you in your transition to Enhanced Campaigns, or to simply get you started into the world of AdWords marketing.

Bluefin’s blog announcing the acquisition mentions that even though their software “included multiple social media services, the reality is that Twitter is the platform where the overwhelming majority ­– about 95% – of public real-time engagement with TV happens”.

Twitter believes that Bluefin’s data science capabilities and social TV expertise will help them “create innovative new ad products and consumer experiences in the exciting intersection of Twitter and TV”.

Twitter’s announcement came just after the Super Bowl, arguably the biggest day in TV advertising in the United States, and the most social comments and impressions of any TV program according to Bluefin. Matt McGee at MarketingLand.com reports that in the US “Twitter was mentioned in 26 of 52 national TV commercials — that’s 50 percent of the spots that aired during CBS’ game coverage. Facebook was mentioned in only four of those commercials — about eight percent”.

Business Insider first broke the news of the Twitter-Bluefin acquisition. They also shared the deck that explains why twitter just bought Bluefin labs for millions of dollars. The deck, created by Twitter UK outlines the benefits of Social TV, hinting to why Twitter made it’s biggest acquisition to date.

This isn’t Twitter’s first step in to the Social TV realm. Twitter partnered with Nielsen in December to create the “Nielsen Twitter TV Rating”, just a month after Nielsen acquired SocialGuide, the first real-time social guide for TV and Movies. The Nielson Twitter TV Rating will be available in the US for the Fall 2013 TV season.

These acquisitions and partnerships prove that Twitter is serious about social TV and is ready to show its value to networks, advertisers and brands.

Simply put, Native Advertising is content. It is not advertorial. It is Un-vertising. It’s a restructuring of internet advertising in such a way that it becomes an integrated part of the user experience online. It blends. Some good examples are web films, promoted tweets and Facebook posts, articles “brought to you by”, engaging standalone ad units (games, interactive graphics) and infographics [for a visual definition, click here]

Covert and sneaky? Some would agree. But the absolute reality is that people choose to engage with what interests them online. If it is a video, article, blog post, photograph, or if it is an advertisement in the form of a video, article blog post or photograph, I don’t think it really matters, as long as, in the end, it is providing a meaningful experience to the viewer.

Establishing and maintaining trust, however, will be one of the challenges that advertisers will face in their exploration of this new medium. Simply put, people don’t like to be duped.

It reminds me of a scene in my favourite holiday movie, A Christmas Story. Ralphie – our 9-year-old protagonist – finally receives his Little Orphan Annie Secret Decoder Pin in the mail after seemingly endless weeks of waiting. A device that will allow him to decipher Annie’s secret messages read out at the end of her radio program. Ralphie dutifully records the encrypted message and excitement builds as he uses the pin to decipher it – what was Annie trying to tell him?

When the message is finally revealed as “Be sure to drink your Ovaltine”, Ralphie exclaims “a crummy commercial?” Even kids know when they’ve been had. If Annie had included an exciting and engaging message for Ralphie to decode, along with the plug for Ovaltine, I’m sure that he would have had a more positive user experience. Now it’s unlikely that he will ever trust Annie, or drink Ovaltine, again.

This is not unlike effective Native Advertising – as long as the user has a meaningful experience in the end, do they care that it’s an ad? Probably not.

There’s a whole lot more to the story, and since the medium is still in its infancy, it will be interesting to see how it develops over time, and how it is received. I think infographics do a great job at presenting complicated information, so I’m including one here. Native Advertising explained simply and visually by Solve Media.

The headlines about how marketers are dealing with social are confusing – GM pulled all ad dollars from Facebook, seemingly sending a message that Facebook was good for branding but not much more.  Their competitor Ford is highly invested and sees the ROI from Facebook in terms of brand advocacy and stakeholder engagement.

The lines become even more blurry as there is limited information to answer the question of effectivity of social and ultimately it’s ROI.

The discussion about the effectivity of social (earned) and paid really can’t be addressed without the context of owned within the marketing plan.

According to Neilsen, the value of social lies in trust.  They report that ‘recommendations from people I know’ scored the highest trust rating among consumers, with branded websites coming in closely behind; all paid ads (including those on social networks) scored the lowest.

So should the marketer give up paid and concentrate on social and owned?  Giving up paid really isn’t an option given its broad reach and effectiveness at driving action.

The question becomes – how can earned, owned and paid work together to improve trust and deliver better results?  Here’s a thoughtstarter:

1. Paid social ads work harder with a social layer; if the consumer sees that your ad is liked by friends they are 55% more likely to recall the ad and more importantly to trust it
2. Paid digital ads drive consumers to owned websites; increases traffic, ecommerce and conversions
3. Owned can be a work horse; exposure to your brands website can drive online and offline sales.

The opportunity is putting it all together to maximize effectiveness – build social into paid, use paid to drive to your website and then optimize your site to drive maximum results.  This integrated approach layers in the elusive trust factor and allows paid media to work harder.

The IAB recently released a great infographic to guide you through developing a holistic approach to Paid, Owned and Earned media – worth checking out. Click here.

Globe and Mail

Postmedia, which includes

• National Post
• Ottawa Citizen
• Vancouver Province
• The Vancouver Sun

Sun Media (launching 2013), which includes

• Toronto Sun
• Winnipeg Sun
• Ottawa Sun
• Edmonton Sun
• Calgary Sun

The Toronto Star (launching 2013)

The metered paywall allows users to view a specific number of articles before requiring paid subscription.  Users can access any article as long as they have not surpassed the set limit.  In the case of the Globe and Mail users can access 10 free items each month (including articles, videos, slide shows and other features).

What does this mean for the reader?

The idea behind the metered paywall is that casual users will not notice the difference, while heavy users will want to subscribe so they can continue to access the content.  For heavy users that do not want to pay for content, they will likely diversify their news reading across multiple sites.

What does this mean for advertisers?

The two things that come immediately to mind are a decrease in reach and impression availability.  The good news is that these potential decreases should be minimal.

Reach

As stated casual users will not notice a difference with the paywall so things should remain status quo with these users.  On the other side, not all heavy users will subscribe, but will they stop visiting the site altogether?  Probably not.  While there will be a few that stop visiting the site (out of spite?), it’s hard to imagine that there will be a significant drop off in the heavy user base either.

Impression availability

As the paywall will cause some users to change from heavy to casual there could be a drop in pages viewed on site, which means available impressions will go down.  Where I suspect advertisers will feel the difference is in attempting to buy this premium website inventory through ad networks.  The decrease in impression inventory will likely mean that the newspapers will be able to sell more of the inventory themselves, thus limiting the unsold inventory to ad networks.

Where advertisers will see the biggest change is in the ability to target specific user demographics.  When users subscribe they will have to submit information like age and sex.  Then when the user is logged in, the site will know their demographic details and will allow for accurate targeting.

In short, all the attention around paywalls may be for naught.  True, some of the heavy users will be upset that they now have to pay for unlimited online access, but although user attitudes towards the newspaper may change this will have minimal impact on advertisers.

How does RTB work?

• RTB is a data-driven buying model through which we place bids for individual ad impressions (somewhat similar to Google AdWords where we bid against competitors on keywords/phrases).
• This process takes place in milliseconds, allowing us to adjust strategies almost immediately based on the performance of individual placements on site and creative iterations.
• In an RTB environment, we analyze multiple variables of an ad impression, such as demographics, geographic locations, and website / publisher attributes – finding the most qualified impression overtime.

Why should advertiser’s care?

• We can target based on content that a user is looking at or behaviours that they have exhibited online
• It is cost efficient – budget is only spent on well-performing strategies and tactics
• Learn what works and what doesn’t work (from a creative version, placement, content environment, and behaviour perspective) at the impression level.
• As soon as the campaign goes live, we start collecting data that helps inform creative / messaging and response rates. It’s the only advertising medium that generates results in real time and allows us to optimize on the fly
• All tactics are optimized to campaign conversion goals (your KPIs) – providing you with tangible results.

Currently the space is growing – and quality inventory is only now (in the past 6-12 months) becoming available. The industry as a whole is still in testing mode – finding the right partner and the right inventory to scale. Watch closely over the next year to see where we net out.

Our prediction? Online publishers focused on building quality and unique data sets for advertisers will come out on top.

There have been no major format changes or new stations introduced since spring 2012, but the fall survey is comparable to the spring with most markets seeing shifts in the top 3-4 stations. However, while their position in the market may change, the top 4 stations remain the top 4 in each market.

We are seeing a bit of a trend this fall with sister stations in most markets.  If one station did well, or remained stable, their sister station experienced a loss. This illustrates the need to work with a deep station list to offset shifts in audience during campaigns.

In Halifax, Q104 was unable to hang on to its impressive audience gains in the spring, but despite a loss of 25%, remains the market leader.  The early success of Energy 103.5 is short lived, but sister station LIVE 105 finally slows its downward trend.  However, against 18-34, both Energy & LIVE gain ground. While not as lucrative a demo as 25-54, their more focussed format seems to be working with younger Haligonians. C100 remains a strong second with FX 101.9 and KOOLFM rounding out the top four. Rogers Adult Contemporary station LITE FM continues to trend upwards grabbing fifth place.

In Moncton K945 regains some of the ground it lost in the spring, and takes back second place.  C103 maintains its position as market leader but sister station XL-96 drops to third. Rogers News 91.9 shows great gains, but remains firmly at the bottom of the English market.

Most of the Saint John stations lost in the spring, but made up that loss and more in fall.  The exception is K100 which continues to slide.  And despite the ongoing strike at Big John, management has kept the station relevant and their audience has stayed loyal.  Like Moncton, the Rogers News station does well.

St. John’s continues to be a volatile market.  HITS FM takes a big hit but manages to only slide to second place.  K-ROCK regains some of its lost audience, and The Coast continues to trend up. 590 VOCM, which was historically the market leader, continues to slide.

In Charlottetown, there is a complete shift in the market from spring.  The MBS stations make gains while the Newcap stations show losses. And while CFCY takes top spot from Hot 105.5, the top three stations are all very close in audience.

Sydney and Fredericton are only surveyed in the fall. In Sydney, with the exception of MAX 98.3, all stations show losses. The Giant remains market leader with MAX 98.3 maintaining second place. In Fredericton, Capital FM holds onto first place despite losing almost 20% of its audience. FRED FM which was strong in the past two surveys takes a tumble with almost 40% audience loss.

As always, local radio offers Atlantic advertisers good value by providing connections to the community. Local radio creates content of interest, such as “Storm Watch” as we head into winter, and works well for both brand and retail efforts.

Source: Fall 2012 BBM, Adults 2554, All Week AQH (000)

Now, almost 18 years later, the online display ecosystem has developed from direct buying and selling into an increasingly complex environment with data now powering digital advertising like real time bidding and selling.

In our journey to help illustrate [in a simple manner] the evolution of display advertising from its inception to today, we came across this great 3 minute video from the Interactive Advertising Bureau that does a great job of visualizing this complex beast.

When the role of online is to drive to Performance or Conversion goals (vs. Awareness or Engagement), we use today’s ad technologies to access data and insights in real-time, for a more efficient and positive return on your online advertising spend.

How can we help you?

Two years later and RTB has properly exploded and entered the Canadian online marketplace. RTB is a game-changer for the online advertising industry and warrants special attention. To make things easy [30 seconds does not do RTB justice], we will be starting a 4-part series that will unravel the mysteries of RTB – what it means for brands, marketers, the industry and the consumer.

The intersection of advertising and technology is something I’ve always geeked out about, so this AdNerd is properly ecstatic about where the industry is headed. Stay tuned for Part 1: Real Time Bidding Defined. Or Unraveled. I haven’t decided yet.

It’s imperative for brands to develop smart mobile strategies that augment the consumer experience. After all, what better way to satisfy curiosity then with a device virtually attached to one’s self?