But some advertisers with big spending accounts are wondering whether they’re getting their money’s worth.

The doubt lingers as bankers and prospective investors decide how to value Facebook for an initial public offering planned for May 18, said people familiar with the matter. Facebook executives will be pitching the company to big investors in an IPO roadshow starting Monday, these people said.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

What gives?

With all due respect to Lewis, who is one of the greatest innovators in media, I left realizing that there are different ideas of what “social” can mean on the Web, and that not everyone knows where the gold lies. Putting the whole picture together, there are four different models for social that, despite sharing the same name, are completely different concepts.

• Social = Viral Hit
  For those on the marketing and advertising side especially, the word “social” often means that you or your client are jealous of someone else’s success. Viral hits are largely based on breakthrough creative, though great distribution is an often-forgotten second factor. Who wouldn’t want to be responsible for the next Old Spice guy? Of course, these kinds of hits are easy to ask for and hard to achieve. And if you do achieve it, you’ll need another viral hit to bring your audience back again.
  Verdict: Good luck!
• Social = 1,000,000 Fans
  
  Here, the theory goes that social means getting lots of fans, and then something magical is supposed to happen. Like the boys’ adventure with the “South Park” underpants gnomes, it usually ends up with a lot of time and money spent, a big collection achieved, and a big question mark over “what now?” It doesn’t matter how low your cost per fan was, if the value per fan is near-zero. It’s not the size of the fan base that matters — it’s what you do with it.
  Verdict: Bad strategy.
• Social = Comments
  Another concept of “social” is that it’s a medium for conversation. With programs like @ComcastCares, brands have used this approach to shape their brand images and reputations — and it has worked. On the publishing side, the Huffington Post and other publishers have succeeded in using social engagement to drive deep participation and connection among an inner circle of its audience. Hosting a conversation certainly builds a relationship. A “Like,” comment, or share from a user can all get you more exposure on the margin, but, as Lewis noted on our panel, the friends who come that way don’t stay very long and don’t come back much. They came for their friends, not for your Web site. That’s why, even though engagement strategies are great for your core audience, they won’t single-handedly drive the large, loyal audience we all crave.
  Verdict: Smart, but it’s not enough.
• Social = Lasting Relationship
  A lasting relationship with an audience is the holy grail of every brand online. In fact, it has made Amazon the most valuable e-commerce company on earth, and it’s made Disney and the NFL valuable over decades. But what some haven’t realized yet is that the most valuable mode of social is in keeping these relationships connected.

  Do you have any idea how valuable a “Like” is? Any seventh-grader goes all atwitter when his crush says, “I like you.” It’s permission to see someone more, get to know them better, and talk to them all the time — not just once, but every day. If you are doing it right, a “Like” or a “Follow” begins a two-way relationship: One where your audience is asking for programming from you every day, week and month; and giving you their interest data about what works and what doesn’t. With that relationship, you can choose what content you create, and when and how you share it. That relationship isn’t once-and-done — it’s ongoing.

  And data from our experience shows that it translates into a million visits a week from our fan base — almost one visit for every fan, not to mention dozens more impressions right in their home page, the Facebook news feed. Done right, social can already drive more traffic than search, making a new top venue to recruit, and more importantly, retain an audience.

  More and more, I talk to marketers and publishers who have hundreds of thousands or millions of fans and followers, and yet have no idea what to do with them. They haven’t realized that they have subscribers at the ready, waiting for great content and experiences — the currency of their relationship.

  Nor do they understand the tremendous value of those subscribers: If you give your friends what they are after, they’ll keep coming back for more, and they’ll bring their friends. This is exactly how companies like Groupon and Zynga have reinvented their categories and created businesses worth billions of dollars in the process.
  Verdict: There is nothing more powerful than a lasting relationship.

Ben Elowitz (@elowitz) is co-founder and CEO of next-generation Web publisher Wetpaint, and author of the Digital Quarters blog about the future of digital media. Prior to Wetpaint, Elowitz co-founded Blue Nile (NILE).

“I have about 50 pairs of Nikes in my closet, and it seemed to me like I should be treated differently by Nike than a customer who has zero pairs,” he said.

The thought inspired Swinmurn to start RNKD, which is launching in beta today. Customers can create profiles and upload pictures of items of clothing they already own by snapping a picture and designating brands and where they bought each piece.

“The idea was to bridge the gap between consumers and brands by using what people already have in their closets,” Swinmurn said.

Users will be rewarded with badges and points for uploading photos, and will have the opportunity to win gift cards based on their participation. Swinmurn believes brands could use RNKD as a way to offer clothing at a discount to their most dedicated fans.

The emphasis is on the brand, rather than the store at which the apparel was purchased, which is how many other loyalty programs are designed.

Swinmurn, who left Zappos before it was sold to Amazon, also gained inspiration for RNKD after starting a small clothing line called Dethrone, which creates gear and clothing for practitioners of mixed martial arts. He said he sells 99 percent of the apparel to small shops. “We have no idea who walks into the shops and buys the product,” he said.

Swinmurn is hoping to tip the market on its head. Brands are already giving discounts on clothing at stores like Ross and T.J. Maxx, and on online flash sales sites like Gilt Groupe, ideeli and Rue La La. But those discounts aren’t being given to the biggest fans of the brands.

Instead, Swinmurn argues, discounts should go to consumers who deserve them.

RNKD is based in San Francisco, and is self-funded by Swinmurn, who has an engineering team of one.

In an interview in Silicon Valley, Brad Serwin, the COO of Playdom’s social games unit, said the company has finally started to come out of hiding after being acquired for $563.2 million, plus a $200 million earn-out, more than a year ago.

One reason it took so long, according to Serwin: The general pains of integrating a small company into a larger organization.

Since the acquisition, Playdom has moved to new offices in Palo Alto, Calif., which it shares with Disney Mobile (which was formed through the acquisition of another Silicon Valley start-up, Tapulous).

Both have been learning to work with a parent company that is headquartered 350 miles away.

“A year after the acquisition, we are successfully transitioning into an operating division within Disney,” Serwin said. “We are 100 percent back to work.”

It took long enough, especially given the radical change the industry has undergone since Facebook launched its third-party application platform in May 2007. [More on how the industry has changed  in an interview today with Rick Thompson, a founder of Playdom.]

Since then, games have become the most popular applications on the platform, and have evolved from simple and inexpensive time killers to graphically rich applications.

Facebook has changed the rules, too.

This has impacted everyone in the space, not just three-year-old Playdom. Two of the biggest challenges emerged when the social network shut down its viral channels: When it became difficult to acquire new users by posting messages on users’ pages, and when Facebook implemented Credits, a virtual currency that requires developers to cut Facebook 30 percent of all revenues.

Playdom execs believe the company has finally reorganized, and are planning on making a big splash in what many worried was a dead pool.

Of the dozen titles slated for the next year, two games will come as soon as this month, and up to three games — coming in January, March and August — will leverage Disney brands.

Playdom’s next game is called Secret Agent X. For now, it is only available in beta in some international markets, but it is coming to the U.S. in the fall. In the game, a player leads a dual life as an average citizen who at night becomes a secret agent, exploring new locations and completing missions with the help of high-tech gadgets.

In the trailer for the game, seen below, a suburban housewife manages to save the world, all the while keeping her cover by making sure dinner is on the table on time.

As the seventh-largest app maker, according to AppData, Playdom falls below Zynga, Electronic Arts and even such new entrants as Germany’s Wooga.

That said, Playdom’s recent launch of Gardens of Time was considered a breakthrough hit that used game mechanics rarely seen on Facebook. The social game falls into the category of “hidden objects,” where players try to find a list of items in a room, similar to “Where’s Waldo?”

The concept behind hidden objects is not new to gaming, but it is new to Facebook, and was recently identified as a niche worth pursuing. Today, Playdom’s game is garnering nearly three million daily active users, which registers slightly below Zynga’s new Adventure World.

Playdom hopes it will prosper by bringing new concepts to social gaming and also by leveraging Disney’s big brands to catch players’ attention.

As a recent test, Playdom renamed its game GnomeTown as Disney’s GnomeTown. Serwin said the game performed much better with the new name.

Playdom’s close competitor Playfish is also relying on the intellectual property of its parent company, Electronic Arts. It has seen its Sims Social title climb the charts to become the second-most-popular game.

On the other hand, Zynga, which is the largest social games maker, has made up all of its own properties, ranging from FarmVille to its newest property, Adventure World. More recently, it has used name-brand promotions within its games to garner attention, such as Lady Gaga in FarmVille, and more recently, Enrique Iglesias in CityVille.

“Competitors have chunks of IP, but we have a lot to choose from,” said Serwin, adding that it’s not as if Playdom alone needs intellectual property: “Everyone needs IP.”

Serwin said the Playdom division’s plan is to work closely with Disney; it has hired a liaison who works in Burbank every day to make sure Playdom’s plans are on course with what Disney has in mind.

Still, Serwin can’t deny that the lull in game making has dragged down the results of Disney’s Interactive Group. Disney reported $21 million in accounting adjustment in the third quarter and $34 million in the second quarter tied to Playdom alone, and the losses are expected to continue.

In the second-quarter earnings call, President and CEO Bob Iger tried to explain its multimillion dollar charges to analysts:

“We thought it would be wise to improve the quality of the games that we’re going to release. So, we took a five-month hiatus, which had not been planned, from releasing games, to build a higher-quality game, and then also to re-stack our technical capabilities to deal with volume or to deal with scale, which we are hoping to achieve.”

Iger declined to say when the group would hit break-even, but that it was expected to get into the black by 2013.

Iger gave Gardens of Time as an example of a game that is monetizing well. “We feel good about the direction of Playdom, particularly with this new hit game in the marketplace,” he said, adding that new games in the pipeline will be based on Disney, ESPN and Marvel brands.

It has taken more than a year, but Serwin believes Playdom is ready.

“We’ve made a connection with people at Disney to get it done,” he said. “Whether it should have happened faster or slower, I don’t know, but it’s happening and it’s great.”

That legacy — and his influence on the lives of people around the world — is inestimable, and we will be talking about him and his amazing, interesting life a great deal in the coming days and weeks.

But as the sun comes up here in New York this morning, still mourning the departed, we are forced to confront more immediate and material concerns. Insensitive though it may seem to consider at this moment, Apple is not simply a great company — it has also proven over the last decade to be a great investment, and as such is one of the most widely held stocks in the world. Its largest shareholders are the big mutual fund companies like Fidelity, the Vanguard Group, State Street Corp. and T. Rowe Price, who among them own more than 15 percent of Apple’s shares.

And as Apple’s value, as measured by market capitalization, has ballooned from less than $10 billion a decade ago to north of $350 billion as of yesterday, the anxiety about the mortality of its founder has regularly caused its value to swoon. Over the seven-year course of Jobs’s illness, Apple shareholders have had to come to terms with the so-called “Jobs premium,” the extra value attached to the company’s shares that existed as long as he was directly involved in mapping company strategy and applying his unique touch to its products.

The conventional wisdom among Apple analysts now is that Apple investors, once known for their hair-trigger reflex to sell on any whiff of rumor, have gained a more complex and reasonable understanding of the situation. Apple, without Jobs, will still be Apple, and for the immediate and medium-term future, there is no reason to believe that its strategy and execution will falter in his absence.

But as I wrote in August, when Jobs resigned his position as CEO, it’s important to understand that Apple’s long-term vision has been deposited deeply within the DNA of the company. There is a script for the next several years. Products are mapped out, schedules are set, components have been purchased, manufacturing deals have been inked. In short, everyone at Apple knows what their job is and will continue to do it without missing a beat. The path ahead is no less clear today than it was yesterday.

No doubt the shares will be volatile as the markets open today. But that volatility will be much less than might have been expected years ago. It wasn’t so long ago that analysts predicted that, upon the death or departure of Steve Jobs, the company would lose as much as a third of its value. That’s no longer likely.

Today, investors seem to understand intuitively that the fundamental reasons to invest in Apple remain unchanged. The growth trajectory and profitability in the sales of its products remain the envy of the industry. There are predictions that Apple will sell more than 100 million iPhones next year, and nearly 30 million iPads in the second half of this year. Mac sales continue to set records quarter after quarter.

For all its strength in North America and Europe, Apple still has significant room to grow overseas. There are already signs of progress. In its most recent quarter, Apple reported revenue in the Asia-Pacific region of $6.3 billion, amounting to 22 percent of sales, and more than triple the sales seen in that region a year ago. One key market — China — remains a strategic priority for CEO Tim Cook and his team. Apple is still something new to the people of China, and introducing them to the brand on an ever-widening scale will be an interesting journey.

If history is any judge, it will be a fruitful introduction. Wherever it goes, Apple’s brand seems to succeed. Ask anyone familiar with it — it is easily one of the best-loved and most recognized brands. And yet when branding experts measure its brand equity, it ranks high but surprisingly also shows room to improve.

Just this week, Interbrand, a consultancy that focuses on corporate brands, released its annual survey of the world’s Top 100 brands. Apple is ranked No. 8, one notch above the Walt Disney Company (of which, ironically, Jobs was the largest shareholder), and two notches above Hewlett-Packard; the company had seen the largest year-over-year improvement in the value of its brand. It’s informative to consider some other names that appeared in the Top 10: Stalwart consumer brands like Coca-Cola (No. 1), General Electric (No. 5) and McDonald’s (No. 6).

Yet it’s also interesting to note that among the technology names that appeared in the Top 10 of the Interbrand survey, Apple wasn’t at the top: That distinction goes to IBM (No. 2), Microsoft (No. 3), Google (No. 4) and Intel (No. 7). Rather than a weakness, I think this fact speaks to Apple’s potential.

The story of Apple has never been one of narrow horizons. It has always been about looking ahead. Not just to the next quarter or to the next year, but of seeing how the march of technological progress can be harnessed to make life better in ways we can hardly grasp now. And yet when things like the iPhone materialize, they become part of us and quickly embed themselves into the very fabric of day-to-day existence. They’re not tools so much as extensions of our minds and identities. And that vision, so carefully articulated by Steve Jobs yet revealed only one product at a time, is still incomplete.

And so I find myself writing something that at once seems absurd and yet completely obvious: It may very well be, on this deeply sad day following the death of its founder, that Apple’s best days are still ahead.

Image via Jonathan Mak’s Tumblr.

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As part of the acquisition, it will spin off a few of the company’s properties to create a well-funded new entity that will be led by GSI’s founder and CEO Michael Rubin.

EBay said it will acquire GSI to help retailers and big brands move into both online and mobile commerce. GSI helps more than 180 leading retailers and brands, including Timberland, RadioShack, Calvin Klein, Levi’s and Ralph Lauren.

But eBay and GSI have identified a few parts of the business that will remain independent.

EBay said it will divest GSI’s licensed sports merchandise business and 70 percent of ShopRunner and Rue La La. EBay will loan the holding company $467 million and retain a 30 percent stake in Rue La La and ShopRunner. In addition, Rubin will invest $31 million in cash.

Rue La La operates in the emerging flash-sales business, competing against companies like Gilt Groupe. GSI purchased Rue La La in 2009 for $350 million in cash and stock. Meanwhile, ShopRunner is similar to Amazon’s Prime membership. It charges members $79 a year for unlimited free two-day shipping with no minimum order from a variety of retailers across the Web.

The spin-off will also include Fanatics, a Jacksonville, Florida-based company that operates more than 250 e-commerce Web sites, including 60 e-commerce stores for collegiate and professional sports. GSI’s acquisition of the company closed only two weeks ago.

While all these companies sound complementary to eBay, the company said they are not core to its long-term growth strategy.

In a conference call this morning, eBay President and CEO John Donahoe, explained that it was important to spin off Fanatics and GSI’s sports licensing business because “we don’t want to be in competition with sellers, and that business would be in competition with them.”

As for Rue La La and Shoprunner, the reasons were a little different. “I would characterize it as a near-term operating loss and a huge opportunity that if we tried to realize, we’d probably screw it up. In Michael, we see a guy who can take those concepts to a level we couldn’t imagine, and our 30 percent investment is our indication of what we think Michael could do over time,” he said.

The day the mall went live, Payvment said its customers’ sales quadrupled, compared to sales when they were limited to a shopping tab on their individual fan pages.

Now, Payvment’s competitor, Adgregate Markets, which also helps brands build storefronts on Facebook, is releasing data that helps define the size of the opportunity for e-commerce on Facebook.

In a study commissioned by Adgregate and conducted with the help of Webtrends, Adgregate looked at the impact of Facebook fan pages on traditional e-commerce sites.

To be sure, the idea of social commerce is so new, it’s difficult to give too much weight to early studies like these, but because everything on the topic is unknown, it’s worth taking the data into consideration.

Generally, what Adgregate found was that Facebook was generating a ton of visits to brands’ Facebook pages, providing an opportunity to convert the traffic into sales, especially as brands see visits to their traditional web sites shrink.

The study highlighted one example. Delta Airlines recently enabled customers to book tickets directly on its Facebook page. While traffic to Delta’s site lost more than a million unique visitors over a three month period, its Facebook page gained more than a 1,000 new fans.

The study analyzed the unique visits to the websites of the Fortune 100 as well as their Facebook fan pages.

From Adgregate’s customer base, the study makes a number of conclusions:

• Following the launch of a Facebook store, wall posts generate on average 1,673 percent spikes in store traffic.

• Facebook stores on average generate a 17 percent social engagement rate (merchandise “likes” and “shares” per visitor).

• Facebook stores generated on average 5.9 pages views per visit.

• Facebook commerce conversion rates range from 2 to 4 percent, which is on par with e-Commerce websites.

• Average order value of $104 with 24 percent growth month-over-month (although this largely is dependent upon retail vertical).

The sky-high billboard is part of a contest that the four-year-old Mountain View, Calif.-based start-up conducted along side American Eagle, the teenage clothing retailer.

The contest challenged participants to come up with the best American Eagle spring break outfit. The grand prize winner received $1,000, and first and second place received gift cards.

Polyvore, which touts its ability to track brand engagement, said users created 13,732 entries, which generated 47,653 “likes,” and 3,552 comments.

Overall, the contest generated 735,808 impressions, and helped American Eagle skyrocket to become the fourth-most popular brand on the site during the campaign.

The first-place prize went to Lauren.y.b, who paired a racerback navy tank, a pair of white-washed skinny jeans, a stripped string bikini with accessories such as ballet flats and a studded wood bangle.

Live Your Life: American Eagle Spring Break! by Lauren.y.b? featuring wood jewelry

The four winning sets will be featured on the billboard from March 11th to March 18th, and will run twice an hour each day.

To that end, Adobe is unveiling new features today that will enable marketers to monitor, measure and monetize platforms, where consumers are having conversations about their products and brands.

As an example, Aseem Chandra, VP of Marketing for Adobe’s Omniture Business Unit, said the product will be able to alert a company to a spike in traffic on Twitter, and track down the original source.

What they might find out is that Justin Bieber, who has nearly eight million followers, tweeted about his favorite jeans, which was read and spread by thousands of others on Twitter or Facebook.

With that information, the tools could then enable a brand to make decisions on future celebrity partnerships, or more likely, on what keywords to buy on Google.

Chandra said one reason it has gotten so difficult to see where the traffic is originating from is that a ton of activity is also coming from mobile devices, including the proliferation of tablets. “How do you measure that, and where does it originate from? You want to be able to correlate those two and encourage the behavior,” he said.

The new SocialAnalytics features, which are apart of Adobe’s Online Marketing Suite, is expected to be unveiled this morning at Adobe’s Omniture Summit in Salt Lake City. The tools track more than 40 different social networks and gather positive, neutral or negative sentiments. A beta was introduced last year, and since then 75 customers have been using the platform. The product will be available more widely in the third quarter.

Chandra said the past year has shown them how important social media is to media, entertainment and e-commerce companies.

“Everything we do as consumers and professionals is informed by social. That’s going to stay regardless. The conversation we are having with CMOs is that they see that, and are asking us how do I make the important decisions around their business, marketing programs and campaigns? …There’s a lot of activity and it’s well deserved.”

Nordstrom will acquire the company for $180 million in stock. However, the transaction size could jump to as much as $270 million over time if the company meets certain performance goals and vesting requirements for the existing management team.

At that price, the transaction gives a lot of weight to a burgeoning new area of e-commerce, fueled by private/flash sales and other group-buying trends.

Los Angeles-based HauteLook offers discounts of 50 to 75 percent off home, beauty, travel and local services for women, men and kids. In the last two years, HauteLook says it has conducted 2,500 private sales events for 1,000 high-profile brands.

Seattle-based Nordstrom said HauteLook will operate as an independent, wholly owned subsidiary, to be managed by its current leadership. The HauteLook brand and Web site will remain separate from Nordstrom, and there are plenty of incentives to keep the management team in place.

While Nordstrom is primarily a physical department store, it has a fairly sizable online presence and recently has spent time integrating its online and store presence, so customers can see what inventory is online and what’s available in the store.

The transaction is expected to close in the first quarter of 2011 and is subject to customary closing conditions, including regulatory and HauteLook shareholder approval.

Designed to offer consumers content based on their interests, Livestand is a sort of personalized digital newsstand for tablets. It will feature content from Yahoo! Sports, Yahoo! News, Flickr and celebrity gossip site OMG, and it will customize that content according to user preference as well as time of day. “Tablets are great for a laid-back experience, but most magazine content remains trapped online,” Irving said this morning . “But consumers don’t want a digitized magazine. They want rich media, they want connections beyond just commenting.”

Which is what Yahoo is trying to give them in Livestand. The platform will be integrated with Yahoo! Finance as well as Yahoo! Mail, and it will support content sharing and commenting. “We see this as the next generation of Yahoo and we’re putting the full force of Yahoo behind it,” Irving said.

The hope here, of course, is that this will play well with advertisers dissapointed by shallow digital experiences. “You don’t exactly curl up with your PC, the way you do with a magazine,” said Irving. “With Livestand, brands can finally match the intimacy that magazines once brought to their audiences.” That means offering them ads that adapt and respond to user interaction and the tools to create “a TV-like ad experience.”

Yahoo Livestand will debut on iOS and Android in the first half of 2011. No word yet on subscription pricing.

However, exactly how it will be accomplished, no one quite knows.

WildTangent believes it has found the winning formula, and, surprisingly, it goes against what others, like social gaming leader Zynga, are already doing in the space.

Over the past 12 years, the Redmond, Wash.-based company has toyed with all sorts of business models.

But the picture started coming into focus a couple of years ago, when WildTangent made the decision to stop developing games itself in favor of helping other PC game makers distribute and monetize their games. Six months ago, it expanded from working on only PC games to social games, too.

In an interview, Mike Peronto, WildTangent’s president and CEO, and Dave
Madden, EVP of sales, marketing and business development, said social gaming has quickly become the company’s fastest growing segment, with revenues tripling year-over-year.

WildTangent is best known for its consumer-facing game platform, which comes preloaded on 85 percent of PCs sold today. The platform, which is also accessible online, attracts 20 million monthly active users and is monetized through a combination of players paying for coins at 25 cents a piece, subscriptions and ads.

Madden said the problem it is now focused on solving is how to monetize social games when only two to three percent of players are willing to pay for virtual goods.

That means advertising is inevitable, but it’s still too early to tell how it will play out.

Last month, Zynga told us it was focused on product placements within games, where virtual goods are sponsored by brands, like blimps in FarmVille and branded cars in Mafia Wars.

But Madden argues that approach doesn’t scale. “We know it doesn’t scale because we’ve tried to build a business doing it,” he said.

“Product placement is appropriate in some media, and games are no different, but it’s not supported well by agencies, and we are trying to chip away at the broadcast budgets. There has to be metrics for them to compare it to other mediums….It’s difficult to measure a sign or blimp.”

Today, WildTangent works with some of the largest brands, including PG&E, Unilever, automobile makers and insurance companies. It also works with some of the biggest social games companies, like Playdom, Digital Chocolate, Crowdstar and others.

While WildTangent does sometimes work with brands on product placements–like a Scoop Away litter box in the Happy Pets game on Facebook–generally, it requires players to watch a short video, or offers the option of playing a very simple game.

So far, Madden and Peronto have been happy with the results. Of all of its social advertising campaigns, WildTangent has been averaging a 10 percent click-through rate.

WildTangent, which has 130 employees, hit profitability two years ago and has been in the black ever since.

Next up is integrating social games into its platform so it can have access to their vast distribution network, and then it will bring what it has learned from advertising on social networks to mobile phones.

Here’s a video of Madden and Peronto talking to eMoney about the opportunities for advertising in social games:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110209/wildtangent-not-playing-around-when-it-comes-to-advertising-in-social-games-video/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20110208/meebo-buys-psychographic-targeter-mindset-media/ http://allthingsd.com/20110208/meebo-buys-psychographic-targeter-mindset-media/#comments Tue, 08 Feb 2011 11:00:50 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=3342 Mountain View, Calif.-based Meebo, the Web toolbar maker, has bought a New York City-based start-up called Mindset Media, which specializes in psychographic targeting for brand advertising. Meebo said the acquisition will help with its expansion of its advertising products. Twelve members of the Mindset team will be joining Meebo, while two who work in business development will not. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110208/meebo-buys-psychographic-targeter-mindset-media/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110203/hearsay-labs-brings-compliance-to-social-media/ http://allthingsd.com/20110203/hearsay-labs-brings-compliance-to-social-media/#comments Thu, 03 Feb 2011 13:00:42 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=3222 Hearsay today launched a social media platform for companies that have both corporate brands and local representatives, with existing customers such as Farmers Insurance, State Farm and 24 Hour Fitness.

The San Francisco-based company helps its customers manage compliance with brand guidelines as well as regulations from the SEC, FINRA and the FTC. That’s especially important when local representatives and franchisees are networking with and recruiting their own clients under the banner of a corporate name.

It also helps these types of companies push out social media content for their local representatives to personalize, and analyze the effectiveness of their efforts on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

The idea isn’t to make social networking boring and corporate, necessarily, but rather to provide sample content to riff off and to flag inappropriate updates before they go up.

Hearsay stems from the work of co-founder and CEO Clara Shih, who wrote “The Facebook Era,” an early book about how businesses can use social networks. Shih then wanted to found a company around those ideas, and iterated her efforts until she found a fit. The company has been in stealth mode since 2009, but it is already cash-flow positive.

Hearsay raised a little more than $3 million in funding last March in a round by Sequoia Capital. Other investors are Michael Abbott (Twitter), Steve Chen (YouTube), Ron Conway (SV Angel), Nils Johnson, David Lawee (Google), Thomas Layton (former OpenTable), Dave Morin (Path), Patrick Pohlen (Latham & Watkins), Alberto Savoia (Google), Aydin Senkut (Felicis Ventures) and Aaron Sittig (former Facebook).

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110203/hearsay-labs-brings-compliance-to-social-media/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110126/greystripe-targets-regional-mobile-ads-not-the-more-trendy-hyper-local-ads/ http://allthingsd.com/20110126/greystripe-targets-regional-mobile-ads-not-the-more-trendy-hyper-local-ads/#comments Wed, 26 Jan 2011 14:00:09 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://emoney.allthingsd.com/?p=1969 If there’s one area of mobile advertising that’s hot right now, it’s hyper-local, or the ability to target coupons, offers or recommendations within a block or two of a person’s location.

But San Francisco-based Greystripe, a mobile ad network, says there’s a bigger opportunity in selling brand advertising when you take a slightly larger view.

“When we looked at the market for local and hyper-local, there’s no brand play there. We asked ourselves, how do you get rich media into a hyper-local experience? It’s not obvious, but the big place for the brands to place ads is at the regional local level,” said Greystripe’s CEO Michael Chang.

To that end, Greystripe is announcing a strategic partnership with Media Networks, Inc., a Time Inc. company, which goes by MNI for short.

Greystripe will leverage MNI’s 80-person sales team, which was focused exclusively on local buys online to sell mobile ads, while MNI will rely on Greystripe’s expertise in mobile and inventory of mobile applications and Web sites. It’s the first time MNI has moved into mobile, and for Greystripe, it will represent a significant expansion beyond its 12-person sales team.

Chang said even though you see local plays, like Groupon and LivingSocial raising billions of dollars, the regional play is not to be forgotten. The hyper-local guys, he says, are often going after the same dollars allocated to the Yellow Pages, whereas there’s a separate bucket for big brands wanting to advertise locally.

Examples include a car dealership that covers a whole region, a hospital that treats patients in an entire county or a McDonald’s franchise that owns multiple locations.

“It’s not so fine grain,” he said.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110126/greystripe-targets-regional-mobile-ads-not-the-more-trendy-hyper-local-ads/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110126/facebook-brings-back-part-of-beacon-and-no-one-blinks/ http://allthingsd.com/20110126/facebook-brings-back-part-of-beacon-and-no-one-blinks/#comments Wed, 26 Jan 2011 12:30:51 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=28585 In 2007, Facebook unveiled a plan to let brands turn Facebook users’ online activities into ads. Cue uproar, and an eventual apology from Mark Zuckerberg.

Yesterday Facebook unveiled a plan to let brands turn Facebook users’ online activities into ads. If anyone is complaining, it’s news to me.

Easy enough to see why: There are some very big differences between Facebook’s ill-fated Beacon and Sponsored Stories, the site’s new ad unit.

For starters, Facebook unveiled yesterday’s news in the trade press, not in a high-profile, Apple-aping event. More important is that while the new ads can tell your friends what you’re doing outside of Facebook, they’re mainly focused, for now, on what you do on the site.

Most important: The ads are replicas of the updates your friends are already seeing in their Facebook newsfeeds. So while Starbucks doesn’t pay a cent when this shows up on on the center of your friends’ pages:

It can now pay up and place this on the right side of your pals’ pages, too.

Users can’t opt out of the ads, which seems like a red flag given Facebook’s history. But if a brand wants to shell out money to tell your friends something you’ve already told your friends, who cares? No one, apparently.

Still, recall what Zuckerberg was saying less than four years ago, when he was going to “build a new kind of ad system” based on “social actions” and “information that is shared between friends.” At the time, that sounded wildly ambitious, and maybe a bit creepy.

And look what Sponsored Stories does now. Marketers can purchase ads that tell your Facebook friends when you’ve “liked” something of theirs. Or posted on one of their Facebook pages. Or checked-in to one of their outposts or played with one of their apps.

And they can do it when you’re not on Facebook, too, via “likes” you make on sites that have tied up with the social network.

This is what Zuckerberg was talking about in 2007, right? He just needed time to get there. So did his users.

Remember that when Facebook rolled out Beacon, the site was a big deal, but not the biggest: A mere 50 million users, not 600 million. Many of those people were still trying to get a handle on how the site worked, and what they ought to do with it.

And recall that the newsfeed itself–more or less the core of today’s service–was still a relatively new idea too, introduced just a year earlier. (Another controversy, and another Zuckerberg apology.)

Now, I think, just about everyone who uses Facebook knows, more or less, what they’ve signed on for: A place that wants you to share as much of yourself, with as many people, as you can.

Letting advertisers help you share that much more? No big deal. This is isn’t 2007, you know.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110126/facebook-brings-back-part-of-beacon-and-no-one-blinks/feed/ 11 http://allthingsd.com/20110121/more-blimps-and-sponsored-loot-coming-as-zynga-ramps-in-game-advertising-in-2011/ http://allthingsd.com/20110121/more-blimps-and-sponsored-loot-coming-as-zynga-ramps-in-game-advertising-in-2011/#comments Fri, 21 Jan 2011 18:45:51 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://emoney.allthingsd.com/?p=1678 More advertising and sponsorships will be inevitable this year in Zynga’s popular Facebook game titles, as the privately held company attempts to diversify its revenue stream.

Today, by far and away, most of Zynga’s revenues are generated from game players who elect to pay for items within games, ranging from new clothes for their avatar to seeds for their FarmVille farm.

But that’s likely to change this year as the San Francisco-based social gaming company ramps up conversations with advertising agencies and slips more campaigns into its game titles, including its latest hit, CityVille, which has attracted an audience of more than 100 million people in a little over a month.

So far, Zynga has executed a number of successful campaigns on behalf of big brands, like American Express, Nestle, McDonald’s, Farmers Insurance and Coke, among others.

In an interview, Manny Anekal, who was hired about a year ago to head up Zynga’s brand advertising, explained that because it’s the early days of advertising within social games, companies have to be a lot more creative, because they don’t have banner ads or room for commercials.

Recent campaigns include giving out free virtual goods, such as Cokes in Cafe World; Green Hornet-branded loot in Mafia Wars; and a Farmer’s Insurance airship in FarmVille.

The brands typically create incentives to make the integrations more valuable (and presumably less annoying). For instance, the insurance blimp kept a farmer’s crops from withering, and if you collected all of the Green Hornet loot within Mafia Wars, you received a Black Beauty car, as seen in the movie.

Anekal said there’s a learning curve with social media buys, because a successful campaign can’t be measured in click-through rates. Instead, he says, it’s measured by engagement, which is the amount of time people interacted with the brand, and the amount of social activity, or the number of times users sent friends within a game a message about the brand, or posted it to their wall.

Next up may include integrating advertising campaigns in games played on mobile devices, where monetization has been more difficult than on Facebook.

For example, you could earn additional energy in Mafia Wars for checking in to a particular store or location, or scan a product for a free virtual good. “We are looking at options to add to game play, and having those conversations right now,” he said.

What Zynga won’t likely do is create a name-brand game, like “Starbucks World” (instead of Cafe World). So far, the idea of branded games has been relatively controversial. Game developers don’t want to have to pay for the required licensing, and so far they’ve been able to get by without it since most games have generic titles.

For Zynga, it’s building a brand of its own, and it wouldn’t want to share the spotlight with others. “Half of the requests I get from agencies is for branded games,” Anekal said. “We may be moving forward, but it’s not in our plans….We want to focus on the Zynga brand.”

In the video below, Anekal discusses Zynga’s in-game advertising aspirations and how Megamind’s campaign on FarmVille was able to prompt 10 million people within FarmVille to interact with the brand in one day.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110121/more-blimps-and-sponsored-loot-coming-as-zynga-ramps-in-game-advertising-in-2011/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110114/some-of-you-remember-the-ads-you-see-on-your-phones/ http://allthingsd.com/20110114/some-of-you-remember-the-ads-you-see-on-your-phones/#comments Fri, 14 Jan 2011 11:30:30 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=28072 Web surfers have trained themselves to ignore the ads they see. Mobile phone users are a different story.

So says a new survey, commissioned by people who would like mobile phone users to pay attention to ads.

MocoSpace, a mobile social network, and Briabe Media, a mobile marketing agency, say 37 percent of phone users they polled are able to recall brands they’ve seen advertised on their phones. Or, at least, they say they can.

The survey results, which you can see embedded at the bottom of this post, are pretty consistent over different ethnic, gender and age groups. Basically, about four out of every 10 people say they can recall ads they’ve seen on their phones.

Those kind of numbers should be encouraging for the mobile ad business, which is supposed to grow dramatically but is still pretty modest.

One important, and/or worrisome, caveat is that poll respondents are most likely to say they remember seeing ads for mobile carriers. The top five most recalled brands are Verizon, AT&T, Wal-Mart, Macy’s and Sprint. (You can see the top 20 in this nifty graphic on the right.)

And perhaps poll respondents are seeing a lot of ads for mobile carriers on their mobile phones. But I wonder if they’re just used to seeing the branding that’s already on their own handsets. Which wouldn’t be nearly as helpful to the nascent mobile ad industry.

Here’s a summary of the research:

TheMobileConsumer_BrandRecall-MocoSpace_Briabe_2-3

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110114/some-of-you-remember-the-ads-you-see-on-your-phones/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20110107/gilt-city-leaves-the-masses-to-groupon-skims-the-cream-off-the-top/ http://allthingsd.com/20110107/gilt-city-leaves-the-masses-to-groupon-skims-the-cream-off-the-top/#comments Fri, 07 Jan 2011 22:07:51 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://emoney.allthingsd.com/?p=1397 As Groupon and LivingSocial scramble for first-mover advantage and launch in as many as eight new markets a day, Gilt City is taking a different approach to the group-buying market.

It’s skimming the cream off the top.

It will not blanket America with offers, but rather only enter markets where there’s enough luxury experiences and high-end restaurants for its target audience of highly educated, 25-to-40 year-olds (In other words–affluent, wealthy and plain ol’ rich people).

Gilt City is an extension of the New York-based Gilt Groupe, which provides invitation-only access to products and experiences at discounted prices. Gilt City competes more directly with Groupon and LivingSocial by offering discounts to spas, restaurants and cosmetic treatments, like Botox. So far, it’s launched in Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, San Francisco and Tokyo.

Gilt Groupe has raised upward of $50 million in venture capital, and will still have to contend with Amazon-based LivingSocial, and Groupon, which aims to raise up to $1 billion after spurning a buyout attempt by Google.

Gilt City’s President Nathan Richardson promises us it still has aggressive goals, but that its plans look different from the others. “We won’t be in a lot of secondary markets, but there’s 40 markets that have the depth we need.”

Meanwhile, Groupon and LivingSocial are in more than 100 markets each today.

“The high-end of the market is enormous,” Richardson says.

Unlike Groupon and LivingSocial, Gilt doesn’t send out a deal every day, but rather offers up to three deals in a weekly email, because “that makes it worthy of reading in your inbox.” In Chicago it’s up to sending two a week, and in Los Angeles and New York, it’s now sending two to three.

In addition to offering discounts on restaurants, spas and beauty, Richardson says Gilt is also selling experiences.

For example, on the Fourth of July in New York, it hosted a party on the retired aircraft carrier USS Intrepid, which was positioned right under the fireworks. ”Not only did the offer sell out, we had three times as many people on wait list,” he says. ”We have the opportunity to extend our curated lifestyle brand to events. People have come to expect us to be consistent. It’s not hit or miss. We want to make sure the email surprises our customers and is always on brand and something we feel proud of.”

To make his point, Richardson often talks about the deal’s “exclusivity,” not how deep the discount is. But why would an exclusive restaurant–which presumably has no trouble selling out–be interested in offering a discount to Gilt’s subscribers?

Richardson says it’s an opportunity for these brands to introduce new opportunities or extend its franchise to a new audience.

For instance, a new restaurant opening in New York’s Flatiron District offered a deal that introduced a new menu to the public. The chef signed the menu and visited the patron’s table for a chat. Another upscale eating establishment used Gilt to promote availability of a private dinning room.

Richardson says that in a survey Gilt conducted, customers said that 80 percent of the time they had the intention of going back to a restaurant, gym or skin-care provider at full price, and in 60 percent of the cases they did go back.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110107/gilt-city-leaves-the-masses-to-groupon-skims-the-cream-off-the-top/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101221/fashion-community-strutting-user-generated-trends-down-the-cat-walk/ http://allthingsd.com/20101221/fashion-community-strutting-user-generated-trends-down-the-cat-walk/#comments Wed, 22 Dec 2010 02:58:14 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://emoney.allthingsd.com/?p=919 Fashionistas may roll their eyes at the effort, but Polyvore is trying to make designing and merchandising apparel more data driven–and presumably less arbitrary.

To do so, the online fashion community will be crunching user-generated data to roll out analytical tools for designers and retailers. Think Quantcast or Compete, but for the fashion industry.

The beta tool, called Style Analytics, will be free and openly available to anyone on Polyvore’s Web site. It’s expected to launch officially tomorrow afternoon.

The data points are coming from its community of users, who create virtual outfits–or what they call “collages” of clothing–by mixing and matching shirts, pants, dresses, shoes, skirts and accessories from around the Web.

Jess Lee, Polyvore’s co-founder and head of product management, said it will show what’s trending, so brands can make better decisions. Specifically, it shows how consumers associate your brand, for instance, with Abercrombie & Fitch or Juicy Couture.

“The fashion industry, from designing to merchandising and marketing is inefficient and not data driven,” she said. “Our goal is to open it up and make it more democratic and more data driven.”

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company has raised about $8.7 million in venture capital since 2007. Each month, its two million registered users create one million collages that generate 140 million page views.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101221/fashion-community-strutting-user-generated-trends-down-the-cat-walk/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101220/ebay-acquires-berlin-based-brands4friends-for-200-million/ http://allthingsd.com/20101220/ebay-acquires-berlin-based-brands4friends-for-200-million/#comments Mon, 20 Dec 2010 17:05:09 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://emoney.allthingsd.com/?p=856 It’s been a busy shopping season for eBay, which has made its third acquisition in as many weeks.

Today, eBay said it has acquired brands4friends, a German online retailer for $200 million in cash. Earlier this month, eBay announced the acquisitions of Milo, which keeps a database of local retailers’ inventory, and Critical Path, a mobile application development shop.

EBay expects brands4friends to strengthen its position as a leading online fashion destination in Europe. Brands4friends claims to be “Germany’s largest online shopping club,” which offers top brands at reduced prices to members through limited daily offers.

Online shopping clubs account for 20 percent of online fashion sales in Europe, according to eBay’s own research.

The 3-year-old company has about 3.5 million members and 200 employees.

As part of the deal, eBay will also assume brands4friends’ equity interests in U.K. shopping club secretsales.com and in Japan’s brands4friends.jp. The acqusition is expected to close in the first quarter, pending regulatory approval.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101220/ebay-acquires-berlin-based-brands4friends-for-200-million/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101217/myte-gyst-and-veer-future-palm-handsets-or-canterbury-tales/ http://allthingsd.com/20101217/myte-gyst-and-veer-future-palm-handsets-or-canterbury-tales/#comments Fri, 17 Dec 2010 16:12:38 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=54541 Companies often file trademarks on brands that they never end up using, so this trio of USPTO filings, made by Hewlett-Packard on December 10 isn’t exactly remarkable. But it is interesting in that the marks for which the company has applied–”Gyst,” “Myte” and “Veer“–sound suspiciously like the names of Palm products.

Certainly it doesn’t take a big leap to imagine Myte as a name for the the next iteration of the Palm Pixi, which is rumored to be smaller than its predecessor–perhaps even “the smallest smartphone ever.”

And Veer and Gyst? Who knows. Maybe HP’s branding team has been reading a bit too much Chaucer lately.

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