One Billion in Word of Mouth

Advertising Age today announced marketers dedicate one billion dollars to Word of Mouth (WOM) advertising. Spending has increased from $76 million in 2001 to a whopping $981 million in 2006, and is expected to grow to $3.7 billion by 2011. WOM grew 35.9% in 2006 alone.

full article here

WOM has taken off as marketers have emphasized the ROI on viral marketing campaigns. Brands benefit from having their campaign spread through trusted networks of friends and family, because 78% of people trust recommendations from other consumers.

These numbers suggest WOM is here to stay, but measuring its ROI still remains elusive as brand marketers face the challenge to measure the “buzz” around campaigns.

Yari Film Group successful with Spongecell

Yari Film Group recently used Spongecell to promote the movie “The Final Season”. They saw an amazing 40% opt-in rate for people who wanted to attend a screening by using our Add to Life technology! Here’s a press release with lots more information, please send sales@spongecell.com an email to find out how Spongecell can help promote your events online.

AdTech New York Highlights

Spongecell’s New York Sales and Marketing team attended Ad Tech this week. Highlights were keynote addresses by Nick Brien, CEO of Universal McCann; and a keynote panel discussion on the state of the industry with Randall Rothenberg, President and CEO of IAB; Michael Barrett, Executive VP, Chief Revenue Officer of Fox Interactive; Arianna Huffington, Co-Founder and Editor-in-Chief, Huffington Post; and Suzie Reider, Head of Advertising Sales, YouTube.

Nick interwove creative video clips into his talk to illustrate the transition from old to new media, a term he prefers over “interactive” or “digital.” He emphasized how the goal of distributing and communicating a brand’s message is to create an exceptional experience for the end user. Nick foreshadowed comments his peers made this morning in the panel discussion, in which they all agreed that creative assets have to engage in such a way that advertising makes a contribution rather than a disruption to time spent online.

The panel also talked about the shift in the internet from talk about portals to platforms, and how eventually the open platform developments we see now will become so commonplace a decade ahead we will take them for granted. This reminded me of when I was a kid, and newscasters used to say “Live, via satellite” and now everything is via satellite – it’s just the standard medium, there’s no need to announce the obvious.

Relevant Messaging

Facebook just announced a new advertising platform based on serving relevant, targeted ads. And Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, recently emphasized relevant targeting is the future of online advertising. In the past week Google also made two announcements: (1) a new platform called OpenSocial to make it easier for developers to build applications that work across multiple social networks, and (2) they will launch a similar platform for mobile phones.

These breaking news stories exemplify a broader industry trend to develop technology that enables communication of direct and relevant messages – from person to person, from brand to consumer. What does this mean for marketers?

Open platforms present a new set of challenges and opportunities to marketing professionals. Better communication technologies encourage the likelihood of a campaign “going viral” from consumer to consumer, but a clever video or website is not a recipe to drive offline purchasing behavior. Many viral campaigns in fact backfire, leaving advertisers wondering how to put out fires in forums, product review sites, and among consumer advocacy groups.

Fortunately, consumers are in many ways more open than ever before to receiving marketing messages – so long as the messages are relevant and beneficial to them. For example, I love watching movie previews. Sure, I know they’re 2-3 minute commercials, but I don’t care. I want to know about releases relevant to myself as a moviegoer, and I want to be entertained. Same thing goes for new products, sales, clothing line launches, etc.

The key to marketing in the changing landscape of the internet is to communicate messages in your audience’s preferred medium (email, SMS, websites, blogs, social networks) that are relevant to their needs as consumers. The recent suite of features Spongecell just released automatically collects valuable information on every user’s interaction with your promotion:

• Type of promotion they encountered (concert, sale, store opening, for example)
• How they engaged it (Add to personal calendar, invite friends, set reminders, email opens)
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Our targeted marketing filters then allow you to use this information to communicate targeted follow-up messages. We really see these features pushing the envelope alongside other industry trends on the technology side. We are also excited to provide the next generation of online marketers with a new tool set to communicate with the growing population of consumers who want to receive relevant messages from their favorite brands.

Vegas Vegoose

I posted recently about Spongecell’s recent trip to Vegas and our fun times at the silent disco.

We also attended the Vegoose music festival while there. They put a lot of effort into their flash site but lacked any good way of pushing information out. How do I get the schedule to my phone? How do I invite friends? They have a pdf I can download and print onto paper. I suppose I can email links to my friends. iPhones cannot even display flash so if we had wanted to lookup info while at the show we would have been out of luck.

Lucky Jeans did it better using Spongecell.

They allow me to get info onto my phone, send branded invitations to my friends with rich content and they could have even exposed an RSS feed of the events.

At Vegoose, our friend Vaugn was able to get a printed schedule of shows from the information tent. During the show the schedule was very difficult read because of the darkness. If Vaugn had been able to get the schedule on his phone not only would he have been able to see the times with ease but he also would have gotten a lot of cool points from the all-ages attendees every time he whipped out the iPhone.

Moral of the story: events are better with Spongecell.