Going (Creatively) Digital
Going Native: Third-Party In-App Ads Growing Rapidly
Third-party, in-app native ads will grow at an annual average rate of 70.7%, according to a study from IHS and commissioned by Facebook Audience Network, MediaPost reports. Consumers engage more with native ads than with banner ads, at a rate of 20% to 60%, according to HIS. Moreover, people are more willing to share native ads than standard banner ads, while standard banner ads are more likely to result in user churn, lower retention rates, lower CTRs and eCPMs, and ad fatigue. Known to Baby Boomers as advertorials, native ads are defined by the Internet Advertising Bureau and Mobile Marketing Association thusly: “Mobile native advertising is a format of advertising that takes advantage of the form and function of the surrounding user experiences, all of which are indigenous to the wide variety of mobile devices.”
As Use Of Messaging Apps Surges, So Do Ad Challenges For Brands
To intrude or not? That’s the question many brands are tackling when it comes to advertising within messaging apps. As The New York Times puts it, “Who wants ads from Pampers cluttering their most intimate chats with friends?” The conundrum is choosing which brands might just resonate within which mobile messaging platforms, something that’s easier said than done. “If we misstep with certain audiences, they’ll unplug,” Suzy Deering, chief marketing officer at eBay, tells the Times. Facebook’s WhatsApp is steering clear of ads—for now. Although it did allow shoe brand Clarks to create three virtual characters to promote its venerable Desert Boot, allowing users to connect to them on the app to receive messages, videos and music playlists.
The Many Stumbling Blocks To Adequately Measuring Cross-Channel Marketing
If you’re having problems measuring cross-channel marketing results, you’re hardly alone. ClickZ cites data from Origami Logic showing part of the difficulty derives from marketers measuring signals–impressions, conversions, CTR, ROI and cost-per engagement—too infrequently. Only 16% of respondents to the company’s survey look at their cross-channel measurements on a daily basis. The largest group, 23.2 percent, measure things on a monthly basis. The majority of marketers have three or fewer signals for most channels, such as display, social and email. When it comes to mobile and video, nearly 30 percent don’t even know how many signals they track. The ClickZ story presents an array of survey data showing how many marketing signals are tracked for each channel, including offline, where some 42% of respondents could not cite the number of signals available to them.
Microsoft Tay Mishap Highlights Hazards Of Chatbot Technology
The day after AcroBabble reported on March 24 about a deep dive on chatbots by TIME, The Wall Street Journal carried a story about how Microsoft’s Tay artificial intelligence software chatbot had been manipulated to spew anti-Semitic rants on social media. Tay was launched on services run by Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter. It wasn’t long before people with human intelligence (and too much time on their hands) outsmarted the AI by tweeting offensive comments at it. Tay then replicated the threads. It wasn’t the first time that chatbots had gone off the digital reservation. Last year, it happened on Yahoo’s Flickr and within Google’s auto-tagging feature. (So much for in-house testing.)
C-Suite Moves:
David Wilkins to HealthcareSource as Chief Marketing Officer, from Oracle, where he co-founded the Oracle Sales Academy.
Ethelbert Williams to InstaNatural as Chief Marketing Officer, from Kimberly-Clark, where he led go-to-market strategy and channel expansion for the facial cleansing category.
Manish Gupta to Redis Labs as Chief Marketing Officer, from Liaison Technologies, where he also was Chief Marketing Officer.
Dan Slagen to Alilgnable as Chief Marketing Officer, from growth marketing roles at HubSpot, Wayfair, Crayon and Nanigans.
Mariano Legaz to Sprint as Chief Procurement Officer, from Verizon Wireless Florida, where he was Region President.
Tiffany Baehman to Cricket Wireless as VP and Chief Marketing Officer, from AT&T Mobility & Consumer Markets, where she was VP and General Manager for the greater Philadelphia region.
Peter Giorgi to Celebrity Cruises as Chief Marketing Officer, from Airbnb, where he was Head of Global Advertising.
