The Future of Google’s Technology

By Barbara Gengler

Sara Kleinberg, Google’s head of marketing, leads Google’s marketing team for established industries. Sara’s team works with marketers from the retail and technology industries to provide insights into the value of online advertising and how marketers can connect with their target consumers through Google’s advertising platforms.

Prior to joining Google, Sara was a product marketing manager at American Express. Previously, Sara was a strategy consultant at The Parthenon Group in

Boston and worked in business development for various internet companies.  Sara holds an M.B.A. in Marketing from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and graduated magna cum laud with a B.A. in Communications from the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Pennsylvania. Sara lives in New York City.

Could you talk about Google’s multichannel marketing and where the technology is heading?
Think about yourself as a consumer and when you’re thinking about buying something. More times than not the easiest thing to do when you’re first considering a purchase is you go to Google and search to get more information,  about something you’ll buy or something you’re planning to buy. So that’s kind of where it all begins and you might then search at the broad category level. Hey, I’m interested in re-doing my kitchen or you might say I’m ready to buy kitchen cabinets, and that would be product information, the second type of search. Then you might say how much do kitchen cabinets cost? Should I buy at  Home Depot or Lowe’s or should I get them custom? The fourth thing may be do I want to search because I’m about to drive over there and need directions to get there?

It all starts with the consumer and their interest in researching something and buying something. And because Google is a place consumers go to determine what they want to buy, it’s also a good place for retailers and other businesses to market their products and services. Because it is where in-market consumers are looking and researching and shopping. So that kind of ties in back into Adwords and why Adwords is successful and a useful forum for businesses that are trying to reach out to customers.

So the idea is because consumers are on Google search asking questions and stating their interests, Adwords platform enables businesses to place the right ad to the right user for right time to answer those inquiries. So that could be anything from big Fortune 500 companies or the Mom and Pop shops. Adwords can really serve the big to small and do that same service of connecting the right ad to the right consumer at the time based on the searches.

Now thinking about ecommerce I gave the four things that people look for. They look for category information, product information, price information or the link to the store. And so getting into multichannel, sometimes you’re looking online or searching online because you actually want to buy something online and that’s ecommerce.

Is the gap between expectations and capabilities in multichannel marketing significant? What challenges do companies face in planning, deploying and measuring campaigns?
Where the multichannel marketing approach comes into play is with the fourth type of search that links to the store offline. So again back to kitchen cabinets, if you need custom kitchen cabinets you may order them online or you may feel more comfortable going to store to talk to a representative. What we find in our consumer research is you still go to Google to search to do the research online but then you’ll actually visit the store and that’s what we call  (or a business thinks about) as multichannel.

If you think about retail overall and how big that market is online and offline, according to Forrester Research, 45 percent of all retail sales are impacted by online. So it’s not that the purchases are made online but the impact online, Forrester is recognizing how much of general business is impacted by this online research.

If I’m a pure-play ecommerce company and online search company, search marketing is a smart online marketing vehicle for me because that individual is searching online. If I’m a multichannel retailer that means I have ecommerce but I also have a physical store. Even if I’m just a physical store and I don’t have an ecommerce platform, (like a lot of local record shops that don’t have the  infrastructure to sell on line), but because like Forrester said 45 percent of sales are impacted by online, so even if I’m a record store that doesn’t have any ecommerce, that’s what multichanneling marketing is all about.

It’s about using the online channel to market your products and services even if the sale is made in the store. And as marketing is evolving and as consumer behavior is increasingly turning online into search ads the critical research piece to the purchase, it’s smart marketing for these multichannel or even offline businesses to use the search marketing to reach the consumer.

And so the whole Adwords platform or concept of search ads on Google is a way to enable that type of advertising. It’s a self-serve system that even a small cabinet maker or record shop or a big multichannel conglomerate can all access to run these search ads and respond appropriately with the right message to the right companies.

What are some of the most effective ways to get the most optimized campaign possible with Adwords?
At Google we encourage what is called test and learn. We do have some general pointers about ad copy and making sure that the ad copy is directly relevant to the search term that is typed in. And making sure it’s very clearly written and that it can have a special promotion reflects that in your ad copy because that’s going to attract attention.

So there are certain tips that we make available for how to write smart copy and then the other thing we encourage is trial and error so that the Adword system enables you to put several different variations of Ad copy and then you can see which one wins. You can trial and error and see what works best for you and see what works best for your business and your product set, or which products you should be promoting more heavily than others through this self-search system. Not only is it a way to place ads but it’s also a way to be strategic and to learn about your campaign because you get the feedback.

Another advantage of search advertising is the real-time feedback about what’s working whereas in traditional advertising it’s just not an option, like television advertising or newspaper circulars which are all traditional marketing vehicles for driving purchases. It’s difficult to know if the green circular or the blue circular works better, or if the picture of the bicycle or the picture of the tricycle is going to sell better. But on the Adwords marketing platform you can learn real time what’s going to be the most effective advertising for you.

Could you talk about measurement and ROI? Online marketing efforts are claiming a lot but without proper measurement, it doesn’t mean much. So what does Google think about ROI?
That builds on what I was going to explain - that one of the advantages and more unique attributes of online marketing is the ability to see results, to see who’s clicking on what. What online marketing provides is hard and fast data and real time reaction.

If you think about ROI, that is the return on your marketing investment, it depends on your marketing goals. So, for example, when we’re talking about ecommerce, one of my goals would be to get people to my website, and that’s something that I can easily measure on Google’s Adword platform, just by seeing who is clicking and the traffic that I’m getting. If you want to see the return on investment, clearly you’re interested in the sales or the actual transactions or the products that you’re able to sell, based on your advertising. And again that requires a little more analysis but Google has tools to help you do that.

You can sign up for free to get some of these tools that allow you to optimize based on your transactions and learn about that and that way you can better optimize your marketing so you can figure out which ads not only bring the most traffic to your site but you can also figure out which ads yield you the most purchases.

Google has these tools, conversion optimizer and conversion tracking. What Google offers is limited to online transactions. It’s possible but more complicated to also measure offline transactions so let’s talk about the world of online transactions.

Google has these free tools that any Mom & Pop or any major corporation can set up. One is called conversion tracking and one’s called conversion optimizer and if I were a retailer on my website I would set up some tracking links and input some of the information and set it up so that the tool tracks the search terms that are coming in or the ads that are getting clicked. It tracks in this online world on the back end, what kind of things are sold or what kind of transactions made on the back end and its all propriety to the retailer.

So if I’m the record shop that’s selling online and decide to sign on for one of these free tools that Google offers nobody else see that information, that’s my private information.

There are plenty of tools and products in the marketplace offered by many different companies. So again the advantage of online marketing is that it is trackable and it is accountable and it provides a lot of data to be able to make smarter marketing decisions based on the impact the ads are having. And now tie it back to ROI, if you understand the effectiveness of your ads, and you’re able to make smarter marketing decisions about which ads to run, you can optimize to get greater yield, more sales, more transactions or whatever your marketing goal is and then that yields you higher ROI versus the kind of traditional market model, its guesswork. You can try to figure it out, and there are ways and data models to help figure it out, but it’s much more complicated; it’s certainly not real time and it’s certainly not as accessible as implementing a free tool from Google’s.

Could you tell us about the vision for the Google Retail Blog?
At Google we have specialists to address different industries because we want to make sure we’re giving the best advice to businesses based on whether they are retailers or in the travel space or whatever it is. So I look after retail and technology, and we have this blog, the retail blog, for retailers whether they be Mom & Pop shops or large multichannel and this is where we provide tips and advice for smarter, more effective online marketing. For example, at the blog’s entry for April 7, which is called Get Ready for Outdoor Entertaining, there’s a trend that we noticed people searching for patio furniture, what kind of patio furniture and what’s on sale.

And by this blog we track and communicate these trends to help marketers be more effective. And in March there’s an entry about Mother & Father’s day coming up and we took a look at when are people searching for gifts for Mother’s Day and when are they searching for gifts for Father’s Day. This is all based on human behavior and we know that consumers start to search when they’re thinking about making a purchase or when they’re ready to make a purchase.

And so by revealing that information about these consumer insights and the learning we have about how consumers shop and how they research, it can help guide advertisers into when people are shopping, if they’re shopping more for Mom’s than Dads or Dad’s more than Mom’s. The blog is a forum for us to help by revealing some of these insights. And we can also provide information on the types of terms people are searching on. There’s an entry on March 25 for fastest rising search terms or things that people are typing into the search engine, what’s bubbling to the top of frequent new things. Here we see graduation party invitations and dresses for graduation. Because search is what consumers do when they’re thinking about shopping or what’s going on in their life right now, we can come up with a lot of insights on consumers behavior and consumer shopping behavior.

Building A Brand Across Multiple Channels For Premium Ad Experience

By Ron Callari

From broadcasting to broader-casting, the NAB Show has evolved over the last eight decades to continually lead the industry. From conception through distribution, the NAB Show proudly serves as the incubator for excellence - helping to breathe life into content everywhere. More than 85,000 audio, video and film content professionals from 157 countries will convene at the Las Vegas Convention Center April 10-15.

Celebrities will include Emmy nominated actor Jim Parsons from “The Big Bang Theory” and Emmy winning actor, author Michael J. Fox will be honored with the NAB Distinguished Service Award for his significant and lasting contribution to the broadcasting industry.

Ivan Askwith is Director of Strategy at Big Spaceship, an award-winning creative agency based in Brooklyn, N.Y. As the head of the strategic practice, Askwith works to help clients navigate the digital landscape and understand emerging behaviors

He is a frequent speaker and lecturer on digital strategy, transmedia engagement and online communities at both academic and business conferences, and an occasional contributor to magazines like Slate and Salon.

Ivan Askwith will be sitting on the “Unboxing Advertising and Entertainment: Building a Transmedia Experience,” which will drill down on how top advertising and entertainment creatives design media worlds across multiple mediums over time. I had an opportunity to interview Askwith in advance of the conference to discuss his perspective on advertising and entertainment in this immersive, convergent and interactive age.

Push vs. Pull Marketing has changed over the years, as Web 2.0 has become an accepted means of engaging with the customer. How do you see pull marketing today versus five years ago?
To some extent, I think this depends on your marketing goals. If you’re trying to launch in the market and have no awareness, there’s still a clear value in push marketing and advertising: no one is likely to engage with your product or service until they know that it’s available.  But in a best-case scenario, push marketing functions like a spark or lighter — it gets things going.

The “pull” approach, on the other hand, is a lot more sustainable for brands that hope to grow, maintain and deepen relationships with both active and potential customers.  Moving forward, at least online and in interactive channels, it seems to me that Web 2.0 isn’t just an accepted means of engaging with customers — but one of the only viable means for engaging with customers and consumers.

There’s just too much value available on the Internet — content, social connection, utility, all the usual suspects — for us to assume that consumers will continue tolerating interruptive “push” messaging, except when it occurs in very specific (and useful) contexts.  There’s really a third concept in play: if push refers to brands trying to capture attention, and pull refers to brands being available when consumers choose to engage with them, the third option is closer to “magnetic” marketing — where the consumer and brand are drawn together, at the right time, without either side needing to take an aggressive action.

That’s where we see the importance of context.  Whether that means a Google ad that gives you a link just when you need it, but before you ask for it, or a location-aware ad that gives you a reason to grab lunch in the diner you’re just about to walk past.  You didn’t pull it, and it didn’t exactly push itself on you — the consumer and the brand just get drawn together at the right time, and everyone benefits.

Since Skittles was one of the first CPG brands to transform its home page into an online portal for Twitter (March 2, 2009), what were some of the positive and negative results of that initiative? Do you recommend this approach for brands in 2010?
I cannot comment on the campaign from last March.  However, in response to the second part of your question, I’m not sure there’s a single, reliable approach that I’d recommend for “brands in 2010″ for two reasons:

First, because in many ways 2010 is not so different from 2009, and I think we often find ourselves trying to always do something new, rather than figuring out what people want — which may well be something they’ve wanted for years — and just trying to get it right.

Second, and more important, because brands benefit the most from figuring out what works in their unique situation, with their unique value proposition and identity, and for the people that it’s most important they connect with.  For some CPG brands, it may be valuable to find a deep and aggressive use of Twitter, while for others it may be a waste of time and effort.

Here’s what I will say: if you’re going to turn your own home page into an online portal for Twitter, or any other community platform, it’s probably valuable to go farther than just appropriating a popular service (whether that’s Twitter, Foursquare or next year’s emerging buzz platform) and putting it on your site.  Again, it comes down to basic social skills: if you want people to value you, you have to give them something of value, rather than simply appropriating something they already value.  So can Twitter be valuable on a brand’s site?  Absolutely, so long as you can find a way to make Twitter better, more valuable, more interesting or more useful than it was to begin with.  An easy example is Best Buy’s Twelpforce, which lets consumers seek tech-support from the chain’s entire retail floor workforce — a brilliant way of integrating Twitter.

2010 has been earmarked as the year for Location-Based Social Networking and Augmented Reality. How can these two services be harnessed together to produce a higher degree of engagement with customers? Can you provide an example?
A quick distinction: augmented reality (AR) is often used to describe two distinct trends.  The first involves using webcams and visual triggers, so that people sitting at their computers can see themselves on screen, along with things that aren’t there — e.g. a dancing unicorn, a robot head on their own shoulders, etc).  In almost all cases, this version of AR has been used as a novelty gimmick, without creating much tangible value.  The second (and, I’d argue, more important) involves using cameras, usually on mobile devices, to augment the world with layers of information.  This version of AR, I think, has incredible implications for just about everything, including customer engagement.  So that’s the version of AR I’m referring to here.

For both location-based social networking and location-based AR, there’s a simple, powerful value proposition: these tools actually help change our experience as we move through the world.  And in both cases, they come back to the concept I mentioned earlier: rather than push or pull marketing, these location-based services are “magnetic,” and focused on connecting people with information at the right time, and in the right place, for it to be useful and actionable.  In essence, location-based services are the ultimate form of contextual marketing: capable of reaching people at the right time to influence (and assist) their behaviors and decisions.

Some of the best examples are also the best known: take Foursquare.  Even before their current slate of big-brand partnership “experiments” (e.g. Bravo, Zagat), the Foursquare team was striking deals with local businesses.  If I’m trying to decide where to grab a drink, and Foursquare can tell me (a) that my friends just arrived at a bar a few blocks away, or (b) that the bar across the street is offering a special deal to Foursquare users, those aren’t just advertisements: they’re useful offers.  And while AR hasn’t yet infiltrated the physical world in a massively useful (and branded) way, it’s not hard to imagine the opportunities: take a grocery store, where you can find deals, compare local prices, and get recipe suggestions for any product, just by pointing your phone at it… that, in and of itself, becomes a more compelling reason to consider shopping there.

You will be contributing to a panel at the upcoming NABSHOW (National Association of Broadcaster), April 12-15 titled, “Unboxing Advertising and Entertainment: Building a Transmedia Experience.” How do you define a ‘Transmedia Experience’ and why is it important to incorporate this approach in an advertising campaign in 2010?
For a full answer to that question, your best bet is to attend the NABSHOW panel on April 13, where we’ll be digging into the details. But the quick answer is that transmedia experiences are ones that take brands, entertainment properties or stories, and roll them out across multiple media platforms.  It’s still a pretty vague definition, so examples tend to be more effective.

The oldest fall-back example is The Matrix, which consisted of three movies, but also used comic books, two console video games, short animated videos, websites and a MMOG, with each of those elements contributing unique details, plot points and characters to the larger fictional world where all of these stories were set.  In the second film, Jada Pinkett-Smith’s character, Niobe, walks off-screen to pursue her own mission, and doesn’t re-appear onscreen until the third movie.  In the case of The Matrix, anyone interested in what happened during that period of time was able to follow her entire mission — because it was the plot of a high-profile video game released alongside the film.  Characters appeared in the second and third movies that audiences knew nothing about — unless they had already met those characters in one of the Matrix comic books, where they were introduced.  Transmedia experiences are ones where there are many different ways to access and engage with the stories, and some form of meaningful connection exists between all of them.  And, because transmedia experiences and stories are so much bigger than any individual film, game, television show or advertisement, they leave a lot more room for the audience — and fans, in particular — to participate.  They don’t answer all of the questions, or suggest that there’s a single “correct” way to engage; instead, they offer a huge range of official and unofficial opportunities for interaction.

As for advertising campaigns in 2010: the truth is that whether we design advertising campaigns to be “transmedia experiences” or not, they often are.  Audiences and consumers are used to engaging with the brands, stories or topics that interest them across the full range of channels that exist, and you could argue that brands that advertise in print, television, digital, OOH and so on are already transmedia experiences — they’re just not good experiences, because they don’t always put a lot of thought into how all of the components that make up a brand, or a franchise, work together.

Often, these things are still separate line items in budgets, and that fools us (as marketers and brand representatives) into thinking that they are different things.  We come up with our basic brand platform, we assign that out to all of the different teams involved in our brand marketing, and then leave it up to those teams to decide how their individual projects turn out.  A smarter approach to transmedia would be to look at each of those components, and ask how it contributes back inward to create the central meaning of a brand.  Because from a consumer perspective, that’s how it works: consumers don’t understand, or care enough to think about, the varying messages that a brand might present in each channel.  In our own lives, brands are brands, and stories are stories, and whatever pieces of brand messaging we encounter as we go about our lives become part of our overall experience of the brand.  So the result, in many cases, is that consumers experience brands as disjointed, inconsistent and self-contradicting. In some ways, it’s important to incorporate transmedia strategy into advertising campaigns now because consumers are way out ahead of us.  Not thinking about our work in transmedia terms just means we’re not concerning ourselves with the overall user experience of our brands.

Drop.io: Adding Businesses In the Cloud

As companies move to the cloud, office collaboration is following suit. DMB’s Matt Robinson spoke with Steven Greenwood, the VP of Applications at Drop.io. Drop.io is one of the leaders in office collaboration. It was named one of TIME magazine’s 50 Best Websites of 2009, and CNET Webware 100.

Anyone can start a “drop,” which is a custom url where you can upload different types of media - audio, video, pdf, text, photos - and invite others to participate in the drop in real time. Millions of people have used drops in thousands of different ways, from film crews on location and journalists covering disasters, to teachers sharing homework with students, Greenwood says.

With office collaboration continuing to gain momentum, how does Drop.io compete against other players?
Well, here’s one way: sometimes I need to share a large file. One way I can do it is via e-mail. Well, a lot of e-mail services are not really designed to handle lots of large files, or different types of files, or edit videos, etc. And, so businesses see us as a great, cost-effective alternative to sending Fed-Ex’s of stuff, or sending or creating CDs, or DVDs.

Have you had any issues trying to convince businesses about the security of the drops?
For any professional or business account we provide SSL. Additionally, its in the way you name your drops. We offer what we would call “privacy.” Meaning, you could name your drop “Red Dog” and it can be about a secret project you’re working on that may not be about dogs or the color red. We call that decontextualized information. Basically, without getting too theoretical, if we were at a bar talking about what the stock price will be tomorrow of some company; the people right next to us will not have heard what we’re talking about, even if they were a foot away, because it was decontextualized - they didn’t know that was going to be valuable information. The much larger story here is the element of privacy, having information where its literally like a needle in a haystack. For example, something like trying to hack into the Department of Defense’s database - you wouldn’t know where the database is. That’s a pretty interesting paradigm shift, going from a security world to a privacy world.

Where do you see the future FTP servers?
I think FTP serves a very good purpose and many, many people use it; it will continue to be used. I would say I’m not really an expert to diagnose the productions of the FTP market, but what I can say, businesses go to Drop.io for the ease of use, for the robustness of the platform, and for the the ability to interact with media without having to download it and replay it.

So, where do you see the future of office collaboration?
You know, that’s an interesting question.  So, let’s say, you, me and Jeremy and some other folks are working on something together. Instead of a long e-mail chain back and forth of, “Oh, what did you think of this? Did you see this attachment? Look at this.” You have this single location of all the content within this drop, of all the different media types, plus the notes associated with it. So every time I upload something, you and Jeremy and the others would get an e-mail update. You can go into it, make some edits, update it, they update it, etc. So, we make - for IT people and companies - their lives a lot easier by reducing e-mail server loads. And, for the users its great because instead of these e-mail threads that go on & on and get really complicated and confusing, and god forbid you go to lunch and miss out and are out of the loop. Its simple, you can access it from home, you can access it from multiple computers - anyone can access it.

This is how Drop.io is being used, as a very simple collaboration point. The other thing that’s really cool is that each drop is a new point of exchange. Let’s say that you and me and Jeremy are working on a project - we’re all in different locations. So, we use the drop’s conference phone line - we’re all in there via phone - we can all use chat in the drop. And if Jeremy wants to show us something he’s been working on, he can immediately click into Presentation Mode without us downloading anything. He can take over our drop screen and walk us through a Powerpoint, walk us through a PDF, walk us through a Word document video, or all of the above. And do it real time - we’re all interacting. You can share any content in any way with any one in real time, and improve the speed and efficiency in which business works.

The Future of Wi-Fi

By Sheila Shayon

David Staas is a 13-year veteran of marketing and product management experience in the mobile and advertising industries. Prior to his tenure as senior vice president of marketing at JiWire, Staas was at Ad Infuse, a pioneer in mobile advertising, where he was vice president of marketing and helped build a premium network and platform business with leading mobile operators.

JiWire is the leading mobile audience media company serving 20 million unique users per month at more than 30,000 high-traffic, premium Wi-Fi hotspots.

Staas will be speaking at the Digital Media Measurement & Pricing Summit, held in New York April 7-8.

DMB’s Sheila Shayon spoke with Staas about JiWire, consumer mobility and understanding the effectiveness of reaching an on-the-go audience.

Any significance to the name, JiWire?
Yes - when the company began in 2003 and it was all about using Wi-Fi for connectivity, the name was created to mean “Joining Invisible Wires.”

How did you build one of the largest location-based interactive learning channels?
We were in the wireless Internet access business and built a directory of public Wi-Fi locations. We developed deep relationships with advertisers around the directory and this evolved into a new business model for early usage - instead of subscription driven with daily/weekly/monthly fees, we moved it to an ad-based model.

How big is that directory today?
291,493 free and pay Wi-Fi locations in 145 countries.

JiWire leverages the context of a user’s location. How?
WiFi is a media channel. It allows us to track location and context. Venue is as important as place. In other words, are you in a Starbucks in San Francisco, or an executive lounge at JFK? Then we can supply advertisers with user location, network provider, and even the venue brand: 123456 café, in Barnes and Noble, at such and such street corner, using a MAC. So the inventory plan and model back into the venue type.

Which venues are seeing the most user growth?
Obviously airports have exceptionally high traffic, and hotels, but as brands like McDonald’s integrate free Wi-Fi, and market themselves as café environments, adding free connectivity results in consumer affinity and the café footprint is growing quickly. US McDonald’s locations that have become free in 2010 are 11,400.

So does being able to reach audiences in the context of their daily lives drive deeper engagement than traditional media?
Absolutely. The mind-set of the consumer is critical to the advertiser. Our channel allows for dynamically delivered, location-specific campaigns. We know the DNA of our audience across our footprint - are they a college student, a tech enthusiast, or a business user. You need scale for the economics to work.

Can you give me an example?
We worked with Microsoft in customizing messages about their Student Edition and Home Edition. In Denver, the ad might read, “A PC without Office is like Denver without the Rockies,” or in New York, “A PC without Office is like NY without the Statue of Liberty.”

Who do you make your business deals with?
The wireless carriers — AT&T or Boingo — and they negotiate the deal with Starbucks or McDonald’s. Foremost on our mind is always — how do we connect with an on-the-go audience.

What verticals will see Wi-Fi next?
Transportation - trains and subways. Also in-flight and college campuses.

How does the U.S. mobile audience compare to the rest of the world?
U.S. leads in public Wi-Fi locations with about 70,000. China is next with 36,000. Then England with 29,000 and France is fourth with 26,000.

How about U.S. cities?
New York is number one with 887, then San Francisco with 869, and Chicago with 794.

As legacy media distribution channels become less relevant to marketers than audience segmentation, how is JiWire leveraging this?
The shift is more to digital and interactive - and as widely distributed as possible. Consumers on average spend 44 percent of their time today on the go - not in front of their PC. The industry needs channels that reflect that behavior. It used to be separate agency teams addressing the issue, digital, OOH, emerging media and mobile. Now those teams are working together and pulling budget from each towards the unified goal of audience as focus - not individual channels.

So in 2010 mobile ad buys will start to look more like online buys?
Yes. The history of online is that people bought channels. Today the buy is to identify the audience and not the device - this is the heart of the mobile ecosystem.

Let’s talk about cost per engagement as an increasingly important metric.
Digital campaigns are all about engagement - it’s the new paradigm. Social media is about spending time with a brand, being a part of the conversation. Banner ads are no longer sufficient. Our Ads for Access model is a value exchange for the consumer and the advertiser: come spend time with my brand and you get free access. It’s an opt-in value-add proposition.

When Bing first arrived on the scene, we did a promotion with Microsoft offering visitors to airports and hotels across the country access to free WiFi in exchange for performing one search.  The results were significant. The average online click through rate of .01% was transformed into a 29% rate when the user was engaged by the value-add offer.

Has the mobile consumer himself become a DOOH destination?
In a sense - yes. It’s all about “the channel finding me.” The key problem with DOOH is the lack of measurement and interactivity. How many people saw an ad - and were they the right audience and was it personally relevant?

Where do you see the mobile industry heading in the near future?
The overall evolution of the mobile ecosystem is amazing considering the time frame is roughly one decade. Mobile devices changed consumer behavior — ahead of the advertising industry. Consumer’s lifestyles are not slowing down. 900 million new, wirelessly-enabled devices will ship this year. The advertising industry has to keep up with the convergence of technology and legacy channels.

How to Cross Promote: The Interactive Solution

Insider Profile: Stephen Strong, Global Director of Interactive, Alberto Culver

Stephen Strong, global director of Interactive, Alberto Culver, oversees interactive marketing strategies for brands such as TRESemme, Nexxus, VO5 and Noxzema. He has been with Alberto Culver for a year and a half.

Prior to that, Strong was the director of interactive for Draftfcb’s Chicago office for eight years. He has more than 15 years interactive marketing experience working with brands that include Kraft, Sears, SC Johnson and Motorola.

At the upcoming Digital Media Measurement & Pricing Summit, Strong will address developing a strategic approach for campaign success, identifying key performance indicators and delivering ROI.

DMB’s Barbara Gengler spoke to Strong about his interactive approach to ad campaigns.

How did you integrate Alberto Culver’s branded content from website to paid media and social media?
We talked about what to use as a spark to have an engaging experience with consumers to support our campaign. The struggle is what’s the big idea to do online? How to create original content to put online?

At Alberto Culver, there are similar challenges to do social media more than product banners on the Internet. There are also sweepstakes and sponsorships to put the message out there. We looked at the marketing pushes last year and started with them and where can we take that to the present marketing events to get that message out there.

We are a big sponsor of the Fall 2010 season of Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week, which took place from Feb. 11-18 in New York City, and for a little more money we had a video crew on stage capturing the video so we could put it in online.

Alongside the sponsorship, TRESemme launched TRESemme TRESpass, an exclusive group on Facebook that gives women instant, VIP access to the latest looks. The site features video on how to get the hair seen on the runway and tips on upcoming fall hair trends.

This year we are ramping up the media across distribution channels and testing out ways to push the content out and on to our Facebook page.

How did you expand its reach and effectiveness? What were the results?
For social media we aren’t so interested in the cost efficiency, since it is so low cost to maintain/upload our videos. But we are looking at consumer engagement (which videos get the most views, which gather the most fan comments/”likes”) to help determine what type of content they are most interested in. We would use this information to guide the type of video content we produce for the next program.

Paid media gets the best results and within paid media you get the most efficient views. We are testing out different ways to push it out there from a media standpoint.

On top of that, raising awareness and brand site/Facebook, people are coming there to look at that site on their own accord. We are providing content people are interested in and using the same content to re-establish with users how you serve it up.

Could you talk about identifying relevant Key Performance Indicators?
For online media/video distribution, we mainly look at cost efficiency, (cost per view), which will tell us which media channels are able to capture the most eyeballs at the lowest cost.

We would then pair that with message effectiveness (ComScore, Dynamic Logic, etc.) which tells us how consumers were affected after viewing the videos (association with TRESemme, increased purchase intent, etc.)

We would combine these learnings to identify the best sites/video networks to use for the next program. Also we did get a lot of comments about the content on the web pages and what brand advantages are connected.

How could they increase the effectiveness of digital ad spend?
From my point of view, I hate banner advertising, it’s a huge mistake with the focus on banner ads. I think I would challenge public relations agencies, media agencies to a no banner media campaign.

This should not be where the industry is going as banner advertising has always been terrible. Take that content elsewhere.

We want to put the content together and distribute it ourselves on Facebook, to the media sites, with some control over it. We’ve started looking at the media programs, most of them, and found this is what we want, and we ask them are you in or out?

We’re coming back with a better strategy and the media sites are open to this type of program. You have to get involved with the media content the agencies are creating.

Basically from my point of view, 80 percent of what I hear during a panel discussion is irrelevant. Most of the upcoming session will be from a strategic approach, a case study, examples of how to do it with no events. This is a type of approach you could use.

Virtualizing a Future in Green IT

By Moria Byrne

As the IBM senior-certified IT architect for IBM Global Business Services, John Lamb works as part of an influential group of architectural engineers changing how IT departments approach energy usage.

An information technology leader who has worked on IT systems for the New York Stock Exchange and other industry leaders, Lamb implements new money and energy-saving techniques as part of IBM’s Project Big Green project. The project will redirect USD $1 billion per year to increase energy efficiency of IBM products and services. As part of a team of technology engineers building data centers for a South African mobile phone company, Lamb helped the company provide energy and services to the local community without expending energy resources.

As part of the IBM Global Business Service team and author of more 50 white papers and two other books on technology, Lamb shares his technical expertise on energy-saving techniques with businesses in the U.S. as well as IT businesses with in his latest book, The Greening of IT: How companies can make a difference for the environment. Lamb explains how cloud computing, more efficient cooling systems, increased use of energy metrics, incentives and better hardware are all changing the role of IT operators from energy users to energy watchdogs. His book is intended for both CEOs and technical engineers by providing both the why (savings and increased productivity) and the how (a technology guide of how to apply energy savings techniques) of energy-saving IT techniques. Lamb recently spoke with DMB’s Moria Byrne.

What are the major trends in IT Green Technology right now?
There is a growing awareness about energy consumption in the IT business community. Also, the economic downturn has forced companies to look for ways to reduce costs.

Fortunately, even in this bad economy, electricity is doing well, which means IT will continue to grow. For example, Google has 450,000 servers and keeps growing. What this means is that the company needs to keep building upon a tremendous database.

Does cloud computing play an important role in IT energy conservation? Absolutely! Ten years from now, everything will be done through cloud computing. It is a way to optimize a data center.

IBM consulting expects the number of server shipments to grow by six times and the number of server databases by 69 times. Information technology keeps growing. It reflects how data centers keep growing. In South Africa, we are working with a mobile phone company with a tremendous customer service database. A lot of the information is regulation customer information, etc. The company has 2 Pedbites of information; that’s 10,000 GB! This is a tremendous amount of data. Overall, IBM is building more than 70,000 GB of new information a day.

Were you able to save a lot of energy by using cloud computing for the South African mobile phone company?
IBM moved all 10 database servers into a private cloud where the energy is shared. IBM worked with a company to make their system of 1,000 data servers more efficient. It was hard to keep track of 1,000 servers and going around to keep up the power supply. Now, their power is all in one server. Companies can save a lot by consolidating data servers.

It’s important to create a network, to consolidate and centralize data centers. Cloud computing makes a global network possible. Currently, IBM has 10 virtual servers. Energy costs were greatly reduced by cloud computing. Yet, consolidating data center isn’t enough; companies must moderate metric systems by new standards.

And cloud computing is your way of virtualizing data centers?
Before laptops and the like, which was 40 years ago, every department had their own terminal. It turns out if you wanted to share energy from one center to another, you couldn’t. We decided to go back to the future and make computer systems highly available, uninterrupted service with high-end supplies of energy. This way when the power goes out, the computers keep running. Now, the power is all in one data server.

You save a lot of energy. It’s like taking 10 houses and turning them into an apartment building in which residents are sharing the same heating system. With cloud computing, we don’t have to think about the servers running out of power.

Virtual just means you don’t have separate servers but systems sharing (like a printer) a bigger storage device. For instance, if you have two stand-alone servers with 10-percent capacity and one is using at 5-percent capacity and [another one is] using at 10-percent capacity, it’s better for the two systems to work together. As one is underused and the other is used to its capacity, you still have 5 percent energy capacity to spare.

Do you think that IT departments will be responsible in 10 years for keeping their energy consumption in check?
Absolutely. IT departments will be responsible for their own energy bills. Currently, there is no repercussions when an IT department wants an additional server. There isn’t a good chargeback system in place.

IT departments would have a certain number of GB of storage per month or fiscal quarter.  If a department decides that they need 100 GB more, they will be charged for the additional GB out of their departmental budget. IT departments take responsibility for their electric bills and consider energy needs carefully before increasing GB storage.

Do you think government incentives are going to become increasingly important in pushing IT companies to use energy more efficiently?
I think there will be an increase over time in the number of government rebates available. More government-sponsored incentive programs to push companies to change would make a difference. The government of California put pressure on BGE. Now, the company receives rebates for reducing energy costs in California.

In 1977 or 1978, there was a big energy crisis. IBM was concerned about cutting servers. Then, energy suddenly got cheaper again. Things are going to get bad if you don’t give people incentives. Would they make the same energy choices without it? I’d like to think so. I think things are changing, I think this is a permanent change.

How are you changing IBM applications for maximum energy efficiency?
It’s not just about saving energy by using more efficient hardware and better infrastructure, it’s about the applications, too. You can do 50 percent of your work in 50 percent of the space. If you optimize your applications, you can save up to half your energy.

Both Google and Amazon use private clouds to store their information. Clouds allow large companies to make their information available and transferrable to staff in India or Beijing as readily as someone in NYC.

Do you think all companies will be using cloud computing in the future?
Yes. Ten years from now, every company will be using cloud computing. Most large companies will use private clouds to consolidate different data centers. This way, the company information is protected and only available to specific employees. Smaller businesses will use public clouds or not have a data center at all.

How can the Internet support these new clouds?
High-bandwidth is on the rise in major international cities and cloud computing internationally will be more easily accessible. Already, I have seen strong bandwidth in international cities such as Bangalore, India, where IBM currently has 70,000 employees.

And as bandwidth grows within companies, the need for more space will also continue to grow within data centers. Companies will increasingly be able to house information where ever they choose. For example, IBM has data center operators in Brazil that manage the data centers physically housed in Chicago.

Do you see any other countries other than the U.S. leading the way in Green IT?
China is on its way to becoming the world’s largest producer of renewable energy, yet it remains one of the most polluted countries on earth. India is also on a green IT boom.

To diagnose how to have energy used in data centers download the following online software tool from the U.S. Department of Energy.

Moria Byrne is a freelance journalist and editor. Her work has been featured in: Baltimore Business Journal, Maryland Daily Record, The Jewish Times and The Narragansett Times.

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