In the earlier days of the Internet, content ruledBanners were the only way to reach consumers, they have gotten better over the years, but remain bannersWe still measure them the same way using impressions and clicks
Social activity has fundamentally changed how people interact on the web, they are playing games together like Farmville, having conversations on Twitter and sharing their location on FoursquareThese activities create a better opportunity for advertisersThe web and content have continued on, but social is different
According to Nielsen, you can see people spending a lot of time on social networks and online games. So we’ve really seen a monumental shift here over the last 3 years.
Everything needs to change. The way people connect with people on the web has changed, so how about we think about how brands then connect with people on the web? That has to change as well.
Mary Meeker, the banker of the group, she’s also looking for this change to come through innovation.
appssavvy has brought many of the world’s leading brands into social activity to create a new advertising experienceOthers offer ads next to social, they may be highly targeted, but not socialwe are rethinking the entire relationship between the delivery and reception of advertising. delivery: how are messages sent out to an audience? and more importantly reception: was it received? was it positively received? and why was it received? We need to rethink through that entire process.
Probably a lot of you have seen this slide before. I actually was once in a meeting with a client who said “oh my god if I see this slide again I might vomit” and I said “I know”. I know what you’re going to say: everyone comes in here and talks about the time spent. There’s tons of time spent on social networks but the ad dollars haven’t moved there yet. Therefore you as an advertiser need to move there because there’s more time spent there. I’m not going to take that approach.My question is: what can we learn from Search and what can we learn from Classifieds? If you look at the metrics here. Time spent vs. dollars spent is inverse. There’s more dollars spent in Search and Classifieds than time. Why? Because Search and Classifieds capture intent and context. You search for something and you get an ad right there based on what your search was. Those two capture intent and context better than anything, therefore the ad dollars and the advertising vehicle is more ripe for opportunity. So let’s learn from that.
Where can we capture intent and context? From what people are doing on the web.
The ad unit doesn’t necessarily fit around the activity, there are 90 million conversations going on every day on our platform, so let’s not put our ads around the activity, let’s put it right within the activity. Let’s understand that all these activities are going on every single day, and that’s where your advertising is going to live, right within the activity.
And once you understand what people are doing, the metrics you’re going to look at aren’t just “how many impressions and I going to get?” “What’s the reach?” “What’s the frequency?” Those are important, but Ytu’re also going to want to know “How much was it shared?” “How many questions were asked?” “How many check-ins took place?”
Let’s look at a game called GodFinger that we work with. This is a game where you play god, you have a planet and you build that planet. Most importantly we’re going to look at what are the activities? What are the things that people are doing? [List activities.] So if those are activities, those are what we are going to leverage.
So there’s your planet, and then we also created Microsoft’s planet but we made it a cloud. It became directly a part of the game in that people visit the cloud.
Here we have basically an ad. But it makes sense. People know they’re going to receive this ad because they’re visiting planets and they clicked on the Windows cloud.
To wrap up, by capturing intent and context, but understanding what people are doing – i.e. social activity – you’re going to be able to improve the distribution channel for your advertising and your branded content.