Will Apps Really Kill The Web?

How many times will Wired predict the death of the web browser before it actually happens?

All kidding aside, the web’s percentage of total Internet traffic is shrinking.  Video is mostly to blame, but it begs the question concerning what else will erode the traditional model of viewing content via a web browser.  Depending largely on device adoption, apps may be a big part of that.

That’s the topic of this week’s piece in iMedia. Yes, apps may be the flavor of the month.  Fast Company even believes we’re in an app bubble.  But, if done the right way, apps give people a way to access utility and content from mobile devices that doesn’t involve awkward fumbling with a mobile browser.  I think its inarguable that utility is the key here – content is nice, but it’s more compelling to download an app that gives access to functionality and utility that otherwise wouldn’t be available on a mobile device (or would be too clumsy via a mobile web browser).  So brands that expect to debut apps that merely push content at users could probably stand to re-evaluate that tactic.

Apps may cannibalize web browsing to a degree, but they won’t kill web browsing as we know it.  One good reason?  We still engage in quite a bit of casual content consumption that’s probably best served up in a browser.  Another good reason?  New media channels don’t obliterate old ones.  They merely erode them.

The best way for marketers to make sense of the app mania is to think about what utility consumers expect from your brand.  If you start with “how can I push marketing messages to my consumer?” you’ll likely fail.  If you start with “what utility can I extend to the consumer that will be useful and help keep my brand top of mind?” you’ll do better.  So if you’re Gibson Guitars, an app that pulls in video from your YouTube channel probably won’t be as successful as a lightly-branded app that shows chord fingerings.  Sponsored utility is the name of the game.

Should Coke Follow Pepsi on Twitter?

Rupal Parekh posed some interesting questions with a Twitter-themed post on AdAge’s DigitalNEXT blog.  Among those questions was whether or not Bill Gates should return Eric Schmidt’s follow.

Doesn’t the notion of two direct competitors following one another seem ripe for an explosive post on reddit or Digg?  I can see such a thing becoming front-page news on the social news sites and then ending up as a mentionable on the morning news.  But Parekh brings up an interesting point.  (And it’s not interesting simply because he quoted me…)  What can we learn from following our competitors?

I see it as something not unlike trying to discern digital strategy from watching competitive creative executions in digital display advertising.  If all you ever see from a competitor is a bunch of ads linking to coupons and promotions, you might think that that’s how they’ve pigeonholed digital display advertising within the organization.  In that case, a sudden burst of brand awareness advertising would be unexpected.

I think a lot can be learned from following competitors.  If it’s a personal feed from a C-level executive at a competitor, you might learn a bit about where their head is at.  If it’s a brand feed, you might learn from the totality of the tweets posted what the overall strategy and role of Twitter might be.  Of course, these roles can change over time, but it’s important to note these things and see where your competitors have experimented and eventually settled on the right role for Twitter for that particular time and brand.

Of course, Twitter isn’t the only channel that can deliver insight on a competitor’s social media strategy.  You also need to look at what they’re doing with social networks like Facebook, sharing sites like Flickr and YouTube, community sites and more.  Not just to see how many “likes” or followers they have, but to see what they’re trying to do to build their business.  Do they run contests or sweepstakes?  Are they driving traffic to a brand site?  Are they trying to start one-on-one dialogues with customers?  Each of these represents a marked path in terms of a social media strategy, so it’s important to ask the right questions as you’re looking at a brand’s presence in social media.

What B2B Marketers Can Learn from B2C

B2B Magazine just ran a short piece I wrote on how B2B marketers can borrow digital tactics from the business to consumer side of digital.

One of the things we really love about working in the B2B space is that it has its own unique challenges for reaching the right audience.  Whereas a broad-appeal B2C product might want to reach hundreds of millions, a B2B product might be trying to reach a corporate audience that numbers in the tens of thousands.  Finding ways to creatively reach the right people is a must for these B2B campaigns, and media plans have to consider ways of reaching a niche audience online other than simply picking the websites of the magazines that appear on the print schedule.  It’s a terrific challenge that we enjoy here.

Aside from advanced targeting, one of the ways we’re adding value for our B2B clients is in the realm of measurement.  The publishers we work with on the B2B side of the business tend to small – not exactly fitting the profile of a comScore 500 site.  So many of them haven’t heard of measurement technologies we might use on the consumer side.  What’s particularly cool about this is that we’ve had the opportunity to work with some of these small publishers to execute their first brand studies.  One surprise we found was that completion rates for surveys were much higher than they typically are in consumer advertising.  And this makes sense – when you’re reaching the right people with a B2B campaign, you won’t have any shortage of people willing to share their opinions about advertising to their particular business sector.

Other things that can be borrowed from the consumer sector?  Rich media technologies, advanced ad metrics and approaches to search marketing.  In the coming months, we’ll be talking a lot more about this stuff.  Stay tuned.

Nobody Cares

Interesting title for a post, no?

I’ve said these two words countless times over the past few years as people within our industry talk about various justifications for the work they’re doing in online targeting, transactional media buying and data mining.  And now the transactional half of the industry is paying the price.

We do this without using Personally Identifiable Information…

Nobody cares.  They don’t want to know about the technical jiu-jitsu you used to aggregate data points on them.  They just know that what you know about them makes them uncomfortable.

But…but… the traditional direct marketing industry does things that are waaaaay more invasive.

Nobody cares.  Besides, your mother should have taught you better.  Since when do we justify doing something creepy by pointing at someone else’s creepy behavior?  Have you not noticed that people don’t much like junk mail, either?

Our privacy and opt-out policies are in compliance with industry best practices.

Nobody cares.  Those little seals of approval all over your rarely-visited privacy page and all your marketing materials didn’t get there because some governing board decided to ask web users how they feel about being tracked and targeted.

And so it came to pass, in a manner similar to how I thought it would, that someone wrote a high-profile yet ham-handed exposé (actually, a series of them) that came decidedly from the consumer’s point of view and illuminated the bigger picture for digital marketers: Nobody cares much how this stuff works.  They just don’t want you building digital dossiers on them.

“So,” you might be saying to yourself, “if I’m the type of marketer who wants to market digitally, but also wants to avoid all these sketchy targeting methods, what do I do?”

Call us – 212-647-8436.  Or drop us a line.  Our clients have a clear path to continued success, even if Congress decides to sweep away the third-party cookie and put an end to all this stuff.  We can also tell you about how The Wall Street Journal has only scratched the surface when it comes to this article series.  Are your current digital marketing plans at risk?  We can advise you.

Opportunity for Rep Firms?

I think rep firms can make a comeback.

Publishers are continuing to monetize through exchanges, regardless of how damaging it can be to their business in the long term.  They’re also juggling networks and trying to figure out which of the gazillion ad networks can get them the best return on inventory that otherwise might not sell.  All the while, nobody is putting up numbers like the direct sales force.

It used to be that several ad sellers were based in the old rep firm model.  Those sellers might represent several sites at once, but they held their publisher clients in higher esteem than an ad network might today.  And it worked.  That’s why it’s curious to me why rep firms aren’t as popular as they once were.  It could be that short-term growth pressure selects against them, since they’re tough to scale once salespeople are maxed out on the number of sites they can reliably represent.  But it’s an opportunity for a private businessperson who wants a steady business that can reliably generate a significant profit every year.

In any case, I think the uncertainty generated by the lack of price and data transparency in the arbitrage business might lead some publishers to be looking for rep firms rather than networks to join.  I’ve already gotten a few e-mails in response to my column – from publishers looking to know who the good rep firms are.  So maybe there’s more demand than one might think…