Social Shopper pioneer Collective Bias has iterated marketing messaging to new heights with a community of 1,400 influencers doing the heavy-lifting for brands.

“We believe that social shopper marketing is the evolution of shopper media, and supplants tired traditional media like FSI’s, retail circulars and digital display advertising,” said John Andrews, co-founder and CEO of Collective Bias. The company, founded in 2009 and headquartered in Arkansas, just received $10.5 million in funding led by Updata Partners to grow its platform where brands such as Tyson, Nestle and Smart & Final pay for their products to be covered by relevant bloggers who push that content across social media. 

Named one of America's Most Promising Companies in 2013 by Forbes, their proprietary Social Fabric community of shopping-centric influencers has an aggregate reach of over 50 million, as the company claims its bloggers have an average reach of 40,000.Continue reading...

They say size doesn’t matter, but the Internet Advertising Bureau disagrees. New research from the UK-based IAB (there's a US body too) shows that consumers pay a lot more attention to brands that don’t stick to the basics of online advertising.

The IAB UK just released a global study indicating that larger formats are “twice as effective at raising brand awareness” than the forms of advertising that have long ruled the Internet: banners, skyscrapers, and mid-page units.

The group checked out how well three larger formats – billboard, wallpaper, and half pagers – did compared to the old paradigm. Five key metrics were measured: ad awareness, brand awareness, brand favorability, message awareness, and purchase intent. Guess who won the fight?Continue reading...

Valentine’s Day was marred for many by failed or faulty delivery of bouquets to loved ones, as we covered here, last week – and many consumers and retailers had things to say.

A popular florist blogger commented in a Feb. 17th post titled “Valentine’s Day Flowers Adwords: Feasting on the Bones of Local Florists”:

“Vultures. It’s the only way I can think to describe Google’s Adwords ads this past Valentine’s Day holiday. ‘Don’t be evil’ flew out the window and Google opened it even wider for the birds of prey to strip consumers and local flower shops of their hard-earned dollars.

First, we had ProFlowers telling shoppers seeking local florists BY NAME in Google searches that the stores were sold out of flowers. It’s a completely despicable ad tactic that diverted consumers by lying about local flower shop inventories. Despite having plenty of beautiful blooms for Valentine’s Day, the drop-shipper tried to suck in late buyers by falsifying the flower availability at these shops. Shame on Liberty Media. Shame on ProFlowers. And shame on the Google staffers who approved those ads."

We asked Google to comment, and they replied by email.Continue reading...

Market research group Lab42 asked a question branding and marketing pros ask all the time: Is anyone even paying attention to advertising?

The three forms of advertising Lab42 focused on were online banner ads, ads in free phone apps, and ads in music streaming apps.

Some of the findings are expected (pop-ups are annoying!) while others are surprising (31 percent of respondents claimed to never fast-forward through commercials in DVR-ed programming). The survey findings in an eye-catching visual graphic:Continue reading...

AOL CEO Tim Armstrong was comparatively upbeat on this week's Q3 earnings call, citing the web giant's February acquisition of The Huffington Post, the growth of the Patch network of hyperlocal community websites and increased mobile content as key drivers. As of September 30, 2011, AOL had $444.1 million of cash.

With a third quarter net loss of $2.6 million, or 2 cents a share on revenue of $531.7 million, down 6% from a year ago, ad revenue is up 8% from 2010 to $317.7 million. "Amazingly," Business Insider commented, some 3.5 million AOL users still access the brand via dial-up. On paper, CNN Money observed, AOL's financials may look "dismal," but its "quarterly revenue declines were the lowest in 5 years (while) search ad sales fell by the smallest amount in 2 years."

Since July’s changes in AOL’s ad operations, which saw Jeff Levick ousted (to land at Spotify as chief ad officer) and Ned Brody upped to the top spot, Armstrong said they’ve been tightening their focus and offering to marketers and advertisers.Continue reading...

Chex Quest, from General Mills, was the first video game to ever be included in cereal boxes as a prize back in 1996. Fast forward 15 years to Create a Comic, General Mills' latest digital advergame designed to engage kids with the Honey Nut Cheerios cereal brand. 

In that brief span of 15 years, the playbook on marketing to children has been rewritten by all things digital, and marketers are increasingly using games, quizzes and mobile apps to woo kids into a social web where they essentially act as marketers themselves.Continue reading...

While not quite as out there as EEG-tracking to determine consume responses to brand messaging, eye tracking — which uses webcams to follow eyeballs as people peruse ads online — is getting more sophisticated.

Traditional web tracking techniques provide data on clicking and scrolling patterns, while eye tracking analyzes user interaction, i.e., what’s literally most eye-catching, in between the clicks, as well as what’s confusing or ignored altogether.

Stockholm-based MRC Online EyeTracking uses technology developed by Tobii Technology to literally track viewers' gaze, and defines effectiveness by where and how long people look at individual elements of advertising. 

That analysis is what attracted P&G to sign up with MRC to track the effectiveness of its Pampers brand marketing in Scandinavia.Continue reading...

On Monday, the editor of left-leaning political satire site Wonkette wrote a piece titled "Greatest Living American: A Children’s Treasury of Trig Crap On His Birthday." The piece lampooned what's known as the "cult of Trig," the rabid fans of Sarah Palin's Down Syndrome youngest child, and accused Palin of using her now three-year-old son as a prop.

Needless to say, many readers were offended by Jack Stuef's post and an online movement started to defund Wonkette by targeting its advertisers. The problem is that Wonkette has a lot of contextual ads, creating a headache for brands targeted in the boycott.Continue reading...