Dove Gives Facebook Ads a Makeover
Preying on insecurities is a common ‘strategy’ in advertising, and especially so when targeting women who are forever conscious of their weight, height, level of hair shine, amount of belly roll, etc. But it really can make you feel ‘not so special’ when you see such ads on Facebook because they have been specifically targeted to people like you. Oops.
I found this sponsored story in my news feed today from Dove:
I remember reading something about Dove this morning so I took a quick look around the blogs. As it turns out, Dove has launched a Facebook “Ad Makeover” campaign in Australia that makes a stand against negative-body-image type ads and uses that to push their own positive brand messages:
The campaign works in the form of a Facebook app on Dove’s page. Without having to become a fan of Dove, users can choose what message they want to send: e.g. “Hello beautiful”, “The perfect bum is the one you’re sitting on”, “Think of your cups as half full” etc. They can also do their own targeting by choosing who to send the message to – women who are thinking about careers, love, beauty or fitness (I wonder if this is real targeting or part of the idea of giving users a sense of empowerment/control over who they send their message to..?). The app then tells you how many women your positive message will reach.
Of course, the ads don’t actually replace would-be negative ads. They are using normal Facebook advertising and targeting methods. There’s also no way that my ‘ad’ message is going to reach 542,900 women as Dove tells me. But I think it would work well as it’s a nice feel good campaign that uses people power to spread the word and makes a stand against stereotypes and insecurity – which has been Dove’s approach for a while as we have seen in Campaign for Real Beauty and Dove Evolution.
Although Dove has received a bit of flak from its past campaigns that on the surface, promoted self-esteem (…and behind the scenes: heavily photoshopped images and involved cellulite cream sales as a KPI…), I think this one will be better received. What do you think?
Alert the Media: FRANk PR is here
Welcome to FRANk PR. As a social business agency that challenges assumptions about communications and looks at how we can engage with people in media, it was a logical next step that we incorporate PR into our offering, fusing it with our social business know how and connecting the missing link for our clients.
And I am the one who will help you do this – hi!
Who am I?
My name is Sarah Kempson and I come to FRANk Media after a number of years working across a variety of marketing disciplines. My background includes PR, advertising, branding and social across corporate, government and consumer clients, in both agency and client-side. I also produce my own blog and write for online and print publications, helping me to better understand the traditional and new media platforms and how best to engage them.
So what is PR today? And how do we address the challenge of integrating PR and social?
PR today is more targeted than even before. In an environment where most people in media have a Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest – or whatever the flavour of the month is – personalisation is required. Who is the right person to talk to? What is the best way to engage them? Who do they influence? Finding the right approach is paramount – one size does not fit all and it’s important to integrate across all platforms – old and new.
PR now needs to focus on engaged content, rather than just push content
Old vs New
PR Professionals need to be savvy in the way they approach journalists today – a press release emailed to the newsdesk is no longer enough to get your client in the media. Hooks need to be stronger; news needs to be quirkier; a unique point of difference is required. What makes your story special?
And it’s not just traditional media that we are sending a press release to anymore. Whilst print, radio and TV might seem the most logical (or most powerful) choices, are they the right ones? Or are they simply the ones we know and are familiar with? As the graphic below represents, half of our media consumption is now via the internet. Social media, be it viral campaigns, blogger engagement or getting your message across in 140 characters on Twitter – needs to be a part of this mix.
50% of our media consumption is via the Internet
Where to now?
At the end of the day, the basic premise of both PR and social business is the same as it has always been; the building and maintaining of personal relationships. This should always remain at the forefront of any planning for your brand’s PR and social strategy. The communications landscape is changing often and while it may seem daunting to keep up, the key will always be to keep it personal.
What are some of the best integrations of PR and social campaigns you have seen recently? Or, the worst?
Now on offer: Facebook Offers
In a move that surely surprises no one, Facebook this week launched ‘Offers’ in Australia, currently available in beta to a limited number of business pages and soon to be available to all pages.
Facebook Offers follows in the footsteps of FourSquare and the multitude of group buying websites that have sprung up over the past years, leveraging the power of bulk buying and word of mouth.
While FourSquare integrated with Facebook over two years ago, at the time Facebook Places replicated the technology of using the location based services facility that FourSquare offered. Facebook Places was replaced with the tagging location technology soon after.
How Does It Work?
Facebook Offers works in much the same way as FourSquare, without the check-in component – an offer is posted on the business page of a brand, such as a coffee shop and appears on the brand page and in your newsfeed. The offer might involve a buy one get one free, or a discount on a product or service, which is redeemed on the brands page. Facebook Offers differs by emailing the offer directly to the consumer, who then takes their mobile device, or a printout, to the venue to redeem their offer.
The offer can be capped, and made available for a limited time only. Facebook then tracks how many offers have been redeemed, which is displayed on the brand page, and the offer can be shared with friends in the same way other content on Facebook is shared.
Here is a bit more about Facebook Offers.
What Does this Mean for FourSquare?
FourSquare announced this week they have 20 million users worldwide, with over 2 billion check-ins, but Facebook Places had 30 million users within two months of launching in 2010. So, will brands choose FourSquare, which uses location based che
ck ins for their offers, or Facebook, which only requires you to ‘like’?
Questions could also be raised about how to police the redemption of Facebook Offers – what is stopping a consumer from redeeming an offer on more than one occasion, especially if that offer is on a mobile device? And what about staff training and ensuring that your brand ambassadors are across all the offers published in time for them to be redeemed?
Recent evidence from Group Buying sites show discounts and freebie offers generally bring customers in the door, but getting them to come back is the area that needs work. It may be that Facebook Offers provides the key to loyalty marketing in the future, given that most people redeeming the offers will already be fans of the brand.
Will you use Facebook Offers for your business?
Facebook downsizes ads and is yet to alert advertisers
A recently discovered document that was uploaded to Scribd by a number of users contains updated advertising specifications for Facebook. These changes will greatly impact an advertisers ability to catch the eye of consumers, but Facebook strangely opted to not alert advertisers to these adjustments. Changes in specifications now see marketplace ads (those that appear down the side of the newsfeed) decreasing in size and decreasing the amount of characters that can be used in the description.
The document displaying the coming advertising changes states the changes will go through on the 31st of march, although Facebook already seems to have begun resizing advertisements automatically.
How these ads used to look:
How they’re going to look now:
The changes by Facebook are an attempt to make their ads from page posts more appealing for advertisers. The larger image size of page post ads makes them more desirable for advertisers over the the traditional marketplace ads.
Inbound Marketing, the way forward.
We all love a good infographic. I think I’ll let this one speak for itself…
Graphic thanks to Voltier Digital
Call to revamp classifications
The Australian Law Reform Commission has proposed streamlining classifications across film, television, computer games and online content.
The proposed changes include the introduction of a PG 8+ and T 13 + (Teen) rating in addition to the current children ratings of C (children) and G (general).
The proposed new framework envisages:
- a greater role for industry in classifying content—allowing government regulators to focus on the content that generates the most community concern, and ensure access to adult content is properly restricted;
- content will be classified using the same categories, guidelines and markings whether viewed on television, at the cinema, on DVD or online;
- changes to classification categories, with age references—PG 8+ and T 13+ (Teen)—to help parents choose content for their children; and
- the Commonwealth taking on full responsibility for administering and enforcing the new scheme.
Currently there are different classification codes across different media. In TV Tonight‘s recent Audience Inventory, readers voted that having TV classifications match Film classifications was an Important industry issue.
The commission believes the use of age references will provide a better guide for parents to in assessing content for children.
Source: The Age/TV Tonight
Facebook users to create online pop-up shops on behalf of brands
Pop-up stores are increasingly becoming popular as an alternative, mobile and unexpected solution to retail distribution; in fact we’ve recently initiated one for Goodness Superfoods in conjunction with the The Prahran Mission Cafe. However, a company in the states recently came up with the initiative to enable Facebook users to run their own pop up shop online on behalf of other brands.
Mypopupshop gives brand ambassadors the power to not only encourage positive word of mouth, but allows them to earn money from their recommendations.
The concept allows users to select a brand for a limited period along with a custom theme for their shop. Users are incentivised to promote the brand to their friends and paid a commission for each sale, with the entire transaction managed by mypopupshop. After 30 days the user can decide whether to continue with the brand or select another.
The application is due to launch very soon. We’ll be sure to check back once it’s up and running to see how well it does.
Nielsen provides an edge in targeted online brand advertising
Nobody likes banner ads. They pop up everywhere, screaming for your attention with bad colours, hawking iPhones and iPads, lagging your computer with pop-ups and animations that hurt your eyes. Advertisers often it difficult to advertise effectively within the online space because of the difficulty of accurate demographic targeting.
Later this month, the Nielsen Company will be rolling out its Online Campaigns Rating system in the US, which promises to measure online brand advertising more like the way brand advertising is measured on television – by identifying the demographics which see each ad.
Nielsen has historically used its panels (often referred to as ‘Nielsen families’) to record exactly who has watched any specific episode of television that was broadcast on the airwaves. In online, however, there hasn’t been an effective way to organise such panels and gather the demographic information required.
But through a partnership with Facebook that has been in the works since 2009, Nielsen is able to provide the demographic data on who sees what ads placed around the Internet, even if the ads aren’t on Facebook itself. Advertisers can tag their ads and place them on targeted websites around the web. When the ads are viewed, Facebook searches its own user database to identify the viewer of the ad and gathers the person’s demographic information (but not personally identifiable information) and sends it to Nielsen, thus allowing Nielsen to report back to advertisers on who saw their ads and where. The panel represents the alliance between Nielsen and Facebook to bring attitudinal and purchase intent surveys to Facebook’s growing audience.
The Online Campaign Ratings system is somehow like the digital equivalent of ‘gross rating points’, the advertising world’s system of measuring television’s reach. Until now, online advertising has worked great for direct response advertising, but not as well for brand advertising which focuses on measuring reach.
‘Online advertising hooked itself to certain metrics that did not have anything to do with the other mediums out there,’ Nielsen’s senior vice president of Online Campaign Ratings, Charles Buschwalter says. ‘Many brand advertisers have been on the sidelines because they haven’t been convinced that they can build brands online.’
OCR will allow brand advertisers to measure exactly who views the ads placed, instead of limiting brand advertisers to ‘pre-buying’ demographics by placing ads on certain sites. It will be available in the US starting August 15 as a subscription service, offered to advertisers and publishers – hopefully it will be introduced in Australia as well, where Facebook has a super penetration rate of 62% of the online population. Nielsen’s future plans of bringing in more publishers alongside Facebook will also help generate accurate demographic data for advertisers.
5 good reasons for starting your online strategy
1. Because your website is a marketing tool. Many think that building a website means people will visit it. The truth is that a website is like a store. You still need to advertise the fact that you have one. So the best way to start building a website is planning. Not only where the buttons go or which information we need. We want to find out how we can differentiate from our competitors, give our customers what they want and keep them coming back. Think about it this way: A website without a strategy is like a building without an architect.
2. Because a website is not enough anymore. The internet has grown a lot in the last 3 years and today we know that having one touch point online is not enough. There are many things you can do online and your strategy should have a mix of them. This can give you a few touch points on the first page of google and will make sure you’re catering for first time visitors as well as people who already know you.
3. Because your audience is not the same. Today’s audience is savvy, time poor and used to advertising. And if attention is the new currency we need to make sure people will pay attention to our offering. Another flash website won’t do it. How about regularly updated content or some sort of community or social game? These are things we need to think about before the website functionality.
4. Because of money, time and your goals. There is no point building a website for $30,000 and then find out it’s not achieving your goals. The first thing we need to do is to come up with a plan that will save you money and get you to where you want to be.
5. Because its not done when it’s done. Building a website is only the beginning. How will you market it? Who will contribute to it? How will people engage with it? How easy it is to change? Will it be out of date in 2 years? There is no point building a website until you can answer these questions.
Using Banners
A recent study by Starcom MediaVest called Natural Born Clickers finds “a very small group of consumers who are not representative of the total US online population is accountable for the vast majority of display ad click-through behaviour.”
It also quantifies just 6% of the online population are heavy clickers which accounts for 50% of all display ad clicks.
While many online media companies use click through as an ad negotiation currency, it appears heavy clickers are not the true representatives of the online population.
“Further preliminary Starcom data suggests no correlation between display ad clicks and brand metrics, and show no connection between measured attitude towards a brand and the number of times an ad for that brand was clicked. The research presentation suggests that when digital campaigns have a branding objective, optimizing for high click rates does not necessarily improve campaign performance. “
This makes sense. It is fair to say that agencies have the tendency to fall on CTR and clicks to optimise and report campaign results. Clients demand accountability and ad servers delivers a tonne of insights on clicks. It is important to have objectives set out clearly whether the campaign is a Branding or Performance (Clicks) based exercise. We’ve known clicks do not translate to a successful brand campaign and as shown in the report that there was no connection between measured attitude towards a brand. What would be interesting is the measured brand shift from a banner branding campaign… what is the effective SOV% / importance of contextual relevance / creative cut through for an efficient brand shift?
Mozilla Firefox buzz campaign
Mozilla has decided to launch a humorous viral campaign consisting of a website called “Fight Against Boredom”, a video on YouTube, a Facebook page and links to download Firefox. However, the website is not available at the moment.
What’s interesting is how they tackled the debate on Firefox vs IE. Through a song, they tell us how Firefox users are statistically better off then IE users. There are harmless ones such as “Firefox users are 67% more likely to go mountain biking” and those that provoke, for example “Firefox users are 38% less likely to have breast cancer”. The latter has caused heated debates on the statistical validity (backed by Nielsen) and ethical issues behind it. Regardless, it has certainly caused quite a buzz.
It’s a scoop
FRANk’s core mantra is that advertising is only interesting when it’s relevant, in turn generating advocacy and positive word of mouth.
Well we’re claiming a world first here by advertising on ice cream vans for kidspot targeting predominantly mums with pre- teen children.
With this intent we discovered the Chief Scooper community scoops, courtesy of google, and after a visit to an industrial warehouse in Melbourne’s suburbs we agreed on a couple of panel sizes placed just to the right of the window where all and sundry queue up.
The stickers arrived today and we’ll be up and running on a number of “high-profile” vans by Nov1.
We’ll post some photos of stickers in situ soonest.
1% blog = 99% entertainment
Monday is a great day to do some free-style websurfing.
It’s pretty much like treasure hunting – you start by googling some semi obscure website (place) and follow the below links (clues) from there.
This Monday I hit Jackpot – a blog called 1%, which is a co-written blog full of great posts on a range of topics like web, culture, design, art and advertising.
1% founder Jason Theodor is an online consultant who’s also writing a blog called: There Is No Box.
I especially liked his presentation about tweens called “TweenLand” – Presentation on Tweens to Ogilvy and Kraft: The Trends and Media Environment of Generation Net.
So if you’re after some pointers about what kids are doing these days you should check it out.
Digital strategy 101 – STA travel
STA travel is one Australian brand that’s really gets online.
Check this out: they’ve got a facebook, myspace and friendster profiles.
They’ve got a second life branch with tours and bookings.
You can call an agent on skype and you can share any of their web pages on Digg, delicious, stumbleUpon, Reddit and Facebook.
They’ve got lots of travel blogs or you can create your own and you can even buy carbon credits to offset your trip.
Next time I’ll know who to talk about when asked which Australian brand gets it right and I’m interested to know how it works for them.
This is digital strategy 101 – have as many touch points as possible and be where your users are.