Facebook appears ready to launch a new set of premium ad units, and, based on a review of documents which purport to describe them, the social network would seem to be doubling down on two core principles that mark fundamental departures from traditional advertising.

First, Facebook is making the new ads social by default, meaning they will automatically show users when their friends have already Liked the advertiser. And the new formats will draw their content exclusively from posts to brands’ Facebook Pages, rather from advertising copy written independently.

Combined, these features make two statements about where Facebook believes the future of online advertising lies—at least in its particular universe. It is saying that ads based on content, rather than messaging, have a better chance of hitting home, and that ads involving tacit endorsements from the people you know have a better chance of capturing your attention.

“When people hear about you from friends, they listen,” the Facebook materials say. “We’ll expand your ad with stories from friends who have already connected.” (“Stories” is Facebook’s shorthand for a wide varitey of interactions on the site. In the case of ads, it seems to refer to the fact that the ads will display which of a viewer’s friends have Liked the brand.)

Facebook has not commented publicly on the new ads (presumably they will discuss them at a marketing launch event in New York next week). But the materials describing the new units were posted to Scribd earlier this week. The news was first reported on GigaOm. The documents are below.

More at: http://www.fastcompany.com/1818952/facebooks-new-ad-units-reveal-a-future-that-is-social-by-default

More at: http://blogs.webtrends.com/2011/06/facebook-marketing-even-more-takeaway-tips/

So Target started sending coupons for baby items to customers according to their pregnancy scores. Duhigg shares an anecdote — so good that it sounds made up — that conveys how eerily accurate the targeting is. An angry man went into a Target outside of Minneapolis, demanding to talk to a manager:

Target knows before it shows.

“My daughter got this in the mail!” he said. “She’s still in high school, and you’re sending her coupons for baby clothes and cribs? Are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant?”

The manager didn’t have any idea what the man was talking about. He looked at the mailer. Sure enough, it was addressed to the man’s daughter and contained advertisements for maternity clothing, nursery furniture and pictures of smiling infants. The manager apologized and then called a few days later to apologize again.

(Nice customer service, Target.)

On the phone, though, the father was somewhat abashed. “I had a talk with my daughter,” he said. “It turns out there’s been some activities in my house I haven’t been completely aware of. She’s due in August. I owe you an apology.”

Target’s Andrew Pole (from LinkedIn)

What Target discovered fairly quickly is that it creeped people out that the company knew about their pregnancies in advance.

“If we send someone a catalog and say, ‘Congratulations on your first child!’ and they’ve never told us they’re pregnant, that’s going to make some people uncomfortable,” Pole told me. “We are very conservative about compliance with all privacy laws. But even if you’re following the law, you can do things where people get queasy.”

Bold is mine. That’s a quote for our times.

So Target got sneakier about sending the coupons. The company can create personalized booklets; instead of sending people with high pregnancy scores books o’ coupons solely for diapers, rattles, strollers, and the “Go the F*** to Bed” book, they more subtly spread them about:

“Then we started mixing in all these ads for things we knew pregnant women would never buy, so the baby ads looked random. We’d put an ad for a lawn mower next to diapers. We’d put a coupon for wineglasses next to infant clothes. That way, it looked like all the products were chosen by chance.

“And we found out that as long as a pregnant woman thinks she hasn’t been spied on, she’ll use the coupons. She just assumes that everyone else on her block got the same mailer for diapers and cribs. As long as we don’t spook her, it works.”

via How Companies Learn Your Secrets – NYTimes.com.

So the Target philosophy towards expecting parents is similar to the first date philosophy? Even if you’ve fully stalked the person on Facebook and Google beforehand, pretend like you know less than you do so as not to creep the person out.

More at: http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/

A recent study has shown that Pinterest is more popular with men than women in the UK. This is, at first glance, quite surprising seeing as 83 per cent of Pinterest’s US users are women.

However, a closer look at the data reveals that many UK users are in fact professionals working in the media industry. This perhaps explains why the gender split is more even in the UK (44 per cent female, 56 per cent male) compared to the US, where women have adopted the site for social rather than professional reasons.

More at: http://www.thinktank.org.uk/blog/2012/02/uk-pinterest-users-buck-us-trend.php

Over the last year, you may have noticed that a once-niche trend not only crept into the mainstream, but is starting to really make a big splash. Gamification has become one of the hottest buzz words in the industry and is probably in the process of taking over a website or user experience near you.

For the uninitiated, gamification, said simply, is the use of game design techniques and mechanics to solve problems and engage audiences. Over the last year, even large companies and enterprises are starting to get in on the game, with Gartner saying that all CIOs should have gamification on their radar, and M2 research predicting that the gamification market will reach 2.8 billion in direct spending by 2016.

Okay, so it’s on the rise, we get that, but let’s take a look at some of the players that are helping to take this trend to the next level. Three companies in particular are currently creating some buzz in the space: Badgeville, Bigdoor and Bunchball.

Badgeville started by making a big splash center stage at Disrupt in the fall of 2009. The company took home the Audience Choice Award at Disrupt, has since gone on a tear and is poised to have a great 2012. (Check out Rip’s original post on Badgeville’s prospects here.)

Badgeville Co-founder and CEO Kris Duggan pulls no punches when it comes to one of the most visible and early adopters of gamification, the check-in king: Foursquare. The CEO says that Foursquare was early in its attempts at gamification, but that its incentivization models remain fundamentally flawed.

Duggan points to the “Mayorship” system within Foursquare: “You have literally hundreds of people and only one mutually-exclusive point of recognition, the Mayor. What happens to the other hundreds of people? Not only are they not engaged, but you don’t take into consideration different types of users.” Duggan believes you need to engage not only the heavy user, but medium and light users as well. Rather than a one-size-fits-all methodology, you can appeal to each user type and incent them accordingly.

More at: http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/12/no-longer-an-awkward-teenager-gamification-grows-up/

New research about digital marketing trends published today shows that social media engagement is rated as both the top priority and most exciting opportunity for companies this year.

But while the fourth Quarterly Digital Intelligence Briefing, published by Econsultancy in association with Adobe, shows a huge appetite for social media programmes, there is a worrying lack of commitment to investment in associated analytics and measurement. 

Research for this report found that, along with content optimisation, social media engagement is rated as the top priority for digital marketers out of a range of digital-related marketing activities and disciplines.

Asked to indicate their top three priorities for the year ahead, companies surveyed by Econsultancy and Adobe found that these areas will be more important in 2012 than other disciplines including conversion rate optimisation, mobile optimisation and content marketing.

Social media analytics lagged behind in ninth place. 

More than 600 companies surveyed for this report were also asked about the ‘most exciting’ digital-related opportunities for their organisations in 2012. 

More than half of client-side respondents (54%) said that social media engagement featured among the three most exciting opportunities, way ahead of mobile optimisation (38%) and content optimisation (37%). Again, social analytics is much further down the pecking order, this time in eighth place.

More at: http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/8995-social-media-engagement-is-the-top-priority-for-digital-marketers?utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=twitterfeed

like sentiment but not execution - was no surprise as wife saw it 1st (unless that was Interflora ploy)

Reality appears to have finally arrived at Procter & Gamble, the world’s largest marketer, whose $10 billion annual ad budget has hurt the company’s margins.

P&G said it would lay off 1,600 staffers, including marketers, as part of a cost-cutting exercise. More interestingly, CEO Robert McDonald finally seems to have woken up to the fact that he cannot keep increasing P&G’s ad budget forever, regardless of what happens to its sales.

He told Wall Street analysts that he would have to “moderate” his ad budget because Facebook and Google can be “more efficient” than the traditional media that usually eats the lion’s share of P&G’s ad budget.

More at: http://articles.businessinsider.com/2012-01-30/news/31004736_1_advertising-saatchi-saatchi-media#ixzz1l1hknbr4

in Share1

QR codes are one of the most often asked about topics, but up to now I’ve pretty much avoided the subject. That’s mainly because it’s been three years since foursquare launched, but there’s still no good way to check in using a QR code that works across all the major platforms.

I recently checked out foursQR on the iPhone and it’s a pretty good solution for iPhone users. No, it’s not the answer for everyone, but it works very well in certain cases.

You can quickly create a PDF QR code sticker on foursQR’s site for any venue and put it wherever you like – provided you have the owner’s permission of course.

What’s it good for? Any place that you check in often and that you control. I’ve put one on the wall next to my desk at the office. I can check in using foursQR in less than 10 seconds thanks to its automatic check-in function at places I’ve added as favorites. It’s a fast and easy process.

More at: http://aboutfoursquare.com/iphone-app-uses-a-qr-code-to-check-you-in-on-foursquare/

Facebook is investing further in its outreach programme to retailers to bring clarity to the term “social commerce” and promote social integration on their websites.  

Gavin Sathianathan, Facebook’s strategic partner manager, is leading the social network’s bid to promote social commerce in the UK and said that agreed definitions are a key building block in its evolution. “It’s really important we nail what we mean by ‘social commerce’,” he said. “At Facebook, we do not equate ‘social commerce’ with opening a store within the network.”

The comments follow a story last week in which retail brands including John Lewis and Reiss told new media age that selling items via social networks, such as a Facebook Store, was not on their 2012 agenda, favouring to hone their m-commerce strategies instead (nma.co.uk 19 January 2012).

Defining social commerce, or “f-commerce”, simply as a transactional store on Facebook is a restrictive way of thinking, according to Sathianathan. “From a defininiton perspactive, it’s important we’re all clear on that,” he saidd. “When I talk to retailers about this, I try to make it clear that it’s about how we can bring social media to bear on the purchase process, be that in a Facebook store or not.”

Most of the discussions taking place between Facebook and retailers centre on integrating Facebook functionality, such as a Like or Shar’ buttons, into their own websites, according to Sathianathan.

Top of Facebook’s priority list are supermarket and FMCG brands, while those that have experienced notable success in their f-commerce strategy stem from the fashion and ticketing vertials, according to the social network. 

“We talk a lot to FMCGs and grocers [whose goods or services are not necessarily social] and talk to them about the social aspects of their products,” said Sathianathan. “For instance, a can of baked beans may not be social but the meal you have them with could.”

Earlier this week, Unilever used its Facebook storefront to help debut its Lynx Attract for Her brand – the first time it has attempted to appeal to female audiences with the brand (nma.co.uk 23 January 2012).

The FMCG giant sold all 100 cans it was offering via the platform, retailing for £3.25 each, within two hours of launch in a campaign that met most of its initial performance metrics.

More at: http://www.nma.co.uk/news/facebook-urges-clearer-understanding-of-social-commerce/3033576.article