Turning the Corner on Housing, Video, Social, Mobile

Real numbers for real B2B marketers




Despite languid GDP growth, more solid quarterly earnings reports pushed stocks to their biggest weekly advance since mid-March. Separately, a report showed U.S. consumers in late April felt better about the economy than earlier in the month and an index that measures the number of contracts signed to purchase previously owned homes rose in March to its highest level in nearly two years, up 12.8 percent from a year ago and 4.1 percent from February, the National Association of Realtors said on Thursday.

Housing rebound for real?

"We very much believe we've hit bottom," Ivy Zelman, chief executive of a Zelman Associates told the WSJ last week. Earlier this week, she raised her home-price forecast for the year, calling for a 1 percent annual gain, up from a 1 percent decline. According to the Journal, real-estate agents consider a market balanced when there is a six-month supply of homes for sale. At the height of the housing crisis, in 2008, there was an 11.1-months' supply. In March, there was a 6.3-months' supply.

Out Take: We’re far from out of the woods but the worst is clearly over. When buyers and sellers have reached a statistical stalemate—buyers aren’t caving in, but sellers aren’t raising their bids—we take that as a positive sign that we’re slowly rebounding from the bottom. Consumer confidence ultimately finds its way to the B2B sector and we’re advising a modest green light on your hiring and infrastructure upgrade plans.

Facebook “Like” not the same as engagement

Appalachian State University’s Department of Communication found that even among 18- to 29-year-olds (aka the Facebook generation), while 75 percent said they had “liked” a profit or non-profit organization on Facebook, seven out of ten (69%) said that once they “liked” the organization, they rarely or never returned to the fan page. What’s more, only 15 percent of the respondents said they visited organizations’ fan pages weekly. Most respondents (44%) spent less than 30 minutes a day on Facebook.

Researchers found 18- to 29-year-olds are not as invested in an organization as the organization may think... when they click the ‘like’ button or click ‘follow’... It’s fairly consistent in the research that Millennials like organizations that give something back to them.”

Fickle "Digital Natives" switch platforms every other minute

If you think the younger generation has perpetual ADD, you’re not alone. According to a new Time Inc. study, digital Natives switch their attention between media platforms (i.e. TVs, magazines, tablets, smartphones or channels within platforms) 27 times per hour, about every other minute!

Because Digital Natives spend more time using multiple media platforms simultaneously, researchers say their emotional engagement with content is constrained. Apparently they experience fewer highs and lows of emotional response and as a result. Digital Natives more frequently use media to regulate their mood; as soon as they grow tired or bored, they turn their attention to something new.

Our Take: One key to these findings is that Digital Immigrants appear to be intuitively linear, whereas Natives, don’t necessarily need a beginning, middle and end to stories--they will accept it in any order. Digital Natives are subconsciously switching between platforms and can pick up different pieces of a story from different mediums in any order.

Mobile ad spend to double in 2012

A new forecast from technology research firm Strategy Analytics projects mobile ad spending worldwide will grow 85 percent in 2012 from $6.3 billion to $11.6 billion. In the U.S., researchers predict mobile advertising will grow even faster, more than doubling (up 128%) to just under $4.2 billion.

Advertising is expected to grow much faster than consumer spending in mobile. Strategy Analytics projects that consumer outlays on mobile media will grow 13.4 percent from $121.8 billion to $138.2 billion globally in 2012. In the U.S., the corresponding figure will increase 15.5 percent to $33.7 billion. The majority of consumer dollars (60.2%) worldwide will go toward carrier data plans and mobile Internet services.

But the study anticipates that strong, continued demand for apps will also play a key role in driving growth. The number of apps downloaded in 2011 surged 38 percent from 23 billion to 32 billion, making apps the second-largest revenue category for both consumer and advertiser spending. Apps are expected to account for 18.9% of mobile consumer spend in 2012, rising 30.7% to $26.1 billion.

David MacQueen, Strategy Analytics’ director of wireless media strategies, explained that mobile video is either often free and ad-supported (YouTube) or bundled without extra charge into services, such as Sky Go in Europe and AT&T U-verse in the U.S. So despite a global audience of 271 million users, mobile video only generated $223 million in ad sales last year.

Strategy Analytics predicts that 125 million Americans will use their handsets to social network. But again, advertising and other types of revenue have yet to catch up with consumers. So related U.S. revenue will reach $412.7 million, or $3.48 per mobile user.

Mobile video to surpass web video

It shouldn’t come as a big surprise that the mobile video ad market will surpass the online video ad market later this year. “It’s happening fast and people are not quite comprehending the speed,” said Tod Sacerdoti, CEO of ad network BrightRoll in a recent statement. “By the end of this year we are pretty confident that more than half of all digital video ads will be mobile.” In March alone, more than 40 percent of the global video exchange requests at BrightRoll were for mobile. A year ago that figure was less than 5 percent, underscoring the rapid trajectory for mobile video, especially in the last few months.

One of the benefits of mobile video ads is they are often brand safe from the get-go, and are served to us in popular apps like Angry Birds, Draw Something, and Pandora, Sacerdoti said. Thus, the growth in mobile video advertising will spread well beyond the premium big name publishers. “You have an enormous influx of supply and this is almost universally good for marketers. For publishers this may be a different group though, and publishers who have a strong business online might not be as meaningful on mobile.”

Conclusion

Your best clients and customers are increasingly less tethered to their desks and desktop computers while working. You’ll not only have to work harder to reach them on the go, but you’ll have to reach them when they’re in the right mindset to be reached. In this digital society, the work/leisure line becomes fuzzier and fuzzier. They’re working when they’re playing and they’re playing when their working. Now more than ever, you have to be smart, fast and creative to get your message through.


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TAGS: mobile, apps, video, Appalachian State, Time Inc., National Association of Realtors, Strategy Analytics, Brightroll, digital natives, digital immigrants 

Markets and Economy Slog Through Fortnight of Tests

New research points to impact of social media and ‘digital natives’ on your brand.
Despite last Thursday’s stomach churning “flash crash” in the financial markets, most U.S. stock indices are clawing their way back to positive territory for the year. This resiliency, in the face of the European debt crisis, the Time Square Bombing, the Staten Island Ferry crash, the BP/Gulf of Mexico oil spill, flooding in the South and tornados in the Midwest, is encouraging.

U.S. payrolls rose by nearly 300,000 in April, the largest monthly jobs gain in over four years. Most experts are ignoring the fact that the squishy “official” unemployment rate rose to 9.9 percent from 9.7 percent. Experts say it’s a sign that once-discouraged Americans have returned to the job market – not a deluge of layoffs from corporate America.

The construction and manufacturing sectors also showed signs of life in the latest economic report, raising hopes of an improving job market. The Institute for Supply Management Monday said the manufacturing barometer had improved 60.4 percent in April, the highest level June 2004. A Commerce Department report said consumer spending rose 0.6 percent in March – the largest increase in five months and households saved less, socking away 2.7 percent of their income in March down from 3.0 percent in Feb. Again, we see the gradual reduction in consumer savings as a confidence indicator, not a return of the conspicuous consumption that marked the latter part of the previous decade.

Is the worst over?

“The worst of the economic impact on Internet advertising is over and the seeds of growth have been planted,” said PricewaterhouseCoopers’ David Silverman in a statement following the release of a new study his firm did in conjunction with the Interactive Advertising Bureau. Forrester Research, Zenith Optimedia and other media forecasting groups have generally revised their 2010 and 2011 ad spending projections favorably in recent months, with most of the upside going to growing sectors (Web, online video, social media, television, outdoor) with a modest slump to continue in out of favor sectors (newspapers, magazines and radio).

Social media and your brand

Though slightly more than 50 percent of regular users never post status updates on Twitter; 70 percent do so on social networking sites like Facebook. Experts say Twitter acts more like a broadcast medium than Facebook does, but users are more than three times as likely to follow brands and companies on Twitter as others users of social networks do, with over 40 percent using Twitter to learn about and provide opinions on brands, according to a recent Edison Research study.

So will social media deliver measurable results for marketers? Well, more than half of marketers surveyed by Datran Media in its fourth annual Marketing & Media Survey say they’re confident it will, and only one in eight (12%) say they’re confident it won’t deliver results. Researchers said social media continues to be a wildcard, but it’s getting easier to measure the impact of a tweet or an update on LinkedIn on the final conversation.

Social media is not as effective at building search engine rankings as it is for building brand awareness and reputation, says a recent Marketing Sherpa study of over 2,000 marketers.

Social media IS effective for:
• Increasing brand or product awareness 49% agree
• Increasing brand or product reputation 45%
• Increasing public relations 43%
• Increasing Web site traffic 41%
• Improving search engine rankings 35%

The future?
Anti social networking of teens, i.e. your future consumers

Last week, the Pew Research Center found that half of American teenagers — defined in the study as ages 12 through 17 — send 50 or more text messages a day and that one third send more than 100 a day. Two thirds of the texters surveyed by the center’s Internet and American Life Project said they were more likely to use their cell phones to text friends than to call them. Fifty-four percent said they text their friends once a day, but only 33 percent said they talk to their friends face-to-face on a daily basis. The findings came just a few months after the Kaiser Family Foundation reported that Americans between the ages of 8 and 18 spend on average 7.5 hours a day using some sort of electronic device, from smart phones to MP3 players to computers — a startling number,

The question on researchers’ minds is whether all that texting, instant messaging and online social networking allows children to become more connected and supportive of their friends — or whether the quality of their interactions is being diminished without the intimacy and emotional give and take of regular, extended face-to-face time.

Gary Small, a neuroscientist and professor of psychiatry at U.C.L.A. and an author of "iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind," said in a New York Times interview that so-called “digital natives,” a term for the generation that has grown up using computers, are already having a harder time reading social cues. “Even though young digital natives are very good with the tech skills, they are weak with the face-to-face human contact skills,” he said.

While many parents and educators fret that the ease of electronic communication may be making teens less interested in face-to-face communication with their friends, we think marketers and employers need to adjust their communications strategies for the crowdsourcing nature of today’s digital natives.

Will young people still be able to sell and communicate?

“Teaching new sales people how to ask good questions and how to listen and keep the intelligence gathering dialogue going in a face to face setting is an absolute ssential,” said Eric Wynne, President of Wynne Media Company in a recent panel discussion I moderated. “It doesn’t come naturally to many of them as they’ve been attuned to communicating by screen in a very truncated fashion.”

Molly Sargent, Principal of Professional Impressions Consulting concurred. “Younger sales people just haven’t been trained the right way. You can’t just do your due diligence on the Web. There’s more to researching a company than Google and Hoovers. They’re not trained in how to pick up the phone, how to ask those critical questions, how to find the internal champion, how to sleuth ahead of time before the call.

At the end of the day, people want to do business with people they like and trust. With all the new technology tools available for reaching, tracking and micro-targeting our prospects, let’s not forget the most important part of selling and marketing successfully -- human interaction.

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