The ShopLocal development teams could not be as productive and collaborative without the help of a great agile lifecycle management tool. For these functions, we rely heavily upon a great SaaS partner named Rally Software. It really is fun to have a great relationship with one’s vendors, where they transcend and become one’s partners. That is the case with the Rally team. From training our team in the dark arts of Agile product development to always asking for product feedback to helping us learn and configure their toolset, the Rally folks have been there for ShopLocal.
It is fun to see the success that ShopLocal has had becoming part of the best practice guide for others interested in using Rally to guide their agile development of software.
Rally has been conducting their Agile Success Tour across the country and have asked ShopLocal to participate in their Chicago stop. Our own Brendan Flynn, Director of Project Management at ShopLocal, will be part of a panel led by Israel Gat discussing Agile success stories from companies as diverse as ShopLocal, BMC Software and Memex Technology Ltd. If you are in the Chicago area on October 15, sign-up to register, it’s free and will cover a wide range of topics and give participants real-world examples and techniques to bring back to their own organizations. The event consists of 3 parts… A panel, breakout sessions on various topics such as communicating to executives & metrics and a Q & A session with panel members and Rally coaches such as Jean Tabaka and Rachel Weston.
Here is the full press release that went out as well as some info on the regional events called the Agile Success Tour.
“Agile Leader Offers Real-Life Agile Implementation Stories from Companies like AOL, BMC Software, Boeing, Constant Contact, Getty Images, Investment Technology Group (ITG), Memex, Microsoft-Mobile, Sermo, ShopLocal, Symphono and thePlatform
BOULDER, Colo.–(Business Wire)–
Rally®, the leader in Agile application lifecycle management (ALM), today announced the expansion of the Agile Success Tour, a series of interactive half-day seminars for software and IT executives who are currently adopting or considering adopting Agile development practices. The free seminars will be held in Seattle on October 1, Chicago on October 15 and London, England on October 29. The Boston event was held on September 17….”
The method to the madness for ShopLocal's agile development teams comes from Rally
So here are the tidbits that stuck in my mind from ad:tech Chicago 2009 day #2:
Overall Digital Advertising / Marketing
- The total of all non-search digital advertising in 2009 is roughly only $10 billion dollars
- Basic measurement of audience size by services like Nielsen NetRatings have some fundamental flaws. For example, MLB.com reported total monthly page views in July of 2009 of close to 14 billion, while Nielsen NetRatings only reported 900 million. This huge error factor is one of the core reasons that spending online is being held back, as offline channels have trusted and fairly accurate measurement techniques and audience audit companies. One of the challenges is to the fundamental approach that Nielsen takes, which is panel based and not an audit based
- One idea taken from the movie studios that digital content owners should at least consider is the following: A consumer that goes to a movie theater pays for a ticket to see the film. That same consumer has to pay again if they want to, at a later point, watch the same movie at home via a DVD rental. The issue is some publishers that charge are adopting a model that is a pay once for global access across all mediums / content access points. This go directly against the model that the movie studios operate under where consumers must pay each time for each unique content consumption session
- On a successful paid content site such as MLB.com, only 5% of all users that visit this site convert to becoming a paid content subscriber. 95% of users come and only consume the free content on the site. Also mentioned that just because you have great content, it does not mean you will get consumers to pay. You have to have still have a great user experience. Also have to offer a free route (think WSJ here) and show these free users what they are missing out on (and the flip side, for those who do pay you need to show the added value of all the things that they are only able to get)
- Some panel experts where predicting a 13% drop within traditional advertising in 2009, but digital growing at around 10%
- Don Hamblen, the CMO at Sears Roebuck, Co. had these thoughts:
- To measure ROBO impacts, market mix modeling
- Really sees the power of combining both search AND display
- Search is the “new” circular for the purposes of customer acquisition and outreach
- The balance or mix percentage is not clear yet, but there seems to be an underlying agreement that there needs to be some split of advertising dollars across both integrated marketing AND traditional buying space & time (eg ad inventory)
- Technology is accelerating faster then one can keep up with. The goal instead of trying to run this rat race is to elevate above. The analogy given was the classic Wayne Gretzsky where the saying goes, “Don’t skate to where the puck is. Skate to where the puck will be.”
Social Media
- Around 40% – 45% of all internet users use at least one social site
- Twitter users only account for 11% of the overall Internet audience, or roughly 18 million people
- 50% of social users interact with social media on a daily basis
- The total ad dollars spent on social media in 2009 is just about $1 billion, which is just about 5% of the total advertising spend overall
Video
- The internet receives the largest share of time spent of any type of media during the generally agreed upon 8 hours media consumption day , at 29% (TV gets 27% for a reference point)
- Video equates to nearly a third (29%) of all time spent on the internet
- Nearly 2 in 5 broadband users have watched video online in the past 24 hours
- B2B audiences are not typically looking for nor motivated by online video
- Online video remains largely sold via CPM pricing, and is more expensive due to the scarcity and limited nature (when compared to network television)
Widget / Apps / Facebook Connect
- Social applications (sites within sites such as a Fan Page within Facebook) are best for mass reach. Also often times excel at the amount of engagement that these type of deployments can create
- Widgets are great for pushing content out and driving users back to a centralized location
- Facebook connect is best for bringing in bits social content into an existing web site experience
- The Three (3) B’s Of Widgets: Be there. Be relevant. Be useful.
- A ‘fan’ is more valuable than an email. Emails don’t multiple or amplify. Fans do
- A Twitter follower of Facebook fan should be thought about as a social CRM database and not an audience to blast messages to
- Standards are being set across the industry. Facebook is solely driven this. A “fan” is now a standard measure of ROI for social, just like an email address. A fan can be re-marketed to for example, much like an email
- There is NOT however a standard set of value that can be assigned to many of the social interactions. For example, what is one complete video view worth? $0.25? $1.00? One suggestion was to try and relate these type of social metrics back to the easily understandable costs of either Google CPC rates or display CPMs
- Suggestions to at least always share with client, other newer metrics that show a complete cost overview as it relates to the core KPI goal of the campaign / medium: Cost Per View, Cost Per Upload, Cost Per Install, Cost Per User
- One big issue is when a social campaign ends. What to do with the widget now? How to continue engaging your new Facebook fans?
- Brands should start thinking of their content as a web service that delivers that content across any platform or sites. This delivery engine of a brands content / messaging then reduces the risk of any one platform failing
- Stand alone gaming web sites are re-surging among the younger crowd
- App click thrus are higher than ads within Facebook. Example: 0.2% – 0.3% average click thru rates on RockYou apps which are higher than Facebook ads
Here are my collection of thoughts, musings and insights that various speakers and panelist shared on day one of ad:tech Chicago 2009 happening now at Navy Pier:
Overall Digital Advertising / Marketing
- Marketing = understand and meeting customer requirements
- A client asking for a Facebook strategy is the same as a client in the past asking for a NBC TV strategy. Its just one channel out of many within the same overall medium
- If you want to understand someones behavior, try to understand their incentives. Good line from Steven Levitt
- “The future doesn’t fit in past containers” – unless we fix organizational structures, we won’t be successful
- Retailers and retail media (think Walmart.com display ads with 50MM uniques per month) is exploding as a sub-industry
- Advertising spend in 2009: The two big dogs – Search 60% and 31% Display – take over 90% of all dollars
- Crowd survey – What areas of digital mrkt will be fastest growing in next 12 months:? Social 56% Video 12% Analytics 10% Search 9% Behavioral 8% & other 5%
- Forcasted CAGR by Forrester thru 2014: Social 34%, Mobile 27%, Display 17%, Search 15% & Email 11%. Interesting that display beat search, but I guess search is more mature
- Time.com GM: “We have NOT sold a standard media buy all year – they always now include custom programs, integrations, etc”. This seems very true from all of the custom publisher integration that ShopLocal has been involved with this year
Ad Networks
- There are nearly 400 ad networks worldwide. Ad networks have grown substantial in number over the last few years and the growth rate will continue as more specialty or vertical networks continue to sprout up
- Ad networks offer a quality audience, NOT quality inventory
- Ad networks in the last 5-7 years have driven most of the innovation in ad serving technologies, as publishers (portals excluded) have invested little to nothing in this regard. Ad networks for example were the ones that commercialized behavioral targeting (BT)
- Ad inventory (supply) still far exceeds advertiser need (demand)
- 24 / 7 Real Media (one of the larger networks of 1,000 top publisher sites) claims that they only want a publisher to allot somewhere between 10% – 15% of their unsold inventory to them. This was somewhat shocking as I always assumed that an ad network would be greedy and want 100% of unsold inventory. 24 / 7 Real Media’s justification is that the yield increase that they can provide erodes after this initial 10% – 15% of unsold inventory. Nice to see a company that is honest about what it can and cannot help with
- Ad networks that sell inventory on a CPA basis (cost per action or eCommerce transaction) are really giving away a lot of real value that is imparted when a graphical display ad is shown to a user that does not choose to take a CPA generating action. This inherent branding that is impressed upon users does have value and publishers and ad networks alike should NOT overlook and give this away
Agencies
- Nearly 80% of all advertising created globally comes from one of four agency holding companies
- Many agencies are losing or already have lost out on being a part of client’s “social media” strategy and/or execution. Examples abound of clients taking in-house the social aspects to their business such as Jet Blue, UPS, Toyota and Kohl’s
- For the most part, agencies have not been driving real innovation which equates to internal tools, technology platforms or other investment driven proprietary solutions. However the big 4 holding companies are starting to change this with some decent size acquisitions and/or capital expenditures
Display Advertising
- Dave Zinman, VP and GM of Display Advertising for Yahoo! made a few great points which included:
- Noticeable absences of online created brands, and noted what a missed opportunity this is for brand advertisers
- Display ads will become a whole lot more intelligent in the next 1-2 years as publisher BT insights about consumers are married up with dynamic or Smart Ad type ad serving technology works, display ads will basically become machine driven test and optimization (eg multi-variant) and used a great retail circular example to explain
- Two growth areas of display will be in performance based campaigns and with a large amount of offline media dollars coming online(cited for example that US retailers alone spend $5.7 billion dollars each year on newspaper advertising)
- Average CPM for all types of display advertising is right at $2.46 CPM
- Cited a DynamicLogix study that again reported that the MPU / Cube sized ad units that are in-line with page content are the most effective display ad format overall
Mobile
- A rough average CPM for mobile display advertising is around $10 – $20 CPM
- There are about 6 million iPhones in the US currently and counting
- There are roughly 62,000 iPhone applications live within the iTunes store and counting
- The average use time of an iPhone application declines by a third per day during the first month the app is installed on a user’s iPhone. This decline stabilizes at around 5 minutes of use per app per month
- Greystripe is an interesting play that is trying to build out a rich media ad network that is centered around being able to insert ads in over 1,000 unique iPhone applications. Typically these ads appear either as “pre-roll” (ads opens as application is loaded up) or “interstitial” (eg ad opens up in the middle of an app experience). Most of their network of iPhone apps are games at this point. Greystripe also has some sort of technology that converts a standard browse based Flash ad to a iPhone compatible format as well as the ability to jun ads on JAVA powered mobile devices
- For a real / serious mobile 6-8 week mobile campaign, roughly a spend of $250K was cited as what it would take to measure impactful results. Any well formed mobile campaign MUST include a SMS component AND a mobile optimized / WAP web site as these are the two ways that the masses are still using their mobile devices. Remember SmartPhones only make up roughly 11% of all mobile phones in circulation. The rest are Feature phones which are the free ones (think Motorola Razr) that are given away to consumers with a long term contract
So within the last week or so, two nifty retail print ads appeared within the Chicago Tribune newspaper that promoted a reader of the print ad to go online for more information. This type of of integrated multi-channel promotion really is becoming the norm rather than the exception.
The two retailer examples that were spotted out in the wild were for Sears and Target. Both do a nice job of messaging that there are other store based deals available within the retailer’s online weekly ad site.
Sears in the bottom left hand corner (e.g., the blue box) of this print ad that appeared within the Chicago Tribune is trying to promote three e-buster deals that are only available online for a limited period of time. It also messages that there are other great deals always available within the Sears online weekly ad site.
Within the Sunday edition of the Chicago Tribune, Target is taking out a ROP ad every single week within the bottom of the front page that is promoting grocery deals within their SuperTarget (those Target stores that sell grocery items) stores and the same ad also attempts to drive consumers back to their online weekly ad site for more deals.
(4.50 out of 5)
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(4.00 out of 5)
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