Media Oxpecker: When Local Isn't Enough
february 22, 2013 02:00 pm
Every week we round up media news you may have missed.
- So what's the deal with the Twitter's new ad API, and why should we care? Salesforce Marketing Cloud CMO Michael Lazerow explains:
Before today, all ads were managed manually on Twitter. Changes were relatively easy to make. But making them in a timely manner across all your campaigns was a labor-intensive endeavor … For the first time, marketers can now manage Twitter ads from the same systems used to manage social listening, social content and social ads for other networks. In the same way that marketers can take an engaging Facebook post and turn it into a Sponsored Story on Facebook, they can now monitor engaging tweets and turn them into Promoted Tweets, further shattering the silos between paid, owned and earned media.
- National ad agencies are "basically clueless" about the potential for location-based mobile advertising, says analyst/consultant Greg Sterling:
The way location is basically being sold to national marketers and agencies (aside from geofencing) is as a proxy for audience. That's the language they understand. They don't really know what to do with location targeting capabilities -- let alone lat long precision … Given this, it's very unlikely that we'll be seeing millions of locally targeted national advertising dollars flowing to mobile display advertising any time soon.
Verve CEO Tom MacIsaac sees an additional problem keeping location-based mobile ads from taking off — bad location data.
- "It sounds like the local salespeople you worked with just couldn't turn those neighborhood merchants into digital advertising buyers." A former Patch editor discusses the economics of AOL's national hyperlocal network.
- Felix Salmon says online publishers will have to look beyond advertising to generate revenue:
Can publishers not deliver certain readers, in certain demographics, to marketers who want to reach them? To a certain extent, yes. But the fact is that Google and Facebook, between them, are extremely good at delivering as many of those readers as any advertiser could ever want: all that Facebook needs to do is turn a dial, and billions of new impressions get added to the stock of global inventory, targeted at any demographic that any advertiser could want. Google, similarly, owns search, especially mobile search. It’s conceivable that some marketers might prefer to reach an audience some other way — but this is a race to the bottom, with a finite amount of demand chasing an essentially infinite amount of supply. That’s a buyer’s world, where the sellers have no real leverage at all.
- Andrew Sullivan on the murky ethics of native ads:
Maybe I'm old-fashioned but one core ethical rule I thought we had to follow in journalism was the church-state divide between editorial and advertizing. But as journalism has gotten much more desperate for any kind of revenue and since banner ads have faded, this divide has narrowed and narrowed. The "sponsored content" model is designed to obscure the old line as much as possible (while staying thisclose to the right side of the ethical boundary). It's more like product placement in a movie - except movies are not journalism.
- Christopher Mims on why no one is talking about Yahoo's — or anyone else's — new homepage:
People just don't surf the web the way they used to. It is now the rule, rather than the exception, to share links over Facebook, Twitter and "dark social" (e.g., email or text messages), which means that most people are arriving on pages buried deep within websites, and may never go near the homepage.
- How to make the most of mobile local search.
- Mobile devices grab more travel dollars.
- The local deals market version 2.0.
- Stealing is stealing, even on Twitter.
- And finally, the next big thing in local? Kids.
