Marketing Tech Sees Significant Progress

Marketing has changed quite a bit over the past few years, thanks to the emergence of social media channels, mobile technology, and other formats that open up greater possibilities to companies. A new report from TechCrunch, written by Ajay Agarwal, breaks down this potential growth – and how it could benefit some companies financially.

The author broke down several statistics with marketing tech spending, indicating that (per IDC) $32.4 billion would be spent on marketing technology through 2018, indicating a 12.4 percent growth per year.

Agarwal referred back to a previous report he posted three years back, and compared to how much has changed in the marketing tech world since that time. He pointed out many acquisitions within that time frame, with some companies selling for billions of dollars, including ExacTarget (going for $2.57 billion to Salesforce), Criteo ($2.54 billion by IPO) and Responsys ($1.5 billion to Oracle).

In addition, he discussed the emergence of marketing automation, which has suddenly become a “must have solution” for CMOs in business. Hubspot and Marketo both show value in this department, somewhere over $1 billion apiece, with increased growth per month.

While Agarwal admitted that it will be a while before we see a $10 billion titan in the marketing tech world, we are getting pretty close to seeing a $5 billion tech company, pointing out three key drivers that will “get us there”. These were broken down from his article.

Predictive analytics and machine learning: The sheer volume of data about buyers, channels and communities that marketers can now harness is astonishing – and it’s the largest opportunity ever seen for CMOs and vendors alike. With sales and marketing automation in place to provide core workflow and plumbing, an ecosystem of new startups and categories has emerged to deliver added value and insight across marketing functions and channels. The best of these companies use machine learning and data science to tap into the marketing and sales automation data sets – and troves of external third-party data – to deliver insights and capabilities. This is especially valuable for B2B companies, where lead times are longer and purchase decisions are more considered. Early pioneers in predictive marketing include Infer, Lattice and 6Sense*.

Consumer identity and personalization: For B2C companies, identity is emerging as the backbone of user experience and digital commerce – similar to what lead management and marketing automation are doing for B2B. Most consumer purchases are quick, ephemeral in nature, and done with limited research. New B2C marketing competencies focus on user identity data and personalization, with a goal of having the right content and experience for each user (during the three seconds they are looking at that page on their tablet or mobile device). It’s the difference between a sale and a bounced user. Key players include Bloomreach, Sailthru, Monetate, Optimizely, Kahuna, and Appboy – all of which focus on optimizing web pages, mobile apps and/or email to drive the highest conversion and revenue per visitor.

Consumer behavior and targeting: Beyond identity, consumer behavior data is becoming increasingly critical for B2C marketing and commerce – location, past purchase behavior, demographics, preferences, household information, etc. This challenge has become increasingly difficult in a cookie-free mobile world, which makes traditional desktop targeting techniques useless. As a result, marketers are relying on vendors that bring cross-device targeting capabilities and others that can ingest anonymous consumer behavior on your website. The best marketers are leveraging this rich information to build massive in-house databases of customer purchase and browsing history. Companies like AgilOne, SmarterHQ, TellApart, Retention Sciences and others are leading the way on this front

To conclude his piece, Agarwal pointed out new frontiers for the tech marketing field, including data science, machine learning and behavioral insights, which in turn can drive optimization and personalization. This could provide great opportunity for vendors and CMOs alike, and, eventually, create the first $10 billion marketing tech company.

DeNA Steps Into Content Curation With Palette

As if DeNA didn’t already make enough waves with its recently announced partnership with Nintendo (which will bring Nintendo franchises to mobile for the first time), the Japanese mobile gaming company has announced some platforms that will expand its horizons even further.

During a press conference in Tokyo earlier today, the company announced DeNA Palette, a business move that will add ten category-specific content curation platforms to its apps and services through a number of areas, including new hiring and collaboration.

“We call them ‘platforms’ because they’re more than just ad-supported media, for two reasons. First, because any user can post an article, and second, because eventually we plan to monetize them with eCommerce, matching and other offline services that are suited to each category,” said DeNA spokesperson Tomoyuki Akiyama.

TechInAsia broke down the first three platforms that were unveiled during the press conference, including the acquisition of Find Travel, a site devoted to community-curated itineraries and travel blogs based across a number of destinations; the launch of JOOY, a platform devoted to men that discusses fashion, love and dating; and Cuta, a forthcoming platform that will help parents with maternity and parenting-based content.

On top of that, three existing DeNA properties, including Mery, CAFY and Iemo, will work alongside these new acquisitions.

“Iemo now has over five million MAU as of March, up from 1.5 million when we acquired them, and Mery has 16 million MAU, compared to 12 million when we acquired them,” Akiyama added. “We’re using their ‘secret sauce’ to give our new in-house platforms a boost.”

The other four curation platforms weren’t revealed yet, but Akiyama explained that they will focus on certain lifestyle traits, “but we don’t know exactly what yet. That’s why we’re soliciting startups and potential recruits.”

Between these new platforms and Nintendo, nothing should keep DeNA from having a great business year in 2015.

Mobile Ad Spend To Top Desktop Ad Spend Next Year

A report from eMarketer predicts that global mobile advertising market will hit two significant milestones in 2016: surpassing $100 billion in spending and accounting for more than 50 percent of all digital ad expenditure for the first time.

eMarketer is predicting is $101.37 billion to be spent on ads served to mobile phones and tablets worldwide next year, which represents a nearly 430 percent increase from 2013.

Moreover, between 2016 and 2019, the last years in the forecast period, mobile ad spending is predicted to nearly double, hitting $195.55 billion to account for 70.1 percent of digital ad spend as well as over one-quarter of total media ad spending globally. Next year, eMarketer estimates that there will be more than 2 billion smartphone users and 1 billion tablet users worldwide.

“The increasing levels of content uploaded and consumed on a daily basis is astronomical. It can be directly attributed to the rise of smartphone and tablet usage making this the dominant platform moving forward to reach your audience,” said Chris Younger, principal and director of strategy at Ayzenberg.

While we know that the European and Asian markets have been strong in mobile broadband adoption and smartphone adoption, the United States will drive mobile ad spending growth over the next few years along with China.

In 2016, US advertisers will spend $40.24 billion to reach consumers on tablets and mobile phones, more than doubling the total from 2014, while those in China will invest $22.14 billion—nearly triple the amount they spent in 2014. Both of these countries will see mobile become a majority of digital ad spending next year.

“Desktop is not dead, but a shift has definitely occurred in the marketplace. Advertisers must adopt a mobile-first strategy into their campaigns which includes mobile optimize site and user funnels that engage users,” said Charles Vasquez, director of digital media, Ayzenberg.

“Millennials are driving the shift from PC to mobile. They represent over 77 million consumers with as many as 90 percent owning smartphones. They are constantly connected to their mobile device on email, social and news sites,” said Vasquez.

 

YouTubers Are Huge In The U.S. – How About Everywhere Else?

by Jessica Klein

You’d be hard-pressed to think of a popular YouTube creator in the U.S. who hasn’t done something outside of the world’s biggest video site. YouTubers are doing everything from live stage shows (Tyler Oakley continues to travel the world with his stage performances), to TV series (Grace Helbig’s now on E!; “Epic Meal Time” has become a network TV show called “Epic Meal Empire”; and beauty creator Ingrid Nilsen has been a judge on multiple “Project Runway” episodes), to writing books (it would take up too much space to list those examples here).

This is because brands, TV networks, and even film studios in the US have realized that YouTubers mean big business. With subscriber numbers in the millions, they carry hefty fan bases made of up of people who trust them — and that is powerful in the world of consumer products (entertainment included).

As MIP Digital Fronts approaches, you have to wonder whether this power has been recognized in YouTube creators outside of the US. Are they being sought out to star in film and TV projects Publish books

The simple answer is yes, but not so much as their U.S.-based counterparts. Though film studios haven’t quite been knocking down international YouTubers’ doors (they haven’t exactly in the U.S., either), a handful of big, online creators have shown up on television. A large European MCN,Divimove, for instance, has had its YouTube creators appear on popular TV series like “X-Factor” in countries such as Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands.

Read more…

This article was originally posted on VideoInk and is reposted on [a]listdaily via a partnership with the news publication, which is the online video industry’s go-to source for breaking news, features, and industry analysis. Follow VideoInk on Twitter @VideoInkNews, or subscribe via thevideoink.com for the latest news and stories, delivered right to your inbox.

Bing Gordon On Marketing Games

Bing Gordon’s perspective on the game industry and game marketing comes from his 26 years at Electronic Arts, and then subsequent time at pre-eminent venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, where Gordon is a general partner. Gordon has headed up investments in numerous firms, and serves on the board of companies like Amazon, Zynga, and N3twork. He spoke with Dean Takahashi at VentureBeat about a number of topics recently, and his comments on game marketing were insightful.

Gordon noted that he’ll be speaking at the Game Marketing Summit later this month, where he’s been asked to talk about “hacking monetization.” Gordon notes that it’s really a tackeoff on a popular Silicon Valley term “growth hacking,” but he sees the changes in monetization as equally important. “For monetization, I use the word “hacking” just because other people use it. It’s a new economy of games. I started talking about it in 2004,” Gordon said.

What’s new with marketing in 2015 that’s changed from 2012? “Instagram. It’s basically channels. 2010, Facebook was the channel. 2012, I’m not sure there was a channel,” said Gordon. “We were transitioning from web to mobile. In 2015 Instagram is a channel. Email is always a channel. How do you build awareness in the first place, and then how do you connect people socially without the Facebook notification channel ”

He sees games that connect people regularly as still an uncommon thing, though games like Game of War and Words With Friends accomplish it, and Clash of Clans does it somewhat. “It’s hard to find other people in a mobile game,” Gordon noted. The clan structure is an interesting retention mechanism for mobile games, which Gordon likened to a “light version of MMO guilds, which are an online version of fraternities and sororities.”

When it comes to game marketing, Gordon said that while games in the 90’s were showing well on TV and thus TV ads were common, now games are being designed for mobile social sharing, and nobody’s quite figured that out yet. He’s not convinced that Twitch or YouTube are the only answer. “Those do not work for all games. Those work for games that are already hits,” he said.

The tricks that worked for console game marketing in the last decade are not working so well in the new era of mobile game marketing. “What they have in common is, they all think the console game marketers are going to lose their jobs,” Gordon said. “In the 2000s, console games were marketed a lot like movies — paid television, a little bit of PR, a lot of retail marketing, and street marketing, trying to get word of mouth among opinion leaders. None of that has worked well for mobile games.”

Gordon went on to note that TV ads are still mostly focused on showing great graphics, and that mobile games just don’t generally have graphics that look great on TV. That’s why we see Liam Neeson or Kate Upton instead of images taken from the mobile game. One of the key things about mobile games is the social connectivity, and Gordon has yet to see any TV ads created around that. Of course, as Gordon notes, “It’s hard to get inventive about social endorsements, showing on video what social is.”

There’s still plenty of potential for marketing creativity when it comes to games, especially mobile games. “I do think there’s stuff going on in short-form online video that’s pretty interesting,” Gordon pointed out. “There’s stuff going on with YouTube and the various creators there. How they build an audience is interesting. But there doesn’t seem to be very many people who are thinking across games and new video simultaneously.

Gordon went on to talk about many other things, including the investment environment, wearables, and new platforms. Read the complete interview on VentureBeat here.

Three Factors Shaping The Global Content Market

by Pierre Ziemniak

MIPTV 2015 is just around the corner, and as hard as it is to predict what the biggest trends are going to be in the TV industry for the months to come, here are a few observations based on our program and keynote announcements. What does the year’s biggest gathering of entertainment industry professionals tell us about the industry itself

The Millennial Shift

First and foremost, our theme this year is “The Millennial Shift”: consumer habits are changing faster than ever and the market must adapt to younger, mobile, and multi-connected audiences. This is not a new phenomenon, of course, but millennials are the consumers of tomorrow, and as media users, their habits tell us a lot about the future of TV distribution, content, and formats. Personalization, streaming, and interactivity are the three key words of this major shift, which sees the rise of web platforms — and YouTube is just the tip of the iceberg here, given the high number of many multi-channel networks competing to reach millennials.

This is where a few clarifications are necessary. The “second screen” It’s not as relevant as it used to be: “We seem to have quickly skipped from online devices being the second screen, to them being the first for many generations, especially the all-important millennials,” says Matt Campion, founder/creative director at Spirit Digital Media, the UK-based digital and social-media production agency. “Cord-cutters” “Cord-shavers” may be a more appropriate term for millennials, who have actually reduced the amount of time they spend in front of traditional TV without totally abandoning it.

Read more…

This article was originally posted on VideoInk and is reposted on [a]listdaily via a partnership with the news publication, which is the online video industry’s go-to source for breaking news, features, and industry analysis. Follow VideoInk on Twitter @VideoInkNews, or subscribe via thevideoink.com for the latest news and stories, delivered right to your inbox.

How Viners Jack And Jack Got Their Game To Go Viral

It’s one thing to enlist an influencer or two to promote your game, entirely another for a game studio to create a game entirely around them. With the success of Glu Mobile’s Kim Kardashian: Hollywood, it doesn’t seem like such a wild bet.

For Jack and Jack, two Viners who share not just a name but a Vine account with 5.4 million followers, their new puzzle game isn’t exactly their first rodeo. The duo actually released Let it Goat! in summer last year in conjunction with SkyVu, a game that VentureBeat said “might be the next Flappy Bird.”

Now, less than a year later, Let it Goat! must have performed impressively enough to launch Jack & Jack Vines Puzzle Game {link no longer active}. A few days after the launch, the game was trending worldwide on Twitter.

How They promoted it in a way that most Twitter personalities are wont to do: they asked their followers to tweet a picture of them playing the game with the hashtag #FREEJackandJackGame {link no longer active} and the Viners themselves would follow them. Talk about social currency.

This kind of strategy wouldn’t exactly work on other platforms and is labor-intensive to say the least, but the pay off for Jack and Jack has been huge. Not many games can boast they’ve trended worldwide on Twitter.

It speaks to how teens communicate on the platform and the power of connection. It is absolute proof that a game developer like SkyVu doesn’t even need to get in touch with the likes of Kim Kardashian or a slew of other recognizable regular celebrities to negotiate major contracts and carefully tip toe around. Influencers also wield this celebrity power that can catapult a game in the App Store.

Moreover, influencers like Jack and Jack inherently know how to market themselves in order to build, sustain and entertain their followers. It’s worth keeping that in mind when figuring out exactly how much trust to invest when working with influencers.

 

CREATIVE: The Trailer For ‘Mortal Kombat X’ Is Here

 

Universal’s Marketing Pushed ‘Furious 7’ the Right Way

Marketing a movie can be tricky, as it takes finding the right kind of campaign to draw audiences in. Obviously, this isn’t a problem with the Fast and Furious movie franchise, which has generated hundreds of millions of dollars with each new release.

However, the death of co-star Paul Walker in a tragic automobile audience back in November 2013 left the newest chapter in the series, Furious 7, up in the air for several months. Eventually, Universal Studios was able to complete the film, using a combination of CGI and Walker’s siblings to fill in his unfinished shots, and, with the help of writer Chris Morgan, made an ending that sent off Walker in a very emotional style.

Marketing the film became a bit of a challenge, as Universal didn’t want to push too many buttons in terms of Walker’s death. However, this article by Business Insider indicates that many were pleased with the way it was pushed, in a “restrained but effective” manner, according to one industry marketing executive.

“They didn’t lean on it, but they touched on it,” said another insider, referring to Walker’s death in the midst of the film’s production.

As you can see by the poster above from Vin Diesel’s Instagram account, Walker played a big part in the advertising for the film, but the tone in which it sets is more dramatic, leaning less on cars and more on the relationship between “brothers,” namely Walker and Vin Diesel, who had grown more close with the production of each sequel following Fast & Furious.

Over the weekend, Universal was silent when it came to the movie’s marketing, but eventually spoke after it racked up a massive $140 million-plus weekend take. “I can tell you personally that I’m very proud of the way the studio and marketing department walked us through what otherwise would have been a very tricky situation,” said Universal’s president of domestic distribution Nick Carpou, speaking to TheWrap.

“They handled everything that had to do with Paul respectfully and positively, and what emerged is more respect and a celebration for Paul and the franchise to the world. For the production team, Vin (Diesel) and the rest of the cast, this was a matter of personal importance and that shows through.”

The campaign came across as something to excite fans for the film, but without going overboard on being exploitative or disrespectful. “I think from the very moment of Walker’s tragic passing, Universal did a masterful job of honoring his memory and respecting his legacy, while at the same time going about the business of marketing one of the biggest movies on their slate,” said Rentrak senior analyst Paul Dergarabedian. “Furious 7 was shifted from its original August 2014 release date in the wake of his death.

“It takes a tremendous amount of sensitivity and diplomacy to walk the perfect public relations tightrope whenever something unexpectedly tragic like this happens,” he continued. “There was clearly a lot of thought that went into the handling of this and how Walker is portrayed not only in the trailers and imagery of the film, but also how he is represented in a very poignant and respectful way within the film itself.”

Furious 7 drew in audiences not only with a heaping amount of action (including a jailbreak on a moving truck and a car driving through two buildings in Abu Dhabi), but also an emotional farewell to Walker in the conclusion, complete with clips from previous Fast and Furious films he appeared in.

Furious 7 is in movies now, and even if you’re a newcomer to the series, it’s worth checking out.

Meerkat and Periscope (Illegally) Hit The Theaters

The possibilities with live-streaming applications like Meerkat and Periscope are endless, as users can broadcast themselves doing a number of things almost instantaneously. However, some are using these programs for rather illegal means – like showing quick clips from popular movies, like this past weekend’s release of Furious 7.

Variety reports that a number of users have been using the service to show these movies online, although that hardly reduces the popularity of those movies, as Furious 7 easily cleaned up with a $140 million-plus opening weekend. As a result, movie studios aren’t concerned – at least, not yet.

“We haven’t encountered any issues with (Periscope or Meerkat) yet,” said Patrick Corcoran, National Association of Theater Owners’ vice president and chief communications officer. He also noted that a number of theaters have been cracking down on people in the audience filming movies for piracy means. “The same would be true of devices that live-stream.”

The company already fought back against similar technology, as Google Glass has already been prohibited from certain theaters, as an effort to fight back against piracy.

One Hollywood executive chimed in on the use of said devices, believing the matter isn’t so bothersome with its shorter broadcast time. “Meerkating a full movie in a theater is no particularly practical,” he said. “The experience of watching a live-streamed version on a phone is not going to stand up.”

It should be noted that both Periscope and Meerkat have policies in place that prohibits users from streaming copyrighted material on their networks, and any streams related as such will be removed from their sites.

When it comes to promotion, Meerkat and Periscope can be quite effective, as IMAX used Periscope to live-stream activities from Furious 7‘s Red Carpet event last week. However, when it comes to the products themselves, it’s best for audiences to experience them on the big screen. After all, it’s hard to eat popcorn while trying to view a movie on a cell phone, right