Try not to scare old people

It’s well documented internally that a healthy proportion of MC&C’s client base have older-than-average customer profiles, Warner Leisure Hotels and Salvation Army being two of the most apparent. Combine this fact with the continuing trend for a greater ratio of advertising response coming from online mechanisms, and you could potentially be looking at losing a greater number of responders from any campaigns undertaken – especially those which involve a web call-to-action.

Please note, I’m not in the business of slurring the advanced generations’ online abilities – I’m sure there are plenty who can use a computer a lot more effectively than I – but it is generally considered that it takes older people slightly longer to adapt to technological change. This is obviously understandable if you’re used to dealing with issues such as bill payment, communication with family and friends, or booking holidays in a set way, only to be presented with an entirely foreign method many years down the line.

In fact, the Guardian has recently revealed a fairly startling fact: “There are 7.4 million people in the UK who have never used the internet, of which 85%, (6.3 million), are aged over 55” partly demonstrating elderly peoples’ caution with regard to the channel. The internet can be a daunting place, fraught with potential pitfalls, and so to eliminate peoples’ fears, it is in online advertisers’ best interests to adapt their website to accommodate the less internet savvy.

To counter this, eConsultancy have put together a handy list of safety checks that web-designers should follow, which should enable most effective navigation amongst those who need a bit of assistance:

1.       Font size should be at least 12-point (not just for senior friendliness, but general usability)

2.       Hyperlinks should be larger than general text and well-spaced from non-hyperlink text so that they are more obvious

3.       Use different colours for visited links to aid navigation and remind people where they have previously clicked

4.       Simplify form filling (especially prevalent when assisting people through the donation or purchase process)

5.       Make error messages within incomplete forms obvious, and clearly demonstrate corrective measures

6.       Avoid major navigation changes when redesigning sites

If these simple instructions are followed, then the ease with which ‘technophobes’ can pass through the donation or purchase process is greatly increased. This will lead to increased conversion rates on the site, and it would be assumed a greater return on advertising investment. Which IS my business!

Written by Alex Prout, Digital Account Manager

Round up of the Google I/O Conference

Last week Google revealed their master plan to change the world during the Google I/O conference and here is a round up of some of the key announcements:
• Android is becoming more prevalent in today’s society. Last year there were 400 million Android users. Now there are a massive 900 million.
• Google are improving their Play Store. It will work like the Game Center from Apple, allowing game saves across device and battles against your mates for the best score. Another cool feature is that you can start playing a game from your mobile phone, stop, and keep playing from another device such a tablet.

• Google officially announced their platform to compete against Spotify: Google Play Music All Access. It will be available for $9.99 a month in US (no UK pricing as of yet). 
• Google Maps will experience big changes in terms of design but also in terms of PPC. Now search ads with location extension can appear directly on the map and just below the search box. Search ads without location extension can appear just below the search box.
• Google+ has a new design based on 3 key arenas: Stream, Hangouts and Photos. It looks more like Pinterest with 3 columns showing more information about the users. Also, they added these new Twitter-like functions:
o “Related hashtags”: a feature that allows users to browse through related photos by clicking on the current photo.
o “Intelligent hashtags”: Google analyses the photo and places a hashtag on the post. For instance, if you have a photo with the Big Ben in the background, your post will automatically contain the hashtag “bigben”.
• Google+ will be on an individual app for Android and iPhone. This application keeps all photos and texts that have been shared on a stream and allows having video conversations with a group of friends. Plus (pun intended), it will be the first time that Google brings Google Talk to iPhone devices.
• Google+ will automatically discard blurry and duplicated pictures. Photo enhancements such as removing red eyes or noise in photos will also be implemented.
• A Samsung Galaxy S4 model will be released with a “cleaner” version of the operating system, so without all the extra Samsung’s functions.
• Google Now (Siri’s competitor) is going to be improved.  - set reminders, check public transport status and receive updates on TV shows.  It will also have a desktop version for Chrome and will be hands-free too.

Finally, at the end of the conference, Larry Page showed up. He gave an amazing speech about the future of the technology, but also making clear that Google is more than just a search engine. He wants to change the world!  You can watch Larry Page's speech here

You can watch the full Google I/O Conference here

 

Written by Marc Calvo Soler, Search Account Executive



Paper pounds, digital pennies and The Sun’s great gamble

It’s pretty much taken for granted now that what used to be known as “newspapers” are expected to be cross-channel “newsbrands”, with their online presence at least matching the traditional, tangible one. The problem is that unless you’re one of the biggest players on the Web, you’re more than likely to see your ad revenue drop rapidly when your readership moves online. So, what’s a newsbrand to do? The Sun recently decided to go all in.

According to The Guardian, from 1 August  The Sun will be rolling out a £2-per-week paywall. The controversial move follows a £30 million deal for exclusive internet and mobile Premier League highlights clips the publisher struck in January. Now, with internet’s prevailing “anything, anytime, for free” attitude towards content, raising a paywall means sailing notoriously treacherous waters even for quality titles, whose readerships are typically both more loyal and more affluent. For a tabloid to do so seems borderline reckless.
Is it really, though? The global rise of Guardian and Daily Mail, two poster children for “post-print” success (and identity crisis at the same time, but that’s a whole different story), cannot possibly be matched by every single UK newsbrand. For those late to the table, ISBA’s Bob Wootton’s words about ad revenue “paper pounds” being replaced by “digital pennies” ring painfully true. The only other way to harness online, he argues, is to secure exclusive, valuable, easily accessible content and charge for it. And as we’re regularly reminded, most recently by BT Sport's marketing offensive, the one kind of exclusive content to rule them all (and lure them all) is football.
It will be interesting to see how the move pays off for The Sun. Especially so for their tabloid competitors, who I’m sure won’t go anywhere near a paywall in the foreseeable future, who will be more than happy to pick up any readers who don’t make it through The Sun’s wall. It is also naïve to expect The Sun to only rely on footie highlights. Prepare for snazzy overhauls and heavy marketing pushes over the summer. Daily Mail’s premium content experiment will probably be watched very closely too, as any knowledge of what else online/mobile audiences are willing to pay for will be gold. Interesting times ahead.

Written by Adam Wika, Media Assistant

More ads anyone?

Remember the days when Facebook used to be this user-centric social network whose sole purpose was to connect you with your friends rather than selling your personal information to the big soulless companies who could then flood you with ads persuading you to buy their products, the purchase of which will have no less of an effect on your social and personal life than a princess’s kiss on an enchanted frog? No? Nor do I.

One of the reasons why might be the recent explosion in advertising developments within the social network, which appear to be kicking in at a steady rate of many-per-month.
Recent developments include, but are not limited to, mobile ads, sponsored stories, behavioural targeting, lookalike profiling, newsfeed re-targeting, and now – video.
The most recent of the above – video ads – is going to be rolled out this summer and according to some sources will allow advertisers to broadcast 15s ads to their target audiences, by also limiting individual users’  ad exposure to content from one advertiser a day only to maximise brand exposure and impact. The ads will start automatically, allowing people to choose whether they want to activate audio and restart the ad.

Estimates show that the new video format could help boost Facebook’s ad-generated income by around $1.4m a day, which would be a more than welcome new revenue stream for the company that is still trying to make up for its nearly disastrous stock market listing last year.
Facebook’s move to video ads is somehow natural and expected, given that the company has access to one of the richest and most thorough databases of personal information, which it would be crazy not to feed into an opportunity to tap into the ever-growing online video advertising market.
Furthermore, despite many online marketeers’ concerns of the new video ads being too disruptive, the social network has been quite good at subtly introducing new ad formats. (Remember how your friends’ news feeds and photos suddenly  got bigger and tidier with the introduction of the latest interface update? Did you pay as much attention to the slightly more prominent sponsored stories that appeared along as well? Didn’t think so.) This suggests that whether the new video format drives people away or not is totally dependent on execution and how Facebook rolls it out to the wider public, which we can assume (and hope) is only going to happen after a good amount of field testing.

Finally, it would be more than interesting to see how the most socially engaged online space handles one of the most engaging ad formats and what results this would produce. So while from a user’s  point of view I am slightly frustrated with yet another addition to Facebook’s advertising portfolio, the digital planner in me is interested to see whether this new development might help us find a new digital golden goose laying the golden eggs of social engagement.
I’ll keep my doubts for the time being, but only time will tell I guess…

Written by Slavina Racheva, Digital planner/buyer

Can you hear what the stats are singing?

The commercial (non-BBC) radio market has experienced increases in audience figures, according to the RAJAR quarterly report. Although the number of people listening to the radio is up by 608,000, the number of listening hours has fallen by 3%. There are however interesting trends within the market, with digital and commercial listening on the rise.

Figures show that half of radio listening adults now use digital radio but only a third of listening hours is done via this medium. In the latter half of this year we might, however, expect this to rise as Bauer Media launch two new digital stations- KissFresh and Kisstory- which will be available on mobile, desktop, tablet and Freeview.

London’s Capital and Magic 105.4 will be pleased with their results. Capital broadcast to 1.95 million people, overtaking Magic in terms of their reach to weekly listeners; yet Magic retained the highest proportion of listening hours with nearly 6%. Capital can be happy further, with Berry and Snowdon’s breakfast show attracting more than 1 million listeners.

 

Photo courtsey of Capitalfm.com

Heart’s breakfast show audience rose by a massive 120,000 listeners, putting them in second place for morning listening. Magic’s Neil Fox took a close third place, and a year on year rise of 20% for Absolute Radio slides them nicely into fifth place.
Nick Grimshaw’s Radio 1 morning show saw a dramatic decline of nearly 900,000 listeners from Q4 in 2012. This translates to a fall of 14%, and a year on year drop of almost a fifth. To add insult to injury, Vodafone’s Big Top 40 attracted a million more listeners than Radio 1.
       
From an advertiser’s perspective, what does this mean for the market and pricing? Total advertising expenditure on radio (as recorded by AdDynamix) for Q1 2013 is down 3% compared to this time last year. This together with stagnation on total listening has therefore ensured that radio pricing remains competitive. MC&C are not expecting any increases in overall pricing during 2013.

Written by Sean Stanfield, Media Intern

Google Enhanced Campaign Update

A lot has happened since Google announced the changes to AdWords in February; mixed reactions across the industry, success stories and complaints, additional features added (mobile ad group bidding changes being our favourite), and recently a confirmed date when the changes become mandatory. Many agencies have chosen to play the waiting game, holding out until 22^nd July in case of any more features being added, but we have begun testing the Enhanced Campaign settings to give us and our clients a head start. So far our results have been mixed:

• Higher CTRs coming from the more targeted Sitelinks and creative
• Higher CPAs where the site is not compatible with Tablets
• A general increase in traffic from being opted into Tablets
• A slight increase in Mobile CPCs

As we predicted, the results were always going to vary depending on the current state of each campaign and its offering. Hopefully most advertisers already have Tablet-friendly sites, or are taking steps to do so as soon as possible.   If you haven’t, we recommend you begin looking at this as soon as you can in order to avoid wasted budget and poor user experience, from being forced to bid for Tablet traffic.

In part we agree with Google that you should migrate as soon as you can, however if you are not set up to serve your site on a Tablet yet, we’d suggesting holding out until you have resolved this issue. No one wants higher CPAs from wasted budget, and poor usability!

If you have any questions or don’t feel like you’re being assisted through these significant changes, don’t hesitate to get in touch. We’d love to help - you can get hold of me via email george@mcand.co.uk

 

Written by George Byrne, Head of Search

 

 

A morning with Harper Reed

Last week I spent the morning listening to, and then talking with Harper Reed. For those who don’t know him he was one of the founders of Threadless, (one of the first practitioners of crowd sourcing) and then Obamas CTO during the 2012 election campaign.

In that later role he led the team that built the technology platform that engaged tens of millions of supporters and helped raise more than $1bn in donations.

He told an impressive story of building what was essentially a massive customer engagement system, with associated content management and donation platform, and then training and motivating thousands of volunteers to use it. One platform managed voter and supporter contact across channels as diverse as twitter, text, email, mail, outbound phone and even door knocking.

The marketing and mainstream commentators hailed this as a masterpiece of “micro targeting”, where small but coherent groups of voters were engaged on issues that most appealed to them.

Harper made two really interesting points, both of which had not been picked up by mainstream case studies.

The first was: this wasn’t really micro targeting, but actually micro listening. The volunteers who knocked on doors and called voters weren’t primarily trying to “sell” Obama. They were trying to listen to what voters needed from him, and what would motivate them to engage with the campaign. Every call, every visit was data captured using an app, and that data appended to the voters record. That listening informed messaging for that individual voter, and for cohorts matched to them.

The second point was one of integration. This was a tech presentation by a tech leader, aged under 35. Clearly he was proud of the work in channels like twitter, instant click to donate on text, and personalised emails. But he acknowledged that much of the heavy lifting with voters took place with old fashioned media, like phone, door knocking and above all in direct mail. Shock horror, paper and mail still have a huge role in this era of digital. And the insight I took from speaking with him: digital media may create the insight. Interactivity tells you in real time what voters engage with. But a real letter shows you value them and their opinions. And that changes minds, and generates money

Not what I was expecting to hear from a young tech guy. But a morning well spent

Written by Mike Colling, MD of MC&C

Shop with your eyes, not with your hands

Everyone has their own way of shopping. Some like to walk in, product in mind and walk straight out in five minutes flat; while others enjoy browsing, never entirely sure what they might leave with. For the latter group, advertisers are in a never ending battle to manipulate what people might buy; and for the former, they are constantly looking to break shopper’s nerves of steel and have them purchase something extra at a last minute impulse.

It appears, however, that the consumer battle has tipped in the advertisers favour, as interactive advertising takes a leap in the right direction. The latest technological developments at Lancaster University provide the advertising world with the Sideways project. The system allows for a single camera to track the faces and eye movements of up to fourteen people simultaneously. This can allow for the adverts to adapt to the product preferences of each individual shopper.

 

While this technology is still relatively new, previous attempts could only focus on one person at a time and the calibration process was “time-consuming and annoying.” With this newer, simpler system however, senior researcher Andreas Bulling told the BBC that he expected “this technology to become available widely in the near future”, possibly in shops within five year.

So what might we see in the future of shopping? Will we see brighter and bolder ads, images and creatives screaming for our attention? Or will adverts become more subtle, with each individual consumer taking home their own unique experience of a store. As the technology develops further in the coming years, we wait to see how this possible game changer to the world of interactive advertising will manifest itself.

Who wants some TLC?....Not me!

Last night [Tuesday, April 30^th 2013] Discovery Network International launched the brand new channel TLC in the UK and Ireland.

Billed as a female version of ‘Dave’ the channels flags-ship shows include - HereComes Honey Boo Boo (an off-the-wall reality show depicting the life of a seven year old beauty pageant contestant and her entourage family, made famous by the delightful ‘Toddlers & Tiaras’ series). A documentary that follows a woman who is addicted to eating cat hair! ‘Swinger Wives’ (speaks for itself) and a smattering of other UK commissions: Holly Valance’s ‘Ultimate Shopper’, Dawn O’Porter’s ‘Undercover Mums’ and Lisa Snowdon’s ‘Your Style in His Hands’.

Whilst the brow of these shows may be lower than the Mariana trench, there is clearly still a huge appetite for ‘women’s content’ and in a declining market (with magazines such as More coming off the shelves after 25 years, due to faltering sales) the channel does opens up new avenues for advertisers trying to reach young women.

 
My personal feeling is that TLC is a lot like a junk food binge. You’ll crave it at times, you may enjoy the hit, but you know you have done something wrong and feel just a little bit guilty afterwards.