The social network adds it as an option along with the current three-second standard.

Facebook lengthens viewability.

Facebook has begun offering advertisers a 10-second-view pay option for video ads, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. The social network will continue to offer its current three-second view option, intimating that the 10-second option will likely come at a premium.

Earlier this year, the Media Ratings Council issued a temporary standard or 50% of pixels in view for two seconds as a viewable impression for video. One second was officially established as the standard for display ads.

A blog on Facebook's corporate site today revealed a new ranking system for placing videos in users' news feeds. Facebook has tagged certain actions—turning on sound, expanding to full screen—as indications that people like videos, and those people will henceforth see videos placed higher up in their news feeds.

An unnamed Facebook spokeswoman commented to WSJ that the company doesn't feel the 10-second option will help marketers' ads perform better, but that “we want to give them control and choice over how they buy.”

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Deciding between first-, second-, and third-party data can be more than some marketers can bear.

Once upon a time there was a community of marketers who struggled to identify the type of data that best fit their organizations' needs. Their quality concerns around third-party data were too big, and the customer insights gleaned from second-party data were too small. And although first-party data was usually just right, even this category had its share of challenges. 

Which types of data can help marketers achieve their fairytale ending? Econsultancy and Signal surveyed more than 300 senior marketers that used at least two data categories about their collection and use practices to find out. Here, the data trends that those polled say are just right.

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A Temple University neuromarketing study finds that direct mail tops digital media for engagement time, recall, and ultimate purchase.

An in-depth neuroscientific study sponsored by the Postal Service Inspector General's office (OIG) found direct mail ads to be superior to those viewed online in eight out of nine categories. Digital ads seized the attention of consumers quicker, but physical ads held that attention longer, elicited a greater emotional reaction, and played a more direct role in ultimate purchase decisions.

Noting that advertising mail accounts for 31% of USPS revenues—some $20 billion last year—the OIG's office partnered with Temple University's Center for Neural Decision Making to provide the Postal Service with ammunition to promote use of the mails in multichannel marketing strategies along with digital methods. The results OIG received could end up making a reasonable case for marketers to consider anchoring their multichannel strategies around mail.

Temple showed a mix of 40 email ads and postcards to laboratory study subjects, using three monitoring methods to gauge the effects the ads had on them. Eye tracking measured visual attention; fingertip sensors monitored heart rate, respiration, and sweating to reveal emotional engagement; and MRIs performed scans to uncover deep brain activity.

Postcards were judged superior to email ads in four of nine ad attributes measured: engagement time, emotional reaction, recall, and building subconscious desire for a product or service. Email ads led in just one attribute: focusing a customer's attention. The two methods tied in three areas (see box).

The MRI scans found that the postcards triggered the ventral striatum of the brain, the center of desirability and value. On that evidence, Temple researchers concluded that physical ads have a deeper and longer-lasting effect than digital ads on instilling desire for products and services.

Based on study results, the OIG offered these suggestions in making better use of direct mail in the marketing mix:

Test the piece for maximum reaction. Take neuromarketing a step further by doing your own studies to determine how specific elements of a direct mail piece—whether color, shape, or use of white space—elicits the best reaction from consumers.

Explore sequencing options. Neuroscience could also be used, says OIG, to determine the most effective sequence of media elements in a campaign. Does email followed by direct mail work best, or vice versa? Should other media such as television be included?

Consider digital print technology. Test whether using augmented reality or QR codes in mail pieces ramps up conversion rates in multichannel campaigns. A previous OIG study found that such methods resonated well with younger digital natives.

Similar results were handed down in a neuromarketing study undertaken in 2009 by Royal Mail in the U.K. It, too, found that physical media generated deeper brain activity than digital media.

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AOL's Tim Armstrong says the goal is to become the world's biggest media provider.

Verizon today completed its courtship of AOL with a $4.4 billion marriage of the leading wireless provider and the pioneering, but ailing, digital media company. In announcing the historic deal, Verizon EVP and president of new business Marni Walden declared that the new entity “will be directly targeted at the global advertising industry.”

AOL henceforth becomes a wholly owned subsidiary of Verizon and its shares will no longer be traded on the NYSE.

AOL CEO Tim Armstrong (above) said that he expected the deal to ultimately be worth $80-$100 billion in added business to his company. “We believe [mobile] will represent 80% of consumer media attention,” said Armstrong, who lauded Verizon as a “pioneer in mobile and media acquisition.”

• Under Verizon's aegis, AOL claims it will operate at the scale of Facebook and Google, touching 70% of Internet traffic in the US and reaching across 1.5 billion PCs, TVs, and mobile devices globally.
• AOL will operate independently and Verizon will contribute its Digital Media Services (DMS) division to the new entity. DMS President Bob Toohey will report to Armstrong, and Armstrong will report to Walden.
• With the deal closed, Verizon said it expects 90% of its traffic to be content in the next five years, as opposed to only 60% currently.

Walden said Verizon expected to launch an expanded content business this summer that will stream fresh titles and live sports and music events. “We will have one of the largest marketplaces for live video,” she said.

Armstrong apparently sees the deal as salvation for his troubled company. “Our goals as a combined entity are becoming the number one global media company. Nobody owns the future, and getting the two companies together allows us to have a bigger seat at the table,” he said.

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Pixalate contends its new Security Dome will help DSPs save clients loads on ads by identifying robot sites before ads are served.

Anti-fraud platform Pixalate today introduces a hardware solution for programmatic advertisers that it's hailing as a watershed product in ad fraud prevention. It accesses Pixalate's database of acknowledged robot domains before an ad is served, bypasses them, and saves clients tons of wasted media dollars.

Called the Security Threat Intelligence Dome, the hardware appliance enables the blocking of botnets, DDoS attacks, malware, phishing assaults, compromised IPs and URLs, and suspicious proxies—all before bidding and optimization activity begins.

“It's been a big problem for marketers, because we currently deal with the issue in a reactionary way. You can't determine whether the receiver of the ad is human until after the ad is served,” says Pixalate VP of Product Khalid Razzaq. “We're offering a completely different approach. Ours is a repetition mechanism that looks at millions of IP addresses and identifies the ones depositing malware.”

The Security Dome does this by connecting users to Pixalate's Global Fraud Threat Intelligence Cloud, an ongoing scanner that crawls 15 million domains and evaluates 350 million IPs every month. “This constant monitoring is the most critical part of the service we offer,” Razzaq says. “Hackers are very intelligent. They won't use the same IP addresses. It's very important that the list is constantly being updated.”

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Smartphone and tablet views have quadrupled in two years, leading mobile to claim 50% of video viewership by year's end, says a study.

As mobile grows, so, apparently, do people's appetites for watching videos on their devices. According to a study from Ooyala, the U.S. video ad platform of Australian telcom Telstra, mobile video views have doubled over the year earlier period and now account for two fifths of all video viewing worldwide. Since Q1 2013, mobile views are up 367%.

TV broadcasters appeared to be the chief beneficiaries of the trend. Tablet viewers of broadcaster content watched ads to completion 89% of the time and smartphone users 79% of the time. Broadcasters, at the same time, held the greater share of the mobile audience, with 53% of their online content playing out on devices versus only 31% for publishers and brands.

Personalization pays, the Ooyala study also found. Content recommended to individuals by sports broadcasters was viewed at least 40% of the time, and those touted by consumer publishers were watched at least a third of the time.

Ooyala's Global Video Index, which tracks viewing habits of hundreds of millions of people worldwide, predicted that more than 50% of all video will be viewed on mobile devices by the end of 2015.

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The cost to maintain loyal users dropped 10% to $2.47 in May, as app developers turn up the volume on targeting.

Targeting efforts pay off for developers.

The average cost per loyal user (CPLU) to app developers dropped by 10% last month to $2.47, according to Fiksu, a mobile marketing tech platform. CPLU represents total cost of advertising divided by the number of users who opened an app at least three times during the month.

Three out of four supporting cost metrics also declined since April. Cost Per Launch (CPL)—the cost of driving app engagement—decreased 31% on iOS to 28 cents in May, while Android CPL dipped 14% to 30 cents. Cost Per Install (CPI) dropped 31% to $1.46 at the Apple Store, but rose 12% for Android apps to $2.33. Fiksu attributes the wide variation in CPI between the operating systems to the fact that incent networks, like Tapjoy, that reward engagement are much more popular in the iOS realm.

Fiksu marks down the May cost decline as a market correction, as developers and brands make better use of their promotional funds via smarter targeting. “While we have seen seasonal slowdowns of app marketing during the summer months in prior years, May's results also reflect brands implementing more precise audience segmentation,” said Micah Adler, CEO of Fiksu. “Rising CPIs in 2015 have caused some marketers to look for ways to reduce costs and focus their spend on the right groups of users.”

Spending on app promotions is likely to remain strong despite the downtrend in downloads. The Fiksu App Store Competitive Index, which tracks daily downloads of the top 200 free iOS apps, recorded a 17% drop to 6.7 million in May. A Fiksu spokesperson said it is not uncommon for top apps to spend as much as $300,000 to $500,000 a month on advertising. 

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Two thirds of supermarket baskets don't include a promoted item, says the e-couponer whose new program looks to wring more sales circulars.

Checkout Circulars?

Catalina Marketing, the company that introduced the concept of reactive couponing at checkout counters, today introduces a concept aimed at adding sales punch to store circulars.

My Favorite Deals calls on the purchase histories of loyalty club members at retailers to deliver them five relevant deals from the store circular. The behavioral strategy is to select items in categories they are most likely to purchase on their next trip.

“Today the average shopper buys just 0.7% of the UPC's in a supermarket, and that same correlation holds true for the circular,” says Marla Thompson, SVP of strategy for Catalina. “What Catalina does is sort through hundreds of deals in a circular and find the best fits for individual shoppers. Our preference engine considers brand purchases and category purchases, as well as where the consumer is in that purchase cycle.”

Thompson notes that retailers in the U.S. spend $6 billion dollars on their circulars annually and that 66% of shopping baskets do not contain even one circular-promoted item in a given week. In a pilot test of My Favorite Deals with a large chain Catalina would not name, the reactive system returned an average weekly sales lift of 1.5% on circular items to targeted shoppers.

“This program is an ‘and' to circulars; it's not meant to replace them,” Thompson said. She anticipates a high acceptance rate for the new program, since it will require no hardware or system upgrades to the Checkout Coupon systems currently installed at 28,000 locations in the U.S.

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Web scraping is on the rise and its legality is being debated. The future of big data could hang in the balance.

I decided that I might want to stop writing about all these successful dot-com businesses and get into the act myself. I mean, how hard could it be, aside from the fact that I have no expertise in any particular vertical, no technological knowledge, and no money? That last was a bit of a problem because I was going to need big data, and big data doesn't come cheap.

So, one day I'm talking to a direct-tech wizard and he says, “Why don't you just find a business you want to be in, find the most successful company, go to their website, and scrape some of their data?”

Scrape? My dad was a house painter. I used to help him during summers. The only scraping I knew was done with a putty knife. But that's what God invented the Internet for. Google turned up endless Web scraping services and I went to one called Automation Anywhere.

Its homepage told me not to try scraping on my own, that I could pay them as little as $1,995 for a program that would have me scraping away in minutes with no programming expertise. A video showed me how. Suppose I wanted to locate all the assisted living facilities in Detroit? (Bedpans! There's a wide-open Web business!) Automation Anywhere showed me how I could request a data pattern—name, address, phone, and service area of targets—apply their program to a rehab facility listing, and minutes later be in possession of tidy customer list on a spreadsheet. A box popped up asking if I had any questions for a live account manager. I did.

“I'm interested in this, but is it totally legal?” I asked Shine, the account rep.

Shine was slow to respond and came back disappointingly noncommittal: “You need to install the software at your end. Hence, you will need to check at your end for legal documents for the website.”

Shine had obviously been reading the same European news sites that I had. Last year Irish airline Ryanair filed suit against PR Aviation, a Dutch airfare comparison site, charging it with copyright infringement and breach of contract for scraping flight data from its site. The Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ) dismissed the suit, saying the scraping amounted to “normal use” of a website. However, the ECJ did potentially leave the door open for businesses with unprotected databases, such as Ryanair, to establish contractual limitations on use of their databases by third parties. That opening, should it be entered into by airlines, might have businesses such as Expedia, Orbitz, and Priceline reimagining their business plans.

And it could have any other businesses that load up third-party data files through scraping activities doing the same. The reality, however, is that that's a big “and.”

“The airlines have been halfway successful taking travel agents to court, but it can take five years and then they lose,” said Gus Cunningham, CEO of ScrapeSentry, one of only “three and a half” companies, in his words, that block scrapers from websites.

Professional scrapers are not only out-front and plentiful—as the Google search demonstrated—they're also nimble and expensive to chase away. Basically, Cunningham said, it's a matter of stopping scrapers at the website door among the airlines, e-coms, real estate sites, and online gambling companies that are scraped the most. Cunningham's company monitors inbound Web traffic and uses an analysis engine to block suspect visitors per parameters set down by clients. ScanSentry has a nine-year-old database that helps it identify bad actors, much like Interpol with its criminal database. Then a human element must enter the process.

Some of Cunningham's clients feed bogus information to competitors identified as scrapers to ferret them out. In many cases, though, they opt to turn their heads. “Airlines have some flights where they just want to get as many butts as they can in the seats, so they won't concentrate their blocking efforts on those. They'll concentrate on the routes that are always jammed,” Cunningham said.

Unlike botnets that steal money by, say, serving bogus websites to siphon off programmatic ad dollars, scraping is not overtly criminal. In the wide sphere of digital commerce, it's probably most common that the scrap-ee is also a scrap-er. How vigilant vulnerable industries become, and how protective courts and law enforcement agencies grow, will depend on how much scraping activity increases. Cunningham said it's growing fast. More than one fifth of visitors to client websites last year were scrapers, according to a ScanSentry study. Among travel companies, meanwhile, scrapers doubled from 15% in 2013 to 33% last year.

“And,” Cunningham noted, “It is stealing.”

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Marching ever further away from its diary days, the ratings king widens its digital footprint with BrightRoll, DoubleClick, Rocket Fuel, Viant, among others.

Stating it wanted to give clients access to further metrics of their digital campaign performance, Nielsen announced the creation of a Preferred Platform Partner Program at its annual client conference in Washington, DC, yesterday.

The partner panel consists of nine inaugural members: BrightRoll, Freewheel, DoubleClick, Moat, Rocket Fuel, Tremor Video, TubeMogul, Viant, and Videology. The ad tech companies were picked by Nielsen for their platforms' abilities to “enable a more automated approach to media buying and selling.”

The move is consistent with Nielsen's strategy to transform itself with digital metrics essential to an ad-buying process that has become largely programmatic. Last March, the ratings company acquired the programmatic data exchange Exelate and also partnered with digital intelligence provider Neustar.

“Programmatic is the way of the future,” said Andrew Feigenson, managing director of digital for Nielsen, in announcing the platform. “We aim to not only provide our clients with comprehensive total audience solutions, but also want to ensure they can access those insights as seamlessly as possible. Members of Nielsen's Preferred Platform Partner Program allow us to do that.”

To qualify for the Partner Platform, companies must meet a series of requirements that include specific tagging and reporting capabilities, as well as server connections .

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The full strength of content marketing lies in marketers incorporating it into their regular omnichannel regimen.

Content marketing is like a muscle: It will only get stronger if you use it. And just as how muscles work with other parts of the body to propel movement, content marketing has to connect to the rest of an organization's marketing mix to generate progress. 

That coordinated effort is one focus area of PAN Communications' report “Content Fitness Data Analysis 2015.” The PR company interviewed 140 marketing professionals about their organization's content marketing coordination for the report. The result: It looks like marketers have some toning up to do. 

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Deliv buys WeDeliver in quest to become the largest same-day delivery company in the nation.

Competiton heats up in same-day delivery.

Same-day delivery options are now must-haves for retailers, both brick and click. Google, Amazon, the U.S. Postal Service, and even Uber are getting into the game. But one deliverer whose name may not be familiar, by design, today moved a step closer toward its goal of being the biggest same-day option for retailers nationwide.

Deliv, which partners anonymously with retailers to move the goods, has announced the acquisition of Chicago competitor WeDeliver to take ownership of same-day delivery in that market. Deliv is now operational in eight markets spanning the country from Los Angeles to Houston to New Jersey.

“Two-day delivery for retailers has become the norm, but retailers are feeling the need to respond to Amazon and its same-day delivery option,” says Deliv VP of Marketing Ingrid Bekkers. Deliv currently services Bloomingdale's, FootLocker, Macy's, and Williams-Sonoma, along with hundreds of local merchants.

Deliv contracts with independent runners who make deliveries in their own vehicles. The company owns no trucks, operates no distribution centers, and has no app for consumers to order deliveries. Bekkers says Deliv is unique among deliverers in that their service is worked into clients' POS systems, so that the option for same-day delivery can be offered to customers at checkout. The company also will integrate into retailers' e-commerce systems, as it does with Macy's, with merchandise picked up and delivered from local stores. It's had success, too, in contracting with mall operators to service affiliate stores.

“We want to keep the service identified with the retailer,” Bekkers says, explaining why Deliv itself does no branding.

Other markets in which Deliv operates are San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle, and Washington, D.C.

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Booze, golf, and custom T-shirt emails lead inbox appeals for Dad gifts, drawing 50%-plus opens

Callaway mails it straight down the fairway.

Some things never change. On Mother's Day, you can't go wrong with flowers. On Father's Day (which happens this Sunday, in case you've been napping), booze and golf remain the go-to categories, with custom T-shirts the comer.

Callaway Golf, Hydro Flask, and CustomInk all achieved 58% open rates in emails sent this week, according to eDataSource. The company, which daily tracks more than 25 million emails sent by some 50,000 brands, counted a total of 14,600 campaigns with the words “Father's Day” in the creative. Just over 4,000 deployed the magic words in the subject line.

Custom T-shirts for Dad's Day seems to be a growing trend. CustomInk achieved more than 64,000 opens based on its blast to 111,000 addresses on Monday with a message warning there was only one day left to get the shirts in time for Sunday brunch with Pops.

Callaway earned nearly 32,000 opens with an offer of “The Essential Father's Day Golf Gift Guide,” and Hydro Flask won almost 39,000 opens with a photo of its pint-sized, insulated flask and copy that said “Don't get Dad a tie. Instead get him a gift he'll actually use.”

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Elyse Dupre, Associate Editor

June 23, 2015

How to Make Your Emails Go Viral

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Eight tips for getting subscribers to forward your emails. (Tip No. 1: Contain your dreams of virality to your subscriber base.)

When most people think of virality, their minds immediately go to social. However, Chad White, research director for Litmus, argues that email can generate mass shares too—through forwards.

There are some key differences between social and email virality. For one, White says social sharing is public and, therefore, relatively easy to measure; email forwarding, however, is private and as such is difficult to track. Viral audiences for each channel are also extremely different. When people share content on social, for instance, it generally reaches their entire network, White says. But he says when someone forwards an email, it's directed towards a specific individual who ostensibly will find the content relevant. 

“It's the scattered shot of social versus that sniper bullet of the forward—something that is very targeted,” he explains.

And forwarding emails does more than just expand that message's reach. Research has shown that consumers are more likely to buy from a brand that was recommended by a trusted source.

So why is social still getting all of the viral glory? Put simply: Generating forwards is hard.

Consider the following: For Litmus' recently published “Viral Email Report,” White used the company's email analytics capabilities to evaluate more than 400,000 commercial emails that each had at least 500 opens. He then looked at what percentage of the B2B and B2C emails generated a forward and ranked them.

The results weren't exactly encouraging. According to the report, emails in the 50th percentile of forward-per-open rates generated one forward for every 370 opens. It wasn't until the emails fell into the top one percent that they generated a forward for every 21 opens.

“The message there is that most emails don't rise to that level of being forwarded that much,” White says. “So to think that you're going to somehow engineer it so that most of your emails are getting forwarded a lot is probably not a realistic goal.”

Instead marketers should take an episodic approach to their email marketing: Rather than constantly trying to generate the next big hit, aim to generate consistent engagement with subscribers and then surprise and delight them with special content or offers that exceed their expectations.

“You should be trying to engineer moments when you're amazingly fantastic, and the rest of the time [you can settle for] fine to good,” White explains. “Try to be engineering intense moments where people are going to want to be engaging with your brand at a higher level [and] want to be sharing the content of that email.”

So how can marketers create these exceptional moments for their subscribers? To get a clearer sense of what actually motivates subscribers to forward an email, White analyzed more than 200 emails from the top one percent and compared them to some 200 emails from the 50th percentile. Here are his suggestions based on those findings—advice that could help your email messages go viral.

1. Start by taking a look at your email editorial calendar. The first thing White says marketers should do is look at their content calendars and ask themselves what are they planning on sending that's special? Not the same “run-of-the-mill” messages that go out every Tuesday and Thursday, he says. One way marketers can determine whether their messages are unique is by asking themselves if they would forward them to their friends: "If it would get you talking about it, [then] that's a pretty good indication that it would get other people talking about it."

He also encourages marketers to look at major events going on within their industries, and try to create special messages for those moments—for example, end-of-year giving for nonprofits.

2. Concentrate on subscribers' hierarchy of needs. There are four things, according to the report, that every subscriber needs: respect, function, value, and remarkable experiences.

White says that each of these experiences builds on the other, and in effect makes it difficult for marketers to meet subscribers' more advanced needs. That's because basic needs have to be met first. White warns, however, that meeting the need for remarkable experiences is critical to build brand evangelists.

“You could probably have a decent business just with the first three layers of the pyramid,” White says, “but to be a really successful business you have to have evangelists, subscribers, customers that are doing some of your marketing for you. That's what the top of the pyramid—that remarkable level of the pyramid—is about. Are you delivering experiences worth talking about?”

3. Know what kind of virality you're hoping to achieve. According to White, there are two types of email forwards: the social forward and the advice-seeking forward.

The social forward happens when a subscriber wants to share news with friends or family, notify them of a particular promotion, or include them in a planning process. For instance, a subscriber who receives an invitation to a company's conference may forward that email to his colleagues to see if anyone else is attending, White explains. An advice-seeking forward occurs when the recipient wants his network's input on whether he should convert. For instance, the report cites an example of how U.K.-based loan provider Glo achieved a high-forward rate by providing a checklist of what loan applicants should look for when choosing a guarantor along with a link to send to a potential guarantor.

Bottom line: Keeping these two types of forwards in mind can help marketers determine whether their messages are actually helping them generate the reach, engagement, or conversions that they're hoping for.

4. Make it clear that you're doing something special. Sending a 40%-off coupon instead of your usual 10% offer? Hosting a major event? Let your subscribers know that you're sending them something extraordinary, such as by switching up your design template, White says.

5. Include a call-to-action button. Just as companies may include a like or share button for their social campaigns, marketers should tell their subscribers that this is something that they should pass along with share-with-your-network CTA buttons. According to the report, emails in the top one percentile were 13-times more likely to include them than emails in the 50th percentile.

“Obviously you can't dump a ‘share with your network' call-to-action into any old email and have it make a significant impact,” White says, “but that should be a part of your email design when you're having those special moments—[like] when you have that great promotion, when you have that special content, [or] that special event.”

6. Narrow down your audience.  Size matters. White says that companies with smaller lists tend to see more engagement. But that doesn't mean that big brands with millions of subscribers can't go viral. Segmentation, personalization, and triggered messaging are all effective ways to boost forwards among your subscribers. Consider the following: 13% of the emails in the top one percent were segmented and 16% were triggered, versus 3% and 5.4%, respectively for the 50th percentile. Nearly 9% of the messages in the top one percent contained personalized content, compared to only 2% for the emails in the midway sample.

 “The more you can focus on one thing and delivering that one thing to the right person...the more inclined [your subscribers feel] to forward that one thing onto somebody that they know that is interested in that one thing.”

7. Keep your content simple. Not only do marketers want their audiences to be focused, but they should want their content to be focused, too. So instead of sending subscribers several announcements or pieces of content, marketers should focus on one specific topic or one specific call-to-action, White says. This will prevent the forwarder from having to explain what exactly he wanted the recipient to see.

8. Know what types of email are most virality-prone. Everyone likes to get discounts. But sending customers generous coupons doesn't guarantee that your emails will go viral. In fact, just 18% of the one percent of emails contained promotions, deals, or discounts—versus 56% for the middle 50th percentile. Events requiring an RSVP were the most common topic in top one percent emails (being featured in 31% of them), followed by news/helpful content (21%) and transactional/account-change/action-required information (18%).

The key, according to White, is focusing on the topics that go above the expected baseline and excite people enough to share.

 “You're sending stuff all of the time about news and promotions. These are just absolutely core to email marketing. These are staples.... [It's] not that people don't like promotions, [and it's] not that people don't like news and content. But in order for them to share it, it has to be truly special and amazing."

Updated July 23 at 10:11 am EST: The correct name of the report is "The Viral Email Report" not the "Email Virality Report" as previously listed.

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Its new release features role-based dashboards that translate data for specific managers and departments.

For customers, silos must go!

Clarabridge today released Clarabridge 7, joining the latest movement among marketing tech companies to speed actionability of data intelligence by burning down the corporate silos. The new release's CX Studio promises to provide users a route to exploring the full customer journey in an intuitive manner. A new dashboard and authoring capability allows for “massive rollout,” in Clarabridge's terms, across an entire enterprise.

Also new are role-based dashboards that translate data in a manner relevant to specific roles, departments, and levels in an organization. The company claims that such personalization lets users take intelligence and feedback and put it immediately into action. CX Engagor expedites that by connecting business units directly with consumers in real time.

"Creating customer loyalty and profitability is no longer a guessing game," said Nithi Vivatrat, chief product officer at Clarabridge. "Clarabridge 7 makes it possible for large organizations to immediately understand customer needs and wants—regardless of how they interact with the company." 

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The new name unites its global units and heralds an expansion into services stemming from its online communities.

C Space CEO Charles Trevail

Communispace, a pioneer in the formation of branded communities, today announced it would change its name to C Space. The new name will henceforth be applied to C Space's Promise unit in Europe and Jigsaw business in China.

The change is as much about requantifying its business as it is uniting its global units, according to CEO Charles Trevail, the founder of Promise. “This is more of a repositioning story,” Trevail said. “What we've been doing over the last three years is more than just fast feedback from consumers. We've been delivering business solutions in the area of CX design, brand consulting, and innovation.”

No branding consultant was brought in to develop the new brand. Most U.S. customers had already been calling it C Space for short, relates Trevail. “We're more like an agency than most people think,” he said. “The only difference is that we feel the consumer is the creative person.”

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91% of marketers either use or plan to use personalization within the next year.

Almost all marketers will utilize real-time personalization for online customer interactions within the next year, according to a new study from Researchscape International and Evergage. Indeed, 91% of the 242 global B2B and B2C marketers surveyed say that they either use or plan to use real-time personalization ("data-driven personalization completed in one second") within the next 12 months.

To put this number into context, approximately 58% of marketers use real-time personalization now. Of the 42% of respondents who don't use it, 78% intend to leverage it within the next year. In other words, approximately 33% of all marketers surveyed don't use real-time personalization, but plan to. 

Clearly, users and non-users alike recognize the benefits of real-time personalization. Consider the following: 86% of marketers who leverage real-time personalization report a lift—with about half seeing a lift greater than 10%. What's more, marketers who plan to deploy real-time personalization expect to see increased visitor engagement (78%), improved customer experiences (78%), and increased lead generation (60%). 

“Personalization is an age-old concept, but extending the customized experience to online visitors in real time—based on deep customer analytics—is a new way to ensure each and every interaction with a prospective customer is relevant and engaging,” says Karl Wirth, cofounder and CEO of real-time Web personalization software provider Evergage. “When nearly 90% of marketers realize lift from personalization initiatives, it's clear that those who embrace this strategy will outperform those who do not.”

However, companies looking to enhance their real-time personalization efforts should be prepared to increase their allocated resources. For instance, almost half (49%) of respondents intend to increase their real-time personalization budgets over the year ahead, and about 80% plan to increase them by more than 10%. In addition, 51% of marketers say that their companies are designating employees to work on real-time personalization programs specifically.

Wirth also emphasizes the importance of giving marketers the tools they need to leverage real-time personalization without constantly consulting IT.

“The primary challenges to successfully using personalization underscore the importance of developing business intelligence, customer analytics, testing, and personalization tools that marketers can use without the help of IT or data scientists,” he says. “Marketers need to be able to easily access a well-rounded view of customer information, and act on it to calibrate and deliver highly relevant and engaging experiences in real time, every time.”

Additional findings include:

• Marketers using real-time personalization have deployed it across their websites (76%), mobile sites (29%), Web applications (22%), and mobile apps (16%).
• Among the most common methods for real-time personalized content delivery are inline content (53%) and call-outs (41%).
• When segmenting visitors, marketers use several different methods; the most popular being the type of content viewed (48%), location (45%), and time on site (36%).
• One third of those using real-time personalization report increased e-commerce revenues and 73% see increased visitor engagement.
• Marketers are doing a good job of measuring the ROI of their real-time personalization campaigns—with only 11% not measuring. Areas primarily looked at include conversion lift (58%), time on site (40%), and revenue lift (39%).

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The gourmet coffee brand links in-store promotion to social interaction through its multichannel sweepstakes.

Customer experience should be like a good cup of coffee: smooth and enjoyable. Gourmet coffee brand The Eight O'Clock Coffee Company tried to brew up this exact experience by launching a multichannel sweepstakes earlier this year.

Eight O'Clock Coffee wanted to generate brand awareness and sales for its Bonus Packs, coffee bags that offer 25% more coffee for no extra cost. The brand also wanted to generate engagement among young families—an audience that it realized it resonated with after partnering with the television series FRIENDS and sponsoring a pop-up of the show's famous coffee shop for its 20th anniversary. Because the percentage of consumers who are loyal to coffee brands is so low—approximately 40%, according to Eight O'Clock Coffee Brand Manager Michael Scalera—engaging customers to form long-term engagement and top-of-mind awareness at the shelf is particularly important.

“We know that if consumers engage with the brand socially, then they're more likely to go to the store and buy our product,” Scalera says.

To fill this tall order, Eight O'Clock Coffee worked with advertising, marketing, and PR agency S3 and launched the “Go Big for Hawaii Sweepstakes” in February.

As its name suggests, the sweepstakes offered customers the opportunity to win a trip to the Big Island by inviting them to submit pictures of themselves flexing their muscles in honor of Eight O'Clock Coffee “bulking up” their Bonus Packs, explains Jaime Hamel, S3's digital strategist.

Here's how participants could enter: Upon visiting one of Eight O'Clock Coffee's retail partners, customers would come across an in-store display shipper. The display would then direct customers to the brand's Facebook page, where they could view images of other people “flexing their coffee muscles,” Hamel explains. Then, customers would be redirected to the brand's microsite. Once there, consumers were asked to provide their email address and opt in to Eight O'Clock Coffee's email list. After entering in this information, participants could upload their photo and then spin a digital prize wheel for the chance to win free coffee or additional sweepstakes entries. Customers would upload a photo or spin the prize wheel up to once a day for the duration of the campaign, which ran until the end of May.

“It really got people from beginning to end to come back more than once, and that's the one thing that we were really charged with doing,” Hamel says.

Scalera says the campaign's biggest challenge was knowing whether customers would actually participate. The brand's efforts, however, paid off big time. Consumer engagement surpassed company goals by more than 230% and engagement with their target demographic increased by 100%. In addition to that, Eight O'Clock Coffee received more than 195,600 entries from more than 20,500 people—meaning that the average participant entered the sweepstakes approximately nine or 10 times. Plus, the campaign generated more than 11,600 email opt-ins, 314,000 unique microsite visits, and more than 13,500 engaged Facebook users.

In fact, the campaign was such a success that Eight O'Clock Coffee has continued to run campaigns that also have a multichannel approach, such as its current "Whole Lotta Beans Sweepstakes."

Certainly those are results that would make any marketer jump out of bed in the morning.

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Consumers today are too fluid to be tracked by demographic studes, says IAB, which presents the concept at Cannes this week.

All that stuff about socioeconomic and demographic groups, reach and frequency? Well, forget it. That's the central thrust of a report on the “Liquid Audience” that Randall Rothenberg, president and CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, will deliver at Cannes this Wednesday.

“The New Liquid Consumer Paradigm,” co-sponsored by digital video company YuMe, is the result of interviews conducted with 36 senior media and agency executives, all of whom affirm that new territory needs to be explored to reach audiences that constantly migrate across media channels like “tribes of interests.” The technological captaincy and the fluid dynamics of the liquid consumers make old tools useless. “Today, using demos to define and reach audiences is like using a blunt instrument,” said McKinney Chief Digital Officer Jim Russell.

As a result, publishers and agencies have moved from media-first targeting approaches to audience-first, maintains IAB. But liquid audiences are hard to pin down, and they are known to shape-shift. “While consumers like to be part of a community, they ultimately want to be treated as individuals,” said Lincoln Bjorkman, Wunderman's global chief creative officer.

What it comes down to for brands, the report concludes, is storytelling—unfolding a consistent brand story across all channels in episodic fashion. “Our definition of audiences has changed as they are now in the driver's seat with myriad ways to access content," said Brian DiLorenzo, CEO of Ming Utility and Entertainment Group. “Still, it's imperative not to chase them. Everyone comes to their destinations with a different mind-set and expectations that will determine their behavior.”

A good place for marketers to start these days, said R/GA Chief Creative Officer Nick Law, is mobile. “All other screens are an impoverished version of mobile,” he asserted. “A desktop mouse can't pinch or scroll like you'd naturally want to do on a mobile device. Geo-location is limited on other platforms. Mobile provides the richest environment so it makes sense to start there.”

Of course, the report allows, all the storytelling and media migration must be informed by astute data analysis, and KPIs can perhaps be stored away in the closet with demographics reports. “Today we have access to real first-party data that generates accurate insights about people's behavior and interests," commented Barbarian Group CEO Sophie Kelly. “It's not about static KPIs. It's about a measurement and optimization system that helps adjust messaging and experience by device in real time.”

The volume of available data and the technological ability to deal with it all has laid down new rules for agencies. “At one point data and measurement used to be mediated and artificial, whereas today we get closer to the truth, which is at the level of engagement with the media,” said the chief creative officer of a global ad agency who asked not to be identified.

In revealing more about “liquid audiences” at Cannes this Wednesday, IAB's Rothenberg will discuss the concept in a panel discussion with Danielle Lee, VP of commercial marketing at Vevo, and Athan Stephanopoulos, SVP of strategy and partnerships at NowThisNews.

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The remote sales tax bill introduced this week by Rep. Jason Chaffetz would handicap Web retailers and catalogers, says an industry coalition.

The Remote Transactions Parity Act (RTPA) introduced by House Judiciary Committee member Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) this week would stall the growth of e-commerce, favor big box stores over remote sellers, and be costly and complex to boot, according to a coalition of organizations called True Simplification of Taxation, or TruST.

“Chaffetz (above) came out with this ‘new and improved' version of his earlier bill, and it's not any better than the original and probably worse,” says Hamilton Davison, executive director and president of the American Catalog Mailers Association, a coalition member along with the Direct Marketing Association, the Electronic Retailing Association, and NetChoice.

Chaffetz's version 2.0 has “no limit on audits and empowers 48 state tax administrations to audit any business anywhere,” continues Davison. “It requires businesses to track rates and rules in 9,600 taxing jurisdictions. It's like asking a brick-and-mortar store to ask every customer for a driver's license and then taxing her what the rate is where she lives.”

E-commerce and catalog players have been fighting a long and hard battle against being required to remit taxes of purchasers to the individual states in which they reside. They are up against the much stronger lobbying forces of mainstream retail groups like the National Retail Federation, and suffered a blow a few years ago when Amazon changed sides and fell in with the big box coalition. Their efforts led to the passage of the Marketplace Fairness Act by the Senate in 2013.

Legislation on the issue has been stalled in the House, however, where Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) has been circulating a draft of a rewrite of his own bill, one highly favored by remote sellers. While Direct Marketing News has been unable to secure a copy of the draft, sources who have seen it say it adheres to seven principles that guided his earlier effort. Among these are that tax rules should be simple and easy to comply with, and that they should not favor brick-and-mortar retailers over remote sellers. This philosophy aligns with that of TruST, which would prefer to have e-coms and catalogs collect the taxes of their headquarters states and then redistribute all tax revenue to states through a clearing house.

In a statement announcing his bill, Chaffetz's office held that the current taxing system “skews the free market. It allows businesses that employ fewer people and contribute to the economies of fewer states to avoid collecting sales taxes.” RTPA would provide remote sellers with free access to software allowing them to compute out-of-state tax liabilities. But Davison maintains that attendant costs of complaints would choke e-commers and catalogers.

“Saying you get free software is like saying you're getting a free puppy; it comes with a lifetime of costs," Davison says. “[TruST] did a study on the cost of integration and maintenance of these software systems and it amounted to hundreds of thousands of dollars over a five-year period.”

As an example of the type of tax collection it would like to see, TruST points to the International Fuel Tax Agreement forged between the 48 contiguous states and Canada. Commercial vehicles, instead of carrying a dozen license plates and paying fuel taxes in each, have an overall tax account. At the end of each fiscal quarter, each licensee completes a report listing all miles traveled and gallons purchased in which states. The appropriate tax amounts are then remitted to each jurisdiction.

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The tool is built on the Experience Optimization Platform, so users can take advantage of Optimizely's other integrations.

Personalized experiences with news feeds, social networks, and the like have pushed today's consumers to expect—nay, demand—a digital experience geared toward them. To quench consumers' thirst for personalization, A/B testing company Optimizely recently announced the release of Personalization.

Optimizely Personalization aims to help companies personalize their websites and mobile experiences via democratizing personalization duties by ixnaying the technical expertise associated with the chore.

“We built Optimizely Personalization because we saw an opportunity to reinvent an old idea and make it accessible and usable for all,” said Wyatt Jenkins, Optimizely VP Product, in a blog post. “Optimizely launched five years ago with the goal of making it easy for anyone in the world to do A/B testing and turn data into action. Personalization is the next step on this journey.”

In addition to tailored content, Optimizely Personalization aims to let users:

• Discover meaningful audiences among visitors to generate hypotheses for personalization.
• Target visitors in real time based on their actions on the site and their information.
• Create compelling experiences tailored to the Web and mobile audiences.
• Measure the impact of the changes made for each audience.

The tool is built on the Experience Optimization Platform, so users can take advantage of Optimizely's other integrations.

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That was the philosophical dilemma presented to marketers attending the CMO panel at Salesforce Connections.

At the CMO Panel on the big stage at Salesforce Connections yesterday, the CRM giant's own chief marketer, Lynn Vojvodich, asked panelists to describe the current state of marketing in one word. Katie Bisbee of DonorsChoose.org answered, “personalization.” John Osborn—actually the president and CEO of BBDO New York—said “tempest.” Gary Briggs of Facebook thought for a second and said, “Yes,” agreeing with Osborn.

It was surprising that no one answered “celebrity.” Regardless of the fact that Salesforce has managed to make customer management cool, packing thousands into New York's Javits Center to hear email techie and Marketing Cloud CEO Scott McCorkle hold forth, the CMOs had just been eyewitnesses to the raw, unabashed power of celebrity. Their session had been preceded by an interview of Diane Von Furstenberg by Late Night host Seth Meyers, who had digital marketers crammed shoulder-to-shoulder inside the exhibit hall-cum-arena. But a third of that crowd walked out along with the fashion designer and the TV star, leaving the insights of some of the world's most influential marketers bouncing off scores of empty seats.

Those who departed missed a bevy of keen insights from the panel, not the least of which was the lack of pretention and hubris that apparently continues to guide their efforts. Indeed, asked by Vojvodich to name the chief characteristic of a good CMO, Osborn came back with “humility.”

Osborn's shop is jam-packed with blue chip clients like ExxonMobil, General Electric, Johnson & Johnson, and PepsiCo, yet Osborn says his focus is constantly working these relationships. “Relationships,” he said, “are the currency of the business I'm in. You've heard of six degrees of Kevin Bacon? For us now it's more like six degrees of anticipation. There are managers, middle and junior level executives, we never used to track. Now we have to anticipate where they're going. It's absolutely critical, given the pace of change, to really get to know these men and women.”

Asked by Vojvodich for tips on how marketers could better use Facebook, Briggs came out slightly at odds with a theme set down earlier by McCorkle in his keynote address—that the old ways of customer segmentation were on the way out. “If you're using Custom Audiences, you really want to understand the target you want to reach,” he replied. “In a lot of ways, marketing's going back to the original fundamentals—really great stories, really great structure. But it's also the ability to understand the targeting. It's incredible the amount of customers who just skip past the target. With our product, we really want you to start at the start. Whom do you want to reach and why do you think it's important that they be reached?”

When the discussion got around to emerging channels, Bisbee verified what numerous studies keep propounding—that email has yet to reach the pinnacle of its marketing power. “Email for us is the biggest channel for driving donations. This year it represents about 50% of revenue. Social, by comparison, is about 10%,” she said. “Email allows us to tell a story. Email allows us to personalize our ask. Email templates allow other people to ask on our behalf. Email is incredibly scalable. Email works.”

Briggs shared an interesting take on his leadership role as the chief marketer of the world's largest social network. Eight years ago, well before he joined the company, he met Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and had a conversation with him about the company's own face in the world. “My key job is to turn skeptics into advocates. The idea then was how quickly he was going to innovate the product. But I think, for a long time, he was skeptical about communicating the company. Now we recognize the role we play in the world and that we have to be out communicating in a way that's true to Mark and true to the trajectory of the company.”

When Vojvodich turned to the old agency pro for his pronouncement on creativity in a digital world, Osborn turned it back around to the subject of leadership. “Creativity is nothing unless it serves a greater purpose on behalf of the clients we're honored enough to serve. That can't be underscored enough,” Osborn said. “In all the purpose-based work we've done, that service-based acumen has taken hold with us. Name any one of our clients and I can give you, in a sentence, how they serve their customers, or the greater community, or society. I can do it across the board. And I think that has had an economic multiplier effect on our business.”

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Kelly Cook moves over from DSW, where she championed digital and omnichannel strategies.

Kelly Cook

Kmart has named Kelly Cook to take over the role vacated by Andrew Stein, who left in 2013 to lead marketing at Big Lots, according to a report in Advertising Age. She joins the Sears Holdings unit from a similar position at DSW.

Cook will be responsible for brand innovation and revitalization, multi-functional marketing strategy and planning, and Kmart's omnichannel presence. Under her purview will fall customer experience, integrated marketing, digital media, creative, research, content, loyalty, and Shop Your Way.

Strong in IT experience, Cook originally joined DSW in 2009 to guide database analytics, CRM, and digital media. In 2014 she was named the shoe retailer's EVP and CMO and given overall responsibility for marketing, including  digital footprint, blogger strategies, advanced analytics, SEO, statistical modeling, mobile/apps, and social media.

Cook names digital and omnichannel transformation and CRM among her strong points on her LinkedIn profile.

The bulk of the 234 stores closed by Sears last year were Kmart locations. The chain's comp sales declined by 7% in the last quarter.

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