e marketer advertising_in_the_moment-real-time_strategies_for_paid_social_media

ADVERTISING IN THE MOMENTReal-Time Strategies for Paid Social Media

JUNE 2013

Debra Aho Williamson

Contributors: Christine Bittar, Tracy Tang

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ADVERTISING IN THE MOMENT: REAL-TIME STRATEGIES FOR PAID SOCIAL MEDIA ©2013 EMARKETER INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 2

CONTENTS2 Executive Summary

3 Paid Advertising Plays a Critical Role in the Real-Time Marketing Process

3 The Challenges of Making Ad Decisions Quickly

6 New Ad Products Make Real-Time Advertising Easier

9 Strategies for Marketers

13 Can Programmatic Buying Play a Role?

16 eMarketer Interviews

17 Related eMarketer Reports

17 Related Links

17 Editorial and Production Contributors

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Marketers are devoting more time and energy

to monitoring real-time conversations in social

media and then rapidly developing creative to take

advantage of those discussions. But to be truly

effective in real-time marketing also means moving

more quickly with paid advertising.

Marketers and their agencies face multiple challenges in this regard, including organizational silos and legacy ways of doing business. However, new capabilities from social media companies and ad technology firms will make it easier for advertisers to be more opportunistic, whether they want to quickly boost organic content with paid ads, reach social media users during the purchasing process or deploy ads to coincide with real-time discussions and trending topics.

Simultaneously, programmatic buying techniques, which have primarily been used for placing display advertising, are making inroads into social media and could offer additional opportunities for reaching consumers in the moment.

KEY QUESTIONS ■ What is the role of paid advertising in real-time

marketing efforts?

■ What can marketers and agencies do to overcome

the organizational challenges associated with

deploying advertising more rapidly?

■ How are social media companies and ad technology

firms making it easier for marketers to buy ads “in

the moment”?

■ Is there a role for programmatic buying technology

to help improve these processes?

% of respondents

Companies Worldwide that Are DeliveringPersonalized Messages in Real Time, by Channel andPerformance Level, 2013

Website85%

67%

Customer service/call center85%

63%

Face-to-face (e.g., in-store, branch)76%

62%

Social media (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, blogs, review sites)71%

50%

Mobile channels (e.g., SMS, mobile email/web sites, apps)62%

43%

Kiosk/ATM43%

23%

Leaders* Other

Note: respondents who know what their company is doing in these areas;*top 20% based on adoption of cross-channel optimization technologiesand ownership of the customer experienceSource: IBM, "The State of Marketing 2013," May 21, 2013157868 www.eMarketer.com


PAID ADVERTISING PLAYS A CRITICAL ROLE IN THE REAL-TIME MARKETING PROCESS

Being successful in real-time marketing means

aligning three marketing functions: insights, content

creation and paid media.

eMarketer’s February 2013 report, “Meeting the Need for Speed: How Social Analytics are Evolving to Support Real-Time Marketing”, showed how marketers are using social media monitoring to gain insights more quickly and support their real-time marketing activities. Our May 2013 report, “Real-Time Marketing: Speeding Up the Creative Process”, discussed what changes marketers and agencies are making in the creative process so they can more rapidly develop content and advertising, particularly for social media.

This report discusses the third marketing function: paid media. It plays a critical role in the success or failure of real-time marketing efforts. Just as a brand cannot post a video to YouTube and expect it to “go viral” without marketing support, real-time marketing is less successful if marketers can’t align their rapid-fire content-creation efforts with equally rapid-fire advertising.

“When I think of real-time marketing or real-time advertising, it’s three things: listening, creating based on what you’re hearing and then knowing what to support and surround with paid media,” said Dave Marsey, executive vice president and managing director at Digitas. “Just like you have to break the mindset and the organizational structure” for creative development, he said, “the same is true of media. You need to have the ability to make decisions on a daily basis for what you want to support.”

In these early days of understanding what real-time marketing is and how to execute it, that is a challenge. In the same way that real-time marketing has started to reveal the organizational issues that slow down the advertising creative process, it will also expose inefficiencies in the way media is bought and sold.

Reacting and responding in real time will require the formation of new structures that will bring insights, creative and paid media fully in sync with one another.

THE CHALLENGES OF MAKING AD DECISIONS QUICKLY

The legacy structures of the media business and the

traditional ways marketers allocate ad dollars are

two of the biggest roadblocks to supporting real-time

marketing with paid advertising.

Consider the upfront, which is the annual rite of spring in which the TV networks tout their fall series and cajole marketers and agencies into committing billions of ad dollars months in advance.

The upfront process started decades ago, when there were far fewer programs on TV but with far more substantial audiences. The new reality marketers now face is the mobile, always-addressable consumer, whose attention is scattered and whose (multiple) screens are flooded with irrelevant marketing messages.

In an environment like this, the idea of pledging large sums of money in advance, rather than making decisions on the fly, seems antiquated at best, and antithetical to success at worst.

In an effort to draw attention to the situation, Networked Insights, a social media measurement company specializing in providing real-time insights, hired an advertising truck to drive past the venues where the upfront events were being held in New York. The truck featured a digital billboard with messages such as, “You wouldn’t bet on the NBA Finals in September. Why buy TV in May?”

Networked Insights and others believe that social data can help inform media purchase decisions—and that advertisers should make those decisions closer to the moment, not months in advance. That philosophy is one reason Twitter this year acquired Bluefin Labs, a social TV measurement firm.

As of mid-June 2013, upfront negotiations were still going on, but total commitments for broadcast TV were projected to be lower than last year’s $9.2 billion. Industry watchers attributed the potential shortfall to lower ratings for certain TV shows, budgets shifting toward digital and continued concerns about the economy.

http://totalaccess.emarketer.com/Reports/Viewer.aspx?R=2001058






The upfront process will probably never go away completely, but the macro trend is toward a future where paid advertising decisions will be more aligned with real-time data analysis and rapid creative execution. The transition won’t be easy; the ad business will have to break away from its longstanding routines.

Marketers need to move past old ways of doing business. In the typical media buying process, “you’d get a brief about an idea. Then you’d develop a media plan, and you would present that plan to your client, and they’d get approval, and then you would go live with that. And that would take a few weeks,” said Ryan Cavanaugh, vice president and media director at Digitas.

Frustration with this approach is mounting. In meetings with other agencies, David Armano, managing director of Edelman Digital, said the slowness of the media process had come up often.

“By the time it takes to actually get briefed—which in some cases can be months—and then work on a program and then go ahead and develop the media plan, things have changed so much that there are missed opportunities to do things that are more responsive in nature,” Armano said. “There’s this general frustration on that standpoint, and also a feeling of not really being equipped to handle those opportunities.”

Marketers acknowledge that they need to move faster, but data from surveys shows that their words aren’t necessarily matched by their actions.

A study from Forrester Consulting and Marin Software, while not focused directly on real-time marketing, sheds some light on this topic. It shows that very few marketers in December 2012 were trying to make changes in their advertising activities on a daily basis, which was the shortest timeframe that was asked about in this particular study.

Only 13% of respondents said they performed real-time recalculations of their advertising bids on a daily basis, while 11% practiced dayparting daily. Fewer than one in 10 said they did daily updates of ad copy to reflect changes in their inventory.

% of respondents

Methods Used by Marketers in North America toManage Their Online Ad Programs, by Frequency, Dec 2012

Recalculate bids in real-time based on competitiveor seasonal shifts

Vary bids by time of dayor day of week (e.g.,dayparting)

Identify profitable newkeywords, placements,or audiences

Update ad copydynamically based onchanges in inventory

Manage match types ornegatives to increaserelevance

Apply multivariate tests toad copy or landing pages

Forecast bid scenarios todo what-if analysis

Optimize bids for "long-tail"ads based on limitedhistorical data

Optimize bids to latent/offline conversions orcustomer lifetime value

Adjust campaign structureto improve quality score

Optimize across multipletouch points in theconversion funnel

Daily

13%

11%

10%

9%

6%

3%

3%

2%

2%

1%

1%

Weekly

26%

22%

31%

28%

31%

22%

8%

14%

9%

20%

18%

Monthly

20%

24%

31%

24%

30%

29%

23%

32%

19%

30%

33%

Quarterly

25%

14%

26%

16%

22%

28%

30%

25%

37%

34%

27%

Never

16%

29%

3%

23%

12%

18%

37%

27%

34%

15%

21%

Note: n=104; numbers may not add up to 100% due to roundingSource: Forrester Consulting, "Revenue Outcomes Matter to OnlineAdvertisers" commissioned by Marin Software, Jan 22, 2013150738 www.eMarketer.com

While the good news is that most respondents were performing these activities at least quarterly, once every 90 days is a far cry from once a day.

The problem isn’t a lack of technology. Reducing the amount of time it takes to plan, buy and traffic paid media advertising isn’t a new goal. The advertising business has plenty of tools and technologies at its disposal to analyze media, make decisions and deliver ads to media outlets. But real-time marketing makes it obvious that technology alone won’t be enough; advertisers and agencies also need to change other processes to make the most of the technology.


“If I spot an opportunity and I have the appropriate assets, I can get out to the buying team and say, ‘I want this media, targeting these people.’ I’m pretty sure I can get that in a few hours, if not minutes,” said Dan Plant, group strategy director and real-time planning director at media buying agency MEC. “The difficulty is being preprepared. I have to have an advertising asset that I can deliver. I have to have client approval in advance to go out and do something. I need that flexibility and leeway to spend that budget as I see appropriate without necessarily getting sign-off all the way up the chain.”

According to a survey from IBM, many companies believe they already have the ability to coordinate or automate their decision-making processes for various forms of marketing. Among businesses worldwide that IBM defined as leaders in 2013, 79% claimed they could do so for online display advertising, compared with 62% of other businesses. When it came to social media, 70% of leading businesses claimed they were capable, compared with 58% of other companies.

% of respondents

Companies Worldwide that Have the Ability toCoordinate/Automate Decision-Making Processes, byChannel and Performance Level, 2013

Online display79%

62%

Social media70%

58%

Online video67%

44%

Mobile apps63%

40%

Mobile display58%

36%

Leaders* (n=102) Other (n=410)

Note: *top 20% based on adoption of cross-channel optimizationtechnologies and ownership of the customer experienceSource: IBM, "The State of Marketing 2013," May 21, 2013157870 www.eMarketer.com

However, another study indicates that marketers have been slow to adopt certain social media advertising techniques that require some sort of automation.

In the Q1 2013 survey by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Kenshoo Social, 60% of US social ad professionals said they used multiple variations of creative in their social media advertising, 35% tried to target small or specific audiences and 23% tried to automate their bidding process. Assembling creative dynamically, such as by pulling from image and copy libraries, was done by just 20% of respondents.

% of respondents

Strategies Used by US Social AdvertisingProfessionals When Buying Ads or Paying to PromoteContent on Social Media, Q1 2013

We rotate through multiple creatives (e.g., images, copy)60%

We target many small, specific audiences35%

We use A/B testing to determine the best targeting or creativefor our ads

35%

We use automated bid management tools23%

We use a tool to create new combinations of creative (e.g.,pulling from image and copy libraries)

20%

Note: n=105 whose companies spend more than $100,000 per year onsocial media advertisingSource: Forrester Consulting, "The Key to Successful Social Advertising"sponsored by Kenshoo Social, May 14, 2013157179 www.eMarketer.com

“We’re coming from a world where we used to think in calendar years. We used to think in quarters, and we used to think in campaigns,” said Jason Kapler, director of marketing at Networked Insights. “Now we live in this always-on, real-time world, and the processes that we have to make decisions or to support decision-making just don’t fit.”

Media and creative teams must come closer together. Some marketers are identifying ways to mesh their creative teams with the departments that control ad dollars. However, this remains a key challenge for many, one that is amplified by the demands of real-time marketing.

“We do have quite a few clients who have a social media person or team that’s separate from the paid media team,” said Chris Bowler, group vice president for social media at digital agency Razorfish. “Organizationally it’s problematic, because we go to them with a paid opportunity in real time and our social media client says, ‘Well, you’d have to go to the media team to get budget approval for that. Let’s just focus on the organic content.’”


Within agencies, the pressure to connect functions is heightened when rapid response is necessary. “Creative, media and PR—we’re all very used to working close to one another, depending on the client,” said Lindsay Lichtenberg, vice president of publishing platforms and partnerships at Starcom MediaVest Group. “But breaking out of these respective silos to ensure that the opportunity is capitalized on at the right moment with the right message and the right support to scale requires even closer collaboration between all of those teams.”

The planning and buying cycle needs to adapt to the realities of real-time marketing. As the TV upfronts demonstrate every year, major marketers are still committed to planning media expenditures months in advance. And in many cases, those ad dollars support an advertiser’s own initiatives—a new product, a new branding campaign, a celebrity endorsement—rather than attempting to tie into what is going on in their customers’ lives at the moment.

“Traditionally, media has supported the business goals and priorities of brands that have been planned over the course of several months,” Digitas’ Cavanaugh said. “There are very few companies that can change or tweak their goals or business priorities or change how they’re communicating those priorities at the pace of the market. If Bank of America spends 12 months to develop a credit card product, and the week that it launches, the marketplace is talking about some other theme, it’s hard for them just to do a quick 180” and change their communication plan, he said.

This is not to say that brands should abandon their long-term planning activities. They can still keep an eye on the future while operating closer to the present. That will give them more success at recognizing and activating opportunities that appear on the fly.

Social media properties and ad technology vendors are increasingly offering ad products to do just that.

NEW AD PRODUCTS MAKE REAL-TIME ADVERTISING EASIER

Although real-time marketing will affect a broad

range of marketing activities, much of the current

attention has been focused on real time within

social environments. As a result, the social media

properties and the vendors that work with social

media advertisers are among the first to start offering

capabilities to make advertising in real time easier.

Twitter has added ad products that allow advertisers to quickly match up their ads with events and conversations, and also to deliver ads triggered by keywords. In addition, several ad technology companies have developed new tools aimed at quickening the pace of social media advertising. Facebook has taken a slower approach, allowing advertising vendors to develop their own tools on top of Facebook’s ads application programming interface (API).

TWITTER Twitter has taken an aggressive stance on real-time marketing, positioning itself as a go-to place for marketers who want to reach their audiences “in the moment.” It has launched ad products and created partnerships that bring that positioning to the forefront.

“Marketing on Twitter is really about winning the moment,” said Adam Bain, Twitter’s president of global revenue, at an April 2013 event sponsored by Salesforce.com.

Keyword Targeting in the Timeline, an extension of Twitter’s targeting capabilities for Promoted Tweets, gives advertisers the ability to select specific keyword triggers and then insert a Promoted Tweet in the timeline of a user who mentions that keyword.

For example, if someone tweeted about their favorite band’s album, and the band was scheduled to play a concert at a local venue, the venue could deliver an ad about the concert in that person’s timeline shortly after the user sent the tweet.


The ads operate somewhat akin to search, in which advertisers bid on certain keywords that trigger ads. The difference is that the ad appears directly within someone’s timeline, not off to the side or sequestered at the top. In addition, the real-time nature of the delivery, in response to something someone posted, gives a feeling of “serendipity,” said Kevin Weil, senior director of product for the revenue group at Twitter.

Twitter is also partnering with TV networks, including The Weather Channel, ESPN and Fox Broadcasting Company, to push real-time video and other fresh content into the Twitter service. Twitter and the networks will jointly sell ad placements adjacent to the video.

For example, ESPN could take a key moment from a live sports event and push the video to Twitter within moments, linking in an advertiser in the process. Likewise, The Weather Channel could push breaking weather news to Twitter, enabling users to watch ad-supported video clips from within the platform.

In a related development, Twitter is also using technology from Bluefin Labs to let advertisers deliver Promoted Tweets to people who may have seen ads from the same marketer on TV. If someone watches a show and tweets about it, that person might subsequently see an ad on Twitter from an advertiser that also ran a spot in the show.

FACEBOOK Facebook has taken a slower approach toward offering ad products to boost real-time marketing, focusing instead on ad formats that allow advertisers to bring in third-party data to more finely target their audience. However, several ad technology companies have built services on top of Facebook’s ads API, with the goal of helping marketers spot opportunities to buy ads promoting the organic content they post on Facebook.

In 2011, Facebook conducted a brief test of delivering ads based on the content of people’s status updates. If a person posted that they were interested in going to Paris, they may have seen an ad for a travel service offering deals on Paris hotels. That test was ended shortly afterward, and Facebook hasn’t revisited the concept.

“It’s not something that we explicitly offer today,” said Daniel Slotwiner, head of the agency and Preferred Marketing Developer (PMD) measurement team at Facebook. “We want to focus on things that are scalable for brands, and anything that’s that micro is likely not going to reach enough people to really matter to most brands.”

A more recent development, the ability to add hashtags to posts, is something that has the potential to scale as an advertising vehicle. For example, a marketer could target ads to people who used a specific hashtag, or deliver messages themed to a current event that people are discussing, similar to techniques already used on Twitter.

However, Facebook has not yet announced ad products tied to hashtags. It first wants to understand the impact of real-time marketing before launching ad products that support it, Slotwiner said. “There are a lot of people who are pushing aggressively for jumping in and running some of these programs, without necessarily knowing empirically that it’s going to actually be positive for brands,” he said. “We’re trying to make sure we’re actually doing our research and coming away with learnings as to whether it was impactful, and if so, how, and how can it be reproduced and scaled.”

Another concern: advertisers risk damaging their brand from acting too quickly with incomplete information. “In order to respond in scale to those kinds of opportunities, you need to have a lot of faith in your algorithms to identify the right opportunities and generate the right message,” Slotwiner said. “I think we’re quite a long ways away from that.”

In the meantime, Facebook has let some of the partner companies that are part of the Preferred Marketing Developer program lead the way with advertising products that support real-time marketing.

“There are several PMDs who are working on understanding within minutes of posting something whether or not it should be boosted and distributed,” Slotwiner said. “Full disclosure, I think that the PMDs are doing much more around this than we have to date, but we’re becoming increasingly interested in looking at that.”


AD TECHNOLOGY COMPANIES AND AGENCIES Marketers that want to quickly decide which page posts or tweets they want to support with advertising can work with a growing number of options. Here is a sampling of recent developments:

Salesforce.com’s Social.com: Salesforce, an advertising partner of both Facebook and Twitter, in April 2013 launched an extension of its Salesforce Marketing Cloud service, dubbed Social.com. Social.com provides tools to help advertisers promote social media content via paid ads.

In marketing materials associated with the service’s launch, Michael Lazerow, CMO of Salesforce Marketing Cloud, said Social.com—in conjunction with Salesforce’s other social products, Radian6 and Buddy Media—and its customer relationship management product would help marketers “connect social advertising with their customer data and real-time trends to maximize return from their advertising dollars.”

In practice, the platform would give advertisers access to real-time insights about conversations related to their brands, as well as the ability to use in real-time CRM data such as customer purchase history, loyalty data and response to previous marketing efforts. They could then deliver ads using Salesforce’s other ad products.

“This kind of advertising opportunity—word-of-mouth at scale, being very timely—is new,” said Peter Goodman, vice president of Social.com. Social.com helps marketers “operate at speeds they previously thought weren’t possible.”

TBG Digital’s ONE Media Manager: TBG, a partner to both Facebook and Twitter, includes real-time features in its ONE Media Manager product. These help marketers respond to real-world events and to user actions.

For UK online betting website Coral, “we doubled engagement rates by synchronizing tweets with sports events,” said Simon Mansell, CEO of TBG. “Latest-odds tweets were also synced with in-game events, like half-time.” TBG also offers analytical features that ride on top of Twitter’s Keyword Targeting in the Timeline, enabling advertisers to build a database of intent-based keywords and compare the results across multiple campaigns.

SocialFlow’s Crescendo: Social media marketing company SocialFlow introduced a paid ad management product in fall 2012 to help clients decide when to bump up or down their media spending on social platforms. The product, Crescendo, works in tandem with the company’s separate social media publishing platform to help marketers find, in real time, people who are having conversations that relate to brands, or who have similar characteristics to people who are talking about those brands. It then delivers ad messages targeted to them. Marketers can also use it to analyze the best time to reach an audience.

“Many brands are recognizing that there is a strong correlation between their earned efforts and their advertising campaign, and they want to be able to control that from one platform,” said Missy Godfrey, CEO of SocialFlow.

SHIFT Media Manager: The company, formerly known as GraphEffect, offers an application that helps marketers quickly find instances where people have shared a brand’s Facebook post or tweeted something positive about a brand. It then suggests an ad format that can be quickly approved and uploaded. “Social moves so fast that you have to be able to coordinate in real time, or you will essentially miss the boat again and again,” said SHIFT co-founder and CEO James Borow in a June 2013 article in Adweek. “It’s a powerful thing to know that a post or tweet is doing well and that you need to put some money behind it,” he said.

In the agency world, efforts are also underway to bring resources together to support faster media decisions.

In fall 2012, Starcom formed a unit called Link.d3 to bring together what it calls the three d’s: discover, design and distribute. “We are discovering consumer insights: what’s being shared online or talked about. We are taking those insights and designing content around those observations, and we’re distributing it across paid, owned and earned channels,” Starcom’s Lichtenberg said.

The unit, which services more than 10 clients including Procter & Gamble and Kraft, focuses on developing what it calls “agile” paid media initiatives.

“Paid [media] is the one of the critical pieces” that the unit offers, Lichtenberg said. Clients use Link.d3 to learn what people are saying, develop creative and then distribute it in digital media.


Digitas, meanwhile, includes members of its media team in working groups that operate under the BrandLIVE umbrella—Digitas’s real-time marketing unit.

These companies, as well as other players in the social media and ad technology space, recognize that closely linking analytics, creative and media will give advertisers an advantage when it comes to real-time marketing.

STRATEGIES FOR MARKETERS

There is no question that these are early days for

determining the best way to use real-time marketing.

Before advertisers can effectively use paid media

to support real-time creative, they need to create

seamless alignment between their creative and

media teams.

“It’s definitely a process of getting our clients used to it,” said Kevin Lang, senior vice president of paid social media at Starcom. “We’ve had some that have been very receptive, but I think it’s going to be a gradual process, where we see our clients become more and more comfortable with it over time.”

In a 2013 study, IBM asserted that the ability to adapt to real-time marketing is a critical differentiator between leading marketers and other marketers.

Leading marketers, IBM said, were 2.6 times more likely to be able to adjust real-time marketing offers based on customer context, and 5.6 times more likely to use optimization technology across all marketing channels. When it comes to media spending, these leading marketers were 2.2 times more likely to apply advanced analytics to determine media spend.

Moreover, leading marketers were more likely to deliver personalized messages in real time in social media, with 71% doing so, compared to 50% of other marketers.


% of respondents

Companies Worldwide that Are DeliveringPersonalized Messages in Real Time, by Channel andPerformance Level, 2013

Website85%

67%

Customer service/call center85%

63%

Face-to-face (e.g., in-store, branch)76%

62%

Social media (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, blogs, review sites)71%

50%

Mobile channels (e.g., SMS, mobile email/web sites, apps)62%

43%

Kiosk/ATM43%

23%

Leaders* Other

Note: respondents who know what their company is doing in these areas;*top 20% based on adoption of cross-channel optimization technologiesand ownership of the customer experienceSource: IBM, "The State of Marketing 2013," May 21, 2013157868 www.eMarketer.com

eMarketer’s interviews with agencies, advertisers and ad technology executives provide a set of guiding principles that marketers can use as they test ways to support real-time marketing efforts with paid advertising.

Bring a real-time mentality to all advertising planning. The most forward-thinking agencies and advertisers recognize that the trend toward real-time marketing is not exclusively a social media trend, and that it impacts buying across media.

“It’s really about the buying process overall,” Starcom’s Lichtenberg said. “It could be in social. It could be in regular paid display. It could be on TV or during events.”

This broad purview is part of why the MEC media agency gave Plant, a London-based executive, responsibility for real-time planning. Rather than strictly focusing on real-time social media, MEC’s goal is to create “a broader planning approach that builds real-time thinking” into the media plan, Plant said. “We’re interested in taking insights from social media and applying that to a more wide-reaching media buy, in real time.”

Plan to be opportunistic. Marketers that are fully embracing real-time marketing are relaxing their rigid focus on making all media decisions in advance.

“I think about it as, what’s planned vs. what’s opportunistic?” Razorfish’s Bowler said. Ad spending for opportunistic moments “needs to be a pretty hefty percent [of the total budget].” Marketers can start to determine the right amount by considering how ready they are to adapt their strategies. “The more ready they are, the more they have teams that are real time and can take advantage of it, the more budget should be opportunistic,” Bowler said.

Unlike with real-time creative, where something that is planned in advance risks seeming canned, there are elements of a media strategy that can be set up in advance, and then tweaked in real time.

“The way we make it as nimble as possible is we set up the buys ahead of time,” Digitas’ Cavanaugh said. “So we allocate budget, we get approval with the client on the types of things we want to do and the platforms we want to be on. We make the real-time decision on which posts we want to promote as an ad, and then we quickly tweak the targeting.”

Edelman’s Armano also used the word “nimble” to describe how clients are approaching media-buying in real time. “Being nimble in your media-buying process, so that when content is performing well, you can spend money in a very targeted fashion as it’s gaining momentum—that machine doesn’t exist yet,” he said. “That’s the machine that a lot of our clients are trying to figure out how to build.”

An always-on budget is necessary when it comes to real-time content marketing. In years past, advertisers may have set aside budget to promote their fan page, or to build awareness of a social media promotion, contest or app. Now, however, promoting the content that marketers create is a necessity. And that needs to be a real-time endeavor. According to social media analytics platform Socialbakers, nearly half of engagement with a Facebook post happens within the first 30 minutes after posting.

Embracing the idea of an always-on budget requires marketers to have confidence that their agency will make good choices when it comes to ad spending. Since real time is by definition unplanned, marketers have to gain comfort with the idea of not always knowing exactly when their ads will be running.


“In the last 6 months, we’ve accelerated this notion of paying to promote our content,” said Dan Skinner, public relations and social media manager at ConAgra Foods. “We’ve got certain dollars allocated towards opportunistic support. It’s something you’ll see more of moving forward.”

ConAgra’s Slim Jim brand tied in to the NCAA March Madness basketball tournament by using Facebook to post images of the brand’s individual meat sticks arranged in basketball-related themes, such as a basketball tournament bracket or a basketball court. When the court image started to gain viral traction within 2 hours of being posted, ConAgra bought opportunistic paid advertising to extend the reach. The post ended up becoming one of the most successful Slim Jim posts to date, with 8,787 total interactions on Facebook and a virality rate of 2.09%, representing the percentage of people who took action on a post (such as sharing or “liking” it) after seeing it in their newsfeed, according to data provided by Edelman.

Other images that were supported with planned media expenditures did not fare as well, with fewer interactions and lower virality.

ConAgra is starting to see the benefit of the opportunistic approach. “When we’re seeing something getting more ‘likes’ and getting more comments than what we’ve normally seen, that’s an opportunity for us to say, ‘You know what? This is something we should put some more [ad] dollars behind, because people are responding to it,’” Skinner said.

Having that flexibility is key to the success of real-time marketing. Shelby Saville, executive vice president at Spark SMG, recounted an experience with one client during this year’s Academy Awards telecast: “We had some things that were trending really heavily and we needed incremental money,” she said. “We were able to get approval on that immediately. If not, halfway through the show we would have had to shut down the campaign, which essentially would negate what you were trying to do with real time, which is to take advantage of a point in time where consumers are engaged.”

“A great real-time moment is probably not going to occur within a specific flight of a campaign,” Starcom’s Lang said. “You’ve got to be ready for that moment to happen at any time, and that requires an always-on budget.”

Put media and creative in the same room—literally. Digitas operates BrandLIVE real-time newsrooms within several of the agency’s offices. Frequently during creative planning meetings, members of the media team also participate. “Oftentimes an email is sent or a request is made to a media partner in that very room,” Digitas’ Marsey said. “Or the recommendation is made to the client to get their approval to do so.”

Digitas has assigned teams to what it calls “stock” advertising (longer-term, more evergreen marketing) and “flow” initiatives (the real-time activations). While media and creative may be fine to work separately to develop plans for “stock” advertising, closer collaboration is essential for more-rapid executions.

For companies that work with separate media buying and creative or social media agencies, it’s still advisable to create lines of communication and set expectations. ConAgra uses Spark SMG to handle media buying for Slim Jim, and Edelman Digital for social media content. Spark SMG “knows that when something’s going well in the social space that they can expect a call from the Edelman team to say, ‘Hey, we want to put some more [advertising] behind it,’” Skinner said. “They’ve got the folks in place to pull the trigger.”

Test various combinations of activity thresholds and media budget. Knowing when to spend media dollars is not an exact science. Marketers and agencies interviewed for this report recommended testing different levels of media spend in combination with different thresholds of activity. For example, one test might look at the impact of spending less and waiting for a higher virality level to be reached vs. spending more at a lower virality level.

“We’ll proactively go to the brands and to the current media buying agency of record and ask for a small piece of the pie,” said Libby Pigg, senior vice president and director of converged media services at Edelman. “That way, we can build a little bit of trust so we can do this more and more in the future with those culturally relevant opportunities.”

Once Edelman gets approval, it will evaluate how a post performs before media dollars are spent, and how that performance compares to previous posts. All of this analysis takes place very quickly. “When the engagement rate hits a certain level, we apply the media dollars against it,” Pigg said.


Align advertising with trends, but use caution. Marketers can use Twitter to quickly latch onto topics that are trending or conversations that relate to one of their brands. Twitter has helped make this process easier, said Amanda Peters, head of social media in the US at iCrossing.

“Until recently, you had to have a $25,000 minimum spend to do any sort of feed advertising on Twitter, but now that they’ve opened it up, it is much easier for marketers to do paid advertising in real time,” Peters said. “Before, when you had to have an insertion order and you had to have a pretty large minimum spend, we were supporting real-time events but we weren’t really making those buying decisions as much in real time.”

However, there is a caveat: Sometimes, following a trending topic isn’t fast enough. “It’s not good enough to look at what’s trending right now, because by the time you’ve figured out a really smart reaction it’s nearly always too late,” MEC’s Plant said. He recommends that brands focus on “channeling people toward your assets and toward your existing content rather than trying to create something new because people happen to be talking about, I don’t know, the weather that day.”

Use ad formats that can be planned in advance and then deployed in real time. There are many ways marketers can do real-time advertising, and not all of them require rapid execution on the media side. Ad products such as Twitter’s Keyword Targeting in the Timeline allow advertisers to plan keywords and bids ahead of time and then let the technology trigger when an ad is delivered.

Agency iCrossing and its clients Jim Beam and Maker’s Mark used this strategy during this year’s Kentucky Derby, buying keywords such as “mint julep” and “Derby” as well as the names of the horses in the race. If someone happened to tweet the words “mint julep,” for example, Maker’s Mark would then send a reply tweet that included a link to a mint julep recipe on the brand’s website.

“That’s one way that we were able to pretend like we were acting in real time, but we had a little bit of proactive advance creativity around it,” said Brendan Thomas, account director at iCrossing.

It will be critical to pick keywords and targeting wisely. In the case of Jim Beam and Maker’s Mark, an ad delivered to a user younger than 21 who happened to tweet about mint juleps would have been disastrous. Other advertisers risk misinterpreting the context, for example, by sending a car ad to someone who had just complained about that car’s performance.

Be prepared for shifts in conversations. Even as advertisers engage in real-time ad delivery, they must continue to monitor a variety of factors, including the ways that tones or attitudes shift over time. Consider the example of a major sports celebrity whose team just won a big game. A sporting goods company that sponsors the athlete might try to push out real-time ads related to the big win. But if, say, there was a controversial call that led to the win, and people started debating the call, then that advertiser might not want to be associated with those conversations.

“You come at it with, well, this is what we think the keywords are that we’re going to want to amplify and put social media advertising behind, but then you get in the moment and you find out that that’s not exactly what people are talking about or that people are talking about it differently,” Razorfish’s Bowler said.

To help analyze such shifts, Razorfish uses a dashboard with data visualization capabilities to see real-time topics and keywords that are associated with a client’s brand. Razorfish staffers use the dashboard in conjunction with a bid management tool to switch ad buys on and off depending on the keywords.

“We can extend the budget by not wasting money and not blowing through some of the keyword budgets that we have assigned to a specific event,” Bowler said. “We can stay on pulse of what people are talking about and amplify what is best to be amplified for the brand.”

But no one interviewed by eMarketer said this sort of advertising was easy. In fact, most acknowledged that the ad industry is only now starting to truly assess the impact of what it means to market in real time. Creating structures that align creative and paid advertising will make it easier to execute and make the most of real-time marketing.


CAN PROGRAMMATIC BUYING PLAY A ROLE?

Over time, programmatic buying techniques may

help marketers make more-rapid media spending

decisions to support real-time marketing. Although

programmatic buying—sometimes called real-time

buying—is typically thought of as a mechanism

for placing display ads, there are aspects of the

technology that can be leveraged for broader

real-time marketing initiatives.

Executives interviewed by eMarketer agreed that exchanges, trading desks and real-time bidding—all elements of programmatic buying—have added efficiency and speed to the media buying process, but there is no consensus on the role those things can play in real-time marketing.

It will be important to watch how the various players in programmatic buying and social media intersect over time, because all parties have a stake in the game.

HOW PROGRAMMATIC COULD BOOST REAL-TIME MARKETING Two scenarios could link programmatic buying and real-time marketing closer together:

1. If Facebook merged the operations of its ad exchange with the rest of its ad business (and if Twitter did the same if/when it announces its own ad exchange)

2. If advertisers become more comfortable with automating their media decisions to support real-time marketing

The first scenario is compelling. Facebook and Twitter already support biddable marketplaces, and both are getting more deeply involved in ad retargeting.

In 2012, Facebook launched FBX, or the Facebook Exchange, which allows companies to target ads to people who have visited a third-party website, such as an online retailer or travel website. Simultaneously, Facebook’s data partnerships with companies such as Acxiom and DataLogix allow advertisers to target people based on their store purchases, so a Facebook user might see an ad for a brand like Tropicana orange juice shortly after they purchased a competing brand at the store.

Facebook’s retargeting partners are testing ways to insert ads into a user’s newsfeed very soon after the user visits an external site. An ad for Nordstrom.com, for example, could appear in a user’s feed within a couple of hours after she shopped for shoes on the Nordstrom site, but did not make a purchase.

The agency community is enthused about the possibilities that FBX presents. “The reach of social is just massive,” said Jonathan Nelson, CEO of Omnicom Digital. “The Facebook Exchange allows us to get access to a lot of that audience in real time. It starts to speed the message up dramatically.”

Currently, Facebook keeps the operations of FBX and the rest of its advertising business separate. The ad technology companies that are approved to place ads via FBX (such as AdRoll, DataXu and [x+1]) are different from the companies that place other types of Facebook ads (such as Salesforce.com, Adobe and TBG Digital). In addition, FBX advertisers do not have access to Facebook’s internal ad targeting capabilities. Because the ads are triggered by actions taken outside of Facebook, there is no way for advertisers to use the FBX platform to boost their organic content on Facebook, or to time the ads to specific real-time events that are being discussed on Facebook.

However, the fact that FBX ads can appear in the news feed and can contain creative that is dynamically generated to show the exact items someone looked at on a separate website shows that Facebook and the FBX partner companies have ambitions to play a larger role in enabling real-time advertising. Over time, if Facebook could more closely link the FBX platform and the rest of its advertising business, marketers could theoretically buy inventory on FBX to target actions within Facebook.

Twitter, meanwhile, is planning to launch its own ad exchange, Advertising Age reported in May 2013.


Twitter will allow advertisers to use Twitter ads to retarget people who had visited their websites, according to Ad Age. Twitter is also exploring the idea of allowing individual advertisers to buy directly from its exchange, rather than going through a third-party platform. To the extent that advertisers can link up their real-time marketing efforts with their exchange-based buying, this could dramatically reduce the amount of time in the media buying process, as there would be fewer intermediaries to work through.

The second scenario under which programmatic and real time could come closer together is to help move toward the goal of making real-time marketing less of a hands-on process and more automated. On the creative side, real-time marketing still requires extensive human involvement to write copy or design an image. But on the media side, when rapid decisions must be made about when to promote an organic piece of content or which audience will respond best to a culturally relevant ad, humans can’t keep up, and algorithms must take over.

“I would rather focus on the creative process that goes into developing content for distribution in social channels, rather than making split-second decisions about whether or not to promote a piece of content into the feed,” said Ian Schafer, CEO of digital agency Deep Focus. “Right now, there’s a lot of human involvement needed to do that.”

When marketing professionals were asked earlier this year to assess the benefits of automating their media buying, 63% cited time saved as the chief benefit, according to a survey from Warc and Festival of Media Global 2013. That number was followed by 35% of respondents who thought automated media buying would give them better media value.

% of respondents

Benefits of Automated Media Buying According toMarketing Professionals Worldwide, 2013

Saving time and resources63%

Clients get the best media value35%

Reducing waste and human error33%

Enables brands to run more campaigns across more mediaoutlets

29%

Source: Warc and Festival of Media Global 2013, April 8, 2013156127 www.eMarketer.com

The algorithmic approach to making real-time media decisions will likely resonate with marketers that are already looking to programmatic advertising to drive more efficiency in their media spending. According to Netmining, the top way marketers and agencies are minimizing waste in their media spending is by working with a company that has an algorithm.

% of respondents

Ways that US Marketers and Agencies Are MinimizingMedia Spend Waste, April 2013

Using a company with an algorithm53.5%

Using attribution37.2%

Using programmatic media to bid on the individual level35.7%

Consolidating all multichannel media buying in one platform19.4%

Don't know7.0%

Not concerned with media spend waste7.8%

Source: Netmining, "The Programmatic Landscape," April 22, 2013156725 www.eMarketer.com

“I think everything from ad servers to DSPs to big management systems all can improve in terms of what they allow us to do in real time. I think that the innovation is going to be driven by really a combination of client need and imagination,” Starcom’s Lang said.

DRAWBACKS TO ALIGNING PROGRAMMATIC WITH REAL-TIME MARKETING Some argue that trying to bring programmatic buying techniques into real-time marketing is the wrong approach. The key arguments against it are:

■ Programmatic doesn’t take into account

the nuances of human communication, and

systems could make mistakes about which ad to

deploy when.

■ The benefits of programmatic buying are more

related to pricing efficiency and targeting, rather

than saving time or speeding up processes—two

aspects of real-time marketing.


One of the key challenges of real-time marketing is to rapidly assess the trends a marketer is seeing, or the conversations that are taking place. There is much more room for error in this analysis than there is in typical forms of programmatic buying, where ads are matched with audience based on material contained in a cookie, such as the frequency someone has visited the site, their demographic information and/or their known characteristics, such as whether their web browsing behavior identifies them as a sports enthusiast.

Although analytics are improving marketers’ ability to detect tone and sentiment in social media, making the leap to spend media dollars to attach a brand to a trend or a conversation is something that some executives think cannot be fully automated.

Plant, of MEC, cited an example from his agency’s work with EE, the parent company of Orange and T-Mobile in the UK. When MEC launched a new Nokia mobile device for EE, he said, there was a disproportionately high amount of chatter about the phone in conjunction with the EE brand. “If you hadn’t dug down into the actual quality of the conversations, you wouldn’t have realized that actually, people were annoyed that we had the Nokia Lumia 920 exclusively, and what we needed to be doing was targeting those key opinion-formers. An automated real-time buying process wouldn’t have been appropriate in that situation,” he said.

Advertisers already have some level of concern about the placement of their ads in social media, and the idea of automating ad delivery in conjunction with contextual analysis is a tall order. An August 2012 study from the Online Publishers Association (OPA) and research firm Advertiser Perceptions revealed that 71% of US ad agencies and marketers felt their brand-focused digital ads were safe on premium publisher sites, while just 36% said the same for Facebook.

When assessing automated media buying, executives worldwide, surveyed by Warc and Festival of Media Global, cited lack of human input as by far the leading disadvantage of the practice.

% of respondents

Disadvantages of Automated Media Buying Accordingto Marketing Professionals Worldwide, 2013

Lack of human input 68%

Lack of industry standards 35%

Lack of transparency 25%

Source: Warc and Festival of Media Global 2013, April 8, 2013156128 www.eMarketer.com

The other argument against using programmatic techniques in the context of real-time marketing is that programmatic is more typically used to achieve better pricing efficiency or targeting, not to save time. According to a survey of US agency executives, conducted in March 2013 by BrightRoll, the leading benefits of programmatic buying were pricing efficiency, cited by 34% of respondents, followed by targeting, selected by 27%. Only 5% said that saving time was the leading benefit. Reducing the amount of time spent between developing an ad and then buying media to distribute it is a key function of real-time marketing.

% of respondents

Leading Benefit to Programmatic Buying for DigitalAdvertising According to US Agency Executives,March 2013

Pricing efficiency34%

Targeting27%

Optimization16%

Audience efficiency12%

Universal frequency6%

Time savings5%

Source: BrightRoll, "Digital Video 2013," May 1, 2013157207 www.eMarketer.com

The advertising industry can expect more debate about programmatic buying and the role it will or will not play in real-time marketing in the months and years ahead. A system which, in a fraction of a second, analyzes audiences, buys ad space and delivers ads is real time at its core. As more marketers look to do advertising in the moment, they may well recognize that the best way to capture those moments is to bring in technology that can help them to move as fast as today’s consumers are moving.


EMARKETER INTERVIEWS

Responding to Buzz by Running Real-Time Marketing Like a Newsroom

Dave Marsey Executive Vice President and Managing Director

Digitas San Francisco Interview conducted on May 22, 2013

ConAgra on Spending Digital Ad Dollars in Real Time

Dan Skinner Public Relations and Social Media Manager

ConAgra Interview conducted on May 28, 2013

David Armano Managing Director of the Central Region

Edelman Digital Interview conducted on May 22, 2013

Chris Bowler Group Vice President of Social Media

Razorfish Interview conducted on May 13, 2013

Ryan Cavanaugh Vice President and Media Director

Digitas Interview conducted on May 29, 2013

Missy Godfrey CEO

SocialFlow Interview conducted on May 15, 2013

Peter Goodman Vice President of Social.com

Salesforce.com Interview conducted on May 8, 2013

Jason Kapler Director of Marketing

Networked Insights Interview conducted on May 21, 2013

Lindsay Lichtenberg Vice President of Publishing Platforms and Partnerships

Starcom MediaVest Group

Interview conducted on May 29, 2013

Simon Mansell CEO

TBG Digital Interview conducted on May 22, 2013

Jonathan Nelson CEO

Omnicom Digital Interview conducted on May 21, 2013

Amanda Peters Head of Social Media

iCrossing Interview conducted on May 21, 2013

Libby Pigg Senior Vice President and Director of Converged Media Services

Edelman Digital


Dan Plant Group Strategy Director and Real-Time Planning Director

MEC London


Ian Schafer CEO

Deep Focus Interview conducted on May 13, 2013

Daniel Slotwiner Head of the Agency and PMD Measurement Team

Facebook Interview conducted on May 13, 2013

Frank Speiser President and Co-Founder

SocialFlow Interview conducted on May 15, 2013

Kevin Lang Senior Vice President of Paid Social Media

Starcom MediaVest Group Interview conducted on May 29, 2013

Shelby Saville Executive Vice President

Spark SMG Interview conducted on May 22, 2013

http://totalaccess.emarketer.com/Interview.aspx?R=6001096




Brendan Thomas Account Director

iCrossing Interview conducted on May 21, 2013

RELATED EMARKETER REPORTS

Real-Time Marketing: Speeding Up the Creative Process

Meeting the Need for Speed: How Social Analytics are Evolving to Support Real-Time Marketing

eMarketer’s Guide to the Digital Advertising Ecosystem: Mapping the Display Advertising Purchase Paths and Ad-Serving Process

RELATED LINKS

BrightRoll

Forrester Consulting

IBM

Netmining

Warc

EDITORIAL AND PRODUCTION CONTRIBUTORS

Cliff Annicelli Senior EditorKaitlin Carlin Copy EditorJoanne DiCamillo Senior Production ArtistStephanie Gehrsitz Senior Production ArtistDana Hill Director of ProductionHeather Price Copy EditorNicole Perrin Associate Editorial DirectorAllie Smith Director of Charts








http://www.brightroll.com/

http://www.forrester.com

http://www.ibm.com

http://www.netmining.com

http://www.warc.com

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