Efficient Frontier Insights

Join us for Advertising Week - October 3rd & 6th

 

EFFICIENT FRONTIER & CONTEXT OPTIONAL
 

Attending Advertising Week?

Join us on October 3rd & 6th for our sessions:

Monday, October 3: 11:30am - 2:00pm

Efficient Frontier Supports Feeding America 

The Advertising Club of Madison Avenue Kick- Off Luncheon

Thursday, October 6: 10:00am - 10:45am

 Wired Social Media Summit featuring David Karnstedt

Thursday, October 6: 3:00pm - 3:45pm

Brands as Storytellers: The Art and Science of Capitalizing on Social Media

• Kevin Barenblat, CEO, Context Optional
• Marty Collins, Director of Emerging Media, Microsoft
• Brooke Angles, Founder, Social Click (Formerly Social Media Strategy, Expedia)
• John Yi, Strategic Program Manager - Marketing APIs, Facebook
• Moderated by Michael Learmonth, Digital Editor, AdAge

Looking forward to seeing you at our sessions!

More information on Advertising Week here. 

The Efficient Frontier & Context Optional Team

Debate: Is Social Media ROI for Real, Or Is It A New Oxymoron?

Morgan Simonson, our Senior VP of Sales joins the conversation tomorrow at OMMA Global. 

Now that companies are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into social media marketing, advertising and earned media campaigns, the rush is on to prove the worth of all those “Likes”, retweets, and check-ins. Of course, those with a vested interest in the social media economy can roll out example after example of social media ROI, but is it for real? Can a medium where many efforts don’t directly lead to a sale convincingly prove return on investment? Welcome to an OMMA Global debate. 

When: Tuesday, September 27th at 12:00pm 

Where: Astor Ballroom, Marriot Marquis 

F8: The Ad Story

 
Yesterday was a huge day at F8.  If you missed it, please read my colleague Lawrence’s blog post for a great summary.  On a personal level, I’m excited about Timeline.  It will be very interesting to see how quickly users adopt and build out their Timelines.  My guess is pretty quickly. 

While a bit more behind the scenes, there were also a number of big announcements at F8 that impact advertising on Facebook.  Both of the announced changes stem from the flexibility to define “action-type” in application usage, shifting from the general “like” to the more specific “played, read, watched, ate, drank” or any other verb.   In this post,  I’ll take a look at the potential impact to both Sponsored Stories and Marketplace advertising.

Sponsored Stories will now be much more impactful by capitalizing on the descriptive format of the new action-types.  Rather than someone simply “liking” a particular music show, a ticket sales application from Live Nation could add the detail that the person bought tickets to a particular show.  This more descriptive action adds important context for connections: this person bought tickets from Live Nation and will attend a particular show.  The addition of specific actions will result in stronger influence.

 

Furthermore, the application owner is not the only person that can use data for Sponsored Stories.  Taking the above example, the concert venue may want to run Sponsored Stories using data from Live Nation to enhance demand for the show.  The caveat is that the Sponsored Story will always link back to the application (in this case that’s good for the concert venue).

 

Outside of Sponsored Stories, the action-type will also create a new pool of targeting criteria for Marketplace ads.  For example, Nike can now target runners as a pool of users whose interactions with all types of applications define them as such (action-type=ran).  Using action-type is potentially much more relevant and recent than the broader interest target pulled from profiles. 

 

These changes are being made available via the Facebook Ads API.  We’re excited to test the efficacy and determine the potential for these new ads and targeting.  And we’re thrilled that Facebook is continuing to innovate in their ads product.

 

More to come from us as we test and learn…

 

Justin Merickel, VP of Marketing and New Product Development

Our CEO to Marketers: "Facebook: Believe The Hype"

In this week's Forbes "On Marketing" column, Efficient Frontier's President and CEO David Karnstedt shares his opinions on Facebook and how we’ve only touched the tip of the "like-berg" of Facebook's effectiveness as a marketing tool.

David goes on to say: "There is a lot of talk about the lack of ROI on Facebook. Interestingly, TV seldom has such a discussion despite its maturity and tens of billions being spent on it. The engagement and its effect on branding and purchase behavior are assumed. The reason why Facebook receives so much scrutiny is because it can be evaluated through a variety of lenses. It is this variation of measurability in Facebook fan engagement and behavior that tempts many advertisers to look at Facebook through a direct-response lens. I think this is a myopic and narrow view of the channel. Facebook is not the same as Search in that it is not pure direct response. Facebook is not TV in that it is not pure engagement. Facebook is, well,Facebook. As more data emerge, the value of Facebook as a branding, engagement and a direct-response medium will become evident to even the most ardent of naysayers."

To read the full article visit: http://www.forbes.com/sites/onmarketing/2011/09/20/facebook-believe-the-hype/

From Russia with Love

We’ve just returned from a trip to Moscow to visit our Russian partner, iConText, and wanted to share some exciting developments for Efficient Frontier in the Russian market.  IConText (icontext.ru) have been an exclusive partner of Efficient Frontier since earlier this year and the growth we’ve seen so far has been fantastic. 

We had the opportunity to present at an iConText event on Friday talking about the success of our partnership so far covering both Search and Facebook.  Of particular interest was the work we are doing integrating Yandex campaigns into our platform.  Yandex is by far the most popular search engine in Russia controlling an estimated 65% of the search market leaving Google a distant second.  Our platform has been integrated with Yandex for some time and we’re now working on launching our portfolio bid optimisation to the Yandex marketplace to help advertisers get more returns for their campaigns.

Clients such as Dostavka, Wikimart and Biglion all spoke about the increased performance they have experienced since migrating to the Efficient Frontier platform.  Biglion, one of the largest daily deals sites in Russia, referred an increase in subscriptions of more than 50% and Dostavka, a large e-commerce site, described how EF optimisation has increased orders by over 100%!

In addition to search there was a lot of interest in our Facebook platform.  The Social Networking scene in Russia is dominated by local player Vkontakte leaving Facebook with just 4.5 million users.   However the limited reach has done nothing to stop advertisers wanting to launch advertising campaigns on the network.  We expect access to our Facebook platform to accelerate the efforts of Russian advertisers who are starting to ramp up their social marketing. 

Russia now has the second highest number of internet users in Europe and that number is growing at over 40% year on year.  With the Russian online advertising market set to grow at well over 30% next year to over $1 Billion, 2012 promises to be a very exciting year for both iConText and Efficient Frontier.

 

 

 

Phil Dance - Director, International Partner Development

August 2011 - CPCs in all sectors are up in the double digits MoM

CPCs in Finance and Retail sectors increased 6.3% Month on Month (MoM), while Automotive CPCs remained flat. However, on a YoY basis CPCs in all sectors were up well into the double digits. It's interesting to note that while CPCs were flat to down Month over Month (MoM) last year, they were flat to up in the same time period this year.  While other preliminary data also indicate a robust Q3 for Search marketers, we will have to wait until the end of the September to see how this quarter rounds out.

Dr. Siddharth Shah
Sr. Director, Business Analytics