Future Matters

Bant Breen delves into the burgeoning potential of social media with Ben Kartzman and Mikhail Lapushner of up-and-coming social event management site Spongecell.

What are people saying about your brand?  What are the issues and topics that are engaging your customers?  How are individuals influencing others with their thoughts and comments?  Bant Breen interviews Chris Ramsey of Radian6 to discuss the state of online social media tracking and monitoring.

Spot Runner is one of the more progressive marketing services and technology providers.  Spot Runner’s online system is changing the way advertisers are thinking about creating, planning and buying all forms of media from local television to online search.  Bant Breen interviews Andrew Bloom of Spot Runner about the company’s services and direction.

Mobile phones are playing an increasingly important role in marketing.  Marketers are utilizing mobile devices as a media channel to run video and text based content, campaigns and promotions as well as employing mobile phones as the “media glue” for integrated marketing efforts.  Watch the latest POV where Bant Breen interviews Vlad Edelman, Ansible Mobile CEO on the mobile marketing landscape today. 

It’s that time of year again for predictions and trends.  Watch the latest POV which has an interview with Bant Breen and Lori Schwartz of the Emerging Media Lab.  Lori talks about the Lab’s emerging media trends for 2008.

To meet the need for expanded online social media tracking and analysis, we are pleased to announce that we have entered into a strategic partnership with Radian6 Inc., a leading provider of social media monitoring solutions.

Radian6’s social media monitoring “dashboard” tracks what is being said online about brands, organizations and issues. The program monitors all forms of social media, including blog sites, top video-sharing sites, opinion review forums, photo-sharing sites and micro-blogging platforms. The Radian6 solution offers visually rich analysis with the ability to export graphs and data. The tool also helps point to the most popular and influential social media thought leaders in a client’s specific industry.

We have worked closely with Weber Shandwick Worldwide to evaluate the social media monitoring solution space and to select Radian6 as a preferred partner. More than thirty-four of Weber’s clients have participated in its Early Adopter Program focused on social media monitoring trials. Weber Shandwick will now roll out the Radian6 solution globally for its employees, supporting the agency’s efforts to present expanded social media intelligence services to clients.

The Interpublic Emerging Media Lab will coordinate the corporate IPG-wide relationship, serving as a liaison between our agencies and Radian6.  To learn more about Radian6’s offerings, please contact Lori H. Schwartz, Director of the Interpublic Emerging Media Lab, at lori.schwartz@ipglab.com or 323-857-7956. 

Bant Breen

President, IPG Futures Marketing Group

The ad industry is buzzing about Facebook’s Ad Network announcement this week.   Facebook’s blog Facebook Ads (Nov 7)> outlines the characteristics of the new system.  

Before this week’s announcement the marketing opportunities within Facebook included:

1. Sponsored Groups: Branded environments within the Facebook walled garden (ex. J&J Acuvue Hampton High)

2. Sponsored Stories: Ads integrated into the users’ News Feed – the home page every time one logs on to Facebook. 

In summary the new features are:  

1. Facebook Pages: An evolution of sponsored groups.  Distinct, customized profiles designed for businesses, bands, celebrities and more to represent themselves on Facebook. Added features:

a. Increase the way users declare interest about your brand through becoming a fan, discussing products and interacting with applications

b. Maximize the opportunity for viral promotion because as users interact with all the applications on your Page Social Stories are created and distributed into News Feed

c. Allow for more creative flexibility than Sponsored Groups through a simple “drag and drop” template and more options for application integration

d. A very simple step-by-step process and tool to help you create it

2. Social Ads:  Provides advertisements alongside related actions your friends have taken on the site. These actions may be things like "Leah is now a fan of The Offspring" (if I added The Offspring to my music). These actions could then be paired with an ad that either The Offspring provides.  Social Ads come in three varieties:

a. Sponsored Story: Brand Message Only, Initial message to promote/seed the campaign

b. Sponsored Social Story:  Brand Message + Social Action Message - Only available once social action is generated

c. Social Story: Social Action Message Only   -  Only available once social action is generated

3. Beacon: An opportunity to turn a one-time action on another website into a social message on Facebook. You now have the option to bring actions you take outside of Facebook back in. Just as Facebook shares your on-site interactions with your friends through News Feed, we now give you an option to let News Feed share your off-site actions with your friends as well.

4. Stronger Targeting Options: Utilize Facebook profile data to target social ad messages. 

5. Campaign Reporting and Insight Tools: Better set of tools for clear in-depth information on campaign performance  

Comment: Facebook continues to extend and evolve its ad model around peer influence.  Word-of –mouth research supports the idea that one’s actions such as product purchases are strongly influenced by the actions and opinions of friends, family members and colleagues.  Facebook is allowing advertisers a system to track peer influence, magnify peer influence and ultimately assess the ROI (return on peer influence). 

 The new feature Beacon is particularly interesting because it extends peer influence outside the hallowed digital hallways of Facebook.  It is unclear at this stage as to how many Facebook users will want to share all of their off -Facebook purchases on their Facebook pages.  Advertisers will want to analyze the percentage of the total number of people that opt-in to share off-Facebook information and how this statistic trends over time to see if this features will garner critical scale.  The Facebook thinking around influence is very promising and will spawn a new set of interesting influence model variations.

Bant Breen

President, Interpublic Futures Marketing Group

Hello, and welcome to the Futures Marketing Group website.  In January of this year Interpublic launched the Futures Marketing Group to be a vehicle for making investments, structuring partnerships, creating new entities and driving research in the emerging media space.  The Futures Marketing Group Companies collaborate with IPG agencies and clients to develop leading edge emerging media solutions.  This year has been a busy one as we have started to build the Group which now consists of assets and partnerships such as Reprise Media, Ansible, the IPG Emerging Media Lab, Spongecell, Spot Runner, Facebook, TiVo and Joost.  Our Futures blog aims to share our perspective on emerging media and marketing industry topics as well as news and ideas from our Group. Thank you for checking out our new site and contact us if you are interested in learning more or if you have innovative emerging media ideas and technology. 

Bant Breen

President, Interpublic Futures Marketing Group