Marketing Roadmaps

Susan Getgood

The true measure of video success: fans, not eyeballs

by

“Eyeballs” don’t fall in love with your program. People do.

This week, an interesting piece on Digiday, The ‘demonetized’: YouTube’s brand-safety crackdown has collateral damage, reported, among other things, that the tools used by YouTube to identify and demonetize unsafe content were often inconsistently or inaccurately applied, causing sharp declines in revenues for many creators, especially those with smaller channels focused on news, politics, social issues and gaming.

Programmatic media buying, which matches audience to impressions, has, if not created, certainly exacerbated the problem of unsafe, unsavory content hosting ads for brands that otherwise would NEVER advertise against that content. On the flip side, programmatic, AI-powered, media blocking may have over-corrected the problem, blacklisting sites that brands otherwise might have wanted to advertise on. Satire. Social commentary. Criticism.

At the same time, I think we are on the brink of a shift in how we experience video content, that brings us back to the spirit of the early days of television. When programming wasn’t just content and audience = ratings point or view = success.

It was a shared experience.

After the first heady rush to digital video a few years ago, publishers realized that building good content wasn’t enough. “If you build it, they will come” is still only true in movies about baseball. We had to draw the right audience to the content. “Eyeballs.” Something that proved difficult for digital-only properties, less troublesome perhaps for owners of broadcast franchises. Over the past year, concurrent with the shift to programmatic media and the rise of OTT, audience became the mantra of the moment. Perhaps even more valuable in some respects than the quality of the content.

But this won’t last. It’s not sustainable and the audiences are not necessarily loyal. If you have to buy every viewer for a fraction less than you sold it for, the pyramid will eventually collapse.

“Eyeballs” don’t fall in love with your program. People do.

What we need is to develop compelling content, reach the right audience and then develop loyal communities of viewers that want to share the experience with each other, not just watch and maybe click through to a sponsor now and then. It comes down, again, to fans.

As I commented last week, the finale of Game of Thrones demonstrates that people will watch in real time, if the content is strong enough, and the shared experience valuable enough. Not only will they watch, but also they will become advocates for the programming. With the right community marketing strategy, their advocacy can extend to the sponsors of the programming, and program advocates become brand evangelists. And, bonus, they don’t actually HAVE to watch in real time for the loyal, committed advocate audience to develop. We just need to feed it well.

That is our branded content and native advertising opportunity. Not to mention the more lucrative opportunity for video creators.

It’s not as easy as media sales. It doesn’t scale as simply as impressions. But the connections forged through shared experience, shared values, are infinitely stronger for brands as well as fans. When we target our advertising to the content and the audience together, we also avoid the problem of adjacency to unsavory content.

What’s old is new.

Again.

 

Updated 10 Sept: 

Late last week, Salon announced that it had inked a deal with Tout to combine Salon Media’s current video distribution on Facebook Live, Twitter, and Salon.com with Tout’s targeted video programming across more than 3,500 publisher partner sites. What this really means is buried in press release gobbledy-gook but my take is that Salon wanted scaled distribution and Tout needed better, more relevant, more engaging content.

It is not enough to have amazing content or a huge audience. You need both. And IMO, to succeed longterm, you need community.

A Marketing Lesson from Game of Thrones

by

The most important lesson of Game of Thrones this year? No, not that incest is okay if you have buns of steel, although for the record, IMO the Jon/Dany incest angle is far less interesting than the power dynamics their blood relationship causes. The real lesson is what Ed Martin discusses in his piece “Game of Thrones” Transcended Technology in Season 7: people WILL engage with entertainment in real time.

His article focuses on the storytelling, which was excellent and pushed just about every emotional button the audience has, but only hints at what I think is the stronger force at work: the community.

People wanted to watch together. To discuss, to rant, to scream, to ooh and aah, together. No one wanted to spoil, or be spoiled, so the best solution was to watch together. At the same time. On Twitter and in private discussion groups and at home and anywhere else humans congregate, really and virtually.

The power of the shared experience. That is the most important lesson.

And for extra credit, note that GoT feeds its community very well. Behind the scenes videos released after the episodes that extend the experience. The steady drumbeat of press tours and convention appearances combined with the general likability of the show stars. And yes, merchandise.

To summarize:

  1. Create amazing content that engages the community and encourages a desire, a demand for the shared experience
  2. Feed the community well: news, merchandise, opportunities to engage with the brand
  3. Build excitement for the real time experience, harnessing the power of the community to do so. HBO promotion could only go so far. We the viewers built the flames even higher. Fan speculation. Fan art. Fanfic. GoT discussion groups.

It starts with the content, but the secret ingredient is the community.

Photo: publicity still from Episode 7, courtesy HBO

The Sharp Left Turn

by

Recently, a Facebook friend shared an anecdote about the sharp left turn — that moment when God corrects your course, sharply, to get it pointed in the right direction.

This idea of the sharp left turn, with or without God in the mix, seems a much better metaphor for those moments in life that not only may seem catastrophic, but also actually (and surprisingly) feel that way too. Such as my sudden unemployment last month when a re-organization at my company eliminated my role. No matter how amicable the parting, and it was 100%, losing my job was still a shock.

The sharp left turn is so much more appropriate than “when one door closes, another one opens,” which, while often accurate, doesn’t address the gut-wrenching feeling that accompanies being laid off.

The uncertainty of #funemployment. The adrenaline rush when the possibilities start to gel into opportunities. The let-down when something doesn’t come through.

The sharp left turn? That’s a survival moment. You made the turn and are moving in the right direction.

Right now, I am still smack dab in the middle of the turn. No longer looking back, just looking forward but not entirely sure when the turn will end. Or where.

But I think back to the last time I was laid off in a reorganization in 2004.

Sharp left.

I had spent 10 years doing basically the same thing. Moving through various roles from Director to Senior Vice President. for multiple companies, as organizations were acquired. But in the end, I spent 10 years promoting internet filtering software to protect children from porn and corporate productivity from, well, also porn. And shopping, which is porn of a different sort I suppose. This was back in the earliest days of the commercial Internet. Before blogs. Before social media. Before WiFi.

It was time for a change. I didn’t want to simply go to work in marketing for another B2B/B2C software company. So I decided to build a consulting practice.

One of the very first things I did was attend an American Marketing Association (AMA) panel on blogging. And found my future.

My consulting practice quickly morphed from general sales and marketing to helping companies large and small integrate blogging and social media into their business strategy. I spoke at the first BlogHer conference in 2005, and met some of the best friends and colleagues I have ever had. I was privileged to write Professional Blogging For Dummies for Wiley, co-founded Blog With Integrity, and spoke at conferences all over the country about social media and marketing.

In 2010, my trajectory led to my dream job with BlogHer in New York.

It has been an amazing seven years. Creating successful branded content and influencer marketing programs for brands. Collaborating with my colleagues to create some of the very first social media marketing programs on Twitter and Facebook. Helping thousands of women make money with their social media presence. Partnering with team-mates to integrate BlogHer products and services when we were acquired by SheKnows in 2014. Developing strategies for scaling influencer content beyond the original blog or social post. Creating models for performance and predictive analytics for branded content, native media and influencer marketing.

August 2017: Sharp left. Still in the turn. Looking forward to the road ahead.

Hat tip to Suzy Soro, the Facebook friend who shared the anecdote.

Influencer Marketing and Instagram: The peril of quantity over quality – MediaKix’s fake Instagram project

by

Earlier this month, influencer marketing company MediaKix released How Anyone Can Get Paid To Be An Instagram Influencer With $300 (or Less) Overnight, a project it undertook to prove whether was possible to game the system of influencer engagement on Instagram. In short, how easy is it to create fake Instagram profiles, purchase followers and then get offered sponsored content opportunities by the major influencer marketing platforms?

Turns out, pretty easy, at least for the two profiles the firm created – one focused on beauty, and the other on travel, not coincidentally I am certain, two content areas where Instagram is particularly strong, and the demand high for influencers with scale.

This has spawned a great deal of coverage in the industry trades over the past week, including AdWeek, PR giant Edelman  and Digiday. All bemoaning the fact that it is possible to game a social network and artificially inflate followers and engagement.

I’m mostly surprised that anyone IS surprised. The demand for volume, for more, more, more – bigger reach, more likes, more clicks — is bound to lead to both fraud and waste. It did in advertising, in search of the almighty click, and it has in social, in search of likes, comments, shares AND clicks.

Let’s take the two problems separately. Fraud is the intent to deceive by artificially inflating numbers, whether buying followers or engagements. Waste is the natural by-product of scale. Not every legitimate viewer/reader of a message is the target, no matter how good our demographic and behavioral targeting. Even today, with the phenomenal matching made possible by programmatic advertising, there will be waste, and targeting on social is a mixed bag. You can do it within a social platform like Facebook, but not across platforms.

In my opinion, the platforms are responsible for posting the first level of defense against fraud in influencer marketing. The social platforms, to police the activity and manage fraudulent accounts effectively. The influencer platforms, to build similar checks and balances into their technology so brands can trust their influencer recommendations.

Managing the impact of waste, however, is part of the influencer marketing strategy. Our best offense is to put scale in its proper place in the strategy. Quantity – followers, likes, comments, shares, clicks – is not the only metric that matters. Quality of engagement is just as important. In the long run, perhaps more important. That means balancing your strategy, and including tactics that lead to deeper engagements with your current and potential customers as well as broader, more volume-centric microinfluencer tactics.

Remember: the influencer who matters is your customer. Always. That’s why influencer marketing works.

ROI and Influencer Marketing

by

Continuing my series about the trends in influencer marketing: The rise of ROI.

In the early days, when blogs and social were new and shiny, return on investment was “squishy.” As influencer marketing matures, so too do the expectations, and the measurement models.

Measurement models are shifting from soft “potential reach” to firmer engagement models, and a better understanding of true awareness (eyeballs, lift) across all platforms, not just the easier-to-measure website ad impressions and content views. The best predictive models look at both awareness and engagement, to provide the necessary context for brands trying to decide which type of content will best deliver to the marketing plan.

How many people see the content across all opportunities – native, social, pageviews. defines REACH or AWARENESS. How many people act on it (clicks, likes, shares) is ENGAGEMENT.

Engagement rates will continue to be important, especially as we are increasingly able to link social actions with purchases through longitudinal studies like Nielsen Catalina, and foot traffic studies that can link a social visitor with a real life visitor, but these are expensive, and more likely to be used by large CPG and retail advertisers with big budgets. Not universal. Yet.

In the meantime, while we wait for the nirvana of proving engagement drove purchase — knowing whether someone who read that blog post last year, purchased it this year, we will rely on brand lift studies from Nielsen, Millward Brown and others, and first party reporting combined with original research. OpenUp is a start-up doing interesting work in the space of linking digital engagement with content to eventual purchase.

Advertisers want to understand the return on branded content, including influencer marketing, in the same way they evaluate their other advertising activities. Cost Per View is emerging as an AWARENESS metric alongside the click-through rate and the effective CPM that advertisers use to evaluate the overall efficiency of a media plan.

Re-visioning Measurement: A model for digital content marketing 

When a marketing tactic is new, we tend to be a little forgiving when it comes to measurement. It is simply not possible to be first to market, and also have a case study to evaluate before you make your decision. We operate on gut, on past experiences that are similar, out of a desire to experiment with the new tactic. We monitor and measure, but it is to establish a benchmark, not against a benchmark.

As the tactic evolves and matures, however, a body of work begins to emerge. Successes and failures, near misses and home runs, all combine to give some indication of what works. And what doesn’t. We are at that inflection point with content marketing, and particularly with influencer marketing. Benchmarks are emerging left, right and center.

Problem is — many of these benchmarks are either the very simple pageview and click-through-rate (CTR) we started with or defined by the different technology platforms people are using, thus hard to compare with each other. In some cases, they measure things because they can, not because the measure is useful or relevant, a criticism I have oft levied at Google Analytics.

In addition to CTRs, content program benchmarks tend to rely on views (page, video, slide) to show reach, and comments and earned social to demonstrate engagement. At publishers that scale content through native, native CTRs get added to the mix. This is a good start, but volume based measurements don’t allow you to compare tactics with different budgets. More budget nearly always delivers more volume.

Adding to the complexity, Facebook and the other social platforms report in the context of their platform – likes, comments, shares – and are more than a little opaque unless you are the account owner. This makes it challenging for advertisers trying to understand their earned media. We can count it, we just have a harder time understanding the person who shared it.

Plus things change. Not every day but it feels like it.

We need to simplify to make the data we collect useful to marketers. Capture key points that let us understand the success of a particular campaign and the component tactics AND compare the campaign to other campaigns, the tactics to other tactics.

Simplify. Standardize.

Every marketing tactic we use has an awareness and an engagement component. We want you to pay attention and then do something. Isolate those and look at them separately to understand the performance of each tactic against its goals. You can also aggregate each measure to understand how the overall campaign performed.

Views — Awareness
While reach will always be important as a general gauge for awareness — the potential or available audience for a message — we need to move past who MIGHT see something, and evaluate our campaigns based on who actually did. To standardize across all platforms, we use views and actions as proxies to estimate the engaged audience of digital content.

Actions — Engagement
Absolute numbers are great to understand the VOLUME of your social engagement, but if you want to compare tactics, you need to use rates. This corrects for size. Our old friend the Click-Through-Rate is still strong here, and lets us compare all our tactics against a single measure. But, it isn’t the only useful RATE we can calculate.

We can also look at an overall engagement rate for a campaign, defined as Total Engagements/Total Reach.

For content, look at the content engagement rate. Of the people who read something, how many shared it with others? Or simply commented.

Content Engagement Rate = Actions/Views

For video, the video completion rate (completed views/total views) remains an important measure, but it underestimates the success of the content. Looking at the ratio of viewers who watched at least 25% of the video (or more than 10 seconds on Facebook) gives a more accurate measure of the video success. You can also look at content engagement rates for video.

Social is a bit more squirrely when it comes to standardized measurements across platforms. We have reach and engagements, but we don’t always have access to actual viewers of a social action due to platform and cost barriers. If we own the channel, we have better data, but influencer data depends on whether the platform allows third-party access, and if so, how much it costs to get and use it.

Right now, I am intrigued by content and sentiment analysis as the path to understanding message penetration on social. Because both paths — audience and content analysis — are on the pricey side, we collectively tend to rely on engagement metrics to understand results on social. We have the data, and we can efficiently compare across platforms.

I recommend looking at two measurements here:

  • Engagements:Followers
  • The ratio of earned:paid.

 

SUMMARY TABLE: CONTENT MARKETING BENCHMARKS

Summary Table, Content Marketing Benchmarks

 

Cost Per View: Quantifying Awareness
Finally, even though we don’t have visibility into every view of our messages on social due to the walled gardens created by the social platforms, we can get to a very conservative estimate of how many people saw our message, and calculate a Cost Per View.

Cost Per View = Budget/Views

What’s a view? What goes into that side of the equation?

  • Pageviews, slide views, video views
  • Viewable native ad impressions. Regardless of clicks.
  • Viewable content amplification ad impressions. Regardless of clicks.
  • Earned social engagements. This is a PROXY for viewers that we can apply across all social platforms. If someone shared or liked or commented, we know they saw it. This will undercount, but it is a start.

Important: Evaluate Cost Per View against your overall content marketing campaign: Native Ads plus Content Amplification Ads plus Branded Content plus Influencer Content plus Social Promotion. Some tactics are more efficient at views than others, while others are stronger down funnel. Content creation will always be more expensive than promotion, but you need the content to promote. And so on.

Where do we go from here?
No single metric is the silver bullet. A tactic with a high cost per view can generate amazing engagement or be the perfect content base for a scale promotion. Or both. We also need to look at these measurements side by side with third party research that measures brand lift or foot traffic or message penetration, and layer in our actual sales results to get the full picture. But the important first step is to begin standardizing our metrics so we can compare campaign performance month to month, year to year, and isolate the tactics that are both efficient and effective.

More of what works, less of what doesn’t.