About
six months ago, we at Polk decided to do a conference to tout the
virtues of multi-channel marketing in the automotive space. This
idea eventually materialized into what is now known as
Polk
Automotive Connections. Day 2, the digital marketing focused
portion, was chocked full of excellent content with digital
advertisers from all channels and strata of the
industry.
The day started off with Polk discussing the trends in digital
marketing and automotive market size. Then,
Collective
Media ...
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Since two-thirds of smartphone and tablet owners use them while
watching TV, then "take a picture of your tv" sounds like a
reasonable request - potentially even an ingenious one. The process
of moving eyeballs across channels to engage, entrust, and
eventually encapsulate a target market in the funnel of
communication could very well be the direction that digital
marketing is headed. In fact the majority of tech users, at all
stages of life, indicate multiple screens as complimentary devices
...
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If you're a local business and/or have rarely advertised online
because of the complexity and time involved, then "man have I got
the solution for you." Just a couple of days ago, our good friends
at Google launched a new service that is very helpful to new
digital marketing practitioners looking to target local
prospects.
Google
Adwords now has a service called
Express. It's a quick and easy
process for getting a locally targeted ad placed online with
relative ease. But wait, there's more! They...
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I figured it would happen sooner rather than later, so I say
'finally.' Search is converging with a larger data ecosystem to
strengthen both text and display advertising for advertisers and
digital marketers. There isn't a whole lot of detail yet, but
according to my sources, Google has code named a service "DDP" that
is using their rich Google Audience Network click data with their
Adwords data to serve targeted non-contextual site specific text
ads.
I'm assuming their running this through...
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As the social media world continues to evolve and become more
prevalent in marketing, it has become commonplace for dealerships
to try and determine how they want to participate and support their
brand using this medium.
The feedback I hear in the dealer world is, "I need to have a
social media strategy." But as with any strategy, I think this
statement is much too general and dealers need to take a step back
and evaluate the concept of social media and really understand that
it is in essence a...
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My 10-year old daughter wrote an essay about what she wants to do
when she becomes a teenager. Of all the things she wants to do, one
item in particularl made me not only smile, but think. She wants to
drive a tiny purple car; tiny, because she wants to leave the
smallest bio-foot-print possible and purple because she is really
into it, "a royal color" as she describes it.
She realizes there are not that many tiny or purple cars out there.
But it doesn't stop her from wanting one. "I still want...
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The privacy situation in digital marketing is so fluid that there
is no way the U.S. Congress will ever be able to come up with a set
of rules that will last for any reasonable amount of time. Already,
this country has spent the last two years (at minimum) in legal
harangue over the reasonable expectations of targeting via the
cookie-based model. Enter IPv6 to complicate the privacy issue with
more vigor. There are a couple of issues at play that make Internet
Protocol version 6 (IPv6)...
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I'm noticing that, in life, things tend to come full circle. Put
another way, the pendulum will swing back to the opposite side,
eventually. Whatever metaphor or analogy you want to use, some
behaviors or axioms make sense and no matter what external factors
temporarily change them - they always come back around. In digital
marketing circles, location is re-entering the lexicon as a
cornerstone of marketing strategy. There was a time in the early
oughts when the big buzz was about content, and...
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One of Volkswagen of
America's first steps along the path to selling one million units
(VW and Audi combined) in the U.S. by 2018 was to launch a
re-designed, and much less expensive, Jetta last year as a 2011
model. Since its launch, Jetta registrations have skyrocketed,
climbing almost 61% during the first two months of this year over a
year ago. The Jetta two-month registration total of 20,272
represents 57% of all Volkswagen retail registrations, a far higher
mix than for any other...
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Whenever I put the letters A, O and L together I get an ear
tightening dial tone and unmistakable coordinated series of clicks
and pops following what sounds like a loud quick-dial of random
numbers. Guess what, AOL does other things than force us to access
the internet through their subscription service with CD's
constantly being sent to our homes. It's true they've successfully
navigated through a serious downturn to become relevant with
hyper-local acquisitions like
Patch; tech sites like
Enga...
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One of the greatest things about online advertising is its
measurability, right? Where else can a marketer get so much data to
assess campaign success? After all, there are impressions,
click-throughs, view-throughs, page views, time spent, and many
more data points from which to derive unique formulae for
determining ad effectiveness. But blessings can also be curses, and
sometimes the abundance of data points can create analysis
paralysis. How are marketers supposed to know which metrics...
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Recently, I was at MediaPost's ReVision
Conference about targeted television advertising. The day was
interesting and informative. We've come a long way from your old
cathode ray tube TV or the little TV sitting on top of the big TV
from yesteryear. I'm talking web-enabled televisions, set-top boxes
synthesizing digital data, and of course, streaming
television/video services online. With all of this new technology
it became very apparent that television viewing habits are changing
dramatically....
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In case you missed it, Google's
Droid Operating System (OS) is dominating smartphone
sales. The open Software Development Kit (SDK) and digital
marketing platforms allow developers to go wild making cool apps,
while hardware brands can tweak the software for differentiation
between phones, creating continuity and customization in one base
OS. More importantly, advertisers have found that working with the
Google technology is easier and potentially more lucrative, since
we learned last year that...
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A colleague sent me an article, recently, titled
'Five Ways Media Data and Analytics Are Changing' written
by
Dave Morgan, CEO of Simulmedia. Though refreshing, it was
somewhat shocking to read the CEO of a media agency being so
effusive about the affect data has on his business. He offered up
five main points.
First, the article discusses how data analytic tools are 'bigger,
better, faster and cheaper.' This trend has driven innovation up,
and costs down, to the tune of 1/100th the cost at 100...
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Much of my time at Polk is spent developing our digital marketing
capabilities. Our newest product is Online Audience Targeting,
which uses Polk's proven predictive marketing models and, through
our partner DataLogix, deploys them online to target automotive
digital marketing campaigns.
In the world of display ad targeting, we often find our audience
data being compared to behavioral targeting data (or "BT"). There's
a huge difference between targeting behaviors (like online auto
"intenders"...
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It looks complex, but actually it's really simple. Publishers have
pages they want to monetize. Agencies have ads they want to place.
Advertisers want their ads to be seen by the right audience. It's a
trifecta of enablement!
Thus, the advertising ecosystem has developed itself into a
technology driven real-time bidding environment to increase the
value of remnant ad inventory. Remnant (non-premium) inventory is
advertising inventory that is not sold by publisher's direct sales
teams. Usually...
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Even though still in its formative years, online advertisers have
gone through multiple data sources to reach the proper audiences
with their messages. Search advertising used keywords; display
advertising has used context, click (behavioral) data, publisher
data and the ever popular retargeting data to reach online
audiences most efficiently.
Polk, along with our partner DataLogix,
thought, "why don't we use industry leading consumer data and
analytics to reach the right audiences"?
Well, that...
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Flexible
(gasoline/ethanol) vehicles, commonly referred to as "E85" or "Flex
Fuel," represent one of every 10 personal new vehicle purchases
year-to-date through November 2010. This represents a market share
increase of nearly 6 percentage points since 2006. As a consumer
who lived through the gas price crisis, I expected the new wave of
fuel efficient vehicles to push Americans into small minicar like
transportation. On the other hand, as a member of the Polk analytic
community, I was keenly...
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Companies like
Yelp,
Foursquare, and
Gowalla have forever changed the digital
marketing landscape with their proximity check-in and geo-location
"friend spotting" services. For whatever reason, some people
like their friends (and some random strangers) to know exactly
where they've been, where they are, and possibly create charts
about where they will be in the future. Alright, maybe that last
one was going a little far but still, the digital marketing
landscape will be forever changed by what I...
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In science it might be called a catalyst or accelerant, but in the
automotive industry we'll call it a driver. We here at Polk can
never seem to get enough of that chart making stuff - often
referred to as data. Data is the key building block to good
decision making, and that fact has never been more true than in
today's digital marketing and advertising environment.
Data, it has been noted, is the key to driving interactive
advertising's growth. The ability to use data to identify markets
and...
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