Google needs to keep the lights on too, right? They’ve got bills to pay, kids to feed, and so forth. So them wanting to get revenue from a product they’ve managed for more than a decade out of the kindness of their hearts makes sense, [...]]]>
:: Chris Reebie, senior search marketing specialist

Google needs to keep the lights on too, right? They’ve got bills to pay, kids to feed, and so forth. So them wanting to get revenue from a product they’ve managed for more than a decade out of the kindness of their hearts makes sense, right?

Well if advertisers agree with the above sentiment, they should have no problem with the recent news that Google Product Search will now be known as Google Shopping – and it will function solely on a pay-for-play model.

Read more at Media Is Power

On May 30, 2012 Google released Google +Local Pages, which effectively merged Google Places pages and existing Google+ pages into one Google+ Local page.   Overnight, [...]]]> What is Google+ Local?
Google Places was a free online business listings platform that gave local business the ability to display their contact information on Google Maps.

On May 30, 2012 Google released Google +Local Pages, which effectively merged Google Places pages and existing Google+ pages into one Google+ Local page.   Overnight, 80 million business listings on Google automatically took on a new look with additional Google+ features that weren’t available through Google Places.

Read More at Media Is Power

When Google announced it was entering the world of survey research earlier this year, my initial response was fear and trembling.  After all, Google’s self-service platform and search business has hastened the end for many an industry.  Anyone remember the last time they used the Yellow Pages as more than a doorstop?  Could [...]]]>

When Google announced it was entering the world of survey research earlier this year, my initial response was fear and trembling.  After all, Google’s self-service platform and search business has hastened the end for many an industry.  Anyone remember the last time they used the Yellow Pages as more than a doorstop?  Could market research be next?

In spite of these concerns, as a research practitioner not beholden to any one product or service, I was intrigued what the search giant would do for our business. It turns out, at least at the moment, not much!

Google Taps Double Click Publisher Network to Serve Questions
Google’s Consumer Surveys leverage Google’s content network to serve survey questions across publisher sites.  Sites in Google’s Double Click network provide content in exchange for readers answering a single question.  Readers get free content.  Publishers earn additional revenue from visitors and Google makes money from each click. Marketers are provided a quick, easy and inexpensive source of consumer insights.  It’s a win, win, win!  Right?

Well, sort of.

Google has provided a broad-based national platform for marketers to cost effectively get consumer feedback using a limited number of questions.  Because of Google’s scope, most surveys can be fielded quickly and the self-service nature of Google allows for easy user analysis.  In addition, Google offers a limited number of commonly used age and gender breakouts.

Testing Approach Against U.S. Census
To prove its methodological approach, Google commissioned a test comparing results from its consumer surveys with those conducted using two well-known online survey research providers against selected U.S. Census data.  The test demonstrated lower deviations from the actual Census data for Google than for other leading online survey providers.

In addition, Google’s initial participation rates are in the high teens, significantly higher than most other online survey firms. While online surveys do have limitations, Google has done its homework to demonstrate its Consumer Survey offering can stand its ground in the online survey space.

Limitations to Consider
Unfortunately, there are a number of significant limitations that limit the offerings value to researchers.

• National sample only – Google does not yet offer any local geographical breakouts, nor are there opportunities to conduct research outside of the US. This limits its value to most local or regional marketers or those with significant international operations.
• Limited to no more than two questions per respondent – if marketers have additional questions, Google offers ‘like’ types of respondents based on their patented algorithm (think black box).  The words ‘patented algorithm’ should make researchers nervous.  It’s essentially saying “trust us, we know what we’re doing but we aren’t going to tell you”.
• Demographic data is inferred by IP Address of browser behavior.  Since Google has taken the ‘less is more’ approach to the number of questions each respondent answers, no standard demographic questions are provided on each respondent.  Again, Google is asking the marketing community to trust them that my 10-year old son isn’t on my laptop answering a question intended for me.  That may be acceptable to a digital advertiser but survey research needs a higher standard of certainty.
• Google’s pricing model quickly increases when age and gender breakouts are used.  To Google’s credit it offers a very inexpensive solution when asking a few questions of a broad general population sample.  However, the price quickly escalates when marketers want to limit questions by age and/or gender.  This large price increase means Google Consumer Surveys quickly lose their cost advantage when a more exact sample is required.
• Google only provides aggregated reporting.  Users do not have access to raw data.  As expected Google’s self-service analysis tool makes for easy analysis, but its limited reporting features make more detailed analysis challenging if not downright impossible.
• There are no opportunities to ask open-ended questions.  Again, Google’s effort to keep the process simple and straight-forward is limiting when additional qualitative feedback is needed in the form of open-ended responses.

Future Opportunities for Google’s Consumer Surveys
While Google’s Consumer Survey tool does provide a low-cost alternative for national general population surveys, its value is so limited as to be primarily an alternative to already inexpensive omnibus studies.

This cannot be what Google intended!  Nor is it where I expect Consumer Surveys will ultimately land if they are to have a winning survey research product.  To truly provide a winning solution for marketers, Google must address these limitations starting with providing marketers greater flexibility in selecting sample and creating multiple question packages that make surveys beyond a few questions more affordable.

:: By Kirby Thornton, Director of Consumer Insights, Decision Sciences

July signals summer vacations (or staycations) for most U.S. consumers. For marketers, it also kicks off the second half of the year.

Empower MediaMarketing is preparing for an unpredictable year ahead with a Presidential election, continued uncertainty in Europe and a minimal increase in consumer spending. Add to this the constant changes in [...]]]>

July signals summer vacations (or staycations) for most U.S. consumers. For marketers, it also kicks off the second half of the year.

Empower MediaMarketing is preparing for an unpredictable year ahead with a Presidential election, continued uncertainty in Europe and a minimal increase in consumer spending. Add to this the constant changes in media, as well as media technology, and there are several steps brands can take today to prepare for a smooth 2013 media planning process.

Review 2012 Business to Date: Evaluate strengths and opportunities going into 2013. Take a look at data that can help inform this process. Be sure to ask questions, like:  what is working, what can work harder, what am I measuring now and how could I enhance this to learn more?

Set Realistic Goals: The best marketing plans start with clear business goals that are aspirational but attainable. This ensures the marketing objectives and media objectives will both ladder up to the same goal and align with key metrics that the entire company will understand.

Refocus On Audience In Your Communications Strategy: Make sure the communications strategy is focused on a current picture of the consumer to ensure alignment between media options and audience consumption habits. Building an audience-based communications plan capitalizes on the “where”, “how” and “how much” a brand’s marketing is speaking to and with consumers.

Evaluate How to Best Leverage the Market & Media: The constant stream of technology innovations ensures new opportunities to consider each year. Here are a few important trends to embrace while looking ahead.

• Leverage paid, earned and owned media.  Convergence of the three areas is accelerating at a rapid pace, and we need to think about each piece of the puzzle and how they can work together to bring our campaigns to life and deliver on the brand promise.
• Acknowledge traditional is going digital.  Include video and audio strategies as traditional TV and Radio plans don’t always leverage new technology like social media and mobile. With multiple devices to carry the right content, think cross-device for the best engagement opportunities.  As mobile, online video and social media continue to grow, online opportunities will increase year over year in many plan recommendations.
• Embrace content as media. If the right opportunity to engage with a target consumer doesn’t exist, brands can now create their own content and credibly connect with the consumer as a publisher that informs, appeals and helps drive purchase.

• Build test and learn into every plan. Whether it’s testing new media technology or more well-established opportunities for the first time, marketers understand the need to test and learn with a portion of their budget to get beyond incremental increases in results.

Avoid Habitual Marketing: Marketing out of habit is when a brand does something simply because it was done the year before. Empower’s mantra is to take the best approach. This means new and established opportunities are always under scrutiny.

As a result, the media mix may need to be tweaked to ensure proper coverage of all consumer touch points.  Consumers are multitasking more than ever- it even impacts their purchase decision and their media choices. A media mix must always be able to grow with audiences and delight them with products and services they discover because media was in the right place.

Anticipate Barriers: Planning ahead for the consumer experience is a key to whether consumers will embrace, ignore or even deface brand names.  We need to be realistic in terms of what can be done within our control and the time lines established. Identifying these parameters as early as possible helps ensure no surprises for the year ahead.

Build a Business Milestone Timeline: In addition to our halfway point check-in, there  are other milestones to look at throughout the year to look at how current campaigns are performing and then optimize them for the next week, month and quarter as needed.  A good measurement plan will help guide this opportunity to optimize for the best possible results.

Create a Strategic Road Map: As part of this annual planning process, look out as far as five years ahead. Where does the brand want to be and how can media help the brand accomplish these goals? The best plans increase  business results for the coming year, but also are thinking ahead with a goal of creating long-lasting relationships with the consumer.

:: By Courtney Ackerman, vice president of planning 

A recent CapGemini survey indicates that two-thirds of all executives describe their organization as data-driven. But when the survey probed a bit deeper, executives acknowledged challenges with “Big Data” pertaining to the management, aggregation, and real-time application [...]]]> An initial focus on specialized, short-term outcomes informs a collaborative, long-term approach.

A recent CapGemini survey indicates that two-thirds of all executives describe their organization as data-driven. But when the survey probed a bit deeper, executives acknowledged challenges with “Big Data” pertaining to the management, aggregation, and real-time application of multiple forms of data.

While industries such as financial services, energy, healthcare, and pharma indicated priority in managing data, other industries heavily dependent on marketing and promotions such as retail and entertainment fared far worse.

More than half of the retail and entertainment executives surveyed indicated data “isn’t much of a priority.”

Big Data Adoption Barriers
Why is this? Some executives acknowledged narrowly-timed promotion windows and overall emphasis on shopper conversion as barriers to adoption of Big Data. In most cases, marketers in retail and entertainment rely on getting the greatest amount of reach in the shortest amount of time.

But the challenges in companies applying big data are shared across a wide variety of industries. The study showed:

• 70 percent of all executives are concerned with making sense of all the data;
• 73 percent are concerned with integrating the data in a cross-channel fashion;
• 91 percent are concerned with ROI.

Fortunately a road map exists for addressing the challenges of Big Data and managing concerns around ROI and cross-channel insights.

Road Map to Big Data Success
In 2011, an IBM research report “Analytics: The Widening Divide” outlined three types of companies gaining a competitive advantage through analytics and Big Data.

1. Transformed companies that have strong and sophisticated analytics capabilities and use data to guide both day-to-day operational decisions and inform strategic priorities;
2. Experienced companies comfortable with analytics and use data to inform a number of important decisions, but lacking a sophisticated platform driving insight;
3. Aspirational companies with basic analytical capabilities, perhaps in finance or another data-heavy area such as operations, but rarely use data to answer but the most basic questions.

When analyzing how companies made the change from Aspirational to Transformed, the research report uncovered two paths: the specialized path and the collaborative path.

Choosing the Right Path
Most organizations seem to prefer the collaborative path (though the MIT study does not quantify the difference between the two options) due to its ability to deliver cross-functional insights to be used in strategic planning. But many times these projects fail because the needs across departments vary a great deal, the data being integrated is unique to a specific discipline, no one can agree on a standard platform and finding a place to start can be difficult.

As a result, more organizations need to consider the specialized path and abandon the theoretical higher order benefits of a collaborative approach and simply get in the habit of working with data in very specialized ways.

A Matter of Timing
Companies will benefit more from building a quality approach to data analysis, even if it occurs on a small-to-medium scale within the organization. This process can then be repeated across the company and these new stakeholders can sit down and build a collaborative platform to identify strategic insights.

Companies hinder their ability to build collaborative platforms because the collaborators have little experience managing data projects and have nothing to bring to the table.

Being honest about the organization’s data maturity and recognizing the need to be more performance oriented within specific departments can jump start data initiatives. Focusing on short-term outcomes will help overcome short-term performance windows and provide better understanding to apply to a future-state collaborative platform.

:: By Matt Booher, director, digital analytics

Whether the topic was focused on online advertising, mobile, TV or social media , the conference sessions I attended all showed the impact of media technology convergence.

Digital is all [...]]]> On the heels of the American Advertising Federation’s annual “Admerica” conference, it’s apparent that the change throughout our industry has a common theme of mobility.

Whether the topic was focused on online advertising, mobile, TV or social media , the conference sessions I attended all showed the impact of media technology convergence.

Digital is all about mobility. Whether your discussing tablets, phones or another screen entirely, innovations in cloud computing and general connectivity mean mobile isn’t limited to outdoors. It’s always on.
Mobile is more than a phone. It provides consumers mobility and a seamless media experience  (there’s that word again).
Television is being watched on the best screen available. And that screen is usually complemented with a mobile device if it’s not the primary screen being used.
Social Media on 2nd and 3rd screens ties offline experiences together. Mobile + Print or TV brings social media into the viewing experience to increase consumer engagement with content.
All mediums require companion creative for the phone. Starting with the mobile device and extending it to other platforms saves a lot of rework when mobile is being added as an afterthought.

This is a 30,000 foot view. There were other things I learned at ADMERICA this year, but after hearing about “the year of mobile” for the last five years….2012 just might be it. And regardless of whether or not the industry delivers, one thing is clear – mobile is a much more pervasive concept that extends well-past the phone to impact consumer habits as a whole.

:: By Rose Wesselman, director, client leadership
iPad + TV uploaded by cameijei 

This is the first in a new series of Empower MediaMarketing (EMM) Product Profiles. These overviews are of Empower products and services we offer clients to help us quickly deliver insights on your brand, your consumer and your business in a world where media can change Every Day.

Need to [...]]]>

This is the first in a new series of Empower MediaMarketing (EMM) Product Profiles. These overviews are of Empower products and services we offer clients to help us quickly deliver insights on your brand, your consumer and your business in a world where media can change Every Day.

Need to know why sales in Chicago are sinking faster than the Cubs chance at a Series title? Are your customers in Minneapolis miffed? Need to know why consumers are selecting your competitor’s product over yours on a crowded store shelf? Store Patrol may help answer these questions — quickly.

What is Store Patrol?
Store Patrol provides immediate retail intelligence and consumer insight through our national panel of consumers. Store Patrol’s national network of more than 100,000 consumers are screened and trained to complete most projects in just a few days.

Common Uses of Store Patrol
Store Patrol has several applications for brands in a variety of categories, including CPG and retail in particular.

• Retail Audits: Check on store signage, displays and competitive pricing.
• Mystery Shopping: Ensure your operations are meeting your customer needs.
• In-Store Compliance: Confirm your in-store materials like signage and shelf talkers, are being installed correctly.
• Path-to-Purchase Research: Learn what consumers are thinking from the moment they enter the parking lot through the entire purchase experience.
• Ethnographic Research: Gain access to consumers at the moment they use your product.

Benefits of Store Patrol

• Affordable
• Scalable for most needs
• Fast – results provided usually in just a few days
• Nationwide network of agents ensure wide coverage

Store Patrol Features

• Time, date and GPS verification
• Photo confirmation
• All shoppers are tracked and screened
  

If your brand could benefit from Store Patrol, our newest in-store shopper insight tool, contact Kirby Thornton, Director of Consumer Insights at (513) 719-6235 or kirby.thornton@empowermm.com.

Those of us who went to school in the United States inevitably ended up reading The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost and the famous opening line “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood”. For those familiar with the poem, you might be wondering what it has to do with the recent updates [...]]]>

Those of us who went to school in the United States inevitably ended up reading The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost and the famous opening line “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood”. For those familiar with the poem, you might be wondering what it has to do with the recent updates from Google and Bing. After scrutinizing the two directions the search giants have taken, it is obvious to me that they have brilliantly started down wildly divergent paths that we all take very often.

Going Deep: Google’s Knowledge Graph

Google has invested a lot of time and money in something really cool (as usual). If you ask Larry Page what Google is going to be building out every year, he is usually going to answer “search”. This year, they have made countless updates to their search product, but perhaps the most intriguing and useful is what they have deemed “The Knowledge Graph”.

They have been appending search data with additional information for quite some time now, most obviously with the Search Plus Your World update. Google has now added another layer of intelligence to its search algorithm: human intelligence and the relationship between pieces of knowledge. Imagine a giant web of pieces of human knowledge that live in web pages on the internet. Google is now rapidly indexing the relationship between those “things” and other “things”, and displaying other relevant information. See the search for “Galileo” below.

I am not only immediately displayed pertinent information next to the SERPs, but other related items that have an inherent relationship with Galileo within the context of human knowledge. This allows users to immediately begin to drill extremely deep into any topic much faster, easier, and better than they were able to before.

Going Wide: Bing’s Newest Social Updates

For a long time I have ridiculed Bing’s attempts at integrating search and social. First, their exclusive data partnership with Facebook is blatant anti-competitive behavior. Second, if I happened to own a Dell and didn’t have the common sense to use Firefox or Chrome and did a search in Internet Explorer for something, I just didn’t see the utility of knowing that one of my Facebook friends liked a bar down the street. There are maybe five people in my social graph whose opinion I would value on something like that.

But with their newest update, they have built in something that I feel is being widely over-looked and is truly remarkable: search results appended with recommendations from people who have true subject matter authority. Some might argue that Google had already accomplished this with SPYW, but the fact is that search results were not really appended with valuable social data, just with data from people who were really good at manipulating Google+.

In the search result pictured above, I’m displayed a bunch of friends who might know something about “restaurants in Cincinnati”. That’s kind of useful, but I don’t really count on their culinary expertise. What is more interesting is the information  displayed in the “People Who Know” box. Everyone in there is influential on both Twitter and in terms of RSS subscriptions. In other words, they are true social authorities, not just great at using Google+. Even cooler, it can tell tangential topics that these people’s suggestions might help me.

So Which Is Better?

Neither! They are both such simple and elegant solutions to very different kinds of problems and very different kinds of research that require different inputs. Google’s update gives me the ability to go as far down the rabbit hole on a given topic as quickly as possible. It is learning at the speed of light. Bing allows me to receive information from both trusted and tested sources. I guess it really depends on what you’re searching for and which you find more valuable: the world’s most advance contextual machine learning tool, or the advice of a trusted source of information.

Either way, I wish these companies would all collaborate more. Imagine if I were able to type in “Galileo” and find recommendations from a professor at Harvard, or “restaurants in Cincinnati” to find out that not only does a place serve a great burger, it also used to be a speakeasy during prohibition.

:: By Alec Painter, Associate Director, Search Marketing