To listen and watch playback of the webinar, Video Advertising Engagement—Trends for Marketers, click here. You can view the PowerPoint deck below.

Key takeaways include:

• What are the primary metrics for measuring video engagement?
• What kind of targeting can be done with video?
• How do consumer control, viral ads and social media work together to enhance video engagement?
• How can sponsored video content create engagement?

About David Hallerman

David Hallerman is eMarketer’s expert in US online advertising and marketing, covering online video advertising, search marketing, internet ad targeting, email marketing and ad spending across media. He is frequently quoted in top business publications and broadcast programs.

Sponsored by Undertone.

AN INTERVIEW WITH:
Emily White
Senior Director of Local
Facebook

Emily White joined Facebook in September 2010. She leads the company’s product, sales and marketing efforts to engage with local businesses and users. White spoke with eMarketer principal analyst Noah Elkin about Facebook Places, the company’s location-sharing feature, and Deals, its location-based commerce initiative, as well as Facebook’s perspective on the burgeoning geolocation market.

eMarketer: Facebook was a relative latecomer to the fast-emerging location market, but given the size of Facebook’s mobile audience, it immediately becomes the heavyweight in the space. Could you talk about how Places and Deals will evolve?

White: You and I know Facebook as the place where users connect with each other—where you’re able to find your friends and you know what’s going on in their lives. You can foster and in some cases even start relationships with those friends on the Facebook platform. And I think the most natural extension of that is into a place where users and businesses can interact.

In fact, it’s really an extension of how businesses have been using the Pages platform. We found that many local businesses started to use Pages as their main communication mechanism, so what we really wanted to do was enable an even deeper relationship between those businesses and their customers. And we picked as a starting point one of the biggest problems local businesses have had online, which is they’ve been told that they need to spend money on advertising and to create a local presence. But they don’t always know exactly what they get for it. The concept of check-in deals helps them start to connect the dots between what’s happening online and what’s happening in their store.

Likewise, we have 200 million users on mobile devices looking at Facebook on a really frequent basis. So why not have an additional feature whereby they can interact with a business in a meaningful way and get some value out of it, and at the same time provide merchants value related to what’s happening in their store.

eMarketer: Two things about Deals struck me as particularly interesting. One is that it’s free for businesses to participate. The other is that Facebook is not currently monetizing it in any way. With this base of 200 million very active mobile users, what is the longer-term plan for monetizing the connection between mobile and local?

White: This has been a frequently asked question since we launched Deals. And the only answer I have right now is we often launch features early in the product life cycle to get them out there, see how users adopt them, and then build a product around the usage we’re actually seeing in the marketplace. We felt like having any barrier around payment didn’t make sense if we wanted to drive really fast adoption from merchants. We wanted to see how merchants embraced it, and then go back and tweak the product flow in ways that were optimal for businesses and users. We’ll think about the monetization on top of that, if and where it makes sense.

eMarketer: A lot of players have jumped into the location space, so there’s fragmentation in the market. Given that Facebook has the largest overall user base, how do you see Facebook helping to resolve the fragmentation issue, especially in a scenario in which a consumer knows there’s a deal out there, but doesn’t know whether to check in on Facebook or on a Yelp, Loopt or foursquare?

White: I get about 10 emails a day from deal sites, and I don’t have time to go through all of them. This is a real user issue that is a clear result of all the excitement around this space. There is certainly a scenario where one of the players is going to successfully and elegantly aggregate this data to make it much easier for the users to figure out exactly what deal they should be looking at on any given day, or where, based on their location.

eMarketer: Does the open application programming interface (API) that Facebook unveiled in conjunction with Deals position Facebook as the potential aggregator of location data and check-in information?

White: That was not the intent of the API, but it certainly is a way for third parties to send us their check-in information if they want. From a merchant perspective, it’s helpful to aggregate the check-in data, and from a user perspective it’s helpful to aggregate the deals data. There are companies such as Yipit that are doing this already. The challenge for any of these other players is, are they the place where the users are? And is that the one place users are going to check in every day as part of their normal routine? This is really a greenfield area, and there’s a lot we’re going to find out over the next year.

eMarketer: When Facebook launched Deals, many media outlets inevitably described it as the foursquare-killer. Whom do you see as the competition in this space?

White: There are a lot of companies that overlap in this space, but I’m not sure I would say they’re all really competition. I’m also not sure this is a winner-take-all market. All signs right now say that users have different ways they prefer interacting day in and day out, and some of them are going to find that foursquare is just part of their life, and they really appreciate the game mechanics behind foursquare. Others are going to like the deal discovery that Groupon gives them.

The complete interview is only available to eMarketer Total Access clients. To learn more about becoming an eMarketer client, click here.

To listen and watch playback of the webinar, Key Digital Trends for 2011, click here. You can view the PowerPoint deck below.

You’ll find out what to expect in mobile, social media and online advertising, including:

• Why marketers are increasing spending on social media –
  and what it means for other marketing budgets
• Why apps aren’t just a mobile tool
• How targeting consumers by location will evolve
• What is real-time bidding and how it will change your job
• Why the privacy issue might be the trend to halt all trends

About the Speakers:

Noah Elkin, principal analyst, covers developments in mobile marketing, usage, content, devices and commerce. He is co-founder and co-chair of the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization’s Emerging Technologies Committee and a member of the Direct Marketing Association’s iDirect Leadership Committee. He is in demand as a speaker at digital and industry conferences.

David Hallerman, principal analyst, is eMarketer’s expert in US online advertising and marketing, covering search marketing, online video advertising, internet ad targeting, email marketing and ad spending across media. He is frequently quoted in top business publications and broadcast programs.

Debra Aho Williamson, principal analyst, is a leading thinker on social media marketing and the demographics of social media users. The founding executive editor of pioneering internet publication The Industry Standard, Debra is quoted for her analysis in the business press and invited to speak at major industry events.

Please join us for this eMarketer webinar, and learn from Principal Analysts Noah Elkin, David Hallerman and Debra Aho Williamson about some key digital trends for 2011.

Sponsored by Unica.

The ad:tech London conference rang several changes in 2010. For one thing, conference sessions were located in the same hall as exhibitors’ stalls and the seminars delivered by industry experts. This made for a buzzy gathering and more concentrated networking.

In another departure, a representative of the print publishing fraternity struck a positively optimistic note. According to Martin Morgan, CEO of the Daily Mail and General Trust, the DMGT now derives 30% of its revenue from digital. With 44 million unique users each month, the Daily Mail earns significant sums from advertisers. As a result, Morgan confidently predicted that the Mail site will remain free to access—and should pick up additional readers from news providers that move behind pay-walls.

But the big stories were social and mobile. Since last year, social media services have consolidated their position in the limelight. Shiva Rajaraman, product manager at Twitter, kicked off the two-day program, sharing some statistics (the site attracted an average 90 million tweets per day in September 2010) and news that the company will soon allow advertisers to target Twitter users on the basis of who they follow and what they are looking for. 

Next up was Colm Long, Facebook’s director of online operations, EMEA. Impressive stats here, too: According to Long, the site now operates in 70 languages (translated within hours by about 300,000 volunteers around the world), and 150 million people access Facebook via mobile apps. In the UK alone, there were almost 28 million users at the start of September 2010—more than 45% of the population, and about 55% of web users. Over 60% of UK Facebook users log in daily, and 52% are female.

Other speakers reporting from the front line of the social frontier included Nicole Vanderbilt, CEO of furniture and interiors site mydeco, which currently boasts 1.2 million unique visitors per month. Advanced software enables users to plan rooms, decorate and furnish them virtually, and offers various sharing options too. Site visitors can comment on the room plans and reviews of other users. Mydeco also benefits from the 1 million monthly click-throughs to retail partners whose goods are shown on the site.

Meanwhile, luxury brand owner LVMH is pioneering the concept of “open luxury.” The key, said Kamel Ouadi, EVP, Digital for Louis Vuitton, was to recognize the complex emotions associated with luxury in consumers’ minds, and recreate those by digital means. LVMH has tapped top-flight writers, artists, photographers, filmmakers, designers, actors and fashion figures to create exclusive high-end content for a new website, Nowness.  Launched in February 2010, the site aims to become “the essential reference point for luxury global lifestyle” and to disprove the notion that luxury and exclusivity sit oddly with social media. One new film or audio production from the stable of creative talents is uploaded each day. The site, said Ouadi, incorporates software “capable of assessing our users’ interests and tailoring our recommendations for stories to reflect their preferences as they browse the content archive.” The site now claims 200,000 unique monthly visitors.

Dell too is exploring the intersection of intimacy and scale, according to Manish Mehta, Vice President, Global Online for the computer giant. The goal, he said, was to take social media “beyond campaigns,” and ensure that Dell established an online “voice” that served as both foundation and expression of the brand. The company is also taking steps in social commerce—one project aims to create a tag cloud for aggregated product reviews, and post the results on Facebook.

Mobile business has also leapt ahead since 2009. Thankfully, the industry is well past the point of asking whether this is “the year of mobile”; recent statistics and projections speak for themselves. According to Ian Carrington, Google’s director of mobile advertising for the EMEA region, mobile search is growing at 400% per year, and spending in this area is set to climb from £500 million ($700 million) in 2009 to £2.8 billion ($3.9 billion) by 2013. Of course, not every proposition succeeds in this highly competitive marketplace. Carrington cited evidence that 90% of mobile apps are deleted within 30 days of download, as their novelty or usefulness wanes. But consumers’ willingness to engage and transact via mobile is good news for many retailers. Overall, said Carrington, Google has found conversions to purchase 43% higher on the mobile platform than on PCs.

Life isn’t always easy for exponents of the new mobile way of life, however—to judge by the recent adventures of Alexandre Mars, CEO of mobile communications agency PhoneValley and Head of Mobile for Publicis Groupe. Mars appeared on the ad:tech stage walking gingerly, and sporting a black eye. Apologizing for his appearance, he told the story: A few days earlier, he was attending meetings in New York City, where stocks of the iPhone 4 were low or nonexistent. Walking alone one evening, he was attacked and beaten by a gang of young people eager to get their hands on the coveted handset. The bruises, said Mars, were taking a while to heal. But he did manage to hang on to his iPhone.

While the big topic today among most pharmaceutical marketers generally has something to do with FDA regulations and DTC marketing on social media, another equally important question is about the healthcare community. As more physicians start using online tools in their daily practice, what are the best ways marketers can reach them?

We recently chatted with Meredith Ressi of Manhattan Research to learn more about the behavior of healthcare professionals online and the most effective strategies for reaching them. Here is a snippet from the full interview, available to eMarketer Total Access clients.

eMarketer: What types of online information do healthcare professionals want most and what sources do they find most credible?

Meredith Ressi:

Healthcare providers, specifically physicians, are integrating their use of digital media and online sources across a broad spectrum of activities. It’s very much a part of how they practice medicine. There’s lot of journal content, continuing medical education and video content that is available online today. Physicians are increasingly looking for things that help them with decision support during the workday—practical tools that are accessible and can help them easily get their questions answered.

We’re also seeing so many more physicians turning to the internet when they’re trying to make treatment decisions for patients. They turn to online journals such as Medscape, UptoDate and sites focused on evidence-based medicine that help them find best practices for treatment.

eMarketer: Have you noticed changes over time in how physicians search for information?

Ressi:

They used to be very loyal to a few websites like Medscape and Bedlinen for journal searches. Today, they’re much more search engine friendly. It’s also interesting that more than half of all physicians are accessing Wikipedia as a medical information source, but less than 10%—maybe more like 5%—of those are actually contributing to it. This is driven by physicians’ increasing reliance on search engines.

As far as age differences, we don’t see as many as you might think. We survey physicians of all ages and what’s been fascinating in the past few years is that there really isn’t a significant segmentation as there is with general consumers. Physicians have overcome that hurdle of education and income that often is a predictor of internet adoption. They have always been a tech-savvy, curious bunch. In fact, older physicians are more likely to be posting user-generated content online than younger ones.

eMarketer: What about physician community sites, such as Sermo and Ozmosis? How are physicians using them?

Ressi:

We’re seeing that adoption of professional communities—such as Sermo, Medscape Physician Connect, QuantiaMD—is still relatively low, with only about 20% of physicians accessing them.

With all the focus on these networks, though, it may be getting overlooked that two-thirds of physicians are accessing user-generated content online, broadly defined, and it’s not necessarily in closed communities. Discussions, for example, are happening in professional blogs and within Medscape or New England Journal of Medicine articles that enable reader comments. So there is a broad audience of physicians turning to their colleagues online through user-generated content that’s not necessarily on the social networks.

eMarketer: How is the increasing use of digital media changing the way that patients, peers and pharma companies interact and communicate with healthcare professionals?

Ressi:

With patients, it’s been a big shift. When I first started looking at the data five or six years ago, less than half of US adults were researching healthcare online. Today, 68% are. These engaged patients are bringing information to their physician’s office and talking about it. Today, you can’t really find a physician who says, “No, no one’s ever done that.”

Physicians went through a transition in coming to terms with this. Primary-care physicians were perhaps a bit put off by online health info at first, but they’ve been coming around over the past few years and have started recommending sites for patient education. Overall, we’re seeing a much more positive attitude from physicians in terms of patients taking an active role in their care. Many think it’s a good thing that some patients are active, involved and educated.

Physicians are also becoming more receptive to pharma marketers’ online info. Of course this varies based on the products and the program and the type of information. Primary-care physicians and a lot of the specialties are quite open to using patient education information to educate their patients about specific medications and conditions.

In terms of getting questions answered about a product, the pharma companies are certainly still the go-to resource for physicians. In fact, when a new product is launched, we see a great opportunity for a wide variety of online promotional interactions with physicians.

Key opinion leader webinars are another big area of interest. For example, if a pharma company has a relationship with a key opinion leader in a certain specialty who has either done work on a product or research in a certain area, a lot of times they’ll ask that person to do a webinar online and talk about some of their work. It’s that kind of peer-to-peer event that physicians are interested in having from pharma.

eMarketer: What are the greatest challenges in getting healthcare providers to use digital media, and what are the challenges in marketing to them online?

Ressi:

For pharma companies, which are among the primary marketers to physicians, the biggest challenge is figuring out how to fit the information they want to share into the physician’s workflow.

Over the past five years, the industry has spent time and money on a range of useful resources, including product websites and service portals that provide product information, answer questions and enable physicians to request samples. We know that most physicians have some sort of interaction with pharma companies but many of these resources don’t have very high traffic. Physicians still don’t know where to go when they need information immediately. So pharma marketers must focus more on letting physicians know that these resources exist.

Search can play a big role in this. Physicians often search for information they need right away. Integrating search is the first way to get into that workflow. Some companies are working with the resources they know physicians already use. For example, physicians use Medscape during the day and Epocrates on their mobile phone so pharma companies can integrate useful information where physicians already are, rather than send them to another site. Epocrates, for instance, is integrating click-to-call or e-mail customer service for some drug companies. And some firms have created an entire physician-facing product site right within Medscape. These are the kinds of things that can help get into that workflow.

The full version of this interview is available here, to eMarketer Total Access clients only. Every day they have access to new interviews with digital marketing leaders and trendsetting entrepreneurs.

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