American Express' twitter campaign generated an estimated 160,000 tweets and $7.2m in spend on the cards

"A campaign launched by American Express in the first week of March on Twitter has generated some eye-brow raising numbers.  Called Tweet Your Way to Savings, the campaign asks AmEx cardholders to tweet #AmEx hashtag in order to receive a deal the cardholder is marketing. The savings are automatically applied with the purchase.
Visibli Social Analytics, which has been tracking the #AmEx hashtags since the campaign launched on March 6, reports that the campaign has generated so far a total spend of approximately $7.2 million and discounts of $1.4 million, roughly. There have been 160,707 tweets, or approximately 259 tweets per hour."

Source:  MarketingVox, 16th March 2012

TV is the most effective medium for driving traffic to websites

"Television is still the most effective advertising channel in driving traffic to websites, according to a new survey by Deloitte.
The sixth annual ‘State of the Media Democracy’ report, based on responses from 2,276 UK consumers aged between 14 and 75 years old, found that 64% of respondents had visited a website after seeing an advert on TV.
61% said they visited a website after seeing a magazine ad, 59% said a newspaper ad drove them online, while only 12% of respondents said a mobile app advert had prompted them to visit a brand's site.
A further 62% of respondents said they paid more attention to newspaper adverts than their online equivalents.
Deloitte said that online display advertising had actually lost ground year-on-year, in 2010 only 49% of respondents said they paid more attention to print than online.
The power of TV advertising is to be expected, as the survey also found that 98% of people chose TV services as their favourite type of media."

Source:  Econsultancy, 19th March 2012

Mobile app Draw Something has been downloaded more than 20m times in 5 weeks

"Three weeks ago, we wrote about OMGPOP's mobile app, Draw Something. The ten-day-old social game had been downloaded more than 1.2 million times.
Now the company has shared even more staggering numbers with us.  In just five weeks, the pictionary-like game has been downloaded 20 million times.
That's more users than 3-year-old Foursquare has. That's almost as many users as 1.5-year-old Instagram.
Draw Something is one of the fastest growing mobile apps of all time.
CEO Dan Porter tells us the game is generating 6-figures per day. His company has generated more revenue from the game in five weeks than the entire company generated last year. He hasn't spent a dime on marketing since the app's first week."

Source:  Business Insider, 12th March 2012

Tablet ads have twice the engagement of mobile ads

"The latest research from mobile video ad network Rhythm NewMedia provides  further evidence that tablet ads are more inviting than those on mobile phones. In its fourth-quarter report, the company said full-page display ads on tablets had a 21% engagement rate compared to 9.4% for the same ad units on smartphones.
Almost a quarter (24%) of tablet owners and 11% of smartphone owners have clicked an ad they were viewing on their respective devices to learn more about a product or promotion, according to data released last week by Nielsen. Doubling the screen size may not always double the interaction rate, but it seems to help.
Among other findings, the Rhythm report showed that combining video with full-page ads increased engagement on mobile devices from 9.4% to 11.5%. When it comes to in-stream video ads, it also indicated that adding custom buttons for social networks like Facebook or Twitter or specific brands pushed up engagement rates from .97% to 1.21%
Fifteen-second ads continued to have better completion rates than 30-second ads, but only slightly -- 89.2% compared to 88.3%. The shorter format still accounts for the vast majority of video ads, although 30-second spots grew slightly in 2011 in connection with people increasingly watching full episodes on mobile devices."

Source:  MediaPost, 1st March 2012

Eventbrite has sold 50 million tickets

"Holy bananas, readers! We did it! Well, really, you did it.
Since Kevin and Julia Hartz and Renaud Visage founded the company back in 2006 in a Ramen-filled conference room, we have issued a dazzling 50 million tickets on Eventbrite."

Source:  Eventbrite blog, 22nd February 2012

Super Bowl advertisers achieved over $11m value in 'free' online views in the 3 days after the event

"Online views have effectively returned a huge chunk of Honda’s Super Bowl investment, as the automaker earned itself some $4.42 million in free media impressions in the three days after Super Bowl XLVI.
According to a new study by Kantar Video, the automaker aired two spots in the Super Bowl that enjoyed a whole new life online after the game. Through Feb. 8, Honda’s spoof of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, starring Matthew Broderick, was viewed 14.8 million times on YouTube and other online destinations, for an “earned media” value of $2.24 million.
Also drawing a crowd online was the Acura NSX spot starring Jerry Seinfeld. The ad, which featured cameos from the Soup Nazi and a usurping Jay Leno, was viewed 18.5 million times on YouTube, generating $2.18 million in free exposure.
Based on the average unit cost of $3.5 million per 30 seconds of airtime, each one-minute spot recouped nearly 33 percent of its original cost.
[...]

All told, the roster of Super Bowl ads churned up some $11.1 million in incremental free online views. The top 10 spots alone accounted for $8.62 million of the total, on 95.2 million views."

Source:  AdWeek, 13th February 2012

American brewer New Belgium estimates that its Facebook fans are worth approx. $50m in revenue

"Facebook fans really "like" New Belgium beer -- so much so that they account for half the brewery's annual sales.
New Belgium has 42,000 local fans in 38 markets and 400,000 across all of its Facebook pages.
While it's tough for brands to value Facebook fans, the No. 3 U.S. craft brewer has a pretty good idea: It estimates its Facebook fans are responsible for $50.7 million in yearly sales. That's why the Fort Collins, Colo.-based brewer goes the extra mile when it comes to social and event marketing. It has made a notable investment in its Facebook presence, enlisting local salespeople (called "Rangers" in company parlance) to update 38 local pages across 28 states and Washington, D.C., and investing in custom apps and experiences. It also strategically targets Facebook ads to existing fans of its main page -- now 211,000 fans strong, compared with 138,000 and 134,000 for the No. 1 and No. 2 in the craft-beer category, Samuel Adams and Sierra Nevada -- to drive them to local pages for their region.
Since the market for craft beer is inherently regional, New Belgium considers Sam Adams to be less of a competitor than much more obscure breweries in its local markets. This is where a regional Facebook presence comes in handy -- especially when New Belgium is eyeing new markets like Michigan, where it will begin distributing this summer.
"With these pages that essentially become Ranger blogs, we're really able to talk about what we're doing locally," said Adrian Glasenapp, New Belgium's director-advertising and social media. "They highlight the fact that we have sales reps who live in these communities and work with local nonprofits [offering sponsorships]."
[...]
New Belgium now has 42,000 local fans in 38 markets and 400,000 across all of its Facebook pages, including 107,000 for Fat Tire, its best-known beer. It set out to figure out how valuable they are this fall by asking Facebook fans to fill out a survey, which nearly 3,000 completed.
Based on the findings, they concluded that the typical fan bought $260 worth of New Belgium beer per year, assuming that respondents drank 10 beers a week and that New Belgium made up 25% of their consumption, which adds up to $50.7 million spent yearly by unique Facebook fans.
New Belgium committed roughly $235,000 to its social-media presence last year that was mostly dedicated to Facebook, including both app development and advertising. However, most of its marketing budget still goes to print buys in national titles such as Wired, Rolling Stone and Men's Journal; niche publications dedicated to topics like cycling; and alternative weeklies and other regional titles."

Source:  AdAge, 13th February 2012

Unilever's digital campaigns yield 'over $3 in revenue for each $1 spent'

"Unilever Chief Financial Officer Jean-Marc Huet also mentioned his company's 15% increase in digital spending last year vs. a 2% increase overall in the context of spending efficiency in a Feb. 2 investor meeting. That follows a December investor presentation by Chief Marketing Officer Keith Weed in which he noted several digital programs that produced north of $3 in revenue for each dollar spent."

Source:  AdAge, 6th February 2012

All of the 5 most viewed online trailers in 2011 came from films that were in the top 10 highest grossing of 2011

"Film sequels ruled 2011, but none more than Twilight's Breaking Dawn: Part 1. With nearly 200 million views for the year, Breaking Dawn – Part 1 was easily 2011's most viral movie trailer. As with all Twilight films, fans have accounted for most of the viral activity for the campaign. With the exception of a few dozen originals, more than 1,500 of the clips are copies or derivatives uploaded by audiences.
Transformers: Dark of the Moon and Cars 2 battled for runner-up, but Transformers came out on top by 2.6+ million views. Fast Five and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows land at fourth and fifth places.
All of the films on this list are in the top 10 grossing films of 2011, and three are in the top 5.  It makes sense – audiences get excited about a movie and they go online to watch its trailers in anticipation of its release."

Source:  Data from Visible Measures, reported in their blog, 21st December 2011

Average clicks and shares on Facebook by day of week

Click to enlarge

The data shows the number of clicks and shares on Facebook content as a percentage of the number of Fans.
Source:  Edgerank Checker, 16th November 2011

A Tweet from Selena Gomez generated 20,000 downloads of the Postcard on the Run mobile app

"Selena Gomez, the 19 year-old pop princess, actress and girlfriend of Justin Bieber, tweeted the above approbation for the iPhone application to her 8.3 million followers two weeks ago. Today, she informed the world that she too can play the celebrity investor and advisor part, and participated in Postcard on the Run’s $750,000 round of financing.
Postcard on the Run is a fresh, Los Angeles-based startup with iPhone and Android applications that lets you send real postcards to friends anywhere the world for $0.99 a piece. It has a few hooks including automatic address retrieval and “smell mail,” a feature that lets users add scratch-and-sniff scents to postcards.
The startup, which competes directly with Postagram and Apple’s similarly-purposed Cards app, now has Gomez, a powerful social media socialite — and possibly her even more influential boyfriend by association — in its corner. In addition to her Twitter legions, Gomez has nearly 25 million fans on Facebook. A Facebook update on today’s news nabbed 4,117 likes and 663 comments in four hours. Score one for Postcard on the Run.
The story goes that Gomez found the iPhone application on her own and loved it so much she tracked down founder Josh Brooks in September. The pair continued to chat and talks quickly turned to investment opportunities, Brooks told VentureBeat.
“She’s a fantastic partner for me,” Brooks said. Case in point: A recent tweet from Gomez netted the startup 20,000 downloads in 24 hours, he said."

Source:  VentureBeat, 17th November 2011

49% of people exposed to Doritos ads on XBox LIVE subsequently went out and bought Doritos

"Doritos’ ‘Unlock Xbox’ competition invited fans to capture the essence of the snack in the form of a Doritos Xbox LIVE Arcade game with the opportunity to win a $50,000 gaming consultant project. The campaign put the votes of Xbox LIVE users at the heart of the contest, driving far-reaching engagement and ensuring huge interest in the final Doritos games. The field was narrowed to eight by an expert panel of judges, and then pared down to three by the votes of Xbox LIVE visitors. After a pitch at Microsoft headquarters, the two finalists (Doritos Crash Course and Harm’s Way – by Doritos) were launched for free download on Xbox LIVE, with gamers voting on their favourite.
Key results:
Throughout the contest, Unlock Xbox delivered exceptional engagement levels
The winning game became the fastest downloaded Xbox LIVE Arcade game in history with over 1 million downloads in the first two weeks
Over 50% of those exposed to the Doritos ads on Xbox LIVE clicked to learn more about the contest
40% voted for their favourite Doritos Xbox LIVE Arcade game
72% took action after seeing Doritos advertising on Xbox LIVE
24% told friends about the Doritos Xbox competition
49% went out and bought Doritos"

Source:  Case study from Microsoft Advertising (UK), 4th July 2011

TV advertising in the UK delivers an average return of £1.70 per £1.00 invested

"Amid gloomy economic forecasts, a new study has revealed how advertising performed during the economic downturn in recent years. It shows that TV advertising created the most profit (an average return of £1.70 for every £1 invested), and that its return on investment (ROI) has increased by 22% in the last five years.
Payback 3, an independent study commissioned from Ebiquity by Thinkbox, is an econometric analysis of 3,000 ad campaigns across nine advertising sectors between 2006 and 2011. It compares, on a like-for-like basis, the sales and profit impact during the last five years of five forms of advertising: TV, radio, press, online static display and outdoor.
Other key findings include:
TV advertising is 2.5 times more effective at creating sales uplift per equivalent exposure than the next best performing medium (press);
TV advertising has a ‘halo effect’ across a brand’s portfolio. 38% of TV’s sales effect is felt by products not directly advertised;
TV’s ‘halo effect’ also makes other forms of advertising work harder;
TV is responsible for 71% of attributable sales in Ebiquity’s database, but only accounts for 55% of spend.
Effective profit
Ebiquity found that TV advertising’s ROI is on average 22% higher than five years ago, despite the recession. This is because TV’s effectiveness (sales uplift per exposure) has remained undiminished while the cost of advertising on TV has been falling in both absolute and relative (inflation-adjusted) terms.
TV also delivers the most extra profit, Ebiquity found: an average return of £1.70 for every £1 invested (ROI of 1:1.7). This compares to £1.48 for radio, £1.40 for press, £1.06 for online static display, and £0.45 for outdoor advertising."
Source:  Research by Ebiquity for Thinkbox, reported in a press release, 13th October 2011

Average Click Throughs on Facebook Q3 2011

Data from US, UK, France, Germany & Canada

Click to enlarge

Source:  Data TBG Digital campaigns from 5 markets in Q3 2011, collected & published in TBG Digital's Global Facebook Advertising Report, October 2011

Online advertising drives offline sales for CPGs / FMCGs

"comScore, Inc, a leader in measuring the digital world, and dunnhumbyUSA, a global leader in building brand value for consumer goods and retail companies, today released results of multiple studies measuring the offline sales impact of online display advertising for consumer packaged goods (CPG) advertisers. Retail sales were measured by analytically linking the permission-based comScore panel of one million U.S. Internet users to their anonymous loyalty card in-store purchase data provided by dunnhumbyUSA; no identifiable personal data was disclosed. By comparing the in-store brand buying of households exposed to online advertising with that of households not exposed, it was possible to determine the impact of online advertising campaigns. The results of the studies indicate that exposure to online display ads can lead to improved in-store sales for CPG brands.
[...]
An analysis of multiple CPG online ad campaigns that involved comparing the offline buying of households exposed to advertising with the buying behavior of households who were not exposed revealed a median in-store sales lift of 21 percent among the exposed households, with five out of every six campaigns generating a positive sales lift. Approximately 70 percent of campaigns generated a double-digit sales lift, and more than 40 percent generated lifts of at least 30 percent.
comScore also analyzed the offline sales results of a limited set of ad effectiveness campaigns that leveraged a new advertising product called Microsoft CPG Online Effect. This solution uses sophisticated predictive targeting algorithms powered by anonymous in-store buying data from dunnhumbyUSA coupled with online browsing data from comScore. These targeting algorithms are deployed by Microsoft Corp. across its network of sites.
The results showed an in-store sales lift of 42 percent, double the lift from campaigns that were not targeted using this approach. These results demonstrate how targeting algorithms can help improve efficiency and effectiveness in display ad delivery, providing more relevant ads to consumers, improved ROI for advertisers and higher CPMs for publishers. Dr Pepper Snapple Group is one of more than 20 CPG advertisers that have used this purchase-based targeting solution."
Source:  Press release from comScore, 11th October 2011

Advertising is more effective if seen on multiple platforms

"In the group that was exposed to TV ads alone, 50 percent of people correctly attributed the ad to the correct auto brand. For groups that saw the ad across all screens – TV, computer, smartphone and tablet – the ability to remember the brand jumped dramatically to nearly three-in-four (74%).
Similarly, only 22 percent of the group exposed to just the TV ad was able to correctly remember that the ad was for a 4-door sedan versus 39 percent of the group that saw the ad across all screens."

Source:  Research from Nielsen, commissioned by Google, reported on Nielsen's blog, 29th September 2011

There is almost no correlation between click through rates of ads and offline sales

(Sales lift on the Y axis, CTR on the X axis.  The random scatter shows that there is little correlation)

Click to enlarge

Source:  Data from Nielsen, quoted on their blog, 3rd October 2011

Twitter has 1,600 advertisers

"Twitter’s Chief Revenue Officer Adam Bain took the stage at IAB’s Mixx Conference today and revealed a few milestones for the communications platform, specifically in the advertising area. Bain said that Twitter now has 1,600 advertisers using the platform to reach consumers, and currently has an 80 percent retention rate with advertisers. Back in July Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said that the number of advertisers on Twitter had gone up by 600 percent, since last year when it was in the hundreds.
Back in March, Twitter partnered with Paramount Pictures to launch the trailer for new film SUPER 8 on Twitter. Bain also said today that Twitter helped Super 8 sell 1 million sneak peek tickets, and opening weekend box office exceeded projections by more than 50 percent."

Source:  Techcrunch, 4th October 2011

Facebook posts made though 3rd party APIs like Hootsuite attract less than 1/4 the engagement of posts made directly

"It’s been a general consensus in the EdgeRank community that 3rd party APIs (this simple list provides examples of potential 3rd Party APIs) are punished in Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm. We ran a study across our entire data set to provide evidence that our hypothesis is true. The result of our study was quite eye opening. Using a 3rd party API to update your Facebook Page decreases your likelihood of engagement per fan (on average) by about 80%.
We ran our analysis on 1,000,000+ Updates on 50,000+ Pages that influence over 1,000,000,000+ Fans. We took each individual post and analyzed the engagement (comment & likes) along with how many fans the Page had at the moment of updating. We then analyzed Facebook vs The Top 10 Other APIs (based on our sample size). We did a weighted average for the 3rd Party APIs, which resulted in 0.22% engagement. The result is a percentage that represents engagement per fan per post (on weighted average, of our Top 10 3rd Party API). Our sample size ranged per API, although we cut it off at the Top 10 APIs outside of Facebook."

Source:  Data from EdgeRank Checker, reported on their blog, 6th September 2011

Larger ad sizes tend to generate greater response

"Larger ad sizes tend to generate greater response. Size does matter apparently. As we have seen in years past, bigger ads perform better. We observed this with the latest set of metrics in which the half-page ad unit (300x600) which had the highest CTR, interaction rate (for both in-page and expandable formats) and expansion rates of all the available creative sizes we tracked for the benchmarks.
Although the U.S. had one of the lowest expansion rates, this market showed the highest expansion time. So Americans seem to expand ads less but when they do spend more time engaging with the ads themselves.
In terms of industry verticals, auto advertisers performed the best in terms of CTR (0.13% for flash ads) but conversely had the lowest interaction (1.9%) and expansion rates (0.2%). For interaction rate, telecom (9.4%) and B2B (9.2%) advertisers were the highest while B2B stood out in terms of expansion rate (7.5%) benchmarks."

Source:  Global data from DoubleClick, revealed in a blog post, 16th August 2011

Methodology:  "A couple of notes about this latest set of online advertising benchmarks. The data for these benchmarks are derived from a robust data set across DoubleClick for Advertisers, based on rigorous methodology with input from the Advertising Research Foundation. The charts cover global benchmark figures for the entirety of 2010 by ad format, ad size and industry vertical. The benchmarks are normalized across hundreds of advertisers, thousands of campaigns, and tens of billions of ad impressions."