Iain Tate, Global Interactive Executive Creative Director at Wieden + Kennedy, is the bright spark behind the campaign that transformed Procter & Gamble’s Old Spice from venerable shelf-filler into a buzzworthy icon.

That shouldn’t surprise anyone who heard Tait speak about advertising’s embrace of digital at the recent Yahoo! Provoke Summit.

He observed that those stuck with traditional thinking dislike the new reality in which “the best stuff wins,” but it’s now the public instead of “experts” determining what’s best. Furthermore, advertising professionals too often seek inspiration from looking at other ads. “That’s the last place you should be looking,” Tait says.

Success requires watching for what people actually do in real life with technology and with each other. And for those biding their time until things settle down? It’s never going to, Tait warns: “We just have to learn how to deal with it and thrive on it.”

Cannes, France — The first day of Cannes Lions was a bit of culture shock—not just because everyone was speaking French and I could barely order a sandwich, but also because of the degree to which everyone had gone beach-y. For example, there was the head of JWT’s Continental Europe operations, wearing shorts—and a jacket—on stage, looking like a 12-year-old prep school student.

But even with the laid-back vibe of the crowd, the ideas kept pace with the buttoned-down—or at least, shoe-wearing—world of advertising outside of Cannes. Here are four ideas you should know about, even if you weren’t here:

1. Where does creativity come from? David Harris, Executive Director of British agency Wunderman, spent months trying to figure out where inspiration comes from. He turned to neuroscience, religion, even mind-enhancing rugs, and somehow brought inspiration into a sense of order. All inspiration has six parts:
   ~ Discovering the problem
   ~ Thinking time
   ~ Dispersal – In other words, walking away from the problem and letting inspiration strike. The problem is, “It’s looked down on as laziness. Investing time and money in something with no output is a hard sell.”
   ~ The trigger – something that puts the pieces together.
   ~ Epiphany – Sometimes this involves overcoming our cultural programming to see the answers.
   ~ Communication
2. Time is currency: Every advertiser needs to find a way to get consumers to part with the one thing they can’t spare: time. So, said JWT chairman Bob Jeffrey, you have to create ideas that people want to spend time with.
3. Sales lives: Ogilvy Worldwide held a competition on stage to name the world’s best salesperson; each of the three finalists had to sell a Motorola Smartphone. The winner was Todd Herman of Edmonton, Alberta. But advertising agencies need to stop thinking of sales as an awkward foot-in-the-door kind of thing, says Ogilvy Group UK’s Rory Sutherland. “I’d plea for this to be fully part of advertising and marketing—and not be someone else’s job,” he said.
4. The world is going mobile: As mobile phones replace PCs in some homes and become a true “second screen,” says Eric Bader, Chief Strategy Officer Worldwide of Initiative, mobile marketers have four wins facing them: Higher media ROI, in-store marketing, loyalty and customer relationship management, and more engagement with the brand.

I’ll be back tomorrow, dressed more casually but just as ready to talk marketing. Au revoir!

— Jeff Sweat, Blog Editor

Three final insights from SMX Advanced Seattle day two

But one word made the crowd perk right up: “cupcakes.”  The Bing booth was handing out cupcakes to celebrate the decision engine’s first birthday.  Just the morning sugar rush that everyone needed for another round of deep dives into search marketing hot topics.  Read on for the top three take-aways.

What you don’t know about building loyalty with local
The mobile and local markets are inextricably linked—and both are ripe with opportunity for marketers.  Consider this: nearly 50% of online search has location intent.  Another important nugget: according to Bing, nearly 40% of commercial purchases happen more than two weeks after the initial desktop search. Contrast that with 65% of actions happening within just an hour of a mobile search!  No wonder it’s been estimated the location services market represents $20 billion worth of potential.

So how do you get your piece of that pie? Here are some tools to get you started:

• Leverage location services like Gowalla, Foursquare, Whrrl, and Loopt.  Or better yet set up an account with Check.in which allows you to manage all your location services in one place. 

• Stay clued in with sites like SocialGreat or buzzd to find out what businesses are creating buzz in your local area. 

• Bookmark Snacksquare to check what your competitors are offering on location service sites as incentive programs. 

• And don’t forget to list your business on getlisted.org for a bit of an SEO boost.

The next step?  Approach these location based services as a way to engage existitng customers, incentivize them to spend and reward loyalty.  Gap, for example, gives customers, who check in at stores, discounts after a certain number of visits.  TastiDlite uses Foursquare as a virtual punch card, giving customers points towards a free frozen yogurt for checking in at stores and sharing their status on Twitter and Facebook.  Holiday Inn promotes discounts on same day check-in and even sometimes gives out free rooms that would have gone unoccupied anyway.  When creating your location based strategy, keep in mind one universal truth: customers will jump through quite a few hoops to get something for free.  

What you don’t know about targeting your audience
Most of the 436 million searches happening on Facebook every month are searches for people.  But the experts still see key opportunities for Facebook and other social media networks in the marketing funnel.  An underappreciated opportunity? The ability to target thanks to the micro demographic information at your fingertips. 

In the search world, marketers get so caught up in keywords and ad networks that they sometimes forget to research their target demographic. Facebook is demography-based, which means you can use it to look at “informational social segments,” according to Marty Weintraub of aimClear.  In other words, you can segment and target based on a variety of self-reported data.  Look beyond gender and age.  Look at interests—are environmentalists or fashionistas more likely to buy your products?  Look at job titles—how about targeting professionals who work at media organizations if you are looking to drive brand awareness?  Look at “likes”—is a person that engages with competitors a good target for your campaigns?  For more ideas on segmenting, check out aimClear’s blog. 

What you don’t know about video strategy
The “What You Don’t Know About YouTube” panel made one thing clear: sorry, there is no magic bullet for viral success on YouTube.  In fact here are just some of the factors Gregory Markel of Infuse Creative, says you  need to optimize to see strong ROI on YouTube: title, description, tags, links, keywords, playlists, flagging, close captioning/transcriptions, social media outreach, inbound link building, subscriber rate, annotation usage, social bookmarking, blogger outreach, press releases, crowd sourcing.  Exhausting list—especially after two exhausting days!

At the heart of success on YouTube is a well integrated strategy.  All the planets aligning helps too. Here are some fundamentals to keep in mind along the way: 

• Respect the audience’s intelligence but a little shock and awe never hurts.

• Find balance between entertainment and branding.

• Include a clear call to action to be able to measure results.

• Promote the video with honesty and transparency.

• Don’t underestimate the power of a few key influencers blogging or tweeting about your video.

• If organic success doesn’t happen, a paid campaign is always a good option.

Thanks to everyone at SMX Advanced for a terrific conference filled with deep insights, dynamic speakers, nerdy laughs, relaxed networking and surprisingly good buffets.  For more on everything you never knew you wanted to know about search marketing, click here.

—Dianne Molina

Yahoo! Branded Game

In-game advertising offers unique reach and  engagement
With spending on in-game advertising projected to grow to $1 billion by 2014, major brands like Kellogg’s, Pepsi and Friskies are getting in the game—and they’re betting big on Yahoo! Games. Here’s why: Not only is Yahoo! Games the number one gaming portal on the Web, but it also gives advertisers frequent opportunities to connect with their customers through in-game advertising.

Yahoo! has an unmatched catalogue of 800 casual games, ranging from traditional crossword puzzles to more immersive titles with winks to pop culture, such as Escape from Lost Island. The site includes both free plays and paid downloads.

And casual online gamers can’t get enough. In March alone, the portal attracted 13.6 million unique users who spent more than 575 million minutes on the site and visited more than 294 million pages. Yahoo! Games also ranks number one with the more than 65 million estimated women in the United States who play casual games.

“With in-game advertising, Yahoo! offers brands not only a broad audience across several key demographics, but also a unique opportunity to accomplish what every advertiser wants: recurring brand engagement through real interactivity,” says Walter Doublestein, Yahoo!’s Senior Producer of Gaming.

The in-game advantage for advertisers
Advertisements have been seen in online games for more than a decade. One in-game advertising model borrows heavily from the “product placement” approach common in the TV and film industry. This type of in-game ad can appear in the form of a branded billboard within, say, a racing game. With this non-disruptive approach, brands are woven into the fabric of an online gaming environment.

Another common form of in-game advertisements are “trailers” or “bumpers” at the beginning, middle or end of a game—similar to what online video consumers have come to expect in recent years. The competitive advantage to advertisers on Yahoo! Games? Ads can be either video or static; plus, they are displayed to users on a two-panel “spread” in a very large game player window. According to Doublestein, the size and flexibility of this digital canvas quite simply gives advertisers the space to get more creative, develop more memorable campaigns, and have better brand impact.

Games customized around your brand
Yahoo! Games offers advertisers another compelling, more customized option: developing a game entirely around a brand itself. Yahoo! game developers pitch several creative concepts—sometimes based on a theme in TV ad campaigns the brand might be running—and the advertiser chooses the right game for their brand. Brands such as TNT, Yoplait and Progressive have all found that this is an ideal way to deliver an advertising message in a gaming context.

These branded games are seen as more than advertisements, since they’re frequently in the top five games on Yahoo! Games and several average more than ten minutes of engagement. “The best part,” Doublestein says, “is that this kind of passive ad messaging is embraced by consumers long after initial launch, meaning they keep coming back and reengaging over and over again.”

For example, Friskies worked with Yahoo! to develop a game targeting women over 35 who love cats. The result, Friskies Wonderland Quest, was the top game on Yahoo! Games for two weeks and among the top 20 for the year. At one point, the free game was garnering about 100,000 game plays a day, extending the brand well beyond the intended audience.

Even though in-game advertising is relatively new, Yahoo! Games offers what advertisers have always wanted: the art of creating immersive consumer experiences that marry advertising and original content. Just more of it.

— Dianne Molina

In the first part of “Lessons for Social Media Stakeholders,” we reviewed ways in which Customer Care, Sales, Product and Editorial teams can actively and passively utilize social media data and networks.

Social networks can include Twitter and Facebook accounts, blogs and blog comments, forums, groups or any site where there is social interaction. In many cases, social networking can also include offline events.

In this article we’ll continue this exploration with four more types of stakeholders within a company:

• Marketers
• Market Research
• Brand
• Corporate Communications and PR

As mentioned in the previous article, one person in a company may wear several hats, taking on more than one responsibility listed in this series. For example, a marketing person may also be doing the research, brand work, and writing editorial pieces. In that case, a combination of listening and engagement activities listed under each one of those stakeholders in these documents would apply.

Listening herein refers to gathering data from social networks, and tapping into conversations our communities are having on and (sometimes) offline.

1. Marketing
Listening to conversations about product sentiment, competitor sentiment, and industry needs and wants online allows marketers to define targeted messages and shape consumer sentiment. 

Marketers can also leverage key influencers (people who are brand- or topic-advocates with a large following or readership) to help spread the word about news, a product release, an article or a campaign to their audience, creating more brand visibility and, ideally, more advocates.

Additionally, social networks can be used to promote products, services and features, driving links and traffic back to the site. An increase in the quality of relevant links can boost search engine rankings, driving even more traffic.

Passive listening:

• Listen to what consumers are saying they want or need from your industry.
• Determine consumer sentiment about your current assets (brands, people, products, services and news).
• Compare consumer sentiment about competitive assets.
• Listen to what industry influencers are saying about your industry, your brand or your competitors’ brand

Active engagement:

• Define marketing messaging and campaign strategies based on consumer sentiment, needs and wants.
•  Determine online marketing channels to target based on where conversation is happening.
• Reach out to influencers in target markets to create evangelists for the brand/product.
• Reward influencers who are already brand advocates to generate brand evangelists.
• Embed links in social networks to drive traffic to your site and influence SEO.

Related Resources

• Social Media Marketing Kit
• The Social Technographics Ladder (social networking audience types)
• Role of Social Networking in SEO

2. Market Research
Gathering research data online by skimming for particular topics or company asset mentions in social networking conversations differs from traditional survey-based research. Comprehensive research would include both methods, rather than one in place of the other.

Here are some of the features that social listening platforms can provide for research:

• Collect real time data, anytime.
• Gather data based on online (and sometimes offline) conversations.
• Measurement is definable by any topic (brand names, products, features and people).
• Determine topic sentiment/satisfaction over time.
• Determine topic popularity over time.

Add this to traditional research reports that give you metrics like retention, engagement, conversion, time spent and likelihood, and you’ve got some very well rounded research.

Passive listening:

• Asset (brand, products, people, services and news) or topic sentiment
• Asset or topic awareness/popularity
• Brand advocacy
• The same measurements for competitors

Active engagement:

• No direct engagement with online community

Related Resources

• Market Research via Social Media
• Social Media Market Research: A Study of the Tropicana Repackaging

3. Brand
Much of your brand work is based on research defined in the previous Research section. Brand and/or Marketing teams can then use this research to shape a brand and its messaging.

Passive listening:

• Asset (brand, products, people, services and news) or topic sentiment
• Asset or topic awareness/popularity
• Brand advocacy
• The same measurements for competitors

Active engagement:

• Shape brand look and feel based on community or target market sentiment.
• Guide marketing strategies and ad campaigns based on brand health and consumer sentiments.
• Prioritize marketing investment in various markets.
• Usually no direct engagement with online community (unless Brand team is also actively marketing).

Related Resources

• As Media Brands Build Their Own Communities, They Must Evolve Their Business Model
• Social Media Brand Engagement Report

4. Corporate Communications/PR
PR teams can leverage consumer sentiment to provide a targeted message to influence sentiment to the company’s advantage. PR can also determine who the most influential and valuable people and products are at the company, based on volume and sentiment, and promote those people and products more.

Passive listening:

• Listen for overall sentiment toward the company’s assets (people, products, services, brands and news).
• Listen closely to what industry influencers are saying about your company’s assets.

Active engagement:

• Uncover company assets that have strong positive consumer sentiment but aren’t currently promoted as well as they could be.
• Prioritize company assets to promote more or less based on sentiment and popularity.
• Formulate PR messaging based on sentiment.

Related Resources

• Resources for New Media and Social Media PR
• 10 of the Best Social Media Tools for PR Professionals and Journalists

Looking for ways that Customer Care, Sales, Product and Editorial teams can utilize social media data and networks? See the first part of this article: Social Media Stakeholders Part 1: Customer Care, Sales, Product, and Editorial.

Do you use additional listening metrics or ways to engage in social networks with your communities? Please share!

— Laura Lippay

Visit Laura at Lip Service. See also her previous posts, “12 Stellar SEO Tools” and “Upcoming SEO and Media Events.”

(Image courtesy Intersection Consulting via Flickr, CC 2.0)

That insect was not a hallucination: You really did see a large praying mantis creep up from the left side of the Yahoo! home page and scamper across to the tree frog’s pool on the other side. It’s just one part of the extraordinary online marketing campaign supporting Discovery’s 11-part television event “Life,” narrated by Oprah Winfrey.

“Discovery’s ‘Life’ is all about uncovering the beauty, awe and unexpected wonder of the natural world from a very personal perspective, and the digital campaign on Yahoo! mirrors this philosophy,” says Mitch Spolan, Vice President of North American Field Sales, Yahoo! “Discovery wanted the online creative to be as artistically stunning as the series, and we believe this campaign offers Yahoo! users a unique engagement with the series.”

For the first time ever there are “floating” elements—like that beautifully photographed bug—taking over the Yahoo! home page. And the NCAA Scoreboard on Yahoo! Sports became the natural habitat of an amazing chameleon on the day of the ‘Life’ premiere, right in the thick of March Madness.

Users also can customize the page with incredible gutter designs taken from “Life,” and express their inner critter on Yahoo! Messenger by using one of the program’s animals as their display image, sharing video from “Life” with their buddy list friends, and updating their status with expressions of interest in the series.

Further demonstrating Discovery’s commitment to “Life,” the network is the first entertainment advertiser to take advantage of Yahoo!’s Rich Ads in Search product and to use Tandem Mail units that interact on the Yahoo! Mail welcome page.

Yahoo! is a big part of your life, and now “Life”—Discovery’s definitive exploration of our planet’s living things and their spectacular, bizarre and fascinating behavior—is a big part of Yahoo!

— Chris Marlowe

This week, your indefatigable Yahoo! Advertising correspondents went on a field trip to the 4A’s “Transformation 2010” conference in San Francisco. (Those 4A’s stand for the American Association of Advertising Agencies.) While there, we did old the meet and greet, tweeted, and posted to Facebook our take-aways from some the smartest minds in the advertising world. We even did a little live blogging and took some video, too. (Lookin’ good, Carol!)

Below is a round-up of some the most interesting sessions, in case you couldn’t be there in person.

How Social Media Has Transformed the Communications Landscape
Who: Arianna Huffington, Co-Founder and Editor in Chief, The Huffington Post
What: Huffington spoke with considerable humor about how the Internet in general and social media in particular have changed the way people interact with media content. “We”—meaning users as well as media outlets—“are consuming news, sharing news, developing news. We are all part of that story,” she noted. Online readership is up 34 million in the past few years, while newspaper viewership is down 7 million. The key for understanding and engaging the online medium for publishers and advertisers is  “transparency and authenticity.” At the 4A’s conference, she mentioned what she calls the “four E’s:” engagement, energy, empathy, enthusiasm, enrichment. These are the real drivers of audience behavior online.
So What?: The shift in attention to online presents a huge opportunity for advertisers and marketers because the most engaged consumers are the most loyal consumers. Notable quote: “If Carol Bartz is outspoken, what does it make me, a demure shrinking violet?” Probably not, Ms. Huffington.

More on this session via AdAge.

How Social Media is Transforming Everything
Who: Pete Blackshaw, EVP Digital Strategic Services Nielsen; Ian Schafer, CEO Deep Focus; Bryan Wiener CEO 360i
What: Traditionally, paid media is the hub and earned media are the spokes; social media puts earned media at the center.
So What?: Tremendous opportunity to measure consumer reactions and emotions as real-time feedback holds us accountable. Social media does not replace TV, it enables communication and feeds curiosity and advocacy in the purchase funnel. Social will also never scale like TV and won’t get the same margins. Agencies need to reengineer themselves for this new business model.

A Message From Magazine Industry Leaders
Who: Cathleen Black, President, Hearst Corporation; Ann Moore, Chairman and CEO, Time Inc.;
Jack Griffin, President, National Media Group; Jann Wenner of Wenner Media
What: Speakers talked about how the vitality of magazines has not been compromised by the Internet but complemented by it. It is a myth that magazines are losing readership; readership is actually up dramatically, especially with young people. As long as magazines continue to innovate, they will remain popular.
So What?: Digital companies should work with magazines to develop new ways to deliver magazine content and advertising Notable quote: “We surf the Internet. We swim in magazines.”

More on this session via AdWeek.

YouthQuake: Transformation of Young Customers
Who:  Jeffrey Cole, Director, Center for the Digital Future, USC Annenberg School and Sr. Associate, Media Link LLC
What: Based on consumer data collected from his research, Cole says that just concentrating on what 12-24-year-old customers want at the time sets a bad precedent for advertisers, because what you really want is to figure out how their purchasing power will emerge as go into their “prime purchasing years.”
So What?: Cole says youth are all about social media and predicts the death of print newspapers within 6 years because of falling readership among this age group. To capture and keep teens into the future, advertisers must turn to social media. Notable quote: “While they don’t read newspapers, teens are active social media users and they will stay in communities for the rest of their lives.”

Transforming Marketing
Who: Rishad Tobaccowala, Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer for, VivaKi (Publicis Groupe)
What: Tobaccowala talked about talent retention for agencies. He riffed on Yahoo! CEO, Carol Bartz’ Science, Art and Scale keynote, concentrating on what he feels is the most important factor for getting and keep the best talent: “art.” Talented young people don’t want to just sell soda pop, they want to create art and messages that reach people’s hearts and minds. He made a distinction between what he called “builders” who create great, inspiring advertising and “bean counters” who run the spreadsheets. Today advertising is too often run by the bean counters and it needs to get back to its creative roots.
So What?: While advertisers and agencies need metrics, we also need to inspire creativity. Notable quote: “During the Renaissance, they built; they did not manage only, they did not data read. They built, they painted, they sculpted.”

More on this session via AdAge.

It’s Still All About the Data
Who: Bruce Biegel, Managing Director, Winterberry Group LLC ; Adam Gerber, Chief Marketing Officer, Quantcast ; Scott Hagedorn, CEO, PHD USA ; Bryan Wiener, CEO, 360i ; David Smith, CEO, Mediasmith Inc.; Geoff Ramsey, Co-Founder and CEO, eMarketer
What: The effectiveness of advertising and media is only as good as its intended targets. Some say 28 percent of U.S. marketers plan to shift larger portion of their budgets to online over the next few years. Other estimates range from 59 percent to 70 percent. The group also discussed the advent demand-side platforms.
So What?: If agencies can scale and cooperate with publishers, we should be able to normalize ad data, plug in solutions and be able to plan better and do better post analysis. But we have to “scale that and scale that rapidly.”

For more on DSPs see “Audiences on Demand.”

Are Tablets the Future of Media?
Who: Chris Anderson, EIC, Wired Magazine
What: Anderson talked about how he thinks tablet computers, such as the iPad, will change the way people read magazine content and how advertisers will reach them. He noted that tablets “could provide the most measurable advertising ever”—and a rich experience for the user online or off.
So What?: A tablet computer user doesn’t always have to be online to view magazine content that has previously been downloaded, and the device and programming will continue to track what the user is seeing even in an offline state and that could be a big opportunity for advertisers and agencies.

More on this session via MediaWeek.

How New ‘Cloud’ Technology Can Transform the Agency Enterprise
Who: Greg Smith, Chief Information Officer, McCann Worldgroup
What: On-the-ground ROI benefits for all agencies from the emerging technology of cloud technology— Internet computing that shares computer resources instead of using software or storage on a local PC.
Technology has to be included in biz decisions and cloud technology is playing massive role at McCann
So What?: Agencies need to think like software companies. Currently 70% of tech budgets are spent on maintenance. Cloud tech will help save on those costs and let agencies concentrate on creative. Kelley Blue Book saved $100k by shifting to cloud. McCann itself saved 30 percent on tech costs. Quote: “21st century ads are not something just looked at, but something to be used.”

Transformative Research on Integrated Media
Who: Artie Bulgrin, Senior Vice President for Research, ESPN
What: Bulgrin says while TV is still the biggest medium, many ESPN users are now multimedia users (46 percent) are now multi-platform users, who cross media freely, representing 71 percent of its overall media time. In 2008, Disney and ABC TV created a new, state-of-the-art media lab in Austin, Texas, where media users are researched so that the company can better understand consumer behavior with regard to both content and advertising through advanced techniques like eye- and skin-tracking.
So What?: One notable finding of the lab was that ads in mobile often out-performed ads on the PC-based Internet, and that It only takes two seconds for user to process and recognize a brand. If Bulgrin’s findings are correct, it confirms assertion that the message is as important, if not more so, than the medium.

More on this session via MediaPost.

Lastly, enjoy 4A’s Flickr page, as well as our own.

— Michael Mattis, Jeff Sweat, Christine Tseng

Advertising the Super Bowl, and beyond
Mitch Spolan, our VP of North American field sales, has just posted a point-of-view commentary on MediaPost, on how digital advertisers are seeing gold in big-ticket events like the Super Bowl, which have traditionally been dominated by TV, radio and print. “Cultural events like the Super Bowl still matter,” says Mitch. “The good news for online marketers is that people are increasingly turning to the Internet for coverage of these events, and audience size and engagement is beginning to reach—and sometimes exceed—that of the original broadcast.” That goes whether you’re a search or display advertiser. To see how advertisers are making the shift online and get some tips for yourself, click over to MediaPost.

New ad formats stop the presses
That Mitch Spolan is redoubtable and seemingly ubiquitous.  Last week he unveiled several new, flexible, creativity-driven ad formats. “Advertising is about telling stories,” says Mitch. “And these formats allow brand advertisers to do just that.” We’re not the only ones excited about these new formats. Check out the write-ups in AdWeek, MediaWeek and paidContent.

Social’s fine, but does it sell?
With all the hype around social media marketing and how it’s good for your brand and customer support, the question arises, “Fine, but does it sell?” AdWeek’s Brian Morrisey asks that question, and adds, “What’s a Facebook friend worth?” He answers with two telling case studies.

Church social:  SM users older than you think
Greg Sterling of Screenwerk points to a survey by Royal Pingdom that indicates social media users are older than often thought, with the average being a creaking 37. At 44, LinkedIn users are practically ancient. Consider that when thinking about advertising on “the Facebooks.”

Graphic courtesy Royal Pingdom

Socialize your website with Yahoo! Apps
Web advertisers are also web publishers. You kind of have to be if you want your customers to land somewhere after clicking on your ads. The Yahoo! Application Protocol, or YAP, lets your developers create apps to socialize your content on your users’ Yahoo! homepages. For a real-life example, see Chris Marlowe’s article on the Huffington Post’s new socializing “YAP app” over at the YPN blog.

Right Media looking forward
It’s kind of Darwinian. Ad markets change and ad networks change with them. At the fore of that evolution is Right Media, Yahoo’s ad network exchange. “Right Media is actively addressing the needs of the differentiated ad networks, direct advertisers, and global agencies to enable brand safety in our premium marketplace,” say Right Media’s Brooke Wyard and Megan Pagliuca. To see how Right Media’s evolving, and how that evolution may affect exchange advertisers, click over to the Right Media blog.

Advertiser, regulate thyself
Regulation has been on the Fed’s docket since the financial meltdown. That’s not surprising. But here’s the deal, says MediaWeek’s Mike Shields: In digital advertising, over-regulation could damage innovation. Advertisers can either regulate themselves, or the government will likely step in. The Internet Advertising Bureau is lobbying for the former, but in order for that to work out, advertisers need to commit, become more transparent, and allow consumers more choice.

— Michael Mattis

There’s a scene in the first season of “Mad Men” in which advertising anti-hero Don Draper asks his boss, “What do women want?” The answer he gets is flippant to the point of rather ugly sexism. But in the male-dominated world of early-1960s advertising, Draper was on to something. He knew instinctively that to reach America, you had to reach out to America’s new, emerging, liberated woman, a fact later borne out by daytime shows from “Phil Donahue” to “Oprah” and beyond.

Today, the audience to reach is teens, both male and female. Last time, we discussed some salient general facts about teens, their buying power ($125 billion and climbing) and the time they spend online. Today we’ll talk about who these teens are, what they want, and how advertisers like you can reach an audience of nearly 25 million Americans.

Smells like teen spirit
First off, how to teens think of themselves? According to a Horatio Alger Association report, American teens are more hopeful than ever before, with 81 percent describing themselves as “ambitious” and 88 percent as “confident,” while 70 percent see themselves going to college. They’re also a career-oriented and community-dedicated generation, with nearly 50 percent considering careers in education, 42 percent considering the military, 33 percent thinking about careers in government, and no less than 20 percent thinking about actually running for public office. That’s a pretty ambitious crew. And there about more than just

Not only are today’s teens ambitious, the Horatio Alger Association report says that they are also more engaged in what’s going on than any generation since the 1960s. A year ago, 78 percent of teens were “very concerned” about the outcome of the presidential election. No matter which side they were on, teens were very, very interested in who their next president would be. They’re also highly concerned about the environment. According to our research, 72 percent of teens described “global warming” as “an urgent or serious problem.”

OK, so the kids are cool and they care and they’re ambitious. So what? Well, Ninety-seven percent of American teens are currently online, according to MRI. That’s the biggest slice of Internet pie of any generation thus far. The way that American teens engage with the world today is online.

A long engagement
Want to reach ’em? You have to hit them where they live online, with messages that resonate with their hopes, dreams and considerable ambitions—and preferably, with a sense of situational humor that they understand. (Oh, by the way, 72 percent of U.S. teens 12 to 17 years old, or about 14.4 million people, spent time on Yahoo! in 2008, according to comScore.)

But the real, practical upshot from this data is that today’s teens are more involved—and crave to be involved—than ever before. Advertising as a one-way street—where advertisers disseminate messages through mass media—is all but dead, especially with teens. To reach and, more importantly, engage teens, you have to develop interactive campaigns that involve young people like never before. For a prime example, see our case study on Butterfinger, a campaign that drove engagement and helped sell product, while giving users a creative voice, one that they were eager to share with others via social networking.

Next time: How teens are using social media and approaching online gaming.

Sources:
Horatio Alger Association: The State of our Nation’s Youth, 2008
MRI: TwelvePlus, 2008
comScore: Media Metrix, April, 2009

(Image by frerieke, CC, 2.0)

—Michael Mattis

Well, it’s not quite like “Dear Abby,” but last year’s how-to posts from the Yahoo! Search Marketing blog and the Yahoo! Advertising blog are the next best thing. In the last year of the “aughts,” we tried to help show you the way to more effective Sponsored Search, and more effective Web advertising in general, with a bevy of posts that answered your most pressing questions—everything from how to develop strong keywords to how to keep those keywords and descriptions from facing rejection, to how to use social networks like Twitter and Facebook to get your messages out.

For the complete list of tips, switch over to the Yahoo! Search Marketing blog.

(Image by awezmaz, CC, 2.0)