Google’s 4Q disappoints as advertising prices sink

Posted by poboutin in SF Advertising on January 25th, 2012

What was supposed to be a celebration of the most prosperous quarter in Google’s 13-year history instead turned into a major letdown.

The disappointment sunk in Thursday after Google’s fourth-quarter earnings report showed the Internet search leader fetched less money per click on its ubiquitous online ads.

That came as an unsettling surprise because investors had assumed a surge in online holiday shopping in the U.S. would enable Google Inc. to charge more for its ads. Instead, the average price decreased by 8 percent from the same time in 2010. Read the rest of this entry »

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Nature Made® Selects Amazon Advertising as Its Agency of Record

Posted by poboutin in SF Advertising on January 18th, 2012

Today, leading dietary supplement brand Nature Made announced Amazon Advertising as its agency of record to lead all brand positioning and integrated marketing including national advertising campaigns incorporating both traditional and digital media.

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British Arrows Awards in San Francisco.

Posted by poboutin in SF Advertising on January 13th, 2012

British Arrows AwardsBRITISH ARROWS AWARDS 2011
(Formerly British Television Advertising Awards)
Thu-Sun, Jan 26-29, 2012  •  2, 4, 6 & 8 pm
Admission: $10 general  •  $8 YBCA members, students, seniors

The annual screenings of the British Arrows Awards (formerly known as the British Television Advertising Awards) have become one of YBCA’s most popular programs. And for good reason — these sly, sexy, sometimes hilarious and sometimes somber British commercials, PSAs, and (new this year!) social networking experiments have a wild creativity.

543 Howard St., 3rd Floor
San Francisco, CA 94105
Contact: Will Holburn
Phone: (949) 375-6940
Email: wholburn@rauxa.com
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

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San Francisco Abortion Ads Draw Ire Of Pro-Life Group

Posted by poboutin in SF Advertising on January 11th, 2012

SAN FRANCISCO — A series of pro-choice banners posted on city-operated utility poles running up and down San Francisco’s Market Street have drawn the ire of an anti-abortion group.

Life Legal Defense Foundation has demanded that the city remove the offending signage or face the possibility of legal action.

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Facebook pushes for ad revenue transparency

Posted by poboutin in SF Advertising on January 4th, 2012

Facebook is pushing advertising sales agencies to be more transparent about how they charge for their services, in an effort to protect companies who market on the social network.
Facebook believes that by improving transparency companies will have a clearer idea of what proportion of the money they give to agencies goes directly on ad spending, rather than on service fees.
“There’s a lot of snake oil out there,” said Brooke Angles, the former brand manager for Expedia and now the chief executive of Social Click, a creative firm.
Facebook advertising is still so new for companies, she said, that most of them were unable to negotiate effectively with the agencies representing them.
“The brands aren’t at a point where they’re smart enough to know the difference between the good guys and the hucksters.”
Facebook has been trying to bring more order to the social advertising market since bolstering its roster of advertising sales partners in August. Stepping up enforcement of its transparency rules could boost the social network’s revenues ahead of an initial public offering.
Grady Burnett, Facebook’s vice-president of global marketing, said: “The primary thing we care about is making sure people understand when they’re paying for media on Facebook and when they’re paying for something else.”
The different ways agencies charge has made it harder for brand-owners to assess the effectiveness of their social media advertising, according to critics.
For example, some agencies charge a direct percentage of the ad purchase, while others charge a fee for every time a user clicks “Like” on a fan page. Because a “Like” is such a new advertising metric with no settled market value, a company could charge a flat fee of $2 per Like, then spend $1 on a Facebook ad to drive the traffic that will generate the Like, keeping a hefty 50 per cent margin for itself.
Advertisers do not like these sales agencies “making loads of margin”, said Simon Mansell, chief executive of TBG Digital, one of Facebook’s ad sales partners, which charges clients a 15 per cent cut of ad spending on Facebook.
Advertisers would rather see more dollars go to Facebook, and so would Facebook, he said. Facebook’s transparency policy could facilitate that.
The rules require agencies to share their margins with clients up front, and to store Facebook account information for each client separately, so Facebook can see how much each company spends on Facebook ads.
“You have to tell Facebook your spread,” Mr Mansell said.
Facebook has been pushing agencies to comply with the policies in the last several months, according to agencies, after it began accepting applications from more of them to become advertising sales partners. So far, it has approved 25.
From: http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/bbf8d058-1430-11e1-85c7-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1iXMsFLwL

Facebook is pushing advertising sales agencies to be more transparent about how they charge for their services, in an effort to protect companies who market on the social network.

Facebook believes that by improving transparency companies will have a clearer idea of what proportion of the money they give to agencies goes directly on ad spending, rather than on service fees.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Homefront marketing stunt results in $7,000 fine

Posted by poboutin in SF Advertising on December 30th, 2011

The San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board has levied a $7,000 fine on the marketing company responsible for releasing 10,000 red balloons to promote Homefront at last year’s Game Developers Conference. The promotion went wrong when many of the balloons ended up in San Francisco Bay, which local residents get just a tad protective over.

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Yahoo’s site deepens connections with Facebook by extending sharing options in more sections

Posted by poboutin in SF Advertising on December 21st, 2011

Yahoo is deepening its connections with Facebook’s online social network.
The latest bond announced late Tuesday will enable Facebook users to share more of their activities on Yahoo’s websites, including which stories they are reading.
Yahoo Inc. introduced the Facebook-sharing option in its main new section three months ago. The same feature will now be available in 26 other parts of Yahoo’s site, including its “omg” service for entertainment news and sections devoted to television, movies and games.
By tying more of its services to Facebook’s popularity, Yahoo is hoping to give people more reasons to visit and stick around its website. Yahoo ultimately wants to sell more online advertising. That’s an area where Facebook has been gaining ground as its website has emerged as a top Internet hangout.
As Facebook has become more influential, Yahoo has been struggling to remain relevant among Web surfers and online advertisers.
It’s been a daunting challenge so far. Yahoo has gone through three different CEOs in the past four years while its revenue and stock price have drooped. The difficulties have prompted a board review that culminate in a sale of all or part of the company.
Yahoo has been pleased with the results of Facebook-sharing so far. Traffic to Yahoo’s news section from Facebook has tripled since that sharing feature was introduced, according to the company, which is based in Sunnyvale, Calif.
Apparently, a relatively small percentage of Yahoo’s 700 million users want their online social circles to know what they’re reading on the Web. Yahoo says about 12 million people have opted to share their tastes in news stories so far. The feature is particularly popular among young adults ranging from 18 to 24 years old, according to Yahoo.
Facebook sharing still isn’t available on two of Yahoo’s most popular sections, finance and sports. The company says those sections will be linked to Facebook early next year.

Yahoo is deepening its connections with Facebook’s online social network.

The latest bond announced late Tuesday will enable Facebook users to share more of their activities on Yahoo’s websites, including which stories they are reading. Read the rest of this entry »

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AKQA named Agency of the Year by AdWeek

Posted by poboutin in SF Advertising on December 14th, 2011

When is a digital agency really more than just a digital agency? When its client says so.
This past Halloween, when AKQA created an online ad for Audi to be shown in rich media and social channels, Scott Keogh, chief marketing officer for the car brand, liked it so much he wanted it on TV as well. So he placed it into airtime the brand had bought on ABC’s Desperate Housewives—a media buy that would normally involve an ad created by Audi’s lead TV agency, Venables Bell & Partners.
Shot from a camera plugged into the car’s dashboard, “Trick or Treat” touts the ability of the Audi A6’s “thermalimaging night vision assistant” to help spot costumed kids in the dark. It addressed an obstacle for auto brands: marketingcomplicated car technologies.
“That’s creativity beyond creativity,” says DeLu Jackson, department manager, digital and relationship marketing at Audi. “That’s solving business challenges that we as an industry haven’t sorted out.”
It’s this acumen that has helped the agency thrive in a marketplace where the lines between media channels are blurring. And the creation of platform-spanning work while focusing on the less-charted terrain of new technologies is what’s made 2011 an especially impressive year for the shop—the name of which, by the way, stands for the full initials of co-founder and chairman Ajaz Khowaj Quoram Ahmed.
“I think our long-term success [is due to] looking over the horizon and seeing what’s going to be important next for our clients,” says AKQA CEO Tom Bedecarre.
A besuited Bedecarre, in from San Francisco, and Ahmed, in from London and buzzing with energy in a T-shirt emblazoned with the trademark swoosh of Nike, a flagship client, spoke to Adweek at the shop’s SoHo, New York office. Peeking out from Bedecarre’s jacket is a yellow Livestrong bracelet, an iconic symbol of the Nike-sponsored charity.
Ahmed and Bedecarre, who show an easy rapport, joined forces in 2001. That was when AKQA, the U.K. digital shop a 21-year-old Ahmed launched in 1994, and Citron Haligman Bedecarre—the San Francisco shop co-founded in 1990 by Bedecarre, an ex-Ogilvy & Mather account man and former vp at Hal Riney & Partners—merged with two other agencies to form the foundation of AKQA’s current footprint.
The agency has grown rapidly in the past five years, adding offices in Amsterdam and Berlin. (There is also an office in Shanghai, and one in Washington, D.C.) But its pillars remain the Bay Area, the heart of the booming tech business, and London, where a powerhouse creative team helps rake in industry awards.
This year, AKQA brought home five Cannes Lions and grew some 25 percent, adding approximately $50 million in global revenue to the estimated $200 million it earned in 2010. Winning lead responsibilities for Audi’s digital creative early this year drove 2011’s numbers upwards, along with other new accounts like Trident (digital creative duties) and Clorox’s host of brands (digital media buying). AKQA also became lead creative agency for YouTube, and has growing relationships with blue-chip clients like Visa and Target.
AKQA’s Cannes wins reflect the agency’s particular strengths in mobile and social. The gold Lion-winning Heineken Star Player game, for example, upped the profile of the beer brand’s UEFA Champions League sponsorship by letting soccer fans participate, in real time, in upcoming plays. Users could also access the app from Heineken’s Facebook page, and boast about their wins on the social network, whether they were participating via smartphone, tablet, or computer.
“The more you can marry [social and mobile], the better the experience will be,” says AKQA chief creative officer Rei Inamoto.
The independent shop, majority owned by private investment firm General Atlantic, also has aknack for growing assignments that start small. Its work for Nike began some 12 years ago on a project in the under-$100,000 range. Other decade-long clients include Visa and Xbox.“We’ve found mobile has a halo effect,” says Ahmed, citing the Royal Bank of Scotland as one client that increased its work based on the success of a mobile assignment. Now, AKQA is also working on social media and in-branch digital signage for the bank.
And Clorox, which hired AKQA to work on its paid search in November 2010, this year expanded that assignment, after a pitch, to include digital media buying—a relatively new area of focus and significant area of growth for the agency. Clorox spent $13 million on online display ads in the first half of 2011 alone, plus an additional $1.75 million on paid search, according to Kantar Media estimates.
Clients are also quick to cite the agency’s ties to Bay Area tech companies as an asset. In October, Fortune anointed Bedecarre “Silicon Valley’s favorite adman.” And Torrence Boone, managing director of agency business development at Google, says that AKQA is “one of the most sophisticated of the agencies in terms of how to leverage digital platforms. . . for their clients.”
At a time when companies are competing for digital talent, AKQA is hiring aggressively. This year it broke the 1,000 employees mark, including new creative directors from more traditional agencies like Taxi and TBWA.
Of course, no agency is invincible. Smirnoff and Western Union, for instance, both stopped working with the shop this year. Daniel Bonner, one of AKQA’s European CCOs, left after 14 years for Razorfish. Ginny Golden, a creative director in the D.C. office, and creative lead on its successful VW account, left for Wieden + Kennedy in Portland, Ore.
But its successes far outshine the rough spots—which makes the agency a prime target for acquisition. It has yet to succumb to the overtures of holding companies, in part because the right deal hasn’t come along. But independence is also a point of pride. “We have to earn our right to work on every single brand . . . because we don’t have a sugar daddy, a holding company, a pipeline of different clients,” says Ahmed.
“We have no plans to sell,” adds Bedecarre, “but that hasn’t stopped people in the last 10 years from asking.”
http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising-branding/agency-year-akqa-137015

When is a digital agency really more than just a digital agency? When its client says so.

This past Halloween, when AKQA created an online ad for Audi to be shown in rich media and social channels, Scott Keogh, chief marketing officer for the car brand, liked it so much he wanted it on TV as well. So he placed it into airtime the brand had bought on ABC’s Desperate Housewives—a media buy that would normally involve an ad created by Audi’s lead TV agency, Venables Bell & Partners.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Raiders Accuse Nation’s Burgers of Unsavory Advertising Practices

Posted by poboutin in SF Advertising on December 7th, 2011

The Oakland Raiders are taking Nation’s Giant Hamburgers to court, claiming the Northern California food chain has …. uhh raided the team’s famous trademark: Raider Nation.

Now the question is will the Raiders “Just win, baby?”

According to the suit filed last week in San Francisco, Nation’s has been running an advertisement on a billboard next to the Oakland stadium where the Raider’s play which reads: “When Hunger Hits, Raid A Nation’s.”

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Newspaper publishers, media companies form joint venture to run local shopping search engine

Posted by poboutin in SF Advertising on November 30th, 2011

A group of newspaper publishers and other media companies are teaming up to sell more advertising aimed at people looking for online deals.

Eight companies formed a joint venture that has acquired Find n Save, a search engine focused on discount offers made by merchants in cities across the U.S. The venture acquired Find n Save as part of its purchase of Travidia, an online shopping service. Financial terms of that deal weren’t disclosed in Thursday’s announcement. Read the rest of this entry »

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