What price popularity?
Following what is probably the most sensational, or at least most expensive week in football transfer history, you’re unlikely to have escaped the fact that Kaka and Cristiano Ronaldo have both moved to Real Madrid.
With Kaka’s fee at an estimated £56m , Ronaldo’s a reported £80m many have been wondering where the money is coming from. Real Madrid have a reported 300m euro transfer kitty this year alone. And the rationale for the excessive spending all seems to boil down to shirt sales. As if those million fans that bought the Beckham shirt are going to chuck it in the pile alongside their Zidane shirt, and buy not just a Kaka edition, but also a Ronaldo shirt.
“Ronaldo can be viewed in the same bracket as Beckham when it comes to global commercial impact, if their image is controlled right and Real Madrid improve their results in the UEFA Champions League as a result of their arrival”, said Professor Simon Chadwick, Director of the Center for the International Business of Sport (CIBS) at Coventry University in England.
But a quick look of their respective popularities on Facebook paints an interesting picture. Whilst Kaka looks to be good value, even at £56m, with over half-a-million fans on the social network on a single page, Cristiano Ronaldo barely registers 23,000 on the most popular page for him at the time of writing. And he, of course, cost about £25m more than the half-million-fans Kaka.
If Real’s return on Ronaldo is destined to be in Shirt Sales then they better charge more for them. A lot more.
Vanity urls to increase ad revenues
Facebook have announced the launch of a publicly accessible Vanity url facility – meaning users and Fan Page owners will be able to get themselves a vanity url in the form of www.facebook.com/firstname.lastname, or variations thereof.
A lot of noise is being created about the SEO value in securing yours, although in truth, despite the PageRank, surely Google is smart enough to counter this when their bots come back to report thousands of new urls pointing at strangely similar content? With so many pages pointing out of the domain, the positive PageRank impact will be diluted by several thousand if not millions of links.
What’s more Facebook themselves have taken steps to avoid abuse, such as only being available to pages with 1000 or more fans.
Perhaps the real value of this will be, ironically, in “old” media. How long before we see the first social campaign to incorporate a Facebook vanity url the way we used to see AOL Keyword terms, to drive co-ordinated activity across media? In fact this could be the cutest move Facebook have made so far to drive ad revenue.
Large and fully integrated media agencies don’t seem to “get” the ad opportunities on social environments yet – or at least they’re not particularly great exponents of the environment. But if they can be introduced to it through the medium of familiarity; the subline on a poster, or the closing frame of the TV ad, then perhaps we’ll see more of them understanding how rich an environment it can be when executed properly.
And once they “get it”, Facebook will reap the rewards through advertising dollars.
Recommendations as ASUs
It appears that some new testing or new ad formats are bing made available on Facebook.
Following the “launch” of Event Ads and Fan Page Ads, and making them available in the ASU position, Facebook appear to have started to run recommendations. Our sources confirm there are currently no plans to make them available as a buyable ad format, although as a format it does become a compelling proposition if the recommendation is for a brand or product as have been developed for user home pages.
Men hiding their love interests
Are men less likely to declare their marrital status than women?
There are 1.58m Male UK Facebook users either “engaged” or “married”, but 2.37m Females with the same status. That’s 19.75% of UK Males, and 25.76% of Females, before the pedants chime up.
Meaning there’s (probably) about 800k engaged or married UK men out there that don’t want you to know.
Or someone’s taking more than their share of wives.
Streaming music. Why the fuss?
I was reminded last night in conversation with good friend Martin Campbell, that vinyl as a format for recording and distrbuting music remains superior to most, if not all, digital formats. And whilst we reminisced about the sleeve artwork, the thrill of pulling a freshly pressed copy from the outer-sleeve, and then the inner dust sleeveI have long since given up the good fight and invested in CD technology, etc. But I have yet to be persuaded by streaming services, although never sure entirely why. Listening to the radio this morning a penny dropped.
If you’re into music in any way whatsoever, you can’t have failed to have come across, tried or read about streaming music service Spotify. And for the more avid follower of the industry, you’ll have heard about Pirate Bay, and the recent legal decisions against their approach.
As my regular reader will know, I’m not entirely against innovation, but I do like to see innovation that takes us forwards. That advances society in a positive way, and not innovation that is there for the sake of it. And so without ever having tried Spotify myself, I have decided to be the last person to ever use it.
And the reason for my inertia? Radio 2, and in particular Terry Wogan. If radio isn’t streaming music then what is? And before you argue that your streaming music channel is just like radio, but more personalised to your own tastes, then try another radio channel. There’s hundreds of them out there. And if you’re not in the mood for Terry Wogan this morning, just press another pre-set on the box. Or if you feel like discovering something different hit the I-feel-lucky button that is the auto tune.
It’s really not so hard.
New Twitter Phenomenon
Twitter Tag is here! And every day, a new game begins. Is there no end to the fun to be had?
A few rules to be aware of:
- No-one knows who starts the game. It will begin of it’s own accord. You cannot start your own game.
- You can only participate if you have been tagged by someone else.
- You cannot re tag the person that tagged you directly. The next tag in the chain must be to a different user.
The launch game has started. Keep an eye out for it.
When brands try to talk to you like a friend
I’m a big fan of social advertising. I like the idea that advertisers can use that information to give me increasingly relevant ads.
However, as mush as I tolerate, nay, embrace this new model, I can’t abide lazy creative.
Take this example. It talks to me as a fan of Liverpool FC. Bingo. Targeting achieved. I am one. Every bit of one.
But where it fails is the message. Apart from ending the question in their title with a full-stop instead of a question mark, their copy doesn’t seem right somehow.
Call yourself a copy-writer?
Yes, I’ve got the official shirt (two of them, actually).
Yes, I’ve got the hat (even the missus has one, reluctantly)
And yes, the scarf too (again at least 2 of those)
And yet somehow, somewhere, in the mind of a senseless out-of-touch advertiser or copy-writer, the hat-trick has not yet been completed.
Now last time I checked, a hat-trick in football constituted three goals. I remember Robbie Fowler scoring the premierships quickest ever (just over 4 1/2minutes against Arsenal in ‘94). Liverpool won 3-0 so he definitely didn’t score more than three.
I remember Peter “good-touch-for-a-big-man” Crouch’s perfect hat-trick, also against Arsenal, in ‘07. Liverpool won 4-1, but Peter Crouch only scored 3 of them.
But our learned advertiser, which I trust is the banking partner concerned and not the club themselves, is determined to sell me the mythical fourth constituent of every fan’s memorabilia “hat-trick” – a club-branded credit card.
Grape Digital launches (maybe)
In a day of launches and relaunches, Grape Digital, a new entrant into the Social Media advertising space is launching today.
Or at least according to their Twitter account they are.
The website is curiously still “coming soon” and there’s been no twitter update so far today (10:50 am on the 20th April).
I remain curious….
Ask relaunches as AskJeeves
Fictional character Jeeves is set to return to the UK following a relaunch of the Ask.com search engine, in it’s latest attempt to become anything more than an also-ran in the search market and challenge the dominance of Google.
But it is unclear what, beyond a cosmetic makeover, they are planning to offer users that will differentiate their service.
Gone is the pinstripe jacket for jeeves, in favour of a less-stuffy charcoal grey, and in comes a high-def 3D rendition of the character.
Unfortunately a large part of the recognition users may have had for the old Jeeves (83% according to research) will be wasted – the 3D image is so vastly different to the 2D cartoon version originally developed. What is clear is that, at roughly one-tenth the size of live.com (from Google.com/adplanner) they have someway to go to recover any ground whatsoever.
As part of the campaign, Ask are going to release pictures showing where Jeeves has been for the last three years. Whilst photo-sharing has become increasingly popular, I’m not convinced this alone will be the killer social media campaign it’s obviously intended to be.
Does anyone really care where Jeeves has been the last three years? I’ve been getting along fine without him, and I’m not sure I have time these days to indulge him. I have trouble enough wading through the vast array of photos available from real people I am now connected to.
I can’t help feeling that the search market is not driven by brands. Google have acheived their position largely through superior product and word-of-mouth. It has become embedded in the psyche of the web-user. It’s probably one of the most-successful viral-marketing stories ever, possibly better even than Hotmail, and yet Ask seem to think investment in brand is the answer to compete against one of the world’s largest and most popular brands.
Where have all the kids gone?
The Facebook ad platform has stopped accepting any ads, it seems, for ages 13 and up. Your ad, if you select the from age to be “any” or “13″ will default to 18 and upwards. Even if that’s from 18 to 17.
Could be nothing more than another glitch, or it could smack of something more sinister. Either way it highlights soem of the discrepancies in the marketplace right now.
By not allowing advertising to under-18s, the CPMs naturally rise if your intended target is “all” users. Media cost for over 18’s is 2-3 times more expensive than it is for children. In the UK at least, anyway.
There are 2 million UK users on Facebook aged 17 and under (about 11%), and the estimated CPM to target them is 0.05 – 0.10 USD. Compare that to the over 18s market, of which there are 15.5 million people, but more poignantly the estimated range of CPMs is significantly higher: 0.16-0.21 USD.
Is this the first sign of scarcity in the (adult) social networking market, as CPMs start nudging upwards? US inventory has been at a premium for some time now, and now the UK seems to be catching up.
