7things Media, a performance-based marketing agency turned 4 years old today. Originally based in London, they now have now expanded to the United States and are completely focused on professional performance marketing solutions for typically  brand clients. They have taken the industry by storm, winning awards on both side of the pond for their excellence in affiliate and performance marketing. Their client base includes everyone from ultra-luxurious lingerie company Agent Provocateur to UNICEF.  According to Founder, Chris Bishop, “7thingsmedia’s business is digital media, so accounts are sought and won – inbound and outbound – on this as the focus; not as an add-on. This immediately sets the agency apart from others in the field – 7thingsmedia was founded as a digital agency so the last three (now four!) years have been honing and perfecting our offering – and realising the potential of an integrated digital solution to benefit a brand as a whole – not just Ecommerce”

Peter Hamilton of HasOffers did an interview with them at DMDays recently, which while not nearly as exciting as my interviews, is definitely worth watching.

Since the social media boom began, Twitter and Facebook have been the names the have led the way in marketer interest. Each has its own unique benefits to offer to advertisers, and each has brought great success to advertisers. This is in essence due to the kind of people that use these social networks, and the ways that advertisers choose to target these social users. Although Facebook has created a substantially greater number of tools for marketers to work with, Twitter still does a great job at helping advertisers reach the social consumers. Twitter recently released the details of a brand new study that the company commissioned from Kantar Media’s Compete, and it shows some detailed information about Twitter’s “primary mobile users.”

These primary mobile users Twitter refers to are those that engage with Twitter much more frequently on the mobile web than on the desktop web. These users are 57 percent less likely to use Twitter on desktop than other Twitter users. However, at the same time these users are 86 percent more likely to use Twitter a few times each day than other Twitter users. Therefore, we can see that the Twitter users that marketers should be showing the most interest are these primary mobile users, as they make up a large chunk of the network’s engagement and activity.

However, the insight from Twitter’s study does not end there. We also learn from the results a bit about the age of these primary mobile users. These users, according to the study results, tend to be a bit on the younger side when compared to the average Twitter user. When compared to the other age groups, those users that are ages 18-34 were found to be 52 percent more likely to use Twitter on their mobile devices significantly more often than on their desktop.

Now that we know that the amount of users that visit Twitter primarily through mobile is relatively high, and that a huge number of these users are of a younger age group, the study tells us just how these young mobile users are using the network. Apparently, these primary mobile users are 57 percent more likely to post original tweets than are the average Twitter users. Also, they are 78 percent more likely to retweet posts on Twitter, and 85 percent more likely to favorite the Tweets of others. Finally, these users are 63 percent more likely to click on links in their Twitter feeds.

Arguably more important though, is that these users are 96 percent more likely than the average user to follow a total of 11 or more brands. With these users being more likely to follow brands on Twitter, marketers should be able to clearly see the value that they hold with them, as they are the users that should be targeted more heavily. These mobile users are also 58 percent more likely to remember Twitter ads that they have seen, which makes them really the overall perfect target for advertising.

These primary mobile users are where the attention should be directed, as they are young, they retweet quite often, they remember the ads that they see on the network, and they are much more likely to follow brands than any other Twitter users. It is in Twitter’s mobile platform that more marketing effort should be put forth.

Good news, despite not wanting to leave, a bunch of publishers were let out of Alcatraz Prison this week. I bet you didn’t know it: that Alcatraz Prison had been renovated specifically to house affiliate marketers and publishers. What did they do wrong? What got them sent to Alcatraz? What got some of the top emailers and publishers in our industry sent to prison?

They made tons of money with AdStation by Adknowledge.

If you were one of the few lucky top publishers and affiliates of Adknowledge, you spent the night at Alcatraz being wined and dined at this uber-exclusive private event held at Alcatraz Prison, now a US National Park. Adknowledge is rumored to have rented the entire prison out fort his event, and brought by boat some of the top people in the industry to be forced to have an amazing good time.

Adknowledge just last week announced that they were having the biggest year on record for emailers and it’s obvious that they are making sure that their huge partners are treated to the best experiences in the industry. With a private tour, the best food and and open bar, this was definitely the next level of how to take care of your publishers. Below are a few great pictures from the event.

You can see the full set on Facebook — and make sure to “like” their page while your at it.
Want to be an AdStation Publisher? Fill out this form and be one of the select few.

If you were fortunate enough to be at ad:tech SF this past week, you could not have missed Engage:BDR. I’m not just saying this because they are our sponsor, or because they are an awesome company with amazing technology: but because they know how to have a good time and made the event a lot of fun. Yep, they are the company of amazing ROI-based display advertising and the company of excessive fun that can only come for the mind of Ted Dhanik.

At their booth they had a professional flipbook maker, where anyone could have a book made on the spot of themselves doing about anything they wanted printed. Flip the pages, and there is it: you in action. Crazy of course that in this day and age of technology that we can find this interesting. Still it was a huge, huge crowd gatherer and people were lined up to make their own books. Below is one of mine, that kept my busy during my flight home. Which I then videotaped and put on the internet…

Well, if that wasn’t enough, Engage:BDR made sure to staff their booth with the hottest booth-babe on the planet, Andy Milonakis.

Of course, what Engage:BDR is most known for in our industry is parties. Almost 2,000 people RSVPed to their party, but the space could only fit 500 people, and if you weren’t there, you missed out on a good time. Feel free to look at the entire party via photos by Murray Newlands on Facebook

 Tipalti, the online automated global mass payment platform that makes it fast, easy and affordable to send payments to any vendor in 190 countries, today announced that the company has partnered with CAKE, the leader in real-time online campaign tracking, to offer affiliate networks, advertisers and brands a complete analytics and payment solution. The new partners will showcase their integrated solution at Booth 2446 at the upcoming ad:tech San Francisco 2013 conference, which will be held April 9-10 at the Moscone Center West.

Tipalti’s powerful payment engine is now fully integrated with CAKE’s publisher and affiliate interface. This integrated solution streamlines the entire payout process, offering one-click submissions, eliminating manual entry and enabling payments in multiple currencies and methods, including ACH/direct deposit, global-ACH/international bank transfer, paper check, wire transfer, PayPal, prepaid debit card or cash payments.

“This partnership allows CAKE’s advertising and network customers to scale up rapidly while managing thousands of affiliates,” noted Jeff McCollum, President and founder of CAKE. “Tipalti has the most robust solution we’ve seen, allowing our customers to better serve their affiliates, remit payments in the currencies of their choice, improve compliance and reduce the workload.”

CAKE customers who rely on the company’s suite of online performance marketing analytics tools will now find a similarly intuitive design and comprehensive array of capabilities on the payment side: The integrated mass payment features provided by Tipalti include payment reporting and analytics that are fully integrated with CAKE’s reporting modules and enable users to create performance-based payment instructions.

Payment instructions are automatically captured by the Tipalti payment engine, and Tipalti scans payments to make sure no funds are disbursed to blacklisted payees, helping to ensure compliance with OFAC regulations. By using the new automated payment features, payers now better serve their publishers and affiliates by offering them the optimal payment method appropriate for their country of residence, in the currency of their choice. The automation and seamless integration allows payers to free up accounting resources to focus on other activities and eliminate labor-intensive tasks like internal invoice reconciliation, as well as tax form collection and processing.

“We’re proud to work with CAKE to offer networks a truly comprehensive solution to managing global affiliates,” said Tipalti founder and CEO Chen Amit. “With CAKE’s industry-leading campaign management tools and Tipalti’s integrated global payment functions, brands, affiliate network managers and advertisers finally have a way to manage all facets of a global operation.”

About CAKECAKE, the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform, is an enterprise solution providing business intelligence for performance marketers. With an easy to use interface, CAKE’s tracking optimizes online campaigns and provides an increase in revenue and reduction in operational costs. Real-time reporting and available API enable a single dashboard to manage all of your digital spend. For more information visit www.getCAKE.com or call 949-548-CAKE.

About TipaltiTipalti’s Software as a Service (SaaS) allows crowdsourcing, crowd-funding and advertising networks to streamline payments to developers, contributors, publishers and affiliates. Tipalti supports a large number of payment methods per country, disburses payments in local currencies, handles tax-reporting requirements and fulfills the required screening of payees. For more information, visit www.tipalti.com.

The mobile advertising market is a young one, but its growth is ever-present, showing impressive numbers on what seems to be a monthly basis. Usually, we see that the larger national brands in the US are the major contributors to the growth of mobile, sending quite significant chunks of their ad budgets to mobile advertising solutions providers. However, even taking a look at more local ad media, we can see huge leaps in mobile adoption and from that will stem some great mobile success. At least, that is what most research companies are predicting for the coming years in mobile advertising. One company in particular, a media consultancy company BIA/Kelsey, is forecasting big things for years to come in the way of local mobile advertising media. This is an ad type that is expected to make a very impressive imprint on the big mobile advertising picture, and it will happen soon according to BIA/Kelsey’s recent U.S. Local Media Forecast.

When local mobile media was last analyzed in 2012 by BIA/Kelsey, local mobile ad revenue had hit somewhere around $1.2 billion for the year. Now, the company is expecting this number will grow to upward of $9.1 billion by the year 2017. Between now and then, if revenues were to reach that high, it would represent an annual growth rate of nearly 50 percent. So, as can be seen local mobile ads will be gaining quite a bit of prominence in the relatively near future. To further prove this, BIA/Kelsey mentions that in 2012, local mobile ads represented a 0.9 percent share of all local media ad revenues, while in 2017 this share is expected to reach about 6.1 percent.

In terms of the bigger picture, BIA/Kelsey has forecasted that overall mobile ad spending, which was at about $3.2 billion in 2012, will be at $16.8 billion in the year 2017. When fitting locally targeted mobile ads into this big picture, they stood for 38 percent of all mobile ad spending in 2012 in the U.S. and by 2017 the percentage will have increased to about 54 percent. But, what is it exactly that is making so many advertisers choose locally targeted ads? BIA/Kelsey credits the huge growth to the following in their press release:

• Large brand advertisers will increasingly adapt their campaign objectives to the capabilities of the mobile device due to effective, abundant, and currently undervalued mobile local ad inventory.
• Mobile advertising will move down market to the SMB segment through a combination of self-serve tools and local media direct sales channels.
• Premiums that develop for location-targeted ads will compound ad volume growth.
• Innovation will increase among ad networks and ad tech providers (i.e., Enhanced Campaigns).

The adoption of mobile advertising methods by SMBs can already be seen, as many mobile advertising providers are setting these businesses up with tools that are easy to use and effective for simple advertising needs. Mobile is the place where companies are focusing their attention, and these advertising solutions providers are putting a majority of their effort into refining the mobile advertising experiences for their business clients. All of this in a nutshell will inevitably lead to growth in the use of mobile as an ads platform, and going further it will lead to more and more revenue.

Today AdStation, Adknowledge’s email network channel, announced record high earnings being paid to partners using the company’s “AdStation Integrated” solution. Improved functionality, combined with mobile optimization and updated targeting algorithms, have combined to drive eCPMs higher than ever before.

“It’s all about the data,” said Matt Hoggatt, GM of Email. “We don’t just indiscriminately fire out emails to our users.  We’re proud to have the largest and most comprehensive response-based targeting system on the planet behind us. Our offers are delivered to people who have an inherent interest in seeing our ads because they have been intelligently and specifically selected just for them.”

At a time when most networks are in decline, or even going out of business altogether, AdStation, and its partners, continues to flourish, in large part because of the success of the AdStation Integrated product. Essentially a fully automated email “offer engine,” AdStation Integrated provides email publishers with full access to not only exclusive creatives, but also the response-based targeting that is driving these industry-leading yields.

“There is no doubt that this gives our advertisers and publishers a clear advantage in the marketplace,” said Hoggatt. “Our partners like knowing that each advertisement being displayed in an email campaign has an better chance of being opened by a person most likely to engage with that specific message. That’s powerful stuff.”

Designed with total automation, targeting and enhanced deliverability as its primary strengths, AdStation Integrated was successfully launched in 2008, and has grown its client base dramatically ever sense. Back then, successful email marketing was more about the volume of mail sent, as opposed to creating user engagement by matching specific creatives to individual consumers. But with the increasingly selective nature of inbox filtering, along with the need to deliver and display clearly on mobile devices and tablets, doubling down on precise targeting and deliverability has proven to be a winning bet.

“We knew there was a significant market for this solution, and our growth continues to prove that we were right,” said Bill Intrater, VP of strategic alliances, “Simply blasting out emails is quickly becoming a justifiably extinct business practice. Publishers that advance with a focus on offer relevance through the use of response-based targeting technology will prosper, and we’re just pleased to be able to provide this functionality to our partners. We started this five years ago, and we’ll continue to evolve the product as the market and our partners demand.’”

To get started with AdStation Integrated, visit http://www.adstation.com/asl06/

About Adknowledge
Adknowledge is a leading online network that offers unique ad formats, data analysis, targeting algorithms, and creative approaches, providing advertisers with quality leads from hard to-reach places on the Web across multiple channels, including social networks, display, games, mobile, apps, and email. With hundreds of employees located throughout North America, plus growing offices in Europe and Asia, Adknowledge aims to set the standard in optimizing online advertiser ROI.

About AdStation

AdStation, Adknowledge’s email network channel, is the leader in email advertising and data monetization. Featuring a response-based targeting system that processes 20 billion calculations a day to match offers to precisely targeted consumers, AdStation delivers industry-leading yields on a fully outsourced or strategically integrated basis via a comprehensive performance advertising solution, reaching more than 400 million unique users. Boasting real-time statistics, targeting driven deliverability and custom creatives, AdStation maintains consistently high-quality conversions resulting in industry leading ROI.

For more information about AdStation, visit www.adstation.com. To get started with AdStation Integrated, visit www.adstation.com/asl06/

Ask anyone about their inbox, and they will tell you that they receive quite a few emails each day from companies that include advertising content. A lot of people will tell you that they are annoyed by the amount of marketing content they receive through emails, while even more may tell you of the benefits that these marketing emails delivered them. Those who do enjoy receiving these marketing emails are the reason that email marketing thrives still today, even with quite a few alternative digital marketing methods becoming more popular. In Econsultancy’s new “Email Marketing Industry Census 2013,” the company reports that at least 66 percent of marketers are quite impressed with email marketing today in that they are seeing the return on investment that they want.

In what is arguably the most informative chart in the report, it is reported that 44 percent of marketers rated their email ROI as “good,” while another 22 percent rated their ROI as “excellent.” With 27 percent reporting an average ROI, only 7 percent said that their ROI was “poor.” When compared to other popular advertising platforms, SEO ads were the only advertisements that marketers reported higher ROIs using, with 75 percent rating them at least “good.” That puts email ahead of paid search, content marketing, social media, offline direct marketing, affiliate marketing, online display, and mobile.

The report shows that even though marketers are seeing quite substantial success through email marketing tactics, most marketers are not spending enough time preparing their email content. The problem lies in optimization, something that most marketers are not giving enough attention to.

More than a quarter [of marketers] (27%) state that they spend no time at all internally on optimizing their email campaigns, a figure that has increased from 21% in 2008.

And even those that do optimise aren’t spending a significant amount of time on it. Just 19% of responding companies spend more than two hours a week on optimisation, compared to 62% who dedicate the same amount of time to design and content.

There are many who are doing everything right though, but still run into issues here and there. This is inevitable with any type of advertising. According to the report, in 2007 the more common issue that email marketers faced was “lack of skills and training,” with 42 percent reporting it as a major barrier. However, in 2013 it seems that the most common barrier has changed, with 50 percent stating that the quality of the email database being used is the biggest issue. In 2012, this was also the largest barrier, with 55 percent reporting it as an issue.

Econsultancy’s report, which was mostly composed of information from a survey of 1,300 digital marketers, is released annually, keeping businesses up to date with the most current portrait of email marketing. For 2013, things look good, but with more and more marketing options coming to light, this could very well change. It seems fewer people are spending time learning the right skills and methods of training for using email marketing, and that could become a bigger problem than it already has in coming years.

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