Rapp sets up innovation unit - Brand Republic News

Steve Furminger: to head RappLabs

Steve Furminger: to head RappLabs

RappLabs will set an eight-week deadline for development and prototyping.

Furminger said: "What RAPPLabs will deliver could be anything from a barcode scanner, to an augmented reality application on a mobile device, as well as pioneering technology 'firsts', and innovating in the traditional spheres as well." 

"The reality is that the modern-day consumer expects, demands, innovation. They want experiences, interactive services and tools, inspiration and valuable content. How we engage them has altered dramatically and, as an agency, we must be in a position to harness technology and new platforms to create new ways to help our clients engage consumers."

RAPPLabs will also harness the power of the RAPP global network.

Furminger added: "Having a close knit network allows us to spot innovation early, wherever it appears around the globe."

Peter Mitchell, RAPP London CEO, commented: "Throughout its 29-year history, RAPP has had a track record of innovation, successfully pioneering DRTV in the UK, and creating the concept of regular giving for charities being notable examples.

"Now, we operate in a media fragmented, ever evolving digital and social world, which has created challenges for brands, but undoubtedly also opens up boundless opportunities for innovation."

This article was first published on campaignlive.co.uk

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Fred Wilson [ http://www.quora.com/Fr... by Babak Nivi - Quora

Early in a startup, product decisions should be hunch driven. Later on, product decisions should be data driven.
Agree. But the best stuff is ALWAYS hunch driven and that doesn't really change (tweaks can be data driven). So for me it depends on what he ment about "Later on, product decisions..." new products or changes...

 

Hunches come from being a power user of the products in your category and from having a long standing obsession about the problem you are solving.
Eh, not so much...  Did Larry and Sergey share a premium AltaVista account? Did Zuckerberg have the most friends on his Friendster profile? Did Jason Fried use a ton of enterprise colab software before Basecamp?

 

Domain expertise to the point of obsession is highly correlated with the most successful entrepeneurs in our portfolio.
Agree...(some of this can be attained with some months of deep thought and exploration/talk to some users).

 

Ideas that most people derided as ridiculous have produced the best outcomes. Don't do the obvious thing.
AGREE.

 

Monetization should be native and improve the experience for users.
YA...AGREE. (But there are lots and lots of businesses that charge for their product and make out great so that is not "non-native" in all cases...it IS in some though).

Michael LevySun Feb 20 2011 05:30:24 GMT+0000 (GMT Standard Time)

Good thoughts to consider in product design...

The Battle For Consumer Data

The Battle For Consumer Data

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February 18, 2011 – 12:15 am

Data-Driven Thinking"Data Driven Thinking" is a column written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.

Today's column is written by Tom Chavez, CEO, Krux Digital.

The battle for consumer data just reached a new, much more feverish pitch.

The day before yesterday, Apple announced what a lot of people in our industry have feared and mostly known for some time:  they want use the iPad to further disintermediate publishers from their audiences.   In addition to claiming a 30% share of any publisher app sales, Apple’s new rules of play (WSJ) would:

  • Prevent linking of content delivered on apps to the publisher’s own website, effectively keeping iPad users behind an iron curtain of Apple’s construction;
  • Prevent movement of customer data outside Apple’s iTunes environment under the auspices of protecting consumer privacy, except in the unlikely “yes, share my email” opt-in of the end user.

Google immediately countered by announcing One Pass, which dominates Apple’s offer along every dimension.   Barring any lurking gotchas, Google is claiming a 10% revshare relative to Apple’s 30% and allowing customer data to flow freely from Android to third-parties at the direction of the publisher, presumably without any of Apple’s strange restrictions on linking.

Before I read Google’s announcement, my reaction to Apple’s news was mixed.   Jobs sounds reasonable when he writes, "Our philosophy is simple—when Apple brings a new subscriber to the app, Apple earns a 30 percent share; when the publisher brings an existing or new subscriber to the app, the publisher keeps 100 percent and Apple earns nothing.”  For the publisher, iPad revenue feels like found money.  Before the iPad, tablet-based revenue for publishers was exactly zero; after the iPad, it’s something greater, possibly much larger.  It reminds me of Google’s 70/30 AdSense arrangement with publishers:  before it existed, publishers saw basically nothing with contextual search; after AdSense, publishers had a new, previously untapped source of revenue.    Who knows if Apple’s 70/30 split is the ‘right’ going-in price, but it has the twin benefits of catalyzing revenue from a new modality that hardly existed before and snapping to a well-understood industry norm.

My larger concerns with Apple’s offer centered on linking and customer data. Hyperlinking is, after all, the essence of internet experience.  Telling a publisher he can post content on the iPad but not link it back to his website is like is like the owner of a shopping mall telling its tenant, Williams-Sonoma, that they can’t also hand out their catalogue in the store.  It’s kooky, tone-deaf, and reminds me of Facebook’s Beacon.   I wager that Apple rescinds it within weeks.

Apple’s approach to customer data is more worrisome. Section 3.3.9 of the iOS developer Ts & Cs tells the app developer that:

"You and Your Applications may not collect user or device data without prior user consent, and then only to provide a service or function that is directly relevant to the use of the Application, or to serve advertising. You may not use analytics software in Your Application to collect and send device data to a third party."

Does tracking code provided by a third-party at the behest of the publisher run afoul of these T’s and C’s?   Does ‘device data’ only include stuff on the device that is happening outside the App environment, e.g., other apps, PII, credentials, or could it extend to more basic usage and usability data that a publisher might have a real need to access?  Presumably, all of these items are to be interpreted according to Apple’s own discretion.

Beyond the definitional issues, there’s a more fundamental problem with Apple’s approach, one with profound strategic significance for publishers:  Customer data is the lifeblood of ad-supported media, particularly in an increasingly real-time, interactive context.   Consumers want more relevant ads, more engaging content, more actionable offers, and they want it all now.  None of that happens without intelligent, real-time synthesis of consumer data.   If Apple becomes the only aggregator and analyzer of consumer data for its current and future iDevices, or if it decides on a whim which third parties publishers get to work with to deliver and enrich their apps, digital publishers forfeit their most important means of generating cool consumer experiences.

Apple’s attempt to present their position on third-party data as a commitment to consumer privacy is, at best, a red herring.  Publishers have the means to demonstrate responsible stewardship of consumer data on their own.   They don’t need Papa Bear to do it for them.  Closed systems drive increasing returns and unbreakable monopolies, and that’s why Apple is pushing iAds – not because they’re worked up about privacy.

But the increasing returns argument doesn’t work in any event.   If Apple executives thought this all the way through, they’d recognize that their current posture undercuts their own long-term advantage.   They need a vibrant ecosystem of third party developers, enablers, and analysts helping publishers make sense of the torrent of data their iDevices are throwing off.  More insight means more publishers, which means more apps, which brings in more consumers, more ads, more offers – and ultimately much more value from Apple’s 30% cut.

At the end of the day, I find myself in the odd position of praising Google’s… openness.   Its 90/10 offer is quite an attention-grabber.  Its commitment to third-party data participation constitutes an even more potent possibility for publishers. I’m lighting candles and praying that publishers think things through before lurching into commitments with Apple bearing drastic long-term effects, and nudging everyone I know to give Google Android a serious look.

Follow Tom Chavez (@tommychavez), Krux Digital (@kruxdigital), AdExchanger.com (@adexchanger) on Twitter.

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 Email This Post
February 18, 2011 – 12:15 am

The battle for consumer data is just beginning...

Attribution Technology: What’s Best For Your Needs?

Attribution Technology: What’s Best For Your Needs?

Apr 9, 2010 at 4:34pm ET by Adam Goldberg

A few months ago, I wrote an article titled Attribution: What It Is And Why It’s Important where I discussed two types of attribution: operational and project based attribution.

For this post, I want to go one step further and explain how you can use several different types of technologies for operational and project-based attribution. The tables below should help you select the most appropriate technology based on your own attribution needs.

Operational attribution allows an advertiser to see all the steps or clicks that led to conversion in real-time and continuously attributes conversion credit across the team of ads. The three most common technologies used for operational attribution are display ad servers, website analytics and advertising analytics.

Technology Pros Cons Audience

Display Ad Servers

Low level implementation; see how display clicks and impressions work alongside PPC. Focused more heavily on paid traffic sources such as display and PPC, and typically excludes other ad sources; revenue focus on ad delivery with limited insight into organic channels. Those with mainly display focus in marketing mix; focus on paid channel overlap.

Website Analytics

Strong digital channel coverage; ability to data mine against site traffic and CRM data. Heavy implementation effort; limited ability to de-duplicate post-impression data at user level. Current users of site analytics; those who have a limited desire to understand post-impression data.

Advertising Analytics

High level of accuracy due to consistent tracking methodology; ability to manage large volumes of data from internal and external systems. Moderate implementation effort; incremental investment to site analytics or ad serving. Those who desire complete channel coverage of digital landscape; those who seek to tie in product, customer and ad creative analytics into the overall value equation.

Project based attribution focuses on your overall marketing program and produces an optimized marketing spend plan, and its solutions include both technology and service providers. For project-based attribution, there are two commonly used technologies: business intelligence and advertising analytics.

Technology Pros Cons Audience
Business Intelligence Ability to pull in and interpret data from disparate sources; manage large volumes of data. Incremental expense to ad serving and site analytics; data from disparate sources can create accuracy and de-duplication concerns. Those who don’t have access to production site; those who are confident in “lift” metrics as opposed to actual metrics at the most granular level.
Advertising Analytics Accurate dataset to conduct comprehensive statistical modeling; ability to translate statistical analysis into day-to-day channel management. Requires code on site; incremental investment to site analytics or ad serving. Those who seek day-to-day dash boarding of their attribution efforts; those who seek to tie in granular data as well as larger econometric data into the equation.

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.

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Adam Goldberg is the Co-Founder and Chief Innovation Officer at ClearSaleing, Inc., a technology provider of advertising analytics. Adam founded ClearSaleing after working at Google for 3 years, where he started their Inside Sales organization.

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Interesting comparison between 'Operational' and 'Project based' attribution approaches.

Getting personal with targeted web advertising | Markets & Analysis

Getting personal with targeted web advertising

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10 Feb 2011

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With his cropped hair and plain-speaking manner, Sam Barnett does not look like one of advertising's slick Mad Men. But then the 27-year-old founder of Struq, a business that offers retailers highly targeted, personalised adverts on the web, has no desire to be part of an established order.

Barnett sees his start-up as a disruptive force that is using new technology to make online display ads as effective as search-engine advertising - and in a way that some of the top media-buying agencies have struggled to match.

The big idea is "re-targeting". That means tracking consumers' online behaviour using cookies (tiny beacon-type devices on your computer), identifying the most "predictably profitable" customers, and then refining the targeting to show more relevant ads to each consumer - based on past behaviour and purchases. "It's all anonymised," stresses Barnett, adding that users can opt out of cookies.

His firm also offers creative input. It uses that customer data to personalise each banner ad by highlighting different products, using a range of colours, marketing devices, and so on.

Struq makes money by buying advertising space from websites in bulk but only charging its clients each time a consumer clicks on their banner ad.
"We take a risk. We need 12 times the industry average of click-through rates on banner ads just to break even."

Barnett has got something right as Struq "serves" millions of ads a day. "On average, for every £1 a retailer spends with us in media, they get £19 in revenues in post-click sales. That's clicking on the ad and subsequently buying a product or multiple products."

Since founding Struq in April 2008 in the depths of recession, Barnett has seen turnover grow from £500,000 in 2009 to £6 million last year, and forecasts £19.5 million this year. "Our growth figure doesn't just go up, it's getting steeper. It's astronomical."

He expanded into France and Germany late last year. "Now it is about global scale. I am pretty focused and ambitious about that."

Barnett, who grew up in Orpington, Kent, says his parents were not entrepreneurial. After studying law at Leicester University, he worked for a year for entrepreneur Seb Bishop's internet-search marketing company Espotting. "I learnt how to sell things to people."

The idea for Struq came after he moved to another site, AdJug, for a year. "I couldn't believe how much money went into online display advertising when it performed so badly," he recalls, referring to the problem of "banner blindness" when irrelevant ads pop up. "I thought 'how can you make display perform as well as search?' "

He launched Struq with £2000, and hired his first employee immediately. "The first year was torrid. No one would give us a loan or an overdraft - thank you, banks. I was a 24-year-old kid saying, 'I'm going to change advertising and the ad agencies told me to f*** off'."

Struq survived by building technology for gambling sites. Then, as the recovery began in 2009, he got his first major advertising client - recruitment firm Jobsite. Adidas, DVD rental firm LoveFilm and car-and-bikes group Halfords followed. At the same time, media owners - from The Sun to ITV - became more willing to sell ad space to Struq.

Barnett's sales pitch was simple: "Let's say, you're a retailer. You spend all your marketing money driving traffic to your site. But 98% of those users don't buy anything. What we do is when a customer looks at shoes and doesn't buy that product, we know that there is a good chance the customer will then review the price of shoes on other sites. So we personalise the banner ads on the sites the users visit next - in real time. We can recommend other products like those the user has already looked at, and other similar products.

"It's like Amazon when they say 'if you bought that, you'll like this' but much more sophisticated." The key, he says, is that "we can predict the profitability of users based on historic data and machine-learning algorithms".

Barnett has had to use headhunters to find the right technical staff. In October 2009, he employed only four people. Now it's 28. Struq has also just moved into offices in New Oxford Street - complete with pool table, dartboard and beer fridge. It's more like a scene from Facebook movie The Social Network than Mad Men.

Barnett isn't keen to build expectations but, when asked, says he turned down five offers for the business last year. One valuation was for £35 million but he suggests it is higher now.

He appears in no mood to sell. He owns 100% of Struq, and has no debt. Instead, he is fired up after having breakfast with Bhs boss Sir Philip Green last week. "He re-forecasts and re-budgets that entire business every seven days," says Barnett admiringly.

The big issue hanging over online advertising is privacy. Clearly consumers must trust the fact their data is anonymised. Barnett defends the use of cookies: "Virtually every retailer in their privacy policy says they can show personalised ads and enable third parties to show ads based on that data.

"There has to be give and take. Advertising supports the internet being free. Why would advertisers continue to spend if users didn't engage? Personalised ads pull more money into display advertising, which enables us to support web publishers."

Building Struq has been tiring. "I feel about a zillion years old. Most of the people I employ are older than me. My receptionist guessed my age at 39. How sh*t is that?" But he is laughing.

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Reader views (1)

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Sam had a great grounding having worked with Satish & the team at both AdJug and Espotting / Miva. He saw the flaws in display advertising and then built answers to those flaws to delivering an amazing business in Struq, one that both the industry and he should be proud of.

But..... Struq is old news, it uses old technology. Pixel tracking only works on big sites that the user may or may not visit and doesnt say anything about the individual other than they saw one advert one time.

Sam, come and take a look at Pzyche.com, so you can see what your competition will be delivering. You're behind the curve, but Pzyche.com can help you move the business (and the industry) onwards.

- Jason Duke, London UK, 10/02/2011 15:08
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