Rose Castronova was Chief Financial Officer of Hill Holliday’s New York office for most of my 18 years at the agency. And I can say without an nanosecond of hesitation, that she was one of the finest human beings to ever call Hill Holliday home.
After a long illness which she fought courageously, Rose passed away late Friday evening.
We’re pretty excited about our new film for Oxfam America. Oxfam wants Congress to stop giving food aid money to special interest groups, and give it to people who need it most. Take a look, share, join the cause.
‘Audience targeting’ is often used synonymously with ‘data buying’ – selecting a data segment whose audience descriptors meet your targeting qualifiers. But with the vast amount of data available to us, doing audience targeting only through pre-packaged data segments is one-dimensional. It’s a one-size-fits-all approach to something far more complex than that.
Today’s Beacon spotlight is on ChoiceStream ‘CRUNCH’, a company whose audience targeting technology is innovative and multi-dimensional. CRUNCH is a product of ChoiceStream – a company with over ten years’ experience in predicting online consumer behavior. The company’s core business is built on understanding relationships between audiences, context, products. And CRUNCH leverages data, including ChoiceStream’s own unique data set, to inform audience segmentation, ad decisioning, and program optimization.
One of Hill Holliday’s major areas of interest is the shift towards buying media through technology platforms. In 2011 25% of our digital media investments were handled through our platform media team, and we expect that to rise as more quality inventory becomes available in marketplace environments.
But we’ve been frustrated that the new sophistication in the way that ads are delivered and optimized has been largely driven by media parameters, as opposed to creative parameters. It’s now possible to understand the characteristics of the person receiving an ad with an amazing degree of specificity, and yet the creative execution that is delivered isn’t generally impacted by all of that knowledge.
We can hardly believe that our TVnext℠ summit took place over a week ago. We already recapped the day’s activity on the #TVnext backchannel. Now we share 56 photos we selected from over 400 that we hope bring to life the awesomeness that happened last February 27.
Stay tuned as we’ll also be posting a highlights video in the coming weeks.
Building advocates for your brand on Facebook is a challenge. Facebook is great for building a community and getting people to interact with your content, but the platform doesn’t provide you much insight into the aggregate behaviors and interests of your fans. That’s why we partnered with Crowdly to be a part of Project Beacon and provide our clients a tool that gives them more contexts around their advocates’ interactions with the brand.
Crowdly has developed a consumer crowdsourcing platform that helps brands recruit fans to be advocates through an application that plugs right into their Facebook brand page. Your fans can submit ideas to your brand, and other fans can then vote on them. Your fans gain credibility over time for the number of ideas they submit, the popularity of those ideas, and the number of people they recruit to submit ideas as well. Fans with the highest scores are deemed to be advocates because of their continued engagement and ability to recruit new people to engage with your brand.
One of the ways Project Beacon is designed to accelerate the relationship between the agency and participating companies is through assigning each company to a “buddy” — someone at Hill Holliday whose interests align with what the company does.
I got paired up with ShareThis who operates one of the most popular sharing widgets and whose logo has become the now-ubiquitous symbol for sharing. The widget gives ShareThis a unique perspective into what and how gets shared online, at what speed and, importantly, by who and to what effect. Understanding how content propagates among audiences is one of our research pillars; we conducted experiments and wrote about the topic in the past. Together with ShareThis, we hope to expand our knowledge of the sharing behaviors and their implications for advertising
