Once upon a time, “Westward, Ho!” defined where the U.S. population – and with it, the U.S. economy – was heading.

Today, “Social, Ho!” hasn’t yet become a watchword, but the advertising industry may have to come up with one. As Americans spend increasing daily minutes and hours on social media, advertisers are spending increasing dollars to be right there with them. But just as settlers heading West in the 1800s were venturing into rich but uncharted territory, brands are staking their ad dollars in a still-new and largely uncharted media terrain. They know they need to be in social media, but they’re still struggling to understand what makes a good social media ad. And metrics that show how well those ads are performing remain elusive. But read on, and you’ll see that effective solutions for mobile social ad testing and mobile ad metrics are in reach.

First, here’s how high the stakes are:

• The Interactive Advertising Bureau reported that 2016 spending on social ads totaled $16.3 billion in 2016, up 50% over 2015. The lion’s share of those ads were seen on the mobile apps that U.S. consumers overwhelmingly favor as portals to their social accounts.

• So far this year, advertising’s turn to social shows no signs of slowing. In an article on the latest figures from Standard Media Index (SMI), which tracks ad spending, MediaPost reports that social media “showed soaring 55% gains” in the second quarter of 2017.

• That’s on top of “robust” growth of 25.9% in the first quarter.

• Social is soaking up spending previously devoted to other U.S. ad channels. Second quarter growth in overall ad spending was just 3.8%, according to SMI, after 2.8% growth in Q1 – which was the slowest first-quarter growth rate since 2011.

So yes --  “Social Ho!”  works as a two-word catchphrase for what’s happening in 21^st century media.

But the latest SMI figures also underscore the uncharted nature of social media advertising, and the uncertainties that result. Social media video advertising, including YouTube and Facebook, “sank an eye-opening 15%” during the second quarter. MediaPost attributes the decline to “brand safety concerns, along with some measurement issues.”

The brand safety concerns arise from automated placement that sometimes embeds a brand’s social advertising alongside incompatible or objectionable content. And measurement has been a puzzle as advertisers search for ways to understand how well social ads generate awareness and drive interest when they land in consumers’ social media news feeds.

Like social media itself, In-app mobile research has matured and taken hold in the 2010s, with social and mobile both driven by the rising dominance of the smartphone. Now newly-developed mobile research capabilities are finally allowing advertisers to fill in the blanks as they seek ways to optimize social media campaigns and measure their effectiveness. 

One breakthrough involves testing social media ads in the best way possible – by injecting them into the actual personal news feeds where those ads will be appear after the campaign is officially launched. Advertisers can test and hone their concepts with panel members who fit the audience for their brand or product, using a process that collects passive data that reflects awareness and interaction with an add, and then surveys ad recipients for detailed, qualitative insights into what’s working or not working.

For measurement after an ad campaign is launched, advertisers can now learn which mobile consumers are receiving the ad on their phones, and determine whether these validated recipients fit the audience profile the advertiser is paying to reach. There’s also an opportunity to send verified ad recipients a mobile survey for whatever further insights a researcher may need.

The takeaway is that  “Social Ho!” and “Mobile Ho!” are no longer calls to venture into uncharted country. Now advertisers have a map they can follow to understand how their concepts and content are faring along the rich frontier of social media and the mobile devices. To learn more, just get in touch at solutions@mfour.com.

Here's your Friday roundup of 3 items from the MFour blog to keep you up to speed on mobile.

Email Survey Notifications Are the New Horse & Buggy

The Sad Facts about "Mobile Optimized"

Why Market Researchers Should Watch "The Big Short"

And here's a Friday tune to get you bouncing into your weekend.

Mike Gaffney has joined MFour Mobile Research as Chief Revenue Officer, a new position in which he’ll play a key role in driving the company’s rapid growth.

Mike will draw on extensive executive experience as he oversees MFour’s sales and marketing teams. He previously helped top technology and advertising companies rapidly expand their sales – most recently as Chief Revenue Officer at Sharethrough, where his five-year tenure coincided with its rise to dominance among native advertising platforms. Previously he was Chief Revenue Officer at Auditude, a video advertising platform, and Vice President of Sales at the pioneering digital advertising exchange Right Media, which was acquired by Yahoo! for $800 million. He began his career at Oracle, then joined Salesforce.com, where he was among its first wave of employees and rose to Vice President. Mike holds a Bachelor’s degree in American Studies from Georgetown University. He and his wife have three children, ages 11 to 15, and recently added a puppy to the family. Mike grew up on Long Island and maintains a long-suffering loyalty to the New York Jets.

If you’re not sure why you should pay close attention to consumer panel fraud, just think back on “The Big Short.” Nominated for a 2016 Oscar for Best Picture, it told the story of the subprime mortgage meltdown that triggered the Great Recession of 2008-2009.

Now it’s market research that’s facing a meltdown, if researchers and clients don’t make it a top priority to know exactly where their data comes from, and how vulnerable it will be if it’s sourced online. It’s this issue that brings to mind “The Big Short,” because the movie is a sobering study of what can happen if an industry gets too complacent or too distracted to be vigilant about data sourcing and data quality.

The film tells a complex story that boils down to a pretty basic business mistake: a failure to obtain reliable consumer data before making important decisions. “The Big Short” focuses on investment bankers who bought thousands of individual home mortgages, bundled them into mortgage-backed securities, and resold them to investors. In the rush to exploit an opportunity created by booming home prices -- and the belief that they would never come down – many sharp minds on Wall Street failed to pay attention to the basics. As the movie shows, they failed to obtain or verify actual on-the-ground facts concerning the financial qualifications of the real home-buyers who were taking out the actual mortgages that served as the foundation for mortgage-backed securities. 

Suspecting the worst, a hedge fund executive played by Steve Carell heads to Florida to do the ground-level consumer research the sellers and buyers of mortgage-backed securities had fatally omitted. He visits actual homeowners in actual neighborhoods to learn how much they owe on their mortgages, and how much they earn. He’s appalled to find that they have no chance of paying back the loans, making it inevitable that they will default, and that the investment pyramid built on their limited resources will crumble and fall.

Today’s consumer researchers and their clients now have to decide whether to risk a Big Shortchange in data quality and reliability. If they opt for online surveys, as most of them have for a generation or more, they’re likely to be buying consumer sample that’s in some ways akin to those mortgage-backed securities. Instead of known respondents who’ve joined a single, carefully-managed panel, buyers of online sample typically get data from a mix-and-match set of respondents who come from a variety of sources. They get verbal assurances that the data is representative, but no transparency about how it was sourced. This leaves the process open to all sorts of errors and abuses that undermine executives' ability to base important business decisions on accurate, reliable data.

One risk of relying on an online panel is duplicate respondents. Because many online panel members belong to multiple panels, there’s a real danger that they’ll receive multiple invitations to take the same survey. Two completes from one panelist is in nobody’s interest. Online research also is vulnerable to fraud by survey-taking bots. Experts say that bots are getting better all the time at mimicking real respondents and evading detection.

The alternative to online surveys is in-app mobile studies that bring two core benefits: They harness consumers’ love of their smartphones to insure a diverse, representative panel, and they exploit smartphones’ unique capabilities to validate each response and ensure it’s not coming from a bot or from duplicate survey-takers. Each phone has its own unique ID code and can be located geographically for further assurance against duplicate responses. Meanwhile, fraud-bots that stalk the online realm can’t break into the protected, in-app space.

If you want to invest in the most reliable data to inform your client's or company's analysis and decisions, it’s important to understand how legacy online technology and methodology stack up against new-generation in-app mobile solutions. To get in on the conversation, contact us at solutions@mfour.com.

Email is among the weakest of the weak links endemic to online surveys – and that's why it's important to learn about the in-app mobile alternative, and how it cuts email entirely out of the survey process.

Online studies seek respondents by sending emails to potential respondents. This begins a five-step process. First, the recipients must notice the emails in their inboxes. Then they must click to open the email. Third, they have to read the message and recognize it as a survey invitation. Fourth, they have to decide whether they want to take the survey. Fifth, they have to click on a link inside the email’s text to connect with a website where the questionnaire is housed.

In-app mobile cuts the process down to two steps. It starts with a push notification that a survey is available. The push comes with a unique audio tone that tells the recipient that this is a survey invitation. The recipient then decides whether to participate. If so, he or she simply opens the app and starts answering the questionnaire, which has been instantly downloaded into the phone.

The takeaway: two steps vs. five steps. One is efficient and drives up response rates and speeds your projects to avoid missed deadlines. The other is just plain cumbersome.

Not to mention outdated. A recent study of email’s use in marketing (as opposed to market research) underscores some of the general drawbacks of trying to reach today’s consumers by email.

• 24% of Business to Consumer marketers in the study by Emma, an email marketing services provider, identified “getting people to open emails” as their biggest challenge, tied with “personalization and targeting.” Targeting is another strength of the in-app, custom panel approach, but we’ll leave that for another day.

The survey numbers were even worse among younger demographics, as represented by responses from email marketers for universities, whose audiences are disproportionately teens and young adults – prospective students, current students, and recent alumni included.

• 41% of marketers for universities said they “struggle to get people to open emails,” leading the study’s authors to remark that “they’re battling a lot of noise in the inbox.”

• Another stat worth noting is the average amount of time U.S. consumers spend using mobile apps – 2 hours and 15 minutes a day, according to analytics company App Annie. A separate study by comScore found that younger adults (ages 18 to 34) average about 3 hours a day in-app. Clearly, the app is the comfort zone where today’s mobile consumers can best be reached.

Because panel fraud is such a pressing issue for market research, it’s also important to remember that fraud bots programmed to masquerade as human survey-takers can latch onto email links to online surveys like crocodiles latching onto their prey. The online sphere is where bots are designed to function, and where they can flourish. Mobile-app surveys take place in a safety zone that stands apart from the wilds of the internet -- a place where panelists can be validated and where bots can't intrude.

Notifications are just the start of the in-app mobile survey process. To get the full story from start to finish, just get in touch at solutions@mfour.com.

You may have heard the story of the football coach who decided his team needed to get back to fundamentals, so he gathered all the players and began at the beginning: “This is a football.”

Today’s Mobile 101 installment is about the fundamental of all fundamentals, beginning at the beginning: “This is a native app.”

Dictionary.com defines “native” as “natural, hereditary, connected with something in a natural way.” So a “native app” is one whose natural and sole environment is a smartphone. It’s been created strictly with smartphones in mind, and designed to give perfect performance on a phone.

Researchers who use mobile have to choose between going with native app survey technology or a “mobile optimized” approach that ignores the smartphone’s own native environment and takes place in the same online space as traditional surveys designed for desktops and laptops.

By going the native app route, you get mobile-specific technology that loads your entire survey instantly into respondents’ phones, enabling them to answer without a connection to the internet. It’s like downloading a gaming app and proceeding to enjoy it without interruption because of the app’s fast-twitch functionality.

Researchers who choose “mobile optimized” over native app are asking their respondents to use their phones like ping-pong paddles. It's not exactly an efficient way to harness one of the most powerful consumer technologies ever devised.

• Mobile optimized surveys don’t load into respondents’ phones. Instead, they depend on users clicking on email notifications to connect with the web page where the survey is housed.

• Questions are served from the web to the phone one-by-one, and respondents volley their answers back, one-by-one. This back-and-forth continues until the questionnaire is complete.

• Each volley can fail if the internet connection vanishes or slows. The predictable result is frustration, dropped attempts, and inattentive responses.

• Surveys take longer, completion rates are lower, and consumers’ overall engagement with survey-taking suffers.

These are the fundamentals of today’s research game. Choosing the right mobile method is up to you – and you need to remember that in-app surveys aren’t just a little different, but different in kind from other mobile approaches. For more information about in-app mobile panel and technology, just contact us at solutions@mfour.com.

Here's your Friday roundup of 3 items from the MFour blog to keep you up to speed on mobile.

Marketing's Job One Is Getting Social Media Right

Is Edgy, Highly-Praised TV too Risky for Advertisers?

Announcing Mobile 101 – Get Knowledge You Can Use

And here's a Friday tune to get you dancing into your weekend.

(L-R) Lily Ingrassia, Abraham Graciano, Shireen El-Maissi)

MFour has hired two new client service staffers and a recruiter to ensure that the rapid, continuous rapid growth of its customer base will be accomplished with no reduction in the personalized attention, effective communications and quality results each client deserves.

Lily Ingrassia will provide customer service to users of MFourDIY® -- the only all-mobile, do-it-yourself survey platform. She will help carry out MFour’s promise to provide full, real-time live backup for clients as they design and field their own do-it-yourself surveys. For Lily, this is a “welcome back,” as she joins the staff fulltime after interning at MFour the past two summers. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Marketing from the University of San Diego, and also has worked for IMAX Corporation and the International Surfing Assn. Her biggest personal interests are surfing, hiking, cooking and rescuing homeless pets.

Abraham Graciano joins the team as a Client Service Solutions representative, dedicated to providing consistent, quality interactions for clients throughout the research process. He previously was a project manager for Welocalize Life Science. His passions include playing soccer and rooting for Mexico’s national team; he’s also patiently working on restoring a 1989 Ford Ranger to mint condition.

Shireen El-Maissi will play a key role in helping hiring managers find and evaluate talented candidates to join MFour’s fast-accelerating push to be the category-defining provider of mobile market research. Previously she worked as an employment recruiter for 24 Seven Inc. and Jobspring Partners. Shireen holds a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology from California State University, Long Beach, plays co-ed flag football and is a connoisseur of many of the finer Southern California dining spots.

Welcome aboard, Abraham, Lily and Shireen!

Is the “Golden Age of Television” proclaimed by many TV critics bad for advertisers?

In many cases, shows beloved by critics are less golden than black and red. That’s black for dark characters and bleak story lines, and red for bloody violence portrayed with graphic specificity.

Two recent commentaries for MediaPost raise questions about whether TV advertisers are wandering into a thicket of contradiction and possible audience backlash when they bet heavily that bleak stories and harsh images will translate into marketing gold. They raise good questions that can only be answered by surveying consumers who watch the shows. For advertisers, and for TV networks and streaming services, it’s important to understand whether ads are being noticed and remembered, and  how they're affecting consumers' perceptions about the brand and product.The advertising and television industries acknowledge that we’re in a moment of confusion and flux when it comes to measuring TV ads’ effectiveness, and how to approach “golden age”-type shows is one more unknown that’s begging for data and insights to inform how advertisers should proceed.

Both MediaPost commentaries concern the Hulu series, “The Handmaid’s Tale,” which envisions a dark, dystopian future that’s not exactly in sync with advertising’s typical aim of establishing a mood of good feeling or positive intrigue about a brand.

“It’s odd, brutal and hard to watch,” writes one commentator, who says she was “flabbergasted” by one particularly cruel scene, “followed instantly by the insertion of a technicolor, upbeat, jaunty commercial…making the advertisers look ridiculous and creating a creepy and tasteless way to annoy viewers.”

The other commentary asked whether advertising on a show like “The Handmaid’s Tale” might create problems for brands that parallel what they face when automated digital ad placement puts their messaging on objectionable websites, or locates it amid content that's embarrassingly discordant with the image and perception the advertiser wants to create.

For these dark shows, the author writes, “we don’t know exactly how the emotional impact of content halos onto its adjacent advertising. If that halo exists, you’d better be sure the emotion supports your brand…the rise of quality long-form content may work against, not for, advertising…the producers of movie-like TV content have some research to do.”

Conducting that research must start with a panel researchers can trust – real, verified consumers who’ve actually watched the show in question. And such a study needs to reach the audience while the viewing experience is fresh in mind. Advanced, in-app mobile surveys can do the job quickly and efficiently. The difference-maker is a quality, deeply engaged panel of mobile consumers who’ve already provided detailed, trustworthy demographic information that’s crucial to targeting your study to the right viewer/respondents.

The MediaPost commentaries point to the need for a detailed understanding of how viewers respond to TV programming. For information on how you can most reliably address that need, just get in touch at solutions@mfour.com.

Advertising is at a crossroads. Brands need to bet heavily on social media, because that’s where the public is. But there are serious pitfalls in this new terrain, especially when it comes to finding accurate and transparent ways to measure social ads’ effectiveness. And as the saying goes, what you can’t measure, you can’t manage.

The stakes are clear: social media advertising is surging rapidly, including 12% year-over-year U.S. spending growth in April, according to a report from Standard Media Index. Compare that to the “scant 3%” growth for other digital advertising, which the report says has been losing steam.

So getting social media ads right is crucial. To help brands meet that challenge, MFour and Kantar AddedValue have partnered on a pioneering approach called Emotional Brand Connections Social Media Ad Testing. In a nutshell, it lets you quickly get a handle on how well an ad you’ve prepared is likely to perform on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other social sites. Mobile consumers see the test ad in their actual news feeds. The test then collects passive data that shows how recipients are engaging with the ad on their phones, and proceeds to a survey phase for deeper insights into why the ad grabs them – or fails to grab them. Here’s how it works:

• Send a test ad to members of an all-mobile panel whose validated demographic characteristics identify them as the kinds of consumers you want to reach.

• Recipients don’t know they’re part of a test. When the ad shows up in their social media news feeds, it’s indistinguishable from regular ads they receive.

• In the first test phase, you capture passive data that shows how recipients are interacting with the ad. Do they even notice it? If so, how much time do they spend with the ad? Do they click on it? Watch and listen to any video? Share the ad with Facebook friends or Twitter followers?

• The next step is to survey the same test-ad recipients, to learn how well they recall your ad and how they perceive it. Does the concept and content engage them, spark interest in the brand and product, and push them toward shopping and buying?

• If your test ad’s a hit, you’ll launch your mobile social media campaign with full confidence. If its performance falls short, you’ve bought yourself a chance to revise and retest the ad until your audience tells you you’re in good shape to proceed.

Social media is the new mainline to marketing success, but a good road map is a must for avoiding costly wrong turns. To learn more, just contact us at solutions@mfour.com.