Appearances matter in the mobile advertising realm – to the tune of billions of dollars.

We’re talking about “native” advertising – ads designed to fit in with surrounding non-ad content, increasing the chances that mobile audiences will pay attention.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau defines it as “a format…that takes advantage of the form and function of the surrounding user experiences…indigenous to mobile devices.” And native advertising is a very big deal, according to a Facebook-commissioned study on the rising importance of native mobile display ads:

• By 2020, brands and companies are expected to spend $53.4 billion worldwide on native mobile display ads, accounting for 49% of all digital display advertising.

• Advertisers will spend $8.9 billion worldwide and $3.9 billion in North America on native display ads placed in mobile apps, as opposed to on websites.

Those are very big bets, and just as they do in more traditional advertising channels such as TV, radio and print, brands will need to test their mobile campaigns -- an essential preliminary step to take if they hope to take full advantage of the native opportunities mobile advertising presents.

Until now there has been no reliable way to accomplish this – it has been a matter of launching the campaign and then trying to measure its effectiveness after the fact. But a new method called Emotional Brand Connections Social Media Ad Testing fills that need – and its concept is identical to the thinking behind native advertising. It turns a test ad into a native ad that shows up naturally in research panelists' social media news feeds – where it’s undifferentiated from all the regular content that surrounds it. Here’s how EBC Social Media Ad Testing works:

• Identify consumers your campaign is targeting and match those characteristics against the members of a million-member active panel who take surveys in the same manner they typically get their social media content – by using a mobile app.

• Place the test ad in the social media feeds of your targeted consumers.

• Collect passive data that records how recipients respond to the native test ad. Get insights into whether the content is sparking positive behaviors such as clicking on the ad, turning on its audio, and liking or sharing it.

• Send a survey to test recipients to obtain insights into crucial success indicators, including ad recall, opinions about the test ad’s content and concept, and whether the ad drives interest and an intent to purchase.

The bottom line is that advertisers now have a direct, natural pathway to timely insights into how their social media ads are likely to be received. If the test panel gives thumbs way up on the content and concept, brands can launch their campaigns with confidence. If there’s room for improvement, they’ll know it while there’s still time to make adjustments that will maximize the social media campaign’s appeal and effectiveness. Consumers’ social media feeds are a space where today’s advertisers need to be – and it only makes sense to test campaigns with the same native approach that will allow them to succeed once they’re launched. For more information, just contact us at sales@mfour.com.

Have marketing focus groups gone the way of Route 66?

The legendary roadway, immortalized in a 1946 hit song and an early 1960s TV show (both named “Route 66"), was the main drag for travelers driving long distances between St. Louis in the heartland and Santa Monica beside the Pacific. It was lined with thriving businesses, because that’s where the traffic was – until the advent of the interstate highway system turned most of Route 66 into a ghost town.

Consumers’ leap to social media has done much the same to the traditional, face-to-face consumer focus group. Why go to the expense of conducting a live focus group when you can cull data from Facebook or Twitter to tell you how your brand or ad campaign is doing? 

The problem is that these data only capture past actions on social media; they won't help brands get the insights they need about social media ad campaigns that have yet to be launched. As it stands now, marketers are spending $58.3 billion a year on mobile advertising -- most of it on Facebook and other social sites -- without being armed in advance with a roadmap telling them what to expect and what can be improved. If only someone could organize a focus group that would convene in today's social media space instead of in a conference room. 

Well, someone has. It's called Emotional Brand Connections Social Media Ad Testing -- a tool that lets you turn social media users who fit your campaign’s target demographics into the biggest, most natural ad-testing focus group ever imagined. EBC Social Media Ad Testing lets you place your test ad directly into mobile recipients' social media news feeds. Consequently, they'll experience the ad naturally -- as regular news feed content instead of as a formal test that's seeking their input. You'll get natural reactions because you've chosen to make the ad-testing process natural to the social media environment in which your campaign will take place. Briefly, here's how it works:

• First, identify your ad’s target audience.

• Access an all-mobile panel that’s large and representative enough to give you a good sample of the consumers you’re targeting. 

• Place the ad you’re testing in the target panelists’ news feeds. It could be a film trailer, a video ad, a banner ad – whatever you’re about to launch. Recipients won't perceive that these ads are being tested, but will experience them as part of the regular ad content they're accustomed to receiving in their news feeds.

Now you’re ready to learn how well your social media ad is likely to perform.

• Capture highly relevant passive behavioral data from the test recipients’ phones: how long do they engage with the ad? Do they click on it? Listen to the audio? Like or share it? 

• Probe further by surveying the test ad's recipients. Obtain insights into unaided and aided ad and brand recall and awareness. 

• Get insights into how recipients respond to creative content, including the ad's impact on their perceptions and emotions toward the brand and product. 

• Is your test ad raising interest and intent to shop and purchase?

Armed with these insights, marketers will be able to make solid, well-informed decisions before launching social media ad campaigns, including whether and how to adjust creative content and the overall strategy. 

People no longer get their kicks on Route 66, but they do still travel cross country. Similarly, traditional face-to-face focus groups are not a proper fit for testing mobile ad campaigns, but there’s still a need to get the same kinds of pre-campaign insights in the new realm of social media. Emotional Brand Connections Social Media Ad Testing is designed to fill that need. It ushers in a new era in ad testing in which the kinds of insights focus groups used to provide can come alive in the challenging but exciting space of mobile social media. For more information, just click here.

Social media is where the most dynamic growth is happening in digital advertising, but it’s also where some of the greatest confusion lies for marketers. Facebook, including its Instagram subsidiary, gets 85% of its advertising revenue from mobile devices. But until now there has been no clarity on how to test whether $58.3 billion in annual U.S. mobile advertising is having the intended effect. Emotional Brand Connections (EBC) Social Media Ad Testing provides a reliable beacon to cut through the fog.

Reach Consumers Where They Live
EBC Social Media Ad Testing takes place in people's actual mobile newsfeed, not on a public page or a fake substitute.

How it Works

• Pick the intended audiences for the ad you want to test
• Proprietary ad injection technology places the ad in the respondent's actual newsfeed
• Consumers see your test ad as a regular mobile ad 

What's Measured?
As targeted consumers scan their social sites, their natural behavior is captured. This includes, but is not limited to:

• Visibility time and reach
• Time spent viewing the ad
• Whether they turned on the audio or viewed on mute
• Whether they tapped to expand the display
• Whether they liked and/or clicked on it

Does Your Ad Get Noticed and Trigger the Desired Outcome?
After you've collected their passive behavior, respondents are taken to a mobile survey environment and asked questions including:

• What brands do they recall seeing advertised?
• Do they recall your ad?
• What message do they take away from your ad?
• What reactions does your ad trigger?
• Is the content likable? distinctive? memorable?
• Is the caption engaging and relevant?
• How does your ad impact people's emotional connection with your brand?
• Does the ad create favorable impressions of your brand and push a purchase?

Bottom Line

• Mobile is where consumers are (77% smartphone penetration in the U.S., 92% for Millennials 18-29).
• Social media is where mobile citizens congregate (91.5% of Facebook usage is mobile)
• Social newsfeeds are consumers' windows on the world

EBC Social Media Ad Testing cuts through the fog that obscures mobile ad measurement in social media, and blazes a path to clear insights. For more information, just contact us at sales@mfour.com.

It probably isn’t breaking news that mobile advertising is on the rise as brands and companies focus their marketing where their consumers are congregating.

But specific data is always helpful, both to quantify what’s already intuitively apparent, and to deepen insights into how businesses should respond to the challenges and opportunities mobile ad campaigns present. So far, attempts to measure mobile ads’ effectiveness have created more confusion than confidence. Which, given the stakes, is very disconcerting.

Here are some specific data and predictions from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), eMarketer and Zenith Media.

• U.S. mobile ad spend in 2015: $20.7 billion

• U.S. mobile ad spend in 2016: $38.6 billion (+76.8%)

• Predicted U.S. mobile ad spend in 2017: $58.3 billion (+51%)

• Mobile ads’ 2016 share of all digital advertising spending: 50.5%

• Mobile ads’ predicted 2017 share of all digital ad spending: 70.3%

• 2016 rate of increase of mobile video advertising dollars: 145%

• Facebook’s predicted 2017 global mobile ad revenues: $28.7 billion

• Mobile’s 2017 Q1 share of all Facebook ad revenues: 85%.

• Mobile’s share of Twitter ad revenues: 90%

• Mobile’s share of Yahoo! ad revenues: 32%

These numbers raise some essential questions on which these huge bets on mobile ads depend:

• You clearly need a reliable, demographically diverse test group of mobile consumers who represent your target audience -- the only reliable source for pre-campaign data on how your planned mobile ad will be perceived. But where can you find a mobile panel that fills that need?

• How do you get insights in time to adjust the creative content of a planned mobile campaign?

• How can you get reliable advance insights to form realistic goals and estimated metrics for your social media campaign?

In this week’s blog posts we’ll be talking about Emotional Brand Connections Social Media Ad Testing, a new solution for ad testing that fills these needs because it's designed specifically to test social media mobile advertising – so stay tuned. If you'd like to get full details right now, just click here. 

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

Learn How Mobile GeoLocation Gets You Where You Need to Go

Location Research History: We're Not in Kansas Anymore

Why `Better Late Than Never' Research is Nonsense

And here's a Friday tune to send you soaring into your weekend.

When it comes to obtaining quality consumer insights, those who hesitate are lost. And relying on slow-mo online survey methods is a sure way to lose your mojo.

The fast track to what's in consumers’ hearts and minds is mobile GeoLocation. Just as the Information Highway – the Nineties metaphor for the then-novel Internet – revolutionized how we access the world’s wealth of publicly-available data, GeoLocation studies made possible by Smartphone Era technology are revolutionizing how researchers can pinpoint surveys to gain richly illuminating consumer data with unprecedented precision and speed. 

If you want to delve into the technical side of how it works, you can Google terms such as “geofence” and “cell tower triangulation.” For consumer insights purposes, it’s enough to know that GeoLocation lets you track and validate mobile survey panelists’ presence when they arrive at a store or other venue that’s important to your research.

If you want insights into the complex web of thoughts and emotions that drive purchasing decisions and attitudes toward brands, you can’t afford to hesitate. With every hour that passes after a shopping experience, the thoughts and emotions you need to mine for insights will fade into the memory-haze of everyday living.

Online methodology settles for screening a general panel to find people who’ve recently visited a quick-serve restaurant, for example. But good luck finding many who are still digesting their meal. Instead, you’ll end up foraging for data from people who’ve already hit the bottom of that slippery slope where fresh experience rapidly deteriorates into a vague recollection.

With mobile GeoLocation, you can talk to diners while they're still in the restaurant or just after they've left. The freshness of your survey is as important to your success as the freshness of the food was to their satisfaction with the meal. The same principle -- and the same opportunity -- applies whenever time and place matter (and don't they always?). By going the in-location route, you’ll get insights into what’s happening while it’s still happening. But data from an after-visit GeoLocation study is also supremely fresh and vivid, thanks to response rates of 25% within an hour and 50% within a day.

Opting for the online method is like buying products that have passed their use-by date. It means you're willing to settle for weeks- or months-old recollections. You may fill your belly with data, but it will be too stale to be even mildly nutritious. You filled your study's quota and got your completes -- but with what quality or reliability? Eventually, bad data will make you look bad, and undermine your ability to play a positive role in business decisions. You hesitated, and you lost.

The main takeaway here is that mobile GeoLocation studies are only partly about location. They’re also crucial in your constant fight against time. GeoLocation technology coupled with an engaged mobile panel gives you your best chance to understand what’s in consumers’ hearts and minds before they themselves have forgotten it.

It’s a paradox of the Smartphone Era that the old assumption that speed compromises quality and depth no longer holds true. It’s slowness that will make your data superficial – and probably just plain wrong. It’s important for you to understand how mobile GeoLocation studies can get you the fast, vivid insights you need. Don’t hesitate -- just click here to set up a live, one-on-one demo.

A picture is worth at least 1,000 words when it helps you visualize a concept. Today’s concept is mobile GeoLocation research. Here’s a description in 58 words:

GeoLocation studies employ GPS technology to locate members of a mobile panel when they enter or exit a retail store or other location relevant to a research project. Panelists who’ve crossed the “geofence” around each location receive push notifications through a survey app, alerting them to take a survey while they’re still shopping, or soon after they’ve left.

The picture you see above is worth many more words than that. It’s a screenshot of the real-time GeoLocation action map of the United States you’ll find by clicking here (scroll down after clicking to see the action map). You'll see  the moment-by-moment survey activity of the million-strong, all-mobile panel that uses the Surveys on the Go® smartphone app.

Each shooting yellow vector represents a survey just begun by a panelist, and each green vector is a survey just completed. But pay special attention to all the flashing white dots. Each represents a panelist naturally entering or exiting a geofence around a commercial location. Each geofence is a doorway to uniquely vivid, real-time insights from consumers who’ve been GeoValidated® so you’re sure you’re talking to them in the right place and at the right time. You’ll get insights from them at the Point of Emotion® – the moment of maximum import in their shopping journey when they’re not just thinking about purchasing, but fully feeling and acting on their agency as consumers. Picture what it would mean for you to be right there with them, via mobile GeoLocation.

You can access more than 400,000 U.S. locations that already have been geofenced -- or specify additional relevant locations, which can be geofenced quickly to meet the requirements of any location study. Geofences for locating Surveys on the Go® panelists extend from Alaska to Florida, from Hawaii to Maine, covering retailers from Abercrombie & Fitch to Zara, and every letter in between. So far we haven’t had a request to add a brand beginning with the Spanish letter “LL,” but we do have L.L. Bean.

For more information about mobile location studies, just contact us at sales@mfour.com.

How valuable are consumer insights that provide the “what” without getting fully inside the “who,” “when,” and “where?”

The question arises from a recently-published case study that examined the fragility of brand loyalty in the face of hotly competitive pricing in the travel industry. The study attacked the question with an online survey of self-identified travelers who’d taken trips within the past six months.

Without questioning the findings about travelers’ brand loyalty – “not very” sums it up – it’s useful to point out how this kind of research can be decisively enhanced and enriched by using mobile GeoLocation. A GeoLocation study would pinpoint people who are traveling right now, instead of relying on respondents to make a half-year memory stretch. And all GeoLocated respondents are, by definition, validated to a certainty – because each one’s smartphone location signal is telling you exactly where you’ve reached them.

Here’s a basic outline of how GeoLocation studies work:

• Put geofences around the locations that are relevant to your study – if you needed to talk to travelers in-the-moment, you might consider travel hubs, conference and convention centers and amusement parks. Any structure can be geofenced, as long as you can provide its latitude and longitude. Proprietary GeoIntensity^® technology ensures state-of-the-art mapping accuracy.

• Go with a mobile panel that’s large enough to achieve an incidence rate and completion rate sufficient for high-confidence data.

• Panelists who cross a geofence to enter a travel hub or popular travel destination receive an immediate push notification, using a proprietary technology called GeoNotification^®. Or, you can hold off and push the survey notification as soon as they cross the geofence as they leave the site.

Either way, you’re talking to people about an experience that’s foremost in their minds at this very moment, instead of asking them to think back weeks and months to recall what they did and what motivated their decisions. Mobile GeoLocation studies cut through the haze of memory decay and give you the clarity and emotion of right now. They take you into a fertile garden of insights about what consumers are thinking, feeling and doing, just when they’re thinking, feeling and doing it.

Does the idea of a research presentation that gives just the “what” and relies on long-range recall seem a little unreliable and bland? Mobile GeoLocation gives you the range and depth you need to make your research timely and vivid to the clients or bosses who are relying on your data and analysis to make sound business decisions.

To learn more, contact us at sales@mfour.com and we’ll set up a live demo at a convenient time.

For nearly 100 years, location-based consumer research has been the gold standard for getting insights when they're red-hot. Now, in the Smartphone Era, in-location insights are even hotter, but considerably less complicated and expensive to obtain.

Location studies have come a long way since 1920, when a dozen researchers fanned out through the shopping district and surrounding neighborhoods of Sabetha, Kansas (pop. 2,003 at the time) to query townspeople for the publisher of popular magazines such as Ladies Home Journal and the Saturday Evening Post. They were on a quest for insights about how much bang these magazines’ advertisers were getting for their buck.

Today’s national or regional companies and brands can accomplish in-location surveys with just one researcher who’s sitting in front of a computer screen that might be anywhere. All it takes is advanced 21^st century mobile GeoLocation technology that can pinpoint any phone’s whereabouts -- and, crucially, a quality, highly-engaged research panel whose members carry smartphones and are eager to be located and receive an in-app push notification. Today’s GeoLocated in-location or after-visit studies are direct heirs of that 1920 research posse that came to Sabetha armed with paper and pencils under the direction of market research pioneer Charles Coolidge Parlin.

History – or at least Stefan Schwarzkopf’s account in“The Routledge Companion to Marketing History” -- doesn’t specify what the Sabetha researchers found out about magazine advertising’s efficacy in rural Kansas. But we’re pretty sure that future volumes on the history of market research will have plenty to say about GeoLocation studies.

For decades, paper and pencil, or clipboards and pens, brought research face to face with shoppers in the store aisle or outside the entrance. The result was data about the in-progress or just-concluded shopping experience that set a gold-standard for reliability at the time. But the encounter between a clipboard researcher and an interviewee came with an inescapable potential for bias that's inherent in any human-to-human interchange. Variance between researcher's personalities, training and consistency in asking survey questions can distort the results.

Mobile GeoLocation puts the answers solely (and literally) in the respondents’ hands. Like researchers with clipboards, the lone survey programmer at a desk can identify shoppers when they enter or exit a retail store, cinema, restaurant, or other location that’s relevant to the project at hand. The objectives will be more or less the same as they were in 1920: insights into shoppers’ motivations, actions, thoughts and feelings at or just after the moment of truth. Except that in 2017, smartphone multimedia extends those capabilities and captures a new dimension in vivid insights. Audio and video can easily be embedded with survey questions, or created by respondents at the researcher's request.

We’ll be sharing more about location-based research in this week’s posts, so please stay tuned. But if you’re one of those insights professionals who’s impatient to learn and explore, there’s no need to wait. Please get in touch right now by clicking here. We’ll set up a live, one-on-one demo session that will walk you through how you can achieve today’s gold standard in GeoValidated® research.

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

Why "Mobile Optimized" Surveys Are Sub-Optimal

Taking the Paddle to Online Panel

Taming the Wild Frontier of Mobile Ad Metrics

And here's a Friday tune to get you hopping into the Cinco de Mayo weekend.