As I was contemplating this edition of the Trendrr chart -- the weekly dose of social-media buzz-tracking that normally runs on Friday, but which we've moved up because of the Thanksgiving holiday -- I began to think about the very meaning of "Black Friday" circa 2009. It's always been a weird marketing construct -- as if consumers ever really cared that the day after Thanksgiving is a chance for retailers to clear the red ink from their ledgers and go into the black (though who knows how realistic that expectation is this year). And while the supposed joy of frenzied bargain-hunting still gets celebrated in the media (shots of bustling mall scenes will surely open local newscasts across the country Friday evening), the darker possibilities, like last year's gruesome Walmart stampede, remain an unsettling subtext.
AP
Anyway, a few notes and observation about this week's chart:
This year, marketers have particularly diluted the meaning of Black Friday, given all the pre-Black Friday, and "better-than-Black-Friday" deals they've been plugging ad nauseam. "Black Friday" first started showing up as significant trending topic on Twitter last week, with 3,725 tweets on Thursday, Nov. 19.
Twitter buzz about Cyber Monday hasn't even pushed past 2,000 tweets a day (as of yesterday), but guess who's doing really great right now in Twitter buzz? Yep, Amazon. I'm keeping an eye on Amazon, Walmart, Best Buy and other retailers getting frequent mentions on Twitter, and may follow up next week once all the dust settles to see if a direct correlation can be drawn between Twitter buzz and and reported sales.
In the meantime, Happy Thanksgiving!
Dumenco's Trendrr Chart of the Week is produced in collaboration with Wiredset, the New York digital agency behind Trendrr, a social- and digital-media tracking service. More background here. A basic Trendrr account is free; Trendrr Pro, which offers more robust tracking and reporting tools, comes in various paid flavors (get the details here).
Simon Dumenco is the "Media Guy" media columnist for Advertising Age. You can follow him on Twitter @simondumenco.
Pizza Chain Rolls Out Point-of-Sale System in U.S. Stores to Woo Customers, Streamline Online Orders
Steve Helmer doesn't order for pizza by phone anymore because, he says, "they're usually busy and not paying attention and they leave something out."
Instead, Mr. Helmer uses a build-your-own-pizza feature that Domino's Pizza Inc. last year rolled out on its Web site. Customers can watch a simulated photographic version of their pizza as they select a size, choose a sauce and add pepperoni, black olives and other toppings. The image changes as ingredients are added or removed.
The site also allows customers to track orders—with updates on when a pie enters the oven or leaves a store. Mr. Helmer, a sales representative for a telephone company in Beaver Dam, Wis., says he likes knowing the price before he's prompted to pay. "If I add something that's too expensive, I can just remove a topping," he says.
The pizza-building feature and order tracking are the flashiest parts of a complex new point-of-sale system installed at Domino's nearly 5,000 U.S. stores. The system also helps the company detect possible theft by matching orders better with cash deposited in store registers, maps delivery routes and makes employee scheduling more efficient.
The Ann Arbor, Mich., company says the new functions—which are designed to streamline both online and phone orders—have improved accuracy and increased repeat visits while boosting revenue and profit. Domino's says online orders now account for almost 20% of orders, up from less than 15% a year ago.
Domino's is locked in a market-share battle with competitors Pizza Hut and Papa John's International Inc. as they confront a pullback by consumers in dinner spending. Pizza Hut, a unit of Yum Brands Inc., and Papa John's also offer online ordering on their sites, but without the simulated pizza or tracking features Domino's offers.
Pizza Hut customers can use their iPhones and iPod touches to place orders, dragging and dropping toppings onto virtual pies. Papa John's customers can send text messages to order from their mobile devices.
Like any big technological shift, Domino's had to overcome early glitches and resistance from within. Some franchisees balked at paying $20,000 each to install the system, and they weren't happy when all the system's bells and whistles didn't work right initially.
"It became a real source of pushback," says Chris McGlothlin, Domino's chief information officer, who was hired in 2006 from Yum Brands to overhaul Domino's point-of-sale system. "We built a system by trying to do 1,000 things, but 500 of them didn't work. We had a real crisis of quality."
Among the early problems: One franchisee had organized delivery maps in a way that didn't work with other franchisees' maps. Another franchisee sorted his employee time sheets in a way that wasn't compatible with the rest of the system.
Mr. McGlothlin decided to pare back the system and focus on doing core tasks such as taking orders, scheduling workers and mapping delivery routes in a consistent fashion.
"We had to make sure the 20 basic things the system needed to do would work, so the first year all we focused on was getting those basic things working flawlessly," he says.
Tony Osani, who owns 16 Domino's restaurants in the Hunstville, Ala., area, had been using the same point-of-sale system for 10 years when the company mandated the switch. "It was hard for a lot of us to embrace," he says.
He has come around. Under his old system, employees had to punch in certain codes when taking phone orders, but now they see a touch screen with simple buttons to push. Online ordering, Mr. Osani says, has boosted overall orders and increased the average amount of each transaction.
Domino's, founded in 1960, is known for tinkering with its process for making and delivering its pizzas. It claims innovations such as the 'spoodle,' a tool for saucing pizzas, and the corrugated pizza box.
For the new ordering system, the company developed the software in house and used hardware from International Business Machines Corp. Domino's describes the system as a "multi-million dollar investment" but declines to say exactly how much it cost, including ongoing improvements.
The system's database contains addresses, phone numbers, maps and menu preferences for millions of customers. The company mines that data to encourage customers to order more frequently or add items to their orders. "We can look at someone who always orders cheesy bread and ask if they'd like to order some" when they order online, Mr. McGlothlin says.
Orders are zapped via computer to a person on the pizza assembly line. After the crust is rolled and toppings are in place, the employee assembling the pie hits a button on a computer screen that updates the system for the customer.
Each pizza takes about six minutes in the oven, after which the customer gets another update. When the delivery driver logs out of the system and leaves the shop, the customer knows the pie is on its way.
OS ANGELES (AdAge.com) -- Is augmented reality ready for prime-time? Twentieth Century Fox and a quartet of brands are about to test the emerging technology's mettle as a marketing tool to promote the Dec. 18 release of "Avatar," the first live-action movie to be produced and released entirely in stereoscopic 3-D.
On AVTR.com, consumers can utilize AR-enabled packaging created by Coke Zero that expands the 'Avatar' storyline.
Augmented reality, or AR, is a hologram-like technology that allows consumers to interact with 3-D images displayed on any monitor. (Think Princess Leia in the first "Star Wars" -- "Help us Obi-Wan, you're our only hope" -- you you'll get the idea.) In recent months a host of brands ranging from Lego toys to Topps trading cards to Toyota have experimented with AR. Now McDonald's and Coke Zero are joining the fold through a pair of marketing partnerships with Fox in support of the James Cameron-directed movie.
Fans and skeptics Augmented reality has garnered more than its share of enthusiasm from early adopters and tech geeks, but its marketing value is yet to be determined. Is it a passing fad or truly useful in creating richer digital-marketing experiences? The jury is still out. A majority of consumers still don't have webcams, which are needed to play with AR on the PC. And many feel PC-based AR is less compelling than the mobile AR-based utilities that have started to unfold, but consumers need smartphones for that, and smartphone penetration in the marketplace is still small but growing steadily.
"Augmented reality has become a unique way for consumers to interact with an IP, and for us it's a way to extend the experience with the movie," said Rita Drucker, senior VP-film promotions at Fox. "Given that consumers are interacting with the interactive space in a much more aggressive way, we're looking at unique ways to engage that digitally."
Because much of "Avatar" is seen through the eyes of Jake Sully, a paraplegic war veteran who undergoes an AR-inspired program, called Avatar, the movie's marketing partnerships will expand that storyline.
Coke Zero's expansive program includes a commercial, airing on TV and in cinema, as well as a significant digital presence with AVTR.com. While the site was created in collaboration with Twentieth Century Fox and Lightstorm Entertainment, Coke Zero is running and producing the site, with minimal branding, where consumers can go to utilize AR-enabled packaging created by Coke Zero. There are 140 million cans and more than 30 million fridge packs, as well as bags, bottles, popcorn bags and fountain drink cups flooding the market, beginning this month. All are emblazoned with Coke Zero logos and utilize AR. Worldwide, Coca-Cola ads will be found in 86% of cinemas.
"We wanted to step outside our comfort zone. In putting together the movie marketing program, we looked at a number of different technology elements," said Chip York, director-worldwide entertainment marketing director, noting the program is rolling out in more than 30 countries. "Augmented reality is something a lot of companies are playing around with right now, and we haven't."
A first for many Mr. York also said the technology should resonate with and create buzz among Coke Zero's target customer, 18- to 24-year-old males. But the brand is focused on keeping it simple, as it will likely be the first time many consumers are using the technology. Once consumers have downloaded an application from AVTR.com, they can simply hold up the can or bag to a webcam to get a virtual ride in a Samson Helicopter from the movie that Sully flies in. In some countries, primarily Asia, lobby displays in theaters will allow consumers to explore AR in theaters. A Coke Zero TV spot for the movie also demonstrates how the technology works.
McDonald's will be employing a similar approach with its campaign, which will kick off during the movie's Dec. 18 opening weekend. The global partnership will span everything from a special Happy Meal that will take kids to an "Avatar"-branded site that will be part of the fast feeder's McWorld virtual world to a young-adult-oriented Big Mac tie-in that will redirect consumers to McDonalds.com/Avatar. McDonald's will support the promotion with two general-market TV spots as well ads for the Hispanic and Asian-American markets, general-market and African-American print and radio ads.
All the marketing muscle behind a still-nascent trend among gamers and other web-savvy consumers seems like it will do more to enhance AR's profile than the movie it's marketing. As Razorfish's Garrick Shmidt recently wrote in an Ad Age DigitalNext post, "After the 'gee whiz' factor is exhausted, there's not really much there to sustain any real engagement. Besides, there's a vague whiff of 'Dungeons & Dragons' around this stuff that will be hard for most to get over."
Avatar Coke Zero can
Coke Zero's Mr. York added, "We're all going to experiment now, but [eventually] we're going to want to see some results. ... There's a rich opportunity to customize content, promotions and marketing. And by customizing messages and providing different messages, we'll be able to tie it into actual business results."
"Avatar" also marks a continued investment on Coke's part in movie marketing. While the Coca-Cola Co. claims music and sports as its primary areas of cultural focus, Coke Zero's focus is entertainment, film and gaming, Mr. York said. 2008's James Bond flick "Quantum of Solace," which Coke Zero marketed in more than 50 countries last year, was the company's first global movie sponsorship in almost 10 years.
Other domestic "Avatar" marketing partners include Panasonic, the film's technology partner LG, which will launch an "Avatar"-themed campaign for its new Projector Phone Dec. 11, and Mattel, which rolled out an "Avatar" line of action figures earlier this year.
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Yahoo's latest brand overhaul? Taking its ad exchange up market.
Today the online portal will start to reposition Right Media Exchange to agencies and ad networks as a "premium exchange" in the hope that major advertisers will feel safe buying inventory. At the same time, it will try to shed a reputation that the trading platform is full of ad networks that are just dealing inventory back and forth in an arbitrage model.
The move is meant to capitalize on the new big-agency dollars moving into exchanges and improve the inventory and transparency in a marketplace that critics say has been that it's overrun with no-name ad networks and pools of inventory that buyers don't know enough about.
To make its move, Yahoo will start luring online publishers, such as Ziff Davis, to the exchange and kicking off any ad networks that aren't adding value in the form of overlaying data or advanced targeting.
"It's us making a statement: We're the oldest, largest ad exchange and it's time for us to go through a maturation stage where we go up market," said Bill Wise, senior VP-platforms at Yahoo. He thinks Right Media -- and the ad-exchange space, generally -- will transition much in the same way one of the web's earlier, auction-based marketplaces did: At first eBay used to sell whatever was sitting unused in people's basements, but today it's increasingly being used to sell major goods, such as cars or Pottery Barn furniture.
Bill Wise Will Continue to Lead Exchange as It Shifts Focus to Premium Inventory
But instead of brokering vintage blenders or wingback chairs, an ad exchange deals in ad impressions. On one end of the market, publishers, ad networks and portals plug in their available inventory and on the other end the buyers, who are increasingly agencies and marketers (vs. other ad networks looking for cheap inventory), plug in the targeting information -- demographic, psychographic or behavioral -- and the price. Like in the search marketplace, an auction takes place to determine the winner.
New attention on exchanges Agencies are focusing more attention on exchanges because they don't want to miss out on a burgeoning market, like when they initially missed out on search. It also allows marketers to be more precise in their targeting. Marketers for decades have used content as proxy for audiences -- soap operas, for example, represent 18- to 49-year-old women. "What an exchange does is let marketers go out and buy the exact audience they want," Mr. Wise said.
"Conceptually a lot of what we're doing is putting the techniques of search buying into the display world, with technology at the center and some sort of campaign and bid-management rules that directs transactions and optimizes the buys," said Matt Spiegel, CEO of Omnicom Media Group Digital. "To the extent an exchange can get me the stuff that people like me are likely to buy -- and provide service that helps me buy that -- great."
Yahoo wants some of that money and needs to assure the big buyers that its inventory is higher quality.
"Two years ago, [those buyers] didn't want to touch the exchange," Mr. Wise said. "And now they do. But if we don't evolve our exchange, then we'll lose that opportunity."
But Yahoo's move is also one of lead preservation. While the new world of display advertising looks a lot like search, there's one glaring exception: Google is the underdog and it's Yahoo's lead to lose.
Yahoo was the first big seller to get into exchanges, having bought Right Media, the oldest and largest ad exchange, in 2007. Not surprisingly, Yahoo's Right Media purchase was followed by an influx of VC money backing new exchanges, which are fast, efficient and trade in real time. More recently, Google introduced a revamped exchange that has access to all of its AdSense inventory as well as, potentially, DoubleClick clients. The DoubleClick AdExchange is a rebuild of DoubleClick's old exchange using Google's technology and the first big product launch out of the search giant's $3.1 billion acquisition of the company, completed in 2008.
"They're getting lapped a bit as everyone's moving to real-time bidding," said Mark Mannino, VP-supply and data at Media Math, which is a buying tool that has its own clients and is often licensed by agencies. "It's easier for these small companies to build anew -- that's the innovator's dilemma -- and Google's coming in with AdWords, which is theoretically huge in size and it's fully transparent, meaning I can pick each site I want to appear on."
To bring it up to par with its newer competitors, Right Media is beta testing real-time bidding, said Mr. Wise, and it's requiring all networks on the revamped exchange to share at least partial lists of which sites they work with.
Regardless of the changes, it's been hard to ignore Right Media because it offers so much Yahoo inventory. The portal is the exchange's biggest client and 100% of Yahoo's non-guaranteed business (inventory that's not pre-sold against a specific time and target to clients) is on the exchange, said Mr. Wise, who considers the Yahoo inventory to be a model of the "premium" impressions he's emphasizing on the exchange.
"At end of day, we want to work with more companies that look and feel like Yahoo," he said.
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Microsoft is, without a doubt, a giant in the world of online advertising, but lately it's been about assembling the platforms that power advertising -- both display and search -- rather than building the media properties that attract eyeballs in the first place.
Which begs the question: Does Microsoft need media anymore?
Last week the Redmond, Wash., giant pulled the wraps off a redesign of MSN, the first top-to-bottom remake in more than a decade. Like Yahoo five months earlier, MSN did away with the '90s-era clutter, adding white space and removing 50% of the links and all text ads. Also like Yahoo, MSN added Facebook, Twitter, Pandora and other social tools and services right into the home page. The hope here is that MSN can hang on to its slice of the market in a world increasingly owned by Facebook.
That won't be easy. In the past five years, Facebook has gone from nothing to dominating 11% of all time spent in the U.S. on the web, according to Nielsen. Meanwhile the big three portals -- MSN, Yahoo and AOL -- together account for just 17%, down from 25%. Though on a global basis, Microsoft sites -- including Microsoft.com, MSN and Bing.com -- account for 14.5% of all time spent on the internet, according to ComScore. That's quite a bit more than Google (9.3%), Yahoo (6.3%) or Facebook (5.1%).
Further, media itself continues to be a money-suck for Microsoft. The company doesn't break out MSN, but its online division, which includes MSN and Bing, lost $480 million in the last quarter on just $490 million revenue, marking 15 straight money-losing quarters. Chalk most of that up to investment in search, but online services is Microsoft's smallest division by a long shot, and accounted for just 4% of Microsoft's revenue.
So why do it? Well, CEO Steve Ballmer sees advertising -- search, display and the enabling technologies -- as an area of potential future growth, if it can beat back Google. But there's a more important reason: MSN has historically been a major distributor of Microsoft products and technologies, such as IE, Hotmail, Silverlight and Bing.
The importance of MSN As the world moves to more cloud or web-based applications, a technology company must also be an audience company, making MSN even more important than when Microsoft was mostly selling shrink-wrapped boxes. MSN is key to building search and is Bing's second-biggest source of referrals (next to Internet Explorer).
"If you ask the people that work [at Microsoft] on operating systems and productivity suites, they will tell you they are a software development company moving into a web-based and cloud-based computing environment," said Joe Doran, former head of MSN and then all of Microsoft's advertising solutions. "The people at MSN and the portal think of themselves as a media company."
But that's not where the investment is going. Rather, it has gone to cobbling together systems buying aQuantive and with it ad server Atlas, ad network Drive PM and Avenue A/Razorfish. Separately, it bought ad exchange AdECN. It has spent billions on search, including the relaunch of Live Search as Bing.com earlier this year. Services like Hotmail and instant messaging, once branded MSN, are now Windows Live.
Just where does, then, that leave Microsoft's original vessels for advertising, its media properties? Former Microsoft ad chief Bill Shaughnessey, who left the company in March, said that while the emphasis has shifted, the importance of MSN to other Microsoft businesses hasn't.
"They have to maintain those assets to create bigger assets," he said. "MSN plays a very important role as an aggregator of traffic for our ability to monetize other assets like search, but no one is going to confuse Microsoft as world-beaters in content."
Others' content Over the years, MSN was built from a confederation of websites and verticals, and investment in it has waxed and waned. Today, Microsoft has abandoned splashy content plays, and is taking a cheaper approach by distributing content from partners such as Delish, with Hearst, Fox Sports, MSNBC or Wonderwall, a celebrity news site produced by former Yahoo content chief Lloyd Braun.
Microsoft became as adept as anyone at playing a media company on TV; holding "upfronts" for advertisers, dazzling them with technology merging the PC and TV, and hiring a crack group of old-media veterans to sell the package in New York. Their current pitch is that they're a one-stop shop for web, mobile, video game and interactive TV advertising. In short, they're putting all the trimmings on a media play that isn't. But that doesn't mean they're not selling advertising.
"Microsoft has a fairly detailed and deep series of relationships with marketers and the companies that serve them," said Rob Norman, CEO of Group M Interaction.
Scott Moore, GM of MSN, said the company is in media to make it a business on its own, even if the endgame is to build other businesses. "We're not confused about profitability," he said. "On the search side of the business, there are only two companies investing, and one has 65% of the market. If you are in that kind of battle, you are not optimizing for short-term results, you are making a long-term play."
Changing definitions For many, the definition of a "media company" has become "sells advertising." Increasingly, though, that inventory will be the free software and services that are ad-supported. In an ad-supported future, to be a technology company, in a sense, you have to be an advertising company. You also have to be an audience company to drive adoption of new services and technologies.
"The web is blurring and distorting all of these classical definitions; a company like Google is all about technology but 99% of its revenue comes from advertising," said Tim Cadogan, CEO of leading ad technology firm OpenX and the former senior VP-global advertising marketplaces at Yahoo.
Indeed, Microsoft.com is an enormous platform for the dissemination of Microsoft products and services, with more than twice the web traffic of Apple.com.
Microsoft also has a track record of investing in things for years, like gaming platform XBox, in hopes it will bear fruit. It is also more intertwined in the ad ecosystem than ever before. Want to buy an ad on Facebook? Microsoft is selling that. Doing business with Publicis? You'll probably get some Microsoft inventory, part of the $530 million sale of Razorfish to Publicis earlier this year.
So Microsoft still cares about media for now, Mr. Shaughnessy said. "But the underlying asset is based on building software at scale for the media industry -- that's the overriding approach."
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