Adaptly Talks

Adaptly Introduces Evergreen to Maximize the Reach of Content on Social Networks and Announces $10.5 Million in Series B Funding

Wed, 09 May 2012 09:09:00 -0400

It is yet another big day for us at Adaptly! We reach two major milestones today as we not only release a new product, Evergreen, but also announce our Series B funding. All of us, Adaptlyians (Adaptly employees), are beyond excited with the native advertising possibilities around Evergreen, and even more thrilled about the opportunities that will emerge from the additional funding! Find more details around both announcements below…

Evergreen, is a social tool that utilizes paid media opportunities on social networks to guarantee content generated by a brand will reach its full audiences. Evergreen automatically generates media by taking content that brands post on social networks, and converting them into native advertising to reach more of the brand’s existing fans and beyond. In short, Evergreen ensures that a brand’s message is delivered to its entire fan base, which in turn increases the opportunity for engagement.

On average, brands find that their Facebook content reaches less than 16% of the audience they have built. Evergreen enables this content to reach all fans in a highly compelling way. Evergreen is persistent. The social space is dynamic and ever evolving in its nature. Evergreen allows marketers to focus on their audience and select only the best content to promote.

As stated by our fearless co-founder, Nikhil Sethi, “This represents a fundamental shift in value for social marketing. Paid is only as good as the content behind it, and content is only as good as how many people it reaches. Adaptly aims to solves these marketing problems with Evergreen by giving brands the power to maximize the reach of their highest quality content.”

We’re launching Evergreen exclusively on Facebook but will soon expand it to other social platforms as well.

As mentioned above, there is more than one reason for the company to celebrate! Today, Adaptly also announces we have raised $10.5 million in Series B funding, led by Valhalla Partners, with participation by additional new investors Time Warner investments and Vivi Nevo. We were fortunate enough to have all existing investors, including First Round Capital, participate in the round as well. Our plans for the capital are to use it for product development, aggressive growth of our sales team and to further develop the business internationally.

We are embarking on the next age of advertising where the focus has shifted towards cultivating an authentic audience through engagement with compelling content. Our innovative team over here is excited to take on this challenge and continuously build tools to help our clients increase the level of user engagement across all social platforms!

Darren Herman Visits the Office!

Tue, 01 May 2012 17:22:16 -0400

By Meghan Sharkey, Director of Marketing

Last week the Adaptly team was lucky enough to have Darren Herman, Founder & Managing Director of kbs+p and Chief Digital Officer at The Media Kitchen, come into the office and provide some invaluable insight into the life of a media agency. Darren opened up the conversation by stating his views on the social media space and what he expects from it in the upcoming years. He feels that social media is an ongoing race and it becomes exhausting to try and keep up with the ever-evolving landscape. He believes the future holds some form of technology that will enable users to be digitally connected in ways that we cannot even imagine right now. Darren opened the floor for Q&A following his introduction and the Adaptly group fired away with all of the questions we have been dying to ask! Although there were plenty of great questions, there was three main takeaway points the group walked away with: education, service, and ROI. Let me elaborate on each point in more detail…

Education:

The gap in communication between agencies/brands and vendors can be attributed to the lack of education around the social media space. It is in the best interest of the vendor to share as much information as possible with the client to help them better understand the space as a whole. Materials that include graphs, charts, and numbers are the most effective way to educate agencies. Companies should consider sending their agency partners periodic newsletters and whitepapers that include insights into the marketplace and company information as means to keep them informed and in turn gain their trust as a thought leader. There is a likely chance that this content will later be used in decks presented to potential clients and will reference the company that provided the information. In short, agency people want to be seen as “the cool kid in the room” and vendors can help them be that cool guy!

Service:

The number one thing that will always separate a vendor from its competitors is the quality of their service. Of course, performance is a major component in the decision process, but a vendor that can out service their competitors will win over the agency every time. The best approach to ensuring you are providing the upmost service is to know your customer, understand what their needs are and recognize how you can help them achieve their goals. Outstanding and consistent service makes you seem reliable and reliable vendors get returned business.

ROI:

At the end of the day, CMOs are concerned with ROI. As of now, the ROI in social is difficult to measure as there is no one metric that remains consistent across the social board. Engagement is the KPI for social but due to the dynamic nature of the space, it can be challenging to accurately measure a user’s engagement. On average, about 30% of an advertising budget is allocated to social. Dollars flow where performance goes, therefore, if a vendor can validate its performance it will see more spend. Using tools like Momentum to measure engagement enables a vendor to verify its performance and in turn, provide CMOs with substantial evidence to continue spending on social.

We were all very grateful to have Darren speak to the team and offer such insightful advice. The team is already putting his advice to good use and continuously improving our services!

Adaptly Makes Time Inc.'s Top Ten NYC Startups to Watch for in 2012 List!

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 16:13:36 -0400

We were beyond excited to hear the news today that Adaptly has officially been selected as one of the top ten NYC startups to watch for in 2012 by Time Inc.! This is a huge milestone for the company and we are very honored to be included in the list. We owe much of our success to our loyal clients; we would not have made the list without all of your support and ongoing business. Of course we also need to recognize our internal team and their never-ending commitment to making the company the successful establishment it is today! Find the original press release below for more information on the list.

TIME INC. REVEALS ITS LIST OF THE “10 NYC STARTUPS TO WATCH”

Second Annual List Forecasts What’s Hot in New York’s Startup Community

New York City (April 25, 2012) – Time Inc. today unveiled its second annual list of the 10 NYC Startups to Watch for 2012. The startups will be recognized at a special event on Wednesday, May 16^th, as part of Internet Week New York 2012.

Editors from Time Inc. brands, including TIME, FORTUNE, CNNMoney.com, PEOPLE, Sports Illustrated, Entertainment Weekly, and InStyle, scoured New York’s thriving technology scene to uncover the ten most promising startups this year. The diverse list spotlights New York City-based startups with the potential to reshape areas from social media and entertainment to commerce and art.

The list made its debut during Internet Week New York 2011 with a selection of startups that have experienced significant growth and success over the past year including GroupMe, the group messaging app, which was later bought by Skype for a rumored $85 million, and online eyewear designer and retailer Warby Parker, which has grown 500% over the past year. The event itself has quickly become one of the flagship events of Internet Week New York, bringing together the most buzz-worthy innovators and entrepreneurs driving New York City’s digital renaissance.

“Whether as journalists on the lookout for the next big thing, or as a publishing company pursuing growth in a rapidly evolving environment, Time Inc. is constantly searching for the kind of digital innovation that changes behavior in the simplest and most profound ways,” said Mark Golin, Digital Editorial Director for Time Inc.’s Style & Entertainment and Lifestyle Groups. “And, given the increasingly hot startup scene here in New York City…we don’t have to look too far to find that innovation.”

Time Inc.’s “10 NYC Startups to Watch” in 2012 are:

Adaptly (http://www.adaptly.com): The easiest way to advertise and increase engagement across all social networks. Adaptly’s technology enables brands and agencies to easily create, execute and analyze advertising campaigns that take advantage of the unique value of each social platform including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon and more.

Art.sy (http://www.art.sy): A new way to discover art, featuring work from leading galleries, museums and private collections around the world. Powered by The Art Genome Project and run by a team of art historians, Art.sy evaluates artworks across 800+ characteristics to create a powerful search experience.

Codecademy (http://www.codecademy.com): A fun, interactive and easy way to learn code. Since the company’s launch in August of 2011, more than one million people all around the world have begun learning to code on Codecademy, including NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Enterproid (http://www.thedivide.com): The Divide platform by Enterproid allows companies to embrace the “bring your own device” phenomenon. Enterproid has created a user experience that allows IT to manage the work persona without compromising an employee’s privacy - so employees can use one device for all their work and personal needs.

Fab (http://www.fab.com): A marketplace for discovering everyday design. Fab’s website and mobile apps offer exclusive access to daily curated design sales featuring emerging designers and venerated design brands.

Fancy Hands (http://www.fancyhands.com): A team of virtual personal assistants ready to work for you right now.

Loosecubes (http://www.loosecubes.com): A global office sharing community, connecting people who have great workspace with people who need it on a daily basis. Loosecubes brings connections into the real world during business hours and has seen that coworking can lead to new jobs, partnerships, referrals and friendships.

SideTour (http://www.sidetour.com): A community marketplace where people can discover, book and host unique experiences and activities. Whether it’s racing down the U.S. Luge track with a former Olympic medalist or learning the art of graffiti with an aerosol artist, SideTour’s mission is to connect people with vibrant and creative hosts who want to share their talents and passion with others.

Stamped (http://www.stamped.com): A social platform that allows friends to put their stamp of approval on what they like best - restaurants, books, music, movies and more. The Stamped app lets you keep track of and share the things you like, as well as tap into the recommendations of your contacts and well-known tastemakers, such as chef Mario Batali, an advisor to the startup.

Truth Art Beauty (http://www.truthartbeauty.com): An online platform that allows users to create their own personal skincare blends. Through a unique online co-creation platform, customers select from premium, natural ingredients best suited to their needs - from Rosehip Oil and Ginseng Extract to Shea Butter and Lemon Peel Powder.

Time Inc.’s 10 NYC Startups To Watch can be found here, on Facebook and Twitter: #TimeInc10Startups.

Taking place from May 14^th – 20^th, Internet Week New York has become one of the world’s top festivals celebrating digital culture and commerce, as well as a global showcase for New York City’s thriving technology industry. This year, more than 30,000 people are expected to attend nearly 250 events across the city.

About Time Inc.

Time Inc., a division of Time Warner, is one of the largest branded media companies in the world. The company’s magazines reach more than 110 million Americans each month, and its websites attract nearly 50 million unique visitors each month. With influential brands such as TIME, PEOPLE, SPORTS ILLUSTRATED, INSTYLE, CNNMoney.com and REAL SIMPLE, Time Inc. is home to celebrated events and franchises including the FORTUNE 500, TIME 100, PEOPLE’s Most Beautiful and SPORTS ILLUSTRATED’S Sportsman of the Year.

Adaptly EMEA Team Expands Further

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 09:40:33 -0400

LONDON, 11 April 2012: The EMEA office of social web advertising specialists Adaptly has been augmented with the arrival of Charlie Neer in the role of European Business Development Manager.

Neer joins Adaptly from Click District where he held the post Head of Technology for three years. This senior-level role saw Charlie collaborate on the design and project management of a stand-alone DSP, which now serves over five billion impressions monthly. Representing the company and the platform on panels in the European, Middle Eastern and Asian markets, Neer worked closely with leading development companies on both front end and back design and implementation.

Neer has been based in Europe since November 2007 when he joined the Platform/Technology Team at Right Media/Yahoo as a Senior International in Business Development, providing consultancy style solutions using the in-house technology for top tier publishers, networks and agencies. Prior to his move to Europe, Neer cut his teeth for Right Media/Yahoo in San Francisco as an Account Executive in the Media Team, helping to drive West Coast growth from $1,200 a month to over $1 million a month.

Commenting on the appointment, Adaptly CEO, Nikhil Sethi, said: “We are delighted to welcome Charlie to our London office where he’ll have a positive and significant impact on our UK and European clients. Charlie has an innate understanding of the advertising technology marketplace and is as accomplished on the technical development aspect of the business as he is in client delivery. He’s a great addition to the team and we look forward to him adding value to Adaptly’s EMEA client base over the coming months.”

Welcome Charlie! We’re beyond excited to have you on the team and can’t wait to start working with you!

A Year in Review: Adaptly Celebrates Its 2nd Birthday

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 17:57:00 -0400

By Meghan Sharkey, Director of Marketing

As most of you already know, yesterday, April 9^th 2012, Adaptly celebrated its 2^nd official birthday. We celebrated the occasion in the office with some festive cupcakes and lots of champagne! Needless to say, it was a great night filled with hilarious stories of favorite memories from the past year. Naturally, I wanted to share all of the amazing tales told but decided to limit it to the top ten milestones for the company. The below events are listed in no particular order.

1.) Our new office space on 40 West 23^rd Street - quite the upgrade from that small apartment that doubled as the Adaptly office!

2.) Dropping the dot from our original logo “Adapt.ly” – without the dot it looks so much more simple and clean, don’t you agree?

3.) The adoption of our PR team, Brew Media Relations – we would be lost without them!

4.) Releasing that social metric we like to call Momentum – we’re able to measure the level of engagement across all channels (paid, earned and owned) for both online and offline events… pretty cool if we do say so ourselves!

5.) Hiring our Director of Marketing – she writes the best blog posts!

6.) Opening our UK office – those British folk really know what they’re doing over there!

7.) Our office-wide ski trip to Bear Creek Mountain – although there was no snow we still had a lot of fun together.

8.) Hosting our first ever Hackathon – proved to be a very successful creative venture for our development team!

9.) The recent announcement of our partnership with Wildfire – they’re a pretty awesome group of people to work with!

10.) The fact that we have gone from a bare bones startup to a fully staffed social media ad buying company – went from a team of 5 celebrating our 1^st birthday to almost 40 employees celebrating our 2^nd anniversary!

This past year has been an eventful one for Adaptly and we have high hopes that the next one will be equally as exciting! Stay tuned to hear more updates about the Adaptly family.

Social Scandal: What to do if it happens to you

Sun, 01 Apr 2012 15:18:00 -0400

By Meghan Sharkey, Director of Marketing

The ease and speed of sending a message across social sites proves to be both the beauty and the beast of using the medium. In many ways it is a positive feature, people can literally reach their followers almost immediately with just a simple click of the button. However if managed poorly, a careless typo can cause irreparable damage to a brand or individual’s reputation. In the past year we have seen countless public social media scandals that have been detrimental to the person’s or company’s image including Anthony Weiner, Blake Lively, and Chrysler to name only a few. As soon as content is published it becomes public and even if one chooses to delete the post/tweet/etc, it can always be found again. Let’s review a few best practices to both prevent a social media scandal from happening and some tips on how to properly manage if one does occur.

The best way to avoid a possible social scandal from happening is to implement some form of social media policies. Many of the guidelines that will fall into this set of rules will come across as common sense to most but are still very necessary to include. Some practices Coca-Cola incorporated into their plan: disclose your affiliation with the company; keep records; when in doubt, don’t post; give credit where credit is due; don’t violate others’ rights; be responsible; keep in mind that local posts can have global significance; and try to remember that anything posted on the internet is permanent.

Telstra is another company that has a good set of guidelines they refer to as the “3 R’s of Social Media Engagement”. In short, the 3 R’s ask that when engaging in social media you be clear about who you are representing, you take responsibility for ensuring that any references to the company are factually correct and accurate and do not breach confidentiality requirements, and you show respect for the individuals and communities with which you interact. The above policies are great examples of guidelines to implement, however, if these principles are not clearly communicated to everyone in the organization the chance of a scandal erupting is still very likely.

Okay, so we know how to prevent a scandal from happening, but what do you do if one unexpectedly happens to you? There are a few simple Do’s and Do Not’s that one should follow:

· DO respond quickly and directly

· DO NOT pull/delete anything (information online never disappears)

· DO respond in the same channel that the scandal originated from

· DO NOT disable commenting

· DO apologize as fast and sincerely as possible

Scandals, especially on social sites, can spread like wildfire and it is always best to take corrective measures sooner than later. The responsible party should assume blame and outline a plan to change the public’s perception around the situation. Incorporating paid media into the crisis management strategy is an easy and effective way to transform the public’s opinion from negative to positive. Scandals are inherently humanizing- but people understand that everyone- even major corporations- make mistakes. They’re never never an easy thing to manage, but if handled properly and with the right amount of transparency, a scandal can actually create trust and positive sentiment around the brand or individual.

An Update from Our Friends Across the Pond

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 11:23:52 -0400

By Paul Turner, Head of EMEA

As the eagle eyed amongst you know, Adaptly opened its first international office about 4 months ago and we thought we’d take this opportunity to update you on its progress! The idea of “going international” is always a bit of a leap of faith - different markets, different cultures, different ways of working - companies are inevitably challenged to adapt accordingly. However at Adaptly we’ve always been confident in both the global scalability of our platform and the relevance of our Professional Services layer so expanding internationally has always made sense - in fact, it seemed more like a natural progression for the company.

From a technology perspective we’re already running campaigns in multiple geographies, from the UK to Japan and from Turkey to Australia (actually, we’re running buys in 50+ markets as we speak!). Recently, we also started to build in local currency and regions into tools like Cost Calculator, enabling clients to plan their budgets in any major currency to run in any region. So, from a technology point of view we’re happy with where we are and more importantly where we’re going.

We are focused on building up our international team, initially Account Managers and Business Development Managers. Working for a start-up is an unique enough experience in and of itself. Beyond that, working in a satellite office that is 3,000 miles away from headquarters requires supremely talented and flexible people (and people who don’t mind changing the paper in the printer when required!!). We have been able to find folk who are able to think on their feet, find answers to questions, contribute to the company culture and, ultimately, provide a world class service to the most important people in all of this - our clients!

Taking a business international is a true challenge. At Adaptly we’re fortunate enough to have world class technology and people that make this entire process easier. Anyone joining our team is in for an amazing experience. Watch this space for more announcements as we continue our expansion and look to open up our 2nd, 3rd and 4th international office!

Employee Spotlight: Let Us Introduce Mike

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 11:06:34 -0400

The Adaptly family recently expanded as we gained our newest member, Mike Finnegan as VP of Client Services. Mike’s role can be described as the glue that keeps everything together. He is responsible for making sure the house is kept together internally, establishing best practices within the teams, developing the strategic side of Adaptly and further making sure we have a robust approach to social media. Most importantly, Mike is focused on keeping all of our clients happy – which of course is our biggest priority around the office. Mike grew up in Schwenksville, PA where he lived next to three farms and preferred to use a John Deere tractor to get from here to there. He graduated from LaSalle University with a degree in Graphic Design. Before joining our Adaptly family, Mike was Director of Automated Trading at Xaxis, GroupM’s Trading Desk which launched in June 2011. Mike previously held a senior position at MEC leading their Audience Buying/Real-Time Bidding practice, before it was absorbed into Xaxis. Now you know Mike’s basic background, let’s ask the fun stuff and learn about who he really is…

How would he describe himself in only three words?

Tenacious, Irreverent, and Inquisitive – sounds like the perfect recipe for a great VP of Client Services!

What inspires him?

Mike finds inspiration through people, but not just anyone. He’s not impressed with celebrities or CEO’s, instead, Mike finds people who go above and beyond the normal day-to-day rigors and take initiative in whatever they do in life to be very inspirational. He offered an example – his cousin who not only started his own business recording bands at a very young age but also established a well known band called “Man Overboard” that toured around the world 3 times. Check out their band here!

Last song he listened to on his iPod?

Mike listened to one of his favorite bands, Bear vs. Shark, during his morning commute today. He describes their music as a combination of hard rock and melodic indie rock.

As a child, what did Mike want to be when he grew up?

This question took no thought; he quickly responded that he always had dreams of becoming a scientist, mainly due to his love of Ghostbusters growing up. Then with some hesitation Mike also added that he aspired to become a dancer but this goal was simply the result of his admiration for Michael Jackson. He was such a big fan that he used to wear one glove to school and would moonwalk into class everyday – well maybe that’s not entirely true but wouldn’t it be great if it was!?

What is his biggest pet peeve?

Mike cannot stand when people use the phrases “it is what it is” or even worse “real Americans”. Don’t worry, we already sent out an office memo forewarning everyone never to utter those two things to him!

What does he like to tweet about?

Mike laughed as he responded that he tweets way too much about TV. He added that its only because he considers himself to be “two-screened” (always watching TV with his phone or iPad in hand).

If Mike had any superpower what would it be?

Almost immediately Mike responded that he would want the power to teleport to anywhere. He loves to experience new adventures in foreign areas but dreads the actual act of traveling.

If Hollywood made a movie about the story of Mike’s life, what would he title it?

“It Is What It Is: The story of a real American” - based on the title alone, we’re pretty sure he would never go see his movie in theaters!

What is one thing that most people do not know about Mike and would be surprised to hear?

Mike actually considers himself to be somewhat of an introvert. He needs at least six hours every week to just close the door, shut off his phone and completely disconnect from the rest of the world.

Favorite candy?

Mike loves York Peppermint Patties – we don’t disagree!

What was the last movie he saw in theaters?

This past weekend he went to go see Project X and was pleasantly surprised! He said it was actually really funny and very enjoyable. This one might have to be added to our must-see list.

What would we find if we raided his refrigerator right now?

There are a few items that Mike loves and cannot live without including eggs, deli pickles, and orange juice. Let’s hope that he never combines these ingredients to make a single dish (he assures us he does not)!

Mike is definitely a fascinating person with a lot of interesting insight to offer. He has a strong sense of humor and often surprises you with his responses. Feel free to reach out to him and get to know him better @mfinnegan33 or @adaptly – just make sure you don’t mention “it is what it is” or refer to someone as a “real American”!

Wildfire and Adaptly Introduce First Social Marketing Solution with Integrated Ad Technology that Optimizes Engagement

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 11:07:57 -0500

Big and exciting things are happening for Adaptly as we embark on a new partnership with Wildfire today! Wildfire, a social media marketing software company, provides complete tools for brands to create, publish and manage content to drive engagement. Integrating Adaptly’s technology into their software will enable marketers to optimize and measure the success of their paid social media. Now for the first time ever, marketers will be able to access content and ad optimization technology in a single integrated solution! Please see below for the official press release and additional details.

Exclusive partnership delivers integrated solution that goes beyond first-generation ad serving solutions to drive maximum engagement at lowest cost

REDWOOD CITY, CALIF and NEW YORK CITY, NY – February 27, 2012 – Wildfire, the global leader in social media marketing software, today announced with Adaptly the integration of Adaptly’s unique social advertising and optimization technology with the Wildfire Social Marketing Suite. The combination of Wildfire’s market-leading suite of tools for designing, publishing, and managing brand content through social media – used by more than 10,000 customers, including many of the world’s most recognized brands, such as Facebook, Amazon, and Target – with Adaptly’s ad optimization technology gives marketers, for the first time, unified control over the combined effect of paid, earned, and owned social media to maximize consumer engagement with the brand. Engagement encompasses social actions such as likes, comments, and sharing of content.

Unlike first-generation ad serving solutions – which focus on traditional metrics such as cost per clicks, fans, or impressions – Wildfire’s solution integrates Adaptly’s technology that optimizes social ads not only for cost but also for maximum engagement. Adaptly’s proprietary technology aggregates more than 160 social metrics from a brand’s earned and owned channels, analyzes the impact of paid media on earned media in real time, and continuously refines ads (including content and target audience) to reach the best social audiences and drive ongoing engagement – the objective that marketers care about most today – at the lowest cost. This self-optimizing technology is unavailable from any other vendor, and Wildfire is the first to bring it to the broad market through a complete integrated social marketing solution.

Content and Advertising Integrated into a Single Seamless Solution

The ability to integrate advertising with content is becoming a critical requirement for social marketing thanks to the launch of Facebook’s Sponsored Stories ad units, which allow marketers to turn fan-generated content into social ad units. For brands to run Sponsored Stories ads they must successfully engage consumers. The Wildfire Social Marketing Suite provides all the tools needed to engage consumers through social media. Extending the Wildfire Suite with Adaptly’s social advertising technology now enables marketers to optimize their whole social strategy in a single seamless solution.

“Integrating a brand’s ads with its content is key to maximizing engagement through social media, yet powerful ad management had been a missing piece from social marketing software suites,” said Victoria Ransom, Wildfire CEO. “We are delighted to partner with Adaptly to bring their innovative advertising optimization technology to our customers. We evaluated many solutions in the market and Adaptly was the clear leader, with a best-in-class technology that is science-based, data-driven, and results-focused. Adaptly is fully aligned with Wildfire’s philosophy of developing highly scalable software solutions that automate social marketing processes to generate maximum impact at the lowest cost and effort for customers.”

“At Adaptly we’ve been focusing on building a powerful social ad platform, spanning Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, and StumbleUpon,” said Nikhil Sethi, Adaptly CEO. “We are excited to partner with Wildfire, to bring together paid, owned, and earned media. Integration of our proven ad optimization technology with Wildfire’s results-driven platform allows brands to both improve the customer experience through smarter, more relevant advertising and drive significantly better results.”

Self-optimizing Technology Maximizes Audience Quality and Engagement

The integration of ad management and optimization into the Wildfire social marketing platform delivers compelling value for brand marketers:

● Enables marketers to specifically target their most valuable audience segments, and even discover new audiences that are highly engaged with their brand.

● Enhances performance of social promotions, brand pages, and newsfeed messages by driving fans to engage with brand content

● Gives brand marketers for the first time a real-time view of advertising, page, and campaign metrics in one unified interface to easily and effectively evaluate engagement and total social marketing ROI

● Allows marketers to optimize advertising across multiple social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn

Ad Optimization Delivers Compelling Results for Customers

Wildfire beta customers have experienced significant results with the Adaptly ad optimization technology. For example, beta customers’ “people talking about this” metric on Facebook – one of the most powerful measures of fan engagement – rose on average by an order of magnitude during their campaigns. Beta customers also saw significant cost improvement, on average more than doubling the size of their fan base while beating their goal for cost per fan by 49%.

Enables Brands of All Sizes, as Well as Agencies, to Optimize Any Level of Social Ad Spend

The Wildfire solution makes it possible for brands to spend at any level with optimal results. For large global brands that are spending tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars per month on social ads, the integration of Adaptly’s technology with the Wildfire suite provides unprecedented ease and control in managing and optimizing ad spend. It also opens the door to social advertising for small and midsize companies, eliminating the need for a full-time person to manage what had previously been a highly manual process. Agencies also benefit from Wildfire’s integrated solution, enabling them to more efficiently deliver cost-effective results for their clients.

Available through Limited Beta Program

The integrated ad management capability is currently available to a limited number of beta customers.

About Wildfire

Wildfire is the leader in social media marketing software and the only social media marketing company to have received an investment from Facebook’s fbFund. Our patent-pending technology allows large brands, small businesses, and agencies to create social campaigns and pages, communicate with their social audience, and measure their own and their competitors’ social media performance. Intuitive and affordable, our software is simple enough for the least tech-savvy manager yet flexible enough for the most creative marketer. Wildfire serves thousands of companies, including Facebook, Amazon, Ogilvy and Target, and has offices in California, Chicago, New York, London, Paris, Munich, and Singapore. For more information, please visit www.wildfireapp.com.

About Adaptly

Adaptly is changing the way brands increase engagement on social networks by helping them harness the unique value of each social network. It offers one consolidated platform to complete a social media ad buy across multiple social networks including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, StumbleUpon and more. Adaptly recently introduced Momentum, a new measurement tool to help brands evaluate how different marketing initiatives impact their overall brand performance across paid, earned and owned social media.

Founded in 2010 by Nikhil Sethi and Garrett Ullom, Adaptly was incubated through DreamIt Ventures and is now based in New York City. Investors include First Round Capital, Charles River Ventures, Lerer Ventures, kbs+p Ventures and more. Adaptly’s clients include brands and agencies such as PepsiCo, Diageo, News Corp., Razorfish and hundreds more. For more information, please visit www.Adaptly.com.

Employee Spotlight: Meet Jason

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 11:36:00 -0500

Let us introduce you to the newest addition of the Adaptly family, Jason Briceno. Jason works with the engineering team as a Data Scientist, trying to optimize the ways that ads are placed. He graduated from Caltech in ’99 with a bachelor’s degree in Physics, making him the third member of the Adaptly Caltech crew! After graduation, Jason worked for a while doing instrumentation stuff and realized he wanted to explore the world. He decided to embark on a life-changing 13-month journey traveling across the globe meeting new people and seeing amazing things. Now that you know a little bit about Jason’s background, let’s dive deeper and ask him the fun stuff!

Favorite color?

Green, all shades. He’s not picky.

What inspires him?

The pursuit of knowledge. Jason claims he has always been a bit of a dilettante and is always seeking out new things to do and learn. Jason explained with an example: a lot of people go to a restaurant over and over again because they enjoy the atmosphere and found a dish they love, however, Jason is the opposite. He feels like he “failed” if he goes to the same place twice in a row. Jason craves the opportunity to do something new and different.

If we were to intrude on him at 2pm on Saturday, what would we find?

He would most likely be at a Capoeira event or practice. For those of us who are not familiar with this activity, it is a form of Brazilian martial arts and also how Jason enjoys spending his free time.

Favorite topics he likes to tweet about?

Jason shamelessly admits he has never tweeted before! This is like hearing a foreign language to us! However, he does want to add that he has a Twitter account so that should at least count for something, right?

Favorite place he traveled to during his 13-month journey?

With no hesitation, Jason easily replies “India” and goes on to explain some of the incredible memories he has from the trip. He was able to keep a blog during his time spent there and was nice enough to share a link to it for all of us to read, check out Operation Cromulent here!

If Jason was a fruit, what would he be and why?

Jason views himself as an avocado because “they’re awesome and one of the most satisfying fruits” in his mind.

What would we find on his DVR?

He does not have DVR, however, if he did there would be a lot of Seinfeld, The Simpsons, and Most Extreme Elimination Challenge (also known as MXEC).

Which does he prefer, pencil or pen?

Jason is a mechanical pencil type of guy.

Okay, what about dogs or cats?

Definitely dogs.

What is his favorite ice cream?

It would have to be double scoop, the first scoop Rocky Road followed by a second scoop of Mint & Chip… sounds delicious!

What was the last book he read?

A collection of short stories by David Sedaris titled “Holidays on Ice”.

What is his favorite season and why?

When asked this question, Jason smiled and said “summer, duhh”. Is there any more explanation needed?

If Jason was sent back in time and could meet any person, who would he like to meet?

Richard Feynman, a famous physicist who was someone that was extremely smart and interesting while also being very social and personable. Jason admires this type of personality, as he believes it is rarely seen.

What is one thing Jason wants to do before he dies?

Save someone’s life.

What is his typical bedtime (on a school night)?

Jason usually goes to bed around 1:00am and tries to wakeup the following morning by 8:00am.

What is an interesting thing about him that most people might not know?

Jason LOVES karaoke and his favorite song to sing is “Baby’s Got Back”.

Jason is one interesting guy (some might say a real Richard Feynman) and we are lucky to have him as part of the team! If you want to know more about Jason feel free to get in touch with him @jasonbriceno or @adaptly.

Super Bowl XLVI: Event Based Targeting System by Adaptly

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 16:21:00 -0500

Download a larger version.

Here at Adaptly, we have always had the vision of creating a system that can intelligently design and run campaigns dynamically based on events or situations that occur in reality. Imagine your copy generating itself based on the most popular Twitter conversations or the Super Bowl score. Cool, huh? Yeah, we think so too.

Aside from just being awesome, a system capable of this behavior would provide immense value to advertisers (number one on our list of priorities!) by increasing both performance and engagement. The design of a real-time event driven campaign system also presents a significant engineering challenge, which naturally provokes our interest.

Our application has reached a level of maturity that now enables us to tackle some of these problems and begin to solve them in a highly scalable way.

What better event to start experimenting our new technology with than the Super Bowl?! We proposed the idea to some of our advertisers and quickly found a partner who was equally as interested. And so it began…

Specific Example:

Manning throws a touchdown ›› Activate Giants touchdown copy and positive Manning copy ›› 10 minutes pass or NE score ›› Pause Giants touchdown copy and positive Manning copy

Our approach was to think of each event as an object. Each event has its own (set or dynamic) definition as well as a (fixed or variable) lifetime to consider. These events also have defined “trigger” criteria that could be a number of things including some specific signal from a data source, a time, or a manual indication. Additionally, each event could also have defined “suspension” criteria.

Some Key Takeaways:

1. The copy with just general Super Bowl context did not perform any better than the baseline Pepsi Max copy.

2. The more specific the copy, the better performance we saw both in terms of CTR and cost per metrics.

3. Copy that directly referenced a proper entity, such as one of the individual players was highly relevant due to its more precise triggering. It was also more effective than copy running against a certain set point in the game (kickoff, halftime, 4th quarter).

4. Amongst the time specific event ads, the 4th quarter clearly performed better. This significant change can be attributed to the increase in tension and excitement around this game’s final quarter.

For Adaptly, the Super Bowl is an especially significant time. It is one of the few reminders that creating a coveted experience with paid advertising IS possible. Brands and their respective agencies invest significant amounts of time, money, and effort leading up to and during their short commercial spotlight to the effect that Super Bowl commercials have in turn increased their own value by helping drive Super Bowl viewership.

This is important.

Social is the only digital medium where it is possible to provide this same type of experience. Recreating the anticipation, the excitement, the buzz regularly with your social audience, as is done every year with the Super Bowl paid ads, is a challenge. Further, attempting to do it on a global scale and consistently is nearly impossible. Rest assured, that’s what Adaptly is here to do; this is why we imagine and implement new technologies like an event driven ad system—to chip away at this colossal problem, to provide a solution and most importantly, to deliver your value.

There is much work to be done, until next time.

The Fifth Seat of Advertising

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 11:47:00 -0500

By Meghan Sharkey, Director of Marketing

Over the past few years, social has been fighting for the fifth seat at the advertising roundtable. Traditionally, there have always been the three dominant seats: Print, Radio, and TV. As the Internet became more popular, we began to see a fourth seat emerge: Digital. Digital advertising is a little bit more complicated than our original three seats and requires a deeper understanding of the World Wide Web and how users seek information on it.

With time we began to see the rise of the digital landscape and new ways in which marketers could better utilize it for their advertising initiatives. Digital eventually separated into two categories: Search and Display. Display advertising is more contextually based and targets users by content, interests, and topics. On the other hand, search advertising enables text ads to be displayed in search results when triggered by certain keywords.

Now with the evolution of social media, we see a fifth seat appear at the advertising roundtable: Social. A big misconception is that social falls under the digital umbrella when in reality social is its own unique advertising medium and deserves its own chair at the table. Social encompasses the same paid media (ie. clicks, impressions, CTR) component as digital but also works with earned and owned channels as well.

Whereas digital advertising is concerned with the consumer’s immediate action and behavior, social focuses on consumer engagement and continuous interaction with the brand. In order to effectively advertise across social networks, marketers need to create a strategy to engage the consumer and continue the conversation. Social advertising can be looked at as a conversation between the consumer and the brand, an ongoing dialogue with constant feedback from both ends. Digital advertising is comparable to a one-way street of information with no room for consumer feedback. Thus, social is its own separate advertising entity and should be seen as and treated as such.

Offline With a Sprinkle of Social

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 13:02:00 -0500

By Meghan Sharkey, Director of Marketing

Marketers are recognizing the power of utilizing social media in their advertising strategy and as this method proves to be more and more successful we begin to see new marketing techniques emerge that encompass both online and offline media. There are plenty of examples of brands that have used events and/or games with prizes to entice participation as means to drive fans to their Facebook page or increase their number of followers on Twitter. However, the big question that remains is are these brands thinking about their social strategy correctly? Simply increasing the number of fans that like your page is only beneficial if you are attracting the right audiences and have a plan to facilitate engagement.

Let’s take a look at a recent campaign that incorporated a social component into both their online and offline media efforts, The Bud Light You Call It Playoffs. This campaign began on January 7^th and ended on January 22^nd of this year. It was themed around the playoff games for the Super Bowl XLVI and essentially allowed participants to guess the “Winning Plays” of each playoff game for a chance to win one of the many prizes being offered. Bud Light used both their TV and Print ads to direct people to an online URL with instructions to register. The interesting thing about this campaign, is the landing page of the website forced users to login through their Facebook account in order to participate. Furthermore, once you login you are then asked to “Like” Bud Light’s page before you are able to proceed any further. Bud Light utilized its offline media presence to directly drive people to a social network.

This Bud Light You Call It Playoffs campaign is a great example of how brands are experimenting with new marketing techniques that incorporate a social element. As marketers, we are absolutely still in this trial-and-error stage of determining what advertising strategies work best on social networks. However, one thing we can be confident in is how crucial it is to target the audience that is most likely to engage with your brand. Driving fans to your Facebook page is pointless if there is no follow up plan to continuously engage these people by interacting with them regularly. Acquiring fair-weathered fans by bribes or sweepstakes is useless as they are more likely to “Unlike” your page or hide the content following the completion of the game/challenge/event that originally enticed them. Marketers should consider the value of leveraging their current fan base to build an authentic community who will continue to engage with the brand long after the campaign is over.

ARel: Nifty & Vexingly Undocumented

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 16:08:44 -0500

By Philip Champon Developer Team Lead

tl;dr Reference (examples and output, sans commentary)

Ambiguous column reference, what ever do you mean?

Ryan Bates was good enough to sneak in some hints on better ActiveRecord encapsulation in his excellent “Advanced Queries in Rails 3”. I began using #merge and #& immediately. Unfortunately, not all of our code was ready to live in an encapsulated world. Quite often, I found myself with SQL errors, because columns were referenced as symbols and ActiveRecord failed to qualify the name space… ActiveRecord only converts symbols in finder methods (find* and #where) to canonically named columns. Any #group, #having, #select, or #order symbols will burn you sooner or later, particularly if they’re part of a scope.

I began solving this on my own, by using the #arel_table class method within my model scopes. As far as piecemeal solutions went, this kept me happy… But I wanted to share the joy with my co-workers and I couldn’t justifiably ask them to read ARel code and tests (since ARel mostly lacks anything nearing useful documentation). I was forced to finally make a presentation…

Ambiguous column references in scopes can be merged into other queries.

The following snippet is a valid scope. It exemplifies the shortsighted tendencies a lot of Rails models assume. Once you attempt to merge this with another model, you’ll find your SQL server returning an ambiguous column reference.

class Product < ActiveRecord::Base
  scope :with_id, select(:id)
end
  => SELECT id FROM "<T>"

class Category < ActiveRecord::Base
  scope :with_product, joins(:products).merge Product.with_id
end
  => SELECT id FROM "categories" INNER JOIN "products" ON "products"."category_id" = "categories"."id"

Better encapsulation yields more reusable and saner code. This can be rectified by hardcoding the table name, using the #table_name class method, or accessing the symbol via the #arel_table class method.

I’m partial to the arel_table method, because it gives you an Arel::Table object, which is very powerful. Aside from canonically naming the field for you, ARel will also correctly quote the name for each database engine you use.

select("<T>.id")
  => SELECT <T>.id FROM "<T>"

select("#{table_name}.id")
  => SELECT <T>.id FROM "<T>"

select(arel_table[:id])
  => SELECT "<T>"."id" FROM "<T>"

Ambiguous and ugly

def self.cheaper_than(price)
  where("price < ?", price)
end
  => SELECT * FROM "<T>" WHERE price < N

This method is ambiguous and it can be more easily written using ARel’s relational algebra. ARel supports many predicates, including eq, not_eq, in, not_in, matches (LIKE or ILIKE in PgSQL), does_not_match (NOT LIKE or NOT ILIKE in PgSQL), gt, gteq, lt, and lteq. Each of the aforementioned predicates also supports _any and _all suffixes, adding AND and OR support for arrays.

def self.cheaper_than(price)
  where(arel_table[:price].lt(price))
end
  => SELECT * FROM "<T>" WHERE "<T>"."price" < N

ARel to the rescue, almost

ARel is fun and fascinating, the helpers it fails to document make writing SQL even easier than ActiveRecord on its own.

scope :order_id_asc, order(arel_table[:id].asc)
  => ORDER BY "<T>"."id" ASC

scope :order_id_desc, order(arel_table[:id].desc)
  => ORDER BY "<T>"."id" DESC

scope :order_name_ci, order(arel_table[:name].lower)
  => ORDER BY LOWER("<T>"."name")

ARel is also a bit young and quirky. For example, when you alias fields using #as, you must use strings, not symbols. ARel also provides you with convenient wrappers for aggregate functions (AVG, MAX, MIN, COUNT, SUM) and infix operators (+, -, *, /). Of course, they don’t all behave quite the same.

When using aggregate functions the results, in the SELECT, is aliased as function_id. This is true for all of the aggregates except count, which will remain unaliased, by default.

scope :avg_cost, arel_table[:cost].average
  => SELECT AVG("<T>"."cost") as avg_id FROM "<T>"
scope :avg_cost, arel_table[:cost].average.as(:avg)
  => SELECT AVG("<T>"."cost") as avg FROM "<T>"

scope :count_cost, arel_table[:cost].count 
  => SELECT COUNT("<T>"."cost") FROM "<T>"
scope :count_cost, arel_table[:cost].count.as(:count) 
  => SELECT COUNT("<T>"."cost") AS count FROM "<T>"

Also, when using multiplication or division infix operators you can alias the results, but you cannot alias addition or subtraction results. Furthermore, there are no infix operators for SQL bitwise operations.

scope :add_n1_n2, arel_table[:n1] + arel_table[:n2]
scope :mul_n1_n2, arel_table[:n1] * arel_table[:n2].as "foo"

ARel also supports grouping (parenthesizing statements, controlling order of execution).

scope :order_id_asc, arel_table.grouping(arel_table[:id].gt(1).and(arel_table[:n1].gt(1))
  => SELECT * FROM "<T>" WHERE ("<T>"."id" > 1 AND "<T>"."n1" > 1)

The tl;dr Reference contains guides on more advanced topics, like polymorphic joins, sub selects, and unions.

The Most Social Super Bowl Yet

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 10:43:00 -0500

By Meghan Sharkey, Director of Marketing

The Super Bowl used to just be about football, but nowadays, the event has evolved into a high-stakes advertising game. Last year, at $3 million or so on a 30-second ad, the pressure was on to produce a campaign that would have a lasting effect long after the 30 seconds were over. Over the past few years, we are beginning to see a new trend emerge in Super Bowl commercials; a large majority of these advertisements include a strong social media component. According to Lightspeed Research, last year it was estimated that:

Nearly two-thirds of 18-34 year-olds planning to watch the Super Bowl have smartphones and intended to use them while watching the game
Additionally, almost a third (32%) of these viewers will be posting comments about the game on a social network

This year it can be expected that more people than ever will be watching the game with one eye glued to some social network throughout it all. Let’s review some of the social media highlights from the 2011 Super Bowl game.

Christina Aguilera opening the game with the National Anthem and forgetting a few words in the beginning verses became a fast trending topic on Twitter.
According to BrandBowl2011, the top commercial was Chrysler with a total of 32,514 tweets. However, the Doritos commercial was the most talked about with an overwhelming 34,063 tweets and the most loved ad was Volkswagon’s “The Force” commercial with a sentiment ranking of +32.1%.
Mercedes-Benz “The World’s First Twitter-Fueled Race” was a campaign first promoted on Mercedes Facebook page and challenged fans to try and accrue the most Twitter followers and Facebook “likes” during a race to Dallas. The team with the most social media tallies won a Mercedes Benz 2012 C-Class Coupe.
Foursquare launching its first ever-global venue allowing fans to check-in to The Super Bowl. This campaign seemed like a great idea until Foursquare experienced several server errors preventing people from checking-in until the second half of the game. In the end, there was a total of 187,281 Super Bowl check-ins.

Now you might be wondering what is the best social media approach to advertising for this year’s Super Bowl? Mashable outlines five of their top social media game plans for the most effective reach.

Establish a Real-Time Narrative: Creating user generated content (UGC) has proven to be a great success for brands like Frito-Lay and Mercedes. These brands start their campaigns in September and encourage users to interact by creating and voting on different ads for the big game.
Turn It Into a Game: In the months leading up to the game, brands should entice fans on Facebook and followers on Twitter to guess the plot for different ad spots or hype secret messages within them. Brands can then reward these users for their engagement.
Release a Tie-In App: Develop an app based on the ad will help to give your Super Bowl campaign life in social media. This method is not widely used but if done correctly it has the potential to reap major benefits.
Advertise the Ad: Similar to a teaser for a movie, brands should consider hyping their Super Bowl ad by tweeting about it beforehand and getting people excited to see it.
Just Throw It on YouTube: This tactic is very new and somewhat untested. Last year, Volkswagon’s “The Force” commercial was posted on YouTube days before the game and within the first 48 hours had 1.5 million viewers and was a trending topic on Twitter.

The 2012 game will be the most social Super Bowl to date and marketers would be smart to keep that in mind when creating their campaigns for the big day. Looking forward to watching a great game!

Adaptly Hackathon

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 12:40:24 -0500

By Sean Shillo, VP of Engineering

The Adaptly office was almost completely empty on December 23, 2011 with the exception of the developer team, a strong aroma of highland scotch in the air, and the excitement surrounding our first ever hackfest. The purpose of this friendly hackathon was to let our developer’s skills and creativity run loose with the guidelines of building something related to both social media and advertising.

Our goal was to evaluate the number of public fans of a current page on Facebook and then rank them by their level of influence. A fan’s influence is measured by his ability to affect other users. Thus, not all fans of a page are created equal, and given equal prices for fans, certain demographics are preferred over others for long term engagement with a page, brand, etc.

Due to time constraints the Klout score was chosen as the best way to measure a person’s social influence. The biggest challenge with using Klout is the API is searchable by Twitter handle and not Facebook user.

Our first approach to linking the Twitter users to Facebook users was to assess the information of all of the active people on a Facebook page. Based on each person’s name, username and location, we were able to use the Twitter search API to match up these fields and make the connection. This method seemed efficient until the rate limiting started. Undeterred, we resorted to Google and issued a search of a person’s name constrained to the Twitter domain. A little regex magic produced a list of possible Twitter usernames, providing us with the relevant information needed to connect the Twitter and Facebook accounts.

There are certainly many concerns and questions with the approaches used and assumptions made here. The main deal breaker assumption is that the fan subset found will have a valid representation of the whole set. There is also the reliance of the Klout metric.

In the end it was felt that with assumptions holding, the project would give the ability to chose a certain demographic of fans against another all others things being equal. It should be noted that all information gathered was public. Next up on the hackfest list:

Backend language shootout - Scala, Clojure, Ruby, Go, Python, there can only be one
Big Data Madness (AKA how do I crash postgres) - HBase, Mongo, Cassandra, or Riak
Hadoop Shadoop - To insert or to log and parse

Tools Used:
Heroku
Postgres
Ruby on Rails 3.1
Relevant Gems: koala, klout-rb, resque, geocoder, twitter, mechanize

Adaptly's What's Hot & What's Not List from 2011

Wed, 28 Dec 2011 07:30:00 -0500

By Meghan Sharkey, Director of Marketing

Lately, every time we browse the web we’ve come across another “What’s Hot and What’s Not” list from 2011. After reading several versions, we, at Adaptly decided to contribute our own opinion on what trends and products in social media are really “hot” and which ones are just not.

Stay tuned for more opinions next year…

Some of Our Favorite Things from 2011…

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 07:30:00 -0500

By Meghan Sharkey, Director of Marketing

The holiday season is right around the corner! People are busy buying gifts for their loved ones, booking travel plans, baking holiday cookies, and of course searching for the perfect New Year’s Eve outfit. As this year quickly comes to an end, we, at Adaptly, didn’t want to welcome the New Year without recapping some of our favorite things from 2011 first. Needless to say this list includes raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens, bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens to name a few. In addition to brown paper packages tied up with strings, Adaptly’s favorite things from the year 2011 include…

1. Our new office located at 40 W. 23rd Street – stop by and say hi sometime!

2. Will and Kate getting hitched – The Royal Wedding

3. The collaboration of our favorite PR team, Brew Media Relations – great people!

4. The premiere of the new hit Showtime series Homeland – re-watch the first season on Monday’s at 8pm

5. The world not coming to an end on May 21st

6. This awesome new social media metric called Momentum – learn more about it http://adaptly.com/momentum

7. The new ABC hit show Once Upon a Time – Sunday nights at 8pm (some say best show out there!)

8. A balanced ratio of males to females in the Adaptly office… finally!

9. The new Timeline feature on Facebook – we’ve all updated our accounts, have you?

10. Opening an office in the UK with Paul Turner - Adaptly’s gone global!

11. The increase in people’s awareness of the power of social media. Companies are now realizing how social media can help to market a brand – learn how Adaptly can help you advertise across the social web www.adaptly.com

Happy Holidays from Adaptly!

Yes, Something Really Does Look Different

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 08:00:06 -0500

By: Jessie Tseng, Designer at Adaptly

Imagine you’re the winner of one of those reality television shows—except you’re actually great at what you do, and you’re much less annoying. And just like any winner, the first you do after crying on stage and thanking your parents is to hire an image consultant and get made over. Because from this moment on, everyone is watching you.

That’s kind of how we feel. In the least arrogant way possible. But if you’ve been following Adaptly over the last year, you’ll know we’ve become kind of a big deal. And while we’re nowhere as attractive as Kelly Clarkson is now, we, too, have begun looking in the mirror to see what needs updating.

The first thing we wanted to address was our blog. The goal for this blog is to be the go-to place for updates about our company. “Where we talk about our favorite topic: ourselves” isn’t just us being a little cheeky (although it is that). This blog is not only our public face; it is also the main way for us to communicate with our audience. So if we’re sending people to this page, it would follow that this page needs to look good.

So we made it look good.

Due to time constraints, the blog design project was less a redesign and more a customization project. Adaptly Talks uses a wonderfully versatile theme from Woo Themes. What we wanted to do was take the blog and adapt it (yes, we went there) to to be more “us”.

Successful design is more than just about color and typography—it’s about problem-solving. Design takes problems and comes up with creative solutions to them. We created a brief list of what major issues we had with the page:

It looked generic. Which makes sense because we chose a generic theme.
There was no personality there. And we have a great personality.
It evoked no emotion.
Our logo was nowhere to be found. Which is an even bigger problem because of Point 1.

Our only guidelines were to keep it simple. We started from the ground up: color and typography (I know, I know). We threw out the existing color scheme. We chose a light grey background to add a little more depth than a crisp white. We used the Adaptly blue as a type accent color. At that point, the blog looked very tech-driven, so we also incorporated the use of a complementary orange to brighten up the colder space. As for typography, we wanted a dramatic use of type. We went with Museo because it’s an attractive font that is just professional enough without being boring and yet different enough that it brings a sense of unconventionality and fun (kind of like us). The heavier weight and tight leading of Museo used in the post titles are meant to draw one’s attention to the post and also to create large color blocks within the predominantly gray space.

Finally, we wanted to make the blog as simple as possible. We took out the genre tabs which came with the original design and replaced them with the specific date of the post (which wasn’t available before). We included a link back to Adaptly.com and made the tags clearer.

All within a few days.

Obviously there are still a lot of kinks on this blog which need to be worked out. We won’t even begin to mention ~~spacing and alignment issues, the fact that our search only kind of works~~ all the things that still need to be worked out. Not to mention that us designers are notoriously nit picky. And in the words of a very awesome and inspiring designer, “the most interesting about being in this field is the progress.”

But for now, what started out as a quick fix on our blog has become a full-blown identity project. Which you’ll hear about later—if we ever finish it.

Social Does Not Equal Search

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 10:08:00 -0500

“Data Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and containing fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.

Today’s column is written by Nikhil Sethi, who is co-founder/CEO Adaptly.

As we look at the emergence of social as a serious contender within a typical media buy, the marketplace is noticing an evolution of the medium rather than the creation of yet another new channel (e.g. video, mobile, etc.). Looking at the four seats of advertising we have our three traditional seats (Radio, TV, Print) and of significant importance in the past decade (Digital). Traditional media has always suffered from the untraceable nature of the beast, whereas Digital, by means of Display, and Search primarily has built itself on its trackable nature, put simply the ability to cookie.

And here comes Social.

Emerging truly as a digital vehicle (meaning it plays in the overarching web and mobile space), Social has presented itself as the FIFTH seat. It ignores most concepts that Digital has been born with. It plays kindly with the traditional metrics (clicks, impressions, CTR), but also embodies a very new idea around conversation, dialogue, and response metrics - creating value in an owned and earned media sense.

The game is not only about distribution anymore, it is now 1 part distribution, 2 parts
engagement.

Who owns Social?

There is significant turmoil within a given agency in terms of ownership around Social.

Because of the separation of Social from Digital, we have several groups from the
digital, PR, branding, and offline teams all seeing budget emerge for social buys.
The problem lies in the perspective each group has for the space.

As Social emerged it began to look like biddable media, based on a campaign to ad unit structure. The first players to jump on the bandwagon were the SEO/SEM platforms.

They essentially looked at social (Facebook) as an extension of direct response inventory and mapped it back to direct response metrics similar to what they have been doing with search for many years.

It became simple for a search group within an agency to mask their social ad buys directly with their search efforts.

Optimizing for Engagement

However the landscape has evolved. No longer are startups alone attempting to penetrate offline dollars, no longer are startups alone constrained by the current set of metrics we have available to work with. The publishers themselves (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.) have made the corresponding changes at the supply level.

As KPIs shift from DR to conversation, the methodology and thought process needs to shift as well. No longer is CTR the godlike metric for optimization - we need to begin to optimize for engagement.

Two new forms of media emerge: Owned and Earned. Within these groups engagement can be defined as any action a consumer can take on a given social platform from tweeting, retweeting, stumbling, liking, posting, sharing, and commenting.

Each of these metrics becomes part of the soup of metrics that all of our paid media on social should report, and optimize towards.

Social is not search and needs to be planned, executed, and reported upon differently.

Follow Nikhil Sethi (@nsethi), Adaptly (@adaptly) and AdExchanger.com (@adexchanger) on Twitter.

Article from AdExchanger on 12/12/2011

http://www.adexchanger.com/data-driven-thinking/social-does-not-equal-search/