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.

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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.

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. 

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.   

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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5.  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!

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…