The release of a new iPhone edition has always been front-page news, with a large number of loyal customers lining up right before the store opens. The new iPhone 6 had the same expected response, till the news of iPhone 6 bending went viral on internet.

One of the world’s strongest brands Apple struggled with the viral and bad mouth-to-mouth advertisement. However, the fact is that only 9 complaints out of 10 million units sold were received about the phone bending backwards. One possible reason could be that before opening the box, the buyers might have damaged the phone.

Internet users definitely ignored the fact that only 9 complaints out of 10 million units are very insignificant. The reason is that the way the negative advertisement was staged had a significant impact on Apple’s reputation.  Competitors such as Samsung, also used the opportunity to pick on Apple showing the strengthen of negative advertisement.

In my opinion, when negative facts go viral about a product, the company needs to take immediate action to protect it. The later you respond, the more damage it does. In this case, least effort was shown by Apple.

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/shelly-palmer/have-an-iphone-6-apple-sa_b_5900160.html

Consumers are bombarded with millions of advertisements. It is very easy to not pay attention to those advertisements. With boring advertisements, users can skip it right after the skip button pops up, leaving the advertiser with only 6 seconds to grab attention. On televisions, people are able to record shows without advertisements, leaving no medium of interaction with the product.

Interactive videos, when delivered to targeted audiences, have shows to be more effective than traditional advertisements. Such videos tend to have more than 90% view completion rate. If advertisements are made keeping the same format as television and online, it will have ineffective as it does not give the user any chance to interact with the advertisement.

However, effective interactive videos focus on the rich content and not only to increase brand awareness. The result of this rich content, when targeted to specific audiences, increases interaction and goes just beyond brand awareness. Customers tend to go further and like other social media platforms for the product, such as Facebook, Twitter etc.

I believe, the habits of users have changed. The users are looking for concise, relevant and interactive advertisements. Use of interactive video, which is not as widely used as any other form of advertisement, can make a significant different in driving traffic for the product. Hence, make the products online presence effective.

Youtube

Source: http://www.destinationcrm.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=99168&PageNum=1

Progressive Insurance deploy open-source data analytics software to drive new customers to its website. The software measures the effectiveness of online advertising that helps Progressive Insurance marketing team to understand the behaviour of customers and what the customers are looking for.

Previously, Progressive Insurance spent millions of dollars based on the strategy: number of advertisement reach along with number of clicks and number of last touch drives policy sale. However, using analytics software, the company formed a cross-functional team of IT and business analysts and built a prototype software in cloud.

The software allows analyzing months of advertising data in hours, which took days in the past. It enables marketers not only to see which site the customer clicked on before visiting Progressive Insurance’s site but also what combination of ads the customer looked at before buying the policy. This allowed the marketers to understand the customers better and tailor what the customers are looking for, avoiding overlaps.

As a result, it leads to more efficient online policy sale. In my opinion, if this software is applied to other consumers goods, such as cameras, the companies will know what kind of features/combination of products a camera user is looking for before buying the product in real. This will lead to more tailored advertising.

Source: http://www.cio.com/article/2686835/data-analytics/progressive-insurance-uses-data-analytics-to-fine-tune-ad-strategy.html 

Tweet Activity Dashboard is a free analytics from Twitter that allows a free analytics offering to see how subscribers engage with contents on the social media website. While testing the dashboard, brands that advertise on Twitter, were able to reach at least 30% of their followers per week.

With the new dashboard, marketers are able to see how many times the posts have been seen on website and mobile devices. The data can be broken down hourly including the number of retweets, replies, mentions etc. The details of users demographics, locations and interests are also captured.

The toolset can hurt Google Adwords, as marketers are able to test the effectiveness of their ads without using Google. The tweets, which the dashboard can test, do not necessarily need to be advertisement tweets but literally any tweets. This will enable the general user to see how effective the content of their tweets are to the subscribed followers.

I believe this toolset can be very effective for marketers as well as general heavy twitter users. This will allow us to see what types of content/advertisements are most successful and liked by subscribers. This can also be used to pretest ideas for future marketing campaigns.

Source: http://www.destinationcrm.com/Articles/Columns-Departments/Insight/Twitter-Updates-Its-Analytics-Offering-99261.aspx