Learning from Benioff and Salesforce

The July 4th holiday is time for family, BBQs, and summer reading lists. I write to suggest Marc Benioff’s Behind the Cloud.  The book details Benioff’s journey building Salesforce into a billion-dollar industry pioneer, lessons learned, and his philosophy.

Salesforce pioneered innovative technical and business models that dramatically changed the enterprise software market. Rather than pay license fees, implementation fees, etc, Salesforce customers were able to buy by the seat and benefit from Salesforce’s single instance, multi-tenant infrastructure. The “No Software” net effect was to dramatically reduce costs, while improving customer experience, enlarging the overall market, and creating recurring revenue streams.

Countdown to Agile: 5 Ways to Prepare Your Team for Agile Display Advertising

 

Having a solid strategy is crucial if you’re going to optimize your ads while they are in market. Through smart planning, lose the fear of changing your ads mid-run. 

Here are a few tips:

  1. Identify goals, key metrics, and possible changes before the campaign goes live. Outline specific and strategic actions, but leave some room for flexibility.
  2. Ask for a buy-in from your team, so that changes to the creative, content or ad functionality are known about, and if possible, pre-approved. Then, if you identify opportunities for optimization or experimentation, you can have an action plan already in place, and streamline the process of making or reverting changes to the creative.

Flite's Secret Weapon: People, Culture, and Fun

Why do I love Flite?

Every Tuesday we demo newly released software, highlight anniversaries and milestones, etc. Today, Steve Bolinger led us through a musical thank you to Tristan Farnon for his two years with Flite. Awesome.

 

Agile Marketing Mantra: Data Beats Opinions

Data by Jim Corwin/Getty Images

This post is part of the Agile Marketing Mantras Series, a collection of favorite quotes about the importance of agility and iteration.  Inspired by Silicon Valley Product Group's Lessons From Leaders.
---
"Data beats opinions."
 Data is factual and objective.  Opinions are subjective, biased, and difficult to defend.  Okay, hold on, you say.  What about that statistic that says that almost all statistics are made up?

 

It's true that data points can be presented and interpreted differently -- the same set of numbers can be manipulated to tell a specific story based on what is emphasized or ommited.  Or the source of the data may be suspect.  In these ways, data is factual but not always objective, since it's often at the mercy of the person sharing the data and whatever his agenda may be.

 

However, when used with integrity and a sense of curiosity about finding the truth behind the numbers, data is a valuable source of information about customer behavior.

 

With metrics, the user is telling you what he cares about, what he doesn't, what he wants to purchase, what triggers him to purchase it, and when in the process he gives in or gives up.  You have to ask the right questions and "slice-and-dice" the data appropriatley to find the underlying story, but once you do, the insights you find can be powerful and informative.

 

On the other hand, opinions without external facts can be written off as unfounded and whimsical.  But when you use data to support your opinions, you add a layer of legitimacy to your idea that can help persuade your colleagues or customers.

Announcing Flite's Engineering Blog at mechanics.flite.com

 

Guest blog post by Giles Goodwin, Co-founder of Flite and President of Product and Technology, and Toshinari Kureha, VP of Engineering.

Flite is proud to launch a new blog for the engineering community.

 

Our goal is to provide a peek under the hood of the Flite platform and to share some of what our engineering team has learned while building and maintaining it.  Our Flite platform has had to overcome a lot of challenges to provide users with a state-of-the-art web studio and supporting cloud infrastructure to make real-time updates to live campaigns and integrate web applications directly into display ads.  The content here is geared towards software developers, but our customers may find it interesting as well.

 

Our inspiration for starting an engineering-focused blog was this: we've learned a lot from other engineers via blogs, webinars, and conferences throughout the years, and we wanted to give back to the software development community by sharing some of our experiences.  We hope that you'll learn about a technology that you're not yet familiar with, or find some new ideas about ones you already use.

 

Take a look around and feel free to reach out to us with questions or tips of your own.  We look forward to sharing with -- and learning from -- you.

5 Metrics You Should Know

Today’s ads can feature application-like functionality, but with every layer of complexity comes new data that begs to be interpreted.

When reviewing complex metrics, it’s helpful to focus on metrics that align with your marketing goals. Consider the following varied reasons for running a campaign:

  • Improve brand awareness and recall
  • Introduce a new product
  • Direct response and lead generation

We often fixate on the big 3--clickthrough, interaction rate, and engagement rate--but depending on our campaign goals, we may be able to better judge campaign success from different key metrics.

Whether you goal is to get face-time with your audience, to drive web traffic, or to move units, here are 5 other display metrics that can tell us a whole lot about our ads and customers.

 

Time on Unit

Since engagement rate [Total Engagements] / [Total Impressions] and interaction rate [Total Interactions] / [Total Impressions] are a function of impressions, it may tell you more about the success of your media buy, while Time on Unit tells you about the effectiveness of your ad to deliver its full message once you’ve obtained viewer interest.

When judging Time on Unit, do it in the context of how long a full ad experience takes for that ad, which is going to vary widely from ad-to-ad depending on if it contains videos, animations, tabbed content, and so forth.

 

Scroll (Feed e.g. Twitter, within Content box, etc)

The often overlooked Scroll is actually a terrific metric to gauge content effectiveness when you want more detail than interaction rate or time on unit can provide you. If your audience is scrolls down your social feed or within your embedded whitepaper, you can assume what you presented them perked their interest. For instance, this can be useful to determine if a Twitter feed is getting interest.

 

Navigate (Arrows, Tab Click, Grid Button Click, Custom Button Click)

Like scroll, navigate shows an interest in seeing more. Keep an eye on navigation for ads that have lots of content tabs or panels, to see how effective your creative is at getting the audience to explore beyond the initial state of the ad.


Share

Shares to social media are the ultimate sign of a successful campaign. Take a good look when your ad content is noteworthy, but don’t fixate on this holy grail of viral marketing if your other metrics are performing well. When shares are lacking, remove those buttons to de-clutter your ads.


Video Play (1/4, ½, ¾, Full)

When including video in an ad, determine at what point the video has delivered enough of its message to be successful. Then review video playtime metrics. For instance, if your product is only introduced after 7 seconds in a video, look to playtime metrics that exceed that duration for confirmation that the content is working.

 

Let’s See This in Action

Agile Marketing Mantra: Be stubborn on vision but flexible on details

Elastic Bands by Petr Kratochvil

This post is part of the Agile Marketing Mantras Series, a collection of favorite quotes about the importance of agility and iteration.  Inspired by Silicon Valley Product Group's Lessons From Leaders.
---
"Be stubborn on vision but flexible on details."

Being agile isn't an excuse to fumble along forwards, backwards, or sideways until you get your act together.  

 

On the contrary, agile marketing requires you to have a strong guiding vision of what you want to accomplish, what problem you are solving, and for whom.  What inspires you?  Why will it inspire the customer? 

 

The vision you set can change once you get feedback from customers, but there should still be thinking done up front so that you don't waste precious time and money on big bets and costly mistakes that don't pan out.

 

A vision that unites the organization will ensure that everyone is on the same page about the overall goal.  Prioritization can be difficult otherwise, because doing one task means not doing another, or at least pushing it lower on the to-do list.  Many times, everything seems urgent and important -- but due to finite resources, certain projects and tasks have to be put above others.

Agile Marketing Mantra: Think in Leaps, but Iterate in Steps

Stone steps by Andrew McMillan

The Silicon Valley Product Group posted a great article on Lessons From Leaders, a collection of favorite quotes and the companies who embody these principles.
 
The ten mantras are not specific or unique to certain companies -- rather, these ideas are found in many startups and corporations because they serve as reminders to focus on core concepts such as product vision, customer needs, and agility.

 

We gathered our favorite quotes and share our perspective on why they matter in agile marketing.  Stay tuned for the rest of the Agile Marketing Mantras series.

 

"Think in leaps, but iterate in steps."

By having a solid understanding of the bigger picture, you can stay flexible during the iteration process because you know the general direction that you're going in, and have thought about guard rails that will guide the creation of more specific features and specs.  You can make adjustments and deviate from the original plan without fear of losing track of what you wanted to accomplish in the first place.

Wikia Case Study: Using Real-Time Marketing to Optimize Ad Performance within Hours of Launch

Wikia operates the world’s largest network of collaboratively published video game, entertainment, and lifestyle content on the web.

In March 2012, they built an interactive ad using the Flite Platform.  When the campaign went live, the Wikia team realized that users weren't engaging with the ad.  After analyzing the real-time metrics, the team identified why, and updated the creative.  

The crucial adjustment made all the difference: interaction rate jumped from 3% to 27%, and the clickthrough rate increased from 0.4% to 0.91%.  

Check out the video below or see our Wikia written case study to read more.

Summary:

Challenge: Quickly identify ad performance issues, and update the functionality of the ad across all publisher sites to improve performance.

Solution: Observe user interactions with the ad in real-time to identify the problem, update the functionality of the ad in minutes with Ad Studio, and instantly publish all changes to all publisher sites with Flite’s live updates feature.

What Publishers Can Learn From Harvard Business School, Gatorade, and Forbes

The Harvard Business Review recently posted an article titled A Sad Lesson in Collaborative Innovation written by Ron Adner, a Dartmouth business school professor and the author of The Wide Lens: A New Strategy for Innovation.

 

How does this apply for publishers in the display advertising world?  

It's crucial for publishers to offer unique ad products because an audience is no longer enough to command premium pricing.  Publishers need to move towards selling unique brand experiences that provide value for marketers.  Top sites are already doing this, many of them using Flite's technology to create custom solutions quickly and at scale, allowing them to charge higher CPMs while making the brand advertiser happy.

But as you can see on the slide below (presented by a Forbes executive at Flite Summit), there are multiple stakeholders involved.  How does a publisher know the best way to explore new solutions?  How do you start with tackling and incorporating innovation into your business process?

IAB's New Ad Creative Formats

The new IAB banner ad sizes include creative formats that are larger, including sidekick and pushdown styles that allow more space for content.  iMedia Connection had a great article about this recently, titled How to Make the Most of the New Ad Creative Formats.  In his post, Eric Picard calls for widespread adoption of the new formats. The success of new IAB sizes relies on support from players at every stage in the display ecosystem.  Here are the highlights summarizing what these new ad formats will mean for publishers:

  • The original IAB sizes were created with lower screen resolutions in mind. Since better screens now have widespread adoption, it's now necessary to introduce larger sizes to provide a similar ad experience.In his post, Eric Picard calls for widespread adoption of the new formats. The success of new IAB sizes relies on support from players at every stage in the display ecosystem.
  • Now that we have the first new formats available in a decade, it's on the shoulders of media buyers and publishers to force this issue. 
  • First, media buyers must demand this inventory from publishers at scale. They should be pushing to get these units on every page of every publisher they buy from.
  • As for publishers, they need to enable (and quickly) every page on their sites to immediately adopt these units as their standard unit.