The Box Office in Your Pocket

Sometimes, we just want to kick back with a bucket of popcorn and watch a good movie. But there are so many questions that need to be answered first— What’s playing? Which theater should I go to? What time does the show start? Did the movie get a good review? Am I going to be able to get tickets? The list just goes on and on.

As mobile devices continue to act as our personal assistants, consumers are turning to their smartphones for answers to these entertainment-related questions. So, last month RadiumOne conducted a survey examining how consumers use their smartphones to make purchase-related decisions, such as researching which movie to see, viewing trailers, and purchasing movie tickets.

Our survey respondents indicated that they predominantly use the mobile web in a research capacity. Here was the demographic breakdown of those surveyed:

• 17.6% were aged 55+
• 46% were aged 35-54,
• 34.9% were aged 18-34
• 1.5% were under 18

56% of survey respondents stated that they use their phones to look up movie times, while 20% use their phones to watch trailers. Later, when asked why mobile users watch movie trailers on their phones, 50% again cited research as a decisive influence, suggesting that consumers are more likely to engage with interactive, contextual advertisements.

Thinking beyond the initial engagement, RadiumOne unearthed that nearly 79% of the audience explicitly prefer to purchase tickets on-location at the theater while 21% would rather buy them on their phone. Of that 21%, 16% feel safer making the purchase on a mobile app such as Fandango or MovieTickets.com. What’s more, advertisers and the entertainment industry would be interested to know that 63% responded favorably to purchasing tickets on their mobile devices if the option was presented to them after viewing a movie trailer.

With these insights in mind, it is imperative for entertainment advertisers to begin putting more thought into mobile creative to take full advantage of the mobile device’s native features.

Here are some additional suggestions gleaned from our research:

• Embed a calendar feature within the advertisement as a way by which consumers can remind themselves of times/dates of upcoming shows playing near them
• Our research shows that users are likely to buy tickets after seeing a movie trailer— include a call to action that redirects the user to purchase tickets on a mobile site
• Make sure to provide the ability to share the ad since personal recommendations are a major influence on purchase decisions. Advertisers can save money and build social credibility by leveraging sharing users as brand ambassadors that will excite other friends to see the movie

Advertisers should look at mobile as a clear choice for maximizing ticket sales during the holiday movie season. They need to perceive mobile as a primary tool for reaching audiences who make purchase decisions largely based on the research performed on their phones. The results of our research make it clear that consumers value relevant information, and more importantly, efficiency. By bridging advertisements and movie trailers with direct-purchase options, advertisers open up the possibility of tracking not only conversions, but also direct ROI.

Bigger Screen, Bigger Opportunities

When it comes to screen real estate, size matters. And, within the diverse landscape that is the mobile device kingdom, tablets continue to dominate in this respect. Certainly, the introduction of tablets into the daily lives of consumers has not only reshaped the way by which individuals interact with consumable brands, but more importantly how companies can more effectively engage their audiences and drive incremental sales this holiday season.  There is much to be learned in the way of mobile user behavior, and while the industry continues to navigate its way through this complex ecosystem, RadiumOne positions itself as a thought leader in helping advertisers to take advantage of first party consumer data, transforming analytics into actionable intelligence.

In a recent mobile survey, RadiumOne set out to test several key hypotheses concerning tablet use by consumers.  Specifically, the survey addresses audience engagement, device utility and temporal and environmental activity. While the expected results underlying each of these topics of interest might appear intuitive, RadiumOne challenges today’s conventional understanding of tablet behavior by going to consumers directly and stress-testing these assumptions in the field.

For example, participating survey respondents indicated:

• 45.9% use tablets for primary research
•  17.5% use tablets mostly for comparison shopping
• 39.5% use tablets most often in the evening
• 70.7% use tablets primarily in a home setting, 24.2% at both home and work
• 63.2% use tablets whilst passing time, while 28.7% use them while watching television

These statistics, although not entirely unexpected, should for all intents and purposes provide data-driven justification for how users engage with their tablets. In order to make use of this data, a framework is required. The audience and demographic profile of those participants in the survey will help place this information into context quite nicely. Provided that 76.7% of the surveyors were of the ages 35-55+ and that 68.5% of the sample population were women, a clearer picture emerges from the stats and figures above. For mobile savvy advertisers, these statistics confirm user behavior by what is surely one of the most sought after mobile audiences: women with discretionary income.

As the holiday season kicks into top gear, RadiumOne recommends, based on its survey findings, that advertisers should consider doing the following to best optimize their mobile campaigns and increase sales returns.

• Tailor ad creative to a parenting audience by including in-app holiday promotions and call-to-action buttons that allow the distribution of shared content across social networks
• Leverage the power of cross-platform interaction by synchronizing ad delivery at peak viewing times for both televised and tablet content
• Offer consumers a clean and efficient way to make purchases by providing one-click-buy, add-to-cart, or quick-step checkouts, either within the ad or presented directly thereafter

Advertisers have a myriad of tools at their disposal to broaden the audience funnel and drive consumer sales on tablets. When tablet based campaigns are combined with traditional mobile smartphone and digital media buys, cross-platform targeting will be advantageous in achieving key marketing and performance objectives, especially as holiday shopping continues to heat up.

RadiumOne’s continued innovation – Bringing our Intelligence layer, ShareGraph, to Facebook

By Gurbaksh Chahal, Chairman & CEO, RadiumOne @gchahal

The team at RadiumOne has been focused on building best-in-class ad solutions for our brand and agency partners. Over the past 18 months we’ve been heads down, building and integrating some of the most innovative social apps and sharing tools into our platform, combining a programmatic buying approach with our big data and ShareGraph^TM intelligence layer.

Today, we want to call attention to one of the most exciting innovations we’ve seen in the digital ad space in the past few years – the launch of Facebook Exchange (FBX). Personally, when I first heard about FBX, I thought it was genius.  It got our company thinking of how this could further serve our customers.

With this backdrop, and the successful completion of FBX integration, we’re pleased to announce that RadiumOne is now expanding our ShareGraph^TM intelligence layer into FBX. Our team is honored to be part of FBX and we are excited by the potential this brings to our customers.

FBX’s inventory is massive and highly valuable for advertisers. By combining existing ad buys with real-time Facebook inventory, advertisers will get near instant campaign performance. This means a more holistic conversation with consumers on the web and Facebook – it’s the complete audience approach.

RadiumOne reaches 25 billion impressions each day across the web and Facebook, to deliver the most targeted audiences for our advertisers. Our initial experiences with FBX suggest that their inventory works incredibly well. Context plays a large part of their success: Facebook ads are not intrusive, and consumers inherently value Facebook’s content – a perfect combination for our Fortune 500 advertisers.

We are excited to integrate Facebook into our social advertising platform and offer advertisers access to entirely new opportunities for display and mobile ad solutions. ‪We make big data work for our customers by leveraging the 10 billion+ proprietary sharing events we see each month from 700 million global users. When we pair that data with our ShareGraph^TM audience intelligence, we are able to deliver campaigns to the right audience across the web, mobile and Facebook. The addition of Facebook (which accounts for nearly 25% of web use) will provide a complete audience picture across the web. It’s a big win for us, and an even bigger win for our customers.

Although we have just begun our integration with FBX and these are still the early days of programmatic buying on Facebook, our team has over 30 years of combined expertise in the data landscape and we are implementing our best practices rapidly. We are truly impressed with the FBX team, and it’s a real pleasure to collaborate with a likeminded group that takes pride in providing innovative ad solutions for brands. We are looking forward to many more great innovations and the continued success of our advertisers.

Cyber Monday Predictions Are In!

The planes, trains and automobiles holiday travel rush is officially on! The airports are already bustling with holiday travelers and cranberry sauce and pumpkin pies are disappearing from grocery stores.  And just today I received three “holiday special” emails from the same website. Sheesh! Black Friday is just four days away. But the biggest shopping day of the year, Cyber Monday, is right around the corner.

Shopping on Cyber Monday offers customers great perks like free shipping and amazing discounts. This year, more than ever before, we think social sharing will play an important role in online shoppers’ purchase decisions. We know that people share the products they love with their social networks.  With access to social sharing data from around the web, we have put together an infographic full of projections about Cyber Monday—from the devices users will be sharing from to which products will be piled under the tree.

Cyber Monday 2012 is on track to break spending records this year, and hopefully sharing records too! We won’t know the results of the big day for a while, but here are our predictions.