ITV

Tag: Social Network

  • Facebook signs first agency deal in India with GroupM

    Facebook signs first agency deal in India with GroupM

    MUMBAI: During her recent visit, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, signed the company’s first agency deal in India with WPP’s integrated media and marketing company, GroupM.

     

    “Our partnership with GroupM will benefit clients to reach over 100 million people in India, 84 million on mobile — both smartphone and feature phone —  and custom audiences within the 100 million in urban and rural India.” said Facebook India head Kirthiga Reddy. “We’re excited about this wide-ranging collaboration which combines the strength of the world’s best global advertising platform with GroupM’s market-leading position to deliver personalised marketing at scale.”

     

    GroupM has been creating cutting edge digital solutions for clients and given its access to data and research and has been integrating digital with traditional media for its clients. GroupM south Asia CEO CVL Srinivas said, “We are delighted with the Facebook partnership that can help unlock even greater value for our clients. We work closely with Facebook globally, regionally and locally. India is projected to be the largest country for Facebook by people very soon and we see exciting possibilities for our clients. This partnership adds to the set of enablers we have created over the years that can help drive digital adoption in our market.”

     

    For Nokia Lumia, GroupM pioneered the deployment of Facebook’s outcome measurement and leveraged Facebook’s sophisticated targeting capabilities to deliver a 54x return on Facebook ad spend.

     

    Once again, leveraging Facebook’s sharp targeting capability, GroupM delivered outstanding results for Arrow, a premium apparel brand. Arrow was running an end of season sale and wanted to drive a special discount promotion to an audience between 18 to 35 years old residing in metro cities. Arrow was able to deliver a 30x return on Facebook ad spend and a significant redemption rate from this exclusive Facebook campaign.

     

    To add to its digital offerings, last year GroupM India launched Mash Up, a digital content unit which has been creating engaging digital content solutions for brands, the most recent being the digital video campaign with Kapil Sharma for Honda Mobilio. GroupM also manages a specialist mobile advertising company, Madhouse, bringing brands together with mobile media publishers to unleash the power of mobile. Its full service digital marketing agencies Quasar and Blazar include end to end digital solutions for advertising across the web, social media, search, analytics and creative services. As part of the renewed focus on digital, GroupM in the past year has evolved its practices in content, movie activation, experiential marketing and analytics.

  • LinkedIn’s SlideShare becomes more personalised

    LinkedIn’s SlideShare becomes more personalised

    MUMBAI: In today’s day and age, social networks are a way of life; so much so that they are the source of news for many media professionals. I happen to be one such professional who gets the beat of the industry through LinkedIn.

     

    Today morning I came across this mail from – LinkedIn’s presentation channel – SlideShare, stating it is integrating its Privacy Policy and Terms of Use into the LinkedIn Privacy Policy and User Agreement, effective 26 March, 2014.

     

    What does this mean for the user? This integration of SlideShare’s terms of service will now make it even easier for the member to discover and share content across both services. This means one’s SlideShare experience can be personalised based on his/her LinkedIn profile, their network, and their engagement with content from both services.

     

    The user’s LinkedIn account will power a richer experience on SlideShare’s service, and in the future may be prioritised over other sign-up or log-in options on the global presentation channel.

     

    “We encourage connecting your SlideShare and LinkedIn accounts, and in the future all SlideShare accounts could be merged into LinkedIn accounts. We’ll let you know ahead of time if we merge these accounts,” stated the e-mail from SlideShare.

     

    SlideShare was founded on the basic desire to easily share presentations on the web. This desire to help professionals around the world to discover people through content, and content through people, led it to join the LinkedIn family in 2012. Both the services claim to work on the fundamental philosophy of “members first”.

  • Facebook prepares to insert video ads into users’ news feeds

    Facebook prepares to insert video ads into users’ news feeds

    MUMBAI: According to media reports the social network giant Facebook plans to let marketers insert 15-second video ads directly into people’s news feeds. This step needs to be taken with caution as it may not go down well with its users.

    Buyers could target the age and gender of the users who’d find the ads in their feeds reports claim citing “two people familiar with the matter.” Ads could sell for as much as $2.5 million a day depending on how many people watch them.

    Execs appear to appreciate the possibility of a backlash: CEO Mark Zuckerberg has delayed the plan “at least twice” as he considers ways to minimise user ire over the ads, for example by offering them in high-def and ensuring that people won’t see the same pitch more than three times a day. But the sales opportunity apparently is too lucrative to resist.

    Advertisers likely will spend nearly $64 billion in the US this year on TV ads vs $36 billion on the web. That’s why digital powers including Google, Yahoo, and AOL are gunning for TV advertising – including by staging their own NewFront sales pitches to ad buyers as they also gather for television networks’ upfront presentations.

    Last week Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg told analysts that her company has “a massive and engaged audience around the world that brands can use to build awareness and drive sales. Every night 88 million to 100 million people are actively using Facebook during primetime TV hours in United States alone.” Nielsen has been working with Facebook to come up with ratings for online videos that would be similar to TV ratings.

  • Cricket SA launches lovecricket app on Mxit

    Cricket SA launches lovecricket app on Mxit

    MUMBAI: Cricket South Africa (CSA) has launched its first mobile-only community, lovecricket, on Mxit, South Africa‘s largest mobile social network.

    The app gives fans match details, player profiles, match scores, news, polls and an opportunity to have their say.

    CSA Acting CEO Naasei Appiah commented, “As a mobile app, lovecricket, expands on our social media success by giving more people the chance to become part of the conversation. Mxit™s natural inclusivity – because it works across feature and smart phones – made it the perfect platform for us to keep increasing awareness and growing our fan base.”

    Mxit is a downloadable social chat application that works on over 3 000 mobile devices from a standard Nokia to a high-end Samsung.

    Mxit CMO Vincent Maher commented, “The scoring functionality is an important part of this app. Getting background information on players or games is great but the real engagement and excitement will be built by giving fans the sense that they are right there at the stadium. Once the real time scoring is added I cant‘ imagine a better mobile way to stay close to a game.”

  • BabyTV launches an online social network for parents

    BabyTV launches an online social network for parents

    MUMBAI: US new media firm BabyUnivers which works in the pregnancy, baby and toddler marketplace, has announced the launch of BabyTV.com.

    This provides the first full-featured video-driven social networking site for parents and expecting parents. BabyTV.com was previewed to select users in late December 2006 as the first Internet-based television network devoted to moms, and the official debut of BabyTV.com brings a rich user experience with high quality video content and interactive functionality for parents, parents-to-be, and caregivers.

    BabyTV.com offers a catalogue of streaming television programming targeted to new and expectant parents from recognized experts throughout the industry. Viewers can tune into the linear schedule of programming and video-on-demand (VOD) library filled with entertaining and informative videos from content partners Oxygen Media and Alpha Mom.

    The website also allows parents to submit original video to share with other parents, using the MyBabyTV functionality which has already been dubbed by some the ‘YouTube for Mommies’ Unlike YouTube, however, all uploaded video content can be quickly reviewed by a BabyTV.com moderator using state- of-the-art tools, allowing MyBabyTV to serve as a family-friendly environment for sharing the special moments of a newborn’s life.

    Importantly, this content screening capability also provides advertisers with protection from negative associations with inappropriate content that has become so common on other video-sharing sites.

    Throughout the site, parents and parents-to-be can use interactive functionality to share their opinions about BabyTV content by providing feedback on specific videos, participating in polls, and posting original comments in video forums. BabyTV also offers a library of text-based articles written by industry experts that are available to users of the site.

    BabyUniverse chairman and CEO John Textor says, “Our goal is to create the ultimate social networking destination for moms who are looking to share ideas and stories and to find out more about the highly individual journey that we call parenthood.”

    “BabyTV brings a wealth of next-generation community features for site visitors, allowing users to create membership profiles, participate in message boards and polls relating to pregnancy and parenting topics, and upload their own videos –providing the premier and most all- encompassing online environment for parents today.”

    The launch of BabyTV.com is also changing the rules on the behind-the- scenes work of bringing live TV programming and VOD to viewers, debuting a new Internet content delivery platform that has been implemented by John Studdard, the company’s executive VP of new media. Studdard, who is known for creating the enterprise architecture behind
    VirtualBank.com /Lydian Trust Co. which allowed it to scale from startup into a multi-billion dollar diversified financial services company, has strong credentials for developing next-generation content delivery platforms.

    Studdard says, “BabyTV is a significant milestone for Internet broadcasting as well as the BabyUniverse family of online websites, providing a robust platform for the next generation of media-driven networking sites,” . As the first web property to be completely deployed on our new enterprise content management system (CMS), BabyTV provides a way to gain efficiencies of scale in rolling out video, text and community assets across multiple sites.”

    The company’s CMS platform allows BabyUniverse to leverage content throughout other BabyUniverse sites, easily moving video and text content created by a centrally located creative and editorial staff throughout the sites, when and where it’s needed, in real time.

  • Viacom looking to acquire social networking site Bebo

    Viacom looking to acquire social networking site Bebo

    MUMBAI: In a bid to connect better with youth US media firms are looking to buy social networking sites. Last year, News Corp plonked down $580 million for MySpace.

    Now media reports indicate that Viacom is looking to acquire Bebo, a social networking site. In the UK, reports indicate that it has overtaken MySpace. In the US, though it has fewer users. It has 25 million users globally compared to around 90 million for MySpace.

    On Bebo, members can stay in touch with their college friends, connect with friends, share photos, discover new interests and just hang out. Reports indicate that it also provides video sharing (via VideoEgg widgets) and built-in Skype presence. While the designs may be more controlled than MySpace pages, most of Bebo’s success seems to arise from network effects – users join Bebo because everyone else is using the site.

    The founders of Bebo are said to be looking at upwards of a billion dollars. British Telecom’s offer of around $400 million was reportedly turned down. For the week ending 5 August, Bebo was the most visited social network in the UK, and its market share of visits has grown 17 per cent in the past two weeks. 1 in every 135 UK visits goes to Bebo, which is now the 11th most visited site on the Internet. Viacom was also said to have been looking at one stage to acquire Facebook the second largest social networking site in the US.