Creative by Epic – Launch and News!

We’re happy to announce the launch of Creative by Epic. This area of the company is now open for business to parties outside of Epic offering all design and creative needs including interactive, print, digital, mobile, video and more! This business was created due to the immense demand we see for exceptional creative strategy and high-quality execution. Previously, the group was focused solely on in-house projects and clientele; now, the team is opening its doors for paid work to all parties in addition to the award-winning work they do within the company.

In that spirit, the team received its first major accolades by winning five Best of Industry awards in the 2011 IAC (Internet Advertising Competition) Awards presented by the Web Marketing Association. The IAC Awards is one of the biggest creative competitions in North America, and the team won the top honor for Best Publishing Website, Best B2B Online Newsletter Campaign, Best Health Care Ads, Best Insurance Rich Media Campaign, and Best Game Site Email Campaign. They received recognition alongside several major creative agencies like Tribal DDB, Saatchi & Saatchi, Young & Rubicam and Neo@Ogilvy in doing so. Read more about it here.

The new business is broadly overseen by Chief Marketing Officer Mike Sprouse, and is under the leadership of our esteemed Director of Creative Services Erica Baer.

For more information, visit the website or the blog.

“How Can You Do Business With ‘Them’?”

The following was written by E.J. Hilbert, President of Online Intelligence.

If you’re in any type of business industry, I’m sure you – in some way, shape or form – have gotten asked that question before, and usually the person asking it reveals various levels of disgust depending on the topic. It has happened to all of us at one time or another and the person asking the question might have various motives for asking it in the manner they do. I figured now was a good time to address it from my perspective, since I’m squarely in the compliance industry and know a thing or two about what makes the online advertising space tick (or not tick, as the case may be).

The old adage that politics make strange bedfellows takes on a new twist in the world of online advertising.  That new twist is a result of “blind” networks and the several degrees of affiliate marketing.

As many of you know, the online ad process can be fairly simple or fairly complex, depending on one’s perspective. A merchant wants traffic to their website but doesn’t want to be constantly buying media so they contract with an advertising network, which has immense scale and efficiency, to drive traffic via display, social media and sometimes, independent affiliate marketers.  In turn, the ad network contracts with publishers and affiliates to drive said traffic. That’s the simple part.

Now for the more complex part. Many times, these affiliates are individuals who buy media or run websites and drive traffic to a merchant via advertisements on their websites. Sometimes, these “affiliates” can also be other networks who have their own affiliates.  In fact, most tracking software used by ad networks allows for up to 5 sub affiliate id’s, meaning the affiliate actually generating the traffic is 5 times removed from the ad network contracted to drive traffic to begin with.

In essence, the contracted ad network does not necessarily know who they are “in bed with”, especially once you’re talking about being 5 levels away. Some networks (or their advertisers or merchants) don’t really care about these “strange bedfellows” as long as they are helping them make money. Sure they claim to check traffic sources comprehensively but …. money is money, to some, and always will be.

For other networks, these “blind” relationships are among the scariest prospects and some invest large amounts of money and man-power in monitoring their network and providing high levels of transparency into traffic sources. These particular networks, the market leaders, the ones continually trying to figure out how to see where the traffic is really coming from and who is behind it, are the saving grace of the industry and are the ones pushing the entire ad stack up, not down.

The Epic Direct Network (EDN) is one such network, and I dare say one of the best, if not the best, at “removing the blindfold” because of our affiliate screening practices and Online Intelligence (OI) software suite. In fact, our software suite is proprietary and among the most powerful set of tools out there today (and that includes any business, not just in online advertising). EDN is committed to understanding the source of all traffic to ensure quality, stop abuse and eliminate fraud – which is good for the entire ecosystem.

At the time of sign up, EDN affiliates are contacted by phone and asked a series of very detailed questions.  Traffic sources are required to be revealed and if an affiliate hides or spoofs their traffic source then they risk being blocked from the network or banned once they are active.  The excuse of, “I can’t tell you my traffic source because you may steal it and cut me out,” does not fly because EDN, for example, does not run in-house accounts.

Once an affiliate is in the network, traffic is continually checked by looking at the click referrer data and then using the proprietary OI tools to scan, spider and scrape the recorded webpage for all ads.  We can then check the creative and links to see the ad network and affiliate id responsible for the ad.

Part of a recent trend has been for questionable affiliates to offer free downloads of pirated software, music, TV shows and/or movies. Once a user signs up or downloads the file they are required to fill out an offer in order to receive a password to unlock the pirated content.  In order to hide this “fringe” (at best) traffic source, the affiliates run traffic through a series of websites with each striping out the click referrer of the site before.

The OI tool suite allows EDN to track-back thru the recorded “click-referrer” sites.  If the affiliates’ ad or creative does not appear on that site, the traffic for the affiliate and sub affiliate can be halted and any planned payments held until the true traffic source is identified.  In other words if you lie to EDN, you will not be paid.

The OI tool suite gives EDN the ability to scan, screenshot and review 75-85% of traffic on a persistent basis. But let’s face it, 85% is not 100%.

This is where we rely on the merchants, advertisers and general public, since there is no “end game”. We want to know when our affiliates are doing it wrong, or when our affiliate’s affiliates are doing it wrong. We guarantee that any complaint received at abuse@onlineintel.com will be investigated immediately and if wrongdoing is discovered, the traffic in question will be voided, the affiliate will not be paid and may be banned from the network as a whole. This is how seriously we take our compliance practices.

We want to make sure our partners – which include the entire advertising stack from advertiser to affiliate – know that we are one of the companies leading the charge for a safe and trustworthy marketplace. We can do most of it ourselves, but we also welcome feedback and real-world examples from others in the industry with a real, vested interest and no axes to grind.

 

E.J. Hilbert is the President of Online Intelligence, a subsidiary of Epic Media Group. He is the former Director of Security Enforcement for MySpace and an eight year veteran of the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) as a Special Agent in their Cyber crimes unit.

The New Truth About Branding and Media

This post was authored by Matt Monahan, Director of Business Development at EpicSocial, the social-centric division of Epic Media Group.

Abstract:

The Internet is now *Social*.   It is now organizing around people and connectedness.  The implications are grand, the value proposition nebulous, the future uncertain for Legacy Media, Brands and audience channel incumbents.   This article offers businesses and Brands investing in building their customer base on the Social Web a lens through which to interpret value and operate effectively in the new frontier.

The second Internet is about people and connectedness and it matters to brands

Let me get straight to the point: my thesis on the Second Internet is nothing new, I didn’t invent it, I’m not sure who did, but I need to articulate it one more time; the first internet was about websites and the second internet is about people and connectedness. This connectedness will change the way that we think about brands, the purpose and the procedure of how we spend advertising and marketing money, and the quantity and quality of data we use to make those decisions. First, a bit about connections.

Human connections are now enabled through websites which so fundamentally change the way that we behave that they deserve to be identified as a kind of new media. You know what I’m talking about: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and the dozens of other companies disrupting the first Internet and other businesses across multiple categories.  Moreover, these connections create a massive amount of data never before known in human history. The second Internet disrupts what were assumed to be laws of humanity like Dunbar’s number and has fundamentally changed the ways that people maintain relationships, organize themselves, overthrow dictatorships, and, although it seems a small disruption in comparison, make purchasing decisions. The connectedness of the second web is not just connectedness with other people, it’s the connectedness of people with ideas, people with movements, and just as easily, with brands. That last point should give you an idea of where I’m going with this.

Below I will share my observations on investment trends in Social Advertising on the Social Web and describe the implications of the shifting paradigm as a result of the second Internet and its organization around people. I often use Second Internet and Social Web interchangeably because as Mr. Zuckerberg is often quoted saying “We’re building toward a web where the default is social.” If I had to guess, I’d say that he’s probably going to win the jargon battle here.

New media requires new metrics

Over the last 10 months I have talked to hundreds of Industry Stakeholders, including Brands, creative agencies, media agencies, PR agencies and SMB’s investing in Social Advertising and a presence on Social Web communication platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube. The goal of my hundreds of conversations was simple: using Steve Blank’s principles of customer development, I wanted to uncover the needs of customers spending money in the Social Advertising industry.  Later on, I went to build the products that address those needs and develop a predictive model for investors looking to participate into the Advertising opportunity on the Social Web.

Several recurring themes came to light during my conversations. First, Brand advertisers and their various agencies were obsessed on sets of core metrics to quantitatively describe success in the nascent Social Advertising industry, and rightly so. These metrics include Video Views, Fans, Followers, Leads, Sales and Engagements, not to mention an explosion of secondary and dubious metrics like cost per creation of an avatar or cost per user generated video submission of a friend playing a prank on a friend.  Second, there was no consensus on which metrics were relevant or how they were to be measured.  Third, Brands were hesitant to shift more than 3-5% of ad spend to Social Advertising and this was primarily a result of having no core metric from which they could base their results like the analogous GRP in Television advertising.  With the explosion of social data, there had to be some way, in that mess of numbers to accurately answer the question “How are we doing?”   Like management guru Peter Drucker said, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”

For social advertisers the first theme is a godsend. We’ve got data, our clients want data. We know how to put the square peg in the square hole. Now, the latter two themes are problems, but they are not problems without solutions. Turns out we’ve got a lot of square pegs, and maybe they’re color-coded, they all fit, but they’re not all equally good. It is my hypothesis that the deeper integration of social with traditional agencies and the emergence of social-centric agencies will drive more consistent Social Advertising practices, consistent metrics, consistent measurement techniques, transparency, and ultimately trustworthy and higher ROI. Once this level is achieved, we will see a massive shift to Social Advertising spending in 2011 and beyond, likely more aggressive than predictions of even the most bullish Social Media Analysts.

Now the people meeting with me understood the Social Web, or at least, understood that they wanted to understand the Social Web. But for all the other people out there not meeting with me there’s one big hurdle: social media, marketing and advertising doesn’t mean spending money on media, it means spending money on being a media company.

From paying to paying to be

The tides have changed for Brand building. We are no longer in the world of leasing our customers on channels controlled by the Legacy Media, and pitching to them during and only during those brief moments. The connectedness of people on the Social Web has enabled Brands to leapfrog audience channel incumbents and create audiences of people interested in sharing similar experiences with Brands. You are no longer paying a media company, you are paying to be one.

Television, radio, billboards and other Legacy Media made massive investments in infrastructure which they pay off using a lease-and-pitch model. If a Brand wants to tell consumers about its great new color of jeans, it must lease the advertising space and will be given one opportunity to pitch its new colored jeans to the audience and hope they convert some leased audience members into customers. Lease and pitch is a great way to make money as a media company. Unfortunately, it’s not a great way to connect with people and until recently, the only alternative was becoming a Legacy Media company yourself. Most companies making jeans don’t have the appetite to build radio towers, launch satellites, or run transoceanic cables. The second Internet is where this model begins to fail and where Brands will become media companies.

When a Facebook user clicks the like button and becomes a fan of a Brand, the Brand can publish messages into that user’s news feed on Facebook in perpetuity, or as long as the user remains a fan, both of which are a whole lot longer than the 30 seconds you get on TV. The same logic applies to Twitter followers and YouTube subscribers. When a user likes or follows or subscribes to a Brand on the Social Web, they are providing the Brand access to the most valuable audience channel, and leaving it up to the Brand to open up the lines of communication as little or much as a Brand Manager sees fit. The reason I claim that this is the most valuable audience channel is because of data; if a brand starts to think of itself as a media company, then I can offer you concrete metrics to guide your brand boldly and profitably into a social media mini-empire.

The brands pivoting their advertising spend onto the Social Web do so for one of two reasons. Some of them are impulsive and want to join the bandwagon, but more often, they’ve found the metrics that answer confidently the question “How are we doing?” The primary metrics for calculating return on audience channel infrastructure investment are earned media value (EMV) generated through paid advertising, the compounding earned media value generated through various owned audience channels, the cost avoidance associated with not having to exclusively lease and pitch audiences — delivering messages for free to already connected consumers to influence purchasing behaviors — and with direct sales.

There are the three main practices to building Brands on the Social web, and they’re pretty much the same principles as you’d employ in throwing a great keg party. First is Social Advertising to buy the resources to construct their owned audience channels. These are the ads and the like buttons, or bright green flyers all around campus that promise an amazing night with friends. Second is Social Marketing to maximize the value created through owned audience channels. These are the promotions and strategies that get people to engage positively with your brand. In the party analogy, this would probably be beer and a live band that everyone on campus likes.  Finally there is Social Media (or social content as some call it) to publish into the new communication mediums enabled by the Second Internet to create value for their owned audiences. This is something related to your brand that people want to share with their friends because it is of interest or creates value or is meaningful in some way. In the keg party analogy, these are probably Polaroids you don’t want to remember, or an invite to the next party.

That’s all for the theory, now it’s time for something useful.

Now what do I do?

Focus on NewsFeed Optimization:

Facebook has an algorithm call EdgeRank that surfaces the most relevant content to the top of the News Feed.  The exact details of the EdgeRank algorithm are known by few, but the two major drivers of relevance between Brands and Fans on Facebook are the number of Fans a brand has relative to other brands in its category and the post quality score of the Brand’s Social Media published through their audience channel.  On Facebook, post quality score is a 7 day rolling average of likes, comments, and shares of content distributed by a brand on Facebook.  It’s important that brands maintain leadership in their category in terms of Fan number and post quality in order to effectively use the News Feed as an audience channel to create EMV, cost avoidance and to drive sales.

Build a framework for measuring your owned audience and stick to it:

Every time you publish a message to an owned audience stuff happens, and this stuff creates data. Figure out what impressions, clicks, video views, followers, subscribers or email sign ups are worth to your brand in earned media value, cost avoidance and ultimate sales. Use this framework to intelligently predict how long it will take your Brand to subside the investment it made in Social Advertising to build owned audience infrastructure, optimize and invest more confidently.

Try to make your comparisons using industry standards and apples to apples comparisons when quantifying the value created through your owned audience.  For example, if you are buying CPM advertising through Legacy Media at an average of a 2$ CPM across all channels, think about how those impressions compare to the impressions generated in the NewsFeed, whether or not they are more or less valuable, associate a value and you very quickly can arrive at an earned media value and cost avoidance.

Similarly, if you are running a search engine marketing campaign where you are driving traffic on a CPC basis to your Brand’s catalog, think about if the click generated through the Twitter and Facebook are more, less or equally valuable, given the same context of the call to action and landing page. Is a click in search engine marketing worth a same as a click from a Twitter feed?

Bottom line: if you don’t know what it’s worth, no matter how cheaply you get it you’ll be wasting your money.

Buy the right audience and buy it now:

Don’t know what your audience should be? Be scientific and design an experiment to measure the EMV, cost avoidance and sales created through each channel, then narrow your focus to the channel that is most effective for your brand. The cost of buying Fans and followers is becoming extremely predictable, and the earned media value, cost avoidance and sales are becomingly increasingly quantifiable. The demand for Social Advertising to buy owned audience is only going to increase this year, and with it, prices.

Interactive Design – Everything You Need to Know

New post over at Creative by Epic today. Basically, everything a good designer should know is right here. If you’re looking for predictions and information on the latest trends, we’ve got that too.

Click on over and check it out!

Traffic Marketplace Named Top Network for Compliance

Digital media verification company DoubleVerify just released the list of most compliant networks for the second half of 2010. We’re very pleased to report that Traffic Marketplace was among the leaders in compliance and brand safety.

“Compliance and accountability,” according to Oren Netzer, CEO of DoubleVerify, represent “two pillars that are critical in building trust and growing online advertising.”

Traffic Marketplace, and Epic Media Group as a whole, are pleased to again be positioned as market leaders – verified by an expert 3rd party – in this all-important area of online marketing.

For more information, you can read more at Mediapost.

About Corporate Social Responsibility

The following was written by Epic Media Group CMO Mike Sprouse, and appeared in Advertising Age on March 9, 2011.

Last year, I had the opportunity to pen an article about what my company, Epic Media Group, was trying to do to break new ground in the area of corporate social responsibility and philanthropy. Since then, I have cut my marketing budget in a few areas. But what was one of the areas I chose to increase our investment and involvement? Philanthropy.

We have now provided support, either financial or otherwise, for 30 different charitable organizations. They’re not just any charities either; every one had to have been involved closely with one of our employees. We’ve expanded the program over the last year to include charities our clients and partners hold near and dear, too. We do this not because we like throwing money around. The reality is that our closest clients and partners are extensions of our own company. Since the expansion of the program, our largest beneficiary has been the Avon Walk for Breast Cancer, which has close ties to one of our company’s best partners.

Some people have called us crazy for everything we do in this area. These folks don’t understand cause marketing and don’t get the importance that charitable giving has on a company’s success and overall performance. Most companies—even in the technology sector, or no matter how automated or turnkey they may be—rely on people. People who are happy and motivated tend to do better work and achieve far greater things. Few employees spend every waking hour at work. They have numerous outside interests that make them far more well-rounded than they might appear from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. every day.

One of the best things you can do if you’re an executive or a manager is to find out more about your people and how you can get involved. What do they stand for? What causes do they support? Where do they volunteer? How do they like to use their time outside the office?

There is a person at our company who volunteers two Saturdays a month at an animal shelter. I’ve been the chief marketing officer at Epic for almost four years now and have known this person for my entire tenure. I had no idea the person volunteered at an animal shelter until I was talking in the company kitchen about my new puppy. This immediately sparked a conversation about our common interests and sure enough led to a more substantive talk about how we could get involved and support this employee’s efforts even in some small way. The whole conversation took less than five minutes.

I’m sure there are countless examples like this one from your own circumstances or perhaps a few examples of people in your workplace who are doing great things outside the workplace. Take a minute to get to know people and invest in them in that way. By actively pledging some level of support, you won’t just be feigning interest or giving lip service to your team (which incidentally is a problem most large companies have—talking the talk but not walking the walk—and sadly is still more the exception than the rule).

I find there are two common fears for those who have called our efforts a little bit nuts. The first is (in the example above, for instance) “What does an animal shelter have to do with your business (online marketing)?” My answer: nothing, zero, zilch. But it has everything to do with our employees feeling like the corporate behemoth they work for has a real identity, supports them and is actively investing in them outside the workplace so that the good will translates to the workplace.

The second fear is cost. If I had a nickel every time someone told me they didn’t have a budget for any philanthropic efforts, I’d have quite a sizable donation on my hands. Charitable efforts don’t always have to be monetary; they can be volunteer work or grassroots movements. If you don’t have a budget, create one. For instance, don’t you think even small businesses can find $500 a month? Hold back on a few team dinners per month in lieu of a charitable donation and you will make a longer-lasting and more powerful impact on your staff, I guarantee it.