Pizza Hut to Pick Stars of Super Bowl Pre-Game Ad Via Facebook
Mashable

Like many marketers advertising in and around the Super Bowl this year, Pizza Hut’s game plan calls for a little Facebook.

The pizza chain introduced the TV spot below on Jan. 1 that threw down the gauntlet to fans: Do your own rendition of the featured song and your video might be featured in a pre-game Super Bowl ad. Those interested can visit Pizza Hut’s Facebook Page to download their video. The deadline is Jan. 15.

Ben Hsi, manager of digital advertising for the brand, says Pizza Hut will choose six winners. The brand is looking for “creativity and uniqueness,” he says. The winners will be included in a montage that will in a 30-second ad before the game.

With about a month to go before the Super Bowl, crowdsourcing content seems to be making a comeback. Last year, the only brand with a user-generated ad was PepsiCo, which ran a total of six of them for its Pepsi Max and Doritos brands. This year, PepsiCo is only running one crowdsourced ad, but is offering the winner the chance to collaborate with Andy Samberg’s Lonely Island comedy troupe. However, at least one other Super Bowl advertiser, Chevrolet, will run a crowdsourced ad during the big game.

In Chevy’s case, there’s a strong Facebook angle as well: The winning video will be determined by which one gets the most shares in Facebook and other social media platforms.

Social Media: Five Facts to Bank On in 201
AdAge

A new year on the calendar means new hope, new opportunities, new products, new trends and, most important of all, new budgets for many marketers. And while you'll get served your share of predictions for the year ahead, here are five things you can bank on happening in social media.

The Face of Facebook Pages is Changing. Again. The new Facebook Timeline began rolling out to individual user profiles last month and is designed to be the "journal of your life." Timeline is also coming to Pages, likely soon. While it's unclear exactly when it is coming or how similar it will be to what we've already seen, we should expect the rollout to begin early this year.

Google+ Is Not Going Away: If Facebook accounts for 1 in every 7 minutes spent online (according to comScore), that means there are six other minutes still up for grabs! New platforms and technologies continue to pop up on a seemingly daily basis. Last year saw the emergence of Tumblr and Pinterest with millions of users, not to mention the long-awaited arrival of Google+. Despite the steadily growing importance of Facebook and Twitter, you cannot ignore the potential of Google+ to impact your SEO and media business. That is, if Google is something that is important to your target consumer (hint: It is). Google+ just passed the 65 million user mark, with a quarter of that coming in December.

Paid and Earned Media Work Best Together: The days of building your Facebook fan count and Twitter following without paid media support are over, plain and simple. This isn't really news. However, if your media strategy is strictly focused on fan acquisition to "get X million fans by the end of the year," then you are still missing out on the potential of what brand-consumer relationships can do for your business. Sure, total fans and followers matter, but only in the context of having as many active fans as possible.

Social is Mobile and Mobile is Finally Social: It feels like we've been waiting and waiting for the "mobile revolution" to hit social marketing, when in reality a mobile evolution has already reached a critical mass.

Move Fast, Or Move Out of the Way: Giving your consumers what they want no matter where they are is synonymous for giving it to them when they want it. Doing so will require a paradigm shift in how you plan, act and react. In the time that you've been reading this, anywhere between one and a thousand people mentioned your product or brand in a social context. And while you may have missed it, their friends and the people they influence certainly did not. That is the power of social.

The Dawn of the Relationship Era in Marketing
AdAge

New Year's resolution: Stop living in the past.

Just jettison some old habits, such as trying to manipulate prospects. Stop viewing purchasers as conquests. They are members of a community, prepared to adore (or the opposite) not just your stuff but the inner you. Your essence is transmitted continually via your relationships with consumers, employees, suppliers, shareholders, neighbors and the Earth itself.

Welcome to the Relationship Era. Say goodbye to positioning, preemption and unique selling position. This is about turning everything you understood about marketing upside down so that you can land right side up. This is about tapping into the Human Element.

Begin with a simple experiment. Type "I love Apple" into your Google search bar. You will get 3.27 million hits. If you type "I love Starbucks," 2.7 million hits. Zappos: 1.19 million.

"I love Citibank" gets you 21,100. AT&T Wireless: 7,890. Exxon: 4,730. Dow Chemical: 3. Out of 7 billion human beings, three! Just to put that into context, type "I love Satan" and you get 293,000 hits. Now consider that in the past 12 months, Citibank, AT&T Wireless, Exxon Mobil and Dow have spent $2 billion on advertising. How's that working out for them?

2012: Rise of Metrics, End of Click-Through Rates
Marketing Daily News

Metrics and measurement will become a major tool in 2012 for advertisers looking to quantify campaigns. Industry execs have been talking about it for years, but Solve Media CEO and cofounder Ari Jacoby believes the movement will begin to materialize next year.

"At least one major industry will do away with the click-through rate for brand campaigns," Jacoby said. "For display, I get the sense that all the exchanges that have cropped up will have challenges. They will continue to be measured on the delivery of the click-through rate, but there won't be enough to go around and prices will drop precipitously."

Jacoby believes brands will begin hearing more about "cheap CPMs" for non-viewable commodity inventory -- the type of ad space that serves up below the online fold on a Web page where the person viewing the page must scroll down to see the advertisement. While it is counted as an impression, no one sees it because the ad unit literally sits at the bottom of the page or too far off to the side.

Ad rates will come down significantly in 2012 because the units aren't valuable. There are only so many top positions on a publisher's Web site. Buyers will increasingly require audience participation far beyond what the industry refers to as "engagement," Jacoby said.

The ad industry will move toward brand lift metrics in 2012, as a replacement for click-through rates. These are around user engagement behavior, brand awareness and purchase intent, along with other measures of perception and persuasion.

Pleasing the Socially Conscious Consumer
Inc

A shift in Gen Y customers' expectations mean businesses need to do more than just make money. Or does it?

A few weeks ago when I was speaking to young entrepreneurs who are building businesses around the idea of combining traditionally crafted goods with cutting-edge business tech, several mentioned what first appeared to be a strange paradox. The recent recession may have caused American consumers to tighten their purse strings, these entrepreneurs said, but the tough times also made people think more carefully about each dollar they spend, focusing interest on the true value of a good, how it was produced, and how long it would last.

"For a long time, because there was so much money flying around, people didn't care, and I think with the financial crisis, the younger generation really started to look at the way things are made, what they are made of and how that would affect us going forward," said Mike Maher, co-founder of Taylor Stitch, a custom shirt manufacturer, in a typical expression of this idea.

But what the young entrepreneurs I talked to see as a business opportunity, a niche to be mined for profit (though, to be fair, they may be passionate about their products as well), others see as a generation-wide challenge or movement. Take a recent post in blog Under30CEO, for example. Written by Kristin Glenn and Shannon Whitehead, the co-founders of {r}evolution apparel, the piece argues that a general shift has occurred in what young customers expect from businesses, forcing Gen Y entrepreneurs to rise to the occasion.