Bing Ads Introduces Location Targeting For Advertisers

Bing Ads, the advertising platform from the Yahoo! Bing Network, has announced that they've integrated location targeting within their advertising system. With this update, advertisers will be able to improve on how well they and their ads can connect with their current and potential customers.

Similar to Google’s AdWords, this new location targeting tool enables users to choose to whom and where they want their ads to be appear. By being able to choose where an ad is displayed, advertisers can target customers in either a local worldwide capacity based on their location or the websites they’re visiting.

How does Bing Ads Location Targeting Tool work?

User first have to click on their location options setting, where there are basic and advance options to choose from. With basic options, users choose which places they don’t want to include as a target location. With the Advanced Targeting options, they can customize how their ads are displayed.  

• The first advanced option allows users to direct their ads to “people in, searching for, or viewing pages about your target location.” This option will direct ads to users who are either in an advertisers target location or who have mentioned the location in a search. For example, if someone’s search included Los Angeles then ads for the city would appear to that person, even if they weren't in Los Angeles area.
• The second option is to “to show ads to people in your targeted location.” This option will only show ads to people within the advertisers targeted location, so even if they are located in Toronto and search Washington, they won’t see ads related to Washington, only those that are related to Toronto.

Bing as a Formative Search Engine and Advertising Tool

The Bing network has gone through a variety of updates in recent months to make the system more efficient.

Bing Ads, which was originally called Microsoft AdCenter was renamed in September and at that time the company also updated their web interface and improved ad rotation controls.

Over the summer they started to improve how their search functions work. In July, their search engine system was updated to include paid ads, while in August, the company added Quora to their search engine to help results be more relevant and topical.

More recently, BingAds updated the reporting tool to help users be more efficient and productive, while making both recent and archived information easier to find.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Why HBO, NBC, and Comcast Are Betting On A Startup To Power Their Second Screens

Mobile devices are moving audiences and advertisers away from the television set. But can they also help bring them back? Zeebox's second screen solution makes live programming more fun and potentially more profitable.

Let’s say you’re the television industry. A Nielsen study says that says 88% of tablet owners and 86% of smartphone owners are using mobile devices while they watch your shows. Some of them are playing Angry Birds, but some of them are Shazaming to get more information, checking into content with GetGlue and tweeting about plots in real-time.

This is the point that likely stands out to you: Bad Piggies, Shazam, GetGlue and Twitter are all making money by capturing your viewers attention on mobile devices. You, the television industry titan, are likely not. At least not directly.

So what are you going to do about it? You might try to make apps that provide a second-screen environment for each show. But those are expensive to develop, and they don’t deliver a great experience for channel surfers who don’t want to app surf simultaneously. You might promote the existing social media conversation around your shows, but that won’t directly promote increases to your bottom line.

Anthony Rose and Ernesto Schmitt

Perhaps it’s time to partner up.

That's what NBCUniversal, Comcast (which owns a controlling interest in NBCUniversal) and HBO have decided. On Thursday, the companies announced partnerships with Zeebox, a startup app designed to play sidekick to any television show. NBC and Comcast have invested an undisclosed amount in the startup. British Sky Broadcasting has previously taken a 10% stake.

Launched in the UK last January, Zeebox has been downloaded by 1.5 million people there. It launches in the U.S. Thursday.

The app isn't an alternative venue for shows the way Hulu and Netflix are. Instead, it aims to enhance programs as they're watched on a television set. The free app not only acts as a program guide--telling users, for instance, which shows are being most discussed or watched by their friends--but also as a remote. Meanwhile, it allows any broadcaster to add additional content like videos, games and polls to their shows' digital hub. Even if a show’s producers don’t participate, users will find a dedicated page for it with relevant twitter chatter, additional information and a chatroom on Zeebox.

Zeebox has no specific killer feature. Its biggest advantage is an appeal to broadcasters.

Like Shazam, it will extend its second-screen experience to advertisements. Unlike Shazam, it will share revenue from enhanced commercials with all broadcasters (Shazam says it does share revenue with some broadcasters, but declined to provide information about the circumstances in which it does so). Adding a mobile component to a commercial can nudge consumers toward action (think “buy this now” buttons) in a way that television ads can’t. You don't have to be an advertising executive to realize the potential for profit. Zeebox has also invented television’s first form of keyword advertisingby pulling important terms from shows' closed captioning data as they air. Users can click on each term within the app to see more information about it. Zeebox plans to sell sponsored versions of the terms the same way Google sells promoted links in your search results.

For HBO, which relies on subscriptions rather than advertising, Zeebox could provide an incentive for watching programming on cable rather than through iTunes or your parent’s HBO Go account.

If you’re still pretending to be the television industry, this probably all sounds awesome. But if you’ve lapsed back into average viewer mode, you might be feeling left out. What does Zeebox give you that you don’t already have? Short answer: Everything. At once.

Want to tweet about the show you're watching? Zeebox has a chatroom for group discussion with strangers. Want to share what you watch with friends? You won’t need GetGlue when you have Zeebox. Looking for what to watch next? There's a guide built in. More info on that celebrity the host just mentioned? Use Zeetags instead of Google. Games? Got those, too. Put your Bad Piggies away.

None of Zeebox's many features is the most likely source of new users. That would be HBO, Comcast and NBC, which will all help promote the app. NBCUniversal EVP of Strategic Integration Page Thompson declined to comment on the scale of the network's planned marketing effort, but Zeebox co-founder and CTO Anthony Rose said it “will be hard to watch NBC without noticing Zeebox.”

Source : fastcompany[dot]com

Shazam Already Helps You Discover Music, Now It Wants To Help You Discover TV Advertising

Starting today, you can Shazam any TV show on any channel. And advertisers hope you'll soon be doing the same for commercials.

If you're one of the 250 million people who has ever used Shazam, the app that first gained popularity for helping you name that tune, you may have also used it in the past year while watching television to unlock extra info about your favorite stars and athletes at live events such as the Grammys, the Super Bowl, and the London Olympics. Now, the company wants you to Shazam any TV show you're watching at any time.

Shazam TV info

Starting today, Shazam for TV will support more than 160 channels in the U.S. to 80 million viewers. Whether on cable, satellite, or broadcast over-the-air, you can Shazam any of your favorite shows (save for local programming) by opening up the app on your smartphone or tablet and hovering it at the "Shazam Now" icon on your TV screen. That will pull up an index of additional show details, which might include the latest celebrity gossip and trivia for a late-night drama, or the most recent stats and scores for a Monday-night football game. Shazam is aiming to make the second-screen experience so compelling, you'll start Shazaming commercials as you would shows or songs. For its 140 brand partners, which include companies such as Procter & Gamble, Progressive Insurance, and Pillsbury, Shazam is offering access to engaged users and minimizing friction between advertisers and their potential consumers.

"TV advertising offers amazing reach, but the level of engagement offered by a television ad is ultimately limited," Shazam CTO Doug Garland tells Fast Company. "So you’ve got this broad brush, very surface-level kind of interaction that’s possible with consumers, but you lack interactivity."

The challenge for Shazam, of course, is that we as viewers are inherently trained to be disinterested in commercials, the necessary pit stops we make en route to our favorite shows. We’ve become so accustomed to ads as a requisite part of the TV viewing experience that, in order to change the way we think about commercials, brands need to make the user feel like he or she has a choice in how to interact with an ad. If you Shazam an ad of your own volition, chances are you’re going to want to engage longer than the average 30-second TV spot, Garland says. Still, it's a big "if."

The good news for Shazam is more and more of us are already fiddling with some kind of second screen--whether that's a tablet or a smartphone--while we're in front of the TV. A recent Nielsen study reveals that 88% of tablet owners and 86% of smartphone owners are on their devices at least once a month while watching TV, and nearly half the tablet owners are surfing both screens on a daily basis.

And though it's competing with others in the social TV space, such as GetGlue, Shazam has the unique advantage of well-established relationships with all the major TV networks, as well as massive reach, which means massive amounts of invaluable user data. Shazam is adding 2 million users a week and logging 10 million content tags a day. Combine those numbers with information users can choose to share with Shazam and you get a gold mine of data that reflects when those users are Shazaming commercials, what kind of content they interact with the most, and what really gets them to engage with a brand. And all of that means new revenue streams for Shazam, who can neatly feed that data back to networks and advertisers to help them make more informed choices about the content they produce.

"There’s a tendency for content creators and producers to think about what happens on the TV screen, with the second screen being more of an afterthought," Garland says. "But as more and more consumers engage on the second screen, I think you’re going to see them think more proactively about how they want to engage users in a way they just couldn’t before."

Source : fastcompany[dot]com