Archive for March, 2011

Horizon PAC Signs Kyle Roberts as Media Buyer/Digital Strategist

Thursday, March 24th, 2011

From the Washington Post, 3/24/2011:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/post/horizon-pac-hires-media-buyer/2011/03/24/AB5JXcQB_blog.html

Horizon PAC hires media buyer
By Chris Cillizza

“Horizon PAC, the organization widely seen as a presidential campaign-in-waiting for U.S. Ambassador to China Jon Huntsman, has signed on Kyle Roberts as its media buyer and digital strategist.

Roberts is the president of Smart Media Group, the single largest political media buying operation in the country during the 2010 cycle — doing work for Sens. Marco Rubio (Fla.) and Jerry Moran (Kans.) as well as for the gubernatorial campaign of former eBay CEO Meg Whitman in California.

Media buying is one of the least understood but most critical pieces of any large-scale campaign; knowing where (and when) to place ads as well as maintaining relationships with local station managers to help get ads placed (or pulled) matters — particularly in the hurly burly of heated campaign. (And, yes, we just used the words “hurly burly”.)

The hiring of Roberts comes just days after a group of Horizon PAC strategists gathered in New Orleans to talk about the possibility of a 2012 presidential bid by Huntsman. Huntsman was not in attendance although operatives with ties to Michigan, Florida, New Hampshire and South Carolina were, according a source familiar with the gathering.

Huntsman is slated to formally resign his position and return to the U.S. next month, at which time he will consider running for president in 2012. While officials at Horizon PAC are not in communication with Huntsman, the level of hires the organization has made in recent months suggest that the former Utah governor is nearly certain to run.

John Weaver, a longtime political adviser to Sen. John McCain, and media consultant Fred Davis are leading the Horizon PAC effort.

In addition to Roberts, the PAC has brought on a fleet of communications staff including Tim Miller, formerly of the Glover Park Group and McCain presidential veterans Matt David, who also served as California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s deputy chief of staff, and Jake Suski. The PAC has also signed on early states operatives like Peter Spaulding (New Hampshire) and Richard Quinn (South Carolina). (For a full look at Huntsman’s political inner circle, check out our piece laying it out.)”

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High Court Allows Coordinated Campaign Spending Limits

Tuesday, March 22nd, 2011

The Supreme Court on Monday declined to review limits on coordinated election spending between national party committees and federal candidates, meaning the restrictions will remain in place.

By not taking up the case of Cao v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court let stand a decision by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals that affirmed restrictions on how much parties can spend after consultation with Congressional campaigns. 

Lawyers for former Rep. Anh “Joseph” Cao (R-La.) argued that limits on coordinated spending infringe on the national party committee’s freedom of speech.

“This morning the Supreme Court deferred to precedent and declined to hear this attack on the long-standing limits on party coordinated spending,” said attorney Tara Malloy of the Campaign Legal Center. “Plaintiffs’ challenge would have blown huge loopholes in the federal campaign finance laws and enabled large-scale circumvention of the individual contribution limits.”  

The effects on the 2012 election campaigns will be twofold. First, national party committees and candidates will not be able to tag-team with each other on campaign expenses. Campaign finance reform advocates argued that knocking down these rules could allow large party donors to foot the bill for many candidate expenses. 

Secondly, the decision closes a potential loophole where individuals could indirectly donate more than 12 times the legal limit to a candidate. An individual is allowed to donate $2,500 per election to a federal candidate. But individuals are allowed to give $30,800 to party committees, and if coordinated spending were unlimited, the party committees could spend these dollars the way the candidate requested.

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SXSW Journal Day 4

Sunday, March 20th, 2011

On our final day at SXSW, we ran into a good problem, there were more panels I wanted to see than time allowed.  At 11a I saw probably the most informative panel of the week.  Steve Zehngut moderated a discussion on “How to Hire and Manage a Software Developer.”  It was funny to learn that everyone deals with missed deadlines, changing scope and costs overruns.  Steve offered some great tips to minimize the chances of this occuring on your project.  This day got broken up a little by a conference call, but I was able to catch the Net Neutrality Debate moderated by Maggie Reardon.  While I am very interested in the topic I don’t believe it is a real issue at the moment.  The limited competition between broadband providers does concern me, but I am not sure if any are real restrictions we need to be concerned about.

In the afternoon there were a handful of panels that looked interesting.  I decided to listen to Josh Williams, the CEO of Gowalla speak about the future of Location Based Advertising.  I really went to see if Gowalla had any staying power in competing with Foursquare.  I left feeling that Gowalla is in a very similar position Apple was in a few years ago when battling with Microsoft.  They have a superior product and are clearly focused on improving the user experience, but are a distant second.  The main goals for Gowalla is to make an online “scrapbook” for people to save and share their adventures.  The final panel I attended at SXSW was about project management.  With a few major projects happening internally it was interesting to learn about new tools we could utilize including Omniplan.  The presenter was surprised no one wanted to talk about the pros and cons of agile vs. waterfall methods, but maybe that is a separate panel for next year.  The last meal in Austin was at Gueros which is a hike from downtown, but well worth the trip.  The trip was capped by attending the Google party on the rooftop deck at Six Lounge.  All and all the conference was a success, learned a good deal and met very interesting people.

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SXSW Journal Day 3

Sunday, March 13th, 2011

Daylight savings hurt attendance at the early panels, I guess everyone forgot to turn their clocks forward.  A hazy morning in Austin in many ways.  Attended an interesting panel on using technology to open government.  It is great to see the House GOP pushing this initiative.  There was a cool example of identifying useless government programs that seems well worth the time and effort.  Speaker of the day was Tim Ferriss, promoting his new book “4-Hour Body.”  Having read his first book “4-Hour Workweek,” I was very interested to hear him speak in person.  The tips in his first book were very practical and he mentioned today that exercise and productivity are directly linked.  He also had some very interesting ideas for improving your language abilities.  I unfortunately missed a session on location based advertising. I am hoping to catch a recap somewhere.

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SXSW Journal Day 2

Saturday, March 12th, 2011

Slow start to day 2, apparently everyone enjoyed day 1 a little too much.  The first session I planned to attend on digital commerce was cancelled.  Checked the line at the pop up Apple store next, and it was still around the corner.  I guess we can consider that a big success for Apple.  They were able to build hype for their new product and get it into the hands of early adopters at a time when they are all looking for the next best thing.  I enjoyed the beautiful Austin morning with a fellow Washingtonian and then decided to head to the convention center.  Saw a very cool series on Gov 2.0 and the outreach to various niche communities.  Government gets a bad rep (mostly well deserved) for being slow to adapt, it was nice to see agencies like NASA leveraging new media to achieve their goals.  Panel  of the day was Joshua Baer’s “Five Secrets to a Killer Elevator Pitch.”  It was great to hear some entrepreneurs get up and sell.  Standing room only for this panel and with good reason, the insight was well worth it.  Met some interesting people from Washington (ironically in Austin) at a Happy Hour at the Moonshiner.  Food of the day, Chili at the Texas Chili Parlor.

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SXSW Journal Day 1

Saturday, March 12th, 2011

18k people… no suits.  Now that the first day of the 2011 SXSW conference is in the books, I identified the three words that will be heard most often over the next few days: BUILD, CODE & STARTUP.  It is great to be in an environment where there are no rules, the sky is the limit and people are still dreaming.  Apple pulled a great move today setting up a special store blocks aways from the conference for the launch of the iPad 2.  I went by at 3:30p (the store opened at 5p) and the line that was 1 city block long.  Definitely more than I wanted to wait,  let’s see what the line looks like on day 2.  Met some interesting developers building great sites, software and apps.  The session of the day was UT Professor Clay Spinuzzi’s discussion on managing loose organizations.  With technology progressing so rapidly, it was very interesting to hear the successes and challenges of companies that either do not have an office or a large percentage of the staff work remotely.  The food of the day, BBQ, both lunch and dinner, when in Rome.

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Twitter Advertising: What’s the Deal?

Thursday, March 10th, 2011

San Francisco based Twitter Inc., one of the fastest growing social media platforms in the world, is in the midst of the second wave of its online advertising beta program which features their “Promoted Products.” 

Why advertise on Twitter?

Twitter’s audience is both massive and engaged.  There are 195 million registered users with approximately 370,000 new registrations each day.  Twitter.com alone commands 210 million monthly unique visitors with about 70 million page views per day.  These would be impressive numbers for any website; however, the engagement level of this audience proffers significantly greater value for advertisers. 

In June 2010, ExactTarget conducted a survey which found Twitter users were 61% more likely to ‘write at least one product review a month’ and also ‘comment on news sites,’ while non-Twitter users displayed a tendency of only 20% and 15% respectively for these actions.  Twitter’s users create 110 million Tweets per day and on average spend $73 online compared to non-Twitter users’ $41.  Another study found that ‘Following’ an entity on Twitter resulted in (or, equated to) a 79% likelihood the follower would ‘recommend’ the company, person, or organization to another, while a person ‘Liking’ an entity on Facebook resulted in a 60% chance that they would ‘recommend’ the company, person, or organization to another. 

How to advertise on Twitter?

Twitter’s triad of “Promoted Products” includes: Promoted Tweets, Promoted Accounts, and Promoted Trends.  All three are expedient options for an advertiser to consider.  Let’s explore them.    

Promoted Tweets:     

These allow an advertiser to show up when users search for specific term or set of terms using Twitter’s search function.  Larger, well-known corporations such as The Coca-Cola Company (@CocaCola) and Volvo (@VolvoCars_US) purchased their own names, which generate a steady flow of searches and interest online.  In this way, if a user searches for “Volvo” a Volvo Promoted Tweet will always show up at the top of the users search results.  Smaller, unsung companies would be better advised to purchase terms other than their own, which may not generate enough interest to be effective.  Songza (@Songza), the Queens, NY based music site, wisely choose to purchase #sxsw which is the hash tag for popular music, film, and interactive conference South by Southwest.  Clicking Songza’s link brought users to a page featuring music from the upcoming event.  Internet Explore (@IE) has also purchased this hash tag in the recent past.      

Promoted Trends:

These allow an advertiser to be displayed as the top trending topic for a day, conferring instant prominence for an advertiser’s brand.  Terms that are trending on Twitter attract a lot of attention and frequently become the subject of conversation between Twitter users.  Users are usually curious to see why certain topics are trending.  Selecting a term that is related to an offer or event is a strategy that many advertisers use.  For example, European ticket giant Viagogo (@viagogo_NA) recently purchased the term “Mumford & Sons” to push tickets to a music festival featuring the popular American band.  This not only drives site traffic and ticket sales, but also associates the brand with the band.  More seriously, Middle-Eastern news leader Al Jazeera (@AJEnglish) purchased the hash tag #bahrain to take advantage of the overwhelming interest in the protests occurring in that country.  Advertisers should choose their terms and hash tags carefully.  Recently, soft drink maker Dr Pepper Snapple Group Inc’s., Sun Drop purchased a Promoted Trend with the hash tag #howudropit which seemingly failed to resonate with users.  Even when a Promote Trend fails to deliver positive feedback and retweets, it still can deliver value by drawing attention and site traffic.       

Promoted Accounts:  

These allow an advertiser to be displayed as the top suggestion of “Who to follow.”  Normally, Twitter displays four accounts on the right side bar which they suspect a user might want to follow. These are personalized recommendations based on users past activity and current accounts followed.  An advertiser behind a Promoted Account can target based on keywords or audience demographics.  Furthermore, an advertiser can request that only users following specific Twitter accounts receive the suggestion to follow their Promoted Account.  Advertisers that have recently taken advantage of Promoted Accounts are: @ATT, @OPENForum (American Express), @AARP, and @Terametric.

Still Confounded by Twitter?

Feel free to send Smart Media Group any questions regarding advertising on Twitter at @Smart_MediaGRP or you could actually call our team directly at 703.518.4747 – we’re always happy to chat!

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