Sabre Corp. has teamed up with Cheetah Digital to add Cheetah’s loyalty management tool to the Sabre Commercial Platform for use by airlines.

The arrangement combines Cheetah Digital’s loyalty capabilities with Sabre’s offer management skills.

It will allow airline brands to reward loyalty via email, mobile social, web, mobile app and point-of-sale touchpoints, the company says.

The Cheetah platform will be a successor to Sabre’s Frequent Flyer Manager technology, the company says.

The cloud-based Cheetah Loyalty tool analyzes millions of digital signals to provide behavioral and contextual data.

Sabre hopes the alliance will be a “game changer for our airline customers,” says Rodrigo Celis, senior vice president, product management, commercial solutions at Sabre Airline Solutions 

The competitive travel industry is “increasingly driven by personalization and real-time data activation, and we value the opportunity to innovate with a recognized leader such as Sabre,” adds Jon Siegal, vice president of global loyalty sales, Cheetah Digital.

The Sabre-Cheetah combo will also help airlines identify potential high-value customers while providing access to mobile engagement apps, Sabre claims. 

Sabre says its global travel marketplace processes more than US$120 billion of global travel spend per annum.

Cheetah Digital is an enterprise cross-channel marketing technology company.

CANNES, FRANCE--IBM iX isn't an "agency," proclaims Global Leader Matt Candy. "We don't call ourselves one. It narrows people's minds where you fit and sit and point you down to the CMOs office."

His company prefers to define itself as a design organization because creative and design elevate the topic to a broader conversation. "We have the ability to transform businesses, not just develop great campaigns that last for four or six weeks." He adds.

"By Design" stands as the company's internal rallying call, framework and mindset. "We want to be the most sought after business designers in future-proof business enterprises," says Candy.

IBM's “Garage” method approach builds a multi-faceted team across IBM divisions, a la Publicis's Power of One or Havas' Together. It includes data scientists, strategists, and IT business executives to work cohesively. "Our way is to drive sustainability and to find a scalable way of working," he says.

Too many companies have "POC-itis," what he calls proof of concept hype whereby firms  introduce an impressive prototypes that can't be scaled. "They have great ideas that don't really roll out," says Candy.

IBM iX is oftentimes called in for cleanup work. Hertz sued Accenture in April for "seriously deficient" web design work and IBMiX was assigned to build an entirely new mobile platform in five weeks. "We delivered what others failed to do," he says.

Under Candy's leadership, IBM iX certainly sounds different from holding company competitors. Creative is viewed as just one component to a larger reengineering project. For instance, if a restaurant chain wanted to promote a new sandwich, Candy would not only seek to launch with ads, but design a 360 view into everything from a new ordering platform and mobile app to tracking conversion rates. "It becomes a much bigger challenge than producing a campaign."

He gets animated when talking about the threaded business transformation possibilities. Cannes Lions parent Ascential, for example, worked with the company to deliver The Works online platform in five weeks that features over 200,000 campaigns as well as speaker sessions.

“Although they are both slotted as consulting agencies, IBM iX and Accenture Interactive differ in their approach to adland. Accenture is bolstering its growth into the creative field through acquisitions, most notably Droga5. IBM iX, on the other hand, prefers to build from within. "We built our creative design from the ground up," though the company has made three acquisitions to "deal with demand in certain markets."

A new study published this week finds that most ad execs are unaware of, or do not really understand, duration weighted impressions (DWI), a controversial provision among the industry's proposed cross-media audience measurement standards, which are under public review until June 25th.

According to the new standard, all cross-media ad impressions should be weighted by their exposure time in relation to a fixed 30-seconds denominator. In other words, a 15-second ad that was viewed to the end would account for half the impression value of a 30-second view, while a 6-second ad would register 20% of the impression value.

The controversy surrounding the new standard comes from the implied linear relationship of duration and advertising effectiveness, and the danger that such an oversimplification will take advertising backwards, especially when it comes to marketing productivity assessment. Let me unpack these concerns.

First, from a research point-of-view, the relationship between “exposure time” and cross-media effectiveness is murky at best, even in some of the research cited in the new standards document. For example, in a well-known study of TV exposure time from 1993, Surendra Singh and Catherine Cole concluded that “a blanket comparison of :15 to :30 could lead to misleading conclusions because length effects depend on message appeal.”  In 2014, in his research on the “rising cost of consumer attention,” Thales S. Teixeira emphasized that  although easier to measure, duration is not a good proxy for attention.

A year later, Goldstein, McAfee and Suri (2015) wrote that “If the total amount of time a publisher gets is divided into slots, two short ads increase memory per slot over a single, longer duration ad.”

MMA´s own SMoX research into the modern marketing mix – multi-touch attribution (MTA) studies with 14 brands - have found that duration doesn’t have a consistent relationship with effectiveness. For instance, in our Allstate MTA study, we observed that a 15-second mobile ad was up to twice as effective on a cost basis compared to a 30-second ad – a finding that in and of itself invalidates DWI.

More importantly, the central theme from all the SMoX studies is that cross-media effectiveness is a complex, multidimensional relationship which cannot be captured by one factor, especially duration. For example, targeting usually works as a multiplier boosting effectiveness of the same creative by 2X-5X.

Ad placements may also impact the effectiveness of the same ad. In one study, a pre-roll video was found to be 80% more effective on a cost basis than an in-banner, auto-play option of the same video ad. Finally, effectiveness also varies by marketing objective. When foot traffic is the goal, desktop and mobile tend to be more effective on a cost basis than TV, but the opposite is true when optimizing for brand consideration.

H.L. Mencken once said that for every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong. DWI falls in that category. It's appealing because it’s simpler than other approaches to assign cross-media value, but it invites advertisers to use it as a shortcut and to bypass the hard work of attribution.

That's important because as of late last year, at least 6 out of 10 marketers didn't have an MTA solution in place. Those that did were only applying MTA to one-third of their media spend. So, although the proposed cross-media audience measurement standards clearly do not recommend using DWI as a standalone effectiveness measure, marketers will very likely use it as one. And those who do will sacrifice ROI because their reallocation will not be based on real effectiveness data.  

For all these reasons, we need to find alternatives to DWI that also work given the current infrastructure of media measurement. For example, we can’t even track the second-by-second ad viewing DWI requires in linear TV yet. So, let's continue building granular measurement for all media including TV. In the meantime, we need to invest more time in attribution and assess what really drives effectiveness.

Google on Thursday began rolling out features in Google My Business to help businesses promote quality services and make their profiles on the site unique and descriptive.

The variety of new features range from the ability to upload photos to earning a badge that designates a business is a “Local Favorite” in a specific category.

As an incentive to keep quality high, Google plans to recognize businesses that consistently deliver a great experience by highlighting the top 5% businesses per category. Those businesses will receive a “Local Favorite” designation to identify them, along with a digital and physical badge of honor.

Poor quality may not be an option for businesses that want to list their sites in Google My Business.

Several companies have complained on Twitter about their page being removed due to quality issues. Sarah Moon, founder of a strategy and design company, tweeted that Google removed a page from one of her law office clients based on “quality issues.”  

Quality has always been a priority for Google, but since launching Google My Business in June 2014 to give businesses more control of what consumers see in search results, the search engine has put the responsibility of quality on the business.

Google estimates it has helped more than 150 million local businesses connect with people who search for something online.

Since the platform launched, people have changed the way they search. Today when people search for something their queries are more specific.

Rather than a keyword or two, people searching online query things like “restaurants near Washington Square Park open after 9 p.m.,” for example. They are also looking for options such as booking a reservation or checking product availability in a store.

Starting today, businesses can reward customers with welcome offers for those who follow their business on Google.

Business owners also can claim a short name and URL for their business, which can refer customers back to their profile on Google My Business.

This search feature also will become available in the coming months in Maps. 

Other updates include the ability to set preferred profile cover photos, brand their business with logos. Businesses that have completed information in their profile such as phone number, hours and other important core information will have their logo displayed at the top right-hand side of their profile.

Google also said that businesses can upload photos and have them appear instantly on a new dynamic module in the profile. Photo captions, which are coming soon to this module, will enable companies to further tell the stories supported by the images.

A website will offer businesses the ability to download and order custom assets for their place of business such as stickers to help promote bookings on the profile, adding reviews, and customer following.

Quibi — the designed-for-mobile, short-form video platform that’s not set to launch until April 2020 — has already secured $100 million in advertising commitments, its co-founders said in a Variety  interview at the Cannes Lions International festival.

The commitments are from six advertisers, reported Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman: Google, Procter & Gamble, PepsiCo, Walmart, Progressive and Anheuser-Busch InBev.

Hollywood studios that have invested in the platform will also be advertisers. Quibi has attracted $1 billion in funding to date and is looking to secure another $500 million to cover most of its production and other costs.

Quibi’s total ad inventory for its first year is $150 million. The executives said that they’ll likely go after two or three more deals, all of which are category-exclusive.

They also said that they’re negotiating an exclusive distribution deal with a U.S. wireless provider.

The startup has promised makegoods if it fails to deliver on audience guarantees made for its first year of operations.

It’s also promising an “uncluttered” ad environment, amid premium scripted and unscripted content — much of which will be produced by known directors and featuring established stars.

Content pieces are limited to 10 minutes or fewer in length.

Users Quibi’s ad-supported version ($4.99 per month) will see unskippable preroll ads that are six-, 10- or 15-seconds long.

The ad-free version costs $7.99 per month.

Katzenberg also promised a big event to celebrate the platform’s launch.

Google is making a push to expand augmented reality (AR) and interactive capabilities to its content and advertising offerings. The company, while slow to incorporate immersive ads, is testing 3D and YouTube live-stream display formats in DV360, its programmatic ad platform.

The perfume and cosmetics company Guerlain has been testing Swirl, a display formant designed for mobile web campaigns that’s available in Display & Video 360. Its marketers created a 3D experience, so that allows consumers to explore every angle of the product by rotating the object in the ad.

Consumer demand for new technology is scaling faster than technical competency. About 62% of creatives see increased client demand for AR campaigns, according to Unity’s survey of 1,000 creative professionals analyzing the state of AR in advertising.

Adoption rates might require a bit of education, however. Guerlain is one of the first companies to test Google’s 3D ad technology, but overall creative professionals struggle to implement augmented reality in their campaigns for a variety of reasons.

Technical and financial hurdles, along with uncertainty about how to use AR technology in campaigns ,are some perceived challenges marketers face, according to data released by Unity Technologies.

Despite these hurdles, 78.4% of marketers participating in the survey have a positive outlook about the technology. Some 55.8% of those designing creatives said they were likely or very likely to consider AR campaigns within the next year, with 54.1% admitting they already deployed them.

Google also announced a live-stream format in Display & Video 360 that allows marketers to run YouTube live stream content in display ads across screens and devices. Marketers can use assets from existing YouTube live stream campaigns with a new template in Google Web Designer.

This live stream format allows viewers to interact with the video using the YouTube player controls. People can preview the live stream, watch full screen, and exit when they are done. It gives viewers control of how they choose to interact with the content.

advertisement

advertisement