Twitter has 2,400 advertisers

"Twitter makes money three ways, says Bain. Twitter sells promoted tweets, promoted trends, and ads. Many brands, for example, want to know how to increase their followers. "We've scaled from next to no advertisers to more than 2,400,' says Bain.  "We have about 100 folks working directly with advertisers and agencies all over.  We thought were going to have to answer the question, 'Why Twitter?' But no advertiser has that question.""

Source:  Twitter Chief Revenue Officer Adam Bain, quoted in SFGate, 30th November 2011

Earlier - 1,600 advertisers announced in early October

Most consumers in developed markets don't want to engage with brands in social media

"The race online has seen businesses across the world develop profiles on social networks, such as Facebook or YouTube, to speak to customers quickly and cheaply – but TNS’s research reveals that if  these efforts are not carefully targeted, they are wasted on half of them.
It found that 57 per cent of people*** in developed markets* do not want to engage with brands via social media – rising to 60 per cent in the US and 61 per cent in the UK. Instead, misguided digital strategies are generating mountains of digital waste, from friendless Facebook accounts to blogs no one reads.  This is being combined with ever-increasing content produced by consumers – the study shows 47 per cent of digital consumers now comment about brands online.
The result is huge volumes of noise, which is polluting the digital world and making it harder for brands to be heard – presenting a major challenge for businesses trying to enter into dialogue with consumers online.
“Winning and keeping customers is harder than ever,” said Matthew Froggatt, Chief Development Officer, TNS. He continued, “The online world undoubtedly presents massive opportunities for brands, however it is only through deploying precisely tailored marketing strategies that they will be able to realise this potential. Choosing the wrong channel, or simply adding to the cacophony of online noise, risks alienating potential customers and impacting business growth.”
TNS’s Digital Life study asked consumers around the world whether they actually want to engage with brands on social networking websites – either to find out more or to make a purchase.
Although 54 per cent of people*** admit social networks are a good place to learn about products, the research shows brands must harness digital more carefully if they are to use it to their advantage and deepen relationships with customers and prospects."

Source:  Data from the TNS Digital Life survey, reported in a press release, 10th November 2011

Access the full report through their interface here

Methodology:  

"*Developed markets: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Republic of Korea, Singapore, Slovak Republic, Spain, Switzerland, Sweden, Taiwan, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, United States.

** Fast growth markets: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, China, Columbia, Egypt, Estonia, Ghana, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Malaysia, Mexico, Morocco, Nigeria, Pakistan, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Romania, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Tanzania, Thailand, Turkey, Uganda, Ukraine, Vietnam.

***This refers to Social Network Users only."

WPP agencies spend $1.5bn a year with Google

"Sorrell says WPP agencies now spend $1.5 billion (£930 million) a year with Google globally, roughly double what they spend with Rupert Murdoch's News Corp.
Google's UK revenues - a good paradigm for digital advertising as a whole given the internet search giant's dominance - surged 21% in the last three months. Contrast that with Britain's TV ad market where growth has been anaemic since the spring and is likely to end the year close to flat.
France's Publicis Groupe, owner of agencies such as Saatchi & Saatchi and Starcom MediaVest in the UK, says that globally, 56% of its revenues from financial services clients are now spent on digital media. Only 44% goes to what it calls "analogue" media.
Other clients remain more committed to traditional media such as TV, press, radio and outdoor because of its effectiveness at brand-building. Consumer goods firms only spend 20% on digital and 80% on analogue.
For now, the big marketing and communications holding groups are coping. "What you lose on the TV roundabout, you gain on the swings with digital," says Sorrell."
Source:  The Evening Standard, 31st October 2011

49% of people exposed to Doritos ads on XBox LIVE subsequently went out and bought Doritos

"Doritos’ ‘Unlock Xbox’ competition invited fans to capture the essence of the snack in the form of a Doritos Xbox LIVE Arcade game with the opportunity to win a $50,000 gaming consultant project. The campaign put the votes of Xbox LIVE users at the heart of the contest, driving far-reaching engagement and ensuring huge interest in the final Doritos games. The field was narrowed to eight by an expert panel of judges, and then pared down to three by the votes of Xbox LIVE visitors. After a pitch at Microsoft headquarters, the two finalists (Doritos Crash Course and Harm’s Way – by Doritos) were launched for free download on Xbox LIVE, with gamers voting on their favourite.
Key results:
Throughout the contest, Unlock Xbox delivered exceptional engagement levels
The winning game became the fastest downloaded Xbox LIVE Arcade game in history with over 1 million downloads in the first two weeks
Over 50% of those exposed to the Doritos ads on Xbox LIVE clicked to learn more about the contest
40% voted for their favourite Doritos Xbox LIVE Arcade game
72% took action after seeing Doritos advertising on Xbox LIVE
24% told friends about the Doritos Xbox competition
49% went out and bought Doritos"

Source:  Case study from Microsoft Advertising (UK), 4th July 2011

The preferred sources for product & service information

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Source:  Data from NMIncite (Nielsen & McKinsey), reported in NielsenWire 14th October 2011
Note - I'm assuming that this is based on US consumers only

Average Click Throughs on Facebook Q3 2011

Data from US, UK, France, Germany & Canada

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Source:  Data TBG Digital campaigns from 5 markets in Q3 2011, collected & published in TBG Digital's Global Facebook Advertising Report, October 2011

Online advertising drives offline sales for CPGs / FMCGs

"comScore, Inc, a leader in measuring the digital world, and dunnhumbyUSA, a global leader in building brand value for consumer goods and retail companies, today released results of multiple studies measuring the offline sales impact of online display advertising for consumer packaged goods (CPG) advertisers. Retail sales were measured by analytically linking the permission-based comScore panel of one million U.S. Internet users to their anonymous loyalty card in-store purchase data provided by dunnhumbyUSA; no identifiable personal data was disclosed. By comparing the in-store brand buying of households exposed to online advertising with that of households not exposed, it was possible to determine the impact of online advertising campaigns. The results of the studies indicate that exposure to online display ads can lead to improved in-store sales for CPG brands.
[...]
An analysis of multiple CPG online ad campaigns that involved comparing the offline buying of households exposed to advertising with the buying behavior of households who were not exposed revealed a median in-store sales lift of 21 percent among the exposed households, with five out of every six campaigns generating a positive sales lift. Approximately 70 percent of campaigns generated a double-digit sales lift, and more than 40 percent generated lifts of at least 30 percent.
comScore also analyzed the offline sales results of a limited set of ad effectiveness campaigns that leveraged a new advertising product called Microsoft CPG Online Effect. This solution uses sophisticated predictive targeting algorithms powered by anonymous in-store buying data from dunnhumbyUSA coupled with online browsing data from comScore. These targeting algorithms are deployed by Microsoft Corp. across its network of sites.
The results showed an in-store sales lift of 42 percent, double the lift from campaigns that were not targeted using this approach. These results demonstrate how targeting algorithms can help improve efficiency and effectiveness in display ad delivery, providing more relevant ads to consumers, improved ROI for advertisers and higher CPMs for publishers. Dr Pepper Snapple Group is one of more than 20 CPG advertisers that have used this purchase-based targeting solution."
Source:  Press release from comScore, 11th October 2011

Advertising is more effective if seen on multiple platforms

"In the group that was exposed to TV ads alone, 50 percent of people correctly attributed the ad to the correct auto brand. For groups that saw the ad across all screens – TV, computer, smartphone and tablet – the ability to remember the brand jumped dramatically to nearly three-in-four (74%).
Similarly, only 22 percent of the group exposed to just the TV ad was able to correctly remember that the ad was for a 4-door sedan versus 39 percent of the group that saw the ad across all screens."

Source:  Research from Nielsen, commissioned by Google, reported on Nielsen's blog, 29th September 2011

Coca Cola spends more than 20% of its media budget on social media

"It’s not just that you can’t control it—when you try, it backfires. You have to understand consumers: They would like to be heard. It’s a question of cocreating content. Five years ago social media was 3% of our total media spend. Today it’s more than 20% and growing fast."
Source:  Coca Cola CEO Muhtar Kent, reported by Harvard Business Review, October 2011

There is almost no correlation between click through rates of ads and offline sales

(Sales lift on the Y axis, CTR on the X axis.  The random scatter shows that there is little correlation)

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Source:  Data from Nielsen, quoted on their blog, 3rd October 2011

Twitter has 1,600 advertisers

"Twitter’s Chief Revenue Officer Adam Bain took the stage at IAB’s Mixx Conference today and revealed a few milestones for the communications platform, specifically in the advertising area. Bain said that Twitter now has 1,600 advertisers using the platform to reach consumers, and currently has an 80 percent retention rate with advertisers. Back in July Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said that the number of advertisers on Twitter had gone up by 600 percent, since last year when it was in the hundreds.
Back in March, Twitter partnered with Paramount Pictures to launch the trailer for new film SUPER 8 on Twitter. Bain also said today that Twitter helped Super 8 sell 1 million sneak peek tickets, and opening weekend box office exceeded projections by more than 50 percent."

Source:  Techcrunch, 4th October 2011

Android accounts for over 50% of the mobile ad impressions on the Millenial Media mobile network

"Today, we released our August Mobile Mix Report, and for the first time, we combined smartphones and connected devices when breaking down impressions on our network by operating system. When looking at both connected devices and smartphones, we saw that Android had a 54 percent share and iOS had a 28 percent share."

Source:  Blog post from Millennial Media, 23rd September 2011

Burberry is spending 60% of its marketing budget on digital channels

"Burberry has switched the focus of its marketing away from glossy print advertising in favour of digital investment.
The luxury fashion brand is promoting the launch of its fragrance Burberry Body through Facebook, instead of glossy fashion magazines for the first time, according to the Financial Times.
The brand now spends 60% of its marketing budget on digital channels such as Facebook, which is more than three times the average investment.
The Facebook promotion offers fans of the brand a free sample of the scent, which will be sent to their home address, in return for allowing the brand’s application access to their data on Facebook."

Source:  Marketing Week, 1st September 2011

Larger ad sizes tend to generate greater response

"Larger ad sizes tend to generate greater response. Size does matter apparently. As we have seen in years past, bigger ads perform better. We observed this with the latest set of metrics in which the half-page ad unit (300x600) which had the highest CTR, interaction rate (for both in-page and expandable formats) and expansion rates of all the available creative sizes we tracked for the benchmarks.
Although the U.S. had one of the lowest expansion rates, this market showed the highest expansion time. So Americans seem to expand ads less but when they do spend more time engaging with the ads themselves.
In terms of industry verticals, auto advertisers performed the best in terms of CTR (0.13% for flash ads) but conversely had the lowest interaction (1.9%) and expansion rates (0.2%). For interaction rate, telecom (9.4%) and B2B (9.2%) advertisers were the highest while B2B stood out in terms of expansion rate (7.5%) benchmarks."

Source:  Global data from DoubleClick, revealed in a blog post, 16th August 2011

Methodology:  "A couple of notes about this latest set of online advertising benchmarks. The data for these benchmarks are derived from a robust data set across DoubleClick for Advertisers, based on rigorous methodology with input from the Advertising Research Foundation. The charts cover global benchmark figures for the entirety of 2010 by ad format, ad size and industry vertical. The benchmarks are normalized across hundreds of advertisers, thousands of campaigns, and tens of billions of ad impressions."

More mobile ads are served onto Apple devices in Europe than those of any other manufacturer

"InMobi, the world’s largest independent mobile ad network, today released its monthly Mobile Insights Report: Europe Edition Q2 2011. This comprehensive report provides insights from InMobi’s network, which served over 104.9 billion mobile advertising impressions across the globe in Q2 2011, including 10.8 billion in Europe.
The report shows continued growth of impressions on Apple devices. During Q2 2011, over 2 billion ad impressions were served on Apple devices in Europe, propelling Apple past Nokia for the first time. Over the same period, Nokia devices dropped by 0.9 share points and now represent 18.7% of ads in the region. One of every five ads across Europe is now on Apple manufactured devices."

Source:  Press release from InMobi, 19th July 2011

Apple devices account for 20% of mobile ad impressions in Europe (estimate)

"The pull of Apple in mobile is undeniable, with the brand regularly leading brand surveys and the term fanboy all but synonymous with its products. Today, some stats out from the mobile advertising network InMobi shows just how much the company’s products get used for advanced mobile data services compared to other devices. On the strength of just three products—the iPhone, iPod and iPad—Apple ranks as the most popular maker on the company’s mobile ad network in Europe, beating out companies that in unit terms have much bigger market shares, like Nokia and Samsung.
The data, compiled in the month of May, charts ad impressions on the InMobi ad network, which says that it serves 35.7 billion monthly mobile advertising impressions worldwide, with 3.8 billion of those in Europe.
InMobi notes that a lot of the growth for Apple, which now has a 19.5 percent share of the market (a rise of 6.3 percent over the past three months), was led by ad impressions on the iPad. The tablet had 80 million impressions during the month in the region, making it the sixth most-popular mobile device in Europe.
Android’s share has gone down by 6.1 percent in the past three months, although it still remains the biggest mobile platform in terms of ad requests—that is, taking all Android handset makers’ impressions collectively. And iPhone still remains the single most popular device."

Source:  Data from mobile network InMobi, reported by PaidContent, 4th July 2011

Ads in mobile apps have a higher level of recall than ads on the mobile web

"Kantar Media's Compete, today released research showing that smartphone users have better recall of in-app ads than ads they view while browsing the web using their mobile browser. The findings, part of Compete's Q1 2011 Smartphone Intelligence survey, show that 52 percent of all smartphone owners recall ads they encounter in mobile apps. That number drops to 40 percent when asked about ads encountered while surfing the mobile web. And the disparity is even greater among iPhone users, with 65 percent recalling in-app ads and only 33 percent recalling mobile browser ads.
Overall, considering both in-app and mobile browser ads, Android users have the highest mobile advertising recall, with 55 percent reporting they've seen some form of mobile advertising. For iPhone users, that number drops slightly to 51 percent. Only 22 percent of BlackBerry owners recall some form of mobile device advertising.
Recall of text messaging/SMS ads is lower still among smartphone users. Just over one quarter (27 percent) of iPhone and Android users recall receiving a text message/SMS ad.
In addition to trends in mobile advertising recall, Compete's research reports that the most downloaded app categories are games (55 percent), weather (44 percent), social networking (39 percent), entertainment (38 percent) and maps/navigation (36 percent). Notably, social networking apps, which were #5 in the Q1 2010 survey, have now climbed to #3."

Source:  Press release from Compete, 16th June 2011

Note - while it doesn't explicitly say so, I believe the research was just conducted in the US

YouTube has 20,000 advertisers, double last year's level

"YouTube is busy funding content channels in hopes of bringing more brand dollars to video. But it turns out that like search, there is a long tail for video advertising. YouTube said it has 20,000 different advertisers running campaigns, a 100% increase from last year.
"The 20,000 advertisers are all separate companies that are running campaigns with us," said YouTube's senior product manager, Phil Farhi. "Everything from major brands to the smaller, newer types of advertisers."
It turns out video can be a pretty powerful tool for tiny advertisers, ones that you won't find on TV. One example: GoPro, a manufacturer of helmet-mounted cameras that upload directly to YouTube and other platforms. Its ads have garnered millions of views and are shared all over the internet.
"They are not a Super Bowl-sized advertiser, but they work really well with a subset of the YouTube community," Mr. Farhi said. "And they are running most of our ad formats." That's one way to take advantage of the audience that's available on YouTube -- niche communities waiting for their kind of product.
Mr. Farhi said that as of this year, 98 out of 100 of Ad Age's top 100 advertisers are now advertising with YouTube. The challenge is increasing those budgets through more "premium" inventory, hence why YouTube's content efforts now under way."

Source:  AdAge, 14th June 2011

Twitter has over 600 advertisers

"[Twitter CEO Dick Costello] said that over 80% of Twitter advertisers come back and renew and claimed that average engagement rate with ads on Twitter was of “orders of magnitude” better than traditional media advertising.
He gave an example of a Volkswagen ran ad for new VW Beetle and said the promoted tweet had engagement rate of 52%.
The claim comes in stark contrast to recent reports that suggested ads onTwitter do not work very well for some advertisers. The report said that advertisers were having mixed results.
He also cited a Radio Shack campaign called ‘You Need a New Phone’, which while it only ran for one day on Twitter it resulted in store exchanges being up by double-digits for the next three days.
“These are amazing statistics that marketers just can’t believe when they first hear them…So the business is working phenomenally well,” Costolo said.
However, Costolo would not be drawn on whether Twitter was profitable. He snapped shut saying only “Not gonna talk about it”.
Twitter had been projecting to have around 100 advertisers by the end of last year. It ended up with 150 and now has 600-650 advertisers.
“We’re in no hurry to go make sure [that we jam Twitter up with ads]. It just doesn’t make sense.”"

Source:  BrandRepublic's Wallblog, 2nd June 2011

The top 10 most effective promoted tweets

Source: AdAge, 9th May 2011