Month: May 2018

Intuit has been around for 35 years, but many people don’t know it exists, even if they use its  TurboTax, Mint or QuickBooks products.

Similar to young financial technology companies that pay for traditional TV ads to bolster their presence, Intuit decided to invest in a large and expensive campaign to create brand resonance. That strategy included a Super Bowl ad, along with a four-minute video shared on YouTube and on Facebook; shorter clips on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter; and an augmented lens on Snapchat.

“We had an opportunity [that we could] bring to life our corporate mission: to power prosperity throughout the world,” said Lauren Stafford Webb, Intuit’s global marketing director. Indeed, Intuit has been climbing on the stock market over the last few years and is now valued at more than $52 billion.

Intuit’s campaign centered on a story expressed in that four-minute video, which the company described as a “Pixar-like” short film. The main character was a giant robot, representing Intuit’s various products.

“Our customers have big dreams and work really hard, but the pursuits can be vulnerable. Serving them in a way that helps them have more money is the role we want to play,” said Jake Whitman, Intuit’s group marketing manager.

Stafford Webb and Whitman, who both joined Intuit in 2017 after spending years at Procter & Gamble, led the campaign. At P&G, Stafford Webb worked on CoverGirl and Tide, and Whitman managed Old Spice and Gillette. They tapped Intuit’s Los Angeles-based agency Phenomenon and Passion Animation Studios to help with the creative.

During the first week, the video received more than 16.8 million views, where 1 in 3 viewers watched the entire video. More than three months later, the video has reached 22 million views on YouTube and garnered an additional 3 million from Facebook. The company’s employees helped drive more than 1 million views on the first day of its launch prior to any paid spend, according to Intuit.

Beyond views, a YouTube brand lift survey showed that its ad recall was up 26 percent, brand awareness was up 17 percent, and favorability was up 27 percent.

Some of Intuit’s ads, including its Super Bowl ad, encouraged viewers to go to YouTube to watch its full video. Intuit also created shorter versions of the video for Facebook and for Instagram, where Instagram turned out to be one of its most successful platforms for driving back views.

“Self-employed has a high engagement rate on Instagram. It’s a creative platform and it’s highly visual, so when you think about the story we’re telling in a very beautiful animated world, a lot of the creative did resonate on it,” Whitman said.

Intuit also paid for a Snapchat lens. Picking Snapchat wasn’t about craving a young audience like other companies. Rather, Intuit was interested in Snapchat’s sophisticated augmented reality ads.

“We wanted to bring [the campaign] to life, and augmented reality was a way to do that,” Whitman said. “Snapchat has been leading the augmented reality industry, and we were really happy with the quality of the animation.”

Beyond paying to have the lens promoted within Snapchat’s app, Intuit created a Snapchat QR code that unlocked the lens and shared the code on Twitter during the Super Bowl. Intuit also used the code as an invite to its South by Southwest party in March.

The Intuit Giant is at #SBLII! Use our Snapchat code to capture how you’re hanging out with your Giant to get some SWAG. pic.twitter.com/kaAXdTHGuh

— Intuit (@Intuit) February 4, 2018

Intuit’s team said they’re now working on the second round of the campaign. Don’t expect that animated giant to disappear anytime soon.

The post Inside Intuit’s first ad campaign appeared first on Digiday.

After scrambling to distribute their articles as widely as possible, publishers have been trying to wrest control back from the tech giants Google and Facebook and get people to come directly to their sites. Now there’s evidence that it’s actually happening, on a broad scale.

Chartbeat is publishing new data today that shows that since October, more mobile readers are coming to publishers’ sites and apps directly than from social platforms, namely Facebook. The number of weekly pageviews, as shown in the chart below, coming direct has steadily climbed since October, while Facebook-driven pageviews have declined. Another view of the data showed that when Facebook traffic to publishers’ desktop sites was included, direct mobile traffic was still greater than Facebook referral traffic.

During this time, Facebook has been sending less traffic to publishers, a trend that’s continued this year when the platform made very public in January that it would prioritize users’ posts in the news feed. Chartbeat said there’s no clear correlation between the Facebook decrease and mobile direct increase that would imply the direct traffic increase is because of Facebook, though.

Chartbeat didn’t have definitive conclusions on why the direct traffic has increased, but suggested it could be that people are more loyal to publishers than previously thought. Mobile has already won over desktop, and most of mobile traffic is from Facebook, but another explanation is that mobile is actually a bigger driver of their media habits than Facebook is.

Mobile’s taking over desktop is not necessarily a bad thing; historically, mobile ad rates have trailed those of desktop, but they’re starting to catch up. At entertainment site Ranker, for one, programmatic ad rates for mobile have started to surpass those of desktop, said Clark Benson, the site’s founder and CEO.

On an individual basis, publishers have been making moves to get more people coming to them directly and wean themselves from dependence on Facebook. The Daily Beast, for example, said it has seen a 30 percent increase year-over-year in traffic coming to its homepage, which is now around 40 percent of its traffic, a trend it’s cultivated by paring back the number of articles it has on the homepage and creating new newsletters. LGBT site PinkNews has 30 percent of its traffic coming direct by focusing on hard-hitting stories instead of what it thinks will play well on Facebook. Slate President Dan Check said Slate has been focused on strengthening reader engagement for the past several years, which has paid off as new reader acquisition has become harder.

The increase in direct traffic matters because it enables publishers to control their own destiny. They have more data on reader behavior, which enables them to better target readers with more content and offers for subscriptions and other revenue drivers.

“Direct is extremely important to us as it is an indicator of the strength of our brand,” said Chris George, evp of product marketing and sales strategy at women’s lifestyle site PopSugar, whose traffic is 70 percent mobile, with direct traffic now representing 33 percent of mobile traffic. “As we look to monetize our audience across commerce, brand extensions, ticketed events, etc., we see the direct audience converting at the highest rate. As we grow our direct audience, we strengthen our brand and our ability to diversify revenue.”

The post In the post-Facebook era, publishers see increase in direct traffic appeared first on Digiday.

For Dave Fanger, building an in-house startup was labor of love.

“It was a nights and weekends passion of mine,” said Fanger, CEO of Swell, the impact investing platform owned by Newport Beach, California-based insurer Pacific Life. “We were looking for asset managers to acquire, but I didn’t see anything out there that was addressing the values I was looking for.”

For Fanger, finding partners who were committed to sustainability was important. So six years ago, he teamed up with a colleague and decided to launch Swell — but instead of creating a startup from scratch, he decided to do so from within Pacific Life. As venture capital funding becomes harder to come by, corporate-incubated startups may become more common. For Swell, maintaining the “separateness” of the startup entity is a critical driver of success.

Read the full story on tearsheet.co

The post Inside Swell, Pacific Life’s in-house impact investing startup appeared first on Digiday.

There’s been plenty of hype surrounding the shift from traditional TV to over-the-top media services like Netflix and Hulu. However, new research cuts through the noise and shifts the focus to numbers, making it clear that no matter what advertisers say, the future favors OTT. Since 2016, the number of TV subscribers in the U.S….

Female entrepreneurship. Second-wave feminism. Women who broke the glass ceiling in industries far and wide. Odds are the Wikipedia entries for these topics were written and edited by men. In fact, only about 16 percent of contributors in the U.S. are female (that’s a top-end estimate; the numbers are much lower internationally). But what happens…

Until a month ago, I had never taken a spin class. While friends and colleagues made regular pilgrimages to boutique fitness studios like SoulCycle or Flywheel, the allure of sweating buckets and feverishly cycling en masse to the beat of Beyonc? as an all-too enthusiastic instructor shouts encouragement about “feeling the burn, baby!” eluded me….

I feel for marketers, not only because they are my clients and lifeblood, but because they are under siege in more ways than ever in the history of business. For one, consumer control over content and marketing has disrupted established channels, applying pressure to CMOs to find alternatives that are meaningful and valuable. Not helping…

Bank of Montreal and Simplii Financial reported their customer accounts may have been breached.

There has been a shift of power from Silicon Valley financiers to star entrepreneurs, who are increasingly wresting control of their companies from venture-capital backers and extracting huge pay packages tied to going public.