TSN and Bell Media - BarDown

Bell Media and TSN yesterday launched BarDown, a new sports and pop culture site to feature original video, viral content and features from “young writers and sports fans.” It’s positioned as a visual and light-hearted complement to the traditional news, stats and analysis sports coverage TSN is known for. Dave Krikst will serve as managing editor, with Cabbie Richards, Jeff O’Neill and Mike Gallay listed among contributors.

As NHL player Paul “BizNasty” Bissonnette explains in an introductory video, the term “bar down” refers to a hockey goal scored on the top portion of the net, behind the crossbar, where the goaltender usually leaves their water bottle. Bissonnette will be featured in a regular series called BizNasty Hockey Lingo.

Nathalie Cook, VP integrated marketing and partnerships, TSN, tells MiC that the site was born out of a combination of the need for a new outlet for personality-driven content that didn’t fit TSN’s hard news approach and advertisers increasingly approaching the network with new content proposals and non-traditional advertising ideas.

“We had a more journalistic approach to TSN.ca as a place where people go for sports news, but what we saw between our Twitter, Facebook and social media was the level of engagement we had on some of the more viral types of sports content, the melding of sports and pop culture. TSN.ca wasn’t always the best place for that content to reside.”

Coca-Cola has signed on as sponsor, activating with display ads and video pre-roll for Sprite and a home for new installments of Moment Zero, the sponsored video series for Coke Zero featuring Steve Stamkos and TSN personality James Duthie that has previously been hosted on TSN’s YouTube page and as a 30-second TV spot.

Cook says BarDown was launched with Coke Zero and Sprite as sole sponsors because it met the needs of the existing advertising partnership between TSN and Coca-Cola, but she adds that it’s not an exclusive deal and there will be opportunities for other brands to get involved with the site. “The goal is not for this to be something that is completely owned by these brands for the long term, but it was certainly a goal to launch together,” she says. “We will welcome all partners.”

She says that the audience will likely align with TSN’s social media following, which skews younger than TSN’s overall audience, but that TSN will wait and see what kind of audience is actually attracted to the content. Despite early comparisons to ESPN’s Grantland, Cook says the tone of BarDown will more closely resemble Gawker or BuzzFeed than Bill Simmon’s longform sports and pop culture journalism hub.

Which Ad Types are the most successful for your DIGITAL MARKETING

 

According to the DG MediaMind ‘Mobile Performance Benchmarks’ report that quantifies the relative performance of mobile ad formats, analyzing more than one billion impressions across more than one thousand mobile campaigns since January 1, 2013, CTR performance overall for mobile expandable banners outperform polite banners, 0.63% to 0.28%. Within expandable banners, the verticals that did the best job generating user expansions include entertainment (9.0 %), electronics (8.9 %) and automotive (5.5 %). Both expandable banner and polite banner formats beat out mobile standard banner performance, which earned a 0.09 % CTR.

The research focuses on the performance of mobile formats and features within key verticals with the goal of providing vertical-by-vertical insight into the most effective mobile advertising strategies for brand advertisers.

The Polite Banner is a Flash-enabled banner that uses “polite,” sequential downloading and proprietary compression technology to allow extra large file sizes to fit within standard publisher specs.

The Expandable Banner expands beyond the confines of the traditional banner. Multiple Flash panels can be launched by a click, roll-over or auto-initiation.

Ricky Liversidge, CMO at DG, said “… consumers depend more (and more) on mobile technology for their media, day-to-day communications and connections to the world… (analysis of) these factors… gives advertisers… data that can guide their mobile marketing decisions… “

Standard banner underperformance on smartphones and tablets is driven by their creative limitations, says the report. Because standard banners do not support interactions or banner expansion, they offer minimal opportunity for brands to engage with their target audiences.
In addition to format performance, the study also examined mobile marketing success by vertical. Entertainment and news/media had the highest mobile CTR among the verticals studied, at 1.10% and 1.21%, respectively. Other strong CTR performers include CPG (0.82%) and Retail (0.58%) and Restaurants at 0.50%.

Each vertical was also analyzed to determine the most effective advertising strategy in mobile:

• Entertainment: The top key performance indicator (KPI) for entertainment advertisers was sustained in-market presence. Videos and social sharing were the features most frequently used by entertainment advertisers
• CPG: Image gallery, location and social sharing were the features most often leveraged by CPG advertisers to increase their most important KPI of brand awareness and consideration
• Retail: To get consumers to visit brick-and-mortar locations, video, location, weather and ‘download app’ were the features most frequently leveraged
•  Auto: Image gallery, video gallery and m.site click-throughs were frequently used to keep a featured product, vehicle model or sales promotion top-of-mind with auto buyers

Among mobile rich media formats that include online video, polite rich media banners had a higher video start rate than their expandable counterparts. 3.33% of videos in polite banners were engaged, compared to 1.51% for expandable banners. Because the video player is immediately viewable to users in polite rich media banners, these ad formats also experienced higher video start rates than expandable banners, which require a user to engage with the ad unit first before the player appears in the ad.

Retail and electronics led the way with the highest CTR among verticals:

Click Thru Rate
Vertical	CTR
Retail	0.52%
Electronics	0.41%
Entertainment	0.40%
Financial	0.34%

Polite rich media banners had a higher video start rate than their expandable counterparts; 3.34% polite engaged; 2.62% expandable engaged:

Video Best Performing Verticals
Vertical	CTR
Auto	9.16%
CPG	5.43%
Telecom	3.29%

Auto advertisers were able to achieve sustained engagement with consumers with features that drove awareness and consideration. Features used in CPG ads aimed to create engagement and drive consumer in-store traffic:

In Terms Of Interaction Rate Auto And CPG Outperformed All

• Auto   20.7% engagement with safety, video and cell
• CPG   11.7% engagement with quality, video, social, coupons

Video Attention Span

• 76.2% @ 25% completion rate
• 61.6% @ 50%
• 52.9% @ 75%
• 47.2% @ 100%

Highest Performers In Getting Consumers To Complete

• Auto   79.8%
• CPG   65.7 %
• Telecom   54.4%

Email Measured Success - Lesson #2

Are you staying up todate on the laws and recent email legislation for marketing with email? PIPEDA is something that all Canadian Marketers need to adhere to. If you plan on making a common practice of marketing to your customers and past customers, you better know the restrictions facing you.