Manhattan Marketing Maven

6 Newsfeed Marketing Tactics

The Facebook marketing challenge has evolved from accumulating to engaging fans. The new success objective is to efficiently and effectively beat the Edgerank algorithm to get the maximum number of posts onto fans walls and trigger the multiplier effect that places brand content in the NewsFeeds of your fans’ friends. 

On average only 3-7% of fans see any given status updated posted to a brand page. In general, there’s only a 2 percent chance that a given post will get any kind of viral pass-along. Brand pages with a million fans or more generally see 1.1% of fans clicking or sharing content. 

Effectively using the Facebook platform is the new black. NewsFeed marketing is to Facebook what SEO is to Google. 

Becoming an effective NewsFeed marketer begins by paying close attention to the content, composition and cadence of posts and then tracking the number of likes, comments, shares and original fan posts you provoke. A consensus is emerging around the definition of engagement – the gross number of interactions (comments, likes and shares) divided by the total number of brand fans. This formula is becoming a new KPI for social media success. 

Start by understanding the general patterns among your fan base. Keep in mind that most fans come to the branded Facebook page just once; to like you or to sign-up. After that initial action, all the actions takes place on their Wall where fans grant attention and access to the people or the content they care about. 

Some of the general observations about usage patterns are emerging in research from companies selling Facebook publishing and metrics tools like Vitrue, Buddy Media, Hubspot, PageLever and EdgeRank Checker. They offer fragmentary ideas for testing rather than a comprehensive view or a proven prescription for action. 

Consider these six emerging clues: 

Photographs generate the most engagement, 54% more than text alone and 22% more than video. Photos are favorably weighted in the Edgerank algorithm. They are the high engagement vehicles for Facebook users accessing the network using mobile devices. 

Early Birds Rule. Posts before noon get 65% more likes, comments and re-posts than those after noon. For mobile users after 7p is prime time. Think about where your fans are and what they might be doing that will compete for attention with your posts. The rates of Facebook use at work grew 300% in 2011. Identify peak usage times for your brand to insure that you maximize the potential eyeballs reading each update. 

Best day of the week varies. Friday is the biggest day for re-posts and mobile comments. Saturday draws the most shares. Wednesday is the big engagement day for QSR and CPG brands. 

Shorter is Better. Posts with 240 characters or less with a photo prompt the most engagement. The longer the post; the smaller the engagement rate. Posts with links drive likes and re-posts at much higher rates. Brand pages with more than 1 million fans are seeing CTRs of 0.14 for links. 

Punctuation reduces engagement. Avoid frequent use of question marks and exclamation points. Word choice affects readership and interaction, though the vocabulary for impact varies widely by business category and user demographics. Directive language (e.g. please like this or please re-tweet) works for 20-35% of users and will drive 4X engagement. 

Cadence Counts. The average Facebook post has a shelf life of 3.2 hours. After 180 minutes, the likes, shares and comments die off. Yet more than 2-3 posts per day is overkill for most brands. Increasingly brands are looking at the type of posts and categorizing them to discern optimal sequences that draw the most engagement. Ideally brands will develop content sequences (e.g. link, photo, coupon, survey question) that delight fans and drive maximum interaction. 

Focus on Fans. Look at behavior, sensibility and the intensity of your fan relationships. The average Facebook fan is a fan of just two brand pages, joins 12 groups, hits the Like button 9 times and posts 25 comments, usually during 55 minutes of Facebook face time daily. 

Develop an editorial calendar and individual posts with this in mind. Zero-in on your core fans; those with highest propensity to engage with your brand. Similarly, during the 3.2-hour shelf life of each post, the more you directly respond to fan comments, the more you influence the Edgerank algorithm in your favor. You have to carefully plan your content and then stay engaged and work it as fans consume it.

 

The implications of these six patterns is that compelling, interesting, share-worthy content posted at the right time, with an image, in the right sequence will both delight your fans and effectively game Facebook’s Edgerank formula. There is scant evidence to suggest that fan feedback per post drives additional reach. The burden is on brands to craft competitive content and engaging experiences.

 

What's Your Twitter Strategy?

What is your Twitter strategy?  

Many brands are on Twitter because they believe its required table stakes. You have to be on Twitter because millions of people and all your competitors are. Yet these same brands post the same stuff on Twitter as they do elsewhere and generally complain about how hard it is to define unique content, spawn free viral distribution or measure the business impact or value of all those tweets. 

Twitter seems to be a barometer of the global news cycle, an early warning radar for trends or shifting popular tastes and a companion/commentary/feedback medium for TV, live music, pop culture, sports and theatrical events. But brands can get the benefit of these insights without investing in pages, content, moderation or sponsored tweets. 

Twitter is a news ticker dominated by news organizations and pundits of all stripes. The amount of re-tweeted material is almost equal to the original content. Finding a unique voice, a persuasive posting cadence and enough engaging content to keep up with the constant ticker pace with compelling or unique content sufficient to prompt significant numbers of re-tweets, comments or riffs is a real stretch for many marketers. 

Several of my clients are asking if Twitter is still worth their time and treasure. They are trying to understand what role Twitter plays in their marketing mix and trying to justify continued spending on a labor-intensive media channel with uncertain returns. 

Initially there were many claims about customer service on Twitter. A few brands are doing a notable job. Yet 99 percent of customer service issues are still handled on branded websites and 800 numbers. And while many brands continue to respond to customer concerns on Twitter, its not considered mission critical nor is there data to prove the assumed brand halo that supposedly comes from tweeted customer satisfaction. 

Twitter has been touted as a cost efficient coupon distribution tool. And there is research to show that coupons are both downloaded and redeemed on Twitter at greater rates than on Facebook or branded websites. But how much are brands willing to spent to cater to deal whores who may or may not ever return to their stores and sites or pay full price for anything? 

Twitter can be a fast way to get news about brands, products and marketplace or competitive developments out quickly. But even using the #hashtag convention as a reach extender, reach is function of the number of followers you can amass and brands generally trail celebrities and news organizations in this category by significant margins. So much so that a cottage industry has sprung up among B, C and D list celebrities selling their popularity and followers via tweets on behalf of brands. It’s not clear if Twitter news distribution trumps e-mail, web publishing and ePR techniques for either reach, virility or engagement.

Its beginning to feel like Twitter is a novelty act that doesn’t have either the communications or business impact that brands can get from other social media networks. 

So what’s your Twitter strategy? Where do you stand?

 

Facebook's Latest Gesture

Mark Zuckerberg wants you to live your life out loud on his platform. The expansion of Facebook Gestures will make it possible to share much more of your daily life with your Facebook friends. 

Gestures uses the Open Graph idea, which automatically tells your friends what you are doing in almost real-time. These are those posts in the right-hand Ticker that say, “Sally is listening to Lady Gaga.” Hulu, Spotify and The Washington Post were early adopters of this functionality, which came into existence last fall at the f8 developers’ conference. 

The expansion of this functionality means that users will give permission to access 3^rd party apps and then have their activities broadcast indefinitely. These notices will appear automatically in the Ticker and, based on a secret formula, the more important ones might get into your Newsfeed wall. 

The idea behind all this is to optimize sharing and eliminate the hesitation that the near ubiquitous Like button creates, since its an explicit endorsement or approval of content. Instead by creating these automatic apps, you can share what you’re doing without assigning a value or judgment. This frictionless sharing will extend from what you are reading, watching or listening to into an unlimited number of personal areas. In no time verbs like, cooked, ate, went to, saw, visited, tried on, hiked, fished, hunted, inhaled, extruded, ran, bought, flashed or swallowed will pop up in your Ticker. 

And while many of us are already at the TMI level, Zuck & Company are operating on the assumption that we are endlessly curious about all the details and nuances of our friends lives. This is tied to the assumption that if “birds of a feather flock together,” Facebook can target and sell wholesale access to distinct flocks for advertisers. 

Surprisingly this stream of personal information might just make sense for retail brands and brands who rely on habitual, seasonal or repeat businesses. Imagine a million people daily seeing that their friends  “ate a Dave’s Hot ‘N Juicy Hamburger at Wendy’s” or “bought 6 cups of Chobani pineapple yogurt” or “downed a six pack of Bud Light.” Assuming that we share a psycho-demographic sensibility with most of our friends this kind of advertising, even assuming the impressions have less attention-per-post, might be much more persuasive and even more directive than traditional online or offline ad formats. 

And so the newest Facebook gesture just might be double-jointed.

 

Did Google Goof?

Google’s decision to weight its +1 button and display Google+ results has created a very interesting contretemps. On one hand, Google is puting its thumb on the scale they invented. On the other hand they are monetizing their unique IP and stitching together their own technology, ostensibly to serve us better. 

Google presents and spins these changes as a consumer benefit. Google transforms “into a search engine that understands not only content, but also people and relationships,”  they claim. The three new features are: personal results, profiles in search and people and pages. The so-called benefit is that your Google search results will be even more personalized, thanks to information shared on Google+. 

Predictably Microsoft is crying foul, arguing that Google unfairly weights its own stuff above everyone else’s and in so doing skews the real value of search engine results. They have begun to aggressively use this move to switch pitch users and advertisers. 

Google streaked to success by offering a different way to categorize and rank search engine results based on inferred popularity and usefulness. They’ve used this mantra to cloak every subsequent move. At the same time, they’ve taught us all how to search. Google is both a verb and an deeply embedded part of our online behavior and muscle memory, so to speak.

The likelihood of BING, newly ascendant over Yahoo, creating enough negative buzz over a sustained time period to prompt mass defections is low. Though Google’s own behavior may help Microsoft’s cause depending on the extent to which they favor themselves in SERPs and the reach, depth or intensity of the perception that Google has conned all of us for the last decade. 

It’s a very interesting turn of events, though it’s hard to predict how things will shake out. But its gonna be fun to watch.

 

Does Facebook Work?

With 800 million active members, as many as 25% accessing the network using a mobile device, and hundreds of millions spent by brands to attract and engage fans, clients are starting the New Year by asking, “Does Facebook work?” 

The short answer is … it depends on what you want Facebook to do.

With massive reach, strong frequency and cultural integration, marketers expect Facebook to be a persuasive tool to reach and engage customers and prospects. Yet on a basic level, the jury is still out on these fundamental questions.

Some clients want to build brand awareness and amass large numbers of fans hoping to better engage customers and prospects in conversation leading to brand preference, loyalty and maybe goose a few more sales. Others want to reduce the distance between a brand and its clientele quickly and build intimacy necessary to accelerate the number, frequency and value of sales.  Measuring these desired results is not clear or easy.

For the most part, brands don’t really know who their fans are. There is no way to crosstab Facebook fans or likes with customer databases or purchase histories. So we don’t know if we are reaching new customers or saturating existing customers by using Facebook as a secondary or tertiary channel.

From a direct marketing standpoint, F-commerce is in its infancy, though Facebook has become an effective vehicle to tout deals or specials and is becoming a significant force in coupon distribution. But nobody is harvesting significant sales on Facebook … yet.

In the absence of customer tracking or direct sales, brands developed content, games, promotions and on-going dialogues to engage customers. Marketers convinced themselves, with a little help from Facebook, that some combination of interactions, likes, clicks, plays, comments, time spent on apps and original posts constitutes engagement which mysteriously translates into brand awareness, preference and advocacy. But there is no consensus on these measures and nobody has documented this phenomenon in a credible way.

There are lots of correlations but little proven causation. Consider the stats that are bandied about brazenly.

• 86% of American women have a social network profile
• 95% of them are on Facebook
• 50% of female social networkers bought products based on information they found on social networking sites.  
• The average user spends 7 hours a month on Facebook,
• Roughly half (49%) of Facebook brand followers want sales and offers  

In spite of these data points, we don’t know who our fans are or their relative value to our brands or our business. We aren’t selling them much that we can track or directly attribute to Facebook. And we think consumers like us and engage with us.

But there’s evidence that brands and customers expectations are out of sync with each other. And Facebook itself has filtered access to the followers we’ve amassed and their friends, which limits our reach and frequency.  To confound things further, we don’t really have a way to translate discrete actions on Facebook by individuals or in aggregate into meaningful behaviors affecting brand or revenue growth.

If we are honest with each other the answer to the question of Facebook’s marketing efficacy is … we don’t really know.

Maybe we are in the infancy of Facebook marketing experimentation or maybe, as Catherine Boera of Active International argues users see Facebook as a social rather than as a marketing medium.

 

 

 

 

4 Ways to Engage "Super Socials"

 

About one-third of Americans with a social media profile have fully integrated social media (mostly Facebook) and smart phones into their daily lives. These 46 million people, manage their lives minute-by-minute and hour-by-hour using their phones. Two-thirds have used their phone to update their social media status which probably places them among the 300 million who check their Facebook pages using mobile devices several times each day. 

Jay Baer, analyzing a new study from Edison Research and Arbitron titled Social Habits II, calls them “Super Socials.”  Some of the key survey findings were: 

• Social networks are mainstream tools for personal communications
• Super Socials are more likely to be young and female
• Mobile access drives increased frequency of social network use
• Frequent users create more content  -- more viral opportunities
• Frequent users are more likely to follow brands
• Frequent users consume more on-demand content
• Frequent users watch more video TV on a digital device
• Almost 25% said Facebook most influences their buying decisions 

This growing segment is the leading target for integrated marketing campaigns. Forty-three percent of social media activists follow brands in social media; 8 in 10 do so on Facebook. Their psycho-demographics inform the personas that marketers use to build digital assets and target digital media.  Mom’s make up a healthy sub-segment of “Super Socials.” Yet when surveyed, 72 percent said that no social network influenced their purchase of products or services. 

A data point like this makes you wonder. 

The obvious explanation is that people say all kinds of stuff on surveys so we can easily dismiss internal contradictions as “survey error”. On the other hand the survey might be revealing a type of cognitive dissonance emerging from the social media experience that is being documented by a growing body of data, specifically the recent CMO Council study that says consumers and brands are coming at social media from different perspectives, with different expectations and agendas that might be seriously out of synch. 

People embraced Facebook and other networks because they created fast, easy and free ways to keep up with and communicate with friends and family. Social media is a personal CRM tool that adds value and fun. Plus it’s the thing to do, as evidenced by huge adoption among every demographic segment. Brands are second cousins. Admitted late to the party, brands are groping for credible ways to enter and participate in the on-going conversation. 

Typical brand interactions on Facebook happen once. The average fan visits the brand page once, usually to sign up for offers or deals or to play a game or participate in a promotion. A “Like” is usually the cost of participation not necessarily a sign of brand awareness, affection or preference. 

Most of the action on brand pages takes place on apps. These visits are not organic repeat visits. Instead media spending drives app use and promotional participation, often Facebook ads and external drivers like banners, video, search, text ads and e-mail. 

The fact that only a small percentage of fans actively visit brand pages without prompting suggests that the relationship with brands is secondary to relationships with real friends and based on a WIIFM calculation rather than as an expression of true loyalty or love.  The implication is that super social consumers frequently participating in the Facebook experience will play along or take goodies from brands but that’s not the reason they visit, post, comment or like frequently. 

No brand wants to feel, much less be, an interloper on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn, YouTube or elsewhere. It’s humbling to realize that the frequency and intensity of brand relationships aren’t what we thought they were or should be. But it also gives us clear direction on how to better serve our customers and ourselves in crafting social network marketing programs moving forward. 

Consider these four social media tactics.  

Focus on what people do.  Interact and support the things that Super Socials (and everybody else) do frequently in social media. Think visually and think through a life on the go. Identify inflection points where your brand has a distinctive positioning or point of view or can uniquely add value. Comment on the things fans care about. Share frequently. Become more like a real friend; helping, advising, celebrating and sharing. 

Enable or enhance functionality. Find ways to add to the social network experience by making it easier to post or share pictures, comment or post on popular subjects or find other people with similar interests. Conceive promotions that either save consumers’ time or money or have talk value. Focus on the simple, frequent functions that are easily done on a smart phone or a tablet. Build promotions or games that engage Moms and their kids. Remember the average Mom has downloaded several apps designed as babysitters or distractors for their kids. This might be a better access point for many brands to the social arena. 

Give Them What They Want. They come for deals, offers and coupons. Give them deals, offers and coupons. They want inside info, early access to new products or services and the real skinny about your category. Tell them in a consumer friendly voice. Expose key personnel. Use video to take fans inside your operation.  Be as candid as the competitive environment will allow. Parse the information to suit your sales objectives, but be sure to get it out to bloggers, brand fans, advocates and your e-mail list. And get it out using language and images that will provoke comments and riffs and that can be easily shared. 

Figure Out Who They Are. Look into emerging eCRM tools or design promotions that require fans and followers to identify themselves in ways that can be cross-matched with brand e-mail lists and databases. You can’t build on-going interactive relationships if you don’t really know who you’re talking to. Remember that social media fan bases are a collection of segments. Develop social media campaigns that break the one-size-fits-all mode. 

 

Facebook's Advertising Squeeze Play

Facebook spouting the rhetoric of community, friendship and changing the world, has systematically built its platform to extrude cash from advertisers. And though we haven’t yet seen an overt expression of naked greed from Zuckerberg & Company, we are beginning to feel the effects of the advertising squeeze play they’ve constructed. 

Understand the back-story. Facebook offers fan pages for brands. Facebook encourages brands to accumulate fans and to spend money on apps, promotions, games and other forms of engagement. Just as brands begin to master this new medium, they change the definitions, swap out fans for likes and generally mess with our heads. 

Like new addicts, brands adjust on the fly, redirect their efforts, redouble the labor assigned to post, monitor and measure Facebook activity and again begin to master the new Facebook universe. Spouting the engagement mantra, brands expand their offerings; begin spending to advertise on Facebook to existing or prospective fans and experiment with Facebook’s ways to optimize access to fan Newsfeeds. 

To incent added advertising spending, Facebook institutes a filter on wall posts, called the EdgeRank Algorithm that, by design or default, significantly reduces the number of brand massages reaching brand fans. At first they encouraged a reach and frequency/engagement play. Then they unilaterally manipulated the platform to reduce free reach thereby creating demand for more new paid ads. Sponsored Stories ads essentially sell brands the access they thought they were getting organically by creating compelling brand posts. 

It must be great to own the end-to-end system so that you can diabolically adjust the variables and run the rats through the maze. Facebook got us hooked on free reach, scolded us into paid engagement and now is subtlety but regularly tightening the apeture on brand access to fans’ walls and by extension to the huge reach multiplier represented by friends of fans in order to force us to buy more ads to get what we were getting in an early iteration of the platform. It’s a classic squeeze play; one that Twitter and others will soon try to emulate. Google has already drawn fire for its attempts to unfairly weight its own travel properties in the search algorithm. 

Savvy brands will resist the tightening of the screws by developing metrics to measure the business impact and monetary value of fan interactions. These calculations should guide the level of future investment. Remember that there is a widespread hunch that Facebook fans are deal-seekers and light rather than heavy customers. Facebook clearly is a game worth playing, but it’s not the only game in town nor is it yet a critical “must have” success factor for brands.  Don’t be surprised to see prominent brands diversify their social media spending, reduce the intensity of Facebook activity or even dump Facebook campaigns in the New Year.  

 

Optimizing the TV-Twitter Connection

 

Twitter has become a companion medium to TV. People watch their favorite shows, with a computer or mobile device at hand, tweeting reactions to the characters, the plot, the action sequences and the story line. They also tweet about brands while they watch. 

The volume of brand tweets can now be correlated with specific TV shows to create a new double-barreled channel for brands to engage their fans and more selectively target likely customers or brand advocates. Bluefin Labs, the social analytics firm associated with MIT Media Labs, has been keeping track of tweets as they relate to TV viewing. 

They found links between brands and the shows their fans watch most, which they call Social TV Analytics. For example Wal-Mart fans are most likely to tweet about America’s Supernanny on Lifetime or the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders on CMT or Las Vegas Jailhouse on TRUTV. In contrast, Target buyers tweet about or during CMT’s Top Secret Recipe or HGTV’s My Yard Goes Disney. 

It has always been assumed that there is lifestyle linkage between TV shows and the people who opt-in to watch them. Apparently this affinity dynamic is true for Twitter as well. 

The data can be correlated by brand and by category according to Bluefin.  For example,  3 of Coke’s Top 10 tweeted shows are on ESPN. But there are no sports shows among the Top 10 tweeted shows for the Pepsi faithful. Some of the results are predictable. Beer drinkers tweet during sports shows and wine drinkers tweet during fashion and relationship programming. TV programming and commercials have always prompted talk. Now everyone is a TV and a social critic with instant digital access to an audience on Twitter and beyond. 

It’s a chicken-and-egg question; do people with lifestyle preferences tweet about brands because they advertise on these shows and networks? Or is there an organic subject matter trigger that drives brand tweets within specific content? 

The relationship between TV and Twitter provokes 4 new thoughts. 

1. Should brands better align with highly tweeted shows and invest in added commercials and product placement to optimize fan engagement? 

2. Should brands anticipate heavy brand tweeting during particular shows and staff social communities to respond in-context and in real-time to fan comments and posts? 

3. Should networks merchandise tweets as a way to expand fan bases and better harvest brand advertising budgets? 

4. Should consumers expect increasingly integrated commercial messages in programming that intertwines their TV watching and tweeting habits?

Twitter is adding a new dimension to TV. It will be very interesting to see how it plays out and which brands leverage this dynamic inter-media relationship. 

 

Experience is Everything

Every so often you have an encounter with a brand that reminds you how little marketers think about customer touch points and how difficult it is to control and shape the customer experience. 

In an era where each and every customer touch can poison a relationship and where any customer can instantly become a viral critic, its surprising how badly brands are prepared to deal with everyday issues. 

Consider two recent examples. 

I go to the Citi ATM and the machine dispenses forty dollars less than I asked for. I validate the underage with the branch manager, who can’t or won’t do anything about it. She puts me on the phone, after an extended wait ( evidently there are no internal priority queues) with CSRs in Guatemala and India both of whom offer no resolution and piss me off. When the issue doesn’t self correct in 24 hours as they promised, the online form won’t take and symbols, like a dollar sign or the ampersand for my email address, and the 800 number is continually busy. No wonder we all hate banks! 

Similarly I get an e-mail announcing that I canceled by New York Times subscription, even though I didn’t. The special number goes unanswered because of high volume, the main 800 subscription number doesn’t get answered, the subscription website takes 12 minutes to load and render and a reply to the email sender bounces. Do you think they’re telling me something about our relationship by this dramatic inattention? Is it a wonder that newspapers are dying? 

These negative experiences are random. Neither brand seems to have any understanding of my purchase history, my status, my long term brand loyalty, my potential as a brand advocate or detractor or my relative profitability or lifetime value sufficient to save me from their systems.  All the platinum cards, special clubs and other marketing blather turn to dust, when you want something simple done and your brand partner can’t or won’t deliver. 

Very few brands think through and map the range of customers’ interactions with the brand or anticipate the result of these interactions on brand awareness, preference, purchase or loyalty. Branding experts talk about the essence and the expression of the brand but very little of their philosophizing gets built into the plumbing of service delivery. All the high falutin’ brand babble doesn’t matter when real customers want real engagement or real services.

Brands need to execute on the brand promise not only in ads but downstream – where transactions take place and where the battle for brand purchase and loyalty is joined. It starts with an attitude. Either you are a brand that understands me, helps me, meets me where I need things or you are not. This can’t be faked or masked by fun Facebook promotions or shortened URLs on Twitter. 

Marketers need to assert quality control over all touch points and anticipate the likely service needs and emotional results of day-to-day business. Infusing the delivery system and the customer service system with a genuine brand ethos will pay off much faster and much better than accumulating thousands of online friends or measuring gross viral impressions

 

Why iAds Bombed

The initial failure of iAds is a tale of Apple’s attitude and arrogance. The introduction of this new ad medium was heavy-handed. 

Three fashionably dressed hotties showed up at our offices, whipped open their MacBooks and laid out the take-it or leave-it value proposition  --- pay us a minimum of a million bucks, create what we tell you to create within a very constrained technology environment and then shut up and be grateful. 

Does it surprise anyone that brands and their agencies didn’t rally to this? 

Apple’s reps asserted that iPad users were smarter, richer, more likely to share and buy than the average Joe. That brands could micro-target using rich data from the iTunes app store. They suggested that those who didn’t get in early on this amazing deal like Target, Unilever and Geico did, or you’d be left in the dust. 

Of course, there was no data to support or document these claims other than the hockey stick sales curve for iPads. There was also a clear suggestion that since Apple invented the platform and since Apple ran the famous “1984” ad, they knew much better than brands or agencies who to talk to, what to say and how to express it on the new tablet landscape. 

A year later, many brands have tried it. Revenues are way off projections. And brands are under-impressed with both the creative canvass, the targeting options and customer response. Marketers have also figured out that iAd creative is one-system only requiring additional, costly creative and technical resources where the cost/return ratio is out of whack. 

Couple that with emerging customer usage patterns that suggest iPads are primarily entertainment vehicles supporting TV and movie watching, games and social media. These are  behaviors and attitudinal inflection points only open to a finite number of brands and campaigns and virtually force advertisers to intrude on customers and prospects.. The promised creative bonanza has not materialized and while rep visits to agencies has increased, interest in iAds hasn’t. 

Apple isn’t the first Internet giant to break into the market with a bull-in-a-china-shop profile. But it could be the first to eat some humble pie, re-tool, re-think and re-stage their approach to the advertising and marketing community.