Blog archive - April 2012

Posted the ATA link the other day, but wanted to post this as well along with our pre-event survey link for interested parties.... The telehealth industry can be convoluted and confusing despite significant efforts by the industry. As a result, success in telehealth hinges upon proper understanding and identification of the markets, as well as an awareness of voice of the customer basic questions, such as who are the customers and what are their needs? Meet Frost & Sullivan’s leading Connected Health analysts at ATA 2012 at Booth 1703 To share and explore the Top 20 Telehealth Markets Click Here to Participate in Frost & Sullivan’s Pre-ATA 2012 Survey We also invite you to participate in the above survey. Current users and vendors’ perspectives are welcome. The survey should take only about five minutes of your time. Resulting research will be shared with all survey participants. We look forward to meeting you at ATA 2012.

The blogpost below was first published on April 19, 2012 on Social Media Today. Clipped from: bit.ly (share this clip) I keep asking myself: Why couldn’t I have discovered Instagram or Pinterest? With last week’s news of Facebook acquiring photosharing app Instagram for an eye-popping $1 billion, many social media experts are now turning their attention to the future of Pinterest, another hot, photo-centric social network. Though I’m smarting that I didn’t create either Instagram or Pinterest, and wasn’t lucky enough to know Mark Zuckerberg & Co. in the early days, there’s hope for me and others wanting to embrace social to build brands and companies. Turns out, after several discussions with developers over the last few months, I learned that any publisher – and aren’t we all publishers these days? – can turn a website into a social network – and reap huge rewards. I’m not talking about starting a social network from scratch – which was apparently the way to go a few years ago. You could have used Ning or hired your own developers for that. Ning is almost dead (it has a new owner), and developers are expensive. Instead, a new category of developer has emerged right under everyone’s nose: the social infrastructure provider. One of the most easily recognizable services of social infrastructure providers, such as Gigya and Janrain, is social login: allowing you to offer ‘Sign in with Facebook’ or ‘Sign in with Twitter’ on your website. I’ve written about social login in the past. Beyond login, infrastructure can be extended to recommendations, gamification, and other plugins. You can just imagine the rich data that results from such social plugins, feeds, and analytics. This data can be used to fuel marketing strategies, advertising creative and ad serving, and content and product recommendations. Feedback, opinions, and endorsements all drive sales, and what better to draw from than your users’ social graphs? As such, social infrastructure can form part of a business’ key strategy for serving the right content to the right end-user at the right time, thereby driving a purchasing decision. Even for B2B or professional services companies, the power of adding ‘Sign in with LinkedIn’ could do wonders to a database of more sophisticated buyers who control a much longer buying cycle. I trust that this category will grow, as the need for expanded user info and social CRM will take center stage. And let’s face it: we need to thank Facebook, Twitter, and others for familiarizing users with social features – we just need a way to bring all of that data into our organizations, make it relevant, glean it for insights, and utilize it to advise on business decisions. You may not discover a hot social startup, but you can have access to the data of one.

Below is the PowerPoint presentation I delivered for a BrightTALK webinar, covering metrics, ROI, strategies, and tactics for the B2B social media marketer. Exploiting Opportunities in B2B Social Media View more presentations from Frost & Sullivan

Multiple people from our Connected Health group will be at the American Telemedicine Association (ATA) meeting in San Jose, as Frost & Sullivan is a Media partner for this event. We also will be at booth 1703 in the Expo and surveying on trends in telehealth. Hope to see you there. Feel free to contact Daniel Ruppar for scheduled meeting opportunities through our main number 210-348-1000.

Is technology changing the doctor-patient relationship? As preventable medical conditions such as obesity continue to grow so does the need for patient involved healthcare. The doctor-patient relationship is critically important to bridging the gap between passive patients and informed medical consumers. Innovative technologies are the enabling factor for this, but are they succeeding — and how long will it be before we start seeing significant changes? Moderator: Zachary Bujnoch, Senior Industry Analyst, Frost and Sullivan Panelists: James White, Vice President, Connected Hospital, Alcatel-Lucent Gene Frantz, TI Principal Fellow, Texas Instruments William Reid, FACHE, VP, Product Management, Numera Alexandra Von Plato, Executive Vice President, Chief Creative Officer, Digitas Health and Razorfish Health Intro: Jill Gilbert, Producer, Digital Health Summit

In my previous blog, we talked about the history of mobile advertising, and how simple banner ads served on WAP phones gave way to rich media advertising served within mobile Internet, application and video environments in mobile. In this piece, I wanted to talk about Private Mobile Ad Exchanges(Private Exchanges), which are likely to become extremely important in the U.S. mobile advertising market over the next few years. Private Exchanges – as the name indicates – allow publishers to 1) specify who is able to see and bid on their inventory, and 2) exert greater control (such as pricing floors) over the types of ads that could be served on their digital properties. These exchanges are also “Transparent”, meaning that advertisers specify exactly where their ads should run and they can also see full detail of where they did run following a campaign. Demand for such exchanges is led by leading publishers, who want greater efficiency, quality, scale and overall control over the advertising experience delivered to their customers. Companies such as Medialets and Nexage have launched Private Mobile Ad Exchanges in the United States. Medialets Private Marketplace is a fully transparent exchange – meaning advertisers know exactly where their ads will run, how many impressions will be delivered to each property and can verify this following a campaign as well. Both application and web inventory is available in the Medialets Private Marketplace across next-generation mobile and tablet devices. Publishers can granularly control impression levels and pricing in Medialets Private Marketplace, and two or more publishers may even combine their inventory to monetize it jointly. In short, Medialets hopes to offer greater flexibility, control and quality to both the buy and the sell side with its private exchange. Existing mobile real-time bidding (RTB) solution providers offer additional value to users of private market exchanges by leveraging several other assets already at their disposal. For example, Nexage’s Private Exchange directly leverages its Public Exchange assets (RTB exchange and the mediation platform). In Nexage’s case, the Private Exchange provides for high value liquidity on top of the public exchange. Initially, publishers participating in the Private Exchange would send impressions to the Private Exchange against a set of pre-decided rules. If those impressions don’t sell, they roll over automatically into the Public Exchange and there they fall into the governance of a new set of rules. In this Public Exchange, the impressions will be tapping into the full liquidity of Demand-side Platforms (DSPs) and real time buyers that are integrated into the RTB. Finally, if these impressions did not sell there, it would then roll over the Nexage Mediation platform, where it may fall under a different pricing floor and be able to tap into the demands of the full ad networks that are tied into mediation. So, as Nexage launches a Private Exchange, it is accretive to liquidity since it provides a solution that has behind it the full power and liquidity of the Public Exchange. Roadmap for Mobile Advertising Looking at entire spectrum of mobile advertising, there are three main business models for inventory monetization. There is the Direct Sales model, where the publishers have direct sale teams and sell to advertisers directly. Then there is the Network business model which has ad networks such as Millennial Media and JumpTap (though they may also have other products as well) selling directly. Then there is the Programmatic Market, defined as mediation and RTB which is really going forward as RTB dominated space. Frost & Sullivan believes that the Private Exchange model logically complements the Direct Sales model for mobile advertising – especially since scaling the Direct Sales model can become an issue due to the requirement of adding sales people which comes at a cost. This is not the say that publishers participating in a Private Exchange will always get same price for their inventory – however they will likely command a CPM that is comparable to what they are able to get by going Direct. This could very well mean that Private Exchanges may end up taking some business away from ad networks – though ad networks themselves are working to build RTB bidders( or integrating with RTBs). Conclusions Let us summarize all this discussion into a few key points. The exchange concept is going to be increasingly important in the ultra-competitive (and complex) mobile advertising space. Overall, Frost & Sullivan expects the mobile DSP/RTB/Private Exchange ecosystem to emerge at a rapid pace and support a majority of rich media ads in future. While I won’t hazard a guess about how much would these platforms contribute to the total market (in terms of ad impression volume or revenue contribution). However, existing industry participants are already serving billions of ad impressions on their mobile exchanges, and it is not unreasonable to expect a double-digit revenue contribution to mobile advertising revenues from these platforms within the next 18 months. Publisher participation in Private Exchanges could come at a premium. Right now, this is done more on a qualitative basis where publishers that can command a premium appropriate for a Private Exchange participate in the marketplace. Both branding and performance campaigns are supported in the Private Exchange, though there is obviously some performance expectation even in branding ads. Additionally, a Private Exchange could also be positioned as a ‘liquidity enhancement’ service, where a tiered or a layered architecture helps to ensure that inventory is monetized well. A key challenge is to ensure end-to-end system performance – especially for rich media ads – and ensuring that the ad creative is rendered properly and the user experience is consistent with the advertisers’ expectations. Ongoing industry standardization initiatives will go a big way in helping address this issue. A picture is worth a thousand words – hence my attempt to depict the evolution and roadmap for the U.S. mobile advertising space. Hopefully, this helps explain what’s going on with mobile advertising.