Business Critical: Kickstarter, Glass for a Day, More (Not Provided)
By Flying Hippo
Business Critical is our weekly collection of what’s new, exciting, and insightful for business leaders from the world of the web, marketing, social media, and more.
Marketers are Hungry for Crowd Funding
What more could a marketer ask for than to get their name in on a project that raises millions of bucks directly from fans before there’s even a product or service to be offered?
That seems to be the thinking behind some calls this week for the crowd-funding platform Kickstarter to start allowing marketers to work with project creators to offer additional incentives and sponsorships to project backers. Current guidelines on the site don’t allow for third-party involvement, but that may be changing.
Broad consensus seems to be that this kind of move could offer a win-win-win scenario; Marketers can work with specific projects to score brand points with target audiences, project creators can beef up their incentive offerings to draw in more backers, and consumers will walk away with more loot for their buck.
At this point, Kickstarter has yet to respond to the requests, but there is growing support for the idea.
Read more about how this would work on Ad Age.
Grab Glass While it Lasts
Google’s flagship wearable tech, Glass, is set to go on sale to the general public for the first time on April 15. In a move that seems aimed at stirring pent-up demand, the product will only be available for purchase on that single day.
Aside from the interesting nature of the technology itself, there are some even bigger marketing implications to explore in this strategy. It is, essentially, the opposite of a discount or sale that other brands might offer. This serves, rather, to reiterate the limited availability of Google Glass without diminishing its value through a price drop.
For my money, it’s a pretty solid move to drive adoption — even for those who are on the fence, this one-day offering should push them into the get-it-while-I-can camp — without sacrificing the exclusive allure that’s sparking many purchases in the first place. (But, I still won’t be buying Google Glass this month. Sorry Google.)
See Google’s G+ post for the details.
Instagram FTW?
Ad Age this week published interviews with some of Adland’s top executives and futurists from the publication’s Digital Conference.
In the videos, there were many thoughts and predictions about the future of digital. But, one of the most notable is that Instagram will eventually win the “Social War”.
This is entirely surprising that Instagram is seen as the social network with the most potential. The photo-sharing platform has become a favorite sharing medium for audiences of many different ages, and offers much of the core functionality — hash tags, photo sharing, friend tagging, etc — that users of Facebook and Twitter enjoy.
Check out more of the predictions from Ad Age.
(Not Provided), Again
In other Google news this week, the search giant announced that they have moved paid clicks into secure search, which means that no keyword data will be passed from PPC clicks to Analytics (Google or otherwise).
This is the latest in a growing transition that has masked specific query information for site owners and marketers. But, this move won’t have as large of an impact as when organic search traffic went to (not provided), as advertisers will still be able to track specific keyword performance from their AdWords reports; that data just won’t be fed into Google Analytics.
For more, see Search Engine Land.
Top image by Flickr user James Cridland.
