Burt blog

New years’ resolutions, summaries, trend predictions and yearly round ups are just as much a part of December as are Christmas decorations. Every year there is a lot of talk on how mobile, or tablet for that matter, will completely revolutionize the marketing playground and in this upcoming year this REALLY will break through. Of course the mobile platforms and hugely increased amount of users and devices has changed the game but not as closely as to what “trend spotters” have been predicting. Let us offer some thoughts of our own in the anticipation of turning yet another year.

To share Burt CEOs, Gustav von Sydows thoughts:
“When it comes to strategic approaches it is rather critical for marketers to analyse and better understand their entire online footprint, from how their prospective customers interact with video, display, integrated marketing etc. to how to build a stronger relationship with their existing customer base thru social media, mobile, email and ecommerce.”

As appeared in Digiday on October 22nd

If you’ve read any of the trades recently, you’ve heard the buzz about native advertising and its promise of improved engagement.

Discussions, fueled largely in part by Facebook’s introduction of sponsored stories and Twitter’s promoted tweets, have pushed the case for native’s importance beyond the usual advertising technology circles into broader channels like Business Insider, TechCrunch and publications that typically cover a more holistic beat.

So why, all of a sudden, is native the topic du jour with the marketing cognoscenti? One might argue it’s because we, on both sides of the advertising/publishing aisle, are coming around to the notion that developing a robust advertising business calls for a lot more than simply building a massive audience and filling pages with ads where few users would ever think to look. Advertising needs to have an impact if it’s going to be effective, and a proven way to create such impact and effectiveness is to make ads an integrated — or native — part of the user experience.

Yet another great read by our VP of Product Development, Carl Nelvig. This time he takes on the ongoing discussion about misconceptions of the premium. 

“Let’s face it. We’re an industry that loves a good buzzword. We latch on to certain terms as if our careers – our very lives – depended on it. A couple of industry visionaries get to talking about some trend and we seize on it like it’s Gospel. Next thing you know, lunch tables and water coolers around the industry are abuzz with what promises to be the next big thing.

However of all the buzzwords we hear (and admittedly incorporate into our lexicon), perhaps the most trite and overused is ‘premium’. Premium gets bandied about like a Justin Bieber song lyric, and we’re so fascinated by the guy and his manicured hair, we overlook the fact he can’t sing (sorry Justin).

In our circles at Burt, we regularly hear, “I only buy premium placements for my campaigns,” or “This is a premium ad network,” or “We only work with premium sites,” or, my personal favorite, “We have both premium and non-premium placements.” The term ‘premium’ is so overused in so many contexts we no longer know what it means.”

Read the entire article at ExhangeWire.

A follow-up to the previous post on the complexity of media and creative parameters in display advertising has been published at the ExchangeWire website today. It is a highly relevant topic if we wish to raise the value of display advertising in order to monetize it better and make it deliver better results for branding purposes. We strongly beleive that the future of display advertising is bright and our concepts and products are developed to make a significant contribution to it.

You can read the whole post here.

It will be very interesting to hear the panel discussions on the current state of display in the Nordics, since it seems to be quite a controversial topics especially when it comes to RTB. 

Not the least to take part of the Fireside chat on The Future of Display in The Nordic Region, featuring our very own CEO Gustav von Sydow.

Following up an interview with Gustav, another fellow Burtling is being featured at the ExchangeWire. This time it is Carl Nelvig, VP R&D, sharing his thoughts on the essential and unavoidable problem of display advertising: the (in)compatibility of creativeness and media.

It seems as if all really successful, large scale advertising formats have three things in common. These rules apply to everything from the beautiful pages of *Vogue Magazine* to the relevant sponsored links at *Google.com*:

1. The format is a native, natural part of the experience

2. The format is simple enough for anyone to understand

3. The format is consistent across properties and over time

Given our startup DNA, contributing at an event such as Start-Up Day Stockholm this coming Saturday is extra fun.

The Stockholm School of Entrepreneurship has put together a program that should keep us going the whole day. Gustav will be taking the main stage at 11.10 talking about the Big business - the happiness and hardships of building an Enterprise 2.0 start-up.

We mostly decided to share some ideas about what happens when you go beyond the first benchmark and you’ve raised money - I guess the real work only begins there if your goal is internationalization and taking over the global market:) We surely won’t miss the exciting Wrapp story or Johan Wendts “Marketing a social organization without a budget”. Do you have your favorites on the programe you think we shouldn’t miss - bring it on!

There will be a bunch of happy campers from Burt attending the event on Saturday. If you’re also there give us a shout and come hang out during a coffee break or mingle at Scandic afterwards!

Otherwise we’ll be tweeting away during the event at @burtcorp

Some thoughts on advertising in social media from our CEO Gustav von Sydow:

Just finished reading a GigaOM article on the value of social ads (or lack thereof). Typical quotes being:

The point is that Facebook is a social medium, not an advertising one, like search or display. It certainly is one of the most powerful, if not the most powerful branding medium. It is, however, a word of mouth or PR medium. You interrupt social conversations with commercial messages at your peril.

and

Can Facebook and/or Twitter manage to prove that social advertising isn’t an oxymoron, but a crucial new way of getting your message to potential customers? Billions of dollars in market value are riding on that question.

So. It seems our industry is finally converging around the idea that social media in it’s current form is sort of like e-mail, telephone, word-of-mouth, “buzz” and PR, but more structured, shapeshifted into one experience and put on steroids. At least in the context of marketing, and especially the outbound variety. Identification, payment, customer service, consumer research etc. is obviously a whole other deal.