Is the Super Bowl the ultimate marketing ecosystem of paid and earned media? 2010 will be huge test, as the new reality of consumer expression and cross-platform integration create a powerful new dynamic hovering over the largest single-spot ad spend on record.

What marketers urgently need to understand is not only total ROI on that mega-media buy, but the full return on all the other activities triggered or reinforced by this paid media stimulus. How does paid media drive earned media? And to what degree does earned media halo future paid media efforts? These are critical questions that Marketers need answers to – along with a metric or common yardstick that quantifies the blending of the two.

Getting Real about Real-Time
In an more agile and flexible marketing environment, where there’s actually a chance of making real-time changes based on available data, marketers need to understand the real-time role they can play in making tactical interventions to grow earned media impressions and ultimately, increase odds of success.

Twitter brings a fresh dynamic and promise to Super Bowl media efficiency. The platform reached a reach tipping point in 2009 – so much so that marketers increasingly use it to fan the flames for events, interact with brand mavens or enthusiasts, and, in a growing number of cases, manage or sandbag tension points like customer disappointment or service shortfalls.

Tweets are also increasingly embedding themselves in Facebook feeds, blog entries, and Google search results, magnifying their long-term value. Translated to the Super Bowl, positive playback about Super Bowl ads can have a “latency” effect and provide brands with an almost endless annuity of “earned media.” The same dynamic will be at work with Facebook brand fan pages, which can see massive growth – hundreds of thousands – following a major ad campaign, offline or online.

Quantifying the Big Picture
In the end, Super Bowl spots today need to meet two distinct “torture” tests – one measurable based on traditional TV scoring, and another based on unique dynamics of cross-platform engagement, most notably word-of-mouth and conversation. On a pure TV-impression alone, one can argue that the Super Bowl has become such an unusual magnet for consumer attention and recall – the one day of the year that we “celebrate” advertising – that it is worth every penny. Indeed, curiosity, anticipation, guessing, nostalgia come into play big time before this festival of brand persuasion. Consumers, after all, want to see the ads, almost akin to seeing a movie.

The entertainment halo certainly matters. Over the last three years, Nielsen IAG research found Super Bowl spots achieved a 31% higher break-through and 93% higher likability than the typical ad on television. But it’s not that simple. Timing is also a factor. First and second quarter spots yield more yardage than second half spots, and 4th quarter spots are about comparable to a “normal” TV buy in terms of generating ad recall. The viewer’s ability to associate the correct brand with the ad, and reported likability levels similarly wane over the course of the game. Surprisingly, branded integration effectiveness shows an opposite trend. Recall and brand opinion are lowest pre-game, moderate during the game, and big gainers post game. For Marketers, the mix is clear: focus on ads early and branded integration efforts late. Lastly, the SuperBowl is a touchdown for brands generally: purchase consideration for the average ad the week after increases +13% versus the week prior.

So that’s the foundation of pure “paid” measurements. What about the “earned” side of the equation, which factors in free media, consumer conversation, participation, and the like? Clearly, the Super Bowl in particular shines light across a far more complicated mix of marketing activity and user-engagement. Great copy finds life in other places.

An engaging, even participatory Pepsi game spot, for instance, might trigger a site visit, a Google search, a tweet, retweet, fan-page sign-up, or DVR rewind. It might trigger a desire to share, forward, discuss, critique, rate, or review. It might bleed over into the social media stream of a New York Times or any media reporter (a growing number of whom leverage social media across all platforms.)

The good news is that this digital trail can be quantified with high levels of precision – by volume, reach, tone, source, or even depth of brand advocacy. And much of this can be delivered in real-time, empowering today’s brand manager to make real-time changes or adjustments to the site. Last year, for instance, a large percentage of brands buying spots on the Super Bowl made real-time adjustments to their websites or social media efforts based on pre-game variables.

This year, Frito-Lay’s Doritos brand sits on the extreme of early-adjustments, as the four spots they are running are sourced from user-participation events and contests. In this case, the “earned media” is stimulating the paid side of the equation. Then again, this can work in reverse. When P&G’s Tide brand ran a highly engaging “Talking Stain” spot two years ago, it triggered a user-generated contest that created an impressive annuity of online video that quickly reshaped the brand’s search results for the better. Three years ago, Nationwide insurance estimated that the “earned media” dividend from their Kevin Federline spot totaled over $20 million dollars.

So in the end, it’s just not as simple as “buying” high-reach media. The broader ecosystems truly matter. This year, Nielsen is putting its biggest effort into measuring and quantifying the full return of Super Bowl advertising, combining a comprehensive suite of paid media and earned media metrics into a total “engagement” score. And we don’t intend to stop at the Super Bowl. Over the course of 2010, we’ll be applying our new cross-platform engagement metrics across our work on the Winter Olympics, Academy Awards, and the World Cup.

Webinar: Learn more about Nielsen’s comprehensive approach to the Super Bowl. Join Pete Blackshaw and Randall Beard for a webinar Maximizing Advertising ROI in a Paid vs. Earned Media Environment on December 8 at 2:00PM EST.

• Download a healthcare-focused whitepaper authored by Melissa Davies: Listening to Consumers 101, How Marketers Can Leverage Consumer-Generated Media

SUMMARY: When is a phone not a phone? In the hands of children and tweens, today’s cell phones are primarily used as text messaging devices, cameras, gaming consoles, video viewers, MP3 players, and incidentally, as mobile phones via the speaker capability so their friends can chime in on the call. Parents are getting dialed in to the social media phenomenon and beginning to understand—and limit—how children use new media.

• This article draws from a keynote speech delivered last month at the Children’s Advertising Review Unit (CARU) annual conference.

Digital media is an enabling framework for brands, parents and educators—it’s on demand, interactive, sensing and connected. And social media adds expression and sharing capabilities. A vast menu of web and mobile tools has been developed to facilitate information sharing and commentary on the Web. Applications and outlets have kept pace as consumers rush to populate blogs, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, forums, message boards and online communities.

In the marketing world, the buzz is all about consumer-generated media. Companies have discovered thatno paid-for communication campaign has the impact of missives penned by consumers grounded in relevant, first-hand experience. Their influence is immediate, highly viral and authentic, with an extremely long tail attributable to archived material.

Giving voice
What motivates people to go online and on the record with personal opinions and information? In part, it is the very human need to be heard and to connect with others. It is the desire to make a difference, to influence the world around us. It is the drive to evangelize on behalf of the things and the people we love. And it is the ongoing quest for authenticity in a world governed by image.

Mobile devices represent a major impetus behind the social media movement, driving part of the 250% audience increase for the year ending February 2009. Teens represented 19% of the 12.3 million active social networkers.

Childhood connections
To adults, cell phones are a communications device. To children, they are a lifeline. Consider that the average 13-17 year old sends more than 2,000 text messages per month. Compared with the total mobile Internet population, teens are much bigger consumers of social media, music, games, videos/movies and technology/science.

Parental use of advanced data services mirrors that of their tween kids. If their children text, then 80% of parents will text as well. Although following their kids’ lead on devices and media, parents still set limits. Six in ten forbid downloads onto their children’s phone for financial and security reasons.

TV times
Even as social media dominates press coverage, TV viewing is on the rise among children and teens. Younger children age 2–11 spend almost 102 hours per month watching traditional TV at home—a 17% increase from May of 2008 to the second quarter of 2009. The increasingly popular time-shifted TV option averaged 5:26 hours during the timeframe, a 26% year-over-year increase.

Traditional TV viewing expanded at a slower rate (13.5%) among teenagers than among younger kids—to 101+ hours, and teen time-shifted viewing showed a 35% growth rate with 4:54 hours of watching time. Interestingly, Internet use was down (-15%), to 10:22 hours per month. The biggest media gainer was video viewing on the Internet, where Hulu and YouTube helped spike time by 66% for a total 2:41 viewing hours. Teens deployed mobile phones to catch videos, spending 6:30 hours with mobile video streams—a 20% year-over-year increase.

Young enough
The debate rages on: what is the right age to give a child their own phone? The answer seems to be younger every year, and if you don’t give them a phone, they’ll just borrow one. In 2008, the average age when kids started to borrow a cell phone was 8.6 years; in 2009, it was down to just 8 years old. As to ownership, in 2008, a child typically was given a mobile phone at age 10.1 years; by 2009, it was down to 9.7 years old.

The next time you hear “everybody’s got one”, the fact is, that classic ploy may be true. By age 10, roughly half of children own a mobile phone. By age 11, six in ten own a mobile phone. By age 12, fully three-fourths of all children have their own mobile phone.

Game on
How do they use phones? Two-thirds of tween mobile phone owners took pictures with their camera phones in the last year. Half spent time playing the pre-installed games. Four in ten activated the speakerphone feature. Twenty-eight percent filmed a video clip, and 24% listened to the MP3 capability.

More than half of the youngest (age 8) mobile phone owners used their cell to send text messages in the last 12 months. That figure soared to 81% for 12-year-old mobile users. The vast majority of text messages were directed to friends and family (90%). All other cell phone uses tracked in the single digits, such as voting on TV shows (8%), buying a ringtone or music (9%), buying wallpaper or a screensaver (4%), buying a game (5%), responding to an ad (5%) or looking up their horoscope (4%).

Parental controls
Surprisingly, given all the publicity about cyber stalking and cyber bullies, more than half of parents do not apply any parental controls offered by service providers to their children’s cell phone usage—although the use of these paid-for controls is increasing. Among those who do assert these built-in controls, 20% limit the number of calls, texts or instant messages, followed by download limits (17%), talk time or voice minute allocations (16%), mobile website access limits (15%), locator services and restricted in/outgoing number access (13% each), time of day restrictions (11%), and alerts to unauthorized texts, IMs or callers (6% each).

While the use of paid-for controls may not be high, just about all parents restrict how tweens use their phone and six in ten prohibit downloads that incur charges. Not taking the phone to the dinner table and maintaining certain grades are other rules put in place by 42% and 40% of parents, respectively.

Coming challenges
From a media perspective, choice leads to fragmentation, and ultimately, divided consumer attention and diminished import for a single medium. Even as social media gains popularity among the general public and marketers, there is no accepted benchmark or measure of effectiveness, making it difficult to forecast or predict the impact of a campaign.

A particular challenge for companies wanting to incorporate social media into their communications arsenal is the blurred line between private and public information, given the highly personal nature of many postings. Advertising models are still in flux, exploring boundaries of ethics, taste and transparency.

Untapped potential
Social media presents a world of new possibilities. Not a better mousetrap, but a new operating DNA for interacting with consumers. It can serve as an early radar or warning system, alerting to trouble spots and yielding fresh insights.

For parents, old rules still govern new media. They will need to stay engaged, enrolled and involved in their children’s lives. The motto “trust but verify” applies. For advertisers, old rules also are still in force. The need for transparency and trustworthiness becomes amplified on new media circuits. Ultimately, the nature of new media will prove its value, as all parties engage in an interactive, ongoing, mutually beneficial conversation. Social media is organic and ever-evolving, constantly presenting new opportunities and challenges.

Kid Stuff
For more on children and their media habits, check back next month. We’ll be exploring television, DVD, DVR, VCR, on demand, online streaming and gaming preferences for children ages 2–11. The silver screen represents marketing gold!

My colleague Pete Blackshaw recently hosted a conference call through Nielsen Online’s Social Media and Advocacy Round Table, focused on how brands can leverage the power of consumers’ contributions to the online community. In the call, Scott Wilder, Small Business Online Communities manager for software publisher Intuit, described listening to customer feedback through Intuit’s call center and realizing that customers thought their problems were unique, and that they felt alone in trying to deal with these problems. The solution: Intuit created an online community to help users connect to one another. The company then took it a step further, tapping individuals from the community as “credentialed authors” who can serve as discussion moderators within their areas of expertise.

How is this relevant to healthcare? We know from our Buzz research that patients — like Intuit’s customers — often feel alone with their condition, and come online looking to connect with others “like me.” The online community already is home to influential patients in many different disease categories who are highly informed about their condition, experienced with different treatment options and respected within their communities. When these influencers share their personal experiences with different medications, their online peers listen. Could there be a credentialed role for some of these influential patients, like the model of Intuit’s online customer community?

Case study: In GSK’s alli discussion forums, weight loss experts with different areas of expertise serve as community moderators. According to the site, the moderators are “compensated for their time but the opinions are their own.” GSK is very direct with visitors to the forum that “what you and we can say about alli and how to use it is restricted by Federal laws and regulations,” meaning that comments must be reviewed before they are posted and that some information shared on the site will need to be reported to the FDA.

I fully recognize that OTC is a different world from prescription treatments, so alli does not face the same types of restrictions that many other brands will. But consider this: In EyeonFDA’s recent interview with Dr. Jean Ah Kang of the FDA/DDMAC about pharmas and Web 2.0 (see my earlier blog post on this topic), Dr. Kang notes that a pharmaceutical company might enlist a consumer to act on behalf of the brand to communicate information within the online community. A brief mention, yes, but it’s not off the radar for the FDA.

Has the time come for pharma companies to bring some of these influential individuals into the fold? There will be challenges, to be sure. And, as Intuit’s Scott Wilder noted, one size does not fit all — it will take some experimentation to find the best solution for any company and its customers. But, as Wilder also noted, the benefits in engaging customers and providing the answers and information they need can be well worth the investment.

Related Post:
Consumers Spread Word Of Peanut Butter Recall Online

1. Consumers Go On Social Media “Diets”
“[In 2008] we impulsively adopted everything from hastily assembled Facebook friends and Twitter followers to groups, apps and widgets, yet rarely revisited them.  In 2009, less may well become the new more,” Blackshaw notes.

2. Marketers Return To Media Basics
“TV will remain a focus because viewership in aggregate is actually going up, so continuing to understand how social media extends and enhances that experience (and sources content in reverse) will be mission critical,” Blackshaw writes.

3. Consumer Intimacy Returns
“2009 will also be the year we rediscover the appeal of living, breathing connections. Our industry research will find that real conversations with consumers, empathetically executed, can yield returns that trump the most sophisticated precision targeting,” Blackshaw notes.

4. Diversity Goes Mainstream
“Diversity will make a notable shift in marketing circles from a peripheral ‘nice to have’ to a ‘must have’ — and there will be a deeper recognition that getting this right is inseparable from competitive advantage.  Expect to see Hispanic marketing notch up to new levels and more nuanced discussion of other minority segments,” Blackshaw writes.

5. Conferences Get Downsized
“In 2009, it will be harder to justify attending industry conferences.  Budget pressure will depress participation and marketers will increasingly get comparable returns from online-enabled events, webinars, on-demand podcasting and iPhone downloads,” Blackshaw notes.

Read the rest of Pete Blackshaw’s 2009 media and marketing predictions in the December installment of his regular Ad Age column.

A lot of folks have seen the Black Friday and Cyber Monday releases that we’ve put out, but we’ve also been tracking Web traffic on a daily basis – in total, by category, and by retailer since the Monday before Thanksgiving. Let me share a little bit more data:

Traffic was up by 10 percent on both of the high profile days, where consumers expected that they would be able to find deals. This is certainly better than some might have feared given the state of the economy. When we look at the other days of the week, however, the story is a bit more mixed. Traffic was down a bit on the Saturday and Sunday following Thanksgiving, was down three percent the Tuesday following Cyber Monday, and was up five percent the following Wednesday (December 3rd). If we took a simple average of the year over year growth rates for the Monday before Thanksgiving through Wednesday, December 3rd, the average daily growth rate, relative to 2007 is four percent.

Where it gets interesting, in case you’re not sitting on the edges of your seats already, is when we dig in by category. The chart below looks at average daily growth, by category.

As you can see, category Web traffic is all over the place. Beauty, Computer Hardware/Software, Books/Music/Video, General Retail (companies like Wal-Mart.com, Amazon, eBay, etc…) and Apparel are all up, while Toys/Videogames, Comparison Shopping, Jewelry, Flowers & Gifts, and Consumer Electronics are down. It is important to note that this is a retailer-based classification, not a product based classification, so book traffic to Amazon falls under ‘general retail’ rather than under ‘books/music/video’.

The early prediction: My instinct is that we will see online sales growth this holiday season, but it will be modest. If I were forced to hazard a guess, it would probably be in the low single digits (2-4 percent) relative to last year. I fear that because traffic is up on ‘promotional days,’ it might be an indication of a poor margin holiday season. The next week and a half are going to be important, but the push by retailers between December 15 and 17th is going to be key. Those are the days that will likely be the biggest of the year, despite the fact that there’s no catchy name.

Retailers might want to think about a catchy name.

Is “listening to the unprompted consumer voice” finally going mainstream? Last month, Nielsen co-chaired a sold out Industry Leader Forum delivered by the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF). Among other things, the event focused on how social media is spurring online conversations about brands, companies, products and services. How do we ‘listen’ to these conversations? And how do we utilize these findings? These insights are expanding the role of research beyond measurement and testing, inspiring a new vision for market research. At this exciting event, I gave a presentation on the “Six Signals of Listening to the Unprompted Voice of the Consumer.” In the brief video below, I summarize key highlights from that presentation. In January. we’ll be co-chairing a similar event on the West Coast. Click here for more information.