Seeing the big picture, loving enhanced television, and doing Zumba with the kids

Editor's Note: What gets search and media planners’ engines revving? Our ongoing "Meet a Media Planner" series looks under the hood each week to find out. Today we’re checking in with Kirsten Atkinson, media director for Team One in Los Angeles. Kirsten’s 13-year career in media includes positions with Starcom, Deutsch, and Mindshare---and work for clients such as Miller Brewing Company, P&G, Symantec, Mitsubishi, and Nissan. For the past 9 years, she has been focused on the automotive industry and currently oversees the national broadcast and out-of-home business for Lexus at Team One.

Yahoo! Ad Blog: You’ve seen big changes in digital advertising over the last 12 years. What surprises you the most?

Kirsten Atkinson: The proliferation of content and the different channels out there today are astounding. When I was planning back in 2003, there were just a handful of premium sites we would consider for their scale and reach. Today, we have more options than there are in the broadcast space. The great thing is that digital and traditional mediums are converging, so we’re beginning to connect the dots and not feel so overwhelmed by the fragmentation of these spaces.

Planning is no longer a matter of, “How do I solve digital?” or “How do I solve out-of-home?” It’s about looking at the bigger picture and figuring out how to tie each media type into an overall goal. You’ve got to leverage the advantages of all of them, because they’re not created equal. In my opinion, it’s definitely a fun time to be in media.

By Jayadev Billa, Product Manager, Advertiser and Data Platforms, and Sean Snider, Sr. Frontend Engineer, Advertising and Data Platforms

Last month, the IAB released the SafeFrame 1.0 specification. SafeFrame allows publishers to serve ads with enhanced rich media capabilities while ensuring the security of publisher and user data. SafeFrame also provides a standard measurement of digital ad impression viewability---a growing advertiser and agency need. Yahoo! has been actively involved in developing the SafeFrame 1.0 standard, and we’re proud to have contributed to this new standard that addresses key challenges faced by publishers today.

We’ve already begun implementing SafeFrame across Yahoo! properties, and we anticipate a significant majority of them will be on SafeFrame by the end of 2013. As we roll out SafeFrame, we will further enhance data and privacy controls while offering advertisers the ability to reach their users with enhanced interactive advertising.

We’ll also be working closely with our partners, including Microsoft, and our vendors to adopt the SafeFrame standard. We encourage other publishers to adopt SafeFrame and further our collective goal to realize a safer web for consumers, publishers, and advertisers alike.

To learn more about our partner Microsoft’s perspective on SafeFrame, visit their blog here.

Tweets under 100 characters get 17% higher engagement than longer tweets. Infographic shares more tips on how brands can better connect with Twitter users.

Twitter’s new pricing plan charges $5 a month to use vowels? They’re trying to encourage us to write more efficient tweets?? Nice April Fool’s joke, but as this week’s infographic shows, tweets under 100 characters long actually do drive higher brand engagement (+17%) than wordier ones. It offers lots of other insights into how brands can better connect with Twitter’s 200 million active users, such as the best times of day to reach them and the value of using hashtags and links in brand tweets.

Here are some highlights:

• Brand engagement is 17% higher on Saturday and Sunday, but only 19% of all brand tweets are posted on the weekend
• Tweets with one or two hashtags have 21% higher engagement than those with three or more
• 92% of engagement with a brand’s tweets are through link clicks

Jmp, I mean, jump on over to check out the entire infographic.

Clicks from mobile devices have risen 67% for advertisers on the Yahoo! Bing Network. Here’s how to get more out of your mobile SEM campaigns

Mobile search is often referred to as an “emerging market,” but the latest numbers on the growth of mobile usage in general and mobile paid search in particular make the case that mobile search could soon be the SEM market.

Consider these stats showing U.S. mobile growth over the last year:

• Smartphone users increased nearly 31% to 121.4 million people
• Tablet users jumped more than 134% to 79.1 million
• By 2016, 50% of the U.S. population will use tablets and 80% will use smartphones

Naturally, these growing legions of smartphone and tablet owners are using their devices for search. The chart on the right shows significant annual growth in mobile search using both types of devices.

On the Yahoo! Bing Network, our advertisers have seen 67% more clicks from mobile devices per month since last spring.* To help you get the most out of your mobile search campaigns on the Yahoo! Bing Network, we offer these three tips:

Hashtag users are on the move, consumers respond to mobile ads, and retail sites are slowing down

In the world of advertising, if you're not there one second, you might miss the next big thing. To help you keep you up to date on the news you need to know, every week we’ll bring you ad stories you might have missed, but can't afford to ignore.

Majority of hashtag users do so from mobile devices
Before the advent of Twitter and other micro-blogging sites, "#" had little purpose in life. But now, it's a whole new world---a world full of hashtags. Used to mark keywords, trending phrases and group like-minded posts, the hashtag symbol has gained massive popularity among social media users, and it has proved to be immensely useful for marketers to gauge what consumers are talking about. As it turns out, the majority are using hashtags on mobile devices. A report from RadiumOne found 71 percent of people use hashtags from mobile devices, and nearly 60 percent use them on a daily basis.

More consumers respond to mobile ads
Continuing in that same vein, another report recently underscored the growing importance of mobile in advertising. According to the 2013 Experian Digital Marketer Report, positive consumer reactions to mobile ads almost doubled from four years ago. Fifty-eight percent of respondents said messages and coupons offered by mobile ads were helpful. In light of that finding, researchers forecasted that by 2018, half of all marketing budgets will be put toward mobile.

Expandable ad is a rich-media rush that features a bright, funny video of “2 Broke Girls” star Kat Dennings

“Drink positive.” That’s the inspiring catchphrase that Lipton is using to launch a new tea made with fresh-pressed leaves. Its new interactive ad on Yahoo.com delivers that message with a light touch and a funny user-activated video starring Kat Dennings of TV’s “2 Broke Girls.” To spread its message far and wide, Lipton ran the ad across the desktop, smartphone, and tablet versions of Yahoo.com.

The inspiration begins with an animated 300x250 east unit featuring two young women sipping the new tea and feeling “surprisingly great.” Lipton’s famed yellow logo fills the unit with a “Click to Expand” button at the bottom.

With 200 million active twitterholics out there, it’s bound to happen

It seems like everything is being made into a musical these days, says our David T. Jones, so why not Twitter?

He’s got a point. If you can make hit musicals from newspaper boys, confused missionaries, or a 19^th century French novel, why not a global digital phenomenon with more than 200 million active users?

This week’s Ad Land cartoon shows what “Twitter, The Musical” might look like on stage and even throws in some catchy lyrics.

Jump on over to see the production before it’s sold out.

Company also offers unique solutions for local search and managing cross-channel campaigns, says Kenshoo’s Aaron Goldman

Editor’s Note: From time to time, we run stories by members of the Yahoo!-Bing Preferred Partner Program that offer expert advice and insights into SEM technology and improving the advertiser experience. Now we’d like to give you a closer look atthe four partners themselves, which include Kenshoo. Here’s Aaron Goldman, Chief Marketing Officer at Kenshoo, who talks about local SEM, dynamically attributing conversions, and helping clients do more with less.

Yahoo! Ad Blog: What do you consider to be the biggest opportunity for search marketers in the next year or two?

Aaron Goldman: Local search, but the challenge for search marketers is doing local SEM at scale. With monthly budgets sometimes in the $100 range, every hour spent managing campaigns eats away at profit margins. Another challenge is going beyond search to manage local listings across other Web properties, such as Internet yellow pages or vertical applications like Urbanspoon. Leveraging solutions like Kenshoo Local can help search marketers manage SEM and local listings side-by-side and optimize time and budgets accordingly.