The Salesperson That Never Sleeps
Following great success, our virtual sales tool, RTC Virtue, is now available in Europe as well as North America.
Using our interactive video technology, RTC Virtue can create completely personalised sales experiences for online customers. To implement the virtual sales tool, RTC captures a client’s existing sales experience and efficiently integrates it into their platform. Indeed, by reflecting “best practice” sales techniques captured from the client’s traditional sales process, RTC Virtue’s conversion rate can exceed human sales conversions.
In the US, premier marketing intelligence supplier Equipment Data Associates (EDA) turned to RTC’s revolutionary video technology to create a personalised online virtual sales tool for each of their direct mail prospects. When a prospective client visits a personal URL (PURL) supplied through EDA’s direct mail campaign, RTC’s platform is able to create a personalised video that incorporates the visitor’s name, current date, location, and product features which will most benefit that particular visitor.
“David Kane (EDA’s virtual salesperson) is our best ever sales hire!” said David Schwartz, EDA Vice President of Sales and Marketing. “He’s ultra reliable and works 24/7, 365 days a year – and gives a perfect personalised presentation every time. The RTC service has more than doubled response rates compare with traditional Webex presentations.”
“I’m delighted that we’ve now launched the virtual sales tool in Europe as well as North America”, said Tom Quinn, the recently appointed new CEO of RTC. “RTC has a clear focus on Response Marketing which delivers measurable results – this is reflected in our work for some of the worlds most prestigious brands including Manchester United, Sony Ericsson and Nationwide. Time after time we’ve delivered massive ROI for our clients – our work for Nationwide increased their sales by 50% and the campaign paid for itself within six weeks.”
You can see the EDA ‘David Kane’ implementation of RTC Virtue in action here. Note that he is totally unaffected by sleep deprivation despite having been selling continuously for many months!
The full press release for RTC Virtue can be read here.
Tags: Innovation, Interaction, Online, Personalization, Sales, Technology
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RTC win award for Innovation
Real Time Content is pleased to have received an award for ‘New Media Innovation’ in the 2009 Global Telecoms Business innovation awards.
The submission was from Real Time Content and BT Group plc. It included demos of our Nationwide Home Insurance and Manchester United Video Messaging projects as practical realizations of the innovative research carried out over many years within BT, and which is now commercially available as part of the technology offering from RTC.
The Nationwide Home Insurance campaign is notable because it resulted in a click-through rate increase of 240% and a sales increase of 50%, proving that personalized video really can make a difference to the advertiser’s bottom line. The Manchester United Video Messaging service allows fans of Machester United to create their own highlights videos and send them to other people.
Presented by Global Telecoms Business magazine, the GTB Innovation Awards are designed to honor innovative projects involving telecoms operators and service providers around the world, in association with their vendors and suppliers. The 2009 Awards were presented on Tuesday, June 16, at a black-tie dinner at the Sheraton Park Lane Hotel, London. You can see a list of all the winners here.
Tags: Awards, Innovation, Technology
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Suddenly, Three Innovations Turn Up!
The last few weeks have seen some fascinating innovations. Google’s Wave shows one view of what email (or more widely, electronic communication) would look like if it was invented now. Wolfram Research’s Alpha shows just how powerful applied computation can be at answering questions, and gives a glimpse of a very intriguing future for knowledge-based computing. Now these things tend to come in threes, and up until now, I was waiting for the third…
So I was not entirely surprised to read Steve Smith’s excellent blog post in MediaPost’s Behavioural Insider, where he talks about something that I can only inadequately describe as an ‘opinion collator,’ from New York-based start-up company Jodange. You can try out the basic idea in three iGoogle Gadgets that track opinons on Energy, The Economic Recovery, and the S&P 500, but the really interesting bit is the ‘Top of Mind’ service, which applies linguistic analysis and collation capability to topics that you choose, rather than presets. You can think of the service as a summary of the collective online opinions, sentiments and feelings of a large number of people – the sort of thing that it would take a lot of effort to determine by reading very widely. And note those words: opinion, sentiment, feeling – these are difficult things to measure reliably.
Written opinions are interesting because they are the carefully crafted and considered result of people thinking, in contrast to the more visceral and immediate behaviors that are what people do, often without thinking too deeply. Online advertising is always looking for ways to infer opinion from behavior, and whilst there is plenty of technology to determine online behavior, opinion has, until now, been a much more intangible metric. Combining what we know about measuring the behaviors of people with metrics for opinions could be a very interesting approach, and one that I’m sure we will see in the future.
Tags: Innovation, Measurement, MediaPost, Research
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ValueClick Increases Value of Banner Ads
Improving ad targeting has always been important to advertisers, but it’s becoming even more crucial as ad space online becomes more dispersed, fragmented and crowded. Last month, ValueClick launched its latest kind of banner ad units that attempts to help marketers better target their messages.
They’re called ActiveAds, and they allow banners to automatically change text and images based on demographic data about the individual viewer. ActiveAds uses motion tracking, or match moving, a technology that overlays different text or graphics on top the original video frame. Although the customization is limited to a few words and images, motion tracking provides a level of personalization not found in static, generic banner ads.
As with Real Time Content, ValueClick uses anonymous information about consumers, so there is no privacy concern. ValueClick uses targeting data from its Precision Retargeting product, which feeds ActiveAds data such as a consumer’s geographic location or contextual data based on the sites they are visiting. While this may not be as granular or accurate as solicited or personal user profile data, ActiveAds, like Real Time Content, supports any number of attributes and data points provided by the advertiser to personalize the ads. This creates a unique experience and a deeper connection with the viewer than a general banner ad.
Even as newer rich media ad formats emerge and video advertising becomes more prevalent on the Web, there will always be a place for banners ads. It’s interesting to see that for banners, there is also necessity to move towards personalization. Not only is there an increasing demand from advertisers, but also, as ValueClick Media general manager Bill Todd says, “[There is a] wealth of data which can be used to improve performance by tailoring ad creative to each individual consumer.”
There is enormous potential to customize ads to be more relevant to each consumer, especially at a time when ad units are ever changing. Increased personalization has shown to greatly affect the attention, reaction and action of consumers, and utilized the right way, this can lead to much higher conversion rates. As content personalization grows as a means for advertisers to connect with their customers on an individual level, we’re going to continue seeing the lengthening of the personalization continuum.
Tags: Advertising, Innovation, Personalization, ValueClick
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Striking While the Iron’s Hot: RTC Makes A Splash in Innovation
Real Time Content recently submitted for and was honored to win in the 2009 Internet Advertising Competition awards. Our entry, “The New Age of Personalization: Matching Message to Need,” won the Best Insurance Rich Media Online Campaign category.
The submission was the demo for our Nationwide Home Insurance campaign, which resulted in a click-through rate increase of 240% and a sales increase of 50%, proving that personalized video really makes a difference in the advertiser’s bottom line.
Presented by the Web Marketing Association, the Internet Advertising Competition awards are given to agencies and technologies for outstanding achievement in Internet advertising. The IAC award is one of the only competitions to recognize only online categories of advertising. Some of the Best in Show winners included campaigns from Atmosphere BBDO, Agency.com and AvatarLabs. See a list of all the winners here. The Web Marketing Association is a leader insetting a high standard for Internet marketing and Web development.
Real Time Content’s technology evangelist, Martin Russ, was also given a Certificate of Recognition for the Advertising Research Foundation’s 2009 Great Mind Awards in the category of Innovation. The awards are presented to individuals who have developed innovative research ideas – methodology, theory, service and solution.
The Advertising Research Foundation (ARF) is a collective of diverse marketing experts, including 400 advertisers, advertising agencies, associations, research firms and media companies, that are all tied by the a single thread of staying true to innovation and creativity in advertising to lead the industry forward.
Tags: Awards, Innovation, Personalization, Real Time Content, Research
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