by Charlotte Otremba | May, 2019 | Content
Gen-Z is the most empowered and savvy generation ever in terms of having control of the media they consume. So brands need to be invited into a relationship with these consumers like never before. Engagement is the most important measure of success. As such, brands must create engagement beyond traditional means to stand out, like events, activations, sampling and, most importantly, content.
– Bidtellect CEO Lon Otremba in Forbes: “Catch The Eyes Of Gen-Z Consumers With These 13 Marketing Tips“
Don’t write off Gen Z just yet. This savvy generation is more discerning than any before them. The takeaway from our stat compilation? Content matters. Get ready to copy + paste.
PASSION FIRST
- Gen Z includes ages 5-19, representing 27% of the global population (Millward Brown)
- Gen Z is dramatically more passionate about music and movies. Ads placed in these contexts are far more powerful with this group, with 39% of Gen Z saying music makes them more positive to advertising and 38% reporting that movies have the same effect (Millward Brown).
- 60% of teens support brands that take a stand on issues they believe in regarding human rights, race, and sexual orientation, according to the study (AdWeek).
- Gen Zers are most likely of all consumers to use “buy” buttons (56%) and shoppable photos (34%) (IAB via AdAge).
UNIQUE, CUSTOM CONTENT
- 88% of Gen Zers indicated that custom content feels like a good way for new brands they haven’t heard of to engage them (Time Inc. Study via MediaPost).
- ⅔ of Generation X and Z consumers trust branded content more than traditional advertising. (Time Inc. study).
- 36% of Gen Zers have a positive reaction to Native Ads (Millward Brown)
“I feel like the native ads are more engaging. They have more entertainment value, are thought-provoking, and I perceive a more memorable and lasting connection than with traditional click ads.” –Nicholas, 33, Finance Guru, a respondent in a Time Inc. Study (MediaPost)
How To Drive Awareness and Sales: E-Commerce + Native Best Practices
MOBILE
- Gen Z consumers require a five-screen experience: phone, computer, TV, tablet, and wearable (MobileMarketer).
- 74% of Gen Z spend more than an hour a day on their mobile device (Millward Brown).
- In 2019, Gen Zers will outnumber millennials, making them the youngest generation to adopt mobile devices. (IAB via AdAge).
VIDEO
Infographic: Here’s the Proof that Millennials Love Native
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by Charlotte Otremba | May, 2019 | Product and Technology
Bidtellect’s Information Technology team recently took on a huge endeavor to revamp and upgrade Bidtellect’s server environment, a process that has been long overdue. Not only will it help them to keep with the ever-changing times concerning technology, but it will also allow them to better streamline their processes, provided that they have used something like these cable wrap around labels to help others to know what each cable does and whether it should be touched or not. Once done, the server environment will see a significant improvement. The undertaking took 32 days of nonstop working – “Work eat sleep repeat,” said Jason Taylor, Director of Information Technology – with some sleepless nights and 40-hour sprints in which the team would take turns napping. CTO Mike Conway explained that the impressive endeavor was akin to changing four tires on a car while speeding 80mph on the highway – and not crashing.
Bidtellect partnered with Cisco and R2 Unified Technologies to deploy wide-reaching upgrades including a modular Network and Server Fabric Platform with extreme throughput, compute, and storage density all while maintaining efficiency. The significant investment and upgrade include large scale additions in computational capacity and data storage. Server and network infrastructure problems may be the reasons for slow internet connection, inefficient data processing, and high electricity bills. Hopefully, the proper upgradation of infrastructure can now make it possible for Bidtellect to listen to 3.5x the number of queries and process 3x the number of auctions per second, laying the foundation for the current growth trajectory.
Thanks to all the increased processing and storage in the new facility, the servers are very likely to heat up pretty soon which means we’ll have to think about investing in newer HVAC cooling systems too. The idea is to get the current system checked out by the likes of Total System Services and make any upgrades as necessary. Got to keep the place cool if we’re going to handle all those queries coming through!
According to JT, the team essentially made the capacity available to increase supply and demand and capture revenue, without increasing our monthly costs or EBITDA negatively. If Bidtellect were a shopping mall, we expanded the mall to make room for more shops and more shoppers to buy!
This building is surely more than enough to handle at least a few more years of growing demand. In case, there is a need to completely switch to a new facility, maybe the Bidtellect professionals would consult Walt Coulston or someone of a similar caliber who could help them move to just the right infrastructure space.
Check out JT’s breakdown below:
What did we do?
Replaced and upgraded a majority of the environment!
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- All UCS Errthang via Cisco Fabric Interconnects – Extremely fast networking and centralized server management
- New Native Blades – Faster CPU’s, increase to 96GB of RAM, ~ 10-15% capacity increase
- Tracking – Migrated DC3 tracking to repurposed VM blades, 24C/48Tx 4
- Kafka, Aerospike – Replaced, some performance increase
- Namenodes – Upgraded CPU/RAM, all SSD for improved indexing speed
- Datanodes – 3x storage increase, 2x RAM and CPU performance increase
- Firewalls – Upgraded 3x cryptography throughput, redundancy in DC3
- Core Network – New ASR’s and Nexus in DC3 to support more throughput and port density
- Load Balancers – 3-3.5x raw QPS capacity increase, 5-6x SSL offload capacity increase
- VM Platform – Increase VM platform capacity, more cores, more RAM
- Modular scalability
Why did we do it?
- Replace aging and end of life equipment.
- We were at capacity limitations of the platform with no path for growth.
- Able to deliver more revenue without negatively affecting profitability. In fact, this helps profitability.
- First step of a truly scalable Infrastructure environment that will allow us to continue increasing our Demand and Supply diversity along with capturing more revenue.
Who was involved?
- Helgi – Never stopped working
- JT – Never stopped complaining
- Chris – Never stopped eating
- Mike – Never stopped asking if it was done yet
- Rob – Always ready and willing
- Luke – The secret weapon
- Roei – Silent but deadly
- Karl – Morale support
How much did it cost?
- Little to no increase in MRC costs by replacing Winmark and seeking our own financing
- Opex NRC cost for temp SE, travel, lodging, car, food and misc datacenter needs
- Why is this important?
- These costs directly affect profitability, EBITDA, which directly affects EBITDA and Bonus
- Allows us to capture more revenue without increasing Infrastructure Costs
- A little piece of my soul
Fun Facts
- Our power usage is equal to approximately 12-15 single family homes in the peak of a FL summer, yet our floor space is less than 350 sq ft combined.
- We could hypothetically build approximately 1,796 home computers if we divided up the compute resources in Ashburn and San Jose.
- Helgi and I went to Target on Easter Sunday and didn’t understand why they were closed. We also didn’t realize it was Sunday, let alone Easter Sunday. The concept of “time of day” or “day of the week” was already lost at this point. But we were tired of doing laundry and were just going to buy new clothes.
- In the last hotel we stayed at, Helgi and I had to fix the hotels internet so that we could work. We got on the phone with their ISP’s support and worked through the issue. The hotel still didn’t give us free breakfast.
- The Load Balancers we deploy in DC3 are the same devices that are used as an internet gateway for entire country of Jamaica.
Exploring what may be coming next…
- MORE QPS & MORE $$$
- More Native and Tracking resources
- Upgrade AD-IX port and enable public peering
- Additional uplinks to service providers and enable Multipath BGP(capacity level redundancy)
- Load Balancing the Load Balancers…..wait what?
- Infrastructure Patch Management, a step towards patch automation
- Windows 2016/2019? .Net 5.0? (test in EU first)
- EU going physical, in a good way
- APAC footprint
- Dedicated Stage Environment
- Deploy an ACI environment (10x scale plan)
Stay tuned for an official Press Release!
by Charlotte Otremba | May, 2019 | Content, Native Advertising
The first Father’s Day was celebrated in Spokane in 1910, but it wasn’t until President Calvin Coolidge officially established Father’s Day as a national event in 1924 that it became a dedicated holiday to “establish more intimate relations between fathers and their children and to impress upon fathers the full measure of their obligations” (U.S. Census). Now a day of celebration and – yes – gift giving, here are some tips to get your campaigns ready for the upcoming shopping rush to honor dear ol’ dads!
1. Know Your Numbers
We’ll help you out with this one. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, roughly 6 in 10 men in the U.S. are fathers – that’s 75 million! Of those, 54% have adult children who are at least 18 years old and 1 in 4 men are grandfathers.
2. Who’s Shopping?
An estimated 77% of Americans will celebrate Father’s Day (t: 1. Drive Sales, 2. Drive Traffic to Blog Content, and 3. Offer-Driven Creative. Get your ad campaigns ready: make sure your creative is relevant and up-to-date, reflecting the holiday and any sales or special offers (some tips in here: What NOT To Do: 6 Creative Practices to AVOID When Writing Your Next Native Headlines!). If you’re working with a platform like Bidtellect, we can optimize towards these goals for you, ensuring that your Father’s Day campaigns are bringing consumers to high-quality content and – most importantly – helping your bottom line.
4. What Kind of Gifts Are They Buying?
According to NRF spending data, here’s a ranking of Father’s Day Gifts based on highest spend:
- “Special Outing” gift (concert, sporting event or dinner) ($3.2 billion)
- Clothing ($2.2 billion)
- Gift cards ($2.1 billion)
- Consumer electronic ($1.8 billion)
- Home improvement supplies ($878 million)
Offer some gift ideas within each of these categories in a blog post or article and distribute it as Native Ads! For example, in the category of home improvement, you might go for some of the best acrylic prints to advertise as decorations within the home. Dads love this! They love little DIY projects and making their home their own. In other words, anything they can get their hands on, such as fixing something, making something from scratch, or even placing wallpaper in the interiors, they might be interested. Therefore, anything in this department would go down a treat no doubt. You could even go ahead and help him out by procuring some landscaping supplies like from suppliers who could provide you materials similar to gravel richmond va to beautify your driveway or garden! There is no greater pleasure than helping your dad out in the things he loves the most. Be it Father’s Day, or any normal day – this should never go out of practice. After all, it is the simple things that we do that matters the most to them. That said, we’re very lucky to have a host of options online these days, to give us some simple ideas that our dads would love, no matter which category we choose. This does two things: establishes you as a thought leader during the holiday and increases the likelihood of engagement and sales! (Just see those stats below).
⇒ Wondering what kind of article? Try a Listicle!
5. Content Matters
As we always say… Content matters. Consumers are much more likely to buy from a brand they trust, are an expert, or they have built a relationship with – especially when it comes to gifts for someone they care about! Content makes consumers 131% more likely to buy (Twitter via Nudge); content can help double website conversion rates from 6% to 12% (Shopify) and marketers who prioritize blogging are 13x more likely to generate a positive ROI (Shopify).
Happy Father’s Day!
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