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Zynga Is About To Lose Its Global Director Of Brand Advertising

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/sources-zynga-is-about-to-lose-its-global-director-of-brand-advertising-2012-2

Manny Anekal, the global director of brand advertising at Zynga, is leaving the company to become COO of Kiip, a firm that operates a network that places branded rewards inside mobile games for advertisers, according to two sources.

Anekal’s Linkedin page currently states he has been on extended medical leave from Zynga. He is expected at Kiip next week.

Kiip has 20 employees, is based in San Francisco, and its clients include Best Buy, Disney and Sony. The company inserts branded rewards inside mobile games for advertisers. When players reach a new level, for instance, Kiip can reward them with free merchandise from advertisers.

Anekal leaves Zynga after its sales and marketing budget rose to $234 million, according to its Q4 2011 results.

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Think headliner Madonna was the highlight of Sunday night’s Super Bowl halftime show performance?

Think again.

According to ClearSpring, the most tweeted about/Facebooked/e-mailed/printed/overall social-media’s most clicked upon celeb of the night was none other than Cee Lo Green.

Cee Lo beat out not only Madonna as the most talked about on the internet during the big game, but also Kelly Clarkson, M.I.A. and Nicki Minaj.

After taking the stage dressed as a band leader and dueting with Madonna on “Express Yourself” and the grand finale, “Like a Prayer,” Cee Lo fans freaked, causing his online presence to surge to over 2,000 percent above normal—and nearly double any other Super Bowl act.

Cee Lo couldn’t be reached for comment but we have a feeling we know what he would say to his competition and haters: “Forget You.”

Check out the chart below that proves Cee Lo’s online popularity:

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Ever thought you would have to read 21 books to get to the bottom of what caused the financial crisis?

Andrew Lo, an economist at MIT, has some bad news: it’s going to take at least 22.

Lo, a leading expert on hedge funds and financial engineering, has written a paper (h/t NPR) for the Journal of Economic Literature describing his experience reading 21 books on the crisis — nine by journalists, 11 by academics and one by a former Treasury Secretary.

His conclusion: In a field that prides itself on its scientific rigor (however dismal), the books reveal that alarmingly few facts about the crisis have been agreed upon. Was there too little or too much regulation? How much of a factor were low interest rates? No one’s been able to say conclusively.

“After each book, I felt like I knew less,” Lo told NPR’s Planet Money.

Economics, he says, has fallen well short of that standard when it comes to understanding the crisis:

“Many of us like to think of financial economics as a science, but complex events like the financial crisis suggest that this conceit may be more wishful thinking than reality.”

Read Andrew Lo’s Reading About the Financial Crisis: A 21-Book Review >

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Reality appears to have finally arrived at Procter & Gamble, the world’s largest marketer, whose $10 billion annual ad budget has hurt the company’s margins.

P&G said it would lay off 1,600 staffers, including marketers, as part of a cost-cutting exercise. More interestingly, CEO Robert McDonald finally seems to have woken up to the fact that he cannot keep increasing P&G’s ad budget forever, regardless of what happens to its sales.

He told Wall Street analysts that he would have to “moderate” his ad budget because Facebook and Google can be “more efficient” than the traditional media that usually eats the lion’s share of P&G’s ad budget.

This is coming from the man who increased P&G’s adspend by a staggering 24 percent over the two years through October 2011, even though sales rose only 6 percent in the same period.

Note that P&G’s revenues were up 4 percent to $22 billion in the quarter but the company’s costs for sales, general and administrative work were flat.

P&G’s staggering ad budget has become a bit of an issue among analysts. On the call, McDonald and his crew were asked about ad costs three different times! . McDonald eventually said:

As we’ve said historically, the 9% to 11% range [for advertising as a percentage of sales] has been what we have spent. Actually, I believe that over time, we will see the increase in the cost of advertising moderate. There are just so many different media available today and we’re quickly moving more and more of our businesses into digital. And in that space, there are lots of different avenues available.

In the digital space, with things like Facebook and Google and others, we find that the return on investment of the advertising, when properly designed, when the big idea is there, can be much more efficient. One example is our Old Spice campaign, where we had 1.8 billion free impressions and there are many other examples I can cite from all over the world. So while there may be pressure on advertising, particularly in the United States, for example, during the year of a presidential election, there are mitigating factors like the plethora of media available.

P&G’s Old Spice campaign is a textbook example of what the entire company should be doing. The problem is that the entire company isn’t doing it. Check out Mr. Clean’s Twitter stream, for instance. Oh, right—he doesn’t have one.

McDonald’s recent discovery that digital media is free comes after the long-delayed launch of Tide Pods, now scheduled for a month from now but with only a limited supply. It was originally planned for July 2011. The ad budget for that campaign is estimated at $150 million and will come from agency Saatchi & Saatchi.

The problem is that while P&G has struggled to get a single U.S. pod out the factory door, several of its competitors have already launched competing laundry pod products.

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