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Adly Announces New CEO and Increased Value to Celebrities and Influencers

Bahram Nour-Omid Ph.D. Named Adly CEO Post Merger, Broadens Adly Offering

[LOS ANGELES, CA] May 12th 2014 - Following the merger with Nestivity, Adly announced today that Bahram Nour-Omid, Ph.D. will lead the combined company as CEO. The integration of the two technologies will create new opportunities for celebrities and influencers to capitalize their highly engaged and growing audiences by authentically endorsing branded digital experiences and content.

Nour-Omid, who brings deep experience in social technologies, said “Our combined offering will bring greater value to all parties involved; brands, influencers, and consumers. We plan to get back to the basics that made Adly great, and offer exciting new tools to increase the effectiveness of our marketing campaigns”

Going forward, Adly will continue to offer in-stream social advertising campaigns using data-driven audience targeting and engagement analytics. Additionally, an expanded technology and services offering that includes Nestivity’s social broadcasting and discussion archiving capabilities will be added.

“By bringing the platforms together we’re able to offer our customers new services to improve their social conversations. The new capabilities will greatly extend their relationships and help uncover new ones.” added Henry Min, who now serves as Chief Product Officer of Adly.

Current Nestivity services will be available uninterrupted under the Adly brand and new capabilities will be introduced in the coming weeks. For more information on Adly’s technology and services, contact [email protected]

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Technology Merger Strengthens the Impact of Social Media Marketing Campaigns

Adly and Nestivity Combine Influencers and Technology to Create an Enhanced Social Offering

[LOS ANGELES, CA] April 25th 2014 - Adly, the leading social advertising platform and Nestivity, a social engagement software company, announce an exciting merger. Adly’s extensive celebrity and influencer relationships and experience in social advertising is now supported by Nestivity’s software toolset that organizes and amplifies the reach of social conversations. This new offering will allow brands to leverage celebrities and established social media influencers to conduct social  marketing and direct sales in new, attention grabbing ways.

“By teaming up with one of the pioneers of social media monetization, Nestivity is able to leverage Adly’s global influencer network and its unique data insights to deliver brands highly targeted impressions,” said Bahram Nour-Omid, Nestivity’s Chairman. “We are pleased to combine our strengths to meet the demands of the marketplace – facilitating social interactions beyond conversations to transactions.”  

Adly will be integrated with Nestivity’s content hub that can turn virtually any type of media (slides, live video, etc.) into a dedicated social conversation with a direct call to action.  Adly will also offer its proprietary brand analytics to aid brands in both discovering and reaching targeted audience segments .  This allows brands to isolate and focus on consumer engagement while cutting through the noise common to social media marketing.

“Nestivity’ s software was exciting to us because it adds both organization and reach to social conversations” said Mark Suster of Adly investor Upfront Ventures.  “Adly’s strong suite of advertising solutions combined with Nestivity’s social engagement tools will help deliver higher-value and more comprehensive social marketing experiences to both brands and consumers.”

The combined company will allow brands to both amplify and focus their social campaigns, offers, and promotions through celebrity and influencer driven conversations. The enhanced  platform will enable brands to more effectively reach their existing audiences through open conversations across social media.  Further, brands can leverage an extensive roster of celebrities and influencers to participate in these socially charged conversations.  By selecting influencers with followers that align with their target customers, brands can extend their social media conversations by hundreds of millions of high quality impressions.

In the coming weeks, Adly will be enhancing their service offering and expanding the number of brand and celebrity conversations using this enhanced technology.  For more information on this new marketing opportunity, contact [email protected]

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Billions of Viewers, Millions of Dollars, Countless Conversations: One Scorecard

While the Super Bowl was a blowout, the game’s ads provided a cornucopia of excitement and social media fodder. From Bud Light to Beats Music, world-class brands not only delivered creative spots, but they also used a strategy for which Adly leads the market: leveraging celebrity power to galvanize and humanize brand equity. To drive home this point, 40% of this year's Super Bowl ads featured celebrities. 

We evaluated the most prominent celebrity-infused ads and their effects on social media. The results can be seen in the infographic below. Here are some highlights:

Grade A

Bud Light

The “random guy’s best night ever” spot featured Don Cheadle with a llama and Arnold Schwarzenegger sporting a 70s-style ping-pong outfit.

The result was over 3 million tweets and 7 million Facebook interactions.

Time Warner Cable

Time Warner upped the ante with a sleek carnival-like setting featuring multiple celebrities, including Diddy, Drake, and Anna Paquin.

The result was over 23 million tweets and 35 million Facebook interactions.

Grade B

Beats Music

Beats Music expanded its demographic reach by using the broad appeal of Ellen Degeneres.

The result was 25 million tweets and 4 million Facebook interactions.

Clearly, using celebrity power supercharges marketing and harnesses more of the potential of social media. In the 12 months leading up to the next Super Bowl, we’ll for sure see many more celebrities endorsing brands and being ambassadors on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media outlets. And this is where Adly will be leading the charge. 

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The Super Bowl: It Lasts a Lot Longer Than Just One Day!

The Super Bowl is already world-famous for its ads. These spots from the globe’s biggest brands often overshadow the excitement in the actual game.

But in our modern social media age, Super Bowl ads have taken on an entirely new life of their own, beyond Super Sunday. Now, it’s not just about the watching the commercials during the game. Rather, it’s about catching teasers beforehand, watching the commercials in pre-release, and sharing the videos via social media for many months after the game has aired.

The New York Times reports that “what used to be a one-day event, with some postgame water-cooler chat, is now an eight- to 13-week experience,” according to Google’s VP of Brand Solutions, Lucas Watson. For example, for 2013’s Super Bowl, ads on YouTube were viewed more than 80 million times before the game. Whereas there used to be huge anticipation about an ad before the game, now the cat’s out of the bag early for millions of people. Also, according to the Times and Watson, “commercials uploaded to YouTube before the game generated about 3.4 times more views on average than commercials that were released on the day of the game.”

During the game, real time social media can have a huge impact as well. Take for instance Oreo’s brilliant tweet during the Super Bowl blackout at the New Orleans Superdome. When the stadium went dark for over half an hour, the brand tweeted “Power Out? No problem” with an image of an Oreo ad featuring the copy, “You can still dunk in the dark.” The tweet went viral and was retweeted over 15,000 times. On Oreo’s Facebook page, the image garnered over 20,000 likes and was shared over 6,500 times. Oreo’s clever messaging took advantage of the moment and translated into real time engagement and exposure. 

Social media also produces an amplification effect for ads that is awesome for brands. Budweiser’s popular “Brotherhood” ad from the 2013 Super Bowl experienced an incredible shelf life after the game. Since February 2013, when the game was played, the ad has been shared over 2.5 million times and viewed over 15.5 million times.

Moreover, this trend of sharing and viewing long after the Super Bowl airs is only getting stronger. The most popular ads of the 2013 game were shared 30 times more than the most popular ads for the 2010 game. Other interesting stats about Super Bowl ad dynamics: 

For brands, these trends reinforce the power of social media.  Social media enables true measurement of the water cooler effect. Create a strong ad and it will continue to thrive, be shared, and compel audiences for a long time after its debut. This is a multiplier effect not only in terms of number of people reached, but also in terms of the shelf life of an advertisement or brand strategy.

It’s very Super, indeed.

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This Will Be the Year! Really!

2014 will be unlike any year before it. But in some respects, it will be just like any other year, particularly in regard to our New Year’s resolutions and perseverance, or lack thereof, to maintain them.

With social media data, however, we now actually have some interesting ways to track what people are resolving to do differently in 2014. Twitter had about 350,000 tweets about New Year’s Resolutions. Here’s how some of the data from those opinions looked:

Almost half of the people who posted resolved to exercise and be healthier

Fewer than 3% resolved to save more money or make more money

Only about 1% (ouch!) resolved to be kinder to others

Almost half said resolutions are lame

Additionally, looking at social media posts reveals some interesting resolution trends over the past few years. For example, resolutions are becoming more positive and happy, with more people aiming to improve quality of life rather than amass material wealth.

Physical fitness always seems to be one the most popular topics for resolutions, but mental wellness is emerging as a trend, with more people stating that they want to read more in 2014. The ubiquity of “finding love” is always prevalent in New Year’s Resolutions, although this year the number of resolutions to “find a boyfriend” more than doubled the resolutions to “find a girlfriend.” Good news for guys in the single scene, perhaps. 

For marketers, awareness of these data and trends is critical to timely, effective strategies. Tapping into the social consciousness when topics are relevant can greatly increase the efficacy of a marketing campaign. Adly is here to help reveal and leverage these trends, along with using celebrity power to boost brands. As a result, we can help make branding and marketing more precise and powerful. And that’s not a resolution—that’s a fact.

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What a Year!

Social media took over water cooler talk and the general popular consciousness in 2013. From the ubiquity of Facebook and Twitter to buzzworthy acquisitions and IPOs, the social media landscape was in the spotlight, changing the nature of how we connect with each and how brands reach audiences.

The social media highlights of 2013 were plentiful. The biggest events included Snapchat declining a $3 billion offer from Facebook (after Facebook paid $1 billion for Instagram in 2012) and Twitter raising over $2 billion in its IPO. In no particular order, we’ve compiled a list of the other major events that we think were the headline stealers over the past 12 months:

Launch of Vine

Oreo Super Bowl Campaign - Lights Out

Launch of video on Instagram

Facebook introduces Hashtags

Instagram gets to 100 million users

Twitter/Nielsen Ratings

Instagram introduces Ads

Apple buys Topsy

Pinterest includes places, rich pins, and analytics

LinkedIn introduces LinkedIn Pulse

Twitter announces media-enriched Twitter Cards

Dow Jones drops 150 points seconds after the AP’s Twitter account is hacked and  messages about President Obama being injured in an attack appear

Apple shares jump 5% after investor Carl Icahn tweets about his large position in the company

Warren Buffet gets a Twitter account

Alibaba invests $586 million in Weibo, China’s top microblogging service

We of course don’t know what’s in store for social media in 2014, but we think it’s safe to assume it’s going to be a wild and eventful ride, perhaps even more so than 2013. Here’s to the excitement of the next frontier!

Happy holidays and New Year from everyone at Adly!

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Battle of the Giants! Twitter vs. Facebook

Thanks to Twitter and Facebook, the words “tweet” and “like” have become ubiquitous in our modern culture consciousness, and for definitions that are entirely new and that are the touchstones of modern technology. Combined, the two companies, which are located just 30 miles apart from each other in the Bay Area’s Silicon Valley, have a total market capitalization of about $140 billion and compete for supremacy of the $11 billion U.S. social media market (not to mention international markets). Twitter has about 220 million active users, while Facebook has over 1 billion. Beyond vying for the social media audience, Twitter and Facebook compete in multiple other areas, such as mobile advertising, international expansions, celebrity and corporate branding platforms, and hiring the top developers and executives.

Twitter and Facebook’s focus on celebrity and entertainment partners is particularly interesting. Twitter was a first mover here, cultivating relationships with celebrity. It is indeed rare to tune into a TV show or see a movie trailer without seeing a corresponding twitter handle accompanying the promotion. Although Facebook is catching up with influencers, it is launching a tool that will make it easier for celebrities and big brands to chat with their fans, ala Twitter. Facebook’s massive scale ensures that its platform will remain relevant with celebrity and entertainment for years to come.

Here at Adly, we see both platforms are realizing that celebrities are not only the largest publishers on the social networks, but that they also generate an emotional connection with their fans. This enduring, powerful connection is the Holy Grail to Fortune 500 brands, and it guarantees that that value of celebrities will continue to increase as social media evolves. 

Ultimately, the social media market is so large that there might be enough room for two winning giants. Think of Facebook as a modern day CBS and Twitter as ABC. But as Twitter and Facebook continue to pursue the same if not similar audiences, it will be interesting to see if one company becomes a more prominent choice for marketing and communications.

Whatever the outcome, you can be sure that Adly will be there to leverage both sites to create the best social media campaigns for celebrities and big brands. 

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Old School vs. New School

Adly recently researched the marketing dynamics of two major NBA dynasties—the Old School L.A. Lakers and the New School Miami Heat. Sports fans and fantasy leagues notwithstanding, comparing the social media and marketing impact of old school and new school sports brands yielded some interesting results.

Not surprisingly, dominant audiences for both are sports fans. But, the Old School also is appealing to other audiences, such as pet lovers and techies. Additionally, while the New School group has a strong association with sports related businesses, the Old School is compelling in areas of more diverse interests such as travel, fashion and entertainment. Let’s see if these dynamics change for the New School as time goes by and their brands grow.

Moreover, this infographic demonstrates how Adly can collect and analyze data to gain critical insights for establishing the optimal marketing strategies for brands, products, and services. 

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2nd Screen Conversations, Primetime Opportunities

The “2nd screen” of social media is quickly becoming an integral part of the television industry. From marquee sports events to hyped TV series finales, viewers are taking to Twitter, Facebook, and other social media channels in real time to chat about their experiences and opinions. For networks, content producers, and advertisers, this burgeoning 2nd screen represents extraordinary opportunities to engage consumers and build brands.

Nielsen’s SocialGuide reported that 600,000 people posted over 1.2 million tweets about the “Breaking Bad” finale. Likewise, Facebook reported that 3 million people discussed the “Breaking Bad” finale on its platform. The true accuracy and relevancy of the data, however, is somewhat questionable, as the 1.2 million tweets included retweets and the Facebook data included comments on posts as well as likes.

Regardless of the true precision of the data, there’s no denying that millions of people are using social media as an adjunct experience that is becoming as important as the TV program itself. Nielsen estimates the average audience for Twitter messages on the topic of a TV show is 50x the number of people posting about the show. That being said, if 1,000 people post about a show, about 50,000 people will see those posts.

As these market dynamics surge, Twitter, Facebook, and other social media outlets are aggressively pursuing strategic arrangements with TV networks and content creators. This is especially true for sports, which garners incredible viewer engagement. According to Nielsen’s SocialGuide, sporting events account for only 2 to 3 percent of TV programming, but are the catalysts for about 50 percent of TV related Twitter activity.

With this in mind, it is more important than ever before for brands to leverage social media in their marketing. Moreover, as social media strategies move to harness TV programming more effectively, using celebrities, from pro athletes to TV personalities, as brand ambassadors becomes critical. These are the strategies that can yield breakthrough marketing results and where Adly is a market leader. 

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What I Really Care About Is Her Personality

When it comes to social media, big brands across the globe put up a great front that looks wonderful—fancy designs, “presence” on all the right platforms, frequent content creation. But many brands miss the same things that teenagers and forlorn lovers everywhere battle with: it’s not about the looks, it’s about the personality.

Celebrities seem to understand this element of social media, which is why posts from pop star divas and famous athletes almost always garner significantly more attention than content from Fortune 100 brands. Why? Because people find a celebrity’s personality engaging. This is the crux of the issue.

When a pop start tweets or posts to Facebook—take for example Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, or Kanye West—followers know what to expect because they identify with the celebrity’s ethos. This is not about “right” or “wrong” or about agreeing or disagreeing with what is being said. Rather, this is about finding something interesting about the speaker’s personality and wanting to hear that voice. 

Brands struggle to find that voice.

Brands also can learn from two key elements of how celebrities approach social media.

Authenticity. Would a pop star diva endorse lawn care products? Probably not. Likewise, brands need to keep the content they produce relevant to their products and audience.

Go Easy on the Hard Sell. Brands who are all about selling, and not connecting, miss golden opportunities to engage with their audience. Sales will happen after the connections occur. Audiences go to social media because they care about the personality of whoever (or whatever) is posting content.

As brands spend more time attempting to understand the mindset of celebrities within the context of social media, they’ll gain insights into how to create meaningful and enduring connections with their customers. On a similar note, as brands leverage celebrities and put recognizable and appropriately relevant names behind endorsements and social media campaigns, they can attach their products to personalities that audiences can identify with.

So the next time you see a diva post something, contemplate the importance of personality in social media. This is what we do daily at Adly, and it’s one of the reasons we are a global leader in helping brands engage their audiences.

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Capitol Hill Might Be Silent, But Social Media Is Louder Than Ever

The calamitous government shutdown has affected the lives of hundreds of thousands of employees and is threatening an already fragile global economy. With our incorrigible politicians on forced hiatus, Capitol Hill all of a sudden is eerily quiet. But how about social media? Well, when the government shuts down, social media blows up. From Twitter to Facebook to the blogosphere, people across the country have taken to social media to express their humor and rage, over the shutdown. Some of the posts and tweets have already been memorialized by the popular culture. Daily News’ image of “House of Turds",  tweets such as “Has anyone just tried turning the government off then back on again?”, and hashtags such as #dearcongress have spurred a feverish deluge of comments across the political and comedy spectrums. Beyond providing a wealth of sidesplitting laughs, the commentary around the shutdown once again proves the importance and extraordinarily far reach of social media. People everywhere now have public forums in which to express their perspectives, to communicate broadly and specifically about the most pressing topics of the moment. So while politicians eviscerate the government and the economy, regular citizens can eviscerate the political process via social commentary. It goes to prove: when one door shuts, another opens.

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Fashionably Social

  New York Fashion Week has undoubtedly become a media entity unto itself. From couture fashion and celebrity-filled parties to a deluge of news outlets and journalists, this week is now as much about media as it is about the actual fashion.

This year over 80 designers unveiled their collections for viewers around the globe via elaborate shows and live-streaming events. A wide range of designers presented backstage footage from their shows using Facebook, Instagram, Google+, Tumblr, Twitter, Vine, and other social networks. And all of this is of course in addition to the plethora of journalists and bloggers reporting in real-time from front row seats.

Tommy Hilfiger’s social media campaign during NY Fashion Week, for example, generated over 200 million impressions on Twitter and Instagram, yielding a 230% increase in social media impressions over brand’s previous show. The campaign included exclusive photos, videos, runway content, real-time concierge responding incoming content requests, and a 90-foot digital installation that projected real-time streams of social commentary. The campaign also featured a content distribution hub that gave access to Tommy Hilfiger’s Spring 2014 collection, including photos, videos, press releases, music playlists, set details, and more.

As NY Fashion Week 2014 demonstrated, social media is quickly becoming the nexus of branding, experiential marketing, information sharing, and next generation media distribution. And for industries such as fashion, the ability to connect to consumers during marquee events (such as Fashion Week) is critical to brand engagement. This is where Adly thrives. Our unique social media platform can help all brands—from clothing to technology to CPG—be fashionably social.

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Adly COO/CFO Featured on Women 2.0

Being a working mom in today’s uber-demanding and lightening-fast business world is one of the toughest jobs imaginable. Lucky for us at Adly, Ronette Kite—our COO/CFO—takes this challenging role head-on and makes it work, not just for her family but for all of her employees, too.

Ronette recently was featured on Women 2.0, a media company at the intersection of women, entrepreneurship, and technology. Her article discusses the challenges of balancing a career and family life, and the importance of knowing your limits. You can read the piece at http://women2.com/know-your-limitations-says-ceo-mother-of-two/.

At Adly, Ronette manages Sales Operations, Finance and Administration.  She also handles all Talent and Entertainment relations, the lifeblood of the Adly platform. Previously, she was the VP of Finance and Controller at PriceGrabber.com.

With people like Ronette leading the charge at Adly, we know we’re in good hands!

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The New Key for Brands: Social Media as a Driver for CPG Sales

We recently blogged about the effect Twitter is having on television programming and ratings. Well, the effect of Twitter, and social media in general, is becoming paramount in all businesses, especially Consumer Packaged Goods.

Research firm Datalogix just released a study that measured the impact of organic and paid Twitter activity (Promoted Tweets) across categories such as beverages, food, wellness, household products, and alcohol for 35 CPG brands. Here are some of the study’s main points:

Users who engaged with a brand’s Promoted Tweets bought more from that brand than an identical control group, resulting in a 12% average sales lift.

Those who simply viewed the Promoted Tweets, without interacting, saw a 2% average sales lift.

A brand’s organic Tweets led to an 8% average sales lift.

Consumers exposed to Promoted Tweets purchased 29% more from that brand than followers seeing organic Tweets alone. 

As an indication of the power of using celebrities in branding and social media, the upscale beauty brand Living Proof recently launched an ad campaign with actress Jennifer Aniston. Aniston, who has been approached by countless other beauty brands but chose to partner with Living Proof, currently is featured in a webisode series for Living Proof.

Link to webisode -- http://www.livingproof.com/jen/obsessions/

Since the Aniston campaign, Living Proof’s brand awareness has more than doubled—up 140% according to the company—and for the first time the company entered the top 300 on Total Beauty's "Share of Audience" report, which ranks brands based on web traffic they generate at review site TotalBeauty.com.  

These studies provide compelling implications, namely that brands that actively communicate with their consumer base via social media have seen a direct impact on sales. Social media plus celebrity endorsement has proven to further catapult sales.  This might seem obvious to many social media evangelists, but having specific data proves that this is an area that Brand marketers should be investing in.

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Tweeting, Tuning In, and the Evolution of TV

Social media is redefining and revolutionizing the way we consume all types of media. It’s no longer about a single screen; it’s about using multiple screens simultaneously to digest information and then immediately communicate about it. For example, television—that venerable bastion of the old guard—is interestingly evolving with Twitter as a driving force in viewership.

According to recent study by Nielsen and SocialGuide, which is a joint between Nielsen and McKinsey & Co. that captures Twitter activity for all U.S. TV programming, increases in tweet volume boosted ratings for 29% of TV episodes (221 primetime broadcast episodes were studied). Conversely, increases in live TV ratings boosted tweets about the show for 48% of the sampled episodes.

So, more social media action in the Twitter universe can drive people to watch a specific show, and more people watching a show can drive up the number of tweets about that program. That seems fairly intuitive. But, there are popular and significant TV shows that demonstrate this intuition isn’t always accurate.

For example, three recent shows were huge topics of conversation on Twitter: the first airing of “Sharknado,” Oprah’s Lance Armstrong, and last fall’s MTV's Video Music Awards. All three of these programs blew up in the Twitter universe, but saw no parallel uplift in ratings.

Researchers can’t really explain these findings. From the Nielsen study, we can see that Twitter activity as of now does not increase ratings more than two-thirds of the time. But, there are some important elements to consider here. The study was for only 221 episodes, which is significant but by no means comprehensive. Also, Twitter by its nature is community-centric; we often follow and are followed by people who share the same interests and opinions. Thus, targeted niches are integral to how this cause-and-effect system works.

As social media becomes an even more prevalent part of our lives, its effects on other media will only increase in breadth and depth. Perhaps one way to view the Nielsen study is to consider what can be done to help tweets more effectively drive TV ratings. For example, if particular celebrities were tweeting about an episode of programming that appealed to a specific niche, the effect on ratings could be more pronounced. Of course, this is where the Adly social media platform can be tremendously powerful.

For now, the jury may be out on how exactly tweeting and TV ratings affect each other and to what extent. Nonetheless, no one can deny that Twitter and other social media channels are fundamentally changing the way we experience entertainment, share our opinions, and connect with each other. Would “Sharknado” have become such a widespread phenomenon without social media? Almost definitely not.

So the next time you’re tweeting and watching TV at the same time, remember that your influence is much greater than you realize, and that your influence is only going to grow.

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Adly Heats It Up at iCR8 Summer Boot Camp

Adly recently volunteered their time and energy to go to Dallas and participate in the Marcus Graham Project’s (MGP) iCR8 Summer Boot Camp Program on July 16.

MGP is a national network of diverse professionals that have purposed themselves in developing the next generation of thought leadership within the advertising, media, and marketing industries. Bringing diversity and a new supply of young talent into these professions, MGP celebrated the 5th year of its summer program, which featured 14 aspiring marketing, advertising, and media students from all over the United States and across the globe.

These talented and energized individuals came together at iCR8 to launch an ad agency and were given the opportunity to strategize concepts and develop marketing and advertising plans for two clients, Falling Whistles and Lisnr. The Falling Whistles campaign, which focused on peace in Congo, featured whistles as symbols of protest, encouraging people to be a “a whistleblower for peace.” The Lisnr campaign aimed to change the way that consumers experience audio by turning what has previously been a passive experience into an interactive engagement platform.

Adly worked with talented young students and offered social media marketing solutions that leveraged the influence of celebrities to build into their strategic marketing plans. They discussed how the evolution of social media allows for deeper digital relationships between celebrities and their fans, and how these connections translate into effective opportunities for brands to reach their consumers in the social stream. 

Adly divided the students into two groups and challenged them to strategize a celebrity activation plan for both Falling Whistles and Lisnr. They walked the students through key steps of the Adly process and helped them define the target audience for each brand, explore which celebrities to leverage based on campaign objectives, and ideate creative branded content authentic to the celebrity publishers they decided to leverage. 

Adly wrapped up the activity by having each group present its campaign solutions and share the rationale behind the choices they made in each step of the process. The students were excited to develop and integrate Adly's in-stream social marketing solution into the media plans they were pitching to Falling Whistles and Lisnr at the end of the leadership program.

Adly’s participation in the iCR8 Summer Boot Camp Program is another example of its leadership in social media and marketing. Adly is not only leveraging relationships with more than 2,000 celebrities who then can be matched with relevant brands; the organization also is using its knowledge, time, and skills to advance the next generation of marketing professionals.

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Adly CEO Breaks It Down for Bloomberg News

Adly CEO Walter Delph recently was featured on Bloomberg News to discuss how technology companies are using celebrities to enhance Internet and social media marketing strategies. As the leader of America’s top social media marketing platform, Walter had plenty of insights into this compelling and timely topic.

In regard to HTC’s enlistment of Robert Downey, Jr. and Samsung’s partnership with Jay-Z, Walter noted that both companies are trying to drive sales in an uber-competitive marketplace. For example, HTC is losing market share and signed Downey, Jr. to a two-year, $12 million deal to boost its prominence and gain more mass market traction. Downey, Jr. is relevant because he’s in the Zeitgeist as a current blockbuster star, he’s perfect for a smartphone because he’s intelligent and witty, and his onscreen characters tend to be tech savvy.

But HTC also runs some risk with this endorsement, taking into account Downey, Jr.’s colorful and sometimes less than honorable past. (The Adly platform, however, provides an effective antidote to such exposure as its celebrity activation enables the opportunity to spread marketing dollars over several celebrities to endorse a brand.)

Samsung, meanwhile, wants to gain market share from Apple, and hopes to do so by tapping into the hip-hop market via Jay Z. Jay-Z's deal includes 1 million free music downloads of his music for Samsung smartphone users, and Samsung will receive exposure and cross-promotion with his new album, Magna Carta Holy Grail.

This is a great example of a deal involving both cash components and cross-promotion. Samsung’s partnership with Jay-Z also is a brand extension for both entities, as Jay-Z has a licensing business, marketing ventures, a restaurant, and other business projects.

Beyond tech companies, Walter discussed how other organizations are pursuing celebrity endorsement strategies. Take a look at Sprint with the NBA Playoffs and Canon with Ashton Krutcher. Likewise, Adly is at the cutting edge of facilitating how celebrities endorse products today, whether in technology or other areas. Adly helps celebrities find the right products to endorse and helps brands find the right celebrities to endorse them, via Adly’s unique “Match Me Up Tool.”

Adly has established relationships with more than 75,000 influencers and celebrities, who then can be matched to relevant brands. The platform also fosters deeper conversations and connections, which generate reach that is earned and legitimate, as opposed to paid for or sponsored. Adly has run over 30,000 branded conversations with over 200 brands, including AT&T, Warner Bros, Samsung, American Express, and AOL.