It’s that time of year again. The holiday shopping season has shifted into full gear, and so have the economists, analysts and retailers who wring their hands over things like Black Friday sales figures. Or those of its fake, and widely mocked, online counterpart, Cyber Monday (which is far from the busiest shopping day on the web — online sales at Amazon, for example, typically peak in mid-December).

Overall, a modest improvement over last year’s dismal performance is expected. Forrester Research projects an 8 percent rise in holiday sales online, up from the 5 percent growth rate last year. comScore sees growth at 3 percent, all but erasing the 3 percent drop last year. But while online retailers are sure to see stronger sales than their offline rivals, the desperate discounts happening across the board threaten to erode any profits they may have once hoped for this season.

For my money, the best indicator is the average consumer shopping budget. Despite all the hot items for sale, we’re still feeling the pinch of the economic downturn, and as such, budgets are back in vogue. A Gallup poll showed consumers plan to spend an average $638 per household this season, up $22 from last year. But a survey by the National Retail Foundation said they will spend $683 dollars, or a decline of 3.2 percent, following on the heels of an 8 percent drop in spending last year.

Think about that. The NRF — the trade group pushing the annual Cyber Monday charade — expects consumers to spend even less than last year. And with respected analysts publicly predicting a double-dip recession, such caution on the part of consumers is more likely to grow in December than abate.

To that end, retailers are responding the way they did last holiday season — with ultra-steep discounts early on. The price war that Wal-Mart is waging against Amazon may stretch consumers’ dollars, but it’s hell on other retailers, who must either match discounts or risk losing customers. Already, 2009 is shaping up to be a repeat of 2008, when retailers desperately slashed prices to entice wary consumers.

That is undoubtedly worse news for brick-and-mortar stores than it is for online stores, where operating costs are lower. Many big retailers like Wal-Mart and Best Buy are responding by pushing deep discounts on their web sites, but in doing do, they risk cannibalizing sales from their offline stores, while the costs of running those stores remains the same. Which means that even if overall holiday sales figures do increase by a few percentage points, profits at many retailers may decline or be eliminated entirely.

The Black Friday deals tracked on Twitter aren’t just a stream of bargains, they also measure the desperation retailers are already feeling. Gap’s site was offering sweaters at 50 percent off. Betsey Johnson took 40 percent off everything in its online store. Even Apple is getting into the deep-discount spirit.

Discovery-oriented sites like Twitter are helping to spread news about bargains, further boosting the appeal of online shopping among consumers, as Colin noted earlier this week. In Apple’s iTunes store, the second best-selling paid app last week was RedLaser, which scans barcodes and offers instant price comparisons with online sites.

As with last year, there is likely to be one outstanding success story in this bleak retail environment: Amazon. In an environment where penny-pinching consumers are driving down retail profits, Amazon – the master at thriving on razor-thin profit margins – is thriving. Goldman Sachs and Piper Jaffray recently raised their revenue estimates for Amazon, citing a rise in unique users and overall traffic.

As long as the economy remains weak, the progression of the retail industry remains clear: All retailers must become more like Amazon – low prices, tiny margins – or suffer a slow death.

My opinion on the below article:

I personally do not see a shift back to SMS advertising.  Working with one of the largest open mobile networks across Europe we see a huge increase in display and text link based advertising.  They work and work well.  Currently, SMS advertising can cost far too much.  CTR’s on SMS advertising generally are much less than display or text links.  SMS can cost an advertiser up to £200 CPM, whereas display and text links will vary from much lower CPM’s or CPC’s.  Whilst with SMS you can get reach that a branding campaign will demand, the majority of campaigns in the UK market this year have been DR.  Moving forward, I believe Network Operators will need to focus on more integrated campaigns across all mobile properties like: Display, Text Links, Video Pre & Post, Idle Screen, Voice Messages, SMS, MMS, Customer Service Messages and so on.

I believe agencies find mobile advertising a challenge because they are learning it is never just about selling an ad spot. Mobile advertising often forms part of a wider mobile marketing strategy tied in with CRM, Customer Acquisition and Engendering Loyalty.  In addition, it often forms part of a campaign that is integrated into traditional media which again presents further hurdles.  Therefore, when brands want and need to understand the entire spectrum and not just the advertising element many agencies struggle.    We can keep blaming lack of clarity on where the buying points are and lack of ad-serving capabilities and reporting but I think this is a weak argument.  All growing industries will have these kind of challenges.  The key should be more focused on how we can work better together, understand each others skills and how this can transform into combined positive output to the client.

To summarize, Mobile is so different to traditional media.  Historically speaking, it has always been ‘ONE FORMAT’ Print, Radio, TV or online.  Mobile is a whole world of different formats from one device to the next few thousand, all with different capabilities and don’t forget the users all come with different mindsets.  It requires specialist knowledge to effectively utilize this channel and understand the dynamics.  This is not knowledge that can be shared overnight and will take time for all to learn.

Whilst I agree it has been tough year from a recession perspective I would argue that mobile marketing and advertising budgets have grown and not been cut.  Well this is certainly what we are experiencing having a record year in the UK. As mobile budgets traditionally have been so small brands cut the bigger budgets in TV, Print, Radio and Online. If anything mobile budgets have grown this year and I certainly would anticipate huge growth in 2009 from 2008.

This is not going to happen over night.  Online took a good part of 11 years.

by Global Telecoms Business

Mobile operators have extensive data about their customers, so why aren’t they earning more revenue from advertising? The market seems as far away as ever, according to key participants in the business


Jay Seaton of Airwide: Trying to force-fit ads to
thousands of different handsets is an issue

Mike Short of Telefónica: Mobile advertising is
going to have to have a debate about reach and
responsibility

John Rands of WIN: Sometimes an agency puts
together a campaign and will do mobile as well

Neil Wentworth of mCentric: Brands are in the
dark. They have no idea how to access people by mobile

Why has mobile advertising not had the stunning success that many have been forecasting for so long? For years the mobile industry has looked for ways to earn revenue by targeting its users with advertising — and there has even been a whole operator, Blyk, which wanted to cut call costs to zero if its customers simply checked a few ads every day.

But little has been achieved, even with smartphones that could, in theory, deliver high-quality content to phone users.

Indeed, says Nick Lane, chief analyst at research company MobileSquared, where operators are achieving anything it’s via the 15-year-old technology of SMS. “We spoke to 30-35 operators around the world,” says Lane. “Just over 60% said they used SMS messaging as the foundation for next generation messages. A lot of agencies are going back to SMS. There’s a shift away from what people were saying 12 months ago.”

James Tagg, head of mobile at ad agency Starcom MediaVest, agrees: “It’s been a very tough world for mobile advertising this year,” he says. The recession means advertising budgets have been cut around the world “and mobile was the first to be cut — massively”.

One of the reasons is that mobile advertising still earns small revenues for agencies, which employ few specialists in the medium. “Some have only two people covering mobile, compared with 30 for print advertising. There’s only so much those people can do until the money is there. We’re not losing money but we’re not making huge money.”

And behind that, “most clients don’t really understand mobile”, he adds. Now’s the time to remedy that, he says: begin to adjust now “and you’ll be in a lot better position in two years”.

One of the key problems is a lack of information on which to make decisions, says Stewart Goldberg, executive chairman of Business Logic System. “The operators don’t have the same demographics about their base that the TV companies have.”

Mike Short, vice president of Telefónica Europe disagrees: “Some of the demographics that we have is a lot better — but it’s in a different format.” The mobile industry is working via the GSM Association and mobile marketing analyst ComScore to remedy that. “We can do age, location and subject,” he says.

Lane is not convinced: “Traditional advertising is very visible,” he says. And potential advertisers can easily get information about how much it costs to advertise. “If you want a rate card [for mobile advertising] you have to go down a long dark tunnel and sign a non-disclosure agreement.”

There is widespread ignorance among potential advertisers, says Neil Wentworth, director of sales at mCentric, which runs a service delivery platform for the industry. “Brands are in the dark. They have no idea how to access people by mobile,” he says.

It is starting to shift in agencies, says Alistair Hill, a senior analyst ComScore. Its work with the GSMA is aimed at “simplifying the process of buying”, so that agencies can see metrics that allow them to compare different types of advertising — including mobile with conventional, if that is the term, online.

Mobile is too often an addition to an existing ad budget, complains John Rands, managing director of WIN, which describes itself as “a dynamic enabler of entertainment, information and interaction services”. Sometimes a brand or an agency puts together a campaign “and will do mobile as well”, he says: “It’s the ‘as well’, and that might mean just putting a text number in the corner.”

It’s better in some countries, says Goldberg. “In south-east Asia and Australia there are millions of transactions executed using two-way text.”

Simeon Coney, vice president of business development at Adaptive Mobile, adds that in South Africa mobile advertising is starting to dominate, because of an underdeveloped traditional media business.

Many customers see mobile advertising messages as spam. “What’s considered as spam is personal,” says Jay Seaton, chief marketing officer of Airwide.

Coney believes the industry has to be careful, as governments might impose rules about what can and can’t be sent. “Governments will be putting the onus on operators,” he warns. “It will be a real challenge to the industry.”

Short says: “We’d rather have a simple set of rules. Mobile advertising is going to have to have a debate about reach and responsibility.” Child protection and parental controls will have to feature in that debate, he adds. “It’s now getting to ministerial level.”

According to Hill of ComScore, mobile advertising is still some way behind online advertising. “Everything on the internet has become contextual,” he says.

Lane also believes that the parallels with PC-based advertising should not be ignored: “All we’re doing on the mobile is browsing: email and social networking, and news, sport and weather.”

Goldberg, who has just had to extend his daughter’s mobile package to 1,000 texts a month, says: “We should have 11-year-olds on the boards of our companies.” Though Hill retorts that “the average age of the mobile media user is 35”.

Gather any group of enthusiasts for mobile advertising together — and this group was at an event hosted by Airwide — and you’ll soon hear stories about mobile advertising successes.

Unfortunately, most of these stories date from those optimistic times before the recession: such as BMW sending its car customers in Germany localised weather warnings by MMS, complete with a picture of each customer’s car in the right colour.

In theory, the industry has the data that could be enormously useful to advertisers — but Short points out that one of the problems is the sheer volume of it.

Goldberg sympathises: “The amount of data on the network is huge — 120 million transactions a day.” That’s the figure for the UK. “You’d need data warehousing the size of small countries. Operators have the data, but extracting the data is a non-trivial exercise. It just can’t be done in real time.”

Short emphasises the scale of the challenge: “We know the location of 50 billion text messages a year,” he says.

But operators haven’t explored new opportunities, suggests Goldberg. They would know the identity of 150,000 people attending a grand prix or other sports event, he notes. There’s potential there to use information to send them messages.

Mobile advertising, in theory, is a lot more economical than television advertising — which reaches many more people than could possibly be interested in a deal. With mobile, “you offer a deal only to people to want to offer the deal to”, he says.

One of the problems is that there is an advanced market for advertising in developed countries, says Seaton. “In developed markets there’s not such a need to innovate.”

Smartphones, if anything, make life for mobile advertisers complicated — simply because there are so many, built with different standards. “The market’s evolving quickly, with lots of new handsets,” says Tagg.

Seaton notes that this is why in some markets advertisers have relied on the simple technology of text messaging. “Trying to force-fit ads to thousands of different handsets is an issue. That’s why we’ll be having the same advertising discussions in two years.”

Goldberg returns to the theme that the industry is ill-informed about mobile advertising: “Operators and suppliers need to educate agencies and brands,” he says. “Many just don’t know what you can do.” That, he adds, is “why text is so good” — advertisers do understand that.

So how should the market move? “It’s up to the operators to expose their assets,” says Seaton. “There will be thousands of opportunities. Application developers can leverage all the assets, not just the 15% of smartphones.”

But Lane concludes with a sceptical note: “There’s hardly any money in mobile advertising and it dominates all our conversations,” he concludes. GTB

URL Link to Global Telecoms Business:

http://www.globaltelecomsbusiness.com/Article/2346535/Operators-still-waiting-for-ad-revenue.html

Well the cat was kinda let out of the bag yesterday when the Internets spoiled the news that Hulu had a huge month in October, according to comScore. So with that out of the way, let’s take a look at what else comScore tells us about online video viewing last month.

Overall, it was a record month for video views, with nearly 28 billion videos watched during the month. The number of unique viewers dipped slightly to 167 million in October from 168 million in September.

GoogTube’s stranglehold on the video views loosened slightly as its share of the videos viewed dropped to 37.7 percent from 40.2 percent in September (like we said, Hulu had a great month). Also breaking into comScore’s top ten rankings of videos viewed for the first time is Facebook (it appeared on the unique visitors top ten in June’s list). The social network generated more than 245 million video views to 41 million unique viewers in October.

On the ad network side, Tremor Media topped the list with a potential reach of 75 million viewers, followed by YuMe Video Network and Broadband Enterprises.

Hulu got a nice shot in the arm in October, according to the latest comScore numbers, indicating that newteevee is a lot like oldteevee in some ways. The premium content portal saw double digit growth in both streams and unique visitors, spurred by a new content partner in ABC (s DIS) and a new fall TV season, reports Ad Age.

For October, Hulu generated 856 million video streams, up 47 percent from September, says comScore. Unique visitors were up ten percent to 42.5 million, and the time spent per viewer jumped to 123 minutes, up from 92 minutes in September.

Hulu got its Christmas goose early thanks in part to new shows from ABC hits like Lost and Desperate Housewives, which had its first full month on the site, along with the new fall TV season, which was in full swing during October.

As Ad Age notes, Hulu’s viewing patterns are looking a lot like traditional TV, as traffic to the site dipped during the summer. Additionally, Hulu viewers are also attracted to hit, broadcast shows like Family Guy and Glee, and not long-tail shows. (Sorry, Airwolf!)

ComScore’s numbers are a ray of sunshine in what has been a cloudy couple of months for Hulu. The company has been under pressure from its network parents to add a subscription service, and there have been reports about bickering over ad sales. Hulu CEO Jason Kilar has even had to go out of his way to remind people that he’s a capitalist. Of course, we’re not sure why he’s let Hulu unleash a baffling new embed blocking initiative that could adversely affect this recent growth spurt.

We’ll see how Hulu stacks up in the overall online video view count landscape tomorrow, when comScore officially releases its October numbers.

Microsoft is holding talks with News Corporation and other media-companies to convince them to remove their news content from the Google search engine while continuing to feature their material on the Microsoft search engine. One source told the Financial Times that this initiative had originated with Keith Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. and that talks are in their initial stages. News Corp and Microsoft representatives refused to comment.

Ahora que vamos llegando al final de un año complejo quiero compartir con ustedes algunas cifras interesantes sobre mercadeo y estrategia digital que he estado leyendo y escuchando y que no sirven sino para reforzar el punto… Digital y alternativo es el camino.

Según un estudio cualitativo realizado por HubSpot a un grupo de PYMES , el costo por lead generado a través de la implementación de tácticas de inbound marketing es 61% más bajo que el de un lead obtenido usando táctica tradicional, adicionalmente esa misma audiencia afirmo que están invirtiendo hasta un 37% de su presupuesto en inbound marketing y también que han incrementado en 180% sus esfuerzos en desarrollar blogs y presencia en redes sociales y 36% en SEO y SEM cuando se les compara con empresas grandes logrando con esto los siguientes resultados:

Generación de leads con estrategia y táctica tradicional:

8% de los leads provienen de ferias y expos

7% por correo directo tradicional

9% por telemercadeo

Total de leads generados: 24% con outbound marketing (tradicional)

Leads generados con inbound marketing (digital)

16% por SEO

14% por email marketing

8% por redes sociales

13% por campañas de PPC

Total de leads generados: 51% de los leads

Con respecto a la redes sociales, para aquellos que aún piensan que esto es una moda, Comscore predice que este año cerrara con poco más de 629MM de usuarios en las distintas redes sociales y que habrá 1 Billón de usuarios para el 2012, también hemos ido descubriendo que los blogs forman parte integral de cualquier estrategia de inbound marketing y en muchos casos son incluso más efectivos que la presencia en redes sociales para obtener resultados y conversión.

Mashable.com sostiene que el mercadeo en móviles está siendo potenciado y debe su crecimiento reciente a las sinergias que se han ido logrando entre este y las redes sociales a través de las aplicaciones desarrolladas para ambos.

Por su lado Forrester Research  nos anuncia que un 27% de los usuarios de redes o medios sociales hacen uso de las aplicaciones para estas  lo que refuerza todo lo anterior.

Para cerrar complemento diciendo que America representa 10% del total de usuarios de internet en el mundo que ya está por 1.3 billones… Nada desestimable… Por cierto, lo más interesante de todo esto es que no importa si su estrategia y negocio es B to B o B to C, la efectividad es prácticamente igual.

Ahí me cuentan… Saludos!!!

Thanks to our partner Arendsoog, we can offer the following videos of Web Goes Mobile 4:

Microsoft has had discussions with News Corp over a plan that would involve the media company’s being paid to “de-index” its news websites from Google, setting the scene for a search engine battle that could offer a ray of light to the newspaper industry.

The impetus for the discussions came from News Corp, owner of newspapers ranging from the Wall Street Journal of the US to The Sun of the UK, said a person familiar with the situation, who warned that talks were at an early stage

However, the Financial Times has learnt that Microsoft has also approached other big online publishers to persuade them to remove their sites from Google’s search engine. News Corp and Microsoft, which owns the rival Bing search engine, declined to comment.

One website publisher approached by Microsoft said that the plan “puts enormous value on content if search engines are prepared to pay us to index with them”. Microsoft’s interest is being interpreted as a direct assault on Google because it puts pressure on the search engine to start paying for content.

“This is all about Microsoft hurting Google’s margins,” said the web publisher who is familiar with the plan. But the biggest beneficiary of the tussle could be the newspaper industry, which has yet to construct a reliable online business model that adequately replaces declining print and advertising revenues.

In a possible sign of negotiations to come, Google last week played down the importance of newspaper content. Matt Brittin, Google’s UK director, told a Society of Editors conference that Google did not need news content to survive. “Economically it’s not a big part of how we generate revenue,” he said.

News Corp has been exploring online payment models for its newspapers and has taken an increasingly hard line against Google. Rupert Murdoch, News Corp chairman, has said that he would use legal methods to prevent Google “stealing stories” published in his papers.

Microsoft is desperate to catch Google in search and, after five years and hundreds of millions of dollars of losses, Bing, launched in June, marks its most ambitious attempt yet. Steve Ballmer, chief executive of Microsoft, has said that the company is prepared to spend heavily for many years to make Bing a serious rival to Google.

Microsoft has sought to differentiate Bing by drawing in material not found elsewhere, though has not demanded exclusivity from content partners. Bing accounted for 9.9 per cent of searches in the US in October, up from 8.4 per cent at its launch, according to ComScore. James Murdoch, chairman and chief executive of News Corp Europe and Asia, hinted last week that the company was making progress with its online plans. “We think that there’s a very exciting marketplace, potentially a wholesale market place for digital journalism that we’ll be developing,” he said

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a243c8b2-d79b-11de-b578-00144feabdc0.html?ftcamp=rss

Los anunciantes han centrado sus esfuerzos en la medición del Post-Click, en lo que sucede después del click, pero la realidad es que la medición con sesgos lleva a conclusiones erróneas 

En Search (Google), el grueso de las conversiones vienen por las búsquedas de la marca, y el resto de acciones online alimentan Search 

Existe un porcentaje de las conversiones que se producen en usuarios impactados previamente por otro de los esfuerzos tácticos online llevados a cabo por la marca (Campañas de Gráfica en Online Media, acciones de e-mailing . . .).  Impactos previos al click y a búsquedas  

Existe un comportamiento previo al Post-Click, el Pre-Click.  Es necesario medir la Post-Impression ya que las acciones de Branding generan impactos de comunicación que influyen sobre el volumen de búsquedas de una marca en Google y otros buscadores, y sobre las conversiones que se producen gracias a la adquisición de tráfico desde dicho buscador

En el siguiente enlace encontraréis el PDF  “No podemos controlar aquello que no medimos”, donde presento de forma detallada las principales Fuentes de Información en Internet, y como explotarlas en beneficio de las ventas a través de este canal

Published in AdNews, website about adverting in Brazil, the comScore will establish its operations in Brazil.

After buy the Certifica, a Chilean company, the comScore ready to start business in the region. The company intends to offer the Media Metrix 360, your tool for traffic analysis.

See full article.

You can view/download the presentations of Web Goes Mobile 4 on Slideshare:

Comscore – Alistair Hill

Microsoft – Didier Ongena

London Calling – Andrew Grill

Pecha Kucha session:

Touring Mobilis – Steven Logghe

Netlog – Louis Jonckheere

Mobillion – Marc Schoutens

Corelio – Joris De Lannoy

MobileWeb – Danny Lein

Today was the 4th edition of the Web Goes Mobile seminar.
A massive turnout of about 250 business people participated in the discussion on “Web or App?”!

Check out some feedback on Twitter.

comScore has released it October 2009 Search Engine Rankings.

From comScore:

In October 2009, Americans conducted 14.3 billion core searches, with Google Sites accounting for 65.4 percent search market share, up from 64.9 percent in September. Microsoft Sites grabbed 9.9 percent market share, up 0.5 percentage points versus September.

October 2009 U.S. Core Search Rankings

Google Sites led the U.S. core search market in October with 65.4 percent of the searches conducted, followed by Yahoo! Sites (18.0 percent), and Microsoft Sites (9.9 percent). Ask Network captured 3.9 percent of the search market, followed by AOL LLC with 2.9 percent.

October 2009 Search Engine Rankings

No search engine market share surprises. However, comScore’s Expanded Search Rankings press release neglects to mention one major web property’s search query surprise -

October 2009 U.S. Expanded Search Rankings

In the October analysis of the top properties where search activity is observed, Google Sites led the search market with 13.5 billion search queries, followed by Yahoo! Sites with 2.7 billion queries and Microsoft Sites with 1.5 billion searches. Bing experienced the largest growth of the top ten expanded search properties with an 8-percent increase in query volume to more than 1.2 billion searches.

Expanded Search

Facebook’s search query volume dropped a whopping 14% from September 2009 to October 2009 – the largest drop of any of the major web properties comScore tracks.

Any ideas why?

Research firm comScore is helping Microsoft gaming division Massive track the impact of in-game ad campaigns on gamers’ online behaviour. The move is aimed at encouraging more brands to advertise in-game by proving such campaigns are cost-effective.

Preliminary research conducted by comScore using the new methodology on a number of recent Massive in-game campaigns showed that people exposed to in-game ads demonstrated the following behaviors when compared with a control group of people who were not exposed to the ads:

• 280 percent increase in visits to a TV channel’s Web site
• 125 percent increase in search queries for a movie rental brand and 57 percent spike in visits to its Web site
• 17 percent increase in visits to entertainment sites after seeing ads for a particular movi

Read more about this here

(Article Source: CNN Money.com)