Interesting Read: Drake Morton

Relevance Is Overrated

Do you care about your customers? (Question from Wisdm.Biz)

by Morgan Stewart, Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Marketers, especially email marketers, are obsessed with the topic of relevance. Of course, there are good reasons for this obsession. Messages targeted to subscribers based on their interests yield higher response rates. Too many irrelevant messages increase the likelihood people will unsubscribe from future email messages.

In recent years, I have become obsessed with the question, “What companies do customers think do the best job marketing to them?” After considering the thousands of responses received through surveys, focus groups, and one-on-one interviews, something occurred to me: relevance is overrated.
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Good Read: Drake Morton

Six Ways to Increase Digital Video Revenue

by Steve Robinson , Thursday, April 21, 2011

With demand for streaming content clearly established, publishers have shifted from testing digital video advertising to bringing ad revenues toward parity with broadcast. Most publishers face two big hurdles to expanding revenues: Providing enough inventory to meet growing demand and fulfilling sold campaigns efficiently.

Both of these challenges result from an imbalance in the digital video ad market supply and demand. When it comes to inventory, premium publishers are typically only selling three to four pre-roll ads per show in digital video, compared to seven or eight in TV, and as such are only making a fraction of the revenues.

Additionally, although they may believe they have reached “sold out” video ad inventory status, most publishers leave money on the table because they simply can’t fulfill their ad orders in a timely manner. Think of the situation like this: You go to a shoe store and the clerk informs you the store is sold out of shoes. However, it’s not that they are actually “sold out.” The real problem is that the retailer couldn’t get the shoes delivered from the manufacturer to the store and into the inventory system fast enough for you to purchase them.
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Good Read: Drake Morton

Behavioral Targeting And Paid Search

by Roger Barnette , Thursday, April 21, 2011

Paid search has a blind spot. Unlike display advertising, paid search marketers do not have the ability to do impression-level (or user-level) creative and bid optimization.   Because of this limitation, search marketers have not gravitated towards user-level analysis and understanding and instead focus more on keyword level understanding.  As performance-based digital marketing channels are converging, this “blind spot” for search marketers is becoming a large issue.

Proper user behavioral analysis includes understanding the ads that a user has viewed (media attribution) as well as the user’s interaction on a marketer’s web site.  Too few marketers have implemented cross-channel media attribution.  Even fewer can tie together attribution with user behavior online.  The upside for marketers who can do both is huge.

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Good Read: Drake Morton

Email Decision-Making: Beyond Revenue or

Best Practices

by Loren McDonald, Thursday, April 21, 2011

“Where should I put the unsubscribe link?” “Should I use a prechecked box to increase opt-ins?” “Should I send email to the addresses we collected via business cards gathered at trade shows three years ago?”

Whenever someone asks questions like these about email marketing, the answer has seemingly been pretty easy: “It depends, so test it. When in doubt, follow the generally accepted best practice.”

But, like everything else in the email world, I believe the conversation has become much more complex, and the easy answer often isn’t the right one.

At one time, we might have cited the best practice as the only way to answer questions like these or to plan out an email program. That might be the right answer if you work in an optimal situation, with an understanding management, a clean list, a healthy budget and so on.
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Good Read: Drake Morton

 More On The New Time Lag:

Not Your Father’s Metric Any More

by Anto Chittilappilly , Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Today’s more sophisticated online consumers — coupled with today’s more multichannel marketers — have created a marketing ecosystem where the traditional definition of “lag time” is no longer sufficient.   Simply put, limiting one’s analysis to the time between the last interaction with an online display ad and an eventual conversion, is like putting blinders on — effectively ignoring other “time factors” such as:

·       Time lag from First Impression to First Conversion

·       Time lag from Last Impression to First Conversion

·       Time lag from First Click to First Conversion

·       Time lag from Last Click to First Conversion

·       Time lag from First Website Visit to First Conversion (more…)

Good Read: Drake Morton

Mixing Topical & Talent-Driven Content To

Build Distribution For Content Owners and Marketers

by Ashkan Karbasfrooshan , Monday, April 18, 2011

With so many professionals expecting 2011 to become the year that online video goes mainstream with marketers and finally garners the ad dollars to reflect that fact, content owners and distributors are facing inversely related challenges that prevent them from growing faster.

While ad dollars continue to flow away from print, television and online display (and to a lesser extent, search) to online video, there is a dearth of premium, brand-safe, click-to-play ad inventory available.

The Haves (Distribution) Tend to Have Not (Content Ownership)
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Excellent Read: Drake Morton

Does Advertising And Digital Behavior Lack

A Unified Theory And Method For Measurement And Analysis?

by Judah Phillips , Friday, April 15, 2011

Major brainpower and capital is spent measuring digital behavior in the context of the performance of customer acquisition sources.  I mean referrers, like search (seo/sem), crm, emails, and other forms of paid, owned, and/or earned media;and, then spending mental energy and money optimizing digital customer experience for conversion and/or retention.  Digital analytical evolution over the last several years should no longer support a focus only on the linear flow of acquisition to conversion to loyalty.  The devolution of the “funnel” metaphor (are we not measurers?) makes sense because of the complexity of the digital and non-digital ecosystem, which has a multitude of customer touchpoints that lead to value-generating customer performance.  Do you believe the linear “funnel” is insufficient?   Is it really a “tumbler”?
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Need to Read: Drake Morton

Down the QR Code Rabbit Hole

by Steve Smith , Thursday, April 14, 2011

“What the hell are you looking for?” barks my fiancée in her now-familiar bride-to-be tone of impatience. Four weeks out from a wedding and everything takes on new urgency and little things get writ large. “I am not marrying a shoe fetishist, am I?”

Well, while she shopped for the right pair to match the wedding dress, I was rooting among the shelves for QR codes. I admit that a guy taking phone cam pictures of shiny black stilettos is going to raise some questions. But my understanding was that Macy’s had been instituting in-store mobile codes that shoppers could activate.

“Focus, please! Or I will call security on you,” she warned.
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Need to Understand: Drake Morton

Uniting Search and Display for

Stronger Results

APRIL 13, 2011

Search and display bring distinct strengths to the marketing table and typically complement each other. Too often, though, separate, siloed groups within companies buy and measure the two interactive ad formats. Integrating search and display can bring greater efficiency and greater understanding of how well marketing efforts are working.

Tools for integrating display and search into holistic campaigns, such as attribution modeling, offer marketers detailed pictures of their work, which can yield more efficient and effective results.

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Good Read: Drake Morton

Five Hot Tips for Cool Summer Email Programs

by Alex Madison and Lisa Harmon, Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Seattle may have seen some snow flurries last week, but the calendar tells us that summer is fast approaching. That means it’s time to start soaking up some inspiration for sunny-day email campaigns.

Here are our top five tips for 2011 summer success:

1.     Get subscribers into your stores by leveraging cross-channel strategies. Social networking use has boomed over the past year across all age demographics. Take advantage of this growth with an extra push toward community building, especially by using social network connections to invite subscribers to shop in-store and attend brand events. When the weather’s nice, people are more likely to go out for social shopping days or to gather friends to attend special happenings, and cross-channel marketing increases the likelihood that your invites will go viral.
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