Need to Know: Drake Morton
by Bryan Boettger , Friday, Nov. 11, 2011

10 Factors Of Viral Propensity 

I don’t believe you can make a “.” There. I said it.

However, you can game the system. In a media landscape where earned media continues to gain greater and greater importance, we find ourselves consulting brands on analytical ways to judge a qualitative product. A way to judge propensity.

And, sometimes, you can do it by analyzing 10 factors…

1. Authenticity
. It can be planned out, but the video must feel in-the-moment. No one wants to be a shill for your blatant marketing.

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Need to Know: Drake Morton

Click Rates – Online Video Ad Metrics

General benchmarks nonexistent as CTR varies by industry, demographic and more

Benchmarks are often important markers for advertisers looking to estimate initial campaign performance and approximate competitor efforts. As online video, a subset of the larger display industry, continues to gain momentum, marketers are increasingly looking for video ad benchmarks to justify increased campaign budget and online video investment. (more…)

Good Read: Drake Morton

3 Tips for Delivering the

Content Your Audience Wants

By Loren McDonald, Vice President of Industry Relations

What’s most important to your email marketing and lead-nurturing efforts? It’s probably some combination of building relationships, increasingly loyalty, moving buyers through the sales cycle and, of course, turning your messages into revenue. Delivering the right message–content that educates, engages and entices recipients to perform the action you want–is essential to all of these goals.

With carefully planned strategy and the correct tools, you can improve the likelihood of providing the content your contacts are looking for–especially if you nail the right timing for your message. Here are a few tips for building your content so you deliver messaging that resonates strongly. (more…)

Interesting Read: Drake Morton

Why Google+ Matters

by David Berkowitz , Thursday, July 7, 2011

I’m done writing about Google+, at least for today. Fortunately, I have enough material for a column thanks to the powers of crowdsourcing — the act of tapping the community to achieve a common objective. In this case, I posted a message on Google+, publicly asking, “Why does Google+ matter?”
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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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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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Good Read: Drake Morton

You Only Get One Chance To

Make Seven Trillion Impressions

by David Koretz , Friday, April 8, 2011

This year, publishers worldwide will serve more than seven trillion display ads.

Those ads will be sold by hundreds of thousands of publishers, more than 400 ad networks, and a growing number of DSPs.  To make matters worse, the amount of online advertising inventory is growing at rates of more than 50% year over year as mobile devices and 4G help skyrocket the number of Web-connected devices.

2012 alone could add three trillion impressions to the pile of inventory that has to be sold.

It shows no sign of slowing down. In 2010, we passed five billion Web-connected devices. By 2017, that number is expected to be 17 billion. (more…)

Very Good Read: Drake Morton

Transactional Emails 2.0: Think Beyond The Purchase

by Loren McDonald, Thursday, July 15, 2010

We marketers tend to think about the transactional email in its most literal sense, relating to a specific transaction as defined by the CAN-SPAM Act and by conventional wisdom.

But transactional emails can become a potent force in your email program when you broaden your vision and look for ways they can enrich your customer relationships, from pre- to post-transaction and beyond.

These triggered messages, based on abandonment, recent purchase and CRM data, enable additional touch points that provide further value to customers and additional revenue and customer data for your company.

Four Categories of Purchase-Related Email Message
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