BlueKai on Tuesday named Cory Treffiletti its first Senior Vice President for marketing. The appointment is effective immediately. Treffiletti will oversee all marketing strategies for the company's data and platform offerings. Treffiletti joins the Cupertino, Calif. data-driven marketing agency with nearly 20 years of experience in the digital media landscape. The company says that he will be working most closely with Omar Tawakol, BlueKai's CEO. Tawakol said the appointment will allow BlueKai to "continue our rapid growth and fuel our success over the coming years." In an earlier statement, Tawakol said, "Cory has distinguished himself as an innovative thinker with a creative mind, [and] I’m confident that he will play a vital role in optimizing mindshare in this rapidly expanding market for BlueKai and am very pleased to have him on board.” "BlueKai is a pioneer in the data space," said Trefiletti in the statement. "I'm excited to be here because I see the potential, I understand the landscape and I know I can bring my industry background to bear." One of the short term goals for BlueKai and Treffiletti will be to give a better definition of their category so that marketers and publishers will understand all of the benefits of working with BlueKai. "I look forward to people seeing and hearing about BlueKai," stated Trefiletti. Trefiletti joins the company at a time in which the intersection between Big Data and marketing is growing. Treffiletti's appointment allows BlueKai to "maintain significant leadership against the competition," said Tawakol. "We are finding more and more companies entering the space and copying our model of solving challenges around data." Treffiletti says that he will be staying in San Francisco. He also plans to continue writing the weekly Online Spin for MediaPost as he has been for the last 11 years.
Marin Software has formed a partnership with RevTrax to connect online paid-search ad clicks and analytics to in-store purchases. This should give marketers running campaigns across channels the tools to closely match budgets to media. The agreement supports data analysis on margin and redemption that aims to support brands. Paid-search promotions link to printable or mobile landing pages that display a coupon with a unique barcode or promo code. The brand can track back the unique code to the coupon and paid-search ad driving engagement. The RevTrax technology triggers a code that sends conversion data to Marin, which attributes the keywords to the specific campaigns, search engine and network. Seth Sarelson, COO of RevTrax, said the offline data reports on things like margin analysis. Are consumers more likely to buy products with higher margins based on specific search ads? Do they come in the store and redeem the coupons quicker? A disconnect kept marketers from attributing paid-search campaigns to in-store purchases, although most sales still take place in brick-and-mortar stores. For every $1 of ecommerce revenue generated from paid search, marketers can expect to see approximately another $6 of in-store revenue, according to a RevTrax study. The finding shows that if marketers undervalue the search channel by not factoring in-store sales into the paid-search ROI calculation, they may undervalue the channel by as much as 85%. A handful of companies have begun to link paid search to in-store sales and revenue. In 2011, Merrell Wreden, vice president of marketing for AMF Bowling, told MediaPost SearchBlog about plans to launch a mobile campaign and tie in coupons. Now, the company takes the strategy a step further to link in paid-search ads. Through support from marketing company MediaWhiz, AMF tied offline conversion data from RevTrax with campaign data from the search engines to analyze return on advertising spend. It took six months, but monthly revenue attributed to search marketing rose more than 10 times than revenue in the first month of the program. Over nine months, AMF Bowling's conversion rate jumped 74% and cost per conversion dropped nearly 70%. Matt Lawson, vice president of marketing and partnerships at Marin Software, said revenue rose tenfold by optimizing offline conversions.
Demandbase, a "real-time targeting and personalization platform for B2B," yesterday released an infographic to help marketers decide what technology to use and when to use it with their content marketing. The infographic, released in a webinar, "illustrates the Content Delivery Funnel." The infographic could actually be very benefitial. With so many technologies available today, it can be difficult for a brand to decide what to use and when. As the amount of marketing technology continues to grow, anything that helps a marketer sift through it all for better results is helpful. Here is the infographic: Jason Stewart, director of marketing at Demandbase, said, "Demandbase's real-time personalization and targeting platform plugs into tools such as content management systems, CRM, marketing automation, chat, and more. Because we plug directly into these platforms, we understand how relevant content should be disseminated." In an earlier statement, Joe Pulizzi, founder of the Content Marketing Institute, said, "Sixty percent of B2B marketers plan to spend more on content marketing in the next 12 months." CMI worked with Demandbase to release the infographic. "The number one thing content marketers must remember is to take a holistic approach in their strategy and understand that the technologies they use need to work together," said Stewart.
Mobile advertising platform Smaato Thursday released its Global Price Index for the first quarter, showing a decline in mobile ad pricing from the fourth quarter. The company said ad volume increased 26% in the quarter, but pricing on average was 30% higher in the fourth quarter because of higher advertiser demand during the holiday shopping season. The Smaato index represents a percentage of the effective cost-per-click (eCPC) average per country across 80 mobile ad networks and uses the U.S. as a baseline of 100 for the overall index. The index serves as a global ”rate card,” helping advertisers better plan and roll out campaigns across different markets. App developers benefit by pinpointing countries or regions where they can drive the highest average revenue per user. The new index for the first quarter shows wide differences among regions worldwide. Western Europe has a score of 117, while the Middle East comes in at 36, underscoring the difference between mobile advertising in advanced and emerging areas. Central America represents an even bigger discount, with eCPCs indexing 70% less than in the U.S. “The Smaato Index indicates that app developers can now make more money in Western Europe than in the U.S. While for advertisers, the U.S. is now an incredible bargain, as they can reach 30% of the U.S. market through smartphones at 30% lower cost than in Western Europe,” stated Smaato CEO Ragner Kruse in a release Thursday. The company noted that users in Italy, with a score of 150, have a high affinity for mobile advertising in both apps and the mobile Web. At the same time, Scandinavia’s high smartphone penetration and low index score (96) make it an attractive but lower-cost option for advertisers. The report also highlighted the huge mobile markets represented by China and India, with index scores of 38 and 29, respectively. It pointed out that the two countries combined now have as many smartphones, as users in China especially have become savvy mobile shoppers searching for products and deals. Smaato says more than 50,000 app developers and publishers use its optimization platform to monetize content in more than 230 countries using rich media ad formats and real-time bidding technology for impression-level buying.