David Woolfson, a long-time TV industry research consultant, and a former Nielsen executive, has joined the Cabletelevision Advertising Bureau as senior vice president-research & insights, replacing Ira Sussman, who left earlier this year to take a client service role at Nielsen. Woolfson, who for the past several years ran his own consultancy, previously worked for consultants such as Jack Myers and Michael Kassan, and held senior research posts at Univision, Turner Broadcasting, and Nielsen. Woolfson, who joins the CAB on Aug. 16th, will be a key member of the trade association's management team. According to the CAB's most recent filing with the Internal Revenue Service, Sussman earned $354,001 in 2009, making him one of the highest paid executives in the organization that year.
Deal seekers searching for money-saving offers through mobile coupon platform Shooger will soon have BlackBerry as an option to clip and save. This week the company made it easier to search for deals on the iPhone, handsets running Android, and the company's Web site, but the company has plans to tie in searches on PC, too. The clip-file-and-save coupon app geared toward local and national specials relies on Google Maps and other technology to pinpoint location and deliver the goods. Consumers can set perimeters -- adding a city, ZIP code or street address -- and change the radius to find retail offers from 1 to 100 miles. The search results sort based on location by category, merchant or keyword and sort offers. Consumers can share deals with friends on Facebook and Twitter. Matt Myers, chief marketing officer, Shooger, says there are more than 100 million monthly Google search queries for deal and coupon-related terms. Shooger offers about 100,000 local and national deals from 50,000 merchants searchable by categories such as Restaurants & Bars, Home Improvement, Travel, Automotive, Dentists & Doctors and Sports & Recreation. The majority of people carry phones everywhere they go, and simply showing the screen to take advantage of the deal transitions the sale from online and into the store. "We're working toward the ability for consumers to create an account and save online searches, linking them to the phone application," Myers says. "The offers found on the consumer's PC will show up on the phone. Location is the first step, but we will link that to other information in the future." Google has also begun to take advantage of coupons. Google Tags, for example, allows small and medium-size businesses to pay a $25 flat monthly fee to promote services on Google Places. There companies can place coupons and photos of other business-related information, making it easy for mobile consumers to find local stores. Searches on Google for Printable Coupons increased 67% compared with the prior year, according to Coupons.com, which earlier this month reported surpassing more than 1 million downloads of its iPhone and Android coupon applications. Representing 20.8% of the U.S. population, 46.4 million American consumers now use online coupons -- up from 40.2 million in 2008, according to Coupons.com. The company estimates that of the 46.4 million online coupon users, 12.9 million do not read any part of the Sunday newspaper -- up 18% compared with 10.9 million in 2008. Mobile and location, the first step in targeting mobile services to consumers, will link to a series of triggers that advertisers can expect to tap, including links to mobile social graphs and profiles. A variety of industry experts participating in the AlwaysOn Summit at Stanford suggested the industry should continue to move in that direction. During a Tuesday panel, Jules Maltz, principal at Institutional Venture Partners, told attendees that startups designing mobile applications now have an opportunity to make a profit. Proving that point, Sunil Verma, co-founder and COO at MobClix, admitted the mobile ad exchange serves up about 7 billion impressions monthly, working with about 10,000 application developers to gain revenue through clicks, rich media and video. It will become all about the data for mobile advertisers as more companies provide incentives for consumers to trade information for discounts. But who owns it? The demand for mobile data has skyrocketed more than 110% on a compound annualized growth, but the revenue generated remains between 15% and 20% -- which provides a huge gap for carriers, according to Bill Diotte, chief executive officer at BroadHop, which sits between the application and carrier to support the flow of information and monetize the assets of the carrier.
One-third of U.S. companies plan to maintain or increase marketing budgets in the 2010-2011 fiscal year, and a higher percentage will set up guidelines and metrics to prove accountability, according to a study released Wednesday. The Forbes Insights and software and analytics firm MarketShare Partners reveals marketers and agencies continue to struggle with finding the metrics to justify dollars spent on campaigns. Fifty-eight percent of companies working with budgets up to $1 million admit they will implement tools that measure return on investment (ROI) to measurable outcomes, compared with 40% for those working with higher budgets. Companies with lower budgets favored working on developing metrics, while 58% of marketers with budgets of $1 million or more believe having a "big idea" was more important. With budgets protected or growing, proving the wisdom of how those budgets are used remains a priority. More than half -- 55% -- of total respondents say CMOs own responsibility for effective marketing campaigns for their organization, and that proportion increases to 71% for those with marketing budgets greater than $1 million. Measurement and accountability may have become equally important. Forty percent of respondents admit that one of the biggest drivers for developing marketing measurement and accountability programs remains justifying spend to senior executives. The more experienced CMO remains at the company 28.4 months, according to Booz & Co., compared with 75.6 months for the CEO. A complex media landscape -- shifts in the market and new technologies and ad formats -- makes it more important for marketers to track budgets. The rise of social media, search and mobile creates increased competition for consumers' attention, and marketers need to know how to adjust. Sixty-eight percent of marketing executives participating in the survey say they have some form of analytics in place to measure effectiveness and ensure accountability. One-third of respondents reveal that they plan to have formal measurement systems in place in the future, while one in five respondents with marketing budgets greater than $1 million said the same -- suggesting that nine in 10 marketing executives will have some sort of formal measurement system in the foreseeable future. Online initiatives are the most popular programs measured, although not surprising. Three of the top four measurement approaches -- including measurement of online search marketing, 64%; measurement of online display marketing, 48%; and measurement of online social media marketing, 43% -- focus on digital marketing. The study, entitled "The Accountability Evolution: Marketers Turn to Metrics to Boost Their Strategic Value," is based on a survey of more than 100 senior marketing executives. It examines the marketing landscape, as well as the strategies and methodologies being put in place by companies. It also looks at how approaches vary between those companies with marketing budgets over $1 million and those under $1 million.
Joel Rubinson is out as Chief Research Officer of the Advertising Research Foundation, after two years in that post. Rubinson, who replaced former ARF CRO Joe Plummer in March 2008, is leaving to become a consultant, and will continue to work with the ARF on its "Research Transformation" and "Shopper Insights" initiatives. The ARF did not announce a new CRO, and a spokesperson said it wasn't clear whether the foundation would fill the position, but it noted that the change follows last week's appointment of long-time media research executive David Marans as executive vice president-media at the ARF.
Technology has reached a critical point in the adoption curve. My wife, who is imminently practical and intolerant of anything that smacks of gadgetry, is becoming intrigued by my iPhone. I can't overstate the importance of this in terms of watershed moments. Steve Jobs, if you can get my wife to buy into your vision, you have crossed the chasm. There's something important to note here in attitudes towards technology that we digerati, gathered together on the leading edge of the bell curve, often forget. Technology only becomes important to most people when it lets them do something they care about. For my wife, my gleeful demonstrations of the wonder that is Shazam gained nothing but a prolonged rolling of the eyes. Twitter clients and Facebook apps? Puh-leeze! Redlaser elicited a brief spark of interest, but this quickly passed when she saw the steps she had to take to do any virtual shopping. Even the wonders of the cosmos, conveniently mapped by pUniverse, did not pass the Jill acid test. As long as my app inventory didn't improve her life in any appreciable way, she remained resolutely unimpressed. But lately, there have been cracks in the wall of technology defense she has carefully constructed since marrying me. A nifty little app called Mousewait was the first chink. Knowing the wait times in the ride lines on a recent trip to Disneyland was something she cared about. Suddenly, she was asking me to take out the iPhone and check to see how many minutes we'd have to wait at Splash Mountain. Yelp helped us find a reasonable family restaurant in San Diego. And Taxi Magic allowed us to quickly hail a cab in San Francisco. But the moment I knew the defenses were ready to crumble was when she recently turned to me and said: "So, you can do all that stuff on an iPhone? What other things can you do?" Aahhh... the door was open, but only a crack. If I've learned one thing in 21 years of marriage, I've learned to tread slowly when these opportunities present themselves. I had to carefully craft my response. Too much enthusiasm shown at this point could be fatal... "Huh? What do you mean?" "On the iPhone... what could you do with it?" "What could I do with it, or what could you do with it? "Me... let's say." And here we come to the crux of the matter. I'm extremely tolerant of technology. I'll struggle my way through an interface and put up with crappy design simply so I can emerge victorious on the top of the early adopter heap, holding my iPhone proudly aloft. At the first inkling of frustration, my wife will turf the thing into the nearest trashcan. If you functionality is what you're looking for, app designers have to provide the shortest possible path from A to B. If you really want to scale the opportunity that lies at the Jill Hotchkiss inflection point, what you have to do is start providing seamless functionality for app to app. The new iPhone OS is edging down this path by supporting multitasking, but there is still a long way to go before you'll make my wife truly happy. And that, believe me, is a goal worthy of pursuit.
Anytime I find myself in a pinch for column fodder, I know I can always fall back on a little Search Haiku. It's not as exciting as covering the search news blotter, but hopefully it will still be as entertaining for you. So here is a fresh new installment of rhymes, adding to my collection from '06 and '09.I decided to go with a theme this time, and also added in a display URL line.Oh boy, enjoy!SEM Has Certainly ChangedBecoming Much Broader In Its RangeAnd Making Marketers A Bit DerangedDonDraperRollingInGrave.comNow Social Ads Are PPCYou Can Buy Them On Facebook EasilyWhat Will Happen With Google Me?DontGiveAZuck.com PPC's Even On TwitterTest It Now Or Be Called A QuitterIt Won't Perform So Don't Be BitterNobodyUsesTwitter.com.comMobile Search is Very HotPeople Check In on Foursquare a LotWith No PPC, The Inventory Will RotMayorOfMonetizationNeeded.com Video's Catching Fire TooPPC on YouTube's Available To YouBut UGC's Playing With Fire, FooIStillHeartNumaNumaThough.comPPC's Even Taken DisplayNow You Can Buy Banners The SEM WayBid in Real-Time And Optimize TodayRIPMediaPlanning.com And What About Dear SEO?It's In All Of The Above You KnowContent's King, We Learnt Long Ago DoesThatMakeSEOsQueens.com Create Content FruitfullyAnd Distribute It All So LiberallyMore Engaged Customers You Will SeeJustAskOldSpice.com Earned Media's Got BuzzROI Can Be Higher Than PPC Ever WasRemember To Include Labor Cost, CuzNoSuchThingAsFreeClicks.com Now What Of Yahoo & Bing?Will The Combo Make Marketers Sing?Or Just Be Another Ill-Fated Fling?BartzAndBallmerBFF.com Whatever Happened to Ask?Someone Should Take Diller To TaskAnd Make Him Wear The Butler MaskBringBackJeeves.com Let's Not Overlook AOLThe Google Deal's Doing Quite WellAnd They've Avoided Highway To HellBeContentWithContent.com The Big G's Looking PatPage & Brin's Wallets Growing FatPulled $700M For ITA Outta The HatMustBeNice.com Emerging Platforms AboundSocial Gaming's Buzzing All AroundFor Zynga, $100M Google Has FoundPleaseNoMoreVilles.com Behold The Common LinkPresent In All But The Kitchen SinkMakes CMOs Really Stop And ThinkRhymesWithLurch.com With SEM At The CenterAny Search Geek Can Be A MentorAnd Any Media Desk's A RenterPositionedWell.com I Know It Can Seem ScaryRuling The Media Biz Can Be Hairy The World Revolves Around The QueryAintThatRightSergeyAndLarry.com Dare I Inflate Your Head?Dare I Declare Trad'l Media Dead?Dare I Envision The World SEM-led?Yes.com So Go Forth SEM ProsClaim Your Stake, My Sisters & BrosBe Ready To Drink From The FirehoseGodErGoogleSpeed.com