The shopping web site is carving out a niche in the online retail world as the meta-search platform for shopping -- something like the Kayak of clothing, accessories and just about everything else. The site, which crawls the web for product listings on other sites aggregates from a very long-tail of some 500,000 online stores in North America, from the Googles and Amazon’s of the world down to mom and pop stores with online shopping carts. "Depending on the [retailer], we are getting product feeds anywhere from once every two hours to once per week," says Usher Lieberman, director corporate communications. He says the site's expertise is a sweet spot in where other search-based aggregators have major problems: apparel. "The focus for us has always been fashion, clothing and accessories. And the hardest problem, and the most unaddressed, is how hard it is to do that. Amazon works well for DVD's, books or things with very well-structured catalogues. Clothing is harder because you have to get style, color, sizing, and materials. But there are all sorts of ways to make clothing searchable." Lieberman says about 58% of clicks from TheFind.com to the retailer are free for the latter. "We want operate as a search engine. So we show stuff that is both paid and not paid. We prioritize stuff that we are getting paid for but only on an apples to apples basis." The site doesn't take ads because, per Lieberman, it gets 12 million uniques per month, "And also, Google has made it clear that excessive ads on your site will lower search results." Of course, it may also give TheFind.com a leg up since Google announced it is moving product search to an all-paid basis, which may become a major point of contention for companies like Amazon who do huge volume with Google, and which is essentially a digital brick-and-mortal since it controls its own entire inventory. And, with services like Amazon Prime, web retail may be moving toward a loyalty paradigm that lowers Google’s relevance slightly, anyway. Lieberman says that TheFind.com realized it couldn't depend on Google and that, for its business, the direction is toward mobile and tablets. “We get 20% of traffic from mobile, so we are building apps to do things like barcode scanning in stores; we see a different commerce evolving." The company also has a new retail catalogue app delivering a rich visual experience with a host of features such as one that lets users a "grab" a product and see how it would look in situ, by using the iPad camera. The app, which works for devices like iPad, Kindle, Surface and Android (since it's HTML5-based) has around 200 catalogues on a tile matrix where users can manually flip from one to the other. "Conceptually, the point is that flat catalogues are a thing of the past," notes Lieberman. The other big trend, of course, is social, which retailers often miss out on because they don't know how to leverage popularity terribly well: the volume of "likes" that a product receives on social platforms or on a retailer's social-media page often has no influence whatsoever on its position on the retailer's e-commerce site. TheFind.com built a Facebook app called Glimpse.com that merges a consumer's Facebook data with the most most-liked stores, brands and products based on the shopper's own preferences. Lieberman says the month-old program is a critical move for the site because most social-media sentiment is about fashion and apparel. "Forty percent is concentrated on fashion items."
Google has been sued for allegedly copying portions of its video chat platform from the company Be In, which offers its own video chat program, CamUp.Be In alleges in its complaint, filed in federal court in San Jose, Calif., that Google misappropriated trade secrets, infringed copyright in the audiovisual elements of CamUp's site and violated the Lanham Act.A Google spokesperson declined to comment on the lawsuit, except to say that the company hadn't yet been served with the complaint.Be In, which unveiled CamUp last year at the South by Southwest festival in Austin Texas, says that it discussed a business deal with Google at a meeting in London last April. "At this meeting ... Be In provided a live demonstration of its CamUp product, and proposed that a 'Watch with your friends' button be embedded within all YouTube pages," Be In alleges in its complaint.Be In also says that Google signed a nondisclosure agreement at the meeting.Around one month later, Google released Google +, which includes the video chat platform Hangouts. Be In alleges that the platform is "similar in look and feel to CamUp." Even if that's true, Be In still has to overcome some hurdles in the case, says Eric Goldman, director of the High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University. One of the most significant centers on the confidentiality agreement. The terms of that agreement -- which aren't yet public -- might not prevent Google from creating its own product.Be In also faces a challenge because its legal claims take an "aggressive view" of intellectual property law, Goldman says.He adds that large businesses frequently face these kinds of product-theft allegations -- often because the people in companies, as well as outside developers, are creating the same tools. "It's a very, very common problem for big companies," he says, noting that Google recently defeated a separate lawsuit by an entrepreneur who says that Google stole her idea after she discussed it over coffee with a company executive.
Today, I want to talk about the last of the three posts by Harvard Business Review bloggers, Karen Freeman, Patrick Spenner and Anna Bird I have been surveying: “Three Myths about What Customers Want.” Specifically, I want to look at this post's implications for online marketing. Myth #1: Most consumers want to have relationships with your brand. This myth is at the crux of many, many social media campaigns. The theory is, a “like” = “intent to buy.” I have said before that I believe this is hogwash. The HBR bloggers concur: “Only 23% of the consumers in our study said they have a relationship with a brand. In the typical consumer's view of the world, relationships are reserved for friends, family and colleagues. That's why, when you ask the 77% of consumers who don't have relationships with brands to explain why, you get comments like ‘It's just a brand, not a member of my family.’” Marketers being marketers, we tend to think the entire world revolves around whatever it is we’re trying to sell. We believe people actually give a damn. They don’t, at least not in the vast majority of cases. In contrast, relationships endure. They are there for the long haul. Consumer consideration runs on much shorter timelines. There are degrees to consider here, however. What consumers can develop for a brand is loyalty. This falls into the category of beliefs, and that is what drives a lot of consumer behavior. We can believe a brand offers good value without having a relationship with it. Beliefs are heuristic decision shortcuts, which help consumers cut through cognitive overload. Myth #2: Interactions built relationships. Actually, say the HBR team, relationships are built on shared values: “Of the consumers in our study who said they have a brand relationship, 64% cited shared values as the primary reason. That's far and away the largest driver. Meanwhile, only 13% cited frequent interactions with the brand as a reason for having a relationship.” Values can be a powerful driver of how we form beliefs. The brand I probably have the strongest affinity for is Apple. And it’s not because I have a relationship with Apple (never having visited its Facebook page). It’s because I believe Apple shares my values of creative freedom, uncompromising design and aesthetically pleasing experiences. I interact with an Apple device every day of my life. But I interact with the company only when I need something. Myth #3: The more interaction, the better. Marketers want to dominate a prospect’s time, in the mistaken belief that it will make the relationship “stickier.” If “stickier” means frustrating and annoying, they could be right. “There's no correlation between interactions with a customer and the likelihood that he or she will be ‘sticky’ (go through with an intended purchase, purchase again, and recommend)," writes the HBR team. "Yet, most marketers behave as if there is a continuous linear relationship between the number of interactions and share of wallet. That's why, as the Wall Street Journal recently reported, you see well-established retailers like Neiman Marcus, Lands’ End and Toys R Us sending customers over 300 emails annually.” We all have lots to do. The last thing on that list is to spend unnecessary time interacting with a brand because they’ve targeted us as a “loyal” customer. Here’s a question to ask yourself: Who benefits most from all these interactions -- the customer or the marketer? If the answer is the marketer, then why should the customer care? The danger of becoming marketers is that we gain a distorted perception of reality. Our job is to love a brand. It consumes our professional lives. This does weird things to a human brain. It makes it almost impossible to look at our brands the same way the rest of the world does. We care because we have to. We get paid to. The rest of the world doesn’t share the same motivation.
Have you taken a look at your Ghostery tool lately? The little tool that tracks the number of trackers on your Browser’s current Web site has been working overtime in the last year. In fact according to a new report from Krux Digital, the number of tracking incidents on the top media Web sites has grown 400% in the last year. A related global survey by Evidon, one of the companies that facilitate the Ad Choices icon and service for ad nets, agencies and publishers, showed similar expansion. In their look at who is behind the massive reach of online tracking, however, the company found two clear data “winners.” When it comes to frequency and reach of trackers around the Web, the top five spots are occupied either by Google or Facebook. In fact using a “Commonality Score” that indexes the the actual depth and breadth of its presence around the Web, Google Analytics registers a staggering 398.6, compared to the next most common tracking element, Google AdSense, which scores 50.4. These measurements are for Q1 2012. Evidon finds that Google’s free Analytics service is present now on 70% of unique domains around the Web. Google +1 has been surprisingly strong, coming in with a Commonality Score of 39.5, placing it fourth. Facebook’s social plug-ins for media sharing are the third most common tracker and Facebook Connect’s login service is fifth. Twitter’s button comes in sixth. “The market in online data is shaping up to be a big battle between Google and Facebook,” says Scott Meyer, Evidon CEO. And both companies are consolidating their data and expanding their reach. Google is pulling its data together into a single ad targeting platform. And Facebook is opening up its inventory and data to third party DSPs. The scale of this market dominance by the two big data collectors of the Web will not be lost on the many publishers that have essentially enabled the growth of these two companies. Increasingly, premium content publishers are rethinking the high cost of “free” tools from both ad tech startups and from these big players. Even the otherwise useful site analytics tools often are unclear about how they ultimately will and won’t use data across different sites, the report warns. “What is happening now is that you have Google analytics running on your site or Adsense and that data can be used for a lot of different purposes. Publishers need to understand that free tools from Facebook or Google come at a price. They aren’t truly free.” One of the costs is speed, Evidon and Krux both argue. As the number of trackers mount, latency becomes an issue. Evidon measured trackers by the ways in which they dragged down page loading and found that analytics elements introduced latency of 471.8ms, compared to ads that added 540ms, while page widgets added 606.7ms. Meyer says that publishers need to take notice. “What has happened in the last month is that the whole tracking discussion has gone from a privacy discussion to a privacy, security and performance discussion.” He believes that the privacy and performance issues are linked and can be tracked to profitability as well. By taking greater control over the tracking that goes on at a publisher’s site, you are managing for more than just data leakage. “When you solve the privacy problem you drive ROI, because you make it run faster.”
Google knows just a wee bit about display ads and a wee bit about video ads. But how do the two mediums play together? In its recent report, Display Business Trends: Publisher Edition, the search giant analyzed “tens of billions” of impressions across its publisher products including DoubleClick for Publishers, the DoubleClick Ad Exchange and the Google AdSense network. With video in particular, Google found several trends that may be useful for publishers to keep in mind as they peddle video ads. For starters, video advertising is one of the fastest growing segments in digital advertising, the report said. Google’s not the first company to note the rapidity of video’s growth; but corroboration from the Web behemoth on what countless other reports say is a good thing for the video ad business. Specifically, in the second half of 2011, the number of video impressions across the DoubleClick for Publishers platform grew nearly 70%, and ads were watched to completion 72% of the time, and to the midpoint 79% of the time. The most eye-popping stat is in the growth of impressions running in wide-screen players. Google saw nearly a tripling in the number of impressions on the 640 x 360 ad unit within wide-screen players. “Conversely, we’ve observed a decrease in standard aspect-ratio video player impressions, indicating that they’re phasing out,” the report said. Google also found that about half of the video ads in its network register between 15 and 30 seconds, with 36% clocking in at longer than 30 seconds and 13% running less than 15 seconds.