Adobe has released upgrades to its Primetime Digital Rights Management platform that bring content protection across apps on connected devices like set-top boxes and through HTML5 on major Web browsers. The company has been working with AMD, Broadcom and Intel to enable hardware-based DRM that protects premium high-definition and 4K content across tablets, smartphones and desktops.DRM has not always worked in the past to protect content, but technology continues to improve. Adobe has made Primetime DRM available on apps without a Flash Player plugin, as well as via HTML5 on some Web browsers. Protecting licensing content becomes necessary to restrict illegal copying. Security and piracy concerns in browser plug-ins continue to push the industry toward browser-based video technology. The technology aims to protect content as more people take viewing across a variety of devices and screens, such as mobile, TV and desktop. Jeremy Helfand, vice president of video monetization at Adobe, points out in a blog post that Adobe is the only non-browser vendor offering a cross-platform DRM product that enables content owners to protect their premium video content regardless of what browser or operating system viewers are using. Netflix signed up as one of the first customers to use DRM with HTML5 in the Firefox browser, explains Anthony Park, vice president of engineering for the streaming video site. Netflix is the latest company to join more than 100 major content providers worldwide using the content protection system. Others include BBC Broadcasting, Comcast, HBO, Hulu, M6 France, NBC, Time Warner, Turner Broadcasting, Walmart (Vudu) and Yahoo.
Bing released a dashboard giving search marketers a six-month view that digs deeper into several important metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) like impressions, clicks, cost per click (CPC) and click-through rate (CTR) for target markets. The tool supports agencies, resellers and small businesses that are dependent on targeting in specific geographic areas. The tool, now available in the Bing Ads Agency Hub, provides the data in an Excel file. There are seven reports. Data is available for the months of January through June 2014, per Microsoft vertical specialist Peter Haubold. He explains how the data will update quarterly. The controls down the left navigation panel allow marketers to select a preferred Designated Market Area (DMA), vertical and sub-vertical to see data. Marketers can integrate third-party data from sites like Nielsen Net Ratings to compare the percentage of clicks coming from specific market areas vs. population size. Haubold explains that the chart shows 2.09% of all people in the U.S. live in the Atlanta, GA metropolitan area -- with the number reflected by a red line on the chart. A blue bar shows the actual click percentage of all Bing Ads clicks for select sub-verticals in the area. "If the blue bar reaches above the red line, the click percentage is actually higher than the population percentage meaning we are seeing more clicks coming from this area than expected based on population size," he writes, explaining how the charts can help marketers make educated decisions on where to align their budget. This week, Microsoft also introduced a redesigned MSN brand with a new home page and several Bing-powered apps. The new Bing apps featuring News, Sports, Travel, Weather, and Finance will rebranded as MSN, with plans to release each app for iOS and Android. Microsoft also chose to outsource news, videos, how-tos and other content, partnering with more than 1,000 creators to develop content on a range of topics.
Yahoo on Monday confirmed extending its native Stream ads to third-party sites through a content recommendation engine that includes sponsored posts. The new offering, dubbed Yahoo Recommends, suggests other articles or content from the same site someone is using, along with a native unit labeled as “Sponsored” and featuring a dollar sign icon in small grey fonts. Yahoo said the recommendations are guided by its personalization technology, so if someone is signed in to their Yahoo account, the “Powered by” tag at the bottom right corner includes their first name of the user, as in “Powered by Yahoo for Rajiv.” The formatting of Yahoo Recommends will also be tailored to the screen it’s shown on, whether mobile or desktop. Among the initial publishers using the new ad tool -- first reported by Ad Age last month -- are Hearst, VOX and CBS Interactive. Yahoo has ad revenue sharing arrangements with publisher partners, but didn’t provide further detail. Ads are served through Yahoo’s Gemini platform for buying mobile search and native ads. “Yahoo Recommends makes it easier for visitors to discover a publisher's content and integrates an additional native advertising unit onto their site. We know first-hand the combination of personalization and premium content works for users, and we’ve created Yahoo Recommends so advertisers and publishers can put that powerful combination to work too,” stated the company in a blog post. Recommendation widgets from companies like Outbrain and Taboola that mix organic and sponsored content have become ubiquitous across the Web as publishers try to boost traffic and increase ad revenue beyond traditional display formats. Yahoo’s version is different than some in that it only promotes content from a publisher’s own site, along with an ad. But given Yahoo’s continuing struggles to rebuild its display business, publishers may not be convinced it has the Midas touch when it comes to native advertising. The Web giant, which says that 40% of its ad units are now native, saw display ad revenue fall 7% in the second quarter after quarterly declines throughout 2013. If Yahoo Recommends gains traction with outside publishers, it could help the company mitigate its display ad woes. Yahoo did not respond to a media inquiry about how many publishers overall have adopted its native ads so far.
AOL is expanding its lineup of rich media mobile ads with a new full-page, interstitial unit aimed at attracting brand advertising dollars. The new format, called the Road Devil Interstitial, builds on the Devil display formats AOL began extending from desktop to mobile two years ago to give marketers more alternative to the standard 300 x 50 banners. These include units that have photo or video galleries, store locators and are capable of running social feeds from sites like Facebook and Twitter. Among them is a format called the Pull, which was selected by the Interactive Advertising Bureau as one of its five Rising Star Mobile units that allows a user to pull a standard banner — starting from the top or bottom of the page to full-screen display. The promise of such ads is that the broader canvas they provide for marketers on mobile screens translates into better performance. In that regard, AOL said the new Road Devil Interstitial has produced a 1.93% interaction rate and an average video completion rate of 23.2%, based on initial testing with a handful brands. A research presentation last month by eMarketer highlighted PointRoll data showing that rich media ads in mobile in 2013 had about the same click-through rate as on the desktop, at 0.09%. But expandable and interstitial units performed better, with rates above 1% in some cases. AOL declined to name any advertisers testing the new format, which auto-expands from the bottom of the screen and typically displays for five seconds, although the duration can be adjusted. Users also have the option to close the ads before they collapse back into a banner. AOL is rolling out the interstitial unit to its owned-and-operated sites, such as The Huffington Post and TechCrunch as well as through its network of 450 third-party sites, including Reuters, Billboard, Martha Stewart and Fast Company. Marketers also have the option to buy the ads programmatically. Michael Treon, vice president, platform strategy for AOL Platforms, said the company’s focus is on allowing marketers to offer a consistent ad experience regardless of the screen size. “Our goal is to enable cross-platform interaction by default,” he said, noting that over half of AOL’s advertisers are now running cross-screen campaigns. eMarketer estimates that display -- including banners, rich media and sponsorships -- will account for $6.7 billion of the projected $17.7 billion in U.S. mobile ad spending this year.
Microsoft is reshaping its flagship Web portal, MSN.com, for an increasingly mobile world. “The reinvented MSN design provides advertisers … unprecedented consumer access,” Frank Holland, corporate vice president at Microsoft Advertising, told Media Daily News on Monday. With the relaunch, Microsoft is promising a simpler buying experience for advertisers across platforms, including personal computers, mobile browsers and native mobile apps. “The new MSN keeps ad buying simple … through immersive ad offerings across screens,” Holland said. Over the next several months, MSN plans to release a suite of new applications across Windows Phone, iOS, and Android. The broader initiative will result in a number of new opportunities for brands, according to Holland. “Just like the MSN Web experience, once a customer’s preferences are set, they are consistent across devices and platforms,” Holland explained on a blog post published on Monday. “For advertisers looking to tell their story throughout a person’s day, Microsoft’s unified presence across screens enables brands to share the consumer’s journey.” The new portal features 11 sections, including sports, news, health and fitness, money, travel and video, while users’ new home screens are integrated with Skype, Outlook.com, Facebook, Twitter, OneNote and OneDrive. With the relaunch, MSN is also adding personal productivity tools, such as shopping lists, flight status, and savings calculators, which can all be synchronized across devices. For some consumers, the notion of Web portal as digital gatekeeper harkens back to the days before mega social networks and mobile apps. In terms of unique visitors, however, the numbers tell a different story. Stateside, Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft properties each bested Facebook (and every other Web property) in February, according to comScore. Microsoft sites drew nearly 163 million unique visitors that month, which topped the roughly 133 million unique visitors that flocked to Facebook. (Worldwide, MSN.com boasts an audience of more than 425 million consumers across 50 countries, according to Microsoft.) Yet, the relaunch comes at a time when Microsoft’s display advertising business needs a stiff shot in the arm. For the quarter ended June 30, “display [advertising] revenue [remained] soft,” Amy Hood, Microsoft’s EVP and CFO, told analysts on the company’s earnings call, in July. During the quarter, Bing search advertising revenue grew 40%, while the unit’s domestic share of share of search grew to 19.2%. Overall, devices and consumer revenue grew 42% to $10 billion, during the quarter.
Mobile analytics company Tune, formerly HasOffers, has tapped Truste veteran Saira Nayak to serve as chief privacy officer. Nayak, who joined the 215-employee Tune last week, is tasked with ensuring that its privacy and security practices are up to date. She also says she will develop a set of “best practices” for Tune's advertising clients and ad-network partners. “I want to get to a point where we are a leader in terms of the practices we espouse -- whether what we're doing, or what we're recommending our clients and partners can do,” Nayak says. Nayak adds that although she doesn't expect to examine the privacy policy of all company's advertisers and ad networks, she hopes to inform them of some privacy basics -- like requiring consumers' express consent before collecting location data. The Seattle-based company also intends to roll out a “preferred partner” network, says CEO Peter Hamilton. He says he hopes the program will “show who is setting an example for the industry” in terms of privacy. The initiative, still in development, would involve some form of public recognition for the companies that follow Tune's best-practices standards. Hamilton says the company began searching for a chief privacy officer in March, shortly after the company was removed from Facebook's mobile ad measurement program. Facebook reportedly threw out Tune for keeping data too long and failing to ensure that its clients disclosed their privacy practices to consumers. Tune's attribution analytics is aimed at helping advertisers understand how their ads influence consumers, Hamilton says. For instance, Tune's data can show whether consumers viewed a particular mobile campaign, then downloaded an app and made purchases. Tune doesn't itself “own” the attribution data it gathers or use that to target consumers. But Tune's clients are free to draw on the analytics data for targeting campaigns, Hamilton says. “Definitely, there are lots of things that marketers can do to utilize the value of their own data,” he says. “Part of the reason why we're bringing in a chief privacy officer is to try to show the value of being clear about your privacy policy.” Tune's decision to hire a privacy officer “shows the coming of age of mobile,” says Jules Polonetsky, executive director of the think tank Future of Privacy Forum. “It's a sign of maturity for this industry that some of the smaller players that are starting to get scale are putting senior capacity in place.”
Citing greater accuracy and transparency as well as competition in the local TV audience measurement marketplace, Walt Disney Co.’s ABC Owned Television Stations Group this morning announced that all of its owned-and-operated TV stations are now subscribing to Rentrak’s local TV audience ratings. ABC was the first major station group to sign with Rentrak, initially licensing its data for three of its stations -- KGO (San Francisco), KTRK (Houston) and KFSN (Fresno) -- in 2012, and is now adding its five other owned stations: WABC (New York), KABC (Los Angeles), WLS (Chicago), WPVI (Philadelphia) and WTVD (Raleigh-Durham). In the interim, the three other major broadcast network-owned station group owners -- CBS, NBC and Fox -- have also cut local TV ratings deals with Rentrak, and earlier this year, Fox became the closest to severing ties with Nielsen altogether -- before signing an 11th-hour deal to renew a long-term contract with Nielsen. Terms of that renewal were not disclosed, but Fox implied it involved both concessions on contract pricing, as well as improvements in Nielsen’s local TV audience measurement methods. Last week Nielsen announced new details of a major expansion of its local audience measurement panel, including the deployment of many new metered TV households, as part of its effort to improve local audience measurement. But sources familiar with Nielsen’s ratings contracts say such deals normally include clauses that allow Nielsen to increase the rates it charges based on increases in sample households, so at least part of the expansion of local TV ratings deals with Rentrak may be a hedge against Nielsen’s cost inflation. One of the big methodological criticisms of Rentrak’s ratings is that they derive household viewing data from digital set-top devices and must model both the geographic and demographic representation of that data to determine coverage of TV markets and the composition of viewers in those households and markets. But last week, Nielsen also unveiled details of a controversial plan to begin modeling viewing estimates for nearly half its national sample during the 2014-15 TV season, although a decision to integrate that data -- part of what Nielsen describes as a major expansion of its national TV audience sample -- is contingent on clients reviewing “impact data” supplied by Nielsen. But the push by Nielsen could give more stations, advertisers and agencies greater comfort with the notion of utilizing modeling techniques as the basis of TV audience ratings vs. an historic bias toward representative samples. “We believe in providing our advertisers and agencies with the most accurate level of measurement,” ABC Owned Stations Group President Rebecca Campbell said in a statement announcing ABC’s expansion with Rentrak. “Partnering with Rentrak not only provides for greater transparency around our audiences, but also encourages greater competition in the marketplace and better measurement tools at the local level.” She added that a big factor in ABC’s decision is that “Rentrak’s larger sample sizes, along with its automotive and political data, provide us with the information we need.”
A few years ago, the California Lottery ran a great advertising campaign with the tagline “Somebody’s Gonna Lotto, Might as Well be You.” I’m not a Lotto player, but I was really attracted to the philosophical message of this campaign. I’ve actually adopted it as a mantra at work: Somebody’s going to create the greatest digital marketing agency, might as well be us! I think this philosophy applies to everything you do in life: Why not me? Why shouldn’t I be CEO? Why shouldn’t I win a marathon? Why shouldn’t I marry the girl of my dreams? Someone’s gonna win – why not me? So let’s say you adopt this mantra and decide that you want to become an SEM leader. You can define leader however you want: founder of an agency, VP of marketing at a large spender, perhaps even the head of product at AdWords. So what does it take to achieve this lofty goal? My advice is simple: Take the hard way. You read that right: Don’t get on the easy road. To be an SEM leader, you have to constantly push yourself to learn as much as you can as quickly as you can. That means taking jobs that will challenge you, probably require long hours, and will push you to your intellectual limits. When I look back on my career, I can distinctly identify two decisions I made for the hard way that got me to where I am today. The first occurred in 1999, when I decided not to practice law (having just graduated from law school) but instead move to San Francisco to get an Internet job, with no money nor qualifications. My first job when I arrived was user-testing a PC game called “Barbie Supersports” for $20 an hour. So while my law school friends were earning six figures and had offices and executive assistants, I was rollerblading with Barbie for hours on end. But it paid the bills until I landed my first job in the industry. The second hard decision came in 2004. I got an offer from Yahoo to join its SEM team. When I came to SF, working at Yahoo was my dream job; to finally be offered a position there meant a lot to me. But I also had an offer from a startup called Adteractive. Adteractive didn’t have the name recognition of Yahoo, but it was clear to me its marketing was at a level way beyond virtually anyone else in the Bay Area. I knew that Yahoo would have been an easier place to work, and it had the cachet of a big brand (so my friends and family would be impressed)! But I turned down Yahoo and went to Adteractive. Over the next two years, I truly learned online marketing (often working until 11 p.m. at night). I learned how to analyze millions of rows of data, how to apply game theory to bid strategy, and I even wrote an algorithm for bid management (we tried to build it internally and failed, but our COO left shortly thereafter and founded Marin Software). Had I not taken that job at Adteractive, I never would have had the SEM knowledge necessary to launch my own agency. I recognize that not everyone wants to be CEO of their own agency or lead product at AdWords. There are many different paths in life, and many of these paths put much more emphasize on family or hobbies, or something other than work. This article is for those of you out there who love SEM and want to become SEM leaders. So take the hard choice. Choose a job for which you think that you might not be qualified, or one that you know is going to require well over 40 hours per week. Choose the path that will make you sweat. Unlike the California Lottery, success in SEM is not luck, it’s about the right decisions and hard work. If you want to be an SEM leader, the opportunity is there for the taking – why not by you?
From a purely observational context, it strikes me that we’re at an interesting cross-roads in generational marketing. So much of what our sports fan and participant research focused on during the first decade of this century was meeting the needs of a maturing Boomer generation that did not always follow the leads of prior generations reaching a similar life stage. Fast-forward to the present day and it seems that everyone is trying to unlock the secret sauce that resonates with Millennials. And on the surface level this makes sense. Like the Boomers before them, Millennials represent a large mass audience that will harness a huge amount of buying power as they move through the next several decades. But sheer market opportunity is far from the only commonalities between these two generations. Both share a tendency towards self indulgence and a desire to come together as part of a community and manifest themselves in unique group experiences. Research has also shown a similarity in the priority that each generation places on family coupled with a belief that time may be the most precious commodity, particularly as we move further into an era of constant connectivity, instant gratification and participatory journalism. So, what does all of this have to do with sports marketing, you may ask. The answer could lie in the other underlying phenomenon that just as Boomers became more child-centric in their thinking and life focus, Millennials have been delaying their departure from the nest, and with Boomer life expectancy on the rise, the tables will ultimately turn as their children seek to return the favor by caring for a generation that will seek to age chronologically, but remain active and relevant as long as health permits. So there is a confluence of need states and life stage situations that lend themselves to what our research continues to point out are a desire for multi-generational experiences that can simultaneously optimize the precious commodity of time and meet each generation’s needs for activities with purpose and self-actualization. As a concrete, sports-specific example, I cite recent qualitative research that we conducted for a sports-centric resort management company that was seeking to re-position itself as more mindful of the needs of multi-generational travelers. In initial discussions and review of various sports related amenity concepts, it became evident that the mindset of most group participants was that there was a great divide between certain active sports interests traditionally targeted to the younger members of the family, and more traditionally older skewing sports like golf, tennis and other historical resort staples. Respondents saw these activities as disparate, limited in their appeal and more appropriate for only one generation at the expense of the other. In the case of the older golfers, they viewed their golf-centric trips as separate and apart from a family vacation. Yet, upon presenting some potential concepts that bridged the gap between the generations, offering accessible “entry ramps” to what had been seen as the singular domain of one generation or the other, the proverbial light bulb went on and respondents across generations were equally enamored with the opportunity to “have the best of both worlds,” enjoying personally favorite activities at the same time that they could integrate quality time with other generations within the nuclear and extended family. We’re also seeing this in a renewed focus that many sporting event properties are placing in developing cross-generational marketing messages as well as on site experiences that extend the value and relevance of the actual sporting event to those who historically might not have been as interested in attending. Similarly there has been a marked and vocal push towards a more acute focus on cultivating the next generation of fans and participants, particularly in sports like golf and baseball. Forward-thinking marketers in these and other sports are coming to the realization that part of the winning formula in achieving these goals, lies in recognizing the opportunity that multi-generational offerings provide. To me, that can mean leveraging the fact that the common values shared across life stages, often includes a desire for each generation to bond across a shared experience that ultimately optimizes time allocation and the premium placed on “family time.” Sports seems uniquely positioned to exploit this opportunity.
In the new second edition of my book, “Email Marketing Rules,” I focus more on measuring success than on anything else except permission. That’s because too often email marketers are using the wrong yardstick to measure the effectiveness of their programs. Here are three examples of how success is often measured incorrectly, leading to underperformance: Unqualified list growth vs. real list growth. All subscribers are not created equal. Some are worth their weight in gold, whereas others aren’t worth anything -- or, worse, cost you money in deliverability troubles. However, as an industry, our discussions around list growth are not very nuanced. To many marketers, a new subscriber is a new subscriber. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve heard marketers talk about boosting their slowing list growth with sweepstakes, as if a subscriber gained through a sweepstakes is equal to a subscriber gained during checkout. I call this unqualified list growth, and it’s an approach that leads to list quality issues. The missing ingredient in creating real list growth is subscriber productivity. I mean “real” in the same sense that “real GDP” is our nation’s gross domestic product adjusted for inflation, or the changing value of a dollar. The value of an average subscriber -- and the value of your email list overall -- also changes. If you’re replacing low-value subscribers with high-value ones, then the power of your list increases. If you do the inverse, then the power of your list decreases. Direct marketers like to say, “The money is in the list.” But it’s time to drill down a little and recognize that the money is in the subscriber. Attracting and retaining high-value subscribers should be a priority. Campaign metrics vs. subscriber lifetime value. Email marketers send a lot of campaigns. It can seem like that’s the job of an email marketer: to send campaigns and maximize their value. However, looking at it this way can cause us to send campaigns that decrease response in the future and to avoid sending campaigns that increase response in the future. I quote a lot of people in my book. One of them is A.T. Kearney Partner Michael Brown, who said, “The customers are the assets; not the store and not the ecommerce sites.” It’s a great quote because it puts a fine point on what the goal of marketers -- indeed all companies -- should be: to maximize their relationship with their customers. For companies like retailers, it’s no longer about starting with a product and then finding people to buy it. It’s now about starting with your customers and finding the products that they want to buy. Applying this line of thinking to email marketing, we find that subscriber lifetime value is the optimal way to view our success in serving subscribers. If we do our jobs well, subscribers buy often and stay subscribed for a long time because we’ve engaged them in between purchases. If we do our jobs poorly, subscribers’ purchases and engagement fall off quickly. Subject line with most opens vs. most conversions. Subject lines are another area where email marketers don’t always stay focused on the big picture. The traditional mode of thinking is that subject lines cause opens, body content causes clicks, and landing pages cause conversions. However, the subscribers you have there on the landing page have a lot to do with your subject line. That’s because a good, descriptive subject line pre-selects openers who are likely to convert. Meanwhile, a poor subject line -- one that’s usually vague and mysterious -- merely attracts the curious, who bolt after opening your email and sating their curiosity. Of course, measuring email marketing success properly is not just an issue for email marketers. It’s also an issue for executives, many of whom don’t understand how email works. So many times over the years I’ve heard marketers say that their CMO or CEO forced them to do something with their email program that they knew was a bad idea. Unfortunately, it falls to email marketers to manage up and educate their managers and executives about how email really works -- and what are the right goals to set and investments to make to create a highly successful email program.
Mobile is finally beating the desktop for shopping at retailer websites. We’ve seen this coming for some time in a monthly mobile tracking study we’ve been following for some time. For the first time, more than half (51%) of visits to retailers’ websites came from mobile devices, according to a new report. When the tracking started four years ago, desktop accounted for more than 90% of website visits, based on the Branding Brand mobile commerce index, which is based on an analysis of 129 million site visits, 1 billion page views and more than 3 million orders with revenue of $350 million. It’s not just the mobile visits that continue to increase, with smartphone commerce activity increasing across the board. Here are the increases from the same month a year ago:
America’s fearless corporate overlords have heard about this social media thing and they know it’s important (that’s what their caddy says anyway) but they’re not exactly setting the world on fire when it comes to maintaining an active social media presence. Or so it would seem from the latest Social CEO Report from CEO.com, which recently checked up on the social media activity of Fortune 500 execs, and found it to be lacking. The headline figure here is that 68% of Fortune 500 CEOs have no presence of any kind on any of the major social networks, including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, and Instagram. Among the 32% who do have a presence, most have a presence on only one platform, and among these the majority (25.4% of the total) are on LinkedIn. Mark Zuckerberg is the only Fortune 500 CEO on all five major social networks -- and, well, he owns two of them. A whopping 42 bosses out of the Fortune 500 list (8.4%) have a Twitter account, up from a mere 28 last year, and 69% of these have posted anything in the last hundred days, with an average of 0.48 tweets per day among the active set. Roughly half tweet once a month or less, and less than a quarter tweet daily. 74% of CEOs on Twitter have engagement scores of less than 10/100. Here the report notes the first tweet from Satya Nadella on becoming Microsoft’s new boss, tweaking his peers: “first commitment as CEO… I won’t wait four years between tweets!” Meanwhile 8.3% of Fortune 500 CEOs have a Facebook account, putting them firmly behind America’s grandparents in terms of adoption. However that’s up slightly from 7% in last year’s survey. And 2.6% of CEOs have Instagram accounts. The CEO.com survey figures jibe pretty well with some other recent studies of top bosses’ social media habits. In December 2013 a survey by influence marketing software firm Augure found that just 30% of executive directors at the top 100 companies in NASDAQ are present and active on social networks. LinkedIn led the way, with 23% of executives maintaining a profile on the professional site, followed by Twitter with 11% of execs, then Google+ with 8%, and Facebook with 5%.
As the world awaits Apple’s expected announcement today that it is entering the mobile payments arena, you don’t need breathless tech pub headline to know that the connection between personal devices and the retail experience will only tighten and further disrupt a struggling channel. All aspects of the retail experience have been altered by the smartphone and tablet. But it is the velocity of these changed behaviors that continues to dazzle. M-commerce platform Branding Brands, which powers mobile for over 200 retailers like American Eagle, Sephora and Crate & Barrel, says it saw mobile finally outstrip desktop for number of site visits in August. In an admittedly selective sample of 25 major retailers and 64 million visits, 50.7% of visits came from devices and 49.3% from non-device sources. It's important to keep basic behavioral differences in mind to qualify the raw mobile stats. In general, people use mobile to visit sites much more frequently and for shorter bursts than they do on desktops. So mobile numbers always feel inflated and divorced from more important engagement and conversion metrics. Still, Branding Brands stats indicate at the very least the integral role mobile is playing in path to purchase. Moreover, the sheer acceleration of mobile use is daunting. Only four years ago the share of visits to major retailers from devices was just 4%. So we really are talking about a sea change in how, where and when consumers access retail brands. The key behavioral shift involves smartphones. We are getting more comfortable doing more on smaller screens. While the number of visits from tablets increased 13.9% year-over-year, they mushroomed 23.5% on phones. We are using the handset for deeper drills, with pageviews up 49.4% compared to tablets, up 20.2%. But it is the all-important conversion where we are seeing the most mobile growth. On Branding Brands’ sample of retailers, orders coming from smartphones increased 64%, and revenue was up 89.3%. Still, overall, desktop continues to lead in conversions, at 3.43%, compared to 2.47% on tablets and 1% on handsets. Holistically, the rap on mobile remains true. People do research and look-ups on their phones but they convert on larger screens. But this also speaks to how critical omnichannel synchronization must be for retailers. Little things like cross-channel cart retention, persistent search and browsing histories, handoffs across devices -- all take on increased importance as decisions get made in quick but iterative ways across multiple screens. As Apple enlarges its screens and tacks on payment mechanisms to its next generation of handsets, it finds itself in the dominant position when it comes to U.S. retail. While its retail sample tends to skew to stylish brands that would also attract iPhone owners, Branding Brands’ operating system breakdown demonstrates how Apple maintains its special power. 61.2% of all mobile visits came from iOS devices in August, and so did 53.7% of revenue. Despite the overwhelming advantage Android devices have in raw reach over Apple, its more fragmented customer base simply use their devices less often for digital interactions. Their average includes many lower-end and less digitally adventurous owners who probably bought a smartphone because it is de rigueur now. Apple buyers tend to be in it for the interactivity. While mobile payments represent a cash cow for the many large, small, legacy and startup companies flooding the space, for marketers it represents a data dog that hunts. Being able to tie digital promotions and ad exposures directly to eventual point of sale closes the loop in a way never before imagined.