Digital strategies like social marketing will influence at least 80% of consumers' discretionary spending by 2015, according to Gartner. The findings, released in a joint study with ExactTarget, analyze multichannel marketing techniques, as well as tips to lead consumers to purchases. The Marketer's Guide to Multichannel Campaign Management suggests that brands must move away from running campaigns individually and toward the integration of many campaigns, such as email, social, search, voice, video and more. The strategy supports consumers moving to a "hyper-connected" model, where many gain access to online content through more than one device simultaneously. Most will connect through some form of mobile device. eMarketer estimates access through nearly 116 million U.S. smartphones this year. Gartner estimates that 6.7 billion devices will connect to the Internet by 2014. Mass-market campaigns on average get a 2% response rate. Personalized email messages on mobile devices, however, continue to climb. In fact, the percent of consumers who opened email on mobile devices rose "double digits" during the first half of 2012, according to Jeffrey Rohrs, head of marketing research at ExactTarget. As marketers prepare for the 2012 holiday season, Rohrs said a successful cross-channel strategy requires knowledge of device, channel and content preferences for a specific campaign. The study approached 1,500 U.S. online consumers on online interactions and brand expectation. Sixty-six percent of participants made a purchase after receiving an email marketing message, compared with 16% after receiving a text marketing message. About 76% prefer email compared with other channels for receiving customer services messages, but 25% prefer text message when it comes to real-time travel alerts. Nine percent of consumers age 25-34 prefer text message over other channels for delivering tickets to an event purchased online. Sixty-six percent of teens ages 15 to 17 prefer email compared with 4% on Facebook when it comes to permission-based marketing. The same age group also admits to making a purchase after seeing a message about the product on Facebook. When it comes to social media, 20% of Twitter users tweet weekly. Sixteen percent of survey participants ages 15 to 17 said they made a purchase after seeing a message on Twitter, and 20% made a purchase after receiving a message on Facebook. Online purchases continue to rise. U.S. retail e-commerce sales for online retail spending rose 15% to $43.2 billion in the second quarter of 2012 compared with the year-ago quarter, according to comScore. The uptick represents 11 consecutive quarters of positive year-on-year growth and seven consecutive quarters of double-digit growth.
Yahoo has struck gold again at the Olympics. The Web giant said today that its coverage of the London Summer Games had so far (through Aug. 6) generated double the page views of both the Vancouver and Beijing Olympics combined. Yahoo's Olympics-related content, anchored by a dedicated Olympics site, has drawn 2 billion page views across the desktop, mobile phones and tablets. Through the end of July, which spanned the opening days of the Games, Yahoo's Olympics programming drew 80 million unique viewers. The company optimized its Olympics coverage for browsers on all three screens and leveraged properties such as its IntoNow app to deliver second-screen viewing options like medal counts, athlete bios and schedules synchronized to to the Games on TV. Cross-platform programming has also paid off for NBC Universal, which has exclusive broadcast rights to the Olympics. The network said last week it had seen nearly a 200% rise in total video streamed to 75 million, with more than a 300% rise in live streams to 34 million. It has also been averaging 31.5 million unique viewers on laptop/computer use versus 29.1 million uniques at the Beijing Games.
AOL on Friday unveiled version 2.0 of its connected TV app, which it is renaming AOL On, after the video hub the Web giant launched earlier this year. Among other things, the relaunch features a new design and interface that makes it easier for advertisers to insert pre-rolls within the app and across AOL’s various platform partners. AOL On programming includes video content from the Web giant’s own properties, like HuffPost Entertainment, Moviefone and Engadget, as well as partners like Reuters, BBC, the Associated Press, Entertainment Tonight, CNET and Sugar, among others. AOL On’s full library hosts 380,000 short-form videos. As part of the announcement, Samsung Smart TVs, Roku, and Sony will join seven other connected and over-the-top TV platforms carrying AOL content. The app for TiVo is currently in beta, and will soon work on its Premiere DVRs. “Demand among advertisers for connected TV inventory is incredibly high,” said Ran Harnevo, senior vice president, video, The AOL On Network. “With this launch, we’re delivering on our promise of giving advertisers the tools to reach consumers across every screen in a high-quality, curated environment.”
To showcase all that the latest generation of personal computers can accomplish, Intel is launching the “Ultrabook Experience,” a series of co-marketing ventures that brings well-known brands together with emerging and established artists, designers and entertainers. “We’re going out and looking for the specific passion points around different lifestyles and showing what Ultrabooks can do, pulling together these different brands in order to celebrate what you can do with this technology,” Elizabeth Broers, Intel’s global director of co-marketing, tells Marketing Daily. “We came up with the idea with putting [these collaborations] together because we want to showcase the intersection of technology and passionate people doing what they love.” The first Ultrabook Experience installment kicks off this week with the launch of “Four Stories,” a collaboration between Intel and W Hotels, offering aspiring filmmakers a platform to showcase their talents. During the month of August, filmmakers can upload an original screenplay (that highlights the mobile, 24/7 nature of travel) for a chance to get their screenplay produced and premiered in global settings. The entries will be judged by a panel of industry leaders and artists that include filmmaker Roman Coppola, Intel chief marketing officer Deborah Conrad and W Hotels music director Michaelangelo L’Acqua. The two major requirements are that the story must take place in a W Hotel, and that an Ultrabook must play a role in the script, Broers says. “We’re keeping it pretty open because we really do want to enable really great storytelling,” she says. Three winning screenplays will be turned into 10-minute short films by Coppola and The Directors Bureau. Coppola will write and direct a fourth film to complete the series. The four films will receive red carpet premieres in W Hotels around the world and shown on Web sites representing The Ultrabook Experience, W Hotels and in the hotels’ in-room entertainment channel. Upcoming Ultrabook Experience projects will include well-known brands from the worlds of fashion (such as Levi’s) and art, Broers says.
While they are not the only factor, faster Internet speeds have contributed greatly to a rapid rise in domestic online content consumption and engagement levels. Unfortunately -- with just 60% of broadband connections over 4Mbps -- the United States still ranks 14th in the world, according to the latest data from content delivery network Akamai. Thanks to their dense populations and strong technological infrastructures, Asian territories remain global leaders -- particularly Hong Kong, with its lightning-fast 49.3 Mbps speeds. Akamai attributes much of the growth in peak speeds to an explosion in "high broadband" connections, where 10 Mbps is the minimum. Along with Denmark, Finland, South Korea, and Switzerland, the United States did manage to nearly double its adoption of extra-fast access over the past year. When it came to average connection speeds, all of the top 10 countries on Akamai’s list experienced positive year-over-year changes in average connection speeds. Globally, a total of 125 countries experienced year-over-year increases, while only 10 countries that qualified for inclusion saw declines in connection speeds. The global average connection speed in the first quarter was 2.6 Mbps. Meanwhile, of all mobile operators tracked, Akamai found that five had an average connection speed of greater than 4 Mbps; 65 mobile operators had average connection speeds greater than 1 Mbps, and only three providers had average connection speeds below 500 kbps. When looking at peak connection speeds for mobile providers worldwide for which Akamai analyzed data, a provider in Hong Kong offered the highest average peak connection speed of 32.2 Mbps, and a German provider came in at a close second at 31.2 Mbps. Overall, six mobile operators had average peak connection speeds of greater than 20 Mbps -- double the number of the previous quarter.
I don't get it. I mean, on some level I get it: Those high-culture knockabouts at The New Yorker want people to buy their iPhone app and, to that end, have birthed a video promoting it. I understand the concept of promotion. Promotion is designed to encourage the purchase of televisions, baked goods and other items, usually via the vehicles of publicity and advertising. This makes sense to me. But in terms of execution, tone and technique, I don't know what the hell to make of this video. There's a joke here somewhere, and it either whooshed over my head Lockheed-spy-plane style or pulled an end run on me while I was enjoying YouTube clips of Van Halen and people falling down. The video unfolds as a mock talk show, hosted by Jon Hamm in aggressive hammin'-it-up (sorry) mode. In front of a generic backdrop, he does his best uninterested-Letterman impression, mangling guest (and clip writer/director) Lena Dunham's name ("Lanny Darlen") and exchanging lazily suggestive repartee about pants. He professes never to have heard of the iPhone or The New Yorker (as if!) and, after Dunham/Darlen describes the magazine to him, likens it to Rolling Stone. The scene is as self-referentially chortlesome as the oceans are salty. It gets more willfully, stridently meta from there. As the guest spot goes south, Hamm throws to a clip from Dunham's faux movie, The Assistant. In it, Dunham schools her unsophisticated guy-Friday on the features of the New Yorker app, doing so with the requisite air of ironic detachment and making sure to include the post-retro-mumblecore staple of air quotes (in this case, around "subscribe"). The clip ends with "maybe next week we can have sex." In some circles, that's known as a "kicker." When the video returns to the couch, Hamm cuts Dunham off mid-sentence with "it was super-nice to meet you" and engages her in a charged, drawn-out handshake. Cue the circa-1982 talk-show music, and we're out. But goldarnit, the clip sure leaves us with a veritable wellspring of memories: Of the appropriate usage of "drop" by a lingo-impaired talk-show dullard, of the plug for a nonsensical-sounding obscure web site that leads to an actual obscure web site, maybe even of the app itself. I've got a whole bunch of questions, but I'll stick to two. First and foremost: Who, precisely, is the audience for this kind of compressed drollery? There wouldn't seem to be a ton of overlap between individuals who'd plunk down $5.99 per e-issue transmission/$59.99 for a full-year app subscription and individuals who dig Dunham's thing, whatever that is. And second: Can somebody guarantee that my poor, overburdened phone won't explode after downloading entire volumes of The New Yorker? I used to subscribe to the print edition (read: "I am very, very cultured and learn-ED, and can banter knowledgeably about a range of important issues, like hydrofracking and Lou Reed") because I tired of having a Leaning-Tower-Of-Pisa of unread issues stacked behind the toilet. Now it's all going to fit on my phone? We live in miraculous times, indeed. Anyway, I'm sure this clip is someone's idea of amusing. It ain't mine. In conclusion, I don't get it.