As marketers learn to focus more on roo (return on objective) than roi (return on investment), social marketing is infiltrating every platform If you’re convinced that social media — and social marketing — is over, you might point to the stock market performance of three of the industry’s erstwhile highfliers: group buying service Groupon, social gaming company Zynga and, of course, Facebook. After peaking at just above $26, about two weeks after its early November 2011 ipo, Groupon’s shares have been in …

Designers and marketers are just scratching the glossy surface of this mobile device’s potential Call them couch toys. Call them heavy. Call them the focus of most agencies’ emerging media energies these days. Any and all would be accurate. Tablets are poised to play a massive role in the future of media. They are likely to have the kind of reach that goes beyond the device itself to change the face of Web design, impact e-commerce, and alter the way TV networks and marketers interact with …

In the latest version of Mars meets Venus, real-time media and social data are helping marketers discover the new Web  Ask a search engine a question through keywords, and it returns well-organized information by interconnecting pieces of content stored across the Web. No easy task for companies building the search engine, such as Google and Microsoft. Aside from finding the correct information, there are ethical and privacy concerns at stake.The engines might do a reasonably good job today at serving …

They were born in 1993 and 1994, and they're just now coming of age. They are your new demographic, and you can't reach them. Yet. They only use email to communicate with their professors. They laugh when asked if they have a cable provider. They'd rather text their parents than talk to them on the phone. They don't listen to the radio. They stream their TV online. The bottom line is that this group wants meaningful connection that is also convenient across all platforms.

As Gen X settles into its Docker years, our intrepid new dad comes cleans about all the media he’s loved — and lost When I became a father last November, I betrayed my family.   Not my actual family, mind you — they’re still treated to the same old mix of unhelpful helpfulness (e.g., I recently devoted a full evening to concocting a vinegar-based solution to detoxify the laundry I abandoned in the washing machine 96 hours earlier) and blithe inconsiderateness (“Honey, I know you just walked …

There aren’t many workdays that I get to officially invoke the spirit of Whitney Houston — or get to sing to defenseless colleagues. But at MEDIA, we believe the children are our future.Go ahead. Roll your eyes. But as we started digging into the technology and demographics driving the trends we hoped to cover in our fifth annual Future of Media issue, we couldn’t help but marvel at how often we had to repeat that line.We knew (and are frankly a little tired of hearing about) the tremendous influence Gen Y is having on all aspects …