According to the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press' 2012 campaign news survey, fewer Americans are closely following news about the presidential campaign than four years ago. As a consequence, long-term declines in the number of people getting campaign news from such sources as local TV and network news have steepened, and even the number gathering campaign news online, which had nearly tripled between 2000 and 2008, has leveled off in 2012.

According to The Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABC), reported by Media Buyer, membership publication AARP topped the second half of 2011 list of consumer magazine circulation, with their Magazine and Bulletin combining to reach 44.6 million subscribers. Excluding all membership based subscriptions, (including AAA Living and American Legion Magazine), Better Homes and Gardens tops the list, with 22.2 million subscribers, down slightly from 2010. BHG claims a monthly readership of 38.33 million readers, 30.28 million of whom are women.

According to a recent post by Experian Hitwise, by Margot Bonner, Analyst on the Strategic Services team, Facebook.com captures one in every eleven Internet visits in the US.

The Gartner Predicts 2012 special report highlights how the control of technology and technology-driven decisions is shifting out of the hands of IT organizations. New forces that are not easily controlled by IT are pushing themselves to the forefront of IT spending. Specifically, the forces of cloud computing, social media and social networking, mobility and information management are all evolving at a rapid pace. Business unit stakeholders often recognize the value of new technology before IT departments can harness it.

According to Ask Your Target Market's (AYTM) latest survey, 38% of respondents said they always use Google as their search engine. 28% said they mostly use Google, 16% said they sometimes use Google, and 17% said they use a different search engine. Only 2% said they do not use search engines.

Results from an Econsultancy survey released in February, conducted in partnership with the Email Experience Council of the DMA, and reported by Marketing Charts, show that 55% of client side marketers are using lead source to personalize/segment their mailings, while 53% are using demographic data. And, although only 49% currently personalize emails based on behavior, including recent purchase, time on site, and pages viewed, almost one-quarter plan to do so in the near future. By contrast, the proportion who already factor in business information is roughly equal to those who have no plans to do so (46% vs. 45%).

According to statistics from online ad server YuMe, the CPG (consumer packaged goods) category was the top online spender of 2011, making up 24% of dollars spent. Health/Pharmaceutical advertising made up 16%, a 400% year-over-year increase from 2010.

According to the Newspaper Association of America, based on data provided by comScore, newspaper websites in the fourth quarter of 2011 averaged more than 111 million monthly unique visitors, an increase of more than 6 million compared with the same period a year ago. The analysis also indicates continuing strong performance in other key engagement and demographic metrics important to advertisers, with 63% of all adult Internet users visiting newspaper websites.

According to a recent conducted in-depth study on the usage of social media in fast-growing corporations by The Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, the Inc. 500 (the fastest-growing private U.S. companies compiled annually by Inc. Magazine) was outpacing the revenue based Fortune 500 in their use of social media.

According to The State of Email Marketing in SMBs, by GetResponse, most small-to-midsize businesses (SMBs) have mastered the basics of organic email list-building, making use of Web-based sign-up forms and even offering incentives to encourage subscriptions, but fewer than half use any type of email-to-social collaboration, limiting the potential of cross-channel marketing.