Marketers will spend about 17% more annually for interactive display marketing in the United States between 2012 and 2017, while European investments will grow a bit more slowly, according to a Forrester Research report released Tuesday. Analysts attribute several factors to the double-digit growth, like the rise of programmatic buying technologies, along with rich media and video options. Forrester Analyst Joanna O'Connell explains that U.S. interactive display media will grow from $12.7 billion in 2012 to $28 billion in 2017, an average compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 17%, compared with offline at 1.1%. The fastest growth will come from cable TV at 4.1%. Radio, newspapers, and Yellow Pages will decline. Forrester also trimmed the U.S. display forecast by about 13% in the next five years, attributing some of the decline to a shift to less-expensive social media impressions, which weakens portals such as MSN and Yahoo. Emerging ad types and pricing models will get a bigger share of budgets by 2017, according to the report. Program media, fueled by audience targeting, will offer the best performance. As marketers compete for similar audience segments and number of bids increase, average CPM prices of exchange impressions will rise from $3.17 to $6.64 by 2017. Video will rise from 23% of online display budgets in 2012 to 33% in 2017. More expensive CPM placements, such as full-page placements and long-form video, will replace older formats, such as buttons and other small banners. How will marketers justify higher CPM? O'Connell believes that this will occur partially through better data and analytics. The best way to identify the most valuable impressions to ensure a higher return on investment points to knowing your current and future customers and their behaviors and using the correct metrics. Internal business processes will change, too. Marketers will become system integrators by thinking about budgeting decisions within the context of an "integrated system" that drives positive advancements and returns on digital marketing campaigns, rather than looking at each channel, creative, or technology expenditure in silos. They will make IT decisions themselves. Forrester analysts also believe that digital media buyers will give up power to internal groups, such as agency trading desks and vendor partners, either managed by technical groups or by the client. O'Connell points out that Team Detroit, a mix of agencies and vendors, already does this for Ford, while other companies, like Allstate Insurance, have just begun to make the change.

The ad industry is continuing to ramp up the pressure on Microsoft to retreat from its decision to activate do-not-track headers by default in Internet Explorer 10. "A 'default on' do-not-track mechanism offers consumers and businesses inconsistencies and confusion instead of comfort and security," the self-regulatory group Digital Advertising Alliance said on Tuesday. The organization added that it won't require members to honor do-not-track headers from people who use the Internet Explorer 10 browser. While the ad group previously indicated that it won't require publishers and ad networks to respect do-not-track signals set to "on" by default, Tuesday's statement was the most definitive to date. "It is not a DAA Principle or in any way a requirement under the DAA Program to honor a DNT signal that is automatically set in IE10 or any other browser," the group stated. It noted that the Council of Better Business Bureaus -- which enforces the industry's self-regulatory principles -- as well as the Direct Marketing Association won't sanction companies that ignore do-not-track signals from Microsoft's IE10 browser. The Interactive Advertising Bureau praised the DAA for taking a position against "machine-driven" do-not-track browser standards, saying that they "restrict consumer control and freedom of choice." The DAA's announcement is the latest in a series of measures by the ad industry aimed at pressuring Microsoft to reverse its controversial decision to activate do-not-track headers in Internet Explorer 10 by default. The company has said it intends to do so when users select "express settings" during the Windows 8 installation process. Last week, the Association of National Advertisers publicly criticized Microsoft for the move, arguing that it will undercut online advertising. As of Tuesday, Microsoft showed no signs of backing away from its position. Brendon Lynch, chief privacy officer at Microsoft, stated that a recent company survey of U.S. and European consumers showed that 75% want the company to turn on do not track. "This reaffirms our decision to enable DNT in the 'Express Settings' portion of the Windows 8 set-up experience," he stated. "There consumers can easily switch DNT off if they’d like." Do-not-track headers signal to publishers and ad networks that users don't want to be tracked as they surf the Web. But the signals don't actually block tracking. Instead, ad networks and publishers decide whether to respond to the signals. The umbrella group DAA said in February that it would require members to honor those signals, but only if the browser wasn't set to "on" by default. Some privacy advocates say the ad industry isn't likely to have the final word on the question. Justin Brookman, director of consumer privacy for the Center for Democracy & Technology, points out that Microsoft theoretically could reconfigure its browser so that it blocks cookies from third parties that reject the do-not-track setting. "Blocking ads would be a bad result all around, but both sides seem increasingly dug in," he says. For now, questions about whether publishers and ad networks will honor the signals are largely academic because no one has developed standards to implement the headers. The World Wide Web Consortium met last week in Amsterdam to discuss the issue, but the group didn't reach a consensus.    

About six months ago Google rolled out an education program around erecting post-PC strategies it dubbed the “Mobile Playbook.” In fact, our own OMMA Mobile event at Internet Week in May was where their head of mobile and social solutions Tim Reis first walked through the concept live. After months of taking the plan on the road and speaking with marketers and agencies, the Googlers say they have some revisions and amendments to the original playbook. Writing on the Google Ad blog, Jason Spero, head of global mobile sales and strategy, says they wanted to include some of the novel ways in which companies are making the most of the mobile palette creatively and also proving the platform’s value on their businesses. “These are two areas that have been top of mind for the thousands of marketers that we’ve talked with and we’re excited to expand the playbook to delve deeper into these topics,” Spero writes. In several recent reports, agency executives have voiced misgivings with the literal scale of mobile screens for getting across brand messages. The microscopic banner has been blamed by some for the microscopic size of mobile spend relative to other channels. A new section of the Playbook titled Mobile Creativity shows off campaigns from Chevy, Toyota, Nike and eMart to demonstrate unique mobile marketing properties. The Chevy Game Time app for the Super Bowl illustrates the use of multi-screen context, for instance. The now famous “Back Seat Driver” app aimed at kids illustrates the use of location awareness and tracking. And a clever tablet ad from Brazilian financial services company Bradesco has the user inadvertently swipe a car in a fake ad and push it into a wall.  A new Full Value of Mobile section is a series of ROI case studies involving brands such as T-Mobile, Adidas and Fab.com. For design showroom Fab.com, 30% of their sales now come from mobile less than a year after launching their app. Off of a search ad with click-to-call functionality, T-Mobile drove over 20,000 calls in a month and saw a 13% click-through rate to its mobile site. Adidas did the math on finding that 20% of store locator users converted to buyers with an average order value of $80. Each store locator look-up was worth $3.20. Spero says the Playbook is designed to highlight illustrative mobile marketing wins and offers from them Google’s tips for others to follow. International editions of the Playbook have been rolled out for Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, France and the UK, with more coming for Japan, Austria and Italy in the upcoming weeks. 

A new study by the Interactive Advertising Bureau reinforces prior research showing that the U.S. Hispanic market has a strong presence online and on mobile devices. The “Digital Hispanic Consumer” report indicates that Latinos have higher-than-average representation in areas like e-commerce and digital media and social media use. The findings were based on an IAB analysis of a survey of 25,000 U.S. consumers (including the Hispanic population) conducted by research firm BIGInsight, compared with a sample of 4,325 U.S. Hispanics. The survey was fielded in both Spanish and English between April 24 and June 11, 2012. Based on the results, the top five online activities for Hispanics include: -Shopping (46% of Hispanics vs. 43% general population)-Reading and posting movie reviews (36%  vs. 28%)-Downloading music and videos (31% vs. 25%)-Socializing online (29% of Hispanics -- equal to general population)-Watching TV shows online (28% vs. 24%) Even as more online traffic shifts from the desktop to mobile devices, Hispanics are more likely to go online via a mobile device than average users and are more likely to own an iPhone, Android device and iPad. Given that data, it’s not so surprising that Hispanic users are less likely to own a desktop computer (40%) than consumers generally (48%). “Hispanic consumers are living their lives on the go and lean on their mobile devices accordingly,” said Pam Goodfellow, consumer insights director at BIGinsight. “Brand leaders would be well-served to recognize the economic power of the Hispanic community and harness their appetite for goods, services and online content -- especially via mobile devices.” The most popular mobile activities among Hispanics were text messaging (56%), viewing email (42%) and taking a picture or video (39%). When it comes to watching video, via mobile or otherwise, Latinos also demonstrated higher rates of adoption: -Subscribe to paid online video services (55% of Hispanics vs. 43% general population)-Pay attention to video pre-roll advertising (58% vs. 54%)-Watch videos on a mobile device (46% of Hispanics vs. 35%) Likewise, Nielsen research released in April showed that Hispanics were more likely than their white and African-American counterparts to watch Netflix on their computers, but on par with Asians. The IAB report found that Hispanics more broadly are optimistic as consumers, with just over half being confident about the economy compared to one-third of Americans generally. With that outlook, they are also more likely than average to make the following purchases in the next six months: -House (more likely by 41%)--Mobile device (37%)-Baby items (37%)-Furniture (29%)-Automobile (28%) The report also suggested that language plays an important role in the media Latinos use. Hispanic participants in the survey were bilingual, English-dominant, with 75% speaking English more than half of the time at home. But more than half (54%) said that they consistently engage with Spanish-language media.The top Spanish-language sites visited regularly were Univision (20%), Telemundo.com (14%), Yahoo en espanol (10%), and MSN Latino, CNNespanol.com and Latina.com, each at 7%.

Do you want to be an average content marketer or a great one? The answer lies in how well you understand how search marketing can help you build a connected brand. As brands wake up and realize they are in the digital publishing business, they have the chance to produce a great publishing strategy that combines search, content marketing, and social media. Here's how the synergy works: Search engines process natural language: Believe it or not, too many marketers still think of natural search as simply "stuffing keyword.” Wrong.  Keywords are connections to people, which means that you must be cognizant of the language you use, and the language used by your audience. Furthermore, search engines are the super heavyweight champs of processing the natural language of the Internet, while social networks and content management systems lag behind. Search engines perform deep network analysis: Search engines don’t just spit out results. They perform intricate network analysis (analysis of the entire Web, and the weighted connections in between, among many other factors). This same type of network analysis is being used as a framework for identifying connections in social networks, and can help the social user experience by understanding themes and the influence of people within a network, among many other areas. So the imperative for the social strategist is to think like a network analyst or like a search engine to better understand influence in networks. Search helps social marketers find their audience: There is a bigger social world out there beyond Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and G+, and the social Web extends to answer sites and discussion boards, among many other places. Companies should value their audience no matter where they may congregate, which includes answer sites, forums, and the commenting sections of various types of publishers. When marketers use deep keyword research and look far to find their audience in these places, they are better able to serve their audience. That's why keyword research and search skills are critical. Search data provides market research and show your audience’s tastes: John Battelle didn’t call search engine databases “the database of intentions” for nothing. This data is like a living focus group for a social or content audience, and should be leveraged to find gaps and opportunity for conversation and content. Using other search tools like Think With Google or Google Ad Planner, marketers can let a search engine’s network analysis do much of the heavy lifting, helping to better understand what their audience wants, and how and where they want it. Search metrics reflect content performance: Backlinks, unique indexed pages, and network analysis of your owned assets are a reflection of your own content’s performance. Don’t just look at SEO metrics in a search context, but as a social and content thing as well. Social networks are becoming more algorithmic: I’ve been writing about this concept for years in this column, and I see no reason to stop banging the drum now. The biggest updates coming up in Twitter and Facebook are algorithmic, and will affect how you get your information. On its own, showing the “most recent info first” is a fairly simple algorithm. As social networks become more algorithmic, social marketers will increasingly find themselves trying to reverse-engineer the algo, just as search marketers sometimes do. “Reverse engineering” is not a bad term; it just means that you want to exercise more control over how your information appears, as you have a right to do. Many of the ideas in this column are from my forthcoming book, “Search and Social: The Definitive Guide to Real-Time Marketing.” I hope this article shows how we are all playing in the same sandbox now. I’ve heard a lot of people speaking about search as being tactical -- so if you disagree with me, I would like to know why you think search is simply tactical in the context of social and content. Don’t be shy -- hit me with your best shot.