Always adapting, Gilt prepares for big mobile push
A steady spring rain served as little deterrence for the hardy attendants of the New York American Marketing Association’s Monday night event featuring Gilt Groupe cofounder Alexis Maybank.
Currently serving as chief strategy officer, Maybank discussed Gilt's four year maturation into the big-data-weilding, five-million-member established player that it is today.
Gilt has thrived, Maybank emphasized, by prioritizing flexibility. When the company hosted it's first invitation-only sale for Zac Posen in 2007, only ten days had passed since the initial customer contact, and the returns section of the website had yet to be built. During the rapid growth that followed, more people were hired in some quarters than had been working at the company.
The first big change of direction occured when the company realized that their partnering brands weren't just looking at them for inventory liquidation, but instead saw Gilt as a marketing channel. The latest pivot, occuring now, is towards mobile.
What do consumers think of social media marketing on mobile?
Stats show the massive growth in the use of smartphones to access social media, but how will consumers react to social media marketing on their mobiles?
Some of the stats in this DMA infographic suggest there is some resitance to this. For example, 44% regard marketing on mobile social media as invasive, while 52% believe that ads should only be seen by fans or followers of brands.
MediaCom's six lessons for mobile marketing
Marketing giant MediaCom has been sharing some valuable lessons it learned from running mobile marketing campaigns.
During a speech at IAB Mobile Engage, MediaCom’s managing partner for mobile and innovation Stefan Bardega said that 18% of the company’s digital ads were now viewed on mobile screens.
This has increased from 4% in just over a year.
Here are Bardega's tips on how businesses should approach the mobile channel...
39m Americans made a purchase via mobile last year: stats
Mobile commerce has been a topic of great interest for marketers and businesses in the past several years.
And for good reason: with more and more consumers carrying increasingly sophisticated mobile devices with them everywhere they go, the potential to drive commerce in ways never before possible is fast becoming a reality.
There are numerous challenges, of course. The mobile device and OS landscape is highly fragmented, there are numerous security concerns and performance is absolutely crucial.
Insights on Mobile in the Middle East from Digital Cream Dubai
When I was offered the opportunity to moderate the table on Mobile Marketing at Digital Cream Dubai, I couldn’t think of a single reason to not be there; it isn’t every day I’d get to sit down on a table with 10 client side marketers and hear about their pains and pleasure of doing mobile. And it really was equal parts both.
There were a lot of insights that came in from the three roundtables featuring 10 marketers each.
How can advertisers increase mobile affiliate revenue?
The ‘rise of mobile’ has been a hot topic in online for years; however, at the start of 2012 it’s beginning to feel like mobile marketing has finally arrived as a channel worth shouting about both in terms of viability and, more importantly for the bottom line, profitability.
More and more consumers are using smartphones and mobile devices to access content. A whopping 42% of the UK mobile users now operate on a smart phone and 51% have browsed the internet on their mobile devices in the past week.
While 65% of mobile owners routinely use their mobile devices to find businesses for in-store purchases (Source: Google, 2011) a significant 13% of UK consumers have actually made a purchase via a mobile, with a further 19% having used their mobile to compare prices and look at product reviews while out shopping.
This shift in consumer behaviour is having a dramatic impact on the affiliate sector, which has proved in the past to be a perfect testing ground for more innovative advertising models.
With advertisers increasingly investing in viable mobile commerce sites, publishers are utilising the platform as another avenue for increasing revenue.
With this in mind, what steps should advertisers and publishers be taking to increase affiliate traffic and drive revenue through a mobile platform?
Loopt gets acquired by prepaid debit card company
What do prepaid debit cards and location-based services (LBS) have in common? If a company called Green Dot is right, the answer is 'a lot more than you might think.'
The company, which is a major player in the prepaid debit card space, today announced that it has acquired mobile LBS startup Loopt for $43.4m in cash.
US teens send almost 3,500 texts per month
It's no surprise that teenagers are some of the most active users of mobile.
Their texting prolificacy is well-established, and for many, sending an email or making a telephone call is a rare event.
But according to a new study released by Nielsen, teens in the United States are also rapidly increasing their mobile data usage.
Mobile social media audience up 37%: report
Social media is big. Mobile is big. So it shouldn't come as any surprise that the number of consumers using their mobile phones to interact with popular social media hubs like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn is growing rapidly.
According to comScore, the number of mobile users in the United States ages 13 and up who accessed a social networking or blog website has grown a whopping 37% in the past year.
What's more: nearly 50% of these users are social networking on a daily basis using their mobile devices.
The rise of mobile marketing spend: infographic
A new infograohic shows the growth of mobile marketing, with US spending increasing by 75% since 2009, while it is predicted to reach $2.3bn by 2013.
The infographic, from Microsoft Tag, also shows that the average mobile app session lasts 4.3 minutes, compared with one minute online.
