The display space has been the subject of numerous exciting innovations over the course of 2012, resulting in some fantastic growth in the industry.
Europe’s online display ad spend for 2012 will reach £3.8bn, and grow at a rate of 13% to be £6.2bn by 2016 – all extremely healthy signs that the sector is on the up.
From social media sentiment analysis to digital ad buying, faster is increasingly seen as better, or at least necessary.
So it’s no surprise that the ability to generate lots of data and analyze it rapidly is changing the way products and services are sold.
Yesterday Twitter’s CEO Dick Costolo tweeted a six second video clip of himself making steak to his 1M+ followers.
This is a big deal to many because it was using the tech behind Vine, a video sharing startup acquired by Twitter.
It should be a big deal to content marketers everywhere because it’s a glimpse into the future.
Last year, Unilver, one of the world’s largest advertisers and a bellweather for the ever-important CPG market, spent $8.6bn on ads, an 8% jump over the prior year.
And it invested heavily in digital, upping its digital ad spend a whopping 40%.
That would normally be reason for agency execs to cheer, but you like won’t hear any champagne bottles popping.
The reason? According to Unilever CFO Jean-Marc Huet, the company is working to reduce “the part of the advertising spend which is used to make films, pay agencies and the like.” And it isn’t where it wants to be yet.
Earlier this month I analysed the way that Walmart uses social media to engage with its customers, finding that it has built up a large following on each of the major social networks with the exception of Google+.
By way of comparison, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at Tesco’s social strategy to see if there are any major differences in its approach.
As with Walmart, Tesco also publishes its social media guidelines online. It asks staff to ‘live the values’, ‘be authentic’ and respect other people’s copyright, as well as warning that the media and competitors are always watching.
Widely heralded as a victory for Google, the recent outcome of the American Federal Trade Commission’s exhaustive 19-month investigation into allegations of anti-competitive practices nevertheless contains at least one point that should have some (minor but beneficial) impact on the PPC marketplace in the near future.
“How do I measure social media?” is one of the most frequent questions I get asked whenever I give social media seminars.
However, it is difficult to give someone a one-size-fits-all answer as it largely depends on what you want to measure, and what you want to measure largely depends on your wider objectives in the first place.
With this in mind, I thought I’d put together a series of articles where each week I take a particular objective and offer some guidance on how to measure it.
I’m going to kick off with brand awareness – this week focusing solely on Facebook so as not to make the articles too long.
According to many industry experts, Australian retailers need to start incorporating new technologies into their stores this year in order to better engage consumers.
The use of technology in stores has grown significantly over the past few years, and it doesn’t appear to be slowing down. QR codes on shopfronts, iPads in restaurants and businesses, mobile wallets, interactive advertising walls – the list goes on.
If Australia wants to take a leadership position in the increasingly global and digital economy, corporations and corporate leaders must make changes to their business plans and direct their resources accordingly.
This view is expressed in a recent report co-produced by Telstra and Deloitte Digital, which discusses the expected growth rate of the Australian digital economy and highlights the best ways for corporations to cope and respond to the change that will come from this.
The 2012 holiday shopping season was one for the online retail records and that led to a very merry Christmas for Google, which reported its fourth quarter earnings yesterday.
All eyes were on the search giant, which failed to deliver in the third quarter, much to the disappointment of Wall Street.
But there was no disappointment this time as the company delivered $14.4bn in revenue, a 36% year-over-year increase, and earnings of $2.9bn, up from $2.7bn in the same quarter a year ago.
A new search ranking algorithm update has shaken things up for ecommerce managers who have been incorporating video into their search strategies.
According to Google and YouTube, they are adjusting rankings so that videos with more “watch time” are ranked highest. In other words, the amount of time a video is played and, presumably, watched, matters more than how many times people view it.
The solution to this ranking challenge is user-generated video. We know that site visitors are interested in what other customers are saying about your products. People value these honest, objective opinions from those outside of your business.
What’s more, user-generated videos are more than informative. They’re often funny, which can compel viewers to stay tuned longer.
Last week brands in the spirits and auto industries moved up in The Dachis Group’s Social Business Index, a real-time ranking of 30,000+ multinationals’ performance in social.
We take a look at the top twenty listings and focus on those brands that performed especially well: Chrysler, Carlsberg, and Diageo, fine purveyor of libations.