October 2007
E-Mail Open Rates Hinge on 'Subject' Line - Personalized e-mails boost open rates, according to a MailerMailer study. The e-mail service provider found that personalized "subject" lines in particular increased the number of times recipients opened their mailings. The "subject" line is so important that, even when marketers have recipients' permission, the wrong line can still mean trouble.
[eMarketer, Posted October 31, 2007]
MySpace Gaming Section May Become Ad Sweetspot - MySpace's soon-to-launch casual gaming section has stirred the interest of some ad industry analysts, who see the feature as a golden cow in-the-make for advertisers. Regardless of how targeted run-of-site ads are on social networks, Deep Focus CEO Ian Schafer tells ClickZ they're "among the worst performers." The performance of website ads are usually determined by the quality of CPM, lead generation and conversions.
[MarketingVOX, Posted October 26, 2007]
Microsoft Drops $240 Million for 1.6% of Facebook - After a long talk and a presumably large number of clammy handshakes all around, Microsoft has agreed to invest $240 million into Facebook for a 1.6 percent stake in the company. This values the social networking site at $15 billion, $5 billion higher than previous estimates. The sealed deal leaves Yahoo and Google, who've also been courting Facebook for the past two months, in the dust, reports the New York Times.
[MarketingVOX, Posted October 25]
Political Ad Spending Great in 2008 - Media looks like an early front runner in the 2008 election. Spending should be impressive even without politicians. Interest groups have already opened their wallets, spending $6.2 million on TV ads in 2007 so far on state and local ballot measures, according to the TNS Media Intelligence/Campaign Media Analysis Group.
[eMarketer, Posted October 22]
African-American Buying Power Gets Star Treatment - The Nielsen Company released insights into shopping preferences among African-American consumers (with a total buying power expected to reach $1.1 trillion by 2012). The information comes via a new online publication, Consumer Insight, reports MarketingCharts. Click on the link above for Nielsen data on African-Americans' shopping activity.
[MarketingVOX, Posted October 19, 2007]
Small Businesses Shop, Bank Online - Nearly two-thirds of US small businesses shop and bank online, according to an eBillme-sponsored survey conducted by Market Platform Dynamics. Of the 64% of surveyed small businesses that shopped online, one-third said convenience and secure payment options were the key to online commerce.
[eMarketer, Posted October 15, 2007]
E-Mail Usage High, Marketing Spend Low - More than one-half of US e-mail marketing executives get 20% or less of their firm's e-mail budgets, according to StrongMail Systems and JupiterResearch’s “Maturation of Email: Controlling Messaging Chaos Through Centralization” report. E-mail marketers appear to get shortchanged when it comes to e-mail budgets, especially considering the medium's wide usage. JupiterResearch found more than one-quarter of the e-mail that consumers received in their inboxes was marketing. But there are reasons why
e-mail spending growth will stay moderate in the short term.
[eMarketer, Posted October 11, 2007]
New Tech Fuels Fancies in Entertainment, Media - The latest technologies and digital services are rekindling interest in media. And as big players like Apple and telecoms expand product offerings and increase competitiveness, they are largely contributing to the hype, according to "Media Trends 2007," a study from SNL Kagan, reports MarketingCharts. "Content owners and distributors are using digital to reach new audiences and boost revenues, while cable MSOs have made significant gains in the phone and high speed data arenas," said Deana Myers, SNL Kagan senior analyst.
[MarketingVOX, Posted October 9, 2007]
Burger King Dips Royal Hand into Mobile Advergaming - Burger King has just signed Mobliss to help the fast food chain develop a mobile advergame for distribution early next year, reports ClickZ. Players will pose as aspirants to the position of The King's right-hand man. (The King serves as Burger King's most familiar marketing character.) The game's city backdrop will also be Burger King-themed, allowing for maximum brand exposure to players.
[MarketingVOX, Posted October 8, 2007]
eMarketer Analysts on Fee vs. "Free" - Content owners aim for more ad dollars.
The New York Times has abandoned its "Times Select" subscription service. The Financial Times is making more of its content available free. Rupert Murdoch is widely rumored to be planning the same for The Wall Street Journal. Is this a trend? Several eMarketer analysts weighed in on the state of fee-based versus ad-supported online content.
[eMarketer, Posted October 5, 2007]
Mobile Users Want Web on Phones - More than four in 10 US mobile users surveyed say they will look at handsets with high Internet capabilities when buying their next phone, according to The Kelsey Group's "Mobile Market View" study, conducted with ConStat. Just over one-quarter of respondents said they were current mobile Internet plan subscribers. “The combination of unlimited data plans and next-generation Internet-enabled mobile devices, like Apple’s iPhone, suggests mobile Web access will grow to become ubiquitous,” said Matt Booth, senior vice president at The Kelsey Group, in a statement.
[eMarketer, Posted October 3, 2007]
So Much for Early Predictions - The Advertising Race Has Been Surprising
If you had told me back in January that after Labor Day Rudy Giuliani would have aired zero TV ads, John McCain would have just run his first ad, Mitt Romney would have run ads unchecked on the airways in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Florida, that Bill Richardson would have spent more on TV ads than John Edwards and Hillary Clinton combined, and that only a handful of states would have even seen presidential ad buys, I would have said you were crazy. Well, call me crazy.
[Advertising Age, Posted by Evan Tracey, October 2, 2007]
Online Job Ads Up 4 percent in September - There were 4,270,000 online advertised vacancies in Sept., an increase of 165,200 - or 4 percent - from August, according to The Conference Board (via MarketingCharts). Meanwhilst, online advertised vacancies leapt 17.5 percent from Sept. '06 to Sept. '07, with 2.78 advertised vacancies online in Sept. for every 100 persons in the labor force, according to the data.
[MarketingVOX, Posted October 2, 2007]
Personalized Internet TV Gets Response - Online television recommendations that are personalized are far better than generic editorial content for generating ad click-throughs, according to a Veoh-Carat study, cited in MediaPost. The two companies examined how computer programs made personalized recommendations to TV viewers based on past behavior. One-tenth of users' personalized recommendations were replaced with "generic editorial" recommendations. In the test of 2 million users, viewer click-through for personalized recommendations was 2.4% versus 0.3% for the generic editorial features.
[eMarketer, Posted October 1, 2007]
Shoppers' Web Savvy Prompts Online Retailers to Improve - With 53 percent of online shoppers early technology adopters, despite constituting just 36 percent of the North American population, retailers feel compelled to provide a consistently positive, sophisticated shopping experience, according to the 10th annual Shop.org study conducted by Forrester Research (via MarketingCharts). Among the top priorities reported by the 150 retailers surveyed for the second part of "The State of Retailing Online 2007" are fixing website design and performance issues, improving the efficiency of online marketing, and enhancing cross-channel integration.
[MarketingVOX, Posted October 1, 2007]
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Archived articles 2007
