The Planner’s Digital Dilemma – Online Research from Microsoft Atlas Institute

Existing media planning tools may help identify sites that have the highest concentration of a target audience, but digital publishers write contracts in terms of ad impressions. So brand marketers are left to guess if the plan that nets out to an $18 CPM is better or worse than the $9 CPM plan. This Digital Marketing Insight will bring traditional media planning to digital media.
Although targeting and frequency capping promise a bright future of less media waste, the vast majority of impressions delivered online are neither capped nor targeted.

The shape of the curve explains why doubling the impression size of a buy will not result in doubling the audience for that buy.
While the audience segment reach curves are not widely available today, planning tools that incorporate the reach curves will emerge within the coming year.

Example of a shorthand technique for calculating digital media plan audience metrics.

 Download the electronic version of 'Planner’s Digital Dilemma' report.

Fluent: The Razorfish Social Influence Marketing Report « Amnesia Blog

Razorfish has just released the inaugural issue of Fluent: The Razorfish Social Influence Marketing report.

This report highlights how Social Influence Marketing encompasses every part of marketing and every dimension of an organisation, as well providing a new metric for the measurement of SIM.

Convergence of Social Media and Traditional CRM - Next Generation Listening and Engagement

Social Media Monitoring systems now offer social CRM solutions. Social media, customer support, and sales teams can use these capabilities to associate and cross-reference social web content with customer and prospect information.

Enhanced capabilities and features to help companies and agencies answer the question: "How well is our brand performing across the web?"
Some of the benefits of the integration:

• Enable social media and community teams to see a customer's entire service case history from a dashboard, providing context for outreach and engagement
• Build new contacts, leads, or service cases and push them to the sales team for follow-up actions to streamline workflow
• Link social properties like blogs or Twitter accounts to existing CRM contacts, or create new contacts or leads from social properties discovered through monitoring
• Automatically capture social conversations mentioning your brand generated by your customers or prospects in social media
• View your team's engagement notes from a dashboard within each customer or prospect record

Post written by Paul Greenberg on How a Social CRM System would work and how it would relate to channels like Twitter:

“Twitter's benefit and its relationship to CRM is that it is a location, a community of people who are engaging with their peers in honest open discussions about things that benefit or hurt specific businesses, among many other things. Because there are operational CRM tools and will be new tools that can potentially tie business rules and workflow, processes and systems to communities of prospects and customers who are conversing, then a channel or location like Twitter becomes eminently valuable. The first reason? Because a problem can be monitored, noticed and acted upon. The second reason? Because gathering data on the actual discussions around brands - both yours and competitors is invaluable.”

Logic+Emotion - David Armano

You have to work with the gifts you're given. David's gift is to visualize thoughts and ideas.

Storybids.com - The Product Placement Marketplace!

Storybids is a website tool for media sellers and content buyers. It connects those with creative ideas for product placement with advertisers who want to place their products in user generated videos, mini-dramas and webisodes, music videos and online commercials.

[YouTube Data shows 70% of Users Click Away From Pre-roll ads]

Winning Teams Join to Qualify for $1 Million Netflix Prize | Epicenter | Wired.com

In a very shrewd move, Netflix created a contest more than 3 years ago to award $1 million to anybody that could create an algorithm more than 10% more accurate than theirs. Now, a team has finally done it.

The two front-running teams, distressingly named Team Pragmatic Theory and Team Bellkor in Chaos, joined forces and have submitted an algorithm that is 10.05% more accurate than Netflix's. Now, the other contestants (it's a field of thousands) have 30 days to beat that score, and if nobody can (and no rules have been broken), Netflix will award the superteam a cool million.

This is a smart move for Netflix—improving their algorithm by that much would have been incredibly expensive anyway, and Netflix has said that the $1 million prize is actually a great bargain.

The McKinsey Quarterly

Consumers are moving outside the purchasing funnel—changing the way they research and buy your products. If your marketing hasn’t changed in response, it should.
Marketers commonly think of consumers’ purchase decisions in terms of a funnel: customers start with many product options and systematically narrow in on a decision, based partly on marketing messages directed at them.

But a more sophisticated approach is required to help marketers navigate today’s environment, with its proliferation of digital channels and increasingly discerning, well-informed consumers. This new consumer decision-making process is less linear and more complicated than the funnel suggests and must be understood by marketers if they are to reach customers not only at the right place and time but with the right message.

The decision-making process is now a circular journey with four phases. The number of brands added for consideration in different stages differs by industry. Two-thirds of the touch points during the active-evaluation phase involve consumer-driven activities such as Internet reviews and word-of-mouth recommendations from friends and family.

Watch the Video: The Consumer Decision Journey

YouTube - Over 200 Videos.

Turbulent times offer an opportunity to the most nimble businesses to get ahead. Decision-makers must act without delay. Drawing inspiration from successful leaders becomes critical.

London Business School, the Daily Telegraph and others are partnering to provide unique bite-sized insights contributed by some of the UK's leading organisations.

Functions:

• Marketing 44 Videos
• eCommerce 10 Videos
• Finance & General Management 71 Videos

Themes:

• Speed 26 Videos
• Agility 39 Videos
• Insights 33 Videos
• Efficiency 30 Videos 

Speaker Presentation at ad:tech, Singapore 10.06.09

In an increasingly fragmented media environment and in an age of accountability, marketers are faced with the complex task of reaching customers in a huge number of different destinations and platforms and converting them. Traditional media buying approaches and processes are inefficient and out-dated. Ad networks and exchanges are promising to streamline media buying and delivery on a pay-per-performance basis.

Nothing but the Net - J. P. Morgan

Collective Media - Ad Network Study 2009

YouTube - Mad Avenue Blues

Social Radar April 2009 | Buzz Study

The April 2009 Social Radar Top 50 measures the brands with the most active Web presence based on overall online conversation volume. To create the Top 50 list, we used Social Radar to analyze millions of blog posts, news feeds, forums, social networks and Twitter posts to aggregate a list of the words and brands mentioned most frequently on the Web during April 2009.

 Download the electronic version of 'Rise of the Silver Surfer' Presentation.

40 Useful and Creative Infographics

Information graphics (or infographics) are graphical depictions of data and information. By presenting information in a compact and creative approach, infographics are able to quickly convey knowledge and engage its viewers.
Here you find 3 highligts of beautiful and educational infographics, displaying the uncommon spectacle of "art meets science":

Global Internet Traffic Map 2008

Flickr User Model

Classifying Experiences

NYTimes.com

Web companies with big global audiences and renowned brands struggle to turn even a tiny profit. Call it the International Paradox. Web companies that rely on advertising are enjoying some of their most vibrant growth in developing countries. But those are also the same places where it can be the most expensive to operate, since Web companies often need more servers to make content available to parts of the world with limited bandwidth. And in those countries, online display advertising is least likely to translate into results.

Build huge global audiences with a free service, and let advertising pay the bills. But many of them ran smack into global economic reality. There may be 1.6 billion people in the world with Internet access, but fewer than half of them have incomes high enough to interest major advertisers.

• Last year, Veoh, a video-sharing site operated from San Diego, decided to block its service from users in Africa, Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe, citing the dim prospects of making money and the high cost of delivering video there.
• MySpace — the News Corporation’s social network with 130 million members, about 45 percent of them overseas — is testing a feature for countries with slower Internet connections called Profile Lite.
• YouTube, which a Credit Suisse analyst, Spencer Wang, recently estimated could lose $470 million in 2009, in part because of the high cost of delivering billions of videos each month. Google does not rule out restricting bandwidth in certain countries as a way to control costs — essentially making YouTube a slower, lower-quality viewing experience in the developing world.
• Facebook faces the expensive prospect of storing 850 million photos and eight million videos uploaded to the site each month. It is struggling to finance its expensive global growth.

"Serving videos to the entire world is just not supportable at this time.”

Primates on Facebook | The Economist

Primatologists call at least some of the things that happen on social networks “grooming”.

Several years ago, therefore, Robin Dunbar, an anthropologist who now works at Oxford University, concluded that the cognitive power of the brain limits the size of the social network that an individual of any given species can develop. Extrapolating from the brain sizes and social networks of apes, Dr Dunbar suggested that the size of the human brain allows stable networks of about 148. Rounded to 150, this has become famous as “the Dunbar number”.

Full Version

Final Beta Version

SilverMatters™ Reports - Marketing Report for Asia Mature Market

In Asia (and elsewhere) there are huge opportunities presented by the ageing populations and the online usage among the 50 plus market in the region - the Silver Surfers.

 Download the electronic version of 'Rise of the Silver Surfer' Presentation.

Insights Library | Yahoo! Advertising Funnel

Yahoo!’s most recent research states that consumers no longer follow the traditional “purchase funnel.” Instead, they chart personalized purchase trajectories that work for them. This study takes a deeper look at the emergence of this new, non-liner buying process that has evolved as consumers have become more engaged in consumer electronics.

• Consumers see technology products in a new way
• The new buying process is consumer-drivenand non-linear
• From a seemingly erratic process, a pattern emerges that indicates unique patterns and a compressed shopping cycle

“Tech socialites” and “Sophisticated want-it-alls”are the most likely to be brand advocates and to try new products. Using the right messagingand tone is imperative to reaching them.

Marketers need more individualized touchpoints that provide the information and connection consumers are seeking.

 Download the electronic version of 'Tech Enthusiasts' Study.

Social Media Marketing Industry Report

Social media is seen by many marketers as the next gold rush. Michael Stelzner set out to uncover the “who, what, where, when and why” of social media marketing with this report.  Nearly 900 of your peers provided the kind of insight that previously has not existed.

 Download the electronic version of 'Social Media Marketing Industry' Report.