Tablets To Drive Shopping During TV Ad Breaks

Recently is has become clear that two strong consumer trends are starting to merge, which might have a major impact on TV advertising.

A survey in the UK found that over 50% of consumers browse the internet at the same time as watching TV.

At the same time, increasingly tablet devices such as the iPad are becoming the home shopping platform of choice.

A recent survey of 4,000 UK consumers TV habits, conducted by Deloitte and GfK, has found a strong growth in simultaneous TV/Internet watching, with over 50% of consumers browsing the Internet at the same time as watching TV. This compares to only 39% in 2010.

The survey also found that shopping is one of the most popular online activities among those who browse the Internet, with 45% of those polled reported e-shopping while watching TV.

One final statistic from the study is that fully 13% of the respondents plan to buy a tablet in the next year.

Clearly this combination sets the stage for these tablet devices to become the purchase mechanism for the products being advertised on TV.

For 18 to 25 years olds, discovering a product or service on TV is currently rated as the third most powerful purchase influence. The study found the following were the strongest purchase influences on this group:

1. discovering the product in a shop (32%)
2. receiving a recommendation from a friend (21%)
3. discovering a product or service on TV (20%)

These were all much higher than social media influencers, with Facebook only reporte by 3%, and Twitter by 2%.

Jolyon Barker, global lead for Technology, Media and Telecommunications (TMT) at Deloitte, made a number of insightful comments on these trends:

• “The television industry should consider how best to react to this opportunity. Taking a share of the transaction value may precipitate an undesired wholesale shift to commission-based advertising. Given television’s role in brand-building, such a move could be counter-productive. Making programmes that are perceived as too overtly created to sell merchandise may trigger a viewer backlash.”
• “Television, via a programme or an advert, can provide the impulse for a purchase. This year more consumers will buy tablets, connected and browser-equipped devices, which can work as digital tills sitting on viewers’ laps.”
• One option (for retailers) might be to update the home page of their websites to reflect what they know is being advertised on television at a certain time, if a certain dress is being advertised at a certain time then the retailer should feature it on the homepage at the same time to assist an easy conversion to sale.”
• “broadcasters … would need to up their game significantly in terms of monitoring the online response to their programmes and adverts, and utilising this rich data.”

Whatever happens in this interesting space, he concludes, “the reality is that television is highly persuasive, multi-channel retail is vibrant, and the TV sector should always be open to new revenue opportunities.”

The Rise of Mobile In-App Ads [INFOGRAPHIC]

If mobile apps are all the rage, then mobile in-app ads are causing rage.

In one recent example, the popular franchise Angry Birds saw in-app ads added to its HD version, and fans and players were in an uproarover the change.

But like them or not, mobile marketers are turning more attention toward in-app advertising. Right now, in-app ads account for around 5% of mobile ad spending, and that number is only expected to rise over the next few years.

One of the reasons in-app ads are taking off is their effectiveness. In spite of the fact that the majority of 18-34-year-olds actively dislike mobile in-app ads, the majority will also be able to recall those ads at a higher rate than the ads they see while browsing the mobile web.

And for app makers, the ads are a good bet, too. After all, Angry Birds publisher Rovio says that by the end of 2011, it’ll be making $1 million each month from in-app ads on the Android platform alone.

While we’re hoping to see better in-app ads as the ecosystem becomes more sophisticated, it’s interesting to monitor in-app ads in today’s relatively nascent state. 

Article source: Mashable

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, DougSchneiderPhoto

Study Reveals Why Consumers Fan Facebook Pages

Have you ever wondered why people decide to become fans of Facebook pages?  Understanding the reasons people become fans can help your business or brand develop better strategies.

In this article, I take a look at two studies.

The first reveals why consumers fan businesses on Facebook. The second one examines how marketers are keeping up with the ever-changing world of social media. 

#1: Nearly 40% of Consumers “Like” Companies on Facebook to Publicly Display Their Brand Affiliation to Friends

As Facebook grows, we’re able to learn even more about the behaviors and preferences of its users. As Facebook continues to change, new stats surface to give us an even better idea of how consumers on Facebook prefer to interact with brands and companies. A new report released by ExactTarget and CoTweet found that discounts and “social badging” were the primary reasons consumers Like brands on Facebook.

Key points of report:

1. Most important trend was that tablets are replacing time spent with PCs. 43% of respondents said that they’re spending more time with their tablet than their PCs now.
2. People are spending ~1 hr/day on their tablet, mostly at home and on weekday nights. This has implications for campaign management / optimization.
3. Tablets are most often used for games, searching for information & email.

US tablet owners use the devices mainly for games, says a Google survey

Google survey finds games trump all other uses for tablets

Research finds that 84% of tablet owners are playing games, versus 51% who are consuming music and videos.

A survey of more than 1,400 tablet owners in the US by Google’s AdMob subsidiary has found that gaming is the most popular use for these devices, considerably ahead of music, video and ebooks.

According to the survey, 84% of tablet owners play games, ahead of even searching for information (78%), emailing (74%) and reading the news (61%). 56% of tablet owners use social networking services on their device, while 51% consume music and/or videos, and 46% read ebooks.

AdMob does not break out which tablets were owned by the users, but the survey was conducted in March this year, at a point when Apple’s iPad accounted for the lion’s share of the tablet market in the US – although Samsung’s Galaxy Tab had also been available for a few months.

The survey found that 38% of respondents spend more than two hours a day using their tablets, while another 30% spend 1-2 hours. It appears that tablets are predominantly domestic devices, with 82% of people primarily using their tablets at home, versus 11% who say they are used primarily on the go, and 7% who said at work.

28% of respondents say their tablet is now their primary computer, while 43% say they spend more time using their tablet than they do their desktop or laptop computer.

It’s the games stat that provides the biggest surprise though. It’s not shocking that games are popular on tablets: the App Store charts for iPad apps make that crystal clear already. However, this is the first survey where games have come ahead of email as a usage for tablets.

What’s missing from Google’s survey, though, is data on time spent doing these various activities – for example, comparing the proportion of heavy tablet gamers with heavy emailers.

Source: Guardian Tech

Full AdMob report can be downloaded from here.

Online retailer surprises rivals with launch of music streaming service and Cloud Drive ‘digital locker’

Amazon has unveiled its ambitious music streaming service, Cloud Player, which allows users to play songs across a number of computers and Android smartphones.

Music lovers will be able to upload most of their existing music library – including tracks bought through Apple’s iTunes – to Amazon, as well as buy new songs for digital playback.

The online retailer has stolen a march on rivals Apple and Google with the service, known as Amazon Cloud Player, with both internet giants planning their own forays into music streaming. The move also represents Amazon’s repositioning as an entertainment destination, rather than just an online marketplace.

Another element of the service, Amazon Cloud Drive, works like a “digital music locker” where users can upload thousands of songs and listen to them via Cloud Player on any computer or Android smartphone.

“Our customers have told us they don’t want to download music to their work computers or phones because they find it hard to move music around to different devices,” said the Amazon vice-president of music and movies, Bill Carr. “Now, whether at work, home, or on the go, customers can buy music from Amazon MP3, store it in the cloud and play it anywhere.”

As an introductory offer, Cloud Player is free to Amazon account holders, although users can pay to increase the amount of music able to be stored on Cloud Drive. Customers start with 5GB of storage space – equivalent to just over 1,000 songs – and those who buy an MP3 album from the Amazon store will be upgraded to the larger 20GB service.

Apple and Google are said to be planning similar ventures, while Sony’s Music Unlimited also offers a digital music locker, but charges upwards of £4 a month. Agreements with all four major record labels are thought to be the sticking point for Apple’s and Google’s streaming services, with rights owners apparently unhappy with the idea of a one-off payment each time a track is played on any device.

Beyond Oblivion, an online music site partly owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, is proposing to woo rights holders by paying them a royalty each time their music is played. The service, which secured $77m (£47m) on investment earlier this month, is yet to launch and negotiations with music labels said to be at a “very advanced stage”.

Amazon said it has sidestepped legal uncertainties about allowing users to upload music from their computer – some of which may have been downloaded illegally – by being the equivalent of any other storage device, such as an external hard drive.

The Amazon director of music, Craig Pape, said: “We don’t need a licence to store music. The functionality is the same as an external hard drive.”

• Amazon’s online retail rival eBay yesterday stepped up its attempt to become the primary destination for internet shopping by buying GSI Commerce, an online services firm, for $2.4bn. The acquisition will allow eBay to expand beyond its network of small retailers into the larger retail market.

Source: Guardian Tech

sent from my Nexus S

media.pdf Download this file

ID : 71198
RefID : 06ATHENS1805
Date : 13/7/2006 6:50:00 πμ
Origin : Embassy Athens
Classification : UNCLASSIFIED//FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY

SUBJECT: HOW TO READ THE GREEK PRESS: A GUIDE FOR THE UNINITIATED

ATHENS 00001805 001.3 OF 003ENTIRE TEXT IS SENSITIVE BUT UNCLASSIFIED – PLEASE HANDLE ACCORDINGLY

1. (SBU) SUMMARY. At first glance, the Greek media may resemble the media in the U.S., with a mixture of broadsheets and tabloids, national and local television and radio stations, and constitutional guarantees guarding the freedom of the press. Closer inspection reveals a Greek media industry controlled by business tycoons whose other successful businesses enable them to subsidize their loss-making media operations. These media operations in turn enable them to exercise political and economic influence. The result is that the media often provides an image of national and international events that is almost uniform but for its division along party events that is almost uniform but for its division along party lines. Similarly, a uniform anti-Americanism is injected into nearly every issue, but has little effect on the bilateral relationship. END SUMMARY.

The History of the Greek Media, from Homer to the Home Page

2. Homer reported on the Trojan War a few hundred years after it happened, and used the facts of the war to create a poetic tale of battles among gods, with men as pawns. Current Greek media uses the same blend of fact and fiction, with an equally judicious dose of deus ex machina (outside forces) that controls events. The first modern day Greek-language newspapers were established in Vienna and Paris in the 18th century and were an important factor in the Greek fight for independence from the Ottomans. With the founding of the modern Greek state, the tradition was established of blaming an outside power (first the Great Powers and then the U.S.) for all ills that befell Greece.

3. Greece currently has about 160 newspapers, 180 television stations, 800 radio stations, 3,500 magazines, and just 10 million people. (Portugal, with the same population, has 35 newspapers, 62 television stations, and 221 radio stations, according to the “World Factbook” of 2004). How can all these media outlets operate profitably? They don´t. They are subsidized by their owners who, while they would welcome any income from media sales, use the media primarily to exercise political and economic influence, and therefore care marginally less about turning a profit from their media operations. Because there are no subscriptions or home deliveries in Greece, newspapers have to sell themselves from newsstands by grabbing the attention of the casual passerby. This means that even the occasional calm and partially accurate story will have a misleading or untrue headline that often has nothing to do with the story. Still, the media utilize sensationalist headlines and stories to capture readers and the all-important television ratings that determine the distribution of advertising revenue. Newspapers also use such tools as DVD and book giveaways.

READ MORE OF THIS VERY INTERSTING & FRANK INSIGHT INTO A MEDIA WORLD by downloading the PDF attached..

Twitter has changed the way we watch television. Say what you will about the 83rd Annual Oscars (and thus far the consensus is “meh”), you’ve probably already said it on Twitter.  Mass Relevance and TweetReach, a Twitter analytics service with commercial access to the Twitter API, have teamed up to make a data map of yesterday’s mass conversation.

Over 20 Oscar-related terms like “Oscars,” “#Oscars,” “Academy” (but no specific names of celebrities or movies) were tracked between the hours of 5:30 and 8:45 PST during the show’s live airing. Total damage? 1,269,970 tweets, 1,663,458,778 potential impressions, and 388,717 users tweeting.

@TheOnion
The Onion
How rude — not a single character from Toy Story 3 bothered to show up. #oscars

about 20 hours ago via HootSuiteRetweetReply

The honor of most retweeted tweet of the night went to The Onion with the above zinger (sorry @parislemon). And the highest tweet peak was shortly after the internet friendly Auto-Tune montage at 7:20 pm PST, clocking in 11,780.

And while that 1.6 billion impressions number may seem high, TweetReach CEO Jenn Davis tells me that the volume was actually lower than she expected, “We were prepared for big spikes, and we just didn’t see those.” Davis told me that the event paled in comparison to the Super Bowl and The Grammy, where TweetReach saw 17,000 tweets in a single minute. In contrast, the spikes topped out at 12,000 at the Oscars.

Davis guesses that this is because the movie industry has not yet found its Twitter groove, “All of the celebrities that generate a lot of the converasation on Twitter are musicians like Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber, so I don’t know if [The Oscars] appeals to a Twitter audience in the same way The Grammys or The Superbowl does. “

Thanks: TweetReach
CrunchBase Information

Twitter

Information provided by CrunchBase

Source: http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/28/the-oscars-twitter/

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Canadian consumers who are becoming addicted to deep discounts through so-called daily deal sites like Groupon and Living Social now have another reason to keep their eyes glued to their mobile phones when they’re out shopping: Facebook Deals.

The social network’s Canadian division unveiled a scheme on Monday by which users who post their location to Facebook when they’re out and about can access special offers from nearby retailers. Facebook Deals, which launched in the United States last November, also rolled out Monday in France, Italy, Spain, and the U.K.

Users access the deals on their touch-screen smart phones through the Facebook Places function, which they then show to a cashier during the purchase. Currently, only consumers using iPhones, Android phones or BlackBerry Storms can participate.

Facebook’s 11 Canadian partners for the so-called public beta period include Chapters Indigo, H&M, Wind Mobile, and Town Shoes. Deals range from a free small popcorn and small drink for patrons of the four participating AMC Imax Theatres, to free access to the Plaza Premium lounges at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport (regular price: $35), to jeans for $5 (normal retail price: $19) at freestanding Joe Fresh locations.

As with most of the online coupon merchants, Facebook Deals will limit the number of people who can claim the individual offers.

Elmer Sotto, the head of strategy for Facebook Canada, said the Deals system reintroduced “serendipity” into the shopping process, which the daily deals sites can’t offer with their current models. “If you are on [Toronto’s] Queen West, and you’re literally just shopping and you click on Places, you see a deal at Kiehl’s or H&M on Queen Street, that’s something that’s highly relevant at that very moment, and you can then walk in and claim a deal – which can’t be replicated by something that you print out of your computer three or four days before you even want to go shopping.”

And the scheme is an enticing one for businesses seeking to increase foot traffic without paying the hefty commissions charged by the leaders in the daily deal space, like Groupon: Facebook says it is not taking any revenue from its Deals partners, except for businesses choosing to tout their deals through purchased ads.

Both Facebook and its partners are counting on people to do most of the advertising for them: When someone claims a deal, it shows up in their Facebook news feed, spreading the word to that user’s friends and effectively turning their post into an ad.

The move represents a long-awaited move by some Canadian retailers into technology-enabled location-based marketing. While that is one of the hottest marketing trends in the U.S., with retailers, sports teams, and other businesses using mobile devices to engage people on the go through such services as Foursquare, Canadian businesses have been slow to show interest.

By Simon Houpt

Source: CTV http://www.ctv.ca/generic/generated/static/business/article1889409.html

sent from my Nexus S

Spreading its tentacles across continents, this image shows just how the influence of Facebook has enveloped the globe.
A mass of white in North America and across much of Britain and Europe shows the dense network of friends built up on the social networking site. 

The Facebook social graph was created by Paul Butler, an intern at the site, who wanted to see if geographical and political borders affected friendships as well as which cities had the most social connections. 

He started by using a sample of 10million friend pairs, correlated them with their current cities and then mapped that data using the longitude and latitude of each city. 

Not surprisingly, the US has the highest concentration of Facebook friendships and Africa the lowest. 

‘It’s not just a pretty picture, it’s a reaffirmation of the impact we have in connecting people, even across oceans and borders,’ said Mr Butler.

Source: Metro.co.uk

A record £831,000 was spent online in only one minute yesterday.

Sales peaked at 1.15pm in what has been dubbed Mega Monday as shoppers took to the internet to secure gifts in time for delivery well before Christmas Day. 

Sales levels have been steadily increasing since Sunday 28th November, with today’s sales far higher than that of Monday 29th, which was called Cyber Monday in the US.  

Amazon workers pack goods ready for shipping at the Amazon distribution centre, Swansea, Wales. Today is the biggest day for online shopping in the year

The first week in December is thought to see the peak in online buying, because it comes after people have received their November salaries but before they are too worried to buy online in case their gift does not arrive in time.

The £1million mark was passed at 12.58pm, when 128 transactions per second were processed by retailers. In last year’s busiest minute, on December 7, £732,000 was spent.

Research carried out by eDigitalResearch recently found that 26.6% of people intend to do more shopping online than they did last year.

Analysis published by the IMRG, the UK trade association for online retailers, forecasted a £0.5bn online spending binge on Sunday December 5 and Monday December 6, and that total online spending for the Christmas period, over the course of November and December will be £12.4bn.

The volume of buying over the internet has been boosted this year by the extreme cold and snow, which has kept many buyers from venturing onto high streets. 

eBay attributed their record-breaking Super Sunday sales figures to the weather. Sales on the UK’s site were up 18% on the same day last year with around 17 gifts being purchased every second.

Jody Ford, Director of SME Businesses, eBay UK said: ‘It’s encouraging to see sales up so considerably, despite the tough economic climate. 

‘We tend to see a sharp rise in sales on the first Sunday in December as people start to think about their Christmas shopping list, although this year’s cold snap has clearly led to even more people choosing to shop without the hassle of the high-street.’

David Smith, Managing Director at IMRG, said: ‘2010 looks set to be another bumper year for online, with sales for Super Sunday and Mega Monday estimated to reach over half a billion at the end of a week when the festive spend really kicked in.

‘We estimate that £6.4bn will be spent in December alone, with total online sales for November and December set to reach £12.4bn. 

‘Consumers have looked to spread the costs of Christmas a bit more this year due to the economic climate, but December 6th is the day that our retailers expect sales activity to be at its highest.’

The most popular gifts being snapped up by internet shoppers are the Mini Micro T-bar Scooter, the Nintendo Wii Fit Plus game, Lego’s Winter Toy Workshop and the Apple iPod Touch, according to analysis by online fraud prevention company Retail Decisions.

Robin Goad, Research Director at Hitwise UK, said: ‘Last weekend was certainly the busiest of the pre-Christmas season so far this year, but the clue that we are not quite there yet is the comparison between traffic levels on Sunday (November 28th) and Monday (November 29th).

‘For most of the year, UK Internet visits to retailers peak on the Sunday and drop off on the Monday, and only on Mega Sunday / Monday do the traffic levels match. This didn’t happen this Sunday and Monday, implying that Mega Monday is still to come.’

But retailers were warning consumers not to get carried away online and to be vigilant against fraud.

Dominic Blackburn, Product Director of 192.com said: ‘It’s easy to get carried away in the Christmas rush, but if legitimate e-retailers are going to be busy, then so will fraudsters.

‘If you’re buying from members of the public or from small businesses, we urge you check out their validity as businesses or their identity as individuals – and the best way of doing that is by confirming their address. If their address cannot be found there is reason to question their authenticity.’

Selfridges said its online sales soared 50 per cent last week, while John Lewis said sales through its website were up 62.2 per cent.