Internet Advertising Passes Cable, Now No. 2 Advertising Medium

Financial services second largest online ad category. Are higher gas prices here to stay?

As the NY Times opined late last week, even President Obama can’t reverse the law of supply and demand. But, federal officials can try to ensure that market manipulation and speculation does not drive gas prices higher than is warranted by economic fundamentals.

So, how do you make that pre-election rhetoric into policy? Experts say research presented in Congressional testimony, academic papers, government and private studies shows excessive speculation, mainly by Wall Street index-fund traders, is needlessly driving up prices, with estimates ranging up to $1 a gallon in jacked-up gasoline costs. And Mr. Obama called on Congress to increase regulators’ budgets and powers to police the oil markets and to increase penalties for manipulation. But conservatives, including The Wall Street Journal said no clear evidence of speculation or who the speculators are….and if so, was is natural gas so low. See video interview of Journal assistant editorial page editor James Freeman Pic=Phantom Oil speculation

Our take: While a reasonable amount of hedging and speculation is needed to ensure free-flowing efficient markets, excessive speculation is what causes meltdowns like we saw in the banking and housing markets. In the short run, don’t expect the Administration to take drastic steps before the elections to curb speculation or to interfere with financial markets that have regained most of the ground lost since the 2008. If your business depends on raw materials, transportation, travel or energy, plan for a short period of higher costs which will impact business and consumer demand for your products and services. Also expect higher business travel costs and possible impact of attendance at your live events.
Internet advertising passes cable, now second-largest advertising medium

Internet ad spending grew 22 percent in 2011 to $31.7 billion, according to the latest data from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers. Researchers said growth is accelerating, not decelerating, from last year’s 14.5 percent growth rate after a recession-induced slide in 2009. The IAB also said mobile advertising was the fastest-growing category in 2011, jumping nearly 150 percent to $1.6 billion in 2010. Mobile also garnered 5 percent of total online ad dollars this year versus 2.5 percent a year ago. Digital video advertising -- which the IAB includes as part of display advertising -- saw strong growth as well, rising 29 percent from $1.4 billion to $1.8 billion. Overall, display spending rose 15 percent in 2011 to $11.1 billion from $9.6 billion.

Financial services second largest online ad category

Financial services accounted for 13 percent ($4.1 billion), behind only retail (22%, $7 billion); telecom, ranked third as 12 percent ($3.9 billion), automotive, 11 percent ($2.9 billion), leisure travel, 8 percent ($2.4 billion), and computing 8 percent ($2.7 billion). IAB said the $31.7 billion in Internet advertising in 2011 exceeded the $31 billion in cable TV advertising last year, making the category second only to broadcast TV ($38.5 billion).

“Pushing past the $30 billion barrier, the interactive advertising industry confirms its central place in media," said IAB President and CEO Randall Rothenberg, in presenting the 2011 figures Wednesday.

Email more popular than social media
Social media may be getting all the buzz, but email is still a more popular mode of Internet communication, according to a new survey from private research firm Ipsos. Of nearly 20,000 adults polled worldwide, 85 percent of them used the Internet for email while 62 percent used it for social networking. Keren Gottfried, research manager at Ipsos, says she expected email use to trump that of social media. “If you think about it, the Internet was first used for sending letters online. It shouldn’t be surprising that we’re using a digital version of sending a letter,” she says. “But the fact that a majority of people are using [the Internet] for social networking is a paradigm shift; there’s no equivalent in the offline world.” Aside from email and social networking, researcher said another key use of the Internet is for Voice-Over-IP. Overall, VOIP is used by 14 percent of people across the globe and trends high in Russia (36%), Turkey (32%) and India (25%). VOIP use is lowest in Brazil (4%), France (5%) and the U.S. (6%).

E-mail most preferred by online consumers
Email is by far the most popular channel among US online consumers for receiving permission-based promotional messages, according to ExactTarget new survey results released last week. 77 percent of respondents chose email, with direct mail (letter, catalogs, postcards, etc. - 9%), text messaging (SMS) on a cell phone (5%), Facebook (4%), and phone (2%) trailing distantly. Email’s is most popular among 35-44-year-olds and 55-64-year-olds (both at 81%), and least popular among 15-17-year-olds (66%).

You owe it to yourself, your clients and your organization to look into every new marketing channel that emerges on the horizon. But please test and evaluate first before rolling out. You need to put your energies into what’s most effective—not necessarily what’s most buzzworthy—but remember what’s working well today may not be your go-to solution a year or even six months from now.

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Mid Year Review: Companies Thriving, Wage Earners and Homeowners Still Suffering

How smart B2B marketers thrive in this schizophrenic economic climate

U.S. stocks rose sharply today, on pace for their biggest weekly gain in a year. Strong readings of manufacturing activity lifted spirits ahead of the long holiday weekend and investors may feel confident that no major “fireworks” are forthcoming from the euro zone and Greece debt crisis to ruin their barbecues and parades. Industrial, financial and tech stocks have led the rally, which is good news for many of you readers who work in—or sell into—those sectors. The market registered sharp gains after data released by the Institute of Supply Management showed the U.S. manufacturing sector expanded briskly in June. The ISM's manufacturing purchasing managers' index rose to 55.3 in June from 53.5 in May. Experts say readings above 50 indicate expanding activity.

If you’re wondering how the financial markets and corporate profits can be so high at a time when the jobless rate, housing market and energy prices are in the dumps, researchers at Northeastern University may have some clues. In their newly released study, (PDF file) “The ‘Jobless and Wageless Recovery’ From the Great Recession of 2007-2009, the Northeastern economists found that since the recovery began in June 2009 following a deep 18-month recession, “corporate profits captured 88 percent of the growth in real national income while aggregate wages and salaries accounted for only slightly more than 1 percent” of that growth. The study, said it was “unprecedented” for American workers to receive such a tiny share of national income growth during a recovery. The study called that $27 billion loss in aggregate wages and salaries during the seven quarters after the recovery began “the first ever such decline in any post-World War II recovery.”

“Aggregate employment still has not increased above the trough quarter of 2009, and real hourly and weekly wages have been flat to modestly negative,” the report concludes. “The only major beneficiaries of the recovery have been corporate profits and the stock market and its shareholders.”

Our Take: Consumers are still very pessimistic about their home values and job security, so if you depend on luxury goods, discretionary spending for travel and entertainment, then you’ll have to pick and choose your marketing spots very carefully. But, if you’re targeting decision makers in the heavy equipment or large corporate sector, then you need to get on their radar ASAP as they’re setting budgets for long-term capital expenditures right now.

Here are some key marketing trends to watch for the second half of this year

First two non-events: the new HP tablet and the Zynga billion dollar IPO. These are not game changers as much as late arriving “me too’s.” Don’t be fooled by the hype

Location infiltrates the advertising market

Location-based advertising is set to triple its percentage of mobile advertising in the next four years. The increase will partially be due to the US’s high adoption rates of mobile devices with GPS capabilities. Revenue for this advertising market is projected to increase ten-fold in the same time period, according to Pyramid Research.

Our Take: Consumers will have greater access to this type of advertising in the near future because of technology progression. Advertising companies at the front of location-based services could see much higher demand from businesses in the near future.

eReaders on the rise, tablets cool off

The ownership of eReaders has surpassed that of tablets largely due to price differences and improvements in technology. The entry price for eReaders undercuts tablets by a few hundred dollars, and eReaders are taking up a share of the tablet market as they begin to incorporate internet-based applications, like browsing the web and checking mail.

Our Take: The rise in eReader adoption will lead to a shift in support and resources from companies appealing to consumers. In part because of their lower price point and lesser technology, eReaders are cheaper to develop applications for than tablets. As many industries are probably in a hurry to try and capture the market opening caused by the iPad craze, it actually may be wiser to focus on the rapidly expanding eReader market. eReaders are also more literature-focused, which could lead to higher adoption rates in the corporate world. Additionally, recent reviews for products such as the nook and kindle have been raving according to CNET www.cnet.com , while their price factor helps them beat out the iPad in a recent CNET head to head comparison.

A new approach to banner ads

New Google studies show that the average rate of users who click on ads is 0.1 percent. A separate study, conducted by Real Media, shows that the main reason people ignore ads is because they did not want to leave the web page they were currently on. In light of this information, startup Adkeeper www.adkeeper.com has put a new spin on ads, one that increases that click rate by 34 times—that’s right, 34 times higher! Adkeeper is making advertisements ‘less interruptive’ as company founder, Scott Kurnit, told the NY Times on Tuesday.

Our Take: Although the articles take on adkeeper is heavily skewed towards entertainment and consumer-oriented industries (and not B2B), there is still a strong possibility that Adkeeper can help businesses. If a company is targeting the right audience and advertising on the right sites, then consumers will save these ads. For example, many may be reading an article and see an ad that they do not necessarily want to click on right away. However, if the ad appeals just a tiny bit to them and their industry, they can easily save and go back to it later.

Have a great Independence Day Weekend and remember what a great (and resilient) country this is despite all our current challenges.

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Signs of a Turnaround?

IPOs, venture capital and philanthropy up. Why smart companies respond ASAP to online customer complaints


IPO Market

Just when you thought a double dip recession was on the horizon, signs of optimism are emerging. I noticed a significant drop in gas prices on a weekend trip through the Northeast Corridor. The Dow seems to have found a support level at 12,000 (up over 100 points again today), despite ongoing agita over the debt crisis in Greece. Technology IPOs have generated nearly $330 million in fees for major banks and brokerages houses according to a New York Times report yesterday. That’s the most since 2000 and nearly 10 times what they generated for a comparable period last year. According to the National Venture Capital Association, investors have poured nearly $6 billion into early stage startups the first three months of this year, that’s up 14 percent from the first three months of 2010.

Charitable giving on the rise

Another study that caught our eye was from the philanthropic front. Charitable giving recovered somewhat last year, according to new estimates by the Giving USA Foundation, but experts are predicting that this year will present more challenges to nonprofit fund-raisers. Individuals, companies and philanthropic institutions made gifts and pledges totaling an estimated $290.89 billion in 2010, an increase of 2.1 percent on an inflation-adjusted basis over a revised estimate of $285 billion the year before. The increase was the first since 2007, when the recession started and led to the biggest decline in giving in more than 40 years.

The power of responding to your online complaints

A new Harris Interactive study confirmed what we’ve been preaching for years—you’ve got to deal with angry customers/members/subscribers ASAP now matter how steamed they are. Here’s why. Researchers found that among customers who got a response from a company after complaining about them online (or on social media):

* 34 percent deleted their negative review
* 33 percent turned around and posted a positive review
* 18 percent turned into loyal customers

As the old saying goes. It’s 10 times easier to keep an existing customer happy than to find a new customer. Thanks to social media and the web, your customers are better armed today than ever before. The Harris findings should be posted over every call center from Nebraska to Mumbai. Smart organizations who heed them will be rewarded handsomely down the road.

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Economy Hinting at Double Dip, But Hiring Strong in Tech, Financial Arena

Big companies more likely than small business to weather latest storm. Also, why great writing still matters for B2B. How this impacts you.

It may be too soon to predict a return to the days of “irrational exuberance,” but you have to scratch your head when social media companies with questionable financials are leading the IPO market back to life and the equity markets end a six-week slide yesterday because retail sales only went down by 0.2 percent.

Most of us are a lot smarter than we were in the late 1990s, but that doesn’t mean we can’t be lured into the financial equivalent of Weinerian temptation. We know it’s wrong, but we can’t help ourselves. Or you can put a positive spin on this less-than-rational exuberance. How? Maybe we just want this protracted downturn to end so badly that we’ll do just about anything to jumpstart it. Can you say Obamanomics?

Food and gas prices remain high, unemployment is inching back over 9 percent and Americans’ equity in their homes has shrunk to nearly 38 percent, nearing the lowest percentage since World War II, according to a Federal Reserve report this week. For some perspective, it was about 61 percent in 2001. What’s more, home prices have fallen by a third since their 2006 peak, reaching their lowest level since 2003, the Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller index of U.S. home prices through May 31. What’s more, the Federation of Independent Business, a trade group representing small business in America, just released its worse monthly hiring survey in eight months. If you sell to small business, those budgets are likely to remain tighter than a portly New Jersey Governor’s belt buckle for some time to come.

Despite this generally depressing news, hiring in the technology and financial services industries, where many of you are engaged has been robust. The U.S marketing director for a well-known online career site told me last week that both job postings and hiring of seasoned execs in financial services is coming back strong and is “white hot” for those in the technology sector. Also, the U.S. trade deficit narrowed again in April which means that’s now two consecutive months in which American companies sold more goods overseas than were imported. Also, last week’s Business Roundtable CEO survey showed that larger companies are more likely to expand their workforces than shrink them in the next six months. Why? They’re more likely to be sitting on piles of cash, they have better access to credit and more exporting capabilities.

Our Take: If you sell to consumers, then there’s still rough sledding ahead, because lack of job security and inability to use homes as ATM machines will keep your customers tight-gripped on their wallets and purses. But, in the B2B sector, companies are looking at the long-term picture, as evidenced by strong 6-figure hiring in the tech and financial sector and bolstering infrastructure and capital expenditures. For instance, a new Commerce Department report said U.S. companies sold more computers, heavy machinery and telecommunications equipment in April, especially to foreign markets. That pushed exports to a record high for the second straight month and narrowed the trade deficit for the first time since December.

Great writing still matters for business marketers

Today’s Wall Street Journal had a great piece by Droga5 chairman, Davi Droga, about the importance of great copy writing in today’s short-attention span, twitter era. “The truth is that good copywriting paved the way for the tweet long before Twitter was actually invented—but who needs all those characters?” he asks.

Social media impact on business

Researchers are finding that social media is great for generating exposure for your business, increasing traffic to your website and improving your search engine rankings, but not so effective for generating leads, increasing sales or reducing marketing expenses. A new study of 3,342 marketers conducted by Social Media Examiner found that while 88 percent of respondents said social media generated exposure for their business, 72 percent said it increased traffic and 62 percent agreed it helped their search engine rankings. On the flip side, only 43 percent of marketers said social media increased their sales, just 49 percent said it cut marketing costs and 51 percent said it generated quality leads.

Why clarity is the new cool

Finally, we recommend this pithy new post by Forbes Chief Product Officer, Lewis D’Vorkin about the importance of clarity in this hyper-cluttered information age.

“Start with clarity, then come up with cool, he says. “If you don’t, you end up with new but incoherent.” We couldn’t agree more.

As regular readers of this blog know, throughout this economic downturn we haven’t wavered from our position: Be smart, stay the course, keep your marketing and product pipeline full at all times, and you’ll always be ready to pounce on new opportunities. That’s a lot more fun (and financially rewarding) than being a hot idea- or hot IPO) chaser.

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Markets and Economy Slog Through Fortnight of Tests

New research points to impact of social media and ‘digital natives’ on your brand.
Despite last Thursday’s stomach churning “flash crash” in the financial markets, most U.S. stock indices are clawing their way back to positive territory for the year. This resiliency, in the face of the European debt crisis, the Time Square Bombing, the Staten Island Ferry crash, the BP/Gulf of Mexico oil spill, flooding in the South and tornados in the Midwest, is encouraging.

U.S. payrolls rose by nearly 300,000 in April, the largest monthly jobs gain in over four years. Most experts are ignoring the fact that the squishy “official” unemployment rate rose to 9.9 percent from 9.7 percent. Experts say it’s a sign that once-discouraged Americans have returned to the job market – not a deluge of layoffs from corporate America.

The construction and manufacturing sectors also showed signs of life in the latest economic report, raising hopes of an improving job market. The Institute for Supply Management Monday said the manufacturing barometer had improved 60.4 percent in April, the highest level June 2004. A Commerce Department report said consumer spending rose 0.6 percent in March – the largest increase in five months and households saved less, socking away 2.7 percent of their income in March down from 3.0 percent in Feb. Again, we see the gradual reduction in consumer savings as a confidence indicator, not a return of the conspicuous consumption that marked the latter part of the previous decade.

Is the worst over?

“The worst of the economic impact on Internet advertising is over and the seeds of growth have been planted,” said PricewaterhouseCoopers’ David Silverman in a statement following the release of a new study his firm did in conjunction with the Interactive Advertising Bureau. Forrester Research, Zenith Optimedia and other media forecasting groups have generally revised their 2010 and 2011 ad spending projections favorably in recent months, with most of the upside going to growing sectors (Web, online video, social media, television, outdoor) with a modest slump to continue in out of favor sectors (newspapers, magazines and radio).

Social media and your brand

Though slightly more than 50 percent of regular users never post status updates on Twitter; 70 percent do so on social networking sites like Facebook. Experts say Twitter acts more like a broadcast medium than Facebook does, but users are more than three times as likely to follow brands and companies on Twitter as others users of social networks do, with over 40 percent using Twitter to learn about and provide opinions on brands, according to a recent Edison Research study.

So will social media deliver measurable results for marketers? Well, more than half of marketers surveyed by Datran Media in its fourth annual Marketing & Media Survey say they’re confident it will, and only one in eight (12%) say they’re confident it won’t deliver results. Researchers said social media continues to be a wildcard, but it’s getting easier to measure the impact of a tweet or an update on LinkedIn on the final conversation.

Social media is not as effective at building search engine rankings as it is for building brand awareness and reputation, says a recent Marketing Sherpa study of over 2,000 marketers.

Social media IS effective for:
• Increasing brand or product awareness 49% agree
• Increasing brand or product reputation 45%
• Increasing public relations 43%
• Increasing Web site traffic 41%
• Improving search engine rankings 35%

The future?
Anti social networking of teens, i.e. your future consumers

Last week, the Pew Research Center found that half of American teenagers — defined in the study as ages 12 through 17 — send 50 or more text messages a day and that one third send more than 100 a day. Two thirds of the texters surveyed by the center’s Internet and American Life Project said they were more likely to use their cell phones to text friends than to call them. Fifty-four percent said they text their friends once a day, but only 33 percent said they talk to their friends face-to-face on a daily basis. The findings came just a few months after the Kaiser Family Foundation reported that Americans between the ages of 8 and 18 spend on average 7.5 hours a day using some sort of electronic device, from smart phones to MP3 players to computers — a startling number,

The question on researchers’ minds is whether all that texting, instant messaging and online social networking allows children to become more connected and supportive of their friends — or whether the quality of their interactions is being diminished without the intimacy and emotional give and take of regular, extended face-to-face time.

Gary Small, a neuroscientist and professor of psychiatry at U.C.L.A. and an author of "iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind," said in a New York Times interview that so-called “digital natives,” a term for the generation that has grown up using computers, are already having a harder time reading social cues. “Even though young digital natives are very good with the tech skills, they are weak with the face-to-face human contact skills,” he said.

While many parents and educators fret that the ease of electronic communication may be making teens less interested in face-to-face communication with their friends, we think marketers and employers need to adjust their communications strategies for the crowdsourcing nature of today’s digital natives.

Will young people still be able to sell and communicate?

“Teaching new sales people how to ask good questions and how to listen and keep the intelligence gathering dialogue going in a face to face setting is an absolute ssential,” said Eric Wynne, President of Wynne Media Company in a recent panel discussion I moderated. “It doesn’t come naturally to many of them as they’ve been attuned to communicating by screen in a very truncated fashion.”

Molly Sargent, Principal of Professional Impressions Consulting concurred. “Younger sales people just haven’t been trained the right way. You can’t just do your due diligence on the Web. There’s more to researching a company than Google and Hoovers. They’re not trained in how to pick up the phone, how to ask those critical questions, how to find the internal champion, how to sleuth ahead of time before the call.

At the end of the day, people want to do business with people they like and trust. With all the new technology tools available for reaching, tracking and micro-targeting our prospects, let’s not forget the most important part of selling and marketing successfully -- human interaction.

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Ad Accountability for Print Media?

Magazines borrow page from online media as page shakeout continues. Facebook as crime solving tool. Google acquisition should jumpstart mobile advertising category.

We’re not sure whether to put this under the “innovation” or “desperation” column, but Monday, The Week magazine announced is was guaranteeing advertisers that their ads will generate higher “recall” scores in The Week than they will in most other magazines in which they run. How? The Week has enlisted the help of Vista from Affinity, who will measure ad recall based on how consumers in its focus groups remember seeing a certain ad in the magazines where it runs. The Week guarantees an ad will score in the top one-third of all magazines where it runs or The Week will run free ad pages for the advertiser until it gets to the benchmark. The program is only reserved for regular 12x advertisers, but Steven Kotok, president of The Week, expected 80 percent of its clients to qualify. We salute The Week’s efforts to bring more accountability to the beleaguered print category and expect many more publishers to follow suit in 2010.

Ad pages drop sharply at Conde Nast

You don’t need the geniuses from McKinsey & Company to tell you it’s a lousy year for print media. Make that a lousy decade. Just days after Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S. announced that Metropolitan Home will be shuttered with its December issue (see below), Conde Nast announced this week that its 2009 pages are in, and it won’t be the merriest of office Christmas Parties high above Times Square for those who remain employed there. Ad pages are down by one-third for the year as more than 8,400 pages evaporated from it normally luxurious ledger. The company closed popular titles Portfolio, Gourmet and Modern Bride as well as Cookie and Elegant Bride and survivors who depend on purveyors of luxury goods took significant hits: Architectural Digest lost half (49.9%) of its ad pages; W lost 46 percent and Conde Nast Traveler lost 41 percent according to company data released to the media. On average, ad pages fell 27.6 percent industry wide for the first nine months of 2009 according to the Publishers Information Bureau. Branding will take you only so far in tough time and once again, print advertising becomes a luxury, not a core necessity, when times are tough and you can’t measure its direct effectiveness to pull customers into your stores.

Obituary announced for MetHome

Another acclaimed aspirational consumer magazine will cease publication in December. Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S. announced that Metropolitan Home will be shuttered with its December issue, citing a lousy housing market and cuts in discretionary income for home renovations. Ad pages were down nearly 36 percent year-over-year, about the same as Gourmet’s, another popular magazine shuttered last month by Conde Nast. No plans announced about Met Home’s Web site. This recession has been particular unkind to the shelter magazine category and has forced the closing of House & Garden, Domino, Southern Accents, Cottage Living, In Style, O at Home and Country Home.

Facebook saves accused from perp walk

With more and more people revealing details of their private lives online – from the banal to the shocking – a potentially useful but unintended application of popular social network sites like Facebook, MySpaceand Twitter may be emerging. Crime-solving. A NYC teen, Rodney Bradford posted a seemingly meaningless post on Oct. 17 at 11:49 a.m. asking where his pancakes were. One of millions of banal, time-wasting posts that day until Bradford, 19, was arrested the next day as a suspect in an armed robbery at the housing project where he lives. Those words became his alibi. The entry, made at approximately the same time as the robbery. The New York District Attorney subpoenaed Facebook to verify that Bradford’s words had been typed from a computer at the apartment where he lives with his father. When that was confirmed, the charges were dropped. While social networking sites has been used as prosecutorial evidence in cases ranging from cyber-bullying to armed robbery and murder, legal experts believe it’s the first time such sites have been used as alibi evidence. Because of how ubiquitous social networking sites have become, we expect them to have a role in increasingly more cases as their user demographics tend to mirror the prime ages of those committing violent crimes, teens and young adults.
Social Media Update

Tweeting your company to the top of the search results

According to Internet Marketing Report (IMR), doing more with Twitter could help your company reach prospects who don’t actively “tweet” or even know what that means. IMR says all the search engines plan to include Twitter updates in their search results. Google plans to add tweets in its search result that may gain from real-time observations. The Bing search engine is planning to add posts from Twitter and Facebook.

Measuring success of marketing campaigns:
• 77% of marketers say new customers acquired
• 73% say the number of new leads
• 67% say net increase in sales
• 29% say increase in purchase intent
• 22% say increase in purchase intent
• 21% say changes in “perceptual attributes”
Source: eMarketer.com, October 2009 study

Blogs, e-mail and Web site optimization most economical sources of leads. But watch PPC.
New research from Hubspot.com finds online channels deliver qualified sales leads for significantly less money than telemarketing, trade shows and direct mail. While Blogs, e-mail and Web site optimization (SEO) scored high on “relative cost per lead”, what caught our attention was that one third (32%) of marketers surveyed by Hubspot said pay-per-click (PPC) was also a relatively expensive way to acquire leads. More on that in future issues.

Relative cost per lead by channel
% of marketers who said “below average cost”

Blogs/social media *****************55%
E-mail marketing**************49%
SEO*********************48%
Direct Mail *********34%
PPC*************32%
Telemarketing **29%
Trade Shows**18
Source: Hubspot.com

Economy

So what’s up with the stock market? The economy can’t get out of first gear. Unemployment’s at the highest level in 27 years. The dollar’s sinking like a stone and the stock market keeps going up. At last glance, The Dow closed the week at nearly 10,200, up more than 16 percent for the year and the S&P closed over 1,100, up more than 20 percent for the year.

Oddly, the same problem that worries many investors over the longer term is what encourages some for the short term: a soft economy. The reason is that an ailing economy requires the Federal Reserve to keep its short-term interest-rate targets near zero and continue pumping billions of dollars into the financial system. That is great for stocks because much of that money eventually finds its way into financial markets, and because cheap money keeps financing costs low and pushes corporate profits higher. Worries about whether government intervention would be enough to keep the economy growing have been one of the reasons behind the series of volatile up and down swings in late October and early November.
*** For a great take on the “Jobless Recovery” check out University of Chicago professor, Casey Mulligan’s blog on Economix.

Google acquisition of startup could jumpstart mobile ad category

Monday Google announced it has agreed to acquire mobile advertising startup AdMob for $750 million in stock. AdMob, whose clients include P&G, Adidas and Land Rover, is a leading seller of banner ads on iPhone apps and Web pages that can be retrieved from mobile phones. This deal will probably cement the viability of the much hyped mobile advertising business….still in its nascent stages at $160 million (source: Kelsey Group), less than one percent of the $23 billion in online ads in 2008 according to Internet Advertising Bureau.

While most of the mobile ads so far have been delivered by text message. Experts point to the growing popularity of the iPhone and other popular mobile devices, the ads will become more engaging and widespread. Analysts say Google already has an edge on its rivals Microsoft and Yahoo when it comes to ads linked to search queries via mobile. Expect Microsoft and Yahoo to look for deals with other mobile ad providers like JumpTap, Millenial Media and Quattro Wireless.

For advertising to work as we head into the second decade of the new millennium, it’s got to be measurable and prove it works. That said, the burden for accountability is a two way street. Publishers and Web site operators have to work more closely with their media partners to understand their marketing objectives, not meet monthly page or banner inventory quotas. On the flip side, marketers and their agencies need to do a better job of understanding their media partners’ audience, editorial tone and pulse. E-mailing generic spreadsheets or RFPs to media partners with 24 hours’ notice to get them done is not how great advertising or marketing gets done. And when it comes time to reconcile the success or failure of a campaign, both sides need real metrics, not self-serving “ad recall” surveys or click-based McMetrics to show ROI.

Let’s be a lot smarter, less greedy and more patient next decade.

First Generation in History in Which Kids Are Smarter Than Parents

Gaming now part of the information paradigm shift at work, home and school. Spike in agency reviews point to ad spending turnaround and need for fresh thinking.

“This is the first generation in recorded history in which the kids are smarter than their parents,” said Tom Hood, CPA, a popular blogger and new media professor who led a poignant social networking panel discussion I attended last week. “They’re way ahead of us in terms of digital technology, interactive media and collaboration.”

While the younger generation doesn’t have the personal spending power or corporate budget influence of its elders, the wired generation is influencing spending decisions (and driving rapid adoption) of anything related to technology, media consumption and social networking. If you market anything that touches a U.S. household or workplace with people under age 30 on the premises, then you better think about ways to market to AND THROUGH the younger generation.

My fifth grader does his school reports in PowerPoint, saves them to a pen drive, turns the device in to his teacher who inserts it into her classroom PC and displays the assignment on a chalk-free SmartBoard for all his classmates to critique. My first grader is an active “MMOGer” (massively multiplayer online gamer) interacting after school each day with virtual peers on Club Penguin, a 12-million member online community containing a range of Web based games and activities in which players user cartoon penguins as avatars, waddle around, chat, play mini-games and participate in other activities with one another in a snow-covered virtual world. Both kids and their pals have taught themselves to use Mom’s digital SLR camera to shoot YouTube videos of their sports and car racing exploits, complete with music, slow motion and title credits. I’m staying out of it, mildly amused. But when the ads start rolling in, I’m insisting on taking a cut to pay for “studio rental” time.

My kids also got their hands on my clunky standard-issue cell phone during a long car trip. Turns out it has a camera, video recorder and app for downloading games and music. Who knew? Like me, they wouldn’t be caught dead reading the manual. Unlike me, they have the patience and intuition to experiment with mysterious looking buttons on the side of the phone and don’t get frustrated when it fails to do what one expects it to do. They still can’t do anything about the spotty voice service, but to this generation, a cell phone is a multi-media toy that happens to have voice capabilities. It’s not a semi-reliable mobile communication tool that we view it as. They also don’t have to deal with the new charges showing up in my monthly bill – yet.

Unlike the games their older siblings grew up with, today’s educational games tend to be online and social, allowing kids to interact and collaborate to achieve common goals. As the New York Times reported last week, the newest educational games, unlike the stand-alone boxed games of the 1990s, are set up like services in which children can enter a virtual world, try on a character and solve problems that may relate to the real world. Newer games work concepts of math, science and language into the actual game mechanics, instead of stopping for something that feels like schoolwork.

For another take on responsible online destinations for kids, check out Fifty P where kids can get real-life lessons on financial literacy and savings plans without stern lectures about the value of money from their elders.

Marketing to the short attention, time-shifting consumer

The debate rages on about whether or not humans can truly perform simultaneous mental processes, but we’re multi-tasking more than any previous generation and there’s no sign of turning back. A recent University of Melbourne study found that people who use the Web at work for personal use are actually nine percent MORE productive, not less, than those who don’t.

If you’re in marketing, you better get used to increasingly shorter attention spans and you’ll have to work harder than ever to reach those targets in a three-screen time shifting world.

Economy

The recession is technically over, stock markets are up double-digits for the year and the Fed yesterday promised not to raise its rock bottom interest rates for an “extended period.” What’s more, the government last week said the economy grew 3.5percent in the third quarter, its first quarterly expansion in a year. Unfortunately, experts says economic growth will remain “weak for a time” as the jobless rate surpasses the 10 percent barrier for the first time in 27 years and retailers brace for a Grinch-like Holiday shopping season. With both consumers and corporations in extended “wait and see” mode, media partners should expect short term, opportunistic ad spending flurries, but no sustained uptrend that you can take to the bank.

Media

U.S. ad spending fell 15.4 percent in the first half of 2009, according to Nielsen Company data with online advertising the only sector expected to record positive growth for the year -- a projected 9.2. percent to $54.1 billion, according to Zenith Optimedia research. All other media are shrinking, notes Zenith in a recent report (PDF) “Most are shrinking at around the market average rate, but newspapers and magazines are in steep decline: we forecast newspaper ad expenditure to fall 17 percent this year, and magazine ad expenditure to shrink 20 percent. In both cases this is a particularly severe example of a longer-term trend; these media have been in decline since 2007, and we expect them to remain in decline for the rest of our forecast period.”

Despite print media’s long-term struggles, signs are emerging that the painful advertising slump of the past two years may finally be easing. The Wall Street Journal reported last week that a long list of major marketers, including UPS, Unilever, US Army, General Motors, Yum Brands and Emirates Airlines, are seeking overtures from new advertising firms. According to the Journal, when the online shoe retailer Zappos.com invited pitches for its small account earlier this year, more than 100 ad agencies submitted credentials.

"Clearly we are seeing the beginnings of an ad recovery. The volume of ad reviews is way up," Russell Wohlwerth, principal of Ark Advisors, a consulting firm that matches ad firms with marketers, told the Journal. But over the past few years, the process of searching for a new advertising or media-buying firm has dramatically changed. About 80 percent of reviews now include procurement departments, up from 30 percent to 40 percent about five years ago, consultants say. And decisions are being made in the conference room not the golf course.

For nation’s newspapers print circulation plummets, but Web visits up

New figures released last week by the Audit Bureau of Circulation showed double-digit circulation drops for 22 of the nation’s top 25 papers amid an industry-wide decline of 10.6 percent for the six months ended September 30. At just 44 million copies, U.S. daily papers sold fewer editions than at any time since the 1940s. Industry execs say part of the readership loss is self-imposed. By that they mean rising manufacturing costs and dropping ad revenue has forced them to cut “unprofitable circulation” which in industry parlance refers to those with bad credit, low incomes, intermittent subscriptions and readers who live in outlying areas. But, few will argue that the Web has siphoned off millions of print readers and advertising dollars. Newspaper Web sites are updated more frequently than their ink-stained brethren. Web papers don’t arrive wet, late or tattered and by and large they’re free. This year, newspaper Web sites have had more than 72 million unique visitors, up 20 percent from 60 million in 2007 according to Nielsen Online reports for the Newspaper Association. We see this trend continuing on an exponential

The younger generation thrives on collaboration, speed and entertainment, said blogger Tom Hood.

If you’re in marketing, particularly B2B, then keep in mind the fact that “Young people may be new to the world of work, but their bosses are immigrants to the world of the Web.”

Look to gaming if you want to win the game.