Americans reluctant to be tracked

Despite the concerns of some consumers and privacy advocates, marketers have defended behavioral targeting on the basis that Internet users would prefer to look at relevant advertisements and offers.

But a study from researchers at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of California Berkeley School of Law and the Annenberg Public Policy Center reports just the opposite.

“Contrary to what many marketers claim, most adult Americans (66%) do not want marketers to tailor advertisements to their interests,” according to the paper. “Moreover, when Americans are informed of three common ways that marketers gather data about people in order to tailor ads, even higher percentages— between 73% and 86%—say they would not want such advertising.”

Respondents showed somewhat more interest in receiving personalized discounts and news, but still, less than one-half of Americans wanted any tailored Web content at all.

That was true of consumers in every age group—even young adults ages 18 to 24 were more likely to say no to behavioral targeting than to accept it, except for discounts.

Several earlier studies reached different conclusions. For example, ChoiceStream consistently found from 2006 through 2008 that at least 70% of Internet users were interested in seeing personalized online ads. And more than one-half of Web users surveyed by Q Interactive in March 2009 said they would prefer to receive targeted advertisements based on their personal data in order to enjoy free content. Most also said they would view an online advertiser favorably because of ads tailored to their interests.

More than two-thirds of respondents to the Annenberg/Berkeley study felt they had lost control over their personal information. At the same time, however, they believed businesses handled their data well and that they were already protected by current regulations.

Even so, marketers hoping to avoid regulation through industry self-policing may have an uphill battle, as most respondents were in favor of new legislation. Almost two-thirds (63%), for example, thought there should be a law requiring advertisers to immediately delete information about their Internet activity.

October, 2009
Emarketer: http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1007121

New Media Gateway continues to leverage its platform as well as integrated partner relationships to maximize return on investment for our clients. 

Article: The Future of Digital Marketing -

The Future of Digital Marketing conference, presented by Econsultancy, is an annual fixture on the London marketing calendar. This year’s gathering again boasted a number of stimulating presentations, as well as heated discussion.

After the opening keynote, four hour-long sessions were devoted to the travel, financial services, retail and publishing industries.

These were the themes of the day:

The Future of Digital Marketing Is the Future of Marketing

Digital channels are increasingly crucial for all advertising and other communications with consumers. In fact, the word “digital” is becoming superfluous.

The Future is Unknowable—But It’s Already Here

Few speakers were prepared to predict the future. But speakers and delegates seemed to share a sense of what it will be like.

Within a few years, one or two genuinely new technologies will burst on the scene. But most “innovations” in marketing will be new applications of technologies already available, such as using Google Earth more to provide local context for travel destinations online, or using augmented-reality programs in mobile phones to display full product and price information for items viewed in the physical world.

Respect Is Key

In a world of behavioral targeting and the mountains of information being amassed about Internet users, transparency is more important than ever.

Top tips:

• Relevance for consumers means respecting their declared preferences, the explicit permissions they give and their right to privacy. Take the high ground.
• Give people access to their own information. That breeds trust and will lower resistance to marketing messages.

Going Back to Basics

A recurring refrain in all the industry sessions. Marketers of all stripes, dogged by the recession and overwhelmed by the plethora of digital tools and channels available, need to get the essentials right.

Top tips:

• Website optimization. Know what’s working, and fix what’s not. Ease of use for consumers is increasingly important. Make sure navigation and content are efficient and up to date, and remove dead links.
• Consistent, end-to-end branding.
• Ensure your products, services and USP are crystal clear to consumers.
• Make simple, clear calls to action.
• Set deadlines and keep them. Work backward from where you want your business to be in six months to establish marketing plans. If you can’t see reaching the goal you set, rethink the goal.
• Concentrate on home markets first. Get those right before rolling out elsewhere.
• Search: It may not be sexy, but it remains “the lifeblood of marketing.”
• Don’t average cost-per-click data over entire campaigns. To see underlying patterns, you need to get granular.
• Make your money go further. Assess the media you own (content assets, Website and so on), the media you buy and the media exposure you earn (mentions in major newspapers or industry news sources, for example). Maximizing coverage of your owned and bought media in the press can multiply your exposure many-fold.

Basics Aren’t Enough

Somewhat paradoxically, this theme went hand in hand with hard advice on Web analytics, clarity, brand consistency and leveraging existing assets. Many speakers stressed the importance of getting beyond the predictable and the merely adequate to deliver an unexpected, higher-value consumer experience—aka “magic.”

Top tips:

• Think high value, not high volume.
• Avoid fake personalization. If you claim to act on your customers’ declared interests, make sure it shows. Tailor content to your site visitors and the recipients of your e-mail campaigns.
• Empower your advocates, and provide tools they can use to spread the word.
• Cool tools are best, such as iPhone applications or widgets that make key activities portable, easily accessible—and fun.
• Use an element of surprise to spark excitement and interest. If you run a travel site, delivering one unexpected, intriguing option in an otherwise predictable list of hotels in Florida can remind users of something often forgotten these days: Serendipity is central to the online experience.

Article by Jeannie Mullen (clickz.com):

When I started to write this column, I ran into a problem. I couldn't think of anything exciting in e-mail to write about. Call it e-mail marketer writer's block. This got me thinking: Has e-mail marketing gotten to a point where we have nothing new to talk about? Has this industry matured enough that we now just need to focus on the tried-and-true acquire, convert, retain principals?

Then it hit me.

The e-mail marketing industry could never land in this type of rut. As the backbone of all other digital media, our e-mail efforts will keep growing and evolving as new technologies do. For those of us who choose to ignore the power that e-mail marketing can have as an influencer for other channels (like social and mobile), e-mail will remain a fairly cut-and-dried direct marketing practice. The rest of us, though, have reason to celebrate.

Here's a list of some newer aspects of e-mail you should be aware of. If you haven't considered these as part of your strategy, what are you waiting for?

Acquisition-focused upgrades:

• Tiered performance pricing for prospecting
  
  
• E-mail as a branding tool
  
  
• E-mail to feed into social networks
  
  
• Mobile e-mail

Conversion:

• Social/micro-messaging options
  
  
• Channel/source optimization
  
  
• Preference center enhancements
  
  
• Win-back advancements

Retainment:

• Partner-oriented value add
  
  
• Inventory management
  
  
• Co-op marketing
  
  
• Social influencing
  
  
• Video in e-mail
  
  

Out of all of these new initiatives, my recent favorite is partner oriented-value add. This is where customer e-mail programs include some type of unanticipated reward for reading the e-mail. Unanticipated rewards have been around a long time in marketing but have rarely been used in e-mail. That's because e-mail marketing was historically such a high conversion channel that this tactic was rarely needed. But in today's world of inbox overload and channel integration, e-mail needs a little sweetener. Including a valuable, unanticipated reward packs a one-two punch. Here's how:

In a recent column, I wrote about a new segment in our e-mail lists: the social influencers. These people aren't always your best click-and-buy people, but they are the best people to share, post, and talk about your recent e-mail effort (which results in even more sales than if they bought themselves).

When these people receive an e-mail from you that contains an unanticipated reward, something that they enjoy, you'll increase their level of loyalty to your brand. That's important. Equally important, or even more so, these people will share that great news and your generosity with others through social networks and online water-cooler conversations.

This opens up a whole new world of opportunity for you to attract new customers and increase revenues simply by adding unexpected value into your messaging.

Yes, the world of e-mail is nowhere near tired and old just yet. As new developments and trends rise, e-mail is right there to help maximize exposure and monetize results.

I love being a part of the e-mail industry. Don't you?

Source: www.clickz.com

The need for measurement and analytics is growing in importance.

According to a study by the Lenskold Group and MarketSphere, 65% of marketers said that CEOs and CFOs are demanding to see return on investment (ROI) as a part of securing budgets for marketing initiatives.

Seventy-nine percent of the marketers felt that the need to measure, analyze and report marketing effectiveness was greater in 2009 than in previous years.

But getting accurate measurements takes money, and with the downturn in full swing, funds aren’t easy to come by.

In fact, 59% of marketers felt the need to measure ROI was greater than ever but were not budgeted for the necessary effort.

Only 20% of respondents said the need to report marketing effectiveness was higher and that they had adequate funds to do the job.

When asked how much of their budgets were dedicated to measurement and analysis, 31% of marketers answered “none.”

A mere 2% of marketers allotted more than 30% of their budgets to marketing measurement and analysis.

Measuring ROI in the best of times can be challenging, but the Lenskold Group has five recommendations for how to succeed:

• Estimate ROI potential in the planning stage.
• Invest in measurements and analytics with immediate payback.
• Increase experimentation and testing.
• Prepare for aggressive competition during the recovery.
• Pursue efficiency and effectiveness.

Looking for ROI...

The economy is putting ever-increasing demands on marketers to make every dollar count and demonstrate positive ROI.

According to the “2009 Promo Interactive Marketing Survey” from PROMO magazine, the demand to perform is driving marketers online. More than one-third of marketers surveyed believed that interactive marketing ROI would be more profitable than traditional marketing—such as TV, radio and outdoor—this year.

While 29% of the marketers surveyed were not sure whether digital marketing ROI would be more profitable or not, only 7% of them believed that digital marketing would be less profitable.

So it comes as little surprise that 22% of the marketers indicated they would shift dollars from traditional media into the digital space.

The problem with shifting funds to digital initiatives is that consumers are gravitating to areas where the metrics are still pretty shaky, such as blogging, social networking, video and word-of-mouth.

Paradoxically, under much pressure and with little choice, the drive for performance seems to be pushing marketers into spaces where they have few means to measure ROI—and prove performance.

Marketers are moving dollars to emerging media—even though, among the marketers polled, 38% didn’t know or didn’t measure their online ROI.

Go figure...

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Article References:

http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1007143

http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1007100

New Media Gateway, the industry's leading sales and marketing technology provider, today announced that its platform for managing multi-channel content is now tightly integrated with EmailReach, a comprehensive solution for delivering email over sixty-nine different platforms.

The combined solution allows for push-button ease in creating and deploying email campaigns that are virtually assured of rendering correctly and exceeding a 98% success rate in reaching the recipient's inbox. Marketers can create high-impact, targeted emails containing Flash animation, video, audio and more using New Media Gateway's Digital Marketing Center (DMC). The EmailReach technology then performs more than 10,000 discrete tests transparently to the user, decreasing the "spam score" and ensuring deliverability. Ad hoc and standardized reporting provides immediate insight into the effectiveness of the campaign so that adjustments can be made in real time.

"With the immense number of email services and browsers in use today, the potential for emails rendering incorrectly or not being delivered is enormous," said Tim Storer, President and CEO at New Media Gateway. "The extensive testing provided by EmailReach virtually ensures deliverability, and the seamless integration with the DMC puts that power at the fingertips of business users without the need for IT involvement."

The New Media Gateway and EmailReach integration also leverages the powerful administration capabilities built into the DMC. Permissions can be centrally managed so that customization, deployment and evaluation rights are safely and easily assigned to any number of users.

To learn more about how New Media Gateway's Digital Marketing Center can help you improve your email marketing effectiveness, visit http://www.newmediagateway.com/marketing-software/dmc.

In a world of continuous technological change, the concept of “new” can get old.

Take online video, for example.

A few short years ago, the term “online video” was wishful thinking. Clips could only be slowly downloaded. They had to be viewed in tiny windows on the computer screen. Sound and graphics were primitive. Video was hardly a killer app.

But then, in a rush came—sometime between 2005 and 2006—YouTube in the US, Dailymotion in Europe and Tudou in China, video-sharing sites that all had three basic elements in common:

• Flash Player technology that enabled instant viewing in the browser, without downloading
• Upload-ability that made file-sharing with friends (as well as viewers around the world) quick and easy
• Embedding code that allowed users to post video clips on Webpages and blogs

Suddenly video was an open, consumer-driven platform, with virtually no cost of entry. As a result, online video moved from niche to mass market, and in the process became one of the fastest-growing media platforms in history.

According to “The Global Web Index,” from Trendstream, with research conducted by Lightspeed Research, early this year 72% of US Internet users watched video clips monthly—making video bigger than blogging or social networking.

According to the survey, 62% of US Internet users watched at least one clip a week, a figure that Lightspeed analysts translated into 97 million weekly viewers.

By contrast, Nielsen Online pegged the number of US online video viewers in April at nearly 117 million.

That scale of usage would mean online video in the US is now as big as network TV.

“This research shows that in just three years we’ve reached a watershed in the way that consumers expect to watch, contribute and share video content,” said Tom Smith of Trendstream. “Web users want to participate at every stage, including the creation and sharing of material.”

The age of online video viewers trends younger: 82% of teens (16-to-17-year-olds) and young adults (18 to 24) streamed video, compared with 73% of Generation X (25 to 34) and 65% of older boomers (55 to 64) who said they watched.

Online video-sharing was less common, with only 46% of users participating. While teen, young adult and Gen X sharing percentages hovered around 50%, the older the Internet users, the less likely they were to send videos.

One-half of all respondents shared videos via e-mail to friends and family. Twenty-three percent sent video out to friends on social networks, 21% by instant messenger and 14% to their friends on video-sharing sites such as YouTube and Hulu.

The most widely used platform for discovering and viewing video online was YouTube, followed by e-mail, music sites, Yahoo! and news sites.

Sharing appears to happen mainly among close friends, as 72% of video-sharers sent to just one, two or three people.

“Those who access video are completely engaged in the content that they choose to watch,” concluded Mr. Smith. “It’s an impactful universe.”

Follow the money.

Economic recessions tend to hurt budgets of all stripes, and the advertising business is no exception.

According to data gathered from an eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit, the budgets of more than 54% of marketers worldwide have been negatively affected by the recession.

More than 6% said it had affected their budget positively, meaning a few CMOs are extremely brave.

During tough times, more marketers are adopting digital marketing techniques.

Over 90% of marketers polled by eMetrics said they would increase or maintain their spend on e-mail advertising, and more than 83% said the same about paid search.

The largest decreases were planned for social media and general online advertising, but even those paled in comparison to overall online spending increases.

In addition, many marketers are realizing the need for increased digital intelligence. One-quarter of the respondents said they planned on increasing their Web analytics budgets, and over 60% planned to maintain spending.

Other research also shows that marketers are moving dollars online.

A 2008 McKinsey & Company survey found that 55% of global marketing execs planned to cut spending on traditional media in order to fund increased online efforts.

The move to online has become so steady that Laura Desmond of Starcom MediaVest predicted that the advertising industry is headed toward a “50%-50% world,” where one-half of spending will go to online campaigns.

Article Source: http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1007073

As marketers begin to better understand how Web site optimization fits into overall campaigns, budget investments in search engine optimization (SEO) will grow at a higher rate each year, compared with other types of search marketing strategies, according to a recent report from eMarketer.

The report, "Search Marketing Trends: Back to Basics," suggests that growth will decline for paid search from 15.9% in 2009 to 11.3% in 2013--while SEO growth will jump from 17.7% to 20.3%, respectively.

"Every company is losing some business because of the economy, whether they buy less, or not at all," said David Hallerman, eMarketer senior analyst. "There is a greater focus on customer acquisition. Search is the best tool for that."

Internet users generally find organic listings more relevant than paid search ads, so they tend to click on the search engine results more often than pay-per-click (PPC) ads, Hallerman said. But marketers should design campaigns that combine paid search advertising and SEO.

Overall, U.S. spending on search engine marketing will nearly double from $12.2 billion in 2008 to $23.4 billion in 2013. All four types of search marketing will gain more marketer dollars each year.

Successful deployment of both methods could mean higher rankings in search query results. Each offers benefits. For example, paid search's effects are immediate, but marketers need to spend consistently for those sponsored-link ads to appear in search results. SEO effects take time, but marketers need Web site maintenance more than daily spending to sustain high organic results. How long it takes to deliver a return on investments (ROI) depends on conversions, Hallerman said.

While lots of data makes search more accountable than other ad media, too much data could overwhelm marketers and create confusion that clouds decisions, according to Hallerman. More important, the abundance of data makes Web analytics crucial for managing the process.

While marketers might see increased traffic as positive, if the search ad's cost relative to its conversion rate means a reduced bottom line, the marketer would need to examine the strategy, including bids on certain keywords, keywords to bid on, and the search engine to place ads on.

"Far more marketers say SEO is much harder to gauge because it has far less metrics," Hallerman said. "SEO is like public relations. You hope people will notice and buy the product. It's a lot like tracking buzz."

Article source: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=101301