... low conversion rates driven by lack of timeliness and engagement. 

According to B2B blogger and marketing guru Paul Dunay, back in the mid-twentieth century new media such as radio, TV and film enabled brands and their ad agencies to dynamically demonstrate product benefits in ways unachievable by earlier static advertising.

Fundamentally, however, says Dunay: "The way we communicated never changed. We were always talking at consumers and never with them. For a long time, that was all we could do. It was all the technologies allowed. Fortunes were made by pushing ads into every conceivable media channel, trying to lure consumers into buying the advertised product. And it worked."

But with the advent of the internet era, and later the the mobile-to-app era, there is a fundamental a change in the relationship between brands and their audiences.

Almost overnight people are no longer tethered to a static terminal and consumers are empowered to interact with brands via advertising, products and packaging at the moment of their interest. No longer do they have to wait until they arrive home or log-in to the office computer. They can do it right here. Right now.

We have entered the 'Age of the Consumer', an era in which, avers Forrester Research, control has shifted from advertiser to consumer.

Behavioral studies show that when an individual seeks information about something and is able to act upon it, the conversion of that intent will be 70% more efficient than a classical push ad. It becomes even more so if marketers add the ability to engage the user in a conversation about a product in which he/she is interested or likes.

Innovative companies, like Vine and mobile marketing platform smartsy, have latched-on to this wave by creating apps and software that enable a dialogue between a brand and its audience, when and where the consumer wants.

Such technology opens a realm of near endless possibilities of content creation, while increasing conversion rates dramatically.

Evangelises blogger Dunay: "Audience participation isn’t just allowed; it’s encouraged. Hell, it’s necessary. By not only providing consumers with information in the moment of their interest, but also engaging them in conversation and empowering them to create their own content, we can drastically increase the relevancy of messaging and its authenticity."

Read the original unabridged Forbes.com article.

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... marketers to boost the performance of existing campaigns by adding a new direct channel - display advertising. 

Over the last twenty years we have seen a steady proliferation of marketing channels. The introduction of this latest channel is a sign of things to come digitally.

A new white paper published by UK-based Callcredit Information Group considers a planning approach that can be used to create multi-channel campaigns – now and in the future.

New opportunities for finding customers have become available and using targeting data in online marketing is nothing short of a game-changer.

The benefits of segmentation are well understood in the offline world but until now have not really touched digital advertising.

The very rapid growth of real time bidding now offers interactive marketers a chance to implement audience based marketing: they can identify the audience to which they are about to serve an ad - even before the ad is bought.

Addressable marketing identifies individuals and delivers personalisedmessages to them based on their unique characteristics.

For example, it would be inappropriate to display adverts for a credit based product to someone unlikely to be accepted for the product by the lender – and the new generation of display advertising can address such issues.

This new multi-channel advertising ecosystem allows a sophisticated mix of cost effective messaging across digital channels designed to maximise conversions.

A contact strategy can be created to orchestrate customer engagements, thereby enabling brand experiences that are consistent yet customisable across channels.

Read the original unabridged Callcredit article.

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... mobile operators will generate larger profits from data traffic than voice usage.

Mobile technology will also have significant public health implications in the fight against deadly diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis. Also the ongoing battle against HIV will increasingly be aided by the greater use of mobile connectivity.

The GSMA report makes other spectacular claims.

It cites the fact that every year around 240 tonnes of food spoils during transit and in storage. But the use of mobile technology to track trucks and monitor the temperature of storage facilities could save enough food to feed 40 million people in 2017 - equivalent to the entire population of Kenya.

The GSMA also claims that the use of mobile handsets, e-readers and tablets could put 1.8 million more children into education by 2017.

Says Michael O'Hara, GSMA's chief marketing officer: "Mobile data is not just a commodity, it is becoming the lifeblood of our daily lives, society and economy, with more and more connected people and things."

The association also predicts that the UK and USA will see data revenues overtaking voice by 2014.

Argentina will reach that goal even earlier, avers the report, with that nation reaching the milestone this year, while Kenya - one of Africa's most connected countries - will hit the target in 2016.

It is not just the developing world that will benefit, says the GSMA. It estimates that by 2017 mobile health services will shave $400bn (£265m) off the OECD nations' annual healthcare bill.

Factual data only is sourced from the original attributed article. The data is then enhanced by additional research and comment.

... the launch of self-help and financial advice video programmes.

According to AdAge: "It's not clear which channels will be part of the first paid-subscription rollout, but it is believed that YouTube will lean on the media companies that have already shown the ability to develop large followings on the video platform, including networks like Machinima, Maker Studios and Fullscreen. YouTube is also looking outside its current roster of partners for candidates."

AdAge also reports that the same sources expect YouTube may introduce the paid channels as early as the second quarter of this year.

One of these informants believes that the channels could be introduced to the public at the Digital Content New Fronts show in late April 2013, where digital-media companies such as YouTube, AOL and Yahoo host presentations to advertisers touting new online-video series.

The show, to be staged in New York City, aims to shape a new and practical marketplace for connecting the wealth of native digital content with brand marketers and their media and marketing agencies.

It will feature fifteen events by leading distributors, producers, creators and thought leaders in online video content.

Read the original unabridged AdAge article.

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... efficient algorithm for ranking web pages.

But as the world now knows, Google's mind-boggling success was built on crawling the web via software that visits every single web page ito build a vast index of online content.

Says entrepreneur Gilad Elbaz, who founded Common Crawl: “The web represents, as far as I know, the largest accumulation of knowledge, and there’s so much you can build on top.

“But simply doing the huge amount of work that’s necessary to get at all that information is a large blocker; few organizations have had the resources to do that.”

Mr Elbaz also points out that new search engines are just one of the things that can be built using an index of the web. He also notes that Google’s translation software was trained using online text available in multiple languages.

“The only way they could do that was by starting with a massive crawl. That’s put them on the way to build the Star Trek translator,” he says.

“Having an open, shared corpus of human knowledge is simply a way of democratizing access to information that’s fundamental to innovation.”

Around five years ago, Elbaz noticed that researchers with new ideas about how to use web data felt compelled to take jobs at Google because it was the only place they could test those ideas.

But Common Crawl’s data, Elbaz claims, will make it easier for novel ideas to gain traction, both in the world of startups and in academic research.

Read the original unabridged TechnologyReview article.

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... “to eliminate [traditional] surveys and instead focus on social feedback as their primary source for customer experience information.”

Moreover, claims the firm, clients will use consumers' online habits to discover how their competitors are doing by benchmarking competitors' social data.

They will also use that competitive data for product creation. NewBrandAnalytics predicts that more than a third of businesses will tailor their products explicitly to what their competition’s online customers are saying.

Also, social intelligence will make real-time performance evaluation common, as companies figure out how to assess their performance from online chatter, even to the extent of using comments - from employees, customers and consumers - to help make hiring and firing decisions!
 
Perhaps most significantly, the trend suggests that social media currents won't belong only to companies' marketing departments.

The firm predicts that 'buzz content' will infiltrate into the decision-making processes of operations, human resources, customer service, and product development.

Read the original unabridged MediaPost article.

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... a collection of datasets so large and complex that it becomes difficult to process using current database management tools.

The benefits - which can only be realised by massive investments in new technology - include capture, curation, storage, search, sharing, analysis and visualization.

According to Peter Tufano, the dean of Oxford’s Said Business School, which played host to the event, while awareness of the topic was high among enterprises, only about 6% of companies have got beyond a pilot stage, and 18% are still in one.

“That means three-quarters of industries are looking at this and saying ‘what is this all about?’”

Why aren’t they looking at Big Data? “The answer across all business,” he said, “was ‘we don’t know what the business case is.’”

But according to speakers at the event, the business case has already been answered.

Michael Chui has extensively researched the area for McKinsey Global Institute. His conclusion is emphatic: “The use of data and analytics in general is going to be a basis of competition going forward for individual firms, for sectors and even for countries. Those companies that are able to use data effectively are more likely to win in the marketplace.” [MT's italics]

MGI’s research showed that in just one field—personal location data—some $100 billion of value can be created globally for service providers through use of data.

Read the original unabridged WSJ article.

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... $7.1 billion, despite which market share will slip to 57.1%. 

Among the report's key forecasts are:

• Since eMarketer's May 2012 forecast, estimates for paid search have risen slightly to a compound annual growth rate [CAGR] of 9.7% on paid-search spending between 2011 and 2016, rather than 8.5% as estimated in May.

• The revision is prompted by greater-than-anticipated search spending in the first half of the year, as reported by the UK Interactive Advertising Bureau. 

• eMarketer estimates that in 2012 around $2.0 billion - or 23% of all UK digital adspend - will go to display advertising such as banners, rich media, video and sponsorships. The steady gains will partially come from an increase in use of realtime bidding and video formats, although doubts about the speed of economic recovery will lead some advertisers to focus on proven search tactics.
   
• Online video ads in Britain should rise from $273 million in 2012 to about $1.4 billion in 2016. The estimates include social video and video advertising on mobile devices.

According to eMarketer, in 2012 only the USA and Japan will outrank the UK’s $721 million market share, with projected mobile ad spending of $2.4 billion and $1.7 billion, respectively.

The annual rate of growth, estimated at 120% for 2012, is expected to remain above 50% until 2016, when mobile ad spending in the UK will approach $3.5 billion.

Read the original unabridged MediaPost article.

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... tracking those consumers wherever they may wander across the web.

Programmatic buying is the reason that luggage ad follows you irrespective of whether you’re on Weather.com or on a local news blog.

Ms Vega reports that this mega shift is "punishing traditional online publishers, like newspaper, broadcast and magazine sites, who are receiving a much lower percentage of ad dollars as marketers use programmatic buying across a much broader canvas".

"Some sites, like CNN.com, refuse to even accept advertising through programmatic buying because they do not want to cede control over what ads will appear.

She cites Ben Winkler, chief digital officer at Omnicom media shop OMD: “It’s allowing advertisers to assign value to media rather than publishers,” he said.

"Publishers can’t control the price, but they can control the quality of the content and the audience on that site.”

FMCG advertisers like Nike, Comcast, Progressive and Procter & Gamble are currently using programmatic buying, while luxury advertisers are starting to follow suit.

Forrester Research estimates that in 2012 all ads traded on exchanges (which includes all programmatic ads) have increased by more than 17.5% to about 629 billion impressions (the number of times an ad appears) versus just 535 billion impressions in 2011.

Read the original unabridged New York Times article.

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... voice control technology will be Intel Capital's next major investment priority.

Meeting with journalists at a resort hotel in Huntington Beach, California, Sodhani gave a demonstration of Dragon, Intel's newly developed voice control system,  similar to Apple's Siri.

He treated the assembled journos to a demonstration of the firm's voice control technology, showing his audience how to use it to search the internet, browse web pages and even play a Gangnam-style video.

Voice-control technology will not only be a trend for Intel Capital, the venture capital arm of Intel Corporation. It will be a megatrend for virtually everybody, evangelises Mr Sodhani.

"Voice is not like a mouse or keyboard. The amount of computing it requires - even the simplest instruction made by speech - is huge," he said, adding that Intel Capital is seeking to work with companies able to solve issues surrounding speech commands.

Many potential partners are to be found in China where, since 1998, Intel Capital has invested about $650 million in more than 100 Chinese technology companies.

Read the original unabridged China Daily article.

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