Tag Archives: Digital marketing

June 27, 2012 · 9:24 am

I Can’t See You

Once in a while we play a little game of compare and contrast which is what we’ll be doing today.

Person with PDA handheld device.

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The two items causing a bit of cognitive dissonance are studies from Pew and from Mongoose Metrics.  Let’s start with Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project:

  • Nearly a third (31%) of adult U.S. mobile Web users say they now go online mostly through their cell phones
  • Leading the mobile-only Web trend are young people and minorities. Nearly half of all 18- to-29-year-olds (45%) who access the Internet on phones do most of their online browsing on their mobile device. Half (51%) of African-Americans and 42% of Hispanics in the same category also mostly go online through their phones. By contrast, only 24% of white mobile Web users turn mainly to their devices for Web access.
  • Less affluent (income of under $50,000 annually) and less well-educated people were also more likely to rely mostly on their phones for Web browsing than those with higher incomes and college or higher levels of education.

OK – pretty straightforward.  Nearly everyone has a mobile device, more than half (55%) use them to go on the web at some point, and as incomes go down the mobile device tends to become the primary point of access.  Got it.  Next.

Part of the 2012 Mongoose Metrics Data Series found that mobile internet access accounts for approximately 9 percent of all traffic. However, the report also found that about 10 percent of websites are fully optimized for mobile access, which means 90 percent are incapable of serving these users completely.

Oops.  You can read the study here if you’re interested.  It also reminds us that 80% of users preferred mobile sites when searching for prices and product reviews.  But then again, if they can’t see the great content you have, what difference does it make?

We’re at yet another point of change.  The desktop computer is dying a lingering death, and I think it will be an enterprise-only device within 5 years.  So why are a lot of us behaving as if nothing has changed?  We need to be thinking and building mobile first, as the data points out.  After all, being discoverable and social is useless if you’re not optimally visible.

Right?

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June 7, 2012 · 8:18 am

What IE10 Means To You

Microsoft did something that’s causing a ruckus in the digital ad industry.  To me, it’s a logical, consumer-friendly move that is in line with best-practices.  To others, it’s…

English: Microsoft Windows Internet Explorer w...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

a step backwards in consumer choice, and we fear it will harm many of the businesses, particularly publishers, that fuel so much of the rich content on the internet.

That quote is from the head of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, and the move in question is to turn on “Do Not Track” in the new version of Internet Explorer.  Another group – the Digital Advertising alliance (the IAB is a founding member) began a campaign earlier this year to inform consumers about interest-based advertising and how to take greater control of their online privacy.  According to the boilerplate in their press releases

These associations and their thousands of members are committed to developing effective self-regulatory solutions to consumer choice in online behavioral advertising.

One last quote:

A default setting that automatically blocks content violates a consumer’s right to choose, and doesn’t factor in the need for digital businesses to innovate and thrive economically.

That’s from the IAB’s official response just in case you think I’m making this up.  However, we’ve finally got to the truth:  this is about commerce and not about consumer choice.

As a digital marketing person I’m certainly aware of the benefits some tracking technologies bring to consumers, who might not even understand that they’re seeing more interesting ads and offers because of it.  However, I also know that most users do not change the default settings on their browsers (ever wonder why those deals to make certain pages the default home or search page are worth so much?).  Apparently, the DAA only supports consumer choice when the default is set to “on”.

This isn’t about blocking ads or blocking content.  It doesn’t block cookies.  It’s a browser setting that sends a message to every website you visit saying you prefer not to be tracked. While that flag is optional for sites and ad nets to obey, it’s gaining momentum with Twitter embracing it.  To me it’s about protecting consumers, even those who don’t know they need it and I don’t buy that defaulting the consumer’s choice to be the way you want it as a business is necessarily the best, or even the right, way.

Unfortunately, the new version of the the latest proposed draft of the Do Not Track specification published Wednesday requires that users must choose to turn on the anti-behavioral tracking feature in their browsers and software.  That means that IE10 will be out of compliance with the standard and, therefore, ad nets and others are free to ignore the browser setting.

I’m always sad when smart people do dumb things such as choosing their businesses over their users.  Let’s see where this leads but I don’t think the conversation is over.  Do you?  Where do you come out on this?

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May 16, 2012 · 8:45 am

Fadbook?

One of the themes we touch upon here is the repeating nature of events.  Or as Peter Allen put it, everything old is new again (so much so that Barenaked Ladieswrote a song by the same name).

Image representing Facebook as depicted in Cru...

Image via CrunchBase

Today’s meditation on this concerns Facebook, or rather an interesting bit of research that came out from the AP and CNBC concerning Facebook’s future.  They conducted the poll in anticipation of Facebook going public and my immediate reaction was AOL‘s trajectory morphing to MySpace‘s morphing to…???   The AP piece summed it up with this question:

Is Facebook A Fad?

You’re laughing?  46% of the poll respondents believe Facebook  will fade away as new companies come along, and it’s not just the old farts – younger adults are no more apt than their older counterparts to expect Facebook’s long-term success; 51 percent think it will fade.

For those of us who have been in digital since the start of the commercial era, it’s not a weird question.  Fifteen years ago, one would have asked the same of AOL and could not have imagined that it would pretty much be a blip.  The rise and fall of MySpace is much more recent but illustrative.  So quit your laughing and think about how the nature of the beast is changing.  Facebook is going from a company built to attract and service folks like you and me to a company that’s built to attract and service marketers.  That’s not necessarily a bad thing except that Facebook seem to be bad at it.

You might have read that General Motors is pulling its advertising from Facebook.  That’s a $10 million deal — not massive in terms of value — but very embarrassing for the social network because apparently it was too hard for GM to quantify their ROI.  The poll data supports that thinking – 57% of users say they never click on ads or sponsored content, while 26 percent “hardly ever” click on them.

Like AOL long ago, there are some other underlying factors that might portend bad things.

  • Just 13 percent say they trust Facebook completely or a lot to keep their personal information private.
  • A large majority (59 percent) say they have little or no faith in the company to protect their privacy.
  • Even among the site’s most frequent users — those who use it multiple times a day —half say they would not feel safe making purchases through the site.

There’s another great analysis from Forrester here and I’m sure more will be written as Facebook’s IPO happens later this week.  So is Facebook a fad?  I’ll let you respond via the comments, but my thinking is that while “fad” might not be the right term, it’s definitely not invulnerable.  Given the underlying concerns from users and marketers, someone ought to spend an hour reviewing the history of AOL and recall that MySpace went from “the most popular site in the US” in 2006 to losing half its traffic between 2009 and 2010.  What’s your thinking?

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