8 Important and Fun Digital Marketing Stats From the Past Week

The last several days were full of highlights from the realm of online marketing data. Here are eight stats that really stood out:

1. One year from now, digital will officially be king
Total digital ad spending will surpass TV for the first time in 2017, according to eMarketer’s quarterly forecast. Next year, the New York researcher said, spending on television spots will total a little more than $72 billion, or roughly 36 percent of total media budgets in the U.S. Meanwhile, online ad spending in 2017 will be about $77.4 billion, or approximately 38 percent of total ad spending, per eMarketer.

2. Pinterest opens up ads to all marketers
The social platform this week revealed that small and medium-sized businesses can now run ads on it like big brands have been doing for some time. Pinterest also reported that marketers that have spent at least $1 per day on advertising on the social platform see a 20 percent increase in clicks on their posts. 

3. People want robot friends, evidently
If you think robots are “so next decade,” guess again. Jibo, maker of a companion robot, said it has presold $4 million worth of its household bionic helper on its website—even though the product won’t be available until the end of the year. 

4. The Jetsons age is finally upon us
There are Jibo competitors hitting the market as well—Asia’s PaPeRo and Pepper, for instance, and Paris-based Buddy. Check out our SXSW-themed cover story about how robots are soon coming to a home near you. What’s more, ABI analysts project that companion robots will grow from a relatively miniscule sector in 2015 to a $46 million industry by the end of the decade and a $2.5 billion industry by 2025. 

5. IHOP gets personal about social targeting
The Glendale, Calif.-based company used personalized Promoted Tweets that included GIFs and users’ names in Twitter ads it ran through March 8, National Pancake Day. IHOP used the platform’s Tailored Audiences feature, targeting approximately 7.3 million users with such personalization, according to a rep for the company. To zero in on groups in such a personal way, the brand and agency MRM//McCann set up 37 custom audiences based on 20 popular names and their derivatives (e.g., Christopher or Chris). 

Christopher, celebrate #NATLPancakeDay w/ a FREE short stack & an invite for a friend! https://t.co/PABtlkznck pic.twitter.com/1fFQdOYTaz

— IHOP (@IHOP) March 1, 2016

6. KLM is flying high on Facebook Atlas
Facebook released new measurement tools for its Atlas ad server, including a path-to-digital-sales feature, which helped airline KLM uncover 24 percent more converted bookings.  

7. Hey, handy person, need a tape measure? There’s an app for that
Speaking of measurement, Hover quietly released a military-inspired app last year that’s designed to be a sort of digital tape measure (just to name one of its chief capabilities). The digital offering must work pretty well because word has gotten around—15,000 folks have downloaded the Hover 3-D Building Visualization and Measurements app in the last several months. Hover told Adweek it’s getting set to debut its first ad campaign in the coming weeks. 

8. Ball cap mocking the Donald is a hit 
The New York Times spelled “Drumpf” in his family’s native Germany.) All the credit goes to the cable channel’s John Oliver, who lambasted Trump on his show Last Week Tonight in late February in a bit that’s garnered 17 million YouTube views. 

8 Important and Fun Digital Marketing Stats From the Past Week

Marketing Guru Ashok Lalla Talks About The Past, Present And Future Of Digital Marketing !

Ashok Lalla

Ashok Lalla has been in the field of marketing for the past 16 years. After driving digital marketing strategy for brands such as Infosys and Taj Hotel Resorts and Places, Mr Lalla is now an Independent Digital and Marketing Advisor and continues to work with some of the top brands in the country. In this interview with Techstory, Mr Lalla talks about how digital marketing has evolved over the past 16 years and how brands can mix online and offline marketing strategies to design a winning campaign.

You have been in the field of marketing since the time internet was not in widespread use. How do you think the way companies look at customers has changed from then to now?

Back in 2000, when I started out in Digital Marketing (called Internet Marketing back then), brands in India were just beginning to discover the Internet. Most focused on building websites (mousetraps they believed the world would beat a path to). Soon they discovered that traffic did not come naturally and then focused on spending on Search to drive their brand’s Internet visibility. Ecommerce wasn’t really a focus for most.

16 years on, the Internet has evolved enormously and not surprisingly, the way brands look at it has evolved too. Today, most brands look to drive their presence beyond just websites and look for more than just traffic to their websites. They seek everything from driving brand visibility to creating brand preference to driving direct and indirect sales to using digital as an important means of delivering customer service and getting consumer insights and feedback.

Marketing has evolved from a common message to all consumers to different messages to different groups of consumers to personalized messages to every consumer. Do you believe that marketing is more and more becoming a function of technology and the company with the best technology will win the branding game?

In theory, digital allows brands to deliver unique messages to their customers. In reality, there is still a lot of push of conventional messages delivered through various digital channels and content formats.

Technology is just an enabler and a means to an end. The development of appropriate brand messages to various audiences is still the task of brand custodians. Technology merely helps connect brands to consumers faster, further and in newer ways.

In times when marketing is becoming more and more personalized, what according to you is the future of mass marketing techniques such as television and print advertising?

Television and print has a role to play in the marketing mix and is unlikely to go away anytime soon. The crores of rupees routinely spent by ecommerce brands in India on print, TV and outdoor advertising to drive traffic to their online stores is testiment to this.

That said, we are seeing more integration of TV and social media and even with print and social though to a smaller extent.

What is changing is how the digital footprints of print and TV channels is growing and evolving beyond just being an online version of offline content. This change is seeing brands seek to build better integrated communications strategies, and also accepting the reality that conventional linear narrative is passé. Over the next couple of years we will see this integrated space evolve further and it’s use get more sophisticated too.

Do you think review sites that allow customers to provide feedback about brands is putting a lot of pressure on companies? Do you think customer becoming the king can affect companies in a negative way? How do you think companies can best handle this situation?

Customer online reviews and their using digital to express displeasure or demand service is growing. Brands are gearing up to recognise that digital (and more so social media) is becoming the default channel for customer expression. Several have already adopted means of listening and responding to feedback in realtime. More evolved brands have even integrated their social channels with their CRM systems so they can respond appropriately to their customers.

Outraging and overly demanding customers is something brands are learning to deal with online, as outrage can spread quickly. At the same time, consumers are also learning to accept that while acknowledgement of their feedback online maybe quick, the actual resolution may take longer, and often require offline intervention and interactions.

What are some of the latest techniques that companies are using in the field of digital marketing?

Taking an integrated approach to digital marketing as part of the larger marketing and business approach is the best way for brands to leverage the true potential of digital. Unfortunately, we still see many brands take a siloed approach to digital and even treat channels and platforms within digital and social independently.

There is a huge lack of clarity about ROI of digital marketing. What do you think this is still the case? What according to you is the solution to this problem?

Most brands still look at lower order metrics from digital such as views, likes, shares, visits… As brands evolve to understand digital better and take a more integrated approach to it, they are seeking to go beyond these relatively trivial metrics to more meaningful marketing and business metrics. Achieving this requires a better integration of digital marketing with the rest of marketing, as well as investing in systems that integrate metrics across channels and roll them up into marketing metrics.

What are some of the biggest challenges that digital marketers are facing today?

The top 3 challenges for marketers in India today would include:
– Cracking the integration game effectively. This is true both at the marketeer end and the agency end. Everyone is talking integration but most are still struggling with its effective implementation.
– Understanding the real digital opportunity in India where English continues to be the major language of the Internet and data speeds and access creates challenges in reaching and influencing consumers.
– Going beyond the mindset of giving discounts and freebies as the only way of acquiring customers. This has become almost endemic in the ecommerce space with most brands unable to think beyond discounting as a marketing strategy.

(Image Credits: Freepik)

Marketing Guru Ashok Lalla Talks About The Past, Present And Future Of Digital Marketing !

Here Are 12 Doggone Interesting Digital Marketing Stats From the Past Week

Thanks to the holidays, there are more digital marketing stats to delve into than usual. We’ve selected 12 of the most interesting numbers from the past seven days. 

1. The Engagement Lab studied digital advertising performances on Cyber Monday and found that the average conversion-to-sale rate was 0.16 percent. That’s a 184 percent increase over the previous before. Last year’s Cyber Monday conversion rate was 0.07 percent, representing a Sunday-to-Monday lift of 49 percent. More than anything, the raw conversion rates—well below even 1 percent—show how hard it is to create an online advertisement that actually gets viewers to click the buy button. 

2. That said, the percentage of lift compared to last year helps explain how Adobe found U.S. Cyber Monday orders totaled nearly $3.1 billion, a one-day Internet record and a 16 percent increase over the same day in 2014. The previous record was set last week on Black Friday, when $2.7 billion worth of goods was purchased.

3. Amazon scooped up 36 percent of all online sales on Cyber Monday, according to Slice Intelligence, an e-commerce data player. 

4. Amazon challenger Jet.com, which launched in July, reportedly brought in $2.7 million in sales on Monday. 

5. With so much noise on the Web, it’s getting more and more difficult to build social-media audiences, but at least one marketer has had a strong month when it comes to Facebook. From Nov. 9 through Dec. 1, toy brand Little Tikes grew its Facebook audience by more than 166,000 fans, according to Engagement Labs (not to be confused with the previously mentioned The Engagement Lab).

6. Pixability looked at the top 100 retailers, per the National Retailer Federation, to forecast YouTube ad spending among big merchants during the holidays. The Boston-based tech company prognosticates that YouTube’s skippable promos, called TrueView, will bring in $41 million this quarter for the Alphabet-owned video giant thanks to gift marketing.

7. Let’s move away from the holidays and into some stuff that’s not so cheery. Ad blocking is costing the digital publishing industry $781 million a year—yet it makes up only a small chunk of the $8.2 billion lost to other problems like bot traffic and content piracy, according to a report from the Interactive Advertising Bureau.

8. VTech’s current public-relations disaster is one of the scariest holiday marketing tales of all time. The toy seller is reeling after learning that hackers gained access to data for about 6.4 million profiles belonging to children. Read here what marketing experts believe the Hong Kong-based company should do now. 

9. Hey, maybe Google+ ain’t dead after all. On Nov. 26, GlobalWebIndex said one in every four Internet users utilize Google’s social platform at least once a month. 

10. And, maybe Facebook ain’t dead yet with the kids. Forrester Research found that while only 65 percent of 12- to 17-year-olds think the social platform is “cool,” it surprisingly reels more of them in than Snapchat, Instagram or Twitter. Sixty-one percent of tweens and teens said Facebook is the social net they get on most often, per Forrester. Additionally, 47 percent are visiting Facebook more this year than they did in 2014.

11. Few people have been as ubiquitous in the media as Donald Trump has been in recent months, and the front–runner for the Republican presidential nomination yesterday chatted with Periscope users for about 10 minutes. In terms of viewers for his virtual Q&A, Trump’s high-water mark for the livestream was nearly 7,500.

12. Last but not least, on Tuesday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan revealed that they plan to give away 99 percent of their Facebook shares over the course of their lifetimes. Zuckerberg’s estimated net worth is about $46.8 billion. The development came in conjunction with the announcement of the birth of their daughter, Max. 

Here Are 12 Doggone Interesting Digital Marketing Stats From the Past Week

Here Are 13 Hot Digital Marketing Stats From the Past Week

The past week was filled with unusually enticing digital marketing numbers—with an upcoming Hollywood epic taking online video by storm, e-commerce insights and branded buzz around body painting. Here are the 12 most interesting, data-driven developments we came across:

1. If critics’ reviews of The Revenant are as positive as the Internet’s early reaction, there will be little stopping the movie from becoming a box-office smash when it hits theaters on Christmas day. The western thriller has gotten nearly 16 million views in three days since 20th Century Fox posted its trailer on Facebook. Leonardo DiCaprio stars as 19th century American fur trapper Hugh Glass in the film, which is directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, who won an Oscar earlier this year for Birdman.

2. Digitally savvy folks who have been looking for extramarital affairs may be a little more nervous than usual today. Hackers have obtained data for up to 40 million users of the dating platform AshleyMadison.com, according to a KrebsSecurity.com post and other reports. 

3. Retail marketers who are in love with Pinterest certainly shouldn’t ignore Facebook, which, per Adobe’s new research, offers the most valuable social commerce clicks out there. Facebook traffic referrals generate an average of 91 cents for each user sent to an e-commerce site. Surprisingly, that figure represents a 17 percent decline from last year. Pinterest’s referral value dropped the most—25 percent in a year—to the point that the average user is worth 51 cents to the retailer, down from 68 cents. Interestingly, Adobe also discovered that at Twitter, the value of a referred consumer actually rose 63 percent to 65 cents.

4. On the subject of retail, Amazon showed the relationship between online buzz and actual sales is sometimes hard to figure. The e-commerce giant’s Prime Day effort on July 15 drew the ire of countless Twitter users, with negative social media sentiment around its brand skyrocketing 241 percent, according to Amobee Brand Intelligence. But Amazon reps contend that product orders actually exceeded Black Friday 2014—the site sold 28,000 Rubbermaid sets, as just one example. So maybe there is no such thing as bad publicity. 

5. Wow. If you are a driver for UberX, Lyft or both—which is often the case—New York is the place to be. Gotham’s ride-sharing drivers make close to $30 an hour, according to research from SherpaShare, a company that drivers use to track their earnings. SherpaShare’s research found that the national average for January through May was $12.62 an hour. Austin, Texas, and San Francisco were the second and third most-profitable places for UberX and Lyft drivers, but those cities paled in comparison to New York. You can read Fast Company’s big take on the data here. 

6. According to Fortune, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki sounded confident about the topic of increasing online video competition from Facebook and Snapchat, as she spoke at the magazine’s tech conference last week. Three days later, her parent company Google released its earnings, which revealed that YouTube’s top advertisers increased their spending by 60 percent in the second quarter. Google’s overall revenue report beat Wall Street’s expectations and sent its market value soaring $65 billion the following day. That is not a typo—$65 billion in a matter of hours. The Mountain View, Calif., tech giant’s share price also jumped more than 16 percent. 

7. The Boston Consulting Group last week released research after studying 25 digital publishers, broadcasters, e-commerce companies and Web portals based in North America, Europe or the Middle East. One of the more interesting takeaways: Condé Nast U.K., in its first year of programmatic ad sales, discovered that 60 percent of its top 50 advertisers that buy through its automated platforms were entirely new customers.

8. Tech vendor Undertone conducted an online survey of 3,600 U.S. adults ages 18 to 64 to suss out differences between desktop and mobile in terms of ad recall. When people were asked if they remembered seeing full-page ads, 38 percent recalled seeing the ad on a desktop. Forty-three percent of those who were served the ad on smartphones, tablets and desktops remembered the ad.

9. Online ad viewability continues to concern marketers, and Trion Interactive’s pitch is that it can help significantly. It teams with publishers like Gannett, McClatchy and Answers.com to run video ads for brands, and the vendor boasts an 82 percent in-view rate for the digital spots it delivers for brands like McDonald’s, Verizon and Amazon.

10. Unless the Winter or Summer Games are going on, Olympic sports don’t normally generate huge buzz online—but they are far bigger in the digital realm than you probably realize. Take FloSports, which covers everything from track and gymnastics to Brazilian jiu-jitsu. The Austin, Texas-based online media company told Adweek that its site traffic from January to May totaled 12.8 million unique visitors and 194 million page views, while video views reached 13.3 million. Read more to learn why New Balance, Gatorade and the dairy organization MilkPEP are buying up FloSports’ sponsorships. 

11. Periscope has generated three times as much traffic as livestreaming rival app Meerkat since its launch in late March, according to Adobe’s aforementioned research.

12. Can digital calendars put butts in seats? Stanza, which offers that very kind of service, revealed that 10,000 people subscribe to the New York Knicks’ Stanza calendar. The tech company said 56 percent of the subscribers last season clicked on ticket links. Although, it’s unclear how many people actually bought seats. 

13. Nestlé’s Coffee-Mate Natural Bliss all-digital campaign runs through September and centers on a risqué video. The brand took over an Irving Farm Coffee Roasters store in New York on April 24 with baristas wearing nothing but body paint, and it released the resulting ad on July 15. Less than a week later, the clip has attracted 3 million YouTube and Facebook views. Read our exclusive report on Nestlé’s initiative here, and check out the video below.  

Here Are 13 Hot Digital Marketing Stats From the Past Week

Here Are 10 Intriguing Digital Marketing Stats From the Past Week

The Women’s World Cup recently dominated digital and real-life discussions, as the U.S. women thrilled fans, winning the title Sunday and bringing home the World Cup trophy. So, our top 10 data points from the last week include a healthy dose of soccer-related stats. But, we are compelled to lead with a number that helps sum up the unusual story surrounding Reddit in the last few days.

1. More than 203,000 people have signed a Change.org petition to get Reddit CEO Ellen Pao to step down after controversy erupted last week about the firing of the website’s wildly popular director of talent, Victoria Taylor. The site has been in disarray for close to a week, with hundreds of subreddits being closed off from the public. Yesterday, Pao issued an apology, but it’s unclear whether her statements will make the problem go away.

2. According to Amobee Brand Intelligence’s comparative data, Nike’s sponsorship of the U.S. Women’s national team resulted in its being 121 percent more associated with the Women’s World Cup than tournament sponsor, Adidas, in content across 600,000 Web, mobile and social-media sites. 

3. With the scandals surrounding FIFA president Sepp Blatter, the soccer organization’s brand received a much-needed boost of positivity during the World Cup. There were 9 billion tweet-based impressions around the FIFA Women’s World Cup, according to Twitter. 

4. What’s more, FIFA’s YouTube channel absolutely smashed its all-time monthly views record during the women’s tournament in June, drawing 28 million views versus the 19 million it got in the same month a year ago—during the men’s FIFA World Cup. 

5. IBM got 1,000 sales and marketing staffers to promote its products and services on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook and has achieved huge results. In one example, the company told Adweek, it launched a business-to-business appeal called #NewWayToWork, which accrued 120 million digital impressions and drove 141,000 clicks to campaign content thanks largely to the employees sharing content through Dynamic Signal’s VoiceStorm software. 

6. A whopping 26 percent of millennials fake birthdays to get better deals online. Actually, that’s the kind of thing what makes the Internet awesome, right? Mindshare North America’s retail arm, Shop+, analyzed more than 1,000 responses to understand how 18- to 34-year-olds shop to suss out that data point.

7. Also, Shop+ learned Gen Y folks don’t stop there with their frugally-minded tactics. Thirty-six percent of them—compared with 24 percent of all adults—share an Amazon Prime account, which costs $99 a year, to receive free shipping.

8. YP has quietly become an effective player in the mobile-search market. For instance, Google controls 46 percent of mobile-search money, followed by Microsoft (Bing) with 11.3 percent. Twitter and Yahoo combine to own 17.8 percent of the market. All other search players combined make up the remaining 17.7 percent. What’s YP’s take? It gets 7.2 percent of the market, which is nothing to sneeze at if you are the old phone-book brand. (Read our feature on YP’s growing digital-ad business here.)

9. In the few days after the Supreme Court ruled that marriage equality was the law of the land, Facebook said 26 million people changed their profile picture and used the social platform’s rainbow filter to show their support for the LGBT community. 

10. According to a Yahoo study that surveyed 620 fathers, 50 percent of dads feel like ads rarely target them. These guys must not ever visit Zappos or other shoe retailers if that’s the case (#retargetinggonemad). 

Bonus stat: BuzzFeed created an entertaining video in which real Italian grandmothers try Olive Garden for the first time. The digital-media company published it on YouTube on July 3, and it’s gotten 1.2 million views so far and seems to be picking up speed. Somewhat surprisingly, a couple of the grandmothers go easy on the restaurant chain. Check it out below:

Here Are 10 Intriguing Digital Marketing Stats From the Past Week