I am happy to see companies with information on campaign effectiveness. Hyper targeted ads are coming, but not quickly enough. Throwing it all at the wall via mass marketing techniques are a huge waste of resources.

Marketing is changing, the future is based on the development of new technology. Mobile & tablets changed everything.

I love this quote, referring to marketing staff, "they have to do lobotomies because some of their marketers are still doing things the analogue way."

Ouch.

Facebook will soon use your activity on other web pages to target ads based on your interests, Financial Times reports. That’s potentially a big boon for advertisers, but it won’t sit well with privacy advocates.

Note that Facebook already targets ads using information from your profile, and this new system will not track all of your browsing.

Rather, Facebook will offer sharing buttons to interested websites. Readers will be able to click on them to share the links with their Facebook friends via Facebook Connect — just like the buttons you already see on this Mashable article.

Once the user shares a link with his friends, Facebook will assume that person shared it because he or she liked it, so the company will include content from that web page in the data it uses to target ads based on user interest. The ads will appear whenever the user visits the Facebook website.

Facebook will probably announce this new system at the F8 conference on Wednesday. The company is also expected to officially announce its already-revealed to change the words “Become a Fan” to “Like” for brands’ pages because it has found that users are more likely to click the latter than the former.

For businesses this is genius. The companies users share links from will be the sites that show up in ads.

Taking off my marketing hat for a moment, I must say that it is a bit Orwellian.

Privacy online is a misnomer.

One of the problems with pageview billing is that it incentivizes publishers to distract you while reading.

Every time they distract you and get you to click on something else, they make money.

But if you’re simply reading their content, they make less.

So they take every possible opportunity to try to get you to read their stories, and then, once you try to do exactly that, they try to get you to abandon what you’re reading before you’ve gotten very far so you can go view something else before abandoning it and continuing the cycle.

You’re not readers to them. You’re “eyeballs”.

You’re not customers. You’re the product.

They really hate when you actually read their content. That’s what they’re communicating by distraction-oriented design: “We don’t respect you, and we’re trying to aggravate you as much as possible, but not quite enough that you’ll stop coming.”

Perfection in a post. What a fantastic point.

Most marketing executives cite email or search marketing as their company's top-performing advertising channel in 2009—39.4% and 23.6%, respectively—and over nine in ten (93.6%) say they plan to increase their budget allocation to digital marketing in the next five years, according to the Fourth Annual Marketing and Media Survey from Datran Media.

Just 9.4% of marketers cited offline channels as their most effective response channel last year. Another 4.7% cited social media, while mobile marketing, still in its early stages, was cited by 0.8% of marketers.

Below, other findings from the Fourth Annual Marketing and Media Survey from Datran Media.

Budget Shifts to Online in 2010 and Beyond

Among marketers who plan to increase investments in digital marketing, 75.2% say their allocations will increase steadily as 2014 approaches, while 18.4% say their allocations will increase greatly.

Moreover, 58.4% plan to reduce or keep flat their offline marketing budgets.

In 2010, most marketers (59.8%) are allocating over one-half of their overall multichannel advertising to digital channels. Another 15.2% of marketers are allocating 30-50% of their budgets to digital, and 7.1% of marketers are allocating 20-29% to digital.

Online Marketing Objectives

Asked to identify their company's objectives when conducting online marketing, marketers cited the following:

• Reach a target audience: 82%
• Lead generation: 72%
• Convert leads into sales: 63.2%
• Measure and understand audience: 60.0%
• Retain existing customers: 56.8%
• Digitally transact with customers: 53.6%
• Avoiding wasted media spend: 40.0%

Among specific tactics, over three-quarters (77.6%) of marketers are using targeting as part of their online marketing strategy this year. Some 71.2% say they are employing customer analytics and measurement tools.

Over six in ten (62.3%) are focusing both on retention and loyalty campaigns and on email list growth.

Mobile, Social, and Video

Interest in online video and mobile marketing is substantial this year: 67.2% of marketers are planning to leverage video, and 54.4% are planning mobile marketing initiatives targeting smartphones users (vs. 34.3% who planned to do so last year).

Marketers are leveraging social media as well: 72.3% have a company Facebook page, and 72.0% have a company Twitter account.

Still, marketers are mixed on whether social media marketing can deliver results: 50.4% say social media will generate quantifiable results this year (vs. 49.4% last year); however, another 37.6% are uncertain and 12.0% say social media cannot deliver quantifiable results this year.

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Looking for real, hard data that can help you match social media tools and tactics to your marketing goals? The State of Social Media Marketing, a 240-page original research report from MarketingProfs, gives you the inside scoop on how 5,140 marketing pros are using social media to create winning campaigns, measure ROI, and reach audiences in new and exciting ways.

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Online Audience Analytics

Marketers are focused on quantifying ROI this year: 72.8% say they now use audience measurement and analytics to assess the success of their digital campaigns, while just 21.6% do not.

Over one-half (54.4%) of marketers say they have optimized campaigns based on audience measurement analytics, while 29.6% have not done so as yet, but plan to in 2010 or beyond.

Most marketers cite clicks (72%), conversions (59.2%), and impressions (58.4%) as the three most important metrics:

Driving Brand Awareness and Revenue with Analytics

Nearly one-half  46.4%) of marketers say accurate online audience measurement is very important for driving increased brand awareness, revenue, and better campaign performance, while another 40.8% say it is somewhat important.

Among the greatest challenges to conducting online audience measurement, marketers cite the following:

• Accuracy: 29.5%
• Lack of ability to take action on data: 23.2%
• Wasted impressions: 9.6%
• Standards: 8.0%

Some 26.4% of marketers say they do not conduct online audience measurement.

About the data: Findings are from the Fourth Annual Marketing and Media Survey, conducted in December 2009 by Datran Media among over 5,000 marketing executives from Fortune 500 brands, top publishers, and leading advertising and media agencies. The survey was conducted in association with the Direct Marketing Association Email Experience Council and other media partners.

Quantifying ROI is still so difficult, but marketers are trying. Surprised that 21.6% do not focus on quantifying ROI of digital campaigns.

Video and Mobile will continue to be huge. Great for BlissTV :)

"In 2010, most marketers (59.8%) are allocating over one-half of overall multichannel advertising to digital." Impressive.

a new Forrester reports says that the role will become obsolete.

You see, “the agency of record” will need to be able to handle both traditional and interactive marketing–the lines have blurred. If you’re not the agency of record, you’ll still have a role to play–even if it’s a niche role that your firm specializes in.

Fortunately, you still have some time to prepare for this migration. Apparently, there’s still so little overlap between the “big 5″ agency types–advertising, direct, media buying, interactive, and PR–that companies are not going to be able to put all of their marketing eggs in one basket–at least not yet.

So what should your company look for in a marketing agency? Well, Forrester says we’re approaching the age of Adaptive Marketing. One that requires three core skills from the agency of record: ideas, interaction, and intelligence.

It will be interesting to watch the agencies adapt to the new landscape. Many will focus in on a specific niche while other expand and bring in talent from many areas.

The ability to master both traditional and interactive is key.

foursquare.com Foursquare’s new statistics page will share information about users with business owners.

11:10 a.m. | Updated Corrected the name of the AJ Bombers restaurant.

Foursquare, a location-based social network, plans to distribute a new analytics tool and dashboard in the coming weeks that will give business owners access to a range of information and statistics about visitors to their establishments.

Tristan Walker, director of business development at Foursquare, said that the latest features were intended to help local merchants run their stores by giving them more information about their customers.

“We’re trying to give businesses more retention with current customers and the ability to add new customers with specials,” said Mr. Walker.

Businesses will be able to see a range of real-time data about Foursquare usage, including who has “checked in” to the place via Foursquare, when they arrived, the male-to-female customer ratio and which times of day are more active for certain customers. Business owners will also be able to offer instant promotions to try to engage new customers and keep current ones.

Remember this from two days ago-

http://worthingtonwire.com/why-location-based-apps-are-getting-traction

Location based apps are a goldmine of valuable information and a targeted distribution method.

Impressive.

So while it's welcome that marketers are beginning to promote the hubs they rent in all of the relevant communities, few are really optimizing them into true relationship builders. Most are devoid of humans - e.g. employees - and many look like faceless companies that are trying to check off boxes or slap shiny logos on their site.

In some ways, it makes sense to me that marketers are emphasizing their spaces where people are spending time and where they can be easily found. However, at the same time, with so few understanding what it takes - people - to really build credible relationships, I wonder how long this trend might last and if a backlash is the works.

If customers come to Facebook and Twitter will humans be there to engage and listen or will a bot simply broadcast messages?

Will be interesting to see the varying degrees of success based upon the resources allocated (time and staff) to social network hubs.

Strawberry and Cream Cheese Bagel-fuls

Bagel-fuls are warm, golden-toasted bagels and smooth Philadelphia cream cheese all in one. Ready in minutes, Bagel-fuls can be heated in the toaster or microwave – or enjoyed straight out of the refrigerator, making it a quick, tasty, no-mess breakfast option. And with eight delicious varieties to choose from, there is a flavor for everyone in the family. The perfect way to start your day!

Making content free was not a well thought out business model. Rather, before the days of Sirius XM and DirecTV, there was no more of a way to charge for freely accessible radio waves than there was to charge for air or sunshine. Making content free, and charging for advertising interspersed in that free content, was pretty much the ONLY business model back then.

And it worked pretty well, because supply (advertising “units”) was limited by the amount of content produced and, more importantly, by the narrow “channels” where such content was made available. With such low supply, high demand, and massive reach, it was easy to reach large swaths of the populace. The advertisers couldn’t really quantify their results, but they came up with a wide variety of methods to attempt to do so. Market research firms such as ACNielsen flourished to fill the need for “metrics.”

But, as I argued in my last piece, brand advertising doesn’t really work – or, perhaps better put, is superseded by “transactional advertising.”......

...Preferential placement of a good or service at/near the point of a transaction is something I call “transactional advertising,” which I predict will expand as a category in the coming years. Transactional advertising describes a clear food chain of brand and positioning; the titans at the top are Google, Amazon, Walmart, and other “aggregators” who themselves hold considerable brand equity and/or organic traffic. Smaller players exist in niche fields: BankRate, Shopping.com, Edmunds.com, Lending Tree, even Diapers.com have become destinations that steer consumer decisions. These have potential to be the new “media” companies in a transactional advertising universe, odd as that might sound.

This form of transactional advertising exists today, although you might not know it. Proctor & Gamble spends great effort and expense (though it pales in comparison to their brand advertising spend) to ensure eye-level placement wherever its products are sold. Many retailers “charge” for shelf-space, with the clear understanding that better merchandised goods have a better chance of ending up in consumers’ shopping carts.

Today you see very little in the way of transactional advertising online; rarely does one brand pop up in another brand’s checkout experience. There’s a good chance that will change in a major way in the near future. If old media companies can figure out how to attach themselves to more transactions, they have a fighting chance of sticking it out online.

The emerging business models are fascinating to observe.

The comments are also a great read.