Advertising & Marketing Blog

Rakuten, a major Japanese online shopping mall operator, has been on a buying spree of other smaller internet companies focused on eCommerce retailing. In a recent article, found here, the company announced the second major acquisition after its announcement to purchase buy.com in the U.S. Rakuten owns and operates a diverse set of companies, from [...]

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Affiliate Summit is a conference for the marketers in the performance-based advertising industry and typically happens twice or three times a year. Not sure if you remember, but we went out to the first one in Las Vegas in February and had an extremely productive trip. On August 10th, we’re heading up to Boston for [...]

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This is a rather contentious question that people in the online advertising industry ask every once in a while. The issue is quite simple. Ad networks are supposed to be impartial and unbiased and should treat every advertiser and publisher as independent partners. The network is supposed to provide the marketplace / platform / technology [...]

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I recently came across a blog post from Fred Wilson over at Union Square Ventures, found here, talking about the fact that online advertising actually underestimates the ROI of the campaign because there is almost always a positive, but unmeasurable, impact of online advertising on off-line sales. Fred is curious if there is a company [...]

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I think the answer is YES. Trust has always been critical in the marketing field, trust of the brand, trust of the product, trust of the media. Social networking is one manifestation of this trust-factor. It all comes down to the trust you have in the person referring the message to you. If you trust [...]

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One of my friends, Darren Herman, recently wrote an interesting blog post titled ‘Apple’s cash pile’ and brings up an interesting question. As Apple grows and does significantly more sales directly to consumers, are they going to run into a customer service problem that has destroyed the reputations of so many large companies? He mentions [...]

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We’ve been working on a new website design for OnCard Marketing and have just released it to the public. We realized it was a bit outdated and did not properly reflect what we’re doing in a concise format. As many of you know, OnCard’s big push is into the world of off-line performance-based marketing. I’ll [...]

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This may not come as a surprise to anybody, but the economic slowdown driven by the housing market and sub-prime mortgage market may have a significant impact on how much money consumer are expected to spend this holiday season. In a recent study, consumers reported that they will probably spend only 2% more than last [...]

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The Ken Blanchard Companies recently announced results of a study that shows passionate employees as the key component to a quality customer experience. This sounds like common sense to me. I’ve had some terrible experiences with customer service both online and offline. Companies are continuously trying to balance the value of a positive customer service [...]

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In a study by the Yale School of Management, they analyzed the impact of extreme price-shoppers on retail profits, specifically focused on grocery stores. The study shows that extreme price-shoppers, which account for no more than 1.0% of total customers, are the largest drain on profits for any grocery store, but the aggregate impact to [...]

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