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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In a recent news release, IBM announced it is acquiring Coremetrics, a prominent online web-analytics company.This is somewhat surprising given that their largest competitor, Omniture, recently sold to Adobe Software for over $1 billion. Adobe and IBM seem like very different sorts of companies within the technology universe that would have an interest in web-analytics [...]

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A lot of recent press has been focused on mobile coupons of all shapes and forms. Coupons via SMS with promo codes or via bar codes, like for Starbucks and Target written up here, are just some of the ways marketers are delivering coupons to the users phone. I’ll try to break down mobile coupons [...]

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In a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, full story by clicking here, it looks like many major restaurant chains are developing mobile apps that will piggy-back on the location based capabilities of newest generation smartphones, like the iPhone and google Android phone. The GPS capabilities will allow restaurants to target offers to customers [...]

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I haven’t been super up-to-speed on Twitter’s newly announced advertising model, so I recently read an article on Forbes (click to read full article here) that outlines the 101′s of their new model. Some may call is contextual advertising, others are calling engagement advertising. Simply put, they’re steering clear of the display ad-model and selling [...]

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RevTrax was in the news recently with a new article published by co-founders Seth Sarelson and Jonathan Treiber (yours truly) in Multichannel Merchant titled “Ten Tips for Curtailing Coupon Fraud.” The article is for bricks & mortar retail, restaurant and packaged good manufacturers looking to embrace best practices for online coupons. I’ll let you guys [...]

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MediaPost broke a newstory that announced Clear Channels endeavor into the digital out-of-home space with the installation of hundreds of digital billboards. Read the full article here for full details. I think that this will have a very mixed reaction both from advertisers and from consumers. Digital billboards are a huge investment to make compared [...]

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MediaPost recently wrote an article focused on the newspaper industry that didn’t harp on the declining circulations and depleting ad-revenue for a change. The article, found here, talks about online local newspaper websites that focus on local content. It’s a very interesting report that consumers would trust local newspaper sites regarding content, editorials, etc. versus [...]

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Just last week, Kmart launched a geo-targeted email campaign with a coupon only available at certain stores. Within hours, the coupon hit the deal sites and blogs and went “national” in a way they clearly did not intend. What ensued was short of mayhem. Consumers were printing and attempting to redeem them at their nearest [...]

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In an article published on Chain Store Age Magazine, available here, we spoke about the ongoing shift from direct mail to digital forms of 1-to-1 marketing, including email and social media. With the price of production and postage going up with no end in sight, digital marketing becomes ever more appealing from a cost perspective. [...]

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