Advertising & Marketing Blog

In a recent article by MediaPost, consumers have reported that they would prefer not to receive gift cards this holiday season on the whole. What I mean is that gift card popularity is on the downward swing. Consumers would simply prefer to receive other types of gifts in lieu of gift cards; only 15% of [...]

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In a recent article by MediaPost, Nielsen is predicting that by 2011, most cell phone users will be using a smart phone rather than a “regular” phone with less functionality and capabilities. The implications for this are huge for marketing and commerce. Smart Phones have way more functionality and can enable everything from mobile “apps” [...]

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One of my co-workers at RevTrax sent me this news story about Sears and how they’ve announced a marketing program that will give customers a Christmas-style savings now (in August) for purchases they make with their special stored value card online or in-store at Sears or Kmart. Sears is saying that they want to address [...]

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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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On February 23rd, the OnCard team is heading out to Las Vegas for the annual Affiliate Summit conference from February 23-26. Each year, affiliate marketing professionals, e-commerce retailers, and online affiliate networks head out there for three days of education on latest trends, best practices and general business networking. It’s a great opportunity to meet [...]

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There was a recent article in American Banker that focused on various online payments alternatives to credit cards like PayPal, Pay by Touch, Bill Me Later, among others. The article provokes the question as to whether or not these payment alternatives should employ rewards and loyalty currencies to promote usage. Credit card companies have been [...]

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I recently read an interesting article about the correlation between consumer loyalty and eco-friendly brands. I think we all can agree that the ‘Green Movement’ is gaining popularity and changing the way we view consumer goods and Corporate America. While I personally believe in supporting the environment, I haven’t yet changed my consumption behavior to [...]

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I was searching on google for any type of news on rewards programs and came across a great article on EcommWire.com. It talks about Shopping Bag, which is a new software application by iBakeSale.com that gives members the ability to collect their cash-back rewards by going directly to any participating merchant’s website. Here’s headline quote [...]

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Somebody recently asked me why an organization would opt for its own credit card. There are a few rewards programs out there that have done deals with large banks for their own co-branded cards. Many of you are familiar with co-branded cards in the form of a Visa or MasterCard for a favorite sports team, [...]

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