Advertising & Marketing Blog

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 Kmart store without knowing that those stores would not accept them. Furthermore, several incidents at “non-participating” stores involved store-manager accusations of consumer-fraud. In one documented situation, the manager of one store even threatened to call the police on a consumer trying to redeem the coupon. Wow!

Check out the full blog post here.

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. However, merchants/marketers need to know that their direct mail strategy does need some tweaking to adapt to the digital world, especially around controlling the offer and more granular tracking that is required to map / tally results. Check out the full article here.

In a recent article published on iMedia Connection, RevTrax co-founders Seth Sarelson and Jonathan Treiber write about how retail and restaurant chains can use paid search marketing to facilitate the viral marketing of coupons on the internet that will drive foot traffic offline into the stores. Combining social media, email marketing and a well-executed search campaign will maximize the viral impact of a campaign and drive the best results at the register.

In a recent article by Chain Store Age, Target announced that they are rolling out a mobile coupon initiative chain-wide, which will involve the ability for their stores/registers to scan bar codes off of customers’ mobile phones. This is a hugely significant evolution in digital marketing for two specific reasons. First, the President of Target.com, Target’s eCommerce business, seems to have been the one spearheading / sponsoring this initiative. I’m not surprised here due to the clear ties with digital media. However, it is critical to see the role that eCommerce can have in driving bricks & mortar adoption of digital technologies. I would have expected the head of retail brick & mortar to have been the one spearheading this…

Second, this is a landmark foray into digital that actually required a multi-million dollar IT infrastructure upgrade to new optical scanners (which are the kinds that can scan a mobile phone). If you do the simple math, assuming Target has 1,500 locations and each location has 20 registers that require optical scanners priced at approximately $200, you’re looking at an IT investment of $6 million just for hardware. That doesn’t include the internal resources of time / money to develop the web applications and back-end technology to accommodate and support this initiative pre-scan and post-scan.

Check out the full article here…

In a recent article on MediaPost, Click Forensics announced that they are launching a new service to qualify impressions / traffic from display ads. I’m not sure the extent to which how they will be measuring fraud and validity of impressions from display advertising. I’m curious to know whether it’s fraud on the part of the ad-network or the publishing site that is of gravest concern. I’m most interested in the scenario in which consumers are to blame for re-posting links from display ads across the web, influencing sales either online or in-store, whereby sales data is attributed to the original display-ad impression. That would certainly be a form of non-malicious activity that has in many instances hurt the validity of display advertising. More by clicking to the full article here.

In a recent article on MediaPost, Tremor Media announced that they are improving their ad targeting by using more real-time audience data. Although a much needed improvement, this trend across the web certainly continues to blur the line between customer-privacy and ad-targeting… Check out the full article here.

Google recently announced a deal with TiVo to use their anonymous user data from shows people watch via DVR and incorporate it via Google ad measurement system. The terms and details of the deal have not been disclosed but I wonder if Google is matching up IP addresses via TiVo and a user’s computer/internet connection via the web / search browser to match up online search ads with TV viewing patterns. This would make a lot of sense. People who have concerns about Google’s growing power and consumer data might be on the right track…

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 consumers have reported that they would prefer to receive gift cards as a gift. The study focuses on the decline of store gift cards but does say that general purpose gift cards for gas, grocery or VISA etc. Either way, the gift card business is a big one to the tune of almost $90 billion dollars in cards sold a year. This year, analysts expect gift card sales to drop from about $93 billion to $87 billion. We’ll have to see if the trend continues.

The quote of the week from this article is that “Gift cards are still better to get than to receive.” This is probably due to the hidden fees, the unused card value, and the loss/forgetful factor.

In a recent study by BIGresearch, mobile marketing is expected to exceed $2 billion in 2010. The issues remaining around Mobile is simply that it doesn’t have a critical mass of users/consumers yet, although the growth in mobile users, especially smart phones, is growing at double digit rates. The demographics are also in question, since a majority of consumers being targeted with mobile marketing are male. Marketers risk turning of mobile consumers if they market the wrong product / message to the wrong demographic. Check out the full article and press release here.

Google recently released a study showing that online search queries for coupons is up 30% over last year. That may not come as a surprise; however, that increase is over and above a record number in the history of online coupons. 2008 was supposedly the biggest year ever for online coupons, so the significant increase this year over that number further illustrates the U.S. Consumer’s need/desire to find bargains and the overwhelming popularity of the web as the means to research and find those bargains. Check out a more detailed article on the state of the 2009 holiday shopping season and how this holiday is being affected perhaps more acutely by the recession than last year. Very interesting read…