84 Marketing Trends found for Marketing Effectiveness / Return on investment

... efficient algorithm for ranking web pages.

But as the world now knows, Google's mind-boggling success was built on crawling the web via software that visits every single web page ito build a vast index of online content.

Says entrepreneur Gilad Elbaz, who founded Common Crawl: “The web represents, as far as I know, the largest accumulation of knowledge, and there’s so much you can build on top.

“But simply doing the huge amount of work that’s necessary to get at all that information is a large blocker; few organizations have had the resources to do that.”

Mr Elbaz also points out that new search engines are just one of the things that can be built using an index of the web. He also notes that Google’s translation software was trained using online text available in multiple languages.

“The only way they could do that was by starting with a massive crawl. That’s put them on the way to build the Star Trek translator,” he says.

“Having an open, shared corpus of human knowledge is simply a way of democratizing access to information that’s fundamental to innovation.”

Around five years ago, Elbaz noticed that researchers with new ideas about how to use web data felt compelled to take jobs at Google because it was the only place they could test those ideas.

But Common Crawl’s data, Elbaz claims, will make it easier for novel ideas to gain traction, both in the world of startups and in academic research.

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... “to eliminate [traditional] surveys and instead focus on social feedback as their primary source for customer experience information.”

Moreover, claims the firm, clients will use consumers' online habits to discover how their competitors are doing by benchmarking competitors' social data.

They will also use that competitive data for product creation. NewBrandAnalytics predicts that more than a third of businesses will tailor their products explicitly to what their competition’s online customers are saying.

Also, social intelligence will make real-time performance evaluation common, as companies figure out how to assess their performance from online chatter, even to the extent of using comments - from employees, customers and consumers - to help make hiring and firing decisions!
 
Perhaps most significantly, the trend suggests that social media currents won't belong only to companies' marketing departments.

The firm predicts that 'buzz content' will infiltrate into the decision-making processes of operations, human resources, customer service, and product development.

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... a collection of datasets so large and complex that it becomes difficult to process using current database management tools.

The benefits - which can only be realised by massive investments in new technology - include capture, curation, storage, search, sharing, analysis and visualization.

According to Peter Tufano, the dean of Oxford’s Said Business School, which played host to the event, while awareness of the topic was high among enterprises, only about 6% of companies have got beyond a pilot stage, and 18% are still in one.

“That means three-quarters of industries are looking at this and saying ‘what is this all about?’”

Why aren’t they looking at Big Data? “The answer across all business,” he said, “was ‘we don’t know what the business case is.’”

But according to speakers at the event, the business case has already been answered.

Michael Chui has extensively researched the area for McKinsey Global Institute. His conclusion is emphatic: “The use of data and analytics in general is going to be a basis of competition going forward for individual firms, for sectors and even for countries. Those companies that are able to use data effectively are more likely to win in the marketplace.” [MT's italics]

MGI’s research showed that in just one field—personal location data—some $100 billion of value can be created globally for service providers through use of data.

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... $7.1 billion, despite which market share will slip to 57.1%. 

Among the report's key forecasts are:

• Since eMarketer's May 2012 forecast, estimates for paid search have risen slightly to a compound annual growth rate [CAGR] of 9.7% on paid-search spending between 2011 and 2016, rather than 8.5% as estimated in May.

• The revision is prompted by greater-than-anticipated search spending in the first half of the year, as reported by the UK Interactive Advertising Bureau. 

• eMarketer estimates that in 2012 around $2.0 billion - or 23% of all UK digital adspend - will go to display advertising such as banners, rich media, video and sponsorships. The steady gains will partially come from an increase in use of realtime bidding and video formats, although doubts about the speed of economic recovery will lead some advertisers to focus on proven search tactics.
   
• Online video ads in Britain should rise from $273 million in 2012 to about $1.4 billion in 2016. The estimates include social video and video advertising on mobile devices.

According to eMarketer, in 2012 only the USA and Japan will outrank the UK’s $721 million market share, with projected mobile ad spending of $2.4 billion and $1.7 billion, respectively.

The annual rate of growth, estimated at 120% for 2012, is expected to remain above 50% until 2016, when mobile ad spending in the UK will approach $3.5 billion.

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... tracking those consumers wherever they may wander across the web.

Programmatic buying is the reason that luggage ad follows you irrespective of whether you’re on Weather.com or on a local news blog.

Ms Vega reports that this mega shift is "punishing traditional online publishers, like newspaper, broadcast and magazine sites, who are receiving a much lower percentage of ad dollars as marketers use programmatic buying across a much broader canvas".

"Some sites, like CNN.com, refuse to even accept advertising through programmatic buying because they do not want to cede control over what ads will appear.

She cites Ben Winkler, chief digital officer at Omnicom media shop OMD: “It’s allowing advertisers to assign value to media rather than publishers,” he said.

"Publishers can’t control the price, but they can control the quality of the content and the audience on that site.”

FMCG advertisers like Nike, Comcast, Progressive and Procter & Gamble are currently using programmatic buying, while luxury advertisers are starting to follow suit.

Forrester Research estimates that in 2012 all ads traded on exchanges (which includes all programmatic ads) have increased by more than 17.5% to about 629 billion impressions (the number of times an ad appears) versus just 535 billion impressions in 2011.

Read the original unabridged New York Times article.

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... voice control technology will be Intel Capital's next major investment priority.

Meeting with journalists at a resort hotel in Huntington Beach, California, Sodhani gave a demonstration of Dragon, Intel's newly developed voice control system,  similar to Apple's Siri.

He treated the assembled journos to a demonstration of the firm's voice control technology, showing his audience how to use it to search the internet, browse web pages and even play a Gangnam-style video.

Voice-control technology will not only be a trend for Intel Capital, the venture capital arm of Intel Corporation. It will be a megatrend for virtually everybody, evangelises Mr Sodhani.

"Voice is not like a mouse or keyboard. The amount of computing it requires - even the simplest instruction made by speech - is huge," he said, adding that Intel Capital is seeking to work with companies able to solve issues surrounding speech commands.

Many potential partners are to be found in China where, since 1998, Intel Capital has invested about $650 million in more than 100 Chinese technology companies.

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... "companies that haven’t put together comprehensive plans for managing and exploiting 'Big Data' expect that the price tag for that failure to act will be $71 million in lost revenue per year."  

So what exactly is 'Big Data'?

In IT-speak, Big Data is a collection of datasets so large and complex that it becomes difficult to process using on-hand database management tools.

There are currently around nine billion devices connected to the internet, mostly computers and smartphones. That number will soar to 50 billion by 2020 and include everything from cars to pharmaceutical packaging to drill bits on oil wells.

According to Wikipedia [take a deep breath now!]: "The challenges include capture, curation, storage, search, sharing, analysis and visualization. The trend to larger datasets is due to the additional information derivable from analysis of a single large set of related data, as compared to separate smaller sets with the same total amount of data, allowing correlations to be found to "spot business trends, determine quality of research, prevent diseases, link legal citations, combat crime, and determine real-time roadway traffic conditions."

Warns a Forbes.com article: If you think we’ve got Big Data problems now—with “only” about 9 billion devices connected to the internet—what’s the situation going to be like when that number soars to 50 billion at the end of the decade?

Oracle president Mark Hurd recently raised the possibility that unless businesses and government agencies can seize control over this Big Data explosion, then they’ll run the risk of simply being overwhelmed by vast volumes of data that they can’t find, control, manage, or secure—let alone analyze and exploit.

Read the original unabridged Forbes.com article.

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... for example J T Wang, ceo of Taiwanese PC-maker Acer who, back in August, complained to the Financial Times that the Surface would have "a huge negative impact for the [PC] ecosystem and other brands". Mr Wang added that he had made his concerns known to Microsoft.

Moreover, Mr Wang doesn't lack concerned colleagues at other hardware manufacturers.

Microsoft's ceo set the cliff crumbling when, back in June, he revealed that the Redmond mammoth company intends to make a family of tablet computers - one offering extended battery-life powered by an ARM-based chip, the other using Intel's technology to offer a deeper Windows experience.

However, Dell - the world's third largest computer maker - was the epitome of insouciance. "The announcement of Surface was necessary to have a proof of concept and to get people excited about what was coming to push application development and create some buzz out there," opined Kirk Schell, Dell's client and consumer product group vp, when speaking recently to the BBC.

"They've invested so much in Windows 8 it was important to make it work, so I felt Surface was the logical thing to do."

Windows 8 is a radical update to Microsoft's core product. The operating system introduces a touchscreen-controlled interface featuring 'tiles' that act as buttons to launch individual apps.

The tiles allow installed software to provide status updates on a computer's home screen. These can include details about the latest emails received, news headlines or social network posts created by friends.

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... market convergence across a host of other markets, including ticketing, retail, loyalty, and access control.

 According to the ABI report, these are the key indicators:

• Market convergence is not quite ready for mass commercial roll out, but the potential value-add that NFC brings has been identified.
   
• Smart card and IC vendors, device OEMs, MNOs, partnering service providers, and payments networks are all set to benefit should convergence prove successful.
   
• According to ABI research analyst Phil Sealy: “Market convergence is at least two years away from reality. We believe transportation and ticketing will be the first market to benefit from convergence, with 26% of all NFC handsets forecast to house a contactless ticketing application in 2017.

• Transport authorities will have the ability to offer additional added value services, including route planners, delay bulletins, timetables, as well as retail and loyalty, or advertising applications offering own brand or partnering/local business a platform to offer additional solutions to generate new revenue streams.

Near field communication is a set of standards for smartphones and similar devices to establish radio communication with each other by touching them together or bringing them into close proximity, usually no more than a few centimetres.

A report from a different source published last week indicated broadly similar growth in this burgeoning market.

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... add more self-checkout lanes, where shoppers scan and bag items without the help of cashiers.

About 1,600 of the 4,500-plus WalMart and Sam's Club stores in the US include a traditional self-checkout option.

Although today's announcement made no reference to WalMart's overseas operations, the payments system will almost certainly be extended worldwide.

Branded Scan and Go, the new mobile-payment application is the retailer's latest attempt to reduce long checkout lines - a mammoth task given the company's claim that in the USA alone it currently spends $12 million per second on cashiers' wages"!

Analysts say an in-aisle mobile scanning system could also function as a loyalty program for WalMart, which doesn't issue discount cards to customers in exchange for the ability to collect data about their shopping habits. Such programs have been very successful for grocery chains, such as UK-headquartered Tesco, in attracting and retaining customers.

The scanning program could serve a similar function by allowing Wal-Mart to collect data on what customers buy and how long they spend in store. Also to electronically transmit coupons for competitive products to shoppers as they scan items.

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