Category — Interactive Marketing

The Globe and Mail reported today that Microsoft is again talking to Yahoo. Get the full article here.

Seen largely as a way to counter any potential Google and Yahoo advertising partnership, a new Microsoft relationship would bolster their rating and access to the market while giving Yahoo shareholder value without raising too many regulatory eyebrows around anti-trust.

The long term play

Although still relatively small compared to the desktop web market, partnering with Yahoo now means Microsoft can also get access to their leading mobile platform.

Within two years mobile advertising in Canada will include inventory for marketers that will reach beyond Carrier on-deck portals. Already we are seeing early versions of mobile search (with proximity capabilities), mobile video, and mobile social networking sites with built-in ad-serving abilities. This market is going to be massive.

It also sets up the possibility of another takeover attempt in the not so distant future.

The CWTA just released updated stats for March 2008:

1. 1.4 billion text / SMS messages were sent in March alone! This is up from 1.2 billion in December 2007.  We are definitely trending towards 20 billion for the year (that would be double 2007 numbers)
2. 42% of messages sent from unique individuals – up from 37% in September 2007. This is really significant because it means the same people aren’t just texting more… we are actually increasing adoption & usage as a whole.

With reasonable data plans finally becoming available in Canada (as low as $7 / month for unlimited on a non-PDA device), we should be expecting huge increases in the mobile web /mobile widgets this year as well.

Here’s a great video on the history and potential future of the mobile phone.

Thanks to Geoff Thomas for sending me this one!

The annual CMA national convention starts today and there is lots of content to choose from. Marketers working in the Interactive and mobile space (or plan to), should plan on attending the following keynotes and sessions: 

1. Seth Godin keynote. His blog is one of the most popular in the industry – even though there is some discussion over the fact his blog doesn’t allow comemnts
2. Keeping Customers Hooked: Integrating E-mail with Mobile Technologies to Increase Customer Retention. Led by Chris Carder – co-founder and CEO of thindata
3. Mastering Paid Search.  Led by Andrew Goodman – Principle, Page Zero Media
4. Mobile Marketing…More than Just Marketing. Led by Michael Carter - President and CEO, Mythum Interactive
5. The Human Web – led by Douglas Walker
6. Finding Waldo: The Highly Selective Art of Behavioural Ad Targeting. Led by Hunter Madsen
   Marketing Director, Yahoo! Canada
7. Marketing Lessons from Second Life’s Fashion Designers. Led by Kate Trgovac - President and Chief Catalyst, LintBucket Media 

I spend just as much (if not more) time deleting or ignoring spam than I do responding to wanted or relevant messages. Here’s a snap shot of what made it through my spam filters this month:

• 7,643 spam emails
• 909 spam blog comments
• 72 event or group invitations on facebook
• 42SMS spam messages from this site
• 24 calls from 1-800 numbers

[Read more →]

Last month I sacrificed an entire weekend to start a Masters Certificate in Marketing Communications Management.  The first module covered such topics as internet advertising, new media channels, public relations, consumer promotions, sponsorship marketing and direct response marketing - topics that consume my every work day.

I figured there wasn’t much to learn…

Imagine my surprise when one guest speaker who claimed to have been part of the creative process that resulted in Tim Horton’s famous “roll up the rim” contest proclaimed this Internet thing was misleading, full of lies and largely ineffective as a communication channel.  Was he talking about television?  

Apparently not.

It led me to wonder if I had been led astray with this whole interactive marketing thing.

I remember being suspicious as far back as 1994.

[Read more →]

Once upon a time, direct mail was the most cost effective way for national customer acquisition campaigns.

Rising postal and production costs drove many marketers to telemarketing.

Thanks to VOIP and off-shore outsourcing, it was possible to achieve better ROI by calling every household in Canada a few times a year from India then to send direct mail pieces.

All that is about to change again.  

[Read more →]

With over 300 RSS feeds to manage, I’ve really valued Netvibes as my primary news and feed aggregator.

That was at least until I discovered Protopage – an evolutionary news and feed aggregator that not only has a superior desktop web experience, but a mobile interface not matched by anything i’ve seen. Check out the two vids below – the first one is a demo of the desktop web version while the second demos the mobile version.

As rumoured since 2006 and reported this morning by Engadget, Microsoft formally made an offer to buy Yahoo today. There is a long way to go from making an offer to actually acquiring & integrating Yahoo into Microsoft, but the concept of the two Web 1.0 companies getting together to battle the new world online order is intriguing.

The fact that Yahoo’s shares have also dropped around 15% year to date also means Microsoft probably saved around 5 billion by making an offer now.

Acquiring Yahoo is clearly a strategic play to counter the growing dominance of Google on the interweb which now includes an impressive lineup of “office” like applications available for free.  

Given Yahoo’s relative success in the mobile space and Microsoft’s investment in facebook last year, it looks like they have armed themselves for a good fight… but the question is, are they too late? 

Will the new Micro-hoo really be Micro-who before long? 

A few months ago I blogged about the impact of facebook on traditional print media. 

Many promoters had stopped printing flyers and started leveraging the power of the social graph available through facebook in order to reach and promote their events.

As reported by Yahoo last week, Yahoo is poised for hundreds of layoffs this week as advertising revenue has dropped significantly. 

Social Media sites have become everything Yahoo used to be – but simpler.  And easier. And more open.

Marketers have followed consumers to popular social media sites such as Facebook and MySpace. It would appear that facebook has moved on from eating the print shop’s lunch to eating the lunch of Web 1.0 sites.

Who’s next?