Today Greystripe released some compelling campaign results from a recent RadioShack campaign including: 

1. The RadioShack campaign resulted in a significant increase in unaided brand awareness, which rose from 15.8 percent to 24.2 percent (+8.4 points)
2. There was a directional increase in the percentage of respondents who agreed that RadioShack is a “Top Wireless Store” (+ 5.9 points at an 86.5 percent confidence level)
3. Among the 25-34 year old target age group, unaided brand awareness increased 10.9 points, while the “Top Wireless Store” metric jumped 16.7 points
4. The campaign outperformed mobile norms for unaided brand awareness by 2.2 percentage points.

 Why should you care? 

1. Greystripe’s mobile ads outperformed other advertising categories, such as online banners
2. This case study is valuable for planners looking to build a case to commit funds to this channel

The highlight for me yesterday at CTIA was the keynote address from Yahoo executive Vice President Marco Boerries where he announced the introduction of Yahoo! oneConnect for the iphone.

The live demo demonstrated how this new application (optimized for the iphone) takes your address book and makes it social by aggregating all your mobile messaging via IM and SMS and all your lifestream feeds into one amazing interface.

Like friendfeed and Social Thing, you can add myspace, last.fm,dopplr,twitter, friendster, bebo,flickr,youtube and facebook feeds to oneConnect under their Pulse feature. You can now scan what is happening across all networks from one mobile interface.  This also means you can update your status in one place and have all your other streams automatically updated.

Users will also be able to track their contacts on a single screen, with information on their status and the ability to quickly call or send an IM or email.

The application is available for free in the app store – although it wasn’t indexing yet on their search tool. If you are having problems finding it, go to mobile.yahoo.com/oneconnect/iphone and click on the app link. This will bring you into the app store for immediate download.

I’ve spent some time on it so far, but I’m afraid of the roaming charges associated with customizing it right now, so look for additional perspective later.

Yahoo plans on releasing versions for other platforms, but it’s hard to imagine how they’ll be able to create a comparable experience on other platforms.

CTIA Wireless I.T. & Entertainment is dubbed the largest technology event in the mobile industry covering all aspects of wireless data. It’s actually a smaller event than their annual wireless conference in Las Vegas every spring, but the focus at this show is actually more relevant to the mobile marketer. 

The show officially starts today; however, I arrived Monday night in order to participate in a pre-show event called exploring mobile web strategies. The event was organized and moderated by Ajit Jaoker from futuretext.com who did a fantastic job of pulling in some heavy hitters in the mobile space for presentations and panels. 

I took 9 pages of notes – much of which I’ll share on this blog over the coming week as seperate entries…although if you’ve been following me on Twitter you’ve already gotten a preview of what is to come.  Topics that really caught my attention were: 

• Understanding and enticing the mobile user by Carol Taylor (Director of User Experience at Motricity)
• Mobile personas and segmentation by Pankaj Asundi (VP Media and content at Ericsson)
• Panel discussion around mobile social networks with senior representation from myGamma, mocospace, itsmy, mig33 and intercasting corp. This was probably the highlight of the day for me and will warrant it’s own entry with perspective
• Monetizing digital communities by Jouko Ahvenainen (Chief Strategy Officer of Xtract)
• Panel discussion around driving mobile web adoption with representation from Openware, Vantrix, Skyfire, Greystripe and Admob
• Panel discussion around mobile advertising – today and tomorrow with representation from Ericsson, Yahoo!, Admob and Nokia
• Designing for mobile by Barbara Ballard (CEO Little Springs Design)
• Mobile search – present and future by Bena Roberts (President, Visibility mobile) and Michael “Luni” Libes (Chief Architect of Medio Systems) – who I ended meeting later that night at the Moco mixer party

Overall it was a great start to the week. I’ve got a full day of meetings and sessions planned today and will likely be taking more notes for future posts. I’ve also brought along my video camera – so you can expect to see some video blog entries similar to what I posted at GSM and CTIA in Mach. 

I’m also still adjusting to left coast time. Speaking of which, it’s time for another coffee

This week Yahoo! announced that they now know where you are… well as long as you give them permission first with their new Fire Eagle location based services (LBS) platform.  

Isn’t Fire Eagle really another term for describing a phoenix… as in the rising of the Phoenix - or is that a bit too ironic… or iconic for them given everything they’ve gone through with Microsoft this year?

Marketers should be really excited about this new platform. Besides making social networking kinda creepy (as blogged here last November), it adds context and relevance to your online ads.

Adding location (aka relevance) to an online behavioural targeting program attached to a CPC (cost per click) or CPA (cost per action) model is an online marketer’s wet dream. 

The way Fire Eagle works is that you either tell it where you are (country, city, town, zip etc…), or give permission for GPS enabled devices to do it on your behalf.  Fire Eagle will then publish your location information to the services that you have approved – whether it be a restaurant review site or facebook. Relevant ads will follow.

The neat thing about this new service is that it is completely open to the development community with a robust API – which means you can add geo-specific information to virtually any web service you want. It could be as silly as tracking where your friends are on the way to Collingwood for that weekend getaway on a google maps mashup. It would be like getting directions then seeing where people are relevant to those directions.

Already over 50 services have adopted Fire Eagle’s platform into their own offering including Six Apart’s blogging service Movable Type, messaging platform Pownce and neighborhood news site Outside.in

Whether or not this service will compete with Apple (they have similar services on their iphone platform) or the upcoming Google Android platform or becomes a complimentary web service to the above remains to be seen.

I’m not sure people really want everybody to know where they are at all times… but fortunately you can control your own settings – even manually update location to defer people from where you actually are…. like saying your current location is your home address where you are “working from home” instead of announcing that you are actually on the golf course AGAIN on a Friday afternoon

How do you find or track websites, content and information?

For many people, it’s Google all the way. Some people even find typing in a website into Google easier than remembering an exact URL in the address bar. It’s certainly a testament to the simplicity and power of their user interface.

Having said that, people are going beyond Google.  Nearly 50% of my total blog traffic now comes from search engines. Here’s a list of search engines in order of traffic volume to this site:

1. Google
2. Google Images
3. Windows Live
4. Yahoo!
5. Digg
6. Alexa
7. del.icio.us
8. Stumbleupon
9. AOL
10. Ask
11. Earth Link
12. MSN Search
13. Comet toolbar search
14. Icerocket

Although Google still clearly rules my reference traffic – does it rule yours too?

More importantly for marketers, does your search engine marketing (SEM) and optimization (SEO) strategy include most or all of the above?

It should be noted that rates for SEM in Canada are still relatively cheap when compared to the U.S. and other mature search markets.

Combined with a good SEO strategy, you can virtually own a category in a very short period of time

The future of search? It’s social and it’s mobile. But I already referenced that here.

I’ve recently installed the Weather Network blackberry widget on my Blackberry 8800. One of the advantages of creating a device specific widget is that you can enrich the user experience beyond a typical mobile website.

The Weather Network is no exception – taking full advantage of the blackberry Java platform to delivery an intuitive and easy to manage widget.

Once you’ve downloaded the widget, you can select your city of choice for weather updates. Coming soon – the ability to add up to 5 more cities – although I believe there should be an unlimited city option like there is on the iphone weather widget by Yahoo.

The neat thing is that once your choice city has been selected, you can get the current temperature by just scrolling over the icon on your blackberry desktop. Clicking on the icon will give you a detailed forecast for that day. Using the options button, you can switch to short and long term forecasts too.

Want to try it out? Point your blackberry mobile web browser to: http://weyebb.pelmorex.com

[Read more →]

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 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 

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?