According to a new study released from eMarketer, desktop-based advertising will peak in 2014 as more spending goes towards mobile advertising. The study suggests that U.S. desktop advertising will reach $35.39 billion in 2014, but by 2015 that number will begin to drop and by 2017 the figure will be $32.51 billion, which is nearly identical to numbers posted in 2012. Simultaneously, mobile advertising will continue its meteoric rise, hitting $11.76 billion this year alone. And by 2017, Mobile will almost equal desktop, reaching $27.98 billion. So far, Twitter has benefited the most from the mobile transition; the company will make more money from mobile advertising than from desktop advertising last year and mobile will take a bigger and bigger share of the company’s profits through 2015.
Tag: Business
Big Media Deals With YouTube Talent
Getting genuine traction in the YouTube world has proven a fickle task for even the biggest advertising groups, and as a result many have focused on attracting homegrown talent in the YouTube world. Instead of invading YouTube, they’re hiring the people who understand the medium from the ground up; indeed, last week Phil DeFranco was acquired by Revision3, and DreamWorks Animation picked up AwesomenessTV for a reported $33 million. So although things like AdSense are great, personalities like DeFranco can offer a much more advanced approach to putting advertising on their content.
STORY Shifts Retail Concepts
In her talk at the PSFK Conference, Rachel Shechtman described what she termed ‘Retail Media’ with respect to he Brick and Mortar ‘experience,’ STORY. The multi-media concept combines curation and editorial content with more traditional retail structures. Most simply, Shechtman curates her physical locations much like a magazine that changes themes and covers every four to eight weeks. In the same way, Shechtman tells a different STORY in a different location, with a new theme, and ultimately, new products in the same production cycle. This offers a discovery platform combined with content, commerce, and community, that revolves around a physical entity. Recent variations and space utilizations have included Wellness, Color, Making Things, and Art. And ultimately, the consumer doesn’t know what will be next, so they’re constantly enticed back a few weeks later to experience the next story.
Monogram Launches Shoppable Magazine Platform
Monogram, a fashion commerce startup, launched an iPad app last fall that attempted to be a mobile, shoppable magazine. It didn’t catch on, and the team went back to square one. The team decided to leverage the huge existing world of fashion bloggers to help create and share content through its platform. The new Monogram provides a full web editing suite, which allows bloggers to share their favorite fashions and build full ‘magazines’ of their favorite content, all of which is shoppable. For bloggers, the system effectively allows consumers to purchase items through their pages, and the platform provides an integrated search function that scours the web for the products bloggers want to share. For viewers, the new Monogram easily enables readability and sharing functions for blog posts. It’s designed as a web app with responsive design, and it can also be used as an app on devices.
Square Launches Square Stand
Square announced today that, after processing $15 Billion in payments, it would debut Square Stand hardware to select U.S. retailers for $299 as a new way to process point of sales transaction right from the iPad. Square Stand is designed to help local businesses with brock and mortar stores, and Square claims, essentially, to have replaced the cash register with this product. It works with the Reader, a mobile credit card payment hardware device. It has real-time analytics, and it rotates to help make active commerce social; it’s mobile at its core, but it can be bolted to a table or counter to act as a more traditional register as well. At the end of the day, this is the first true hardware that Square can call its own, instead of relying on other, partnered solutions from other companies. Shipping begins on July 8th.
OK Go Releases Word Game App
OK Go has never been a band known for living “by the book,” but their latest effort shows them crossing new boundaries as a band. Today marks the launch of “Say the Same Thing,” a word-based mobile game for iOS and Android coded by the band’s own guitarist, Andy Ross. The premise of the game is for two players to each say a random word, and then in turns work to present words that are conceptually “between” the random words until they meet in the middle by saying the same word. This isn’t an app to extend the reach of OK Go’s music per-se; instead it is an extension of OK Go’s brand and sensibility. The app is released by OK Go in partnership with the label they started, Paracadute Records, a partnership that allows the band to pursue its unique set of artistic and technological endeavors.
Staples Now Sells 3D Printers
In a true sign of the times, 3D printing is now more than ever rapidly becoming a regular consumer product. The office product supply chain announced today that it will begin selling 3D printers through its website, and that the printers will hit stores by the end of next month. Staples also claims that it is the first major U.S. retailer to sell the product. Potential consumers will be able to purchase the Cube 3D Printer from 3D Systems for $1,299. It comes with built-in WiFi and more than two dozen 3D design templates, with infinitely more available for download online, of course. Staples will also sell plastic cartridge refills. Though this means that 3D printers might lose some of their ‘cool factor,’ it heralds their continued acceptance as a genuine consumer product in the marketplace that the average person might purchase. The day when everybody will have a 3D printer in their homes is rapidly arriving.
LinkedIn Adds Mobile Ads
LinkedIn has redesigned its mobile apps to improve the activity stream and incorporate sponsored content for more than a quarter of their user base that access the networking site on iPhone and Android. LinkedIn is quickly expanding their offering to build out the news feed and encourage conversations on the platform. Also interesting is the addition of content from key influencers outside your network, which in turn makes paid posts feel more native. For brands wanting to reach decision makers, LinkedIn provides plenty of targeting parameters like job title, industry and company size.
SteelHouse Slingshot Tackles Viewthroughs
Marketing tech startup SteelHouse announced the launch of a feature called slingshot that tackles the elusive metric of “viewthroughs,” or people who see and ad and are promoted to visit the advertisers website without clicking on the ad itself. The traditional measurement of “clickthroughs” doesn’t take these viewers into account and thus fails to fully determine an ad’s effectiveness. Even worse, though, is the tact that “viewthroughs” aren’t prioritized like “clickthroughs,” in the sense that the clickthroughs land on a custom page created for people who arrive through the ad, while viewthroughs will just enter through the homepage. SteelHouse claims to fix this problem by integrating their technology into both ads and websites – both from laptops and through mobile. Currently, the technology is limited to visitors who show up within an hour of seeing an ad; nonetheless a test with entertainment hardware company Creative Labs resulted in an 87% improvement in conversion, a 322% lift in overall revenue per visitor, and a 27% increase in average order value.
Australian Store Charges $5 To ‘Just Look’
In the most overt attempt to battle Showrooming yet, an Australian store has decided to charge $5 for “just looking” that will be deducted when goods are actually purchased. The goal is to get people to purchase actual items in the physical store, and discourages looking on phones and other mobile devices to compare and contrast prices – the management claims, of course, that their policies are in line with other stores and that their physical location has unique products worth investigating. The policy has been panned online, though, as many analysts think this policy will turn potential customers off from even entering the store in the first place, and many commenters have agreed that it seems like a desperate ploy. However you spin it, this is just another sign that brick-and-mortar stores are genuinely threatened by showrooming’s popularity.
