Forbes

There¹s an awful lot of excitement in the digital publishing world around native advertising and a lot of new marketing dollars being spent on ads that blend seamlessly with or mimic the forms of content. What there¹s not an awful lot of is proof that native ads actually do what they¹re supposed to do, or even consensus on exactly what that is. A new study by Sharethrough and the IPG Media Lab provides some of the former while raising new questions about the latter.

The study surveyed 4,770 consumers on their responses to native ad formats, with 200 of the participants agreeing to have their eye movements tracked as they looked at different arrangements of ads and content. The results overwhelmingly backed up the central contention of companies like Sharethrough, which helps publishers push their native ads across different platforms: that readers are more likely to pay attention to marketing messages that resemble the content around them.

³As far as we could tell from all the things we measured, it was pretty much an equivalent level of engagement for content and native ads,² says Chris Schreiber, VP of marketing and communications at Sharethrough.

To quantify that, study subjects were 25% more likely to look at a native ad than they were at a banner, and they looked at them 53% more frequently, checking them out 4.1 times per session on average, versus 2.7% for banners.

The only metric in which banners significantly outperformed native ads was in brand recall, where they enjoyed a 38% to 25% advantage. Schreiber says the study authors weren¹t surprised ³because, if you think about it, a banner ad is just a big logo, typically.²

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IDG Enterprise

IDG Enterprise’s 2013 Consumerization of IT in the Enterprise Research Details Main Stream Adoption of Mobile Devices, the Increasing Use of Business Apps and Cloud and Security Challenges

ClickZ

If I hear “SaaS” or “cloud” in the news one more time, I’m going to scream! Cloud computing has become a hugely overused buzzword over the past few years, although probably for good reason. Cloud companies have taken the technology world by storm, and have seen growth rates unlike any other sector in software. So why not study their adoption of marketing technologies to see if they are changing the way they go to market just as much as they are changing the tech world?

Software as a service (SaaS) had such an immediate impact because it allowed companies to use software over the Internet. Instead of large, upfront capital investments in hardware and software, companies could simply pay a monthly “lease” and use software via the Internet. Gmail is a great example of a SaaS technology. In the list of the largest SaaS companies, you might also recognize companies like Salesforce.com, VMware, and ExactTarget. Taking a closer look at the 17 largest SaaS companies can give us some interesting insight into adoption trends when it comes to marketing technologies.

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B2C

Email Still Isn’t Dead!

There were 1.3 billion Google search results for the phrase “email is dead” when I sat down to write this. Even though some may think that the era of connecting with consumers via their inbox is over, the numbers tell a very different story. Email is actually better than it’s ever been before, and companies who take advantage of the growing need for mobile-optimization and the very latest stats on best practices could see an ROI that makes interruption marketers want to cry.

As the public’s adoption of mobile technology and the Internet continues to grow, email marketing has proven to be one of the most rapidly changing fields within the arena of marketing. If you needed any more evidence that marketing is really a game for the most nimble, take the following stats to heart:

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Content Marketing Inst./IDG

eMarketer

eMarketer has raised its forecast for advertising spending on Twitter for 2013 and 2014, estimating the company will earn $582.8 million in global ad revenues in 2013 before nearing $1 billion next year. More than half of that total will come from mobile, and mobile’s share will rise over the next few years. 

According to the new forecast, more than half of Twitter’s ad revenues—about 53%—will come from mobile advertising this year, up from virtually no ad revenue from mobile in 2011.

Advertising on mobile devices will be where Twitter sees the most incremental growth over the next two years. By 2015, Twitter is expected to pull in $1.33 billion in worldwide ad revenue, more than 60% of which will come from mobile advertising.

Read the full article 

Marketers spent more than $40 billion on custom media in 2011. B2B marketers are allocating one-third of their budgets to content marketing, and more than half plan to increase content marketing spending in 2013. However, as many IT marketers are discovering, content marketing is a complex practice that requires insights not just into what type of content to develop and deliver, but when and how to deliver these assets to ensure maximum engagement.

This whitepaper will provide you with:

• A better understanding of the role content consumption plays in the purchase process for major technology products and services.
• Important insights on creating distinctive and high impact content marketing campaigns that create high levels of engagement with IT decision-makers, driving awareness, trust, and, most importantly, sales.
• Tips on delivering the right content—in context—to make your brand message stand out in an increasingly crowded landscape.

Download the white paper now

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Media Briefing

3/4/13

Too many advertising budgets are still weighted towards printed newspapers and magazines, while mobile and online platforms should be getting a bigger slice of the marketing pie, according to Sir Martin Sorrell, CEO of WPP. Meanwhile, success in media in 2013 means developing your own technology to manage and monetise audience data instead of relying on the likes of Google, says Sorrell.

Presenting the company’s preliminary 2012 results on Friday – a good if “ugly” set of results, the key details of which are below – Sir Martin spelled out the progress the company is making in becoming more digital and even more international: one third of revenue is digital and emerging markets make up 29.4 percent. The target for both is between 35 and 40 percent.

“The two big discontinuities are in print, where clearly clients and agencies are spending too much, and internet and mobile, where they are investing too little,” he says. Echoing Mary Meeker’s now infamous slide from last year, Sorrell points out that print has 25 percent of advertising spend but only accounts for seven percent of consumers’ media time. Conversely, mobile devices account of 10 percent of media time but get just one percent of ad spend.

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BtoB

Real-time bidding—serving up display ads from a winning bidder within milliseconds directly to a targeted prospect—promises to reach mainstream maturity this year. “The advantage of RTB to the marketer is that it takes less effort than standard display ad placements,” said John Dietz, VP-applications at ad verification company Adometry Inc. “You can go to a platform and say, “This is what I want to achieve,’ and you automate the estimated price to achieve that.”

Dietz said RTB, also known as programmatic ad buying, will never capture 100% of the ad-buying market and that there will always be room for agency media buying desks. “I don’t know if the branding guys will be very involved, but for those marketers with performance-based campaigns, I would see budgets for programmatic buying going upwards of 50% of their ad budgets,” he said.

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