Marketing Pilgrim

A midnight marketing news snack to tide you over til morning:

• Yet another reason why you should consider using product reviews: Peer reviews help to increase consumers’ brand trust.
• LonelyGirl15 Part Deux: KateModern. The Bebo-based online video serial is from the same people that did LonelyGirl last year, but this time they’re not keeping us in suspense about whether or not it’s real. But, as Red Herring put it, they are “creating a richly drawn world where real and fake become difficult to decipher.”
The New York Times catches up, but Pownce is so yesterday.
• After last week’s in depth look at Facebook, Read/WriteWeb is taking a look at Yahoo. The series is called “100 Days for Yahoo,” but that’s from a quotation by Jerry Yang after their Q2 announcement, not how long RWW’s Yahoo week will last. (What? I was seriously wondering that when I saw it.)

Who knew display ads might actually be useful? A new study from Yahoo and comScore finds that online display ads produced 11% lift in dollars spent in in-store conversions. Search ads yielded a 26% lift in dollars spent.

Most impressive, however, was the result from a combination of search and online display ads: a 83% lift in dollars spent in later in-store conversion. The combination also increased incremental in-store revenue 90% (as opposed to 43% with search-only ads and 15% with display-only).

Display ads were also found to increase page views 37%—comparable to search ads’ effect (46%). Together? 68%.

Finally, MediaPost reports:

The study also found that a joint display and search campaign was more effective at converting online researchers to in-store purchasers–as the combination pushed 43% more in-store purchases than search (26%), or display (6%) alone.

I wonder if Ask’s parent company is regretting spending the big bucks on Crispin, Bogusky + Porter yet—increased advertising costs for Ask.com was one of the many factors cited in contributing to poor results in this year’s Q2, as reported today.

Overall, InterActiveCorp’s revenue rose 5.6% over last year’s Q2, to $1.51 billion (after adjusting for “special items and one-time gains,” as Reuters put it). Their net profit nearly doubled to $95.97 million, up from $53.8 million last year. However, this growth only represents a one-cent increase in earnings per share over last year’s (and falls one cent short of analyst’s expectations).

The Federal Communications Commission has made its decision on the ground-rules for winning the 700MHZ wireless spectrum. Remember, Google upped the ante by making a bid provided the FCC agreed to:

• Open applications: consumers should be able to download and utilize any software applications, content, or services they desire;
• Open devices: consumers should be able to utilize their handheld communications device with whatever wireless network they prefer;
• Open services: third parties (resellers) should be able to acquire wireless services from a 700 MHz licensee on a wholesale basis, based on reasonably nondiscriminatory commercial terms; and
• Open networks: third parties (like Internet service providers) should be able to interconnect at any technically feasible point in a 700 MHz licensee?s wireless network

Wow, it’s the last day of July already! Ok, you’d better read this news item quick as they’ll turn into mice at midnight tonight.

• WebTrends releases a new version of their Marketing Lab web analytics product.
• Mark Evans suggests that the music industry no longer needs fear peer-to-peer networks. It’s social networks that are sharing illegal music.
• Not only are more of us using social networks, we’re spending more time on them that ever before.

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So, is Google really interested in winning the bid for the FCC’s upcoming 700mhz wireless spectrum auction, or is it just a big bluff?

You can never really tell with Google. Maybe they’re interested in owning the frequency so they can continue their quest to dominate every aspect of our connected-lives. Then again, maybe they’re just using this as leverage. Here’s a ZDNet statement that caught my eye…

But the company has been tight-lipped about specific plans for building out mobile access. And now it seems to be hedging its bets between a strategy of partnership and one that puts Google in full control. So while it rails against the phone companies at hearings on Capitol Hill or within city halls, the company is also trying to strike deals with these same operators behind closed doors.