Marketing Pilgrim

Before you read any further just lean back and take a deep breath. You are about to enter the “Research Zone”. You know the place well. It’s where we give you shocking numbers that someone has come up with using their “methodology” and it is then used to create shocking headlines around the Internet for your reading enjoyment. It’s almost like having an informant who whispers something in your ear then you get to blab it all over the place and set the masses running. It’s fun!

Today’s “OMG stat” is brought to you by comScore via TechCrunch. Apparently, Twitter had a rough October.

Usually, when we see Facebook and arrest in a story, the story is filed under The World’s Dumbest Criminals. Like the guy that made fun of his DUI charges by posting pictures of himself in a jailbird costume. Or the burglar who logged into his Facebook account at the victim’s home. Or the woman who violated a restraining order by poking her victim.

But this time, Facebook is finally saving someone’s bacon. Or, oddly enough, his pancakes. As the New York Times says,

The message on Rodney Bradford’s Facebook page, posted at 11:49 a.m. on Oct. 17, asked where his pancakes were. The words were typed from a computer in his father’s apartment in Harlem.

We talk and think a lot about mobile marketing. But frankly, only a small proportion of cell phone users have devices that are equipped for any substantial web interfacing. But that may soon change—Nielsen predicts that smartphones will make up the majority of the cell phone market in two years.

MediaPost reports that by mid-2011, half of cell phone subscribers, about 150M people, will be using smart devices. Smartphones are already showing a marked increase—Nielsen predicts that Q4 of this year will show that 40% of new phones sold are smart devices (as opposed to the Q309, slowest quarter in recent memory with smart devices accounting for only 25% of new phones).

Interactive marketing as a whole is a good place to be relative to the rest of the marketing world. Anywhere where the worst numbers show low single digit decreases and the happy numbers are still in the positive teens despite a continued overall economic morass you have to smile at least a little. We need to, however, remember that the overall interactive marketing is doing fine it is still like any other market. That means, simply, that some industries are going to be much better off in the interactive space than others. It is not a silver bullet for everyone.

Forrester is starting a series of reports that tell just how particular industries are utilizing the interactive marketing environment. The first is called “US Interactive Marketing Forecast by Industry, 2009-2014″. It is interesting to see how some of the verticals are using the medium in its various forms and what lessons can be potentially learned.

Not to ‘dog pile’ on an industry and a company, in particular, that is obviously struggling, it is important to keep track of where traditional media buys (newspapers, magazines, TV etc) are heading. It’s important to see where the balance may occur between online and traditional as well as a barometer on the economic environment we all are living with but seemingly saying less about these days.

Conde Nast has already cut four titles this year which sent a shiver down the spine of the magazine industry as a whole. Now, as the company reports on its 2009 ad page sales it becomes obvious why that kind of move may have been the only choice. The New York Times reports

Microsoft has announced several new features for its rebranded search engine—I mean, “decision engine”—Bing, including the rollout of Bing Videos, a partnership with Wolfram Alpha and a new hover preview feature.

Bing Videos

Yesterday, Bing announced a new video site that will take over the old Microsoft Video (yeah, I’d never heard of it, either). In addition to MSN videos, Bing Video will feature content from Hulu, ABC and YouTube.

While it’s unlikely that Bing Videos will challenge YouTube in a major way, I think it’s a good idea for them to launch their own site, if their goal is merely to increase time on site, and make Bing even more of a go-to resource.