Marketing Pilgrim

“Are you really still rockin’ a flip phone?”

That’s an ad you might see if you try surfing the web with your Motorola Razr phone only it’s being sent to you by Nokia. It’s called “intercept campaigning” and according to an article in today’s Wall Street Journal, it’s becoming very popular among cell phone companies as they all vie for a piece of a pretty small pie.

Says, Phuc Truong, managing director of Mobext:

“The [wireless] market is saturated, and pretty cutthroat. There’s not that much room to play. You can go after a new segment that doesn’t have mobile phones, or you could refine and search for users that just are getting out of their two-year plans.”

Comcast cleared one more hurdle last week in it’s bid to acquire control of NBC Universal. FCC chairman Julius Genachowski gave the deal his blessing as long as they agreed to certain conditions. Conditions that certainly took the merry out of Hulu’s Christmas.

Says the Wall Street Journal:

According to people close to the FCC negotiations, those conditions would require that Comcast make NBC Universal and its other Comcast-owned video content available to pay-TV competitors at reasonable, nondiscriminatory terms. He also wants to impose conditions that would require Comcast to offer NBC Universal programming to other online video providers.

Right now, Hulu is the preferred carrier of all NBC programming online. They do syndicate out the video feeds to other third party sites, but they still get a piece of the pie and control of what and where it goes.

Now that Christmas 2010 is behind us it’s time to look at just how well the holiday shopping season was for the online crowd. If we are to believe the numbers reported by the Wall Street Journal and MasterCard Advisors it was very merry indeed.

According to a WSJ article there are more than one source reporting an increase

The current year’s increase is “a very healthy growth rate and one of the positive stories of 2010,” said Michael MacNamara, vice president of research and analysis at SpendingPulse.

Sales over the Internet now account for about 10% of all retail sales, excluding purchases of automobiles and gas, according to SpendingPulse.

It’s the time of the year when the Marketing Optimists’ Club convenes daily and tells how 2011 is the year of (fill in the blank here). There are wonderful predictions that are based on surveys of nameless companies and their so-called executives who break out their crystal balls and give service providers hope that there will be business in 2011.

Today’s version comes from Strongmail via eMarketer. Strongmail (I always think of Homestar Runner’s Strong Bad when I see this name) provides solutions to integrate e-mail and social media so I’ll give you one guess what their survey found. Ding! Ding! Ding! You got it! Both e-mail AND social media will see increased spending in 2011 and will merit more attention than search by a longshot.

What is today really about?

Here’s an explanation–with some help of Google, Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare.

Merry Christmas!

I wasn’t planning on posting today until I saw an article in the Wall Street Journal about how Google has added sales people to sell to local businesses. The push is to move products like Boost and Tags for the local market.

The article says

Google Inc., which helped popularize the idea of automated ad sales on the Web, has been quietly turning to an old-fashioned tool—phone calls—to compete in the hot market for local business advertising.

The Internet-search giant this year has hired several hundred sales representatives to call U.S. businesses such as spas, restaurants and hotels to promote new advertising initiatives, people familiar with the matter said. The effort includes an office in Tempe, Ariz., with around 100 sales representatives, one of these people said.