Marketing Pilgrim

Ok, first watch this video:

Next watch this one:

Question: What do these two videos have in common?

If you said something about innovation, you’d be right but that’s not what I am looking for. What I am looking for is more about the way the folks in these videos talk about their projects. In both cases they called their work an experiment. Not a product or a service, just an experiment.

This is important.

comScore’s MobiLens service has some new data regarding those folks who use their phones to “check-in” and it’s all upside for marketers.

First of all, they concluded that 16.7 million US mobile phone users accessed a check-in service in March 2011. 12.7 of those folks were on smartphones, which is not surprising. Also not surprising is the fact that the majority of the users were between 18-34 years old. Compared to mobile users in general, 23.3% of check-in folks were full-time students and nearly half of check-in users were employed full time.

What’s interesting to note, is that when it came to general mobile media usage, check-in users returned results very similar to early adopters. 40.3% said they read tech news, 28.2% owned a tablet and a whopping 95% use applications or the browser on their phone.

Real-Time Relevance Through Science! That’s Yahoo’s pitch for the Smart Ads which use highly technical, scientificicated algorithms to determine which ad to show to which web visitor.

Now, they’ve taken that technology to the next level with their new Smart Ads for Video! (Insert animated twinkling starburst here.) The program, which is powered by Mixpo, allows an advertiser to serve up tightly-targeted, 15-second snippets of in-banner video.

Here’s Yahoo’s “for instance”:

If you’re advertising a movie, you could show males in Boston one clip of your movie with showtimes for that location, and females in Seattle an entirely different clip. Other elements within the ad, such as graphics, can be personalized as well.

Remember all the commotion about the owner of the DecorMyEyes website back in November? The man, Vitaly Borker, had built his business on negative reviews, mistreating customers and, to his ultimate demise, threatening to kill them if they didn’t stop complaining because he knew where they lived.

Sick stuff for sure but the New York Times’ exposed this character for what he is (which shows how incredibly stupid he is vs. being crafty like he thought he was, since he told the NYT how he operated and how he was using the negativity to gain favor in Google’s rankings).
Well, yesterday Vitaly was found guilty on several charges and now faces up to six and a half years in jail for his antics. We’ll give the New York Times the honors since they brought this creep to the light of day.

Each year Econsultancy does a benchmark study as it relates to the search space. Recently social media marketing has worked its way into this overview as well as one would expect. The report is quite comprehensive and looks at UK based businesses and has been produced in association with digital marketing agency Guava.

One of the most interesting things to see each year is the differences that occur between how agencies view things versus companies do. Rather than get into all of that though, I think the following three charts are what tell the best story for the industry as a whole. These charts are only the company (or client side) view of whether they will increase budgets. In the end, it’s the only view that matters because they are the ones spending either directly in the industry or through agencies.

Properly labeled and tagged photos can help any website get an extra search engine boost and now Facebook is ready to give you that same leg-up.

Facebook’s new photo-tagging feature allows anyone to tag a photo with any Facebook Brand & Product or People page. Here’s a visual example:

When the tagger clicks the photo you get a drop down of your own pages to choose from, or you can type in the page you want. Right now, only the specified categories are available, so not everything you type in will return a result.