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What Are Teens Spending Most of Their Money On? Surprise, It’s Not Games

posted on April 12, 2013

The folks at Piper Jaffray are a very brave lot. They put themselves in close proximity with 5,200 teens (average age of 16.3 years) in order to quantify their spending habits. They did this, so marketers like you could have a better understanding of how teenagers think without having to actually get close to one. You can thank them later. But right now, let’s take a look at what they got.

The survey is called the 25th semi-annual “Taking Stock With Teens” project and it begins with an overview of teen spending by category.

teen spending

Incredibly, most of their money goes to fashion. Upper-income teens said they’re spending a little less but plan to spend more in the near future. Maybe they’re waiting for the new spring fashions to land in stores. Average-income teens are spending a little more than usual and I don’t even have a guess as to why.

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MapQuest Reinvents Itself with Priceline Partnership and New Customer Tools

posted on April 11, 2013

Every company has to grow and change with the times, but it’s even more vital when you’re in the internet biz. In a few short years, we went from using AOL and dial-up to Facebook and high-speed modems. Reinvention isn’t an option, it’s essential.

MapQuest spent the last 16 years helping people find their way. But now, everyone has a GPS system in their car or their phone and when we do look up an address online, we expect more than just turn-by-turn directions. So MapQuest reinvented itself as a travel discovery engine not just for actual travelers but for armchair travelers, too.

In November of 2012, they introduced MapQuest Discover. It’s Pinterest for places.

mapquest

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Tumblr Shuts Down Their One Attempt to Rise Above the Noise

posted on April 11, 2013

storyboardSocial media has a higher than average noise to signal ratio. For every truly creative or informative blip, there are thousands of useless blurbs, nasty retorts, misinformed mentions and lots and lots of spam. Tumblr is like this. You can skim through page after page of duplicate celebrity photos, bad manips and overused pictures of animals making funny faces. If you keep digging, you will find a few gems like Restaurant-Restaurant (a man who turns restaurant stationary into art) and Last Book I Loved. These are the kinds of Tumblrs that made it to the Storyboard and now Tumblr is shutting it down.

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Facebook’s Partner Categories Link Ad Targeting to Offline Purchases

posted on April 10, 2013

Did you buy cereal at the grocery store this week? If you used a store loyalty card at check-out, then you might start seeing cereal ads when you log in to Facebook.

Facebook is now using both online and offline shopping data from “select third parties including Acxiom, Datalogix, and Epsilon” to group Facebook users into very specific buckets. They call the new tool Partner Categories and for marketers, it’s pretty nifty.PartnerCategories1

In this example, an advertiser can pick not only people who bought cereal, but people who bought children’s cereal verses fiber cereal. If I’m selling toys, I want to hop on that first train. If I’m in the fitness biz, that second grouping looks good to me.

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Why Monday, Thursday and Sunday Are Important and Other Digital Video Facts

posted on April 10, 2013

adobe reportWhich mobile device is popular with “content snackers?” Which social media site has the most video referrals? And what is the significance of Monday, Thursday and Sunday in regard to video viewing?

Lucky you, I have the answers to all these questions. Even more lucky for you, I didn’t come up with myself. I dug them out of a new report from the Adobe Digital Index. It’s called The U.S. Digital Video Benchmark 2012 Review  and though it sounds like a heavy read, it’s actually an informative quickie.

Let’s start at the top with the big numbers – video consumption in Q4 2012 was up 30% year-over-year.

That’s a 13% increase from Q3 to Q4. Video viewing isn’t just growing, it’s growing at an insane pace.

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EBay Takes on Amazon with Lower Fees, Local Offer App and Big Data Sales

posted on April 9, 2013

new-ebay-logo,9-C-352848-13eBay is preparing to do battle with Amazon for the title of Top Shop. They made several announcements this week that were both smart and surprising.

First, AdWeek says that eBay is now prepared to open up their big data box to advertisers. With both buyers and sellers and their parental link to Paypal, eBay has access to an enormous amount of customer data.

eBay’s head of digital display in North America, Stephen Howard-Sarin spoke about the change at AdExchanger’s Programmatic I/O conference;

Someone might be OK with—and even appreciate—eBay knowing who they are and what pair of shoes they’ve bought or are looking to buy. However, “they expect eBay not to tell anybody else who they are. But that doesn’t mean we can’t create segments of shoe shoppers and let someone like Zappos—or actually not Zappos [which is owned by Amazon]—to target against those shoe buyers.”

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Blurring the Line Between Editorial and Ads

posted on April 9, 2013

blurryBack in the Golden Age of television, most shows were “sponsored by” one or two products. Between acts, TV characters proclaimed their love of a certain product and today we have product placement that requires the cops of Hawaii Five-o to stop and eat a Subway sandwich.

In other words, we’ve been blurring the lines between editorial content and advertising for a long while. We took a little break in the 80′s and 90′s and now we’re finding all new ways to mix brands and content.

Taking the Brand to the Content

Tanzina Vega of the New York Times published a piece this week on this very subject. She points out a collection of space tech articles on Mashable that were sponsored by Snapdragon (a Qualcom brand of computer chip) then remains journalisticly neutral, presenting both sides of the issue.