So it’s no wonder that consumers are willing to give a little more of themselves to a brand, as long as there’s a prize at the end.

SocialVibe and KN Dimestore recently conducted a survey to discover just how helpful incentives can be. They placed interactive ads on sites such as Causes.com and Pandora and on games like Farmville. Visitors were asked to play a branded game or take a survey and in return they’d receive an appropriate reward. For Farmville it was game credits, air-time without ads on Pandora and donations on Causes.com.

What they found was that 91% of people pay attention to the brand message when they interact with an ad. 48% said that they may have initially gone in just to get the reward, but ended up staying for the messaging anyway.

They also found that more people came away with a positive feeling about a brand after participating in an interactive activity. This positive feeling carried over into purchase intent with one product seeing a 56% lift as compared to the control group. And how about this one:

“Consumers exposed to an incentivized engagement were 161% more likely to visit the brand’s website.”

The survey also proves that incentives equal conversions by monitoring ticket sales after participants interacted with an incentivized movie campaign. Sales were 22% higher than those who were not given an incentive to view the ad.

Jay Samit, CEO for SocialVibe says,

“People go online with a purpose, and most forms of advertising, such as display and pre-roll, are disruptive and not additive to that experience. The way to capture a consumer’s real attention is to respect their time commitment through the value-exchange approach.”

It’s also interesting to note that the value of the incentive doesn’t have to be very high in order to get a positive outcome. You don’t have to hand out cash in order to get people to participate. Virtual merchandise and coupons are both very popular, inexpensive options.

Your customer’s time is valuable, so why not give them a little something special just for paying attention? If SocialVibe is right, it will come back to you two-fold in the end.

Bloggers aren’t dumb. Everyone who accepted the invitation knew that it was for PR purposes and they all expected a pitch. What they didn’t expect was a bait and switch and their reactions captured on hidden cameras.

The entire stunt was to promote Marie Callender’s frozen dinners. The bloggers, after talking extensively about fresh ingredients, natural foods and even food allergies, were served boxed lasagna and pie.

The author of FoodMayhem.com had this to say on his blog:

“I told you first hand of our focus on wholesome food, particularly with our baby in tow.  We both said to you, with 20+ witnesses and apparently hidden cameras, how much we despise over-processed foods and artificial ingredients.  We discussed with the group the sad state of chemical-filled foods and discussed various chains.  And yet, you still fed me the exact thing I said I did not want to eat.”

Obviously, the PR company was hoping to capture the happy reaction of diners who thoroughly enjoyed what they thought was a meal prepared by a four-star chef. Others have done it, we’ve seen the results on TV. But in this case, the bloggers who spoke about the event said that the food, while good for a frozen meal, wasn’t anything to rave about. They also couldn’t understand why the PR company would direct the conversation toward wholesome, additive-free dining, before serving a chemical-laden meal.

Says Chubby Chinese Girl:

I’m NOT their target consumer and they were totally off by thinking I would buy or promote their highly processed frozen foods after tricking me to taste it. I’m not saying I ONLY eat/write about healthy and organic foods, but what unhealthy stuff I choose to eat/write, at least I was aware of it and it was my decision to do so.

If that wasn’t insult enough, the bloggers were appalled to find out that they were being secretly taped and at least a couple refused to sign the waiver after the reveal.

A follow-up by the New York Times, says that the PR company had a highly favorable response rate to the food and that most of the guests had “fun.” The bloggers countered, saying that at the time, they were reluctant to express their distaste for the food so as not to insult their celebrity chef host.

The moral of this story is, be honest with the people you want on your side. Instead of trying to trick healthy foodies into eating a product they wouldn’t ever buy, they should have brought in bloggers with busy families and frugal lifestyles — in other words, their target audience.

I will admit that there was one time when I was tricked and didn’t mind. The PR party was for the TV show Leverage and the party goers were conned in order to show how easily it can be done. Bravo to that PR company, boo hiss to those behind the Marie Callender stunt.

According to numbers from eMarketer, the majority of B2B marketers say their spend is equal to 5% or less of their company’s revenue. But even though the numbers are tied together, 35% of marketers said they didn’t report their financial contributions to senior management. 33% said they don’t even track their return on investment.

If we talk strictly about smaller B2B companies, it’s easy to see why they aren’t tracking and reporting — because it takes too much time and time is an even tighter commodity than money. There are plenty of tools online to help you gather stats but connecting those stats to income is the tricky part.

The other reason financial return is hard to track, particular in B2B is that it usually means moving a client through a variety of departments. The marketer generates the lead but it’s the sales department that follows through. Along the way there may be other parties involved each getting the buyer closer to writing the check. On a big ticket item, the time lapse from the initial contact to the sale could be months. Unless the company has a follow up system in place, it’s likely the marketer will never know how much revenue was made, or he may hear about it only in passing. “Hey, George bought a software package. That was a good lead.”

Granted, some amount of marketing isn’t going to be quantifiable in terms of direct sales, but what if you could account for every dollar spent by a customer who saw some kind of branded message? That would take in sales from almost every new customer and that has to be equal to more than 5% of your company’s revenue.

Think about it. You could make the best product in the industry, but without marketing, how is anyone going to know to buy it. Time you got credit for all your hard work.

Google has purchased and will soon bring online g.co. Yes, g.co. In the near future, when you type g.co, you will be taken to a Google page. No one knows what page, but it will be a page in the Google family, so you know that you’ll be well taken care of.

Why? Because Google.com is too hard for people to remember. It has too many letters, not to mention that pesky “m” at the end. It’s going to be much easier for people to remember to type g.co (because unlearning to type an “m” after co is so simple) and then from there, they can navigate to where ever they really want to be.

Is this as dumb as it sounds, or am I missing something?

Google reminds us not to confuse g.co with goo.gl, which is their new URL shortener. In other words, goo.gl, will help you get small, while g.co is already small.

Now we must warn you to take care when getting small. As Steve Martin says, you should never get small while driving. He made that mistake, and here’s what happened:

“a cop pulls me over. And he makes me get out, he looks at me and he says, “Heyyy.. are you small”? I said, “No-o-o! I’m not!” He said, “Well, I’m gonna have to measure you.” They have this little test they give you – they give you a balloon.. and if you can get inside of it, they know you’re small.”

I’m not sure that Google should be encouraging such reckless behavior, but they’re Google. Next week Facebook will roll out .co, and then we can all get small together.

According to a new chart from comScore, men respond to commercials that makes superiority claims while women prefer to see solutions to their problems. It’s a sad, sexist state of affairs but we’ve seen the evidence on our TV screens for years. Female oriented commercials taught us how to remove ring around the collar, get a full serving of vegetables into our kids without a veggie on the plate, and look years younger and pounds thinner.

Commercials aimed at men promise faster cars, prettier women, adventure, and excitement. As unbalanced as it is, it’s hard to find fault when it’s a system that obviously works.

comScore also found that men in general are harder to persuade with advertising than women. Is this because men are more skeptical of ad claims, or could it just be a side effect of the fact that women are the majority buyers, controlling 75 to 80% of all dollars spent.

Source

Granted, not everyone went whole hog. Some people came with cow-spotted t-shirts or paper ears, but even a partial costume is enough to earn you a free entree.

Steve Robinson, Chick-fil-A’s senior vice president of marketing says,

“Cow Appreciation Day is a great barometer of how passionate our customers are for our brand. If you’re willing to dress up like a cow for a free meal, you’re obviously a loyal and even ‘raving’ Chick-fil-A fan. While the event is a natural tie with our cow-themed marketing campaign, Cow Appreciation Day is intended to be a fun day to reward some of our most loyal customers with free food.”

This year, the fast food chain upped the ante with a dedicated website that includes a downloadable costume kit, an iPhone app that shows you how you’d look if you were a cow and a cow photo contest.

What undoubtedly started as a late-night, out of ideas, almost joking campaign idea, has turned into a successful, yearly marketing event. Cow Appreciation Day, combined with their “Eat Mor Chikin” Cow campaign, earned Chick-fil-A one of the top “Marketers of the Year” award from Advertising Age. They also report an 11.37% growth in sales from 2009 to 2010 and they’re still going strong.

The takeaway here, is that no idea is too crazy when it comes to setting yourself apart from the competition. Chick-fil-A took what they did best, the chicken sandwich, and made it the centerpiece of everything they do. And what could be wackier or more unexpected than having a cow sell chicken sandwiches.

Have you ever tried a crazy sales promotion? We’d love to hear about it as soon as we’re done stenciling our cow t-shirts for tomorrow.

Search still claims the top spot for dollars spent, but video is the fastest growing format. The old fashioned banner ad is still climbing and email is the only category that slipped.

Who is benefiting from the rise in online ad dollars? The big five, Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, AOL and Facebook. eMarketer says that combined, they’ll claim 68% of 2011’s total online ad spending. That still leaves a nice chunk for smaller ad network and individual site buys which eMarketer recommends as a way of staying connected to a specific industry.

Do you buy one-off ads from individual websites or do you prefer to put your money into the larger ad networks?

A new study by Harte-Hanks shows that overall delivery rates are at 95% for 2010, slightly up from 2009 and unsubscribes are down to .19%.

When it comes to the all important open and click, it varies by industry. Overall, open rates dropped to 17% from 26%, but Harte-Hanks says this might not be an accurate depiction of the facts. They say that many emails only report as “open” once the images have been downloaded, but many people will skip the images, rather than deal with the potential for a virus or simply because it’s an unnecessary step.

Click rates averaged 3%, which was in line with 2009. When you break it down by industry, you can see that our health and welfare is of utmost importance. Both insurance and pharmaceutical have the highest click rates, while technology barely shows up as a blip on the graph. My guess would be that tech buyers are too tech savvy to go with a boring email click. It’s likely they’re following through online or through a mobile app. Harte-Hanks surmises the problem is a reliance on trade show mailing lists which doesn’t demonstrate a specific interest in a company.

The keys to email success? Highly-targeted, customized emails, sent to properly vetted customers on a regular, but not too frequent basis. Couldn’t be simpler, right?

“Source: Harte-Hanks Postfuture Index™ Email Response Metrics 2009-2010, 2011.”

That winner was branding agency Mlicki, and they won for their Blue Octo campaign which had a 10% response rate.

The Blue Octo is a line of waste-water pumps and these guys managed to make it look cool and exciting. Their mailer looked like a classified dossier with reports and photos about sightings of a mysterious Blue Octo creature.

Mlicki creative director John Randle told Deliver;

It was intended “to showcase the first ‘photographic evidence’ of the Blue Octo’s recent movements obtained by G.R.A.N.D.(Gorman-Rupp Advanced Nature Detectives).  We wanted recipients to question the authenticity of it in a ‘wait, is this real?’ sort of way, to get them involved in the rest of the story.”

Now, I do love the US Postal Service, they did save Santa Claus that one time, and they bring me freebies and coupons. I also believe that direct mail does work, especially in the case of local service and B2B. However, I’m not sure that the success of the Blu Octo campaign can be attributed to the mail service alone.

The agency also created an excellent digital campaign which included fun videos of Blu Octo spottings, plus a Facebook and Twitter page. It’s likely that the combination of direct and digital did the trick, but the topper on this cake is the creativity. These guys came up with a story and they followed through in all aspects of the delivery. The hunt for a mysterious swamp monster to sell pumps? It really is brilliant.

The trouble is, free samples aren’t free for the business who provides them. They actually cost quite a bit of money, particularly if they have to be shipped to thousands of people. Consumers don’t get this. Especially if they’re asking a business to donate an item to a local charity. Consumers think, well, you’re making cookies anyway, so what’s the big deal about making two dozen more in support of the youth soccer team? After all, it’s good advertising for your company, right?

Cowboy Dan will tell you what the problem is. It’s Marketing Opportunity Bingo and you don’t always win.

Cowboy Dan is the CEO of Liz Lovely bakery. They made the spice cookies that arrived in my Foodzie box this month and I’m sure they hoped that free sample would make me go to their website to buy more. I did go and I found this excellent blog post about the real cost of providing free samples. Says Dan,

“Business is like bingo, not everything that’s offered helps you win.”

He says that if sample cookies and donations don’t lead to a direct link back to his company’s website, then they probably aren’t worth doing. That’s why he won’t give to a celebrity gifting suite but will give to a food blogger.

Ah, but what if a big star tasted his cookies at a gifting suite, fell in love and ordered 2,000 of them for a private party? It could happen, right? That’s where the cost of the sample comes in. Let’s say you could make the cookies for $100. Is that worth spending on potential word of mouth from influential people? In the blog Dan says, “Will a picture of Lindsay Lohan holding your [insert product here] really increase your sales?” In some cases, it will.

I live in the world of TV fandom and we often joke about the unexpected rise in sales when our favorite TV star offhandedly mentions a book he just read or a movie he saw on a plane. Lindsay Lohan may not work for your cookies, but if Justin Bieber is photographed holding your hair gel sales are going to go through the roof. Just look at the recent brouhaha when Tom Cruise’s daughter was inadvertently photographed holding naughty gummies. The store couldn’t keep them in stock.

So is it always worth it to give our free samples? No. Simply handing out freebies is no guarantee you’ll make it back in return business.  Should you always say no to free samples? No. There are times when just the word of mouth will be worth the cost of the product.

How do you know when to say no and when to say yes? Trial and error. Figure the cost of providing free samples as part of your marketing budget. Then find away to carefully track return sales. It could be with a special code or a website affiliate tag.

Finally, if Justin Bieber asks you for a free sample, always say yes, then make sure you take a photo and blast it all over the internet. Then prepare for the onslaught of sales like your company has never seen before.

Do you give out free samples? We’d like to hear your thoughts on when to say yes and when to say no.

Oh, and Cowboy Dan, if you’d like to send a free sample of your Liz Lovely Peanut Butter Classic cookies my way, feel free.

Imagine if you could match marketing to mood. Actually, you may not have to imagine for long, because the experts say it’s coming soon.

Moodagent is one step in that direction, it’s a mobile phone app that delivers a playlist of music based on your chosen mood. The program uses a variety of criteria to slot songs into emotional compartments such as happy, angry and sensual. For some odd reason my husband thinks “wistful” should be one of the choices, but what would it play? “Rainbow Connection” and “Breakfast at Tiffany’s?”

It’s a cool concept, because we’re emotionally connected to music, so perhaps, instead of choosing the blues when you’re blue, you could choose “happy” and it would cheer you up.

Now imagine that concept extended into advertising. Peter Berg Steffensen, CEO of Syntonetic (the makers of Moodagent) offers up an example;

“You could be listening to Bob Marley’s ‘Sun is Shining’ and an ad recommends a chilled relaxing beer or a groovy holiday destination. Through our deeper  understanding of the intrinsic link between music and mood we empower powerful and emotional connections between brands and their fans.”

It’s a great idea, but how could we make it work on a larger scale? Maybe all cell phones could come equipped with a mood ring-type interface that picks up your mood when you handle the phone. Then your mood is broadcast out just like your geo-location and the matching mood ads are returned to your phone.

Angry at your boss? Check out Monster.com for a new job or buy a voodoo doll online. Feeling sexy? May we suggest a romantic dinner for two at a local restaurant and Nine 1/2 Weeks from Netflix?

What do you think? Do you have a product would sell better with mood-based marketing? We’d like to hear about it.

This is not the case with your average bargain shopper. According to a report compiled by eMarketer, more than half the people who subscribe to deal newsletters are excited to get them to the point where they “can’t wait” to see what’s inside.

I love shopping. I love deals, but really? Part of me wants to suggest that these people need a hobby, but the marketing part of me says, yippee! This is great news. And it gets better. Remember the concept of deal fatigue? Guess it’s not happening. . . yet.

The February 2011 survey found that US adult internet users subscribe to an average of almost three daily or weekly shopping emails or newsletters, and 56% of internet users subscribe to at least two of the emails.

What’s even more amazing is that of those who get several deal emails, 61% said they read all of them. That’s a lot of interested eyeballs and those eyeballs beget eyeballs, because the survey shows that all but 22% forward those emails to friends and family.

Sounds like it’s time to start contemplating the art of the deal.

The new IAB guidelines is a 35-page document that covers such topics as Acquiring Inventory, an Online Media Rating System, Data Disclosure and methods of handling customer complaints. Ad networks who agree to follow a published set of guidelines will receive what they refer to as “the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval for digital marketing.”

For those of you born in the later half of the century, the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval was awarded to products that were tested and approved by the popular homemaking magazine. It started in the early 1900′s and was a highly recognized symbol of trust through the 40′s, 50′s and 60′s. If a product had that seal, then the consumer knew it was safe, reliable and a good buy.

The IAB is hoping that consumers will feel the same way about their new Quality Assurance Certification seal. More than that, they hope the threat of not getting approved will be enough to make errant advertisers change their evil ways.

In a video presentation, David Moore, founder of 24/7 Real Media says;

[He expects the seal] to eliminate a vast percentage of the people that are not playing the game the way it should be played.”

At the end of the video, Moore thanks those advertisers who are compliant, then points directly at the camera and says,

“for those that aren’t, we’re going to get you.”

There’s a laugh after that and maybe he meant, ‘we’re going to convince you that being compliant is a good thing,’ but it sounds more like he’s going to arrange an accident or delivery of a horse’s head.

I’d like to think that they’re doing all of this because they believe in doing right by the public, but the cynic in me says it’s more about keeping the government from imposing regulations of their own. As far as this being a seal of approval that consumers can trust, I don’t see it. The folks in the presentation video admit that the only way this will work is if consumers refuse to deal with companies that aren’t certified. That’s not going to happen. Most people aren’t going to check the ad delivery service on their favorite website to see if they’ve been approved before typing their email into an form.

I’m not saying these guidelines aren’t a good thing. I just think it’s a moot point, because the government is going to step in with language and rules of their own sooner than later.

Would you stop using a website that didn’t carry the IAB Seal of Approval?

Not surprisingly Google, Yahoo, Apple and Microsoft took the top four places in that order. Fifth place went to Netflix with their estimated revenue of $1.5 billion-plus. Netflix recently lined up some big deals with the studios and now that they’re doing well with their streaming arm, the future looks very bright for this ground-breaker that is slowly clearing the field of all competition.

AOL came in seventh and is probably the most unpredictable company in the top ten. With all the firing and shifting of content over there, it’s hard to say where they’ll be by the end of the year. Better off or on the way out?

Facebook, which feels like it should rank higher, came in tenth with $1.07 billion in revenue. I’d expect them to climb the chart a few notches before the year end. Their popular playmate Zynga also made the list, claiming the 13th spot.

Online job search engines CareerBuilder and Monster came in 19th and 20th. Monster tying with WebMD, the leader in online health information.

Groupon may make a lot of noise, but they came in middle of the road, landing in the 23rd spot just above Major League Baseball. Football beat them both by a few notches.

Linkedin landed almost at the bottom of the list, but that’s likely to change with their new ad strategies. Also at the bottom, the parent companies for Classmates and Friend Finder, two sites that I didn’t realize were still big moneymakers now that Facebook has claimed much of their audience.

Want more information? You can see the full list along with the revenue amounts and business snapshot at paidContent.com.

What they did was look at the amount of time the average adult spends watching TV, reading the paper, surfing on the internet, etc. Then they matched those percentages to the percentage of the overall ad spending dollars by category.

Here’s what they got.

As you can see, people spend most of their media time watching television. By a strange coincidence, the percentage of ad dollars spent on TV is nearly identical. Pretty neat. But after that, things get funky.

Internet consumption for the average person (which would not be me) is 25.2% but ad spending is only 18.7%. Mobile is way underfunded compared to usage. It’s so underfunded that it shows up only as a thin line on the graph.

So where is the extra money going? To newspapers and magazines that no one is reading. Look at the gap. Combined, you’ve got less than 10% usage but more than 26% of the ad spending pot.

eMarketer CEO Geoff Ramsey said;

“Those of us focused on the internet channel have complained for years that it hasn’t been getting its fair share of media dollars based on time spent.  However, the precise extent of that imbalance has been shrouded in mystery and exaggeration. Now we know—it’s a gap of 6.5 percentage points.”

Now we know indeed, but will the knowledge do us any good? Are advertisers still pouring money into magazines and newspapers because it’s the way it’s always been done? Are we that afraid of change that we can’t see money going down the drain? Spending the most money where the people spend the most time makes sense, but is it really that simple? Probably not.

Certainly there are behavioral factors involved. Are people more likely to act on an ad they see in a magazine than one they see online? If that’s true (and I’m not saying it is), then it makes sense to target readers overs surfers. I suppose it also depends on what it is your advertising. A political memoir might do better as a full page ad in the Sunday New York Times where an ad for a trendy music CD might fair better on the web.

I imagine there will come a time when ad spending for print media will drop below that of the Internet. When that happens, we’ll likely be sitting here wondering why mobile ad spending is still so light. Don’t people know that internet ad spending is old school! It’s all about the holograms! That’s the future of marketing.

Microsoft is looking to strengthen its bid to make Hotmail the leading web-mail client by making it more interactive.

Right now, email is either text or HTML based which means your only real option for hooking people up is to include a link in your email. Microsoft wants to take that link and deliver that information right inside the email blank.

Imagine getting that YouTube video of a cat eating spaghetti right in your email client. No need to click! Even better, is the ability to add real time information in an email such as this example from Netflix.

Here, the customer is able to view instant movie choices, read pop-up reviews and add items to his queue without leaving the email client.

The ability to interactive with email on the same screen is even more important now that people are using tablets and smartphones to access their mail. Studies have shown that people prefer to stay inside their current application when completing a task and this is how you get that done.

Adding interactivity to email also gives the marketer a behavioral edge. We’re highly suggestible creatures, so “click this one button to add this movie to your queue” is going to be much more effective than “click here to open a browser, login, pick the movie, add to queue, now close browser and go back to your email.”

I’m a busy email user and I routinely give up on offers because they require too many steps to complete or the link to the email is broken, or I can’t remember my login to the website. If I was given the opportunity to complete a task without leaving the email message, I’d guess that my conversion rate would rise at least 30%.

The downside to this miracle of efficiency is security and that’s why Microsoft is only offering the option to a few trusted clients at the start.  Interactive emails come with the kind of coding that makes mail services nervous. It’s too easy to hide a malicious code in the script which means every piece has to be checked before it’s delivered.

Sounds like there are still a few chinks in the system, but it’s without a doubt, the future of email and for marketers, it’s a good thing.

What  would you do if you could make your marketing emails interactive?

AdAge got the scoop from CBS Corp. Chief Research Officer David Poltrack, who talked about the idea at the Advertising Research Foundation’s Re:Think 2011 conference.

Poltrack says that small test studies conducted by Nielsen and Nielsen Catalina have proved what he’s always known, which is that “There is no link, none, between the age of the specified demographic delivery of the campaign and the sales generated by that campaign.”

He pointed to the results of a test involving snack food buyers. The survey came up with a long list of shows that snackers listed as their favorites, but only three of those shows were tops among the coveted 18-49 age group. Now, this is a good place to note that CBS has the oldest audience of any of the five networks with a season premiere median of 54.9. Since they land well outside of the preferred age group for advertisers, it’s possible that this influenced their decision to erase age from the equation.

Poltrack didn’t dodge this fact during his speech, he actually used it to make a very good point for all marketers. The 18 – 49 demographic is on the decline and is headed to hit a low of 55% by 2016.

As for noting whether a viewer is male or female, it’s fair to say that there are certain products that lean more one way or the other, but gender lines are shifting. Diaper companies now run ads aimed at men and there are plenty of car commercials aimed at women.

CBS’s wants to build a new ratings model that divides the audience up into behavioral segments.  (From AdAge)

TV companions: For this group, TV is almost always on and is like a member of the family.

Media trendsetters: Early adopters of technology and new content, and also 39% multicultural.

Sports enthusiasts: Made up mostly of men, but most guys aren’t classified here. This group also likes action-adventure programming.

Program passionates: Highly involved with favorite shows, and the biggest DVR time-shifters.

Surfers and streamers: Most open to watching alternative content on TV and most often using laptops or tablets to multitask while watching TV. They skew young, but include a large component of 50-plus people.

TV moderators: Those who enjoy being experts and leading others’ choices.

I fit nicely into the “program passionates” label. The perfect person to get pitches about the latest TV on DVD ads, TV tie-in products and anything that my favorite characters eat, drink or touch on my favorite shows. It doesn’t matter how old I am, or that I’m a woman. I’m likely to buy those products because I am passionate about my shows.

Finally, somebody gets it!

Earlier today I was reading an article titled, “Of Course Social Media Works — If You Measure It Right.” It’s another call to stop using click-throughs as the be all and end all benchmark of digital success. Like demographics for TV ratings, click-throughs are a measure everyone recognizes and so it’s a measure they trust. But with the changes in technology and in online and TV viewing habits, blindly sticking to the old way isn’t doing anyone any favors.

When Nielsen began measuring audiences, it made sense to group them by age and sex. Laundry detergent manufacturers wanted to reach young women with families and razor companies were after men of shaving age. But who are you trying to reach with an ad for the iPad, or green smartcar or the latest Glee soundtrack?

I’m here to tell you that if you based your advertising pitches to me on my gender and age, you’d be way off the mark.

What do you think of CBS’s plan to switch from demographics to behavioral targeting? And smart or not, do they even have a chance of changing fifty plus years of ratings history?

Kantar Media calls it the “feel good headline” and it’s likely that everyone but the newspapers would agree. According to their new report, ad expenditures across the board rose 6.5% in 2010 for a total of $131.1 billion. The downside is that not everyone benefited from the growth.

Have a look at the chart:

Kantar says that political advertising and a fresh push by the car companies helped lift TV advertising. Auto ads alone, rose 19.8% over last year while Direct Response and Pharma both dropped by 5 to 8%.

Running a close second in growth is Internet Display advertising which rose 9.9%. A bit surprisingly, Outdoor was right there with 9.6% growth.

Print was the biggest loser last year with a 3.5% drop for Newspaper Media and Business-to-Business magazines also took a hit. But even in the print areas that showed growth, it wasn’t much. Spanish language advertising in both magazines and on TV rose quite a bit in relation to their English language counterparts.

The Kantar report also quantifies the use of product placement on TV. They found that scripted TV shows have an average of 6:57 minutes of brand placement per hour while unscripted shows have 14:19 minutes! When you add in the commercials during the same hour you get a whopping 29.25 minutes of advertising during a one-hour unscripted show. Sounds like reality programs are the new infomercials.

To see more breakdowns and mostly encouraging numbers, click here and you’ll be whisked away to Kantar Media.

The author of the piece suggests that QR codes are likely to become the commonplace connector between all things offline and online. He points out the fact that the code is open-source and freely available for use, that adding it to a magazine page doesn’t cost extra and that the rise in smartphone usage makes them accessible to more people every day.

All of this is true, but there’s one big downside to QR codes that I think will keep them from becoming mainstream; they don’t mean anything when you look at them. They’re cool and for folks who love puzzles, they’re enticing, but for the average person flipping through a magazine, they’re an out of focus eye chart.

We do need a way to make offline links clickable but why does it have to be done with a graphic that holds no information for the human eye? Why can’t we have a code that looks like an image or has text but is still readable by a smartphone?

I’m sure that if enough advertisers invest enough time and money in QR codes, they could catch on. As Mashable says, the payoff is the key. Right now, many codes return information that could have printed on the magazine ad and that’s bad use of technology. What we need is to find a reward that is worth the effort, like exclusive content, a deep discount or a free sample. Even still, without an image pulling you in, it’s going to take time before consumers feel the need to crack a QR code when they see one.

What do you think? Do you use QR codes as a consumer or marketer? We’d like to hear about your experience.

The Product Stewardship Institute estimates that phone books create 660,000 tons of waste per year and because they’re printed on low-grade paper, recycling isn’t easy. That’s why San Francisco Board of Supervisors President David Chiu has proposed a bill to stop the unsolicited drop off of these books. He’s suggesting that instead of an opt-out program, Yellow Pages delivery would be an opt-in program and that’s a big difference.

Neg Norton, president of the Yellow Pages Association told The Wall Street Journal that “Chiu has ‘significantly undervalued the value that Yellow Pages delivers to the city of San Francisco.’ San Francisco Chamber of Commerce CEO Steve Falk agreed saying that the Yellow Pages represent an important marketing tool for small businesses, especially those without a website. Falk is backed by a coalition of local business owners who are speaking out against the proposal.

It’s an odd fight. The SMB’s are responding as if that reduced number of books would reduce the number of people who see their ads, but dropping 10,000 books on doorsteps around the city doesn’t mean 10,000 people are using them.

With Chiu’s proposal people who need a phone book would still get one and the city would get a breather from the tonnage of waste. That’s got to be a win all around.

What do you think? Will Chiu’s proposal actually hurt local small business, or is this an idea that should be put in place all across the US?