Marketing Pilgrim

I am woman and if you hear me roar, it’s probably because I’m at the overload point and there’s still grocery shopping to be done, dinner to be made and bills to be paid. Grrr.

In this, I am not alone. Look at this chart from a new survey by Hearst Magazines and Fleishman-Hillard International Communications.

The women surveyed. . .

Well, two out of three ain’t bad. The numbers come from part four of the Women, Power and Money series of reports. This one is called “Game-Changers: Women Defining the New American Marketplace.“

What they found overall is that women feel responsible for the well-being of their families. That need to help often extends out to their co-workers and friends of both the physical and virtual kind.

Looks like a lot of people found tablets and ebook readers under the tree this past December and that’s good news for marketers.

A new Pew Internet study shows that tablet ownership nearly doubled between the end of 2011 and the start of 2012. Take a look:

Okay, so 19% overall isn’t anything to write an article about, but look at the jump from just a year and a half ago. It’s pretty striking. What’s even more amazing is that ebook readers, which were expected to go on the decline thanks to tablets, popped up, too.

One of the biggest reasons for the jump has to be Amazon’s release of their inexpensive Kindle line. The iPad comes off as an expensive toy that only the wealthy can afford and the techy can understand. Amazon’s Kindle Fire is just the opposite. It’s not just lower in price, it feels like a product for the everyman.

TLC has a TV show called “Extreme Couponing,” which demonstrates the lengths people will go to in order to save a buck. The saying “only in America” comes to mind and a new survey from GfK bears that out.

The study took a look at the behaviors of “Xtreme Shoppers” around the globe. They don’t offer a clear definition of which shoppers fall into this category, but they’re definitely people you want on your side.

Europe has a larger concentration of xtreme shoppers with Russia and the UK taking the lead, well over the US. What’s really fascinating is how folks on the two sides of the globe answered the following shopping questions.

It’s Millennial Media S.M.A.R.T. report time again. In this round, we’re looking at mobile advertising reach and targeting in November 2011.

Let’s start with the Post-Click Campaign Action Mix. Here we find that Store Locator is up 47% month-over-month. Not surprising, given that November was the big push to get shoppers into stores for holiday sales. Going along with this was an 64% rise in m-commerce, still, m-commerce as the final action is on the low side.

Biggest click actions? Enroll/subscribe, application downloads and store locator shared the top three slots.

When it comes to advertiser goals, there was a shift toward lead generation, making it the second most mentioned campaign goal (25%, an increase of 63% month-over-month). Sustained in-market presence was still number one, but only with 28%. Millennial Media says the shift was due mostly to financial and educational verticals aggressively tracking down leads for their products.

QR codes are popping up everywhere. Not long ago, these mysterious patterned squares could be found in an occasional magazine or on a mailer. Now you can find them on grocery displays, packaging, even on bus shelters.

More QR codes must mean more people are using them! Right? Sort of. A new study from Chadwick Martin Bailey shows that people are scanning, but they don’t know what do with the results.

Here’s a visual from Marketing Charts:

I’m part of that top line, too. When QR codes were new, I scanned them all the time. Now, I rarely bother. I find that most codes just lead me to a website that I could have arrived at more easily by typing in the URL. Other than that, I’ve been led to a few recipes and some behind the scenes videos for movies. Nothing thrilling and certainly nothing worth sharing.

When I was a kid, holiday toy shopping for my mom meant cracking open the Sears Wish Book. She’d chose the items from our lists, call in the order and everything would arrive on the doorstep a few days later. No need to step inside a toy store at all.

Times haven’t changed all that much. Today, parents are still avoiding the aisles by doing a large amount of toy shopping online. Even when they don’t buy online, the internet is influencing their decisions on what to buy. Check out this chart from the new Google study “The Role of Digital in the Toy Shopper’s Journey.”

Today we ponder the question, if people stopped loading videos on the internet right now, how long would it take to watch everything that’s already been submitted?

These are the kinds of things that keep me up at night. It’s like calculating how long it would take me to watch every minute of every DVD I own. I don’t know that either feat could be accomplished in the time we have on this earth.

According to Nielsen, 166.9 million unique US viewers watched nearly 22 billion videos in November 2011. In January of 2011, the unique viewer number was 143,930 watching almost 15 billion videos. That’s quite a jump in only ten months.