A recent study has addressed many differences in perception, from the value of gifts and gift cards to the wasted time spent on shopping for them. For example, apparently behavioral studies have proven that individuals place up to an 18% lower value on items they receive as gifts (depending on the gift-giver), as opposed to purchasing themselves. There are other very thought-provoking findings, suggesting that women feel most of the burden of the holiday gift season, and that more than half of all giftcards are unused because of the person simply didn’t have the time to cash them in. Check out the full infographic after the jump.

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According to a new infographic, 7 out of every 10 people in your office are actively browsing online video content, irregardless of work (Without fingers being pointed, let’s just agree that the Tron holiday special “from 1982″ is pretty hilarious). However, what’s even more interesting is that the workers indulging in viral videos and flip-switching to Excel when their boss walks by are actually 9% more productive than those who don’t. Click through for the full report.

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Digital agencies have had to work damned hard to stake their place in the marketing mix and over a relatively short period of time we have seen a complicated divide in specialities and channels. From social media agencies through mobile marketing groups to analytics firms. The situation has gotten quite confusing but each has its own merit and most sell their proposition on a heightened sense of return of investment. Almost everything we do in the digital space, obviously, has a high level of data that can be tied to it and almost always a group of very smart people who can derive insights of great value to the client. Great. Just what we asked for. Kind of.

Analytics, data, ROI have all been things we’ve all used to prove our worth and to convince our clients to constantly increase their marketing spend on digital and now that we’re seeing another rush towards the medium – particularly regarding social media – we now have client who are demanding the metrics we’ve been boasting about. And they should absolutely have that, as long as the numbers match both the business objectives of the company and realistic bench marks for success.

However, what seems to be left behind here in the fight for accountability is the importance of “risking the genius”. The focus on data/analytics may be having a throttle effect on agencies where a perfect balance of strategy and creative excellence needs to be in place. I’m always reminded here of a famous quote by Henry Ford regarding consumer inclusion:

“If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have said a faster horse.”

The answer is unsurprisingly simple; that we follow a process that has been in play at (traditional) agencies for decades, i.e. understand the consumer and, perhaps more importantly, consumer behavior and make sure the agency you hire has the creative genius to use that in their articulation of the message. Use data again to learn and re-process.

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Chegg has made quite the name for itself since “setting up e-shop” back in 2003. Now, 4.2 million books and 6,400 campuses later, Chegg has “disintermediated” the $5B+ college textbook market by providing a low-cost, short-term, nationwide rental alternative” to the steep prices of the university bookstore. Carpenter further predicts that Chegg is poised to control 80%+ market share.

Having garnered a substantial online presence, Chegg wanted to brach out offline, while still staying loyal to the insight that today’s students were both cost-conscious AND creatively expressive. The challenge for us was not just the technical development of the boxes, but also the launching of a campaign that would garner more online/offline awareness via offline engagement.

We joined forces with Dr. Pepper to hatch an interactive marketing campaign called the Chegg Book Box Builder Challenge where participants were given pre-loaded colors and graphics to design a Chegg bookbox. Students were further egged on by the incentive of an Apple Macbook Pro and the guarantee that the highest voted box design would be the one shipped out to renters.

Sure enough, 4,000 submissions and two million votes later, the winning designs from Rachel Sperber, Sarah Herman and Sebastian Carames, are set to ship this Fall (Congratulations, you three!). We enjoyed working with both Chegg and Dr. Pepper on this project and definitely look forward to the next challenge.

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“It is not the winning that matters; it is the taking part that is important.” Or so I was brought up to believe. The spirit of the game embodied in the Olympics and other self-supportive, nurturing ideas have provided a framework for individuals, organisations, and governments to praise the winners whilst not forgetting to value everyone who takes part.

But the X-Factor, the World Cup and the forthcoming election are all about the winner, and the economic crisis couldn’t have triggered a realignment of society’s values if the gap between winners and losers hadn’t grown so big.

And that is also happening online. That sense of the web being free for all, where anyone-can-join and anyone-can-participate is fast becoming, as in life, a place where only the top 3 count.

Google has been the first to clearly mark the finish line; we all know that the top 3 search results account for 80% of clicks. The rest sink into oblivion. The next was Twitter with the launch of the ‘promoted Tweets’, which allowed companies to bid on keywords.

This is a powerful message to marketeers and brands: participation in the conversation alone is not enough. Having a presence on Facebook, a voice on Tweeter, an advert on Google, a page in Wikipedia does not by itself create a winner.

Targeted content written around keywords and an in-depth knowledge of the consumer, the things that they want, the things they search for and aspire to will mark out the strongest and the fittest. And there are plenty of tools both online and offline to help on the targeting journey: Google’s targeted ads, HP’s customisable ads publishing software, Facebook Ads, Twitter feeds – the list goes on.

And most importantly, it won’t be about the tools anymore, but about real people and real, gripping, insightful content and ideas. The Gold medal is worth fighting for.

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The Internet Advertising Bureau has launched the new framework to measure the success of the Social Media campaigns in an attempt to standartise the framework for both clients and agencies.

The IAB Social media Council will look into finding ways to standartise the measurement metrics and explore successful case studies to propose the benchmarking activity.

More at:

http://www.nma.co.uk/news/iab-devises-ways-of-benchmarking-social-media-work/3015762.article

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Evernote, the virtual memory, filing and storage start up with a single mission of ‘helping the world remember everything’, has grown to 3.7 million users globally and today launched Trunk. Evernote’s Trunk is part App store part an expanding showcase of their integration capabilities and services. The company announced plans for further expansion into social media sharing as well as analytics and search.

Source: http://blogs.ft.com/techblog/2010/07/evernote-extends-elephant-memory-with-trunk/

Source: http://blog.evernote.com/2010/07/14/the-evernote-trunk/

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Unsurprisingly, pretty much all students in the US (and I’m sure most developed nations) have mobile devices with a large portion (51.2%) of those being smart phones. According to a recent survey, reported in eMarketer Daily, a vast majority of those young adults responds negatively to mobile ads – in particular those of a ‘pushed’ text/sms nature. Given the forum to voice their complaints, many even indicated they would be less likely to buy a product from advertisers and even suggested compensation for being exposed to ads  (as much as a $1 per ad) would be suitable)!

As with all surveys , research studies and resulting statistics you have to put this into context if and where one exists and, of course (as a footnote to the article it does say that attitudes are softening towards mobile marketing). This study doesn’t take into account the relevance of the ads to the market, i.e. whether the ads were targeted or not, the quality of the messaging, the value of the product or service, or any other contextual basis for understanding the validity of mobile ads.

The fact remains, as this article starts out, that almost all young adults own a mobile device and use them as their primary connection to the (digital) world beyond, and that this are extremely important segment for many marketers/brands.

What digital agencies must do of course, is use this kind of data to build extremely relevant, highly targeted campaigns that utilize an entire toolbox of digital and traditional platforms to reach an audience. So, whilst Ido believe that ‘engaging’ with an audience by being part of a long term conversation is one of the most powerful ways to influence the decision making process, I do understand that all media from banners to mobile ads make up important parts for a very large puzzle.

My hope is that the marketing managers at the brands themselves don’t give into sensationalist headlines and consider the bigger picture, or at least allow the experts to provide it.

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Every industry it seems is going ‘forensic’.

There are forensic medics, forensic lawyers, forensic accountants, forensic economists, forensic engineers and last but not least… forensic marketing. In the wiki descriptions of all the above, there is an an immediate sense of an almost alien brain’s effort required, some incomprehensible intelligence required to decipher and prophet – the Mulder and Scully’s.

In Marketing? In Digital? With so much data available for measurement, evaluation, research and insight, available at a click of a Google button to all of us. Perhaps the time has come for a re-definition. A question is though: should it still remain a dissection of case study material, mathematical analysis of human behavior and drawing of proven equations of social patterns, producing long reports and filling databases or perhaps, better, should it encompass what web 2.0 is all about?

People. Web 2.0 is about people. People talking, people calling, people tagging, people chatting, viewing, recommending, liking, digging, tweeting, poking and every/any other form of a blend between the cyber-human interaction.

Hence a thought towards the re-definition and taking forensic marketing to a new level of forensic as personal, forensic as identifying the reason for a behaviour, a habit and the trigger.

The emerging field of forensic marketing is defined as dealing with individual people, their personal habits, their social patterns, digital prints and cyber paths. But it is in danger of over-complicating things; all we need to do is listen.

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We make some very important decisions every day and whether life critical or strictly for pleasure, every decision requires thinking and weighing the alternatives. The closer we get to the moment when we need to make a decision, the more nervous we get and the more help we instinctively look for. Now lets leave the life’s critical decisions for the moment to concentrate on one decision that most people have the luxury for: Lunch. Rather, getting distracted from your desk and having the liberating 10mins to an hour for picking the special treat for your daily, traditional and much anticipated lunch break.

Imagine this: it’s 11am in your office and you are starting to get hungry, you are already shifting in your seat and thinking of what will you choose. Come 12pm and you are racing through…a salad, no a healthy burger…no maybe a delicious fish pie. 12.30: Still undecided and highly receptive to anything that bears the food connection you overhear your colleagues’ quick poll for lunch today. 12.45 going, going, gone. And you choose the office favourite (the local burger with chips).

Then, the clock strikes 4 and an email lands in your inbox tempting you with tomorrow lunchtime’s delicious meals, sandwiches and all you could have wished and hoped for back at 11am …. Come tomorrow and that email is so far up your email list or filed or lost in your Blackberry or iPhone, that you are back where you started at 11am: your office thinking of things to try.

Now if that email came at 11am? The queue that day would have doubled.

Being able to reach customers is key but reaching them at key times is crucial. And that’s what Digital as a field and Digital Strategy in particular enables to do best. Results? Always a happier customer and increased ROI.

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