A Consumer Electronics Association and Yahoo study found that 77% of electronics purchases are researched online before customers head to a store. [CEA via E-Consultancy news blog, October 2006]
Internet advertising will account for more than 10% of all ad expenditure in two markets this year. In the UK it will account for 12.9% of total expenditures, and in Sweden it will take 10.5%. [ZenithOptimedia, October 2006]
As marketers and media companies try to better utilize online video advertising to communicate with consumers, research is starting to identify what works and what doesn’t creatively. Our November 2006 Beyond The Click® demonstrated the power of online video campaigns in their ability to positively move all branding metrics compared to overall MarketNorms®. With more data, we begin to see a wider range and variance in effectiveness. While video norms in general are positive, there are some dramatic differences in the results of the most memorable and least memorable video campaigns.
To read the rest of the article click here
The blogosphere is 100 times larger than it was just three years ago. [Technorati, via E-consultancy news blog, August 2006]
6.6% of the UK online population use RSS feeds. [Harris Interactive/Guardian Unlimited, October 2006]
Having played and worked with internet technologies for over a decade I thought the bad old days were coming to an end. After 5 years Microsoft had finally released an update to their flagship browser Internet Explorer. Whilst not perfect IE7 is definitely a step forward in terms standards compliance. Now this may not mean much to the lay-person but to my development team and I it was music to our ears. Standard compliance put simply means we can develop to this standard safe in the knowledge that most browsers will display the work we create in the same way.
Happy times ahead it seemed, well apparently no. It seems with Microsoft us developers are doomed not to have an easy life. For although they have taken a tentative step forward with IE7 they have taken a huge step backwards with their imminent release of Outlook 2007.
Without getting too technical, previous releases of Outlook have always used IE as their rendering engine, in other words if a HTML email looked correct in IE you could guarantee it would look the same in Outlook. Now in their wisdom they have decided to change this in the next release of Outlook, instead of using IE, essentially Outlook will be using Word to render HTML content.
So when I say this is a big step back it really is, and whilst I understand some of the reasoning behind this move, it still heralds some interesting times ahead. At Five by Five we have consistently been producing creative yet effective email campaigns for many years, so as an experienced team we know what worked and what didn’t. Using our extensive back catalogue of email campaigns as testing material I have been testing a range of emails. The results were, well to put it mildly, horrendous. At best the emails were slightly broken, in some cases so garbled it was almost funny.
So it looks like, in both development and design, with HTML emails it will be back to basics.
Further Reading:
Internet Explorer is still the main browser of choice for 88% of Britons online, but its share of the market has decreased by 9% over the last two years. [Source: Nielsen//NetRatings, December 2006]
The team at Five by Five went to an interesting conference yesterday where the VP of Marketing of the Mentos mint brand talked to us about how UGC (user generated content) allowed them to reach a massive audience. All you need is a bottle of diet coke and some Mentos Mints. You can check the movie out that started an American Mentos road show and ultimately a growth in Mentos and Diet Coke sales on You Tube - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8J4RdX5H8Y
Remember do try this at home and if you would like a copy of the Mentos presentation please email mark.cox@fivebyfivedigital.com
Older people are missing out on critical services because they do not use the internet. Just 28% of people over the age of 65 have home internet access, compared to a UK average of 57% of households. [Ofcom, July 2006]
European consumers are now spending more time online than reading newspapers and magazines. [Jupiter Research, October 2006]