comScore Chairman Gian Fulgoni to Present Update on Q1 2012 E-Commerce Trends in Upcoming Webinar

RESTON, VA – comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, today released its Q1 2012 U.S. retail e-commerce sales estimates, showing that online retail spending reached $44.3 billion for the quarter, up 17 percent versus year ago. This represents the tenth consecutive quarter of positive year-over-year growth and sixth consecutive quarter of double-digit growth.

“The first quarter of this year was especially strong for retail e-commerce as we returned to year-over-year growth rates in the high teens, numbers we haven’t seen since 2007,” said comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni. “While the economic recovery continues to be painfully slow, the channel shift to e-commerce appears to be accelerating. This presents opportunities but also challenges for brick-and-mortar retailers if they can’t hold onto their offline market share in the digital world. E-commerce has reached critical mass in several product categories, and it will be important to monitor these sales trends by category in order to correctly gauge the impact e-commerce is having on overall retailer performance.”

Other highlights from Q1 2012 include:

• The top-performing online product categories were: Digital Content & Subscriptions, Computer Software, Consumer Electronics, Jewelry & Watches and Event Tickets. Each category grew at least 17 percent vs. year ago.
• 48.8 percent of e-commerce transactions included free shipping, the highest percentage for a quarter on record outside of the holiday season. Only Q4 2011 (51.8 percent) and Q4 2010 (49.3 percent) have been higher overall.
• According to comScore’s Q1 2012 Retail survey, 38 percent of tablet owners have made a purchase on their devices within the past month. Apparel was the most popular category for purchase among tablet shoppers.

Webinar Series: State of the U.S. Online Retail Economy through Q1 2012

Join Gian Fulgoni and Andrew Lipsman, VP of Industry Analysis, as they present an update of the state of the U.S. online retail economy through Q1 2012 in a live webinar on Thursday, May 17 from 2-3 p.m. EST / 1-2 p.m. CST / 11-12 p.m. PST. New topics being covered include retail “showrooming” and shopping behavior on tablets.

To register for the webinar, please visit: www.comscore.com/SOR_Q1_2012_Webinar

About comScore
comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR) is a global leader in measuring the digital world and preferred source of digital business analytics. For more information, please visit www.comscore.com/companyinfo.

New Research from Pretarget and comScore Suggests that Buyer Conversion is More Highly Correlated with Ad Viewability and Hover than with Clicks or Gross Impressions

SAN FRANCISCO and RESTON, VA – comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, and Pretarget, the intent targeting company, today released results of an online advertising study which found that ad viewability and hover time are more strongly correlated with conversions (defined as purchases and requests for information) than clicks or total impressions.

“Your ad being seen matters more than your ad being clicked – if you have a back-end conversion metric,” said Pretarget Founder Keith Pieper. “After all, what good is an ad that can’t be seen? It’s intuitive that an ad must be seen to make an impact, and it’s even more intuitive than someone hovering and engaging with an ad might convert, even absent a click.”

Research Methodology & Approach

To arrive at these initial findings, Pretarget analyzed 263 million impressions over nine months across 18 advertisers in numerous verticals. Pretarget used comScore validated Campaign Essentials™ (vCE) to collect viewability and hover data and a DSP to collect click and cookie-based conversion data. Pretarget then performed a Pearson correlation analysis of the data, including gross impressions, “views” (75 percent of ad within screen, either above the fold or after scrolling)*, time in-view, hover/engagements and total hover/engagement time, clicks and conversions.

Traditional display ad impression measurement and reporting simply verifies the number of ads that were sent by an ad server to a user’s browser. For a variety of reasons, this way of counting impressions does not ensure that the ad ever rendered within a browser. In addition, ads can load below the fold (requiring a user to scroll down), which means that most users will probably never see the ad unless they scroll down. In the worst cases, some ads load within 1×1 pixels and therefore never render as viewable impressions.

Research Findings Show Ad Hover Most Highly Correlated with Conversion

The research findings indicate that the traditional way of buying mass impressions and hoping for conversions (aka “spray and pray”) is not the most effective approach. The results showed that ad hover/interaction (correlation = 0.49) and viewable impressions (correlation = 0.35) had highest correlation with conversion, while gross impressions (correlation = 0.17) was significantly lower. Perhaps most interestingly, clicks (correlation = 0.01) had the lowest correlation with conversion, far under-performing all other metrics analyzed in the study. These findings suggest that advertisers and media planners ought to break their addiction to clicks and instead look to more meaningful metrics for evaluating campaign performance.

“The Pretarget study helps illuminate several critically important findings for the digital advertising community,” said Kirby Winfield, SVP of Corporate Development, comScore. “First, it once again demonstrates the perils of relying on click-throughs for measuring the performance of display ad campaigns, with this metric showing virtually zero correlation with total conversions. Secondly, it highlights why the viewable impression – which is now easily measurable through vCE – is significantly more meaningful than the unvalidated impression. Finally, this study shows why other non-click metrics of engagement, such as interaction or hovering, may be much more important in evaluating campaign performance than the click ever was. It’s time to start measuring the impact of campaigns using metrics that really matter, not just the ones that are most easily measured.”

The Pretarget analysis supports several third party studies with consistent conclusions. MediaMind “2009 Benchmark Report” released in July 2010 found that “on average, increasing Dwell [hover] from 5% to 15%, increases conversion rate by 45%, from 0.4% to 0.6%.” Casale Media’s 2011 “Ad Visibility Report,” found that “ads appearing above the fold were 6.7x more effective at generating conversions than those appearing below the fold.”

Pretarget previously found that approximately 89 percent of display ads on its network load above the fold or appear after a user scrolls down, creating an opportunity for a user to see the banner. Pretarget’s position paper is available for download at http://www.pretarget.com

To participate in additional research as part of a broader study, please contact info@pretarget.com

*The Making Measurement Make Sense (3MS) defines “in-view” as 50%+ of the pixels of an ad being visible in the browser, and comScore vCE adheres to this definition for its typical definition of “in-view”. The Pretarget studies, however, used a more conservative in-view requirement of 75% visibility.

About Pretarget
Pretarget offers keyword based intent ad targeting using patented and patent-pending internet search and behavioral algorithms that reach users “ahead of the click”. Pretarget’s hybrid contextual-behavioral targeting complements existing search and retargeting campaigns with custom keyword based segmentation. No site tagging is needed. Pretarget is well suited for online advertisers who have maxed out search, find site retargeting offers little scale, are fiercely competitive and see the value of an ad impression.

About comScore validated Campaign Essentials (vCE)
vCE is a holistic solution for complete campaign delivery validation and in-flight optimization. Unlike existing single-point solutions, vCE provides an unduplicated accounting of impressions delivered across a variety of dimensions, such as ads delivered in-view, to the right audience, in the right geography, in a brand safe environment and absent of fraudulent delivery. vCE reports on reach and frequency, comprehensive demographics and behavioral segments. This measurement eliminates all impressions that never had a chance to make an impact, providing a more realistic and accurate picture of campaign delivery.

About comScore
comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR) is a global leader in measuring the digital world and preferred source of digital marketing intelligence. For more information, please visit www.comscore.com/companyinfo.

validated Campaign Essentials™ (vCE) Enhances Transparency and Accountability for Digital Advertising Market

LONDON, UK  - comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, announced the UK launch of its validated Campaign Essentials™ (vCE) product, a new measurement solution for validating digital ad delivery. vCE is an innovation that enables the advertising industry to measure verified impressions across key areas such as visibility, targeting and brand safety.

vCE enables a comprehensive, holistic view of validated impressions, which can be expressed as ‘validated gross rating points’, or vGRPs. This new metric reflects measurement of ads that were not only delivered, but that had an opportunity to have an impact on consumers. Validated impressions are also the basis for vCE’s campaign audience reports, which include reach and frequency, comprehensive demographics, and behavioural segments, providing measurement of only the people who have received a valid exposure to the advertising campaign.

“With nearly 800 billion display ad impressions delivered in the UK in 2011, it’s clear the online ad market today features a surplus of inventory, with many ads delivered on parts of a web page that are never viewed by the user. Ads that aren’t seen by the target audience can dilute the impact of campaigns for advertisers and drag down prices for publishers,” said Mike Read, SVP and managing director of comScore Europe. “The ability to measure validated impressions, which are delivered in-view to the right target audience, in a brand safe environment, will help increase transparency and accountability for online campaigns. As we help to enhance advertisers’ trust in the digital medium to deliver desired results, the flow of marketing expenditure is likely to follow.”

vCE Charter Study Findings 
To better understand the quality of ad delivery today and to start an informed discussion across markets, comScore conducted a European vCE Charter Study to measure if ads had an opportunity to be seen by the target consumer, in the right geography, next to appropriate ‘brand safe’ content and absent of fraudulent delivery.
The European charter study included 15 campaigns from advertisers such as Kellogg’s, Nivea, P&G, Ralph Lauren and Telefónica (O2) and analysed 640 million impressions, across 213,000 publisher sites without requiring publisher site pixels. Impressions across all delivery methods including iframes were measured.

The following results are the highlights from the first phase of our European study.

• Across the European charter campaigns measured, 67 percent of ad impressions were classified as being ‘in-view.’* The remaining 33 percent were delivered but never seen by a consumer, a likely result of a consumer scrolling past the ad before it loaded or a consumer never scrolling the ad into view. In-view percentages varied by site and ranged from 64 percent to 72 percent.
• An average of 7 percent of ad impressions were delivered outside the desired geography, but individual campaigns ran as high as 27 percent. In many cases, ads were served in markets where the advertised product is not sold, meaning wasted ad spend and sub-optimal effectiveness results.
• 67 percent of Charter Study campaigns had at least some ads running next to content deemed “not brand safe” by the advertiser, meaning that the content is deemed objectionable by the brand. This type of unsafe delivery has the potential to damage the brand, creating a difficult situation for all members of the digital advertising ecosystem.

The above is part of a global initiative to support industry discussions on validated impressions. The full results from the US-based vCE Charter Study involving online advertising campaigns for 12 premium advertisers, are available for download here:http://www.comscore.com/vce-charter-study.

*In the UK, a standard for ‘in-view’ hasn’t been defined yet. For this charter study the parameters recommended by the American initiative, ‘Making Measurement Make Sense’, consisting of the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), the American Association of National Advertisers (4A’s) and the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB.) have been used as a guideline. These parameters say that at least 50 percent of the advertisement must be viewable for at least 1 second in order to be considered in-view.

Industry Leaders on vCE and vGRP
“At Kellogg’s we have tripled our digital marketing spend over the past few years and are continually seeking ways to get the most return from the investment. One of the key factors justifying this shift is the ability of online to measure every impression – from visibility to targeting effectiveness. Our aim is to make sure media plans deliver the intended brand impact and vCE gives us the visibility we need to achieve this.”
––Matt Pritchard, European Digital Director at Kellogg’s

“In order for our clients to have the same confidence in the digital channel as they do in TV, they need reliable measurement that validates ad delivery. The insights from comScore’s vCE solution and the possibility to optimise campaigns in-flight, helps our clients to reach relevant audiences and improve the overall efficiency of online advertising.”
– Paul Silver, Head of Product for Audience on Demand (AOD), VivaKi

“The inclusion of vCE within the overall comScore suite of tools will offer us another metric to provide to our clients with the type of data they require and have been seeking for many years. They want to know that the money they are spending online is doing its job and will actually have a chance to make an impact. This type of third-party, holistic validation is a great start to do just that and is a win for all parties in the industry. Once standards are in place this can and will serve as a new currency in the marketplace.”
–– Julian Zilberbrand, SVP Global Digital Director, Technology Activation Group, Starcom Mediavest Group

About comScore
comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR) is a global leader in measuring the digital world and preferred source of digital business analytics. For more information please visit www.comscore.com/companyinfo

Study Conducted with EXPO Shows Persuasive Elements of User-Generated Product Videos Lift Brand Affinity When Used in Tandem with Professionally-Produced Content

NEW YORK, NY and RESTON, VA – comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, and EXPO, the first consumer network focused on creating and distributing high impact product videos to drive engagement and conversion, released the results of a study on the synergy of professionally-produced video content and user-generated product videos in marketing campaigns. The study evaluated an actual campaign that included a combination of a professionally-produced “how to” video and a user-generated product video that was created and submitted by an actual product user. The results of the study indicate that professionally-produced video content and user-generated product videos are highly synergistic, driving higher levels of sales effectiveness when used in tandem.

“This study aimed to answer a critical question for today’s digital advertisers: ‘how do user-generated videos complement professionally-produced content, if at all.’ What we found was strong evidence of incremental benefit with exposure to both forms of media,” said Frank Findley, Vice President, Research and Development at comScore. “In the campaign examined, professionally-produced content and product videos drove strikingly higher lifts when used together than when either was used individually. While marketers may already be familiar with the effectiveness of professional video content alone, these results suggest that even greater returns can be had by combining their use with authentic, user-generated content.”

Unique Combination Dramatically Increases Sales Effectiveness

The first group of consumers participated in a veiled exercise in order to determine the sales effectiveness of the professionally-produced content, the user-generated content, and both together. Professionally-produced content generated a 24.7 point lift in Share of Choice for the featured product and a 16 point lift for the brand’s total line. User-generated product videos drove an 18.7 point lift in Share of Choice for the featured product compared to a 10 point lift for the brand’s total line. When exposed to both professional content and user-generated product videos, lift in Share of Choice for the featured product jumped to 35.3 points for the featured product and 28 points for the brand’s total line. This demonstrates not only the value of each of these media individually, but also the powerful combination when used together.

Significant Lifts Seen in Favorable Perceptions of Advertising When Used Together

A second group of consumers participated in a cued exposure exercise and were surveyed after being directly exposed to the content. On its own, professionally-produced content resulted in a higher percentage of respondents understanding the importance of the key message presented than user-generated content, while the user-generated product videos were more successful at producing emotional intensity, key message communication, and ease of relating to. When consumers were exposed to both professionally-produced and user-generated content, the combined increases were greater than for either of the individual media exposures.

“It seems that professionally-produced content and user-generated product videos are each successful at delivering different key elements to a consumer through video ‘advertising’,” said Jessica Thorpe, Vice President of Marketing at EXPO. “We found that consumers perceived feature benefits as more believable when coming directly from the brand through professionally-produced content, while the unbiased user-gen videos were more believable in verifying specific product claims, such as superiority and convenience. When used together, all of the perceived gaps get filled in and consumers become more confident in their purchase decision, resulting in better sales effectiveness from the advertising.”

About Share of Choice
comScore’s Share of Choice metric is the most well-documented and independently-validated measure of advertising effectiveness in the world. Share of Choice quantifies the ability of an ad to influence brand preference and has been shown to be predictive of advertising-induced sales. The metric captures actual consumer preference for a brand among a competitive set. Therefore, lifts in Share of Choice have been proven to strongly correlate with in-market sales lifts.

About comScore
comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR) is a global leader in measuring the digital world and preferred source of digital business analytics. For more information, please visit www.comscore.com/companyinfo.

About EXPO
EXPO (www.expotv.com) is the first consumer network focused on creating and distributing high impact product video to drive engagement and conversion. The company’s end-to-end solution captures, manages and publishes persuasive consumer video for leading manufacturers and retailers. Through EXPO’s platform, clients can harness their own brand enthusiasts and fans or rely on EXPO’s community of consumers to produce authentic video content, such as product reviews, how-to’s, demonstrations, recipes and other topics relevant to a client’s brand. EXPO guarantees the content’s quality and timeliness, allowing brands and agencies to use the video to support campaign messages, communicate new product benefits, capture video SEO, or simply spark engagement on social platforms. Clients can leverage EXPO’s proprietary distribution network to ensure the videos are placed on product pages of top retailers, social networks, and across all owned and mobile destinations.

New York – On the heels of a record Q4, the first quarter of 2012 generated continued, strong year-over-year growth for search advertising. Q1 2012 had a YoY growth in search spend of 30.3% — more than double the rate of both Q1 2011 and Q1 2010. During this time Yahoo!/Bing reasserted itself with the highest market share of their partnership.

Mobile search advertising continued strong growth YoY, with 67.4% of the mobile activity coming from tablets, showing the incredible adoption of these devices. Meanwhile, the global travel vertical had an unseasonably strong Q1 in search advertising with a 58.9% increase in expenditures.

These figures are released quarterly by IgnitionOne, a leading digital marketing solutions firm, managing more than $1 billion in online advertising.

Key findings in the report:

• Yahoo!/Bing have strongest showing since Q2 2010 – With a strong Q1 Yahoo!/Bing showed signs of a rebound with a 46.4% increase in US search advertising spend YoY compared to Google’s less expansive 26.6% growth YoY. And while Q1 search spend is normally down quarter over quarter due to the spike in holiday spending in Q4, Yahoo!/Bing posted a 14.3% increase in spend vs. Google’s decrease QoQ of 5.4%. The robust quarter may be attributed to Yahoo!/Bing’s push for increased utilization of broad match keywords, which leads to more competition in auctions. This growth also propelled Yahoo!/Bing to a 21.2% market share – their best quarter since before the two combined forces.
• Tablets drive usage as mobile stays strong in US – Mobile search accounted for 12.3% of total search advertising spend in Q1, holding steady following an amazing Q4. Mobile clicks were up 246.1% YoY, showing acceleration over the last quarter. Impressions were up 119.9% and ad spend was up 221.1% YoY, but both showed slower growth than the preceding quarter. Much of the mobile search activity can be attributed to tablet devices which accounted for 67.4% of total mobile search advertising budgets for the quarter. In addition, tablet click through rates of 3.1% were higher than those for PC of 2.5%
• Travel vertical has breakout quarter globally – In a time of the year that normally is soft for travel search advertising, there was impressive growth in activity and spend in Q1 compared to the same time period last year. Travel demand (impressions and clicks) was up by 34.6% and 34.1% respectively, and search spend among travel marketers increased 58.9% YoY. Revenue for travel grew by a large margin with a YoY increase of 32.3%

“This was a very successful Q1 on many fronts. The Yahoo!/Bing turnaround was arguably the most interesting with an uptick coming primarily from the adoption of broad match targeting by marketers,” said Roger Barnette, President of IgnitionOne. “And while the growth in mobile ad spend has been an ongoing trend, I am impressed by the level of activity and click-throughs on tablets. This should be a wakeup call for marketers who are not yet leveraging search advertising on these devices.”

This report is the latest in a series of reports from IgnitionOne reviewing trends across the online advertising landscape. This report can be found at http://bit.ly/HaCoih. Previous quarterly reports can be downloaded at http://bit.ly/ignitiononeresearch.

About IgnitionOne

IgnitionOne, the global leader in digital marketing solutions, enables companies to integrate cross-channel marketing efforts within one platform, allowing for deeper insights and greater online success. Managing over $1 billion of advertising annually across search, display and social, IgnitionOne provides the world’s top marketers with media optimization, cross-channel attribution and website conversion solutions. IgnitionOne’s solutions are backed by proprietary, best of breed technology: IgnitionOne’s Digital Marketing Suite^SM.

IgnitionOne currently powers more than $30 billion in revenue each year for leading brands, including General Motors, Chico’s, Ann Taylor, La Quinta, Travel Guard and Fiat, as well as advertising agencies such as MRM Worldwide and CyberAgent.

For more information, please visit http://www.ignitionone.com or follow the company on Twitter @ignitionone.

Trust Index Shows that Ongoing Verification and Remediation Reduce Noncompliance and Increase Brand Safety

NEW YORK - DoubleVerify, the pioneer and worldwide leader in online media verification and real-time decisioning, today published its 2H 2011 Trust Index. The report highlights the positive impact that verification has had on the ad-serving industry in increasing accountability, transparency and insertion order compliance. It shows how campaign compliance is further strengthened when combined with blocking and remediation.

As part of the Trust Index research, DoubleVerify analyzed campaigns across more than 30 platforms and 150 networks and identified the most compliant ad networks from July to December 2011 as (alphabetically): 24/7 Real Media, aCerno, AudienceScience, Epic Marketplace, Microsoft Media Network, RocketFuel, Specific Media, ValueClick, and Yahoo! Network Plus and interclick from Yahoo!. Advertising platforms that were most compliant include (alphabetically): Cadreon, a part of the Mediabrands Audience Platform, MediaMath, and Xaxis.

“DoubleVerify is making a significant impact on the online-advertising industry,” said Oren Netzer, CEO of DoubleVerify.  “Verification and remediation continue to play a vital role in increasing industry transparency as well as driving displayadvertising compliance and campaign ROI.”

The Trust Index’s analysis of the second half of 2011 highlights the enormous improvements to noncompliance that comprehensive verification, combined with active remediation and blocking, brings to a campaign. Once remediation and verification take full effect, incident rates drop dramatically. Campaigns starting after July 1, 2011, saw a 25 percent drop in noncompliance rates after verification services started. By adding weekly remediation, campaigns showed a 46 percent improvement in average rate of noncompliance over campaigns using only verification. Blocking is another valuable way for providers to reduce noncompliance — one campaign saw 7 times higher average rates of compliance for the partners on which blocking was used.

In both 2H 2011 and 2H 2010, trends pointed to greater noncompliance at the end of the year, with 2H 2011 traffic increasing by more than 57 percent. The weeks surrounding Black Friday and Cyber Monday saw jumps in traffic up to 23 percent above the 2H 2011 average and noncompliance rates 12 percent above average. This increase in noncompliance was considerably larger on unverified traffic.

 Other highlights include:

• 44 percent of ads on verified campaigns were served below the fold (compared to 47 percent in 1H 2011)
• 13 percent of advertising pages included multiple ads for the same campaign (compared to 14 percent in 1H 2011)

DoubleVerify examined metrics from hundreds of advertisers, thousands of verified campaigns and more than 200 billion impressions to produce this bi-annual report, which can be downloaded at www.trustinadvertising.info and www.doubleverify.com/trustindex.

 About DoubleVerify

DoubleVerify (www.doubleverify.com) is the worldwide leader in online media verification and real-time decisioning. It is the top choice of marketers, agencies, ad networks, demand side platforms, exchanges and publishers looking to ensure quality advertising environments, campaign transparency and performance. DoubleVerify handles over 60 billion advertising impressions per month for hundreds of leading Fortune 500 marketers, advertising networks and platforms. A World Economic Forum 2012 Technology Pioneer, DoubleVerify is headquartered in New York City, with sales offices in London and engineering offices in Tel Aviv, Israel. Investors inDoubleVerify include JMI Equity, Institutional Venture Partners, Blumberg Capital, First Round Capital and Genacast Ventures.

Biggest gains seen for brands with less than 1 million fans; “pinned” content such as photos and videos also shown to dramatically increase engagement

Redwood City, Calif. –  Wildfire, the global leader in social media marketing software, today shared results of an analysis of early brand adopters of Facebook’s Timeline, which launched on February 29, 2012. Wildfire’s research shows that for the majority of brands, the switch to Timeline had a very large, positive impact, with double-digit increases in metrics such as Likes Per Brand Post, Comments Per Brand Post and “People Talking about This” (PTAT). It also showed that the new layout boosted performance of rich-media content such as photos and videos.

Key findings include:

1. Brands with less than 1 million fans got a sizable boost from switching to Timelines.

For brands with less than one million fans, which represent about 85 percent of the company pages on Facebook, the effect on engagement of switching to Timelines was very positive. Likes Per Brand Post increased by 60 percent, Comments Per Brand Post increased by 40 percent and PTAT spiked by 67 percent.

A smaller increase in engagement was noted with brands sized between one to ten million fans. For these brands, Likes Per Brand Post increased by about 14 percent, and PTAT increased by nearly 29 percent. However, Comments Per Brand Post for this group actually decreased by about 17 percent.

The data showed that brands with more than 10 million fans actually saw decreases across all measures; however, the brands in this category were all participants in Facebook’s Timeline debut, which generated significant media attention and inflated engagement numbers for these brands at the time of the launch.

Despite the significant differences in engagement activity after the implementation of Timeline for brands, there was little change seen in Facebook Fan Growth Rate. Though Timeline is more engaging, the increased engagement doesn’t necessarily translate to an increase in fan count. People are interacting with pages without becoming fans, and continue to be very selective about which brands they will publicly like.

2. Photo and video posts perform better in the new Timeline layout.

Prior to Timeline, status updates were the best ways to generate likes and comments, outperforming the next best post type by about 22 percent and 17 percent respectively, while video posts were the best way to generate shares, outperforming the next-best type of post by nearly 70 percent.

With the new visual structure of the Timeline, performance of photo and video posts increased significantly. This visual media has more screen real estate and is displayed very prominently – videos and photos posted to the Timeline attract more attention from users, and the engagement numbers reflect this. Photos are now tops when it comes to generating comments, outperforming the next-best post type by more than 8 percent. Video posts in the new Timeline layout now outperform the next-best post type at generating shares by 90 percent.

3. Pinned posts may perform better than regular posts, with pinned photo posts performing best.

Brands can now opt to “pin” or “feature” content in their Timeline to give it more prominence, and since February 29, the brands Wildfire tracked generated 98 featured posts and 18 pinned posts, out of 2,228 posts analyzed. Although this is a small sample size, early indicators point to superior performance for pinned posts, but little change in performance for most types of featured posts. Wildfire’s preliminary findings suggest that brands could be more successful by pinning posts with greater frequency.

On a per-post basis, pinned posts performed better than regular posts, generating 39 percent more Likes, 6 percent more comments and 32 percent more shares than regular posts. Pinning a photo may boost engagement even more: on a per-post basis, pinned photo posts generated 44 percent more likes, 3 percent more comments and 63 percent more shares than regular photo posts.

Featured video posts were tops when it comes to generating shares – featured video posts outperformed any other type of featured or pinned content by 3.77x, and outperformed regular video posts by 2x.

“With the debut of Timelines for brands on February 29th, brands and marketers everywhere wondered whether the major changes to fan page functionality would cause noticeable differences in engagement activity,” said Jordan Drewitt, Director of Analytics at Wildfire. “Our analysis shows the new Timeline format offering significant opportunities for brands to boost engagement with their content and their pages.”

To download the report, please visit:

http://lp.wildfireapp.com/TimelinesEffect.html?utm_source=Press_Release&utm_medium=PR

About the Wildfire Timeline for Brand Pages Study

Wildfire compiled a statistically significant analysis of 43 early-adopter brands of Facebook’s Timeline, looking to understand engagement statistics such as People Talking about This (PTAT), Likes per Page Post, Comments per Page Post, and Fan Growth Rate for brand pages of all sizes of a representative cross-section of brands that switched on day one. The brands were tracked over Jan 18 – Mar 23, 2012. 45 percent of the brands tracked had less than 1 million fans, 40 percent had between 1 million and 10 million fans, and the remaining 15 percent had greater than 10 million fans.

About Wildfire

Wildfire is the global leader in social media marketing software, with over 13,000 paying customers worldwide, including 30 of the world’s 50 most valuable brands. Wildfire’s Social Marketing Suite combines best-of-breed social promotion and advertising software, robust mobile and desktop page management, messaging and sophisticated real-time analytics in one complete platform. Wildfire’s powerful and intuitive software allows creative marketers and non-technical managers alike to create social campaigns and pages, communicate with their social audience and measure social media performance. Brands and agencies such as Facebook, Virgin, Amazon, Target and Ogilvy as well as thousands of small businesses use the Wildfire platform to engage with audiences on major social networks, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube. The only social media marketing company to receive an investment from Facebook’s fbFund, Wildfire has offices in California, Chicago, New York, London, Paris, Munich, and Singapore. For more information, please visit www.wildfireapp.com.

Study Reveals That Most Lack the Tools and Resources to Tap Data for Fast Decisions

BOSTON – Some 75% of enterprise decision makers polled in a recent survey believe that leveraging data will help their companies dramatically improve their business, yet more than half feel they currently lack the tools to mine true customer insights from the data generated by digital and offline efforts.

That was one conclusion of the 2012 Digital Marketing 2.0 Study, an online survey released today that was conducted between December 2011 and February 2012 among 350 enterprise decision makers. The survey, commissioned by DataXu (www.dataxu.com), was conducted by customer strategy firm Human 1.0 and the Society for New Communications Research (SNCR), a non-profit think tank.  Respondents included decision makers in management, marketing, communications, digital, IT and social media functions.

The study demonstrates the disconnect between the tools currently available on the market and a company’s ability to aggregate and take action on the data generated by digital consumers. The result: a majority of those polled reported their organizations were unable to sufficiently leverage data to make intelligent business decisions for their marketing efforts due to the evolution of tools, necessary job skills, and business relationships.

“The study makes clear that marketers are grasping the importance of big data to game change, but they are still looking for a way to make business-impacting decisions from the wealth of digital and customer data,” said Mike Baker, CEO and co-founder of DataXu.  “Companies who learn to effectively analyze and make decisions using real-time data will outperform their competition.”

Other study highlights:

58% of respondents said they lacked the skills and technology to perform analytics on marketing data, and more than 70% said they aren’t able to leverage the value of customer data

Only 15% of marketers said they involve the IT department—whose personnel are ostensibly more comfortable with collecting, managing and analyzing data—in marketing technology purchase decisions

90% of respondents believe that digital marketing can reduce customer acquisition costs, but 46% of respondents also agree that they lack the information to communicate the benefits of digital marketing to management.

Respondents identified the lack of a single, cross-channel digital marketing platform as the number one obstacle to the growth of digital marketing.

DataXu and Human 1.0 will discuss the results of the study in a March 29 webinar, “Marketing in the Digital Age: Why Winning Companies Compete in Data & Analytics.” To register for the webinar and download the survey white paper, please visit: www.dataxu.com/download-marketing-in-the-digital-age-whitepaper.

Hulu Streams Record 1.5 Billion Videos Ads in February

RESTON, VA – comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, today released data from the comScore Video Metrix service showing that 179 million U.S. Internet users watched nearly 38 billion videos of online video content in February.

Top 10 Video Content Properties by Unique Viewers

Google Sites, driven primarily by video viewing at YouTube.com, ranked as the top online video content property in February with 147.4 million unique viewers, followed by Yahoo! Sites with 60.9 million, VEVO with 52 million, Facebook.com with 43.6 million and Viacom Digital with 43.2 million. Nearly 38 billion video views occurred during the month, with Google Sites generating the highest number at 16.7 billion, followed by Hulu with 951 million and Yahoo! Sites with 721 million. The average viewer watched 21.8 hours of online video content, with Google Sites (7 hours) and Hulu (3.8 hours) demonstrating the highest average engagement among the top ten properties.

*A video is defined as any streamed segment of audiovisual content, including both progressive downloads and live streams. For long-form, segmented content, (e.g. television episodes with ad pods in the middle) each segment of the content is counted as a distinct video stream.

Top 10 Video Ad Properties by Video Ads Viewed

Americans viewed 7.5 billion video ads in February, with Hulu delivering a record-high number of video ad impressions at more than 1.5 billion. Google Sites ranked second with 1.1 billion video ads during the month, followed by Adap.tv with 706 million, BrightRoll Video Network with 683 million and Specific Media with 611 million. Time spent watching video ads totaled nearly 3.2 billion minutes, with Hulu delivering the highest duration of video ads at 650 million minutes. Video ads reached 50 percent of the total U.S. population an average of 49 times during the month. Hulu delivered the highest frequency of video ads to its viewers with an average of 48, while ESPN delivered an average of 26 ads per viewer.

Note: Google Sites’ video ad data includes a sizeable increase vs. previous months due to the recent inclusion of certain YouTube ad formats in our reporting. Any changes vs. previous months should not be treated as organic growth. In addition, Google Sites’ video ad data currently does not include promoted videos on YouTube or homepage ads. 
*Video ads include streaming-video advertising only and do not include other types of video monetization, such as overlays, branded players, matching banner ads, homepage ads, etc.
**Indicates video ad network
†Indicates video ad exchange

Top 10 YouTube Partner Channels by Unique Viewers

The February 2012 YouTube partner data revealed that video music channels VEVO (50.8 million viewers) and Warner Music (29.9 million viewers) maintained the top two positions. Gaming channel Machinima ranked third with 22.9 million viewers, followed by Maker Studios Inc. with 14.4 million, FullScreen with 12 million and Warner Bros (The Ellen Show) with 9 million. Among the top 10 YouTube partners, Machinima demonstrated the highest engagement (64 minutes per viewer) closely followed by VEVO (61 minutes per viewer), while VEVO streamed the most videos (674 million) followed by Machinima (344 million).

*YouTube Partner Reporting based on online video content viewing and does not include claimed user-generated content

Other notable findings from February 2012 include:

• 83.8 percent of the U.S. Internet audience viewed online video.
• The duration of the average online content video was 6.2 minutes, while the average online video ad was 0.4 minutes.
• Video ads accounted for 16.6 percent of all videos viewed and 1.3 percent of all minutes spent viewing video online.

About comScore
comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR) is a global leader in measuring the digital world and preferred source of digital business analytics. For more information, please visit www.comscore.com/companyinfo.

New YieldMetrics AdRoutes™ Offers Critical Business Insights for Advertisers, Publishers, and Technology Providers

Santa Monica, CA – YieldMetrics, a leading provider of advertising market intelligence solutions, today announced the public launch and general availability of YieldMetrics AdRoutes™, the advertising industry’s most comprehensive analytics solution. YieldMetrics also announced the release of its first AdTrends report, a quarterly look at the current state of the advertising industry.

“We’re excited to bring the power of YieldMetrics AdRoutes’ insights to the market,” said Gabe Gottlieb, CEO of YieldMetrics. “For too long, publishers, advertisers, ad networks, and technology providers have had to make decisions based on incomplete and unreliable data. Using YieldMetrics AdRoutes, our customers can inform their strategies with real-time, accurate analytics.”

Driving Business Through Data-Driven Insights

YieldMetrics AdRoutes is a groundbreaking analytics solution designed to help publishers, advertisers, ad networks, and advertising technology providers optimize their business strategies and improve their operations. YieldMetrics AdRoutes provides insights available nowhere else for sales, marketing, and business development teams. For example, YieldMetrics customers can discover:

- A full listing of competitors’ customers

- Details on an advertiser’s media plan

- A breakdown of how a publisher is selling its inventory

- The channels an advertiser is using to reach its targeted audience

- An accurate view of an advertising network’s inventory

Unlike other analytics solutions that provide only monthly or quarterly data, YieldMetrics AdRoutes is updated daily to provide the most up-to-date view of market activity. Real-time alerting enables YieldMetrics customers to react quickly to changes in the market, such as a targeted customer beginning a trial of a competitive solution.

Breakthrough Technology

YieldMetrics AdRoutes is built on a breakthrough, patent-pending technology called PathSource™. Using a farm of cloud-based, intelligent crawlers, PathSource is able to capture detailed information about advertising operations across thousands of publisher websites. For example, PathSource can identify which specific advertising networks, exchanges, and data providers a publisher is using, along with a full catalog of the specific advertisers buying inventory on that site.

Additionally, through the unique ability to follow the “path” of an advertisement, PathSource can determine the specific channels being used in the buying and selling of advertising inventory. For example, PathSource can identify whether a given impression was served via reservation or via Real-Time Bidding (RTB).

Pricing and Availability

YieldMetrics AdRoutes is available today, with site license pricing starting at $25,000 per year. For more information, please visit http://www.yieldmetrics.com/adroutes

YieldMetrics AdTrends

YieldMetrics also today released its AdTrends report for Q1, 2012. YieldMetrics AdTrends leverages YieldMetrics’ data to provide a unique snapshot of the advertising industry. AdTrends reports include detailed analyses of advertising provider market share, advertiser activity, and overall industry trends. This first edition of YieldMetrics AdTrends examines the market penetration of Real-Time Bidding, looks at who’s winning among ad networks and exchanges, and dives into the advertising of a top advertiser.

YieldMetrics AdTrends is published quarterly and available at no charge at http://adtrends.yieldmetrics.com.

About YieldMetrics
YieldMetrics, an advertising technology company, provides breakthrough market intelligence solutions to publishers, advertisers, ad networks and technology providers. Using patent-pending PathSource technology, YieldMetrics products deliver critical business insights to supercharge sales, marketing, and business development efforts. YieldMetrics is headquartered in Santa Monica, CA, and is currently self-funded. To learn more about YieldMetrics, please visit http://www.yieldmetrics.com.

New research from Crain’s BtoB Magazine underscores significant opportunities for B2B marketers to expand their marketing mix and more effectively leverage data and emerging channels in changing digital media environment

Crain’s BtoB Magazine today shared results of a comprehensive survey of business-to-business (B2B) marketers across the U.S. developed in conjunction with business audience marketing company Bizo. The data paints a vivid picture of where B2B marketing tactics are on the maturity curve and underscores a number of specific opportunities for marketers to increase the sophistication of their programs in 2012.

Crain’s BtoB Magazine and Bizo will host a free webinar on March 22nd at 2pm ET to discuss in-depth findings from the survey. To register for the webinar, please visit http://a.sw.io/Rj5fOI.

“This is a period of creative re-invention for marketers, in the end marketing will emerge as a stronger more potent discipline,” said John DiStefano, Research Director of Crain’s BtoB Magazine. “We have moved from a push environment, to pull style messaging, to finally the permission economy. While this contextualizing of the sales funnel presents challenges for some marketers, others are leveraging the new tools to reach their audiences online and drive more targeted, effective campaigns. This data shows that there is still a tremendous opportunity to further leverage new technologies and emerging channels to boost marketing results.”

Key conclusions from the survey include:

(1) Email marketing remains a top tactic, but one that’s plateauing in its ability to meet sales pipeline demands.

When asked to rank different marketing activities based on time and resources spent on each, respondents put email marketing at the top, with 49 percent saying they spend more time and resources on email than on other channels. Paid search was ranked second, with 36 percent, and display ads were ranked third, with 35 percent. Social media, which enjoys a high adoption rate among B2B marketers, also gets the least amount of their time and resources, with just 29 percent saying this tactic receives the largest share of their time and resources.

According to the survey, 59 percent of marketers also perceive email to be the most effective channel in generating revenue; however, the data also shows that the majority of B2B marketers do not feel their current online marketing mix is meeting sales demand. More than 60 percent of marketers report that their greatest marketing challenge for 2012 is generating more leads, and nearly two-thirds (63 percent) of respondents report that their marketing mix either doesn’t meet sales demand or they’re unsure of whether their mix is effective

When asked where they would spend additional time and resources to improve online marketing effectiveness, more than three-quarters (77 percent) say they plan to expand or diversify their marketing mix in 2012, and 56 percent of respondents identify brand promotion as a key area of focus. Interestingly, 88 percent of respondents report that they are using email to promote their brand online.

These findings also suggest marketers may be over-reliant on some of their more mature, well-understood programs and lag in their ability effectively add new channels to their mix.

(2) Marketers are struggling to measure the impact of their marketing programs.

Measurement continues to be tough for marketers, with nearly 40 percent of respondents citing accurate measurement and attribution of online conversions as a top online marketing challenge.

The data also shows that while email is seen as the most effective channel for lead generation, many marketers are not taking into consideration the impact of other channels on the success of email programs, particularly when it comes to full-funnel marketing channels such as display advertising. Less than 20 percent of marketers say they nearly always attribute their leads to multiple marketing programs, while the greatest of percentage of respondents (36 percent) say that they “sometimes” attribute leads to more than one program. More than one-quarter (26 percent) of respondents say they do not track leads to any marketing program at all or they only attribute leads to one program.

(3) There is still a large opportunity for marketers to use data-driven segmentation and targeting.

Data-driven targeting has evolved significantly over the past few years, but most marketers have yet to take full advantage of targeting techniques that can be deployed across all of their marketing channels. With the vast amount and range of audience data available to drive more targeted, effective campaigns, marketers have a substantial opportunity to raise the bar in 2012.

B2B marketers appear to be most comfortable using segment targeting in their email campaigns, where there is an 84 percent adoption rate, but only about one-third are using segment targeting in their display, paid search or social media programs. Those that do are also mostly using segments such as industry (65 percent), geography (56 percent), job function (55 percent) and title (49 percent).

Marketers say their biggest roadblock to effective use of segment targeting is lack of data on users (37 percent), with a close second being uncertainty about how to best use targeting and segmentation in campaigns (33 percent).

(4) Marketers report that all channels could benefit from increased optimization.

Across the board, marketers report that their online marketing programs need improvement. Nearly half (46 percent) of respondents who use email marketing say their program could benefit from increased focus and optimization (e.g., A/B testing) , while about one-quarter of those using display ads, paid search and social media report the same.

There may be less room for incremental gains when it comes to email marketing, however: with marketers’ heavy reliance and investment in this channel, 30 percent of respondents report that email is now a mature and well-optimized part of their mix, and other 46 percent view email as a core part of their mix. There may be more upside for incremental gains from paid search and display ads, as only 19 percent and 12 percent respectively see these as mature marketing programs, and only 5 percent of marketers see social media as a mature and well-optimized part of their mix.

Survey Methodology

This survey was fielded online from the period of January 18 to February 3, 2012. The true population of B2B marketing professionals in the US was researched via a 28 question online survey. A representative sample of the BtoB marketers audience was invited to participate in the survey via email. A sample of 326 completes was achieved. Confidence Interval: 94% – Margin of Error: +/- 5%

Methods and procedures adhere to the standards and ethics established by the Market Research Association (MRA-net.org). Individual participant or participant company names are not disclosed. Results are reported in aggregate only. No incentive was offered to complete the survey.

About Crain’s BtoB
BtoB is dedicated to integrated business-to-business marketing. The magazine is read by 100,000 b-to-b marketers in print and online. Every issue is filled with game-changing strategies and tactics needed for success, including news, analysis, benchmarks and best practices. BtoB also publishes a wide variety of e-newsletters addressing specific areas of b-to-b marketing, and hosts webinars, virtual trade shows and live events. BtoB is published by Crain Communications Inc., which publishes more than 20 business, trade and consumer publications and related websites in North America, Europe and Asia.

Advertising offices—711 Third Avenue, 3rd Floor, New York, NY 10017
| 212-210-0100 | www.btobonline.com | btobwebinfo@crain.com

Editorial offices—150 N. Michigan Avenue, Chicago, IL 60601
| 312-649-5200 | www.btobonline.com | btobwebinfo@crain.com

About Bizo
Bizo gives marketers instant access to the people who sign the checks at work, and have the most to spend on life: business professionals. Fueled by proprietary demographic data, the Bizo Marketing Platform precisely targets more than 100 million professionals around the world, including more than 80 percent of the U.S. business population. Bizo has won the confidence of more than 400 key brands including AMEX, Mercedes Benz, Monster, Salesforce.com, Porsche, Microsoft, AT&T and UPS who use Bizo to exert inordinate influence and effectively target their online marketing programs to the business professional audience. For more information on Bizo, or for a free look at the business demographics of your website audience, visit www.bizo.com.

DUBLIN - Research and Markets has announced the addition of the “Media in the United Kingdom” report to their offering.

Media in the United Kingdom industry profile provides top-line qualitative and quantitative summary information including: market size (value 2006-10, and forecast to 2015). The profile also contains descriptions of the leading players including key financial metrics and analysis of competitive pressures within the market. Essential resource for top-line data and analysis covering the United Kingdom media market. Includes market size and segmentation data, textual and graphical analysis of market growth trends, leading companies and macroeconomic information.

Highlights

• The media Industry consists of the advertising, broadcasting & cable TV, publishing and movies & entertainment markets. The advertising market consists of agencies providing advertising including display advertising services. The market value reflects income of the agencies from such services. The broadcasting & cable TV market consists of all terrestrial, cable and satellite broadcasters of digital and analog television programming. The market is valued as the revenues generated by broadcasters through advertising, licensing (or public donations) and subscriptions. The publishing market is valued as the retail sale of books, newspaper and magazines. The movies & entertainment market includes both producers and distributors of public entertainment formats, such as movies, music and sports.

• The UK media industry had total revenue of $41,759 million in 2010, representing a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 1.7% between 2006 and 2010.

• The B&C TV segment was the industry’s most lucrative in 2010, with total revenue of $17,649 million, equivalent to 42.3% of the industry’s overall value.

• The performance of the industry is forecast to decelerate, with an anticipated CAGR of 1.6% for the five-year period 2010-2015, which is expected to drive the industry to a value of $45,232 million by the end of 2015.

Read more inside Media in the United Kingdom

For more information visit http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/9d4e1e/media_in_the_unite

NEW YORK - Total advertising expenditures increased 0.8 percent in 2011 and finished the year at $144.0 billion, according to data released by Kantar Media, the leading provider of strategic advertising and marketing information. Ad spending during the fourth quarter of 2011 dropped 1.0 percent versus the year ago period, the first quarterly decline since the end of 2009. Since reaching a post-recession peak in Q3 2010, advertising growth rates have slowed sequentially for five consecutive quarters.

“The contrast of resilient TV spending and waning budget allocations to other traditional media was plainly evident at the end of 2011,” said Jon Swallen, SVP Research at Kantar Media Intelligence North America. “Some mature digital media formats were also touched by the year-end tide of reduced spending. Whether this is an isolated occurrence or an early sign of digital dollars moving more quickly towards emerging and unmeasured digital platforms bears watching as 2012 unfolds.”

Measured Ad Spending By Media

Television continued to lead the ad market in the fourth quarter. Network TV expenditures jumped 7.7 percent year-over-year and were helped by strong pricing for football, a baseball World Series that went the maximum seven games and the launch of The X Factor singing competition program. The rate of Cable growth eased during Q4, finishing at +2.4 percent as higher demand from restaurants and retailers was offset by reductions from consumer packaged goods. For the full year, Network TV decreased by 2.0 percent while Cable rose 7.7 percent.

Spanish language TV ad spending surged 19.1 percent in fourth quarter, paced by higher sell-out levels at over-the-air networks. For all of 2011, the segment increased 8.3 percent.

Syndication TV benefitted from higher spending by department stores and health & beauty brands and saw expenditures soar 11.0 percent in Q4. Full year spending advanced by 15.4 percent.

Spot TV expenditures fell 8.7 percent in the fourth quarter but the more significant indicator was that November and December spending were each down, despite easy comparisons against diminished, post-election spending volume of a year ago. Full year Spot TV spending dropped 4.5 percent.

Free Standing Inserts achieved healthy gains in the fourth quarter with spend rising 3.0 percent. Although manufacturers have been distributing fewer FSI coupons, retailer promotion pages have increased significantly and this contributed to the improvement.

Ad expenditures for measured digital media declined in the fourth quarter. Paid Search budgets were 6.4 percent lower versus a year ago with continuing reductions from financial, insurance and local service advertisers. Display investments decreased 5.9 percent in Q4, dragged down by smaller budgets from auto manufacturers, telecom providers and travel companies. For the entire year, Paid Search declined 2.8 percent and Display increased 5.5 percent.

Magazine ad spending eroded at year end. Consumer Magazines declined 5.2 percent in the fourth quarter due to deep cutbacks in auto, food and pharmaceutical advertising. Total year expenditures were level compared to prior year. Outlays in Sunday Magazines fell 9.8 percent in Q4, the sixth consecutive quarter of year-over-year declines, and were down 7.2 percent for all of 2011.

Local Newspaper ad expenditures fell 3.9 percent during the fourth quarter, hurt by the reallocation of retailer advertising budgets to other media channels during the key holiday shopping season. Full year spending was 3.8 percent lower. The losses in Newspaper spending are consistent with reductions in the amount of space sold.

The pace of spending in Radio media also sagged. Local Radio expenditures were down 3.8 percent and National Spot Radio plummeted 13.9 percent in the fourth quarter. The telecom, financial service and automotive categories were prime contributors to these quarterly decreases.

Source: Kantar Media

Measured Ad Spending By Advertiser

Spending among the ten largest advertisers in 2011 reached $16,061.6 million, a 2.8 percent decline compared to a year ago. Among the Top 100 marketers, a diversified group that represents over two-fifths of all measured ad expenditures, full year budgets were down 0.2 percent.

For the ninth consecutive year, Procter & Gamble was the top advertiser with spending of $2,949.1 million down 5.4 percent compared to last year. While TV is still the foundation of its advertising media buys, P&G’s 2011 budget allocation saw share gains for magazines at the expense of TV.

AT&T was the second largest advertiser in 2011 with expenditures of $1,924.6 million, a decline of 11.7 percent. Media budgets were severely curtailed during the fourth quarter when the company abandoned its attempted acquisition of T-Mobile, triggering large breakup fees and a huge earnings loss. At Verizon Communications, full year ad spending was $1,636.9 million, a decrease of 11.8 percent. After a string of quarterly budget cuts dating to early 2010, Verizon sharply boosted its spending during the last quarter.

The largest growth rate among the Top Ten marketers was posted by Chrysler, up 36.2 percent to $1,193.0 for the full year. The increase was driven by marketing introductions for several new or redesigned models, coupled with the improved sales climate for new vehicles. In contrast, General Motors lowered its 2011 outlays by 16.1 percent to $1,784.1 million. Q4 media budgets dropped 24.7 percent. As factory support has been trimmed, GM dealers have been bearing a larger share of the overall marketing effort.

L’Oreal investments in 2011 rose 18.1 percent to $1,343.5 million as the company expanded marketing support for the L’Oreal Paris, Maybelline and Garnier brand lines. Comcast (+11.3 percent, to $1,577.2 million) and Time Warner (+5.8 percent, to $1,279.4 million) also posted full year spending gains.

Measured Ad Spending By Category

Expenditures for the ten largest categories grew 3.3 percent in 2011 and reached $81,629.2 million

Automotive was the leading category in dollar volume and finished 2011 at $13,890.4 million, up 6.3 percent. Category spending growth became increasingly bifurcated during the year with Tier 2 and Tier 3 dealer budgets continuing to expand and Tier 1 manufacturer expenditures flattening.

Miscellaneous Retail, which is comprised of all retail segments except Department Stores and Home Improvement purveyors, was the second largest category with 2011 expenditures of $10,019.5 million, up 4.0 percent. Robust ad spending during the critical year-end holiday season bolstered results.

Insurance registered the largest growth rate among the Top Ten categories with a 13.5 percent gain to $5,519.0 million. Aggressive competition among auto insurers to gain market share continues to drive media budgets higher.

Financial Services totaled $9,059.9 million of spending, a 3.6 percent increase. Growth has been fueled by the credit card segment, offsetting continued weakness in ad budgets for investment products and retail banking.

The Telecom category lost ground as 2011 expenditures fell 5.8 percent to $8,649.0 million. Declines were most pronounced among the leading wireless service advertisers. Aggregates expenditures from TV service providers also slowed.

Top Spending Advertisers Within Select Media

The top ten TV advertisers spent $10,115.4 million in the medium during 2011, down 0.8 percent from a year ago. This group accounted for 14.9 percent of total TV expenditures by all advertisers.

The ten largest Internet advertisers invested a total of $2,360.6 million in paid search and display campaigns, up 10.0 percent versus a year ago. Despite fragmentation on the web, the group accounted for 10.9 percent share of all Internet ad dollars.

The top ten advertisers in Hispanic Media spent $1,403.6 million during 2011, an increase of 29.2 percent. This group accounted for 24.7 percent of all Hispanic Media expenditures, the largest Top Ten share concentration of any medium.

About Kantar Media

Kantar Media provides strategic advice and competitive intelligence to the world’s leading brands, publishers, agencies and industry bodies, helping them navigate and succeed in a rapidly evolving media industry. This includes analysis of paid media opportunities; counsel on brand reputation, corporate management and consumer engagement through owned media; and, evaluating consumers’ reactions in earned media. Kantar Media provides clients with a broad range of insights from audience research, competitive intelligence, vital consumer behavior and digital insights, to marketing effectiveness and online influence. Our experts currently work with 22,000 companies tracking 3 million brands in 50 countries.www.KantarMediaNA.com.

Males Showed 3x Higher Engagement with Online Content Videos than Females

LONDON, UK - comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, released UK data from the comScore Video Metrix service, showing online video consumption in January 2012. Online video reached 34 million UK internet users, representing 80 percent of the total UK internet audience, with Google Sites ranking as the leading video destination with nearly 30 million unique viewers. An analysis of online content video and video ad viewers showed that 64.1 percent of the online video audience was exposed to a video ad, with the 15-24 age group representing the largest video ad audience in terms of both unique viewers and engagement.

YouTube Helps Propel Google Sites as Top Online Video Destination
34.2 million UK internet users saw a total of nearly 8.4 billion videos for 58.8 billion minutes in January. While the size of the UK online video audience has not grown in the past six months, the number of videos viewed has grown 28 percent while the total time users spent engaging with online video grew 42 percent, suggesting that online video viewers continue to become more engaged over time.

For online video content, Google Sites ranked as the top property with 29.9 million unique viewers who watched nearly 3.7 billion videos for more than 15.9 billion minutes. YouTube videos accounted for 99.5 percent of all videos watched on Google Sites. Online music video destination VEVO ranked second on the list with 11.7 million unique viewers watching 177 million videos for 820 million total minutes. Rounding up the top three was social network Facebook, which attracted 8.3 million unique viewers who viewed 45.0 million videos for a total of 162 million minutes.

Males Three Times More Engaged With Online Video Content than Females
21.9 million UK internet users were exposed to a video ad stream and 33.3 million UK internet users watched a content video in January. A demographic analysis revealed that males were far more engaged with content videos, accounting for 74.7 percent of all time spent watching them compared to just females who only accounted for 25.3 percent. When it came to video ads, the gender split was more even with males accounting for 56.4 percent of all time exposed to ad videos compared to 43.6 percent for females.

15-24 year olds represented the largest age segment for content videos with 6.3 million viewers, while 4.6 million 15-24 year olds were exposed to video ads. People in this age bracket also spent the greatest amount of time engaging with content and ad videos, accounting for more than a quarter of time spent in both cases. As younger age demographics become more difficult to reach via traditional media channels, online video represents an important channel for reaching and engaging this particular audience.

* Percent of Total Time Spent: % of Time Spent Watching Content or Ad Videos by Demo Segment / % of Total Internet Population from the Demo Segment x 100

About comScore
comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR) is a global leader in measuring the digital world and preferred source of digital business analytics. For more information please visit www.comscore.com/companyinfo

Report Highlights the Latest Digital Trends in Canada and What They Mean for the Year Ahead

Toronto, Canada – comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, released the 2012 Canada Digital Future in Focus report. This annual report examines how the prevailing trends in general web usage and demographics, social media, online video, digital advertising, mobile and search are defining the current Canadian marketplace and provides insight into what these trends mean for the year ahead.

“The digital media industry in Canada is evolving in extraordinary ways, largely driven by today’s multi-platform consumer engaging with content across a variety of media,” said Bryan Segal, vice president, comScore Canada. “2012 is poised to be a defining year for digital as consumers grow their engagement with social, video, mobile and other emerging media. As Canadian businesses shift more of their ad dollars and investments online, it is more important than ever to understand the key trends being seen across platforms to devise effective marketing strategies and deliver digital ROI.”

To download a complimentary copy of 2012 Canada Digital Future in Focus report, please visit: http://www.comscore.com/2012CanadaDigitalFutureinFocus

Key insights from the 2012 Canada Digital Future in Focus include:

• Canada continues to lead the world in online engagement, with visitors spending an average 45 hours per month online, representing a fertile ground for digital marketers and advertisers.
• While Facebook is nearing a point of visitor saturation in Canada, other social networks’ visitor bases are posting strong growth, including Twitter, LinkedIn and Tumblr. Engagement on many social sites is trending upward, with Facebook driving the large majority of the increase in total minutes and page views for the overall category.
• Online video is becoming an increasingly popular channel, with total videos viewed up 58 percent. YouTube continues to dominate the marketplace, representing nearly 1 in every 2 videos viewed in Canada.
• Display advertising is evolving to be more social, not only with the rise of “socially-published ads” (i.e. those published on social networking sites), but also the increase of “socially-enabled” ads running across the web that direct click-throughs to the brand’s Facebook fan page.
• Smartphone penetration has reached 45 percent in Canada, with daily mobile content usage growing more than 50 percent in several key content categories.

Webinar – 2012 Canada Digital Future in Focus: Trends Every Marketer Needs to Know

Join Mike Wall, Director, comScore Canada, on Wednesday March 21st at 2 PM ET, as he shares key insights from the 2012 Canada Digital Future in Focus report and discusses what these trends mean for marketers in 2012. For more information and to register, please visit: http://www.comscore.com/2012_Canada_Future_in_Focus_Webinar_Registration

About comScore
comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR) is a global leader in measuring the digital world and preferred source of digital business analytics. For more information, please visit www.comscore.com/companyinfo.

New study shows that prospecting techniques can increase incremental conversion volume by up to 147% on top of conversions from offline media-driven retargeting

BOSTON, MA – DataXu (www.dataxu.com), provider of the industry’s only fully-integrated enterprise digital marketing management (DMM) platform, today released its latest MarketPulse report that examines the effects of online Prospecting techniques when used in concert with retargeting to increase conversion volume. The report analyzed data from digital marketing campaigns across the automotive, telecom, consumer services, and financial services verticals.

Advertisers today are faced with the challenge of finding new customers to grow their businesses. Retargeting (showing an ad to a consumer who has already visited a brand’s website or taken an action) is a popular and effective technique for turning browsers into buyers. However, retargeting campaigns typically don’t scale as they are inherently limited by the number of people who visit an advertiser’s website, ignoring a broad universe of untapped potential customers. One way to identify those untapped consumers is through prospecting – strategic techniques that discover pockets of dynamic demand.

DataXu’s Advanced Analytics Group (AAG) worked with several advertisers in the automotive, telecom, consumer services, and financial services markets to study the actions of the consumers who converted. The AAG segmented consumers into two groups: 1) those retargeted due to offline media such as television, and 2) those first discovered by online prospecting and later converted by retargeting. The team then measured the number of incremental conversions driven by prospecting.

The results demonstrate that advertisers looking for incremental sales can create more leads with online prospecting, and close these leads through retargeting. Additionally, the greater quantity of leads generated by prospecting reduces the pressure on advertisers to fight for every retargeting impression and potentially overpay for media.

“As the overwhelmed salesmen of the cult classic Glengarry Glen Ross contend, it’s all about having ‘the good leads,’” said Sandro Catanzaro, SVP of Analytics and Innovation and leader of the AAG at DataXu. “DataXu’s prospecting techniques identify a high volume of potential customers – ‘good leads’ – and introduce them to a brand. Retargeting works in tandem with prospecting, providing these consumers with the subtle push they need to complete a purchase.”

To download the complete MarketPulse report, view past reports, and subscribe to upcoming reports, please visit: http://www.dataxu.com/category/marketpulse/

About DataXu

DataXu has developed the industry’s only fully-integrated enterprise digital marketing management (DMM) platform – DX3. Comprised of the #1 ranked demand-side platform as well as sophisticated data management and attribution management capabilities, DX3 defines a new class of enterprise solutions that manage, optimize, and automate digital marketing initiatives to turn Big Data into profitable actions. DataXu’s executive team unites leading executives in digital media with MIT technologists. The private company is backed by Atlas Venture, Flybridge Capital Partners and Menlo Ventures. For more information, visit www.dataxu.com or follow us on Twitter at @dataxu.

Report Offers Insights on the Mobile and Connected Device Landscape in 2011 and What They Mean for 2012

RESTON, VA  - comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, released the 2012 Mobile Future in Focus report. This annual report examines the mobile and connected device landscape, covering several mobile markets measured by comScore, through an exploration of key trends driving smartphone adoption growth, mobile media usage in categories such as social networking and retail, mobile ecosystem dynamics, and shifts in multi-device digital media consumption in 2011. The report highlights insights primarily from mobile markets in the United States, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, United Kingdom, Japan, and Canada.

“2011 proved to be a groundbreaking year for the mobile industry, with smartphones hitting the mainstream, tablets emerging as a formidable fourth screen, and consumers increasingly integrating mobile behaviors into their lifestyles. As the industry continues to innovate and more consumers look to multiple devices and platforms to consume digital media, we expect the mobile and connected device landscape to be shaken up even further in 2012,” said Mark Donovan, comScore Senior Vice President of Mobile. “As mobile channels present a more personal, social, and ubiquitous experience to consumers, advertisers and publishers have an opportunity to better engage target audiences, given an understanding of how to connect and leverage the unique characteristics of these emerging platforms.”

To download a complimentary copy of 2012 Mobile Future in Focus report, please visit: http://www.comscore.com/2012MobileFutureinFocus

Key findings highlighted in 2012 Mobile Future in Focus include:

Smartphones Gain Adoption Among ‘Early Majority’, Driving Mobile Media Consumption

- Nearly 42 percent of all U.S. mobile subscribers now use smartphones, along with 44.0 percent of mobile users across the EU5 (comprised of France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the UK). Mobile media use – defined as browsing the mobile web, accessing applications, or downloading content – saw increased growth as a result, surpassing the 50-percent threshold in many markets, supported by the proliferation of high-speed networks and increased public WiFi availability.

Smartphone Platform Wars Intensify As Android and Apple Take the Lead in Most Markets

- The Google Android and Apple iOS smartphone platforms emerged as the leaders of the U.S. smartphone market in 2011, with Android just a few points shy of capturing half of the smartphone market and iOS accounting for nearly 30 percent of the market. In the EU5, Android saw similarly significant gains, unseating market leader Symbian in 3 out of the 5 European markets measured.

Surge in Mobile App Usage Shapes a Dual Mobile Browsing Experience, Fueling Category Growth

- In 2011, both the U.S. and EU5 saw the growth in mobile app use exceed the growth in mobile browser use, leading to both markets seeing the same percentage of their mobile audience use both apps and browsers to access mobile media. Health ranked as the fastest-growing mobile media category in the U.S. in 2011, followed by Retail and other commerce-related categories such as Electronic Payments and Auction Sites.

Mobile Retail Information Leads to Emergence of Smartphone Shopping Behaviors

- More than half of the U.S. smartphone population used their phone to perform retail research while inside a store in 2011, illustrating the emergence of savvy smartphone shoppers who bring online shopping behaviors in-store – a trend seen in other markets as well. At the end of 2011, nearly 1 in 5 smartphone users scanned product barcodes and nearly 1 in 8 compared prices on their phone while in a store.

Mobile Devices Fuel Social Networking On-The-Go, Driving Real-Time Online Interaction

- 64.2 million U.S. smartphone users and 48.4 million EU5 smartphone users accessed social networking sites or blogs on their mobile devices at least once in December 2011, with more than half of these mobile social networking users accessing social media almost every day. While mobile social networking users showed the highest propensity to read posts from people they knew personally, more than half of those in the U.S. and nearly half in the EU5 also reported reading posts from brands, organizations, and events.

Mobile Connectivity and Connected Devices Encourage Cross-Platform Digital Media Consumption among ‘Digital Omnivores’

- Tablets quickly rose in popularity in 2011, taking less than two years to account for nearly 40 million tablets in use among U.S. mobile users and outpacing smartphones which took 7 years to reach the same. By the end of 2011, nearly 15 percent of U.S. mobile users also had tablets – a trend seen across other markets as well.

About comScore
comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR) is a global leader in measuring the digital world and preferred source of digital business analytics. For more information, please visit www.comscore.com/companyinfo.

With the Academy Awards this weekend, Banyan Branch (www.banyanbranch.com), a Seattle-based full service social media agency, issued a detailed infographic that outlines the online buzz created around the Academy Awards 2012 nominees. The data was collected between 2/21/11 and 2/21/12.

Some interesting findings include:

- Though The Help did not top the list in terms of nominations – it generated the most likes on Facebook and Twitter mentions of all the films nominated

- Hugo and the Artist received the greatest number of nominations but a low level of social interactions

- Brad Pitt has the greatest overall social share of voice of all the nominated actors, though only a small portion of those posts actually reference his role in Moneyball

- Viola Davis captured the greatest share of voice in US conversations of the actresses nominated. Over 1/3 of that volume stemmed from conversation about her role in The Help

- Meryl Streep generated the largest global share of voice of all the actresses nominated for an Oscar

Spring break is rapidly approaching and many travelers have already planned their spring break trips. BlueKai (www.bluekai.com), the world’s only complete platform for data management, analysis and acquisition, has analyzed the traits of the typical spring break traveler and the results are outlined in the infographic below.

Long-Form Video Content on the Rise, Reaching 6 Minutes on Average in January

RESTON, VA – comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, today released data from the comScore Video Metrix service showing that 181 million U.S. Internet users watched nearly 40 billion videos of online video content in January.

Top 10 Video Content Properties by Unique Viewers

Google Sites, driven primarily by video viewing at YouTube.com, ranked as the top online video content property in January with 152 million unique viewers, followed by VEVO with 51.5 million, Yahoo! Sites with 49.2 million, Viacom Digital with 48.1 million and Facebook.com with 45.1 million. Nearly 40 billion videos views occurred during the month, with Google Sites generating the highest number at 18.6 billion, followed by Hulu with 877 million and VEVO with 717 million. The average viewer watched 22.6 hours of online video content, with Google Sites (7.5 hours) and Hulu (3.2 hours) demonstrating the highest average engagement among the top ten properties.

*A video is defined as any streamed segment of audiovisual content, including both progressive downloads and live streams. For long-form, segmented content, (e.g. television episodes with ad pods in the middle) each segment of the content is counted as a distinct video stream.

Top 10 Video Ad Properties by Video Ads Viewed

Americans viewed 5.6 billion video ads in January, with Hulu delivering the highest number of video ad impressions at 1.4 billion. Adap.tv ranked second overall (and highest among video ad exchanges/networks) with 652 million ad views, followed by BrightRoll Video Network with 598 million, Tremor Video with 580 million and Specific Media with 398 million. Time spent watching video ads totaled more than 2.3 billion minutes during the month, with Hulu delivering the highest duration of video ads at 540 million minutes. Video ads reached 47 percent of the total U.S. population an average of 38 times during the month. Hulu delivered the highest frequency of video ads to its viewers with an average of 43, while ESPN delivered an average of 20 ads per viewer.

*YouTube Partner Reporting based on online video content viewing and does not include claimed user-generated content

Other notable findings from January 2012 include:

- 84.4 percent of the U.S. Internet audience viewed online video.

- The duration of the average online content video was 6.1 minutes, while the average online video ad was 0.4 minutes.

- Video ads accounted for 12.2 percent of all videos viewed and 0.9 percent of all minutes spent viewing video online.

About comScore
comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR) is a global leader in measuring the digital world and preferred source of digital business analytics. For more information, please visit www.comscore.com/companyinfo.

RESTON, VA – comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, today released its monthly comScore qSearch analysis of the U.S. search marketplace. Google Sites led the explicit core search market in January with 66.2 percent of search queries conducted.

U.S. Explicit Core Search

Google Sites led the U.S. explicit core search market in January with 66.2 percent market share (up 0.3 percentage points), followed by Microsoft Sites with 15.2 percent (up 0.1 percentage points) and Yahoo! Sites with 14.1 percent. Ask Network accounted for 3.0 percent of explicit core searches, followed by AOL, Inc. with 1.6 percent.

*“Explicit Core Search” excludes contextually driven searches that do not reflect specific user intent to interact with the search results.

17.8 billion explicit core searches were conducted in January, with Google Sites ranking first with 11.8 billion. Microsoft Sites ranked second with 2.7 billion searches, followed by Yahoo! Sites with 2.5 billion, Ask Network with 527 million and AOL, Inc. with 277 million.

U.S. Total Core Search

Google Sites accounted for 66.2 percent of total core search queries conducted (up 0.1 percentage points), followed by Yahoo! Sites with 16.0 percent and Microsoft Sites with 13.8 percent. Ask Network comprised 2.6 percent of total search queries, followed by AOL, Inc. with 1.4 percent.

* “Total Core Search” is based on the five major search engines, including partner searches, cross-channel searches and contextual searches. Searches for mapping, local directory, and user-generated video sites that are not on the core domain of the five search engines are not included in these numbers.

Americans conducted nearly 20 billion total core search queries in January. Google Sites ranked first with 13.2 billion searches, followed by Yahoo! Sites with 3.2 billion and Microsoft Sites with 2.8 billion.

“Powered By” Reporting

In January, 68.4 percent of searches carried organic search results from Google (vs. 68.1 percent in December) while 26.5 percent of searches were powered by Bing (no change vs. December).

About comScore
comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR) is a global leader in measuring the digital world and preferred source of digital business analytics. For more information, please visit www.comscore.com/companyinfo.

Sixth ANA/Forrester Survey Measures Marketers’ Attitudes Toward TV/Video Advertising

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – A joint ANA (Association of National Advertisers) and Forrester Research, Inc. (Nasdaq: FORR) survey of more than 100 national advertisers illustrates a renewed belief in the effectiveness of television advertising. Compared to 2010, the number of respondents who believe TV ads have become more effective in the past two years has tripled. In addition, respondents express a growing confidence in set-top box data that has the potential for TV ads to be targeted at specific customer groups. In fact, nearly three-quarters of marketers expressed a strong interest in targeting their advertising to addressable audiences, making use of this new behavioral and demographic data to place television ads.

Seventy-six percent of respondents to the ANA/Forrester study of national advertisers said their media budgets will remain stable this year. TV ad spending will account for 47 percent of media budgets, a 6 percent increase from reported budgets in our 2010 survey. Other findings include:

- Growing confidence in alternative measurements. While Nielsen data remains the most trusted data source for TV media purchasing decisions, marketers express a growing faith in set-top-box data. Seventy-two percent of respondents believe the quality and accuracy of set-top-box data will improve in the next few years, and 47 percent see unique visitors/watchers as the eventual industry standard for cross-platform audience measurement.

- Experimentation with advanced ad placements. Nearly half of respondents are testing or planning to test advanced TV ad placements in the next 12 months via platforms such as video on connected TVs. With the growth of second screens, 18 percent of respondents have already implemented synchronized ads, and another 31 percent will try out this strategy in 2012.

- Prioritization of digital ad spending. Digital remains a top priority for respondents. Seventy percent plan to spend more on web ads this year, followed closely by social media and mobile. In fact, mobile ads top the list of video alternatives to the linear 30-second spot that respondents will likely spend more on in 2012.

- Improved perception of agency skills relative to TV. Compared to 2010, respondents view their agency partners as better equipped to help navigate the changing TV ad landscape. Sixty-two percent of respondents, a 10 percent increase over 2010, believe their media agency is well-equipped in this arena.

“The TV business is on the precipice of change, and marketers are poised to benefit,” said Forrester Research Vice President and Research Director David M. Cooperstein. “New sources of insight into consumer interests, combined with multitasking TV viewers, have created a new playing field upon which marketers can reach their most relevant audience.”

“This survey confirms that the death of television has been greatly exaggerated,” said Bill Duggan, Group Executive Vice President, ANA. “Our findings shine a spotlight on the bullish attitude that advertisers have towards the medium, including passion for new TV and video platforms.”

The survey results were presented at the ANA’s TV & Everything Video Forum in New York on February 16, 2012. Respondents to the ANA/Forrester survey include 124 advertisers across 16 major industries. The survey was conducted during December 2011 and January 2012.

Full survey results will be available to ANA members and select Forrester clients in an upcoming Forrester report entitled “TV Effectiveness Is On The Upswing.”

About Forrester Research

Forrester Research, Inc. (Nasdaq: FORR) is an independent research company that provides pragmatic and forward-thinking advice to global leaders in business and technology. Forrester works with professionals in 19 key roles at major companies providing proprietary research, customer insight, consulting, events, and peer-to-peer executive programs. For more than 28 years, Forrester has been making IT, marketing, and technology industry leaders successful every day. For more information, visit www.forrester.com.

About the ANA

Founded in 1910, the ANA (Association of National Advertisers) leads the marketing community by providing its members with insights, collaboration, and advocacy. ANA’s membership includes 400 companies with 10,000 brands that collectively spend over $250 billion in marketing communications and advertising. The ANA strives to communicate marketing best practices, lead industry initiatives, influence industry practices, manage industry affairs, and advance, promote, and protect all advertisers and marketers. For more information, visit http://www.ana.net/, follow us on Twitter, join us on Facebook, or visit our YouTube channel.

Report Offers Insights on Key Trends from 2011 and What They Mean for the Coming Year

RESTON, VA – comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, released the 2012 U.S. Digital Future in Focus report. This annual report examines how the prevailing trends in social media, search, online video, digital advertising, mobile and e-commerce are defining the current marketplace and what these trends mean for the year ahead.

“2012 promises to be an exciting year for the digital media industry as the explosion of available content and proliferation of web-enabled devices drive the evolution of the digital consumer, creating new opportunities and challenges for the entire digital ecosystem,” said Linda Abraham, comScore CMO and EVP of Global Product Development. “In order to be successful in this new paradigm, digital marketers must understand the key trends shaping the current marketplace and what that means for the future of their businesses.”

To download a complimentary copy of 2012 U.S. Digital Future in Focus report, please visit: http://www.comscore.com/2012USDigitalFutureinFocus

Key insights from the 2012 U.S. Digital Future in Focus include:

Facebook-Led Social Media Market is Redefining Communication in the Digital and Physical Worlds

Social Networking accounted for 16.6 percent of all online minutes at the end of 2011 and is on track to surpass Portals as the most engaging online activity in 2012. Facebook continues to lead as the driving force behind this shift in consumer behavior, accounting for the largest share of online minutes across the entire web in 2011.

Bing Gains Ground in Search

Although Google maintains a strong lead in the U.S. search market, one of the most notable stories in search in 2011 was Bing’s positive growth trajectory. Bing closed out the year by surpassing Yahoo! for the #2 position among core search engines for the first time in its history, bolstered in part by its social search partnership with Facebook implemented in early 2011.

Online Video Boom Signals Sea Change in Video Ecosystem

Online video viewing witnessed impressive gains across a variety of measures in 2011, signaling a behavioral shift in how Americans are consuming video content. More than 100 million Americans watched online video content on an average day to close out 2011, representing a 43-percent increase versus year ago.

Digital Advertising Enters Era of Increased Accountability as Brand Dollars Continue to Shift Online

A staggering 4.8 trillion display ad impressions were delivered across the U.S. web in 2011 as brand advertisers continued to shift dollars to the digital medium. This shift in ad dollars has magnified the need for greater transparency and accountability in ad delivery across the digital advertising ecosystem.

Smartphone and Tablets Fuel the Rise of the Digital Omnivore

The rise of smartphones and tablets has drastically altered consumers’ digital media consumption. In 2011, the majority of all mobile phone owners consumed mobile media on their device, marking an important milestone in the evolution of mobile from primarily a communication device to also a content consumption tool. At the end of the year, more than 8 percent of all digital traffic was consumed beyond the ‘classic web’ via devices such as smartphones and tablets.

E-Commerce is Back and Better Than Ever

Despite the backdrop of continued economic uncertainty, 2011 was a strong year for retail e-commerce. Throughout the year, growth rates versus the prior year remained in double-digits to significantly outpace growth at brick-and-mortar retail. Total U.S. retail and travel-related e-commerce reached $256 billion in 2011, up 12 percent from 2010.

Webinar – 2012 U.S. Digital Future in Focus: Trends Every Marketer Needs to Know

Join Eli Goodman, comScore Media Evangelist, on Wednesday February 22nd at 2 PM EST, as he shares key insights from the 2012 U.S. Digital Future in Focus report and discusses what these trends mean for today’s marketers. For more information and to register, please visit: http://www.comscore.com/2012_Future_in_Focus_Webinar

About comScore

comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR) is a global leader in measuring the digital world and preferred source of digital business analytics. For more information, please visit www.comscore.com/companyinfo.

Deutsch LA measures the volume of Big Game audiences

LOS ANGELES – Ever notice how some people say “Quiet down, the ads are on” during the Big Game? In Deutsch LA’s first Sounds of the Game Study, the advertising agency used decibel meters to see if people really did quiet down for the ads—and what made them get loud. They measured every second of the crowd’s response to Sunday’s Big Game in ten crowded sports bars.

Deutsch LA placed professional-grade decibel meters in 5 bars each in Chicago and Los Angeles, collecting 5 data points for each second at each bar. That’s more than 720,000 data points throughout the matchup between the New York Giants and the New England Patriots. The attached chart shows how ambient noise levels went up and down throughout the game.

Do people quiet down for the ads?

As an agency, we wanted to know if people quiet down to pay attention to the Big Game commercials? They do: on average, Big Game party crowds lowered their volume by one decibel for the ads, a statistically significant amount. “When people say, ‘Shhh, the ads are on!’ there really is a measurable decrease in crowd noise,” says Kyle Acquistapace, Director of Media & Data Strategy at Deutsch LA.

But crowd noise only drops a bit. The audience noise hovered around 85 decibels—roughly as loud as a lawnmower. “This should factor into creative development,” Acquistapace says. “Big Game spots–at least in bars–have some serious sonic competition.”

The ad breaks with the loudest ambient crowd noise came after notable points in the game, including the game’s end and the second New England touchdown.

Fans don’t immediately quiet down when the first ad starts, especially if there’s latent buzz from the game. While the first commercial spot in an ad pod remains a coveted position, ads in the second position appear to have potential “insulation” from residual crowd noise from the game.

When the game gets loud

As the beers and the points add up, fans get louder. We thought that could make the fourth quarter much louder, and possibly a more challenging environment for commercials. Yes, the fourth quarter was louder—but not the complete din that we expected:

By contrast, the point of the game with the lowest crowd noise was the first-quarter safety. Because the officials didn’t rule the points until well after the play was completed, there was a measurable stunned silence from audiences.The fourth quarter did exhibit the biggest swings in ambient sound, but this was simply due to an exciting game: the fourth quarter was home to a Giants walk-in touchdown and the Patriots final-seconds hail-Mary – adding up to a 102.1 decibel peak in cheers (or groans) from fans. Tom Brady’s interception in the third quarter was another high point.

Crowd noise grew throughout halftime, as well, but dropped abruptly after Madonna’s halftime show—presumably as people scattered a bit for drinks & food before the game started.

Finally, agency staffers from Chicago suggested that their hometown sports fans might be louder than those in our Los Angeles study. Well, the Chicago bars were almost 3 decibels louder than the LA bars, and the Windy City was home to the single loudest bar in the study.

Want the full study? Email soundsofthegame@deutschinc.com

Clint Eastwood’s Chrysler Ad Leads List of Most Effective Super Bowl Auto Ads

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – Ace Metrix™, the authority in television advertising effectiveness, today revealed the official rankings of the most effective and least effective ads from Super Bowl XLVI. The most effective ads of the Super Bowl were Doritos’ “Sling Baby” ad and M&M’s “Just My Shell” ad, both of which tied for the honor with an Ace Score of 671. Chrysler’s “It’s Halftime America” ad starring Clint Eastwood was the most effective automotive ad, achieving an Ace Score of 633 and ranking 6th on the overall list. Budweiser aired three of the five least effective ads, including the lowest scoring ad of the Super Bowl.

The average Ace Score for this year’s Super Bowl ads was 552, up slightly from 2011’s 549. While the automotive category provided the largest number of ads, soda and snacks ads once again dominated the top scoring list with seven of the top 10 ads.

An Increase in Super Bowl Storytelling

This year saw the continued trend in storytelling, a trend towards longer, more emotive spots. Thirty percent of this year’s Super Bowl spots were 60 seconds or longer vs. 17 percent in 2010. The trend continues as evidenced by the longer form ads showing strong performance.

It was also a year of more blatant sexual themes with 13% of the ads having this attribute vs. 2% in 2011. Interestingly, none of the seductive ads made the top 10 list and most were in the bottom third of Super Bowl ads.

Most Effective Super Bowl Ads, 2012

“The Super Bowl has a diverse set of brands and advertising objectives on the world’s largest stage. The winners on the Ace Metrix list scored exceptionally well with consumers on criteria that is far beyond how likeable an ad is,” said Peter Daboll, CEO of Ace Metrix. “For example, the two top ads from M&M’s and Doritos used humor to achieve high likeability and attention scores, as well as top scores in relevance and desire. They also had broad demographic appeal, a key consideration for an audience as large and diverse as the Super Bowl.”

*Definition: Ace Score is the measure of ad creative effectiveness based on viewer reaction to national TV ads. Respondents are randomly selected and representative of the U.S. TV viewing audience. The results are presented on a scale of 0-950, which represents scoring on creative attributes such as relevance, persuasion, watchability, information, attention, etc.

Coca-Cola was the brand winner this Super Bowl, airing three of the top 10 Most Effective Super Bowl ads.

“Coca-Cola’s polar bear ads were quite effective with consumers—two ranked within the top five overall ads, trumping Pepsi’s star-studded ‘King’s Court’ ad, which was quite effective in its own right,” commented Daboll. “Skechers’ replacement of Kim Kardashian this year for Mr. Quiggly the dog was a brilliant move. The mix of canine cuteness with humor paid off, as the ad scored 629, a 24 percent increase over last year’s ad – proving the point that animals are often a better choice in Super Bowl ads than expensive celebrities.”

Some serious commercials were also high performers. High performing examples include Chrysler’s Clint Eastwood ad, as well as GE’s “Building Something Big in Louisville” ad, both Top 10 ads.

Auto Bowl 2012

The automotive category ads represented 34 percent of all Super Bowl ads and claimed two of the Top 10 spots on the Ace Metrix Most Effective Super Bowl Ads list. Chrysler / Clint Eastwood’s two-minute homage to Detroit during halftime performed better than last year’s much-discussed ad starring Eminem, delivering an Ace Score of 633 versus Eminem’s 591.

“The Clint Eastwood ad proved highly inspirational, and in addition to scoring very high on likeability and attention, it also performed extremely well on relevance,” said Daboll. “It performed well across demographics and across regions of the country. The only negative about it was that it had low brand ID, meaning people had trouble recalling the ad was specifically for Chrysler.”

The second most-effective automotive ad featured Matthew Broderick in a grown-up version of “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.” The ad for Honda’s CRV was a crowd pleaser, achieving an Ace Score of 630.

Acura’s “Transactions” ad starring Jerry Seinfeld and Jay Leno ranked third among automotive ads, achieving an Ace Score of 593, followed closely by this year’s installation of Star Wars-themed ads from VW (“Dog Strikes Back”), which delivered an Ace Score of 590, not quite measuring up to last year’s category-leading “The Force” ad, which achieved an Ace Score of 603.

Most Effective Automotive Super Bowl Ads, 2012

*Definition: Ace Score is the measure of ad creative effectiveness based on viewer reaction to national TV ads. Respondents are randomly selected and representative of the U.S. TV viewing audience. The results are presented on a scale of 0-950, which represents scoring on creative attributes such as relevance, persuasion, watchability, information, attention, etc.

Least Effective Ads

While Budweiser produced five ads for the Super Bowl advertiser this year, three were in the bottom five, including both ads for Bud Light Platinum. Budweiser also had the lowest scoring ad of the Super Bowl with “Welcome to Halftime” show featuring the band LMFAO, which had an Ace Score of 396.

David Beckham’s ad for H&M was also among the 5 least effective Super Bowl ads, proving that sex does not necessarily sell.

“The Beckham ad, which performed best among 50+ women, proves that the inclusion of celebrities often fails to lift effectiveness except in rare cases where they are expertly applied,” said Daboll. “Chrysler and Honda demonstrated the right way to do this, as opposed to Hulu’s baffling use of Will Arnett – a great example of humor gone terribly wrong.”

Least Effective Super Bowl Ads, 2012

Watch the ads and see the full list of scores at acemetrix.com.

Note: The measure of ad effectiveness is a more robust measure than mere popularity and takes into account such criteria as an ad’s watchability, likeability, relevance, information, persuasiveness, ability to alter opinion, and ability to create desire.

About Ace Metrix

Ace Metrix is the industry authority in measuring and understanding the impact of advertising creative. Through patent-pending Ace Score™ measurement technology, Ace Metrix collects and measures the consumer impact of every nationally breaking TV ad in near real-time. Through its Creative Lifecycle Management™ suite of products, Ace Metrix provides actionable creative analysis, from ideation through real-time in-market performance optimization, to many of the world’s leading advertisers and agencies. Ace Metrix works with leading global advertisers. For more information, visit www.acemetrix.com.

Twitter Users Select Doritos as Most Effective Brand on this Year’s Super Bowl Telecast

Mullen and Boston.com Use SalesForce Radian6 Social Media Analysis to Create Real-Time Ranking of the Best and Worst Super Bowl Commercials

According to the 400,000 tweets monitored by BrandBowl2012, Doritos was the most effective brand to advertise on the Super Bowl telecast on the NBC Television Network this year. Brand Bowl ranks brands based on volume of chatter and positive/negative commentary on Twitter in reaction to their Super Bowl commercials.

Doritos won with its “Crash the Super Bowl” consumer-generated commercials. One spot featured a dog who bribed a man with Doritos to conceal the whereabouts of the family cat. A second spot featured a grandmother who sling-shots a baby in a swinging seat toward a tree fort to grab a bag of Doritos from a little boy. The second and third place overall finishers were Swedish apparel retailer H&M with a provocative spot starring soccer star David Beckham modeling underwear, and Chrysler, with a powerful message about the American economic recovery. The Chrysler commercial starred legendary actor/director Clint Eastwood. The spots appeared during a closely contested game between the New York Giants and the New England Patriots.

Brand Bowl Top Scorers

When all was said and done, the top ten brands (a combination of volume and popularity) were:

1. Doritos (48,811 Tweets) (Sentiment +29%)

2. H&M (44,031 Tweets) (Sentiment +14%)

3. Chrysler (33,943 Tweets) (Sentiment +10%)

4. Pepsi (39,765 Tweets) (Sentiment +8%)

5. Chevrolet (36,934 Tweets) (Sentiment +17%)

6. M&M’s (18,316 Tweets) (Sentiment +41%)

7. Budweiser (18,916 Tweets) (Sentiment +12%)

8. VW (17,131 Tweets) (Sentiment +26%)

9. Coke (18,463 Tweets) (Sentiment +4%)

10. Bud Light (15,298 Tweets) (Sentiment +18%)

Most Liked Brands

Those with the highest number of “positive” tweets were:

1. M&M’s (Sentiment +41%)

2. Best Buy (Sentiment +30%)

3. Doritos (Sentiment +29%)

Least Liked Brands

Those with the highest number of “negative” tweets were:

1. Go Daddy (Sentiment -10%)

2. Cars.com (Sentiment -2%)

3. Lexus (Sentiment -1%)

Most Volume of Tweets

The most talked-about brands (those with the highest number of overall tweets) were:

1. Doritos (48,811 Tweets)

2. H&M (44,031 Tweets)

3. Pepsi (39,765 Tweets)

The Five Least Effective Brands on Brand Bowl 2012

Those with a combination of low volume of chatter and low positive commentary:

1. Cadillac (Tweets 345) (Sentiment +2%)

2. Century 21 (Tweets 520) (Sentiment +6%)

3. Lexus (Tweets 922) (Sentiment -1%)

4. CareerBuilder (tweets 1001) (Sentiment +5%)

5. Hulu (Tweets 1191) (Sentiment +10%)

Mullen, a Boston-based advertising and social media agency and Boston.com, one of the nation’s largest regional news portals, teamed up to present BrandBowl2012, a Twitter/Super Bowl experience that used real-time analytics from SalesForce Radian6 to determine which brands were getting the most and least amount of commentary and which brands were getting the most positive and negative tweets during the telecast. BrandBowl2012 ranked the commercials using some of the most comprehensive social media metrics available to analyze the full Twitter data stream.

This is the fourth year that Mullen has run Brand Bowl and its second year of partnering with Boston.com to create the online experience where participants could view their tweets and see the dynamic brand rankings during the game. New features this year included:

- “Head-to-head” statistical breakdowns between brands
- A “featured tweet” section that highlighted funny and insightful tweets from participants
- A streamlined Brand Bowl mobile experience so users could more easily see the live rankings and tweet their votes.

“This was truly a watershed year for social media and the Super Bowl,” said Edward Boches, Chief Innovation Officer at Mullen. “With nearly 200 million people on Twitter and 2/3’s of all smart-phone owners using social media while watching TV, just about every brand built interactive elements into their commercials, knowing that the true measurement of success these days is immediate consumer reaction and long-term consumer engagement.”

“We were very happy to once again host Brand Bowl with Mullen. We believe in the importance of social media as a tool for the public to share their commentary with the world,” said Ron Agrella, editor of Boston.com. “We were thrilled that so many people participated.”

Boston.com is one of the most visited regional portals in the U.S. and is wholly owned by The New York Times Company, a leading global, multimedia news and information company with 2011 revenues of $2.3 billion, that includes The New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, The Boston Globe, NYTimes.com, BostonGlobe.com, Boston.com, About.com and related properties. The Company’s core purpose is to enhance society by creating, collecting and distributing high-quality news, information and entertainment.

Mullen is a leading, Ad Age A-List advertising agency, named the fourth most innovative marketing company in America by Fast Company. Mullen is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Interpublic Group of Companies (NYSE: IPG).

Spending Reaches $161.5 Billion for Full Year 2011 Marking 13 Percent Gain

comScore Chairman Gian Fulgoni to Present Update on Q4 2011 E-Commerce Trends in Upcoming Webinar

RESTON, VA – comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, released its Q4 2011 U.S. retail e-commerce sales estimates, which showed that online retail spending reached $49.7 billion for the quarter, up 14 percent versus year ago. This growth rate represented the ninth consecutive quarter of positive year-over-year growth and fifth consecutive quarter of double-digit growth rates. For the entire 2011 year, U.S. retail e-commerce spending reached a record $161.5 billion, marking a 13-percent increase from 2010.

“The fourth quarter of 2011 capped off what was yet another strong year for online retail, one in which every quarter achieved double-digit increases versus the prior year,” said comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni. “In the face of continuing uncertainty regarding the U.S. economy, consumers increasingly went online for their shopping needs. Price and convenience continue to be the critical value drivers for e-commerce, and unless those conditions change we can expect to see more channel-shifting to online in 2012 and perhaps even an acceleration in the current growth trend.”

Other highlights from Q4 2011 include:

- The top-performing online product categories were: Digital Content & Subscriptions, Jewelry & Watches, Consumer Electronics, Toys & Hobbies, and Computer Software. Each category grew at least 18 percent vs. year ago.

- Ten individual days in Q4 surpassed $1 billion in online spending, led by Cyber Monday (Nov. 28) at $1.251 billion. Monday, Dec. 5 ranked second at $1.178 billion, followed by Green Monday (Dec. 12) at $1.133 billion.

- 52 percent of e-commerce transactions included free shipping, representing an all-time high. The previous high was Q4 2010 at 49 percent.

- Smartphones and tablets played a growing role in online shopping, with consumers increasingly using smartphones to check prices and product features while physically in a retail store.

Webinar Series: State of the U.S. Online Retail Economy through Q4 2011

Join Gian Fulgoni and Andrew Lipsman, VP of Industry Analysis, as they present an update of the state of the U.S. online retail economy through Q4 2011 in a live webinar on Wednesday, February 15 from 2-3 p.m. EST / 1-2 p.m. CST / 11-12 p.m. PST.

To register for the webinar, please visit: http://www.comscore.com/SOR_Q4_2011_Webinar

About comScore
comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR) is a global leader in measuring the digital world and preferred source of digital business analytics. For more information, please visit www.comscore.com/companyinfo.

DUBLIN – Research and Markets has announced the addition of the “The Future of Social Media for Marketing Financial Services” report to their offering.

Social media channels are changing the way in which consumers gather information, research products, and make purchasing decisions. The reach of social media and its power to engage consumers makes marketing through this channel highly effective. The reluctance of FS providers to use social media is often attributed to issues of ROI and regulation but these are hurdles which can be addressed.

Scope:

- Boost consumer engagement and increase the impact of marketing by learning how best to use social media for marketing new products and services.

- Build brand equity by understanding how social media can raise brand awareness and the perceived quality of a brand.

- Address the issue of return on investment through analysis of this measurement and its application to social media.

Highlights:

Globally, there is considerable demand from consumers for the marketing of suitable products through social media. Almost 40% of consumers state that they would be interested in the ability to receive information about suitable products through this channel.

The overexposure of consumers to marketing messages makes it impossible to pay attention to all of these. Inbound marketing, which encourages consumers to find out about a company or product themselves, engages consumers because it has consumer consent. Social media in turn amplifies the impact of inbound marketing.

Two of the main objections to social media within the FS industry are related to ROI and regulation. However, these hurdles can be overcome by looking at ways in which to alter the definition of ROI within a social media context and by following best practice guidelines on the regulation of this type of marketing.

Companies Mentioned:

ASB Bank Limited
AXA
CMS Energy Corporation
Devoteam SA
General Mills Inc.
Hutchison 3G UK Limited
National Australia Bank Group Limited

For more information visit http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/1e7433/the_future_of_soci.

Source: Datamonitor

More Root for the Giants, But Patriot Fans’ Video and Social Media Habits on Smartphones & Tablets Power New England Team to a Digital Win

NEW YORK – With Super Bowl 2012 marking the first time that the big game was streamed live on computers and mobile devices, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) (www.iab.net) today released, “Super Bowl Goes Mobile.” The study includes the first-ever “IAB Mobile Sports Savvy Index,” which pitted New England Patriots fans against New York Giants fans regarding ownership of smartphones and tablets, and regular digital usage of those devices. It was a close call, but Patriots supporters took the digital win.

The IAB created the index based on an online survey conducted in January on their behalf by Harris Interactive of more than 2000 U.S. adults, 70 percent of whom said they planned to watch the Super Bowl. Of those, 40 percent said they were rooting for the Giants, while 29 percent claimed they were cheering for the Patriots. The index, which looked at ownership of smartphones and tablets, as well as regular digital usage, yielded an extremely close score. Comparing the fan bases to the national average, Giants supporters did outgun “Pats” fans when it came to accessing sports content on mobile devices. Ultimately, however, Patriots fans’ predisposition to watch video and propensity to post to social media sites awarded them the victory.

Regardless of consumers’ Super Bowl team favorite, smartphone or tablet owners are likely to have their mobile device nearby. Fifty-six percent of smartphone owners said they plan to use their phone during the game, and 45 percent of tablet owners plan to use that device. One in 10 expect to watch or get more information about Super Bowl advertising on smartphones or tablets during or after the big game.

“Historically, the commercials that run during the Super Bowl have been as highly anticipated as the game itself,” said Joe Laszlo, Senior Director, IAB Mobile Marketing Center of Excellence. “Americans will now be augmenting their game day viewing with numerous activities on smartphones and tablets. Revealing the ‘mobile savviness’ characteristics of Giants and Patriots fans is a lighthearted way to underscore the value that mobile brings to sports enthusiasts and also the opportunity it offers to brand marketers trying to reach this in-demand audience.”

Age will play a significant role as to whether or not phones will specifically be in the mix on game day. Eighteen to 34 year-old Super Bowl viewers with smartphones look like they will be glued to those devices, with 74 percent claiming that their phones will be a part of the “big game” experience. Over half (51%) say they will definitely be texting, emailing and/or instant messaging to discuss the event.

Despite the growing use of mobile devices, consumers are unlikely to be viewing the whole game on their phone. Although Verizon Wireless users could stream the Super Bowl live exclusively on mobile phones, merely 4 percent of smartphone owners expected to watch the entire event on their handsets.

Some of the other survey findings include:

- Nearly two-thirds (62%) of smartphone or tablet owners who plan to watch the Super Bowl away from home (at a friend’s house, public place, or somewhere else) plan to use their device during the game

- More than half (53%) of smartphone or tablet users planning to watch at home expect to make use of their mobile gadgets

Going beyond mobile, the study revealed additional digital Super Bowl findings:

- Four in 10 (41%) of those who plan to watch the Super Bowl will use their computer for something related to Super Bowl ads

- The most popular activity that viewers of the game plan to do on their computer during or just after the Super Bowl is watching Super Bowl commercials (18%)

- In comparison, only 8 percent of viewers plan to watch highlights or replays during or just after the game on their computer

To download the entire research study, including the “IAB Mobile Sports Savvy Index,” please visit www.iab.net/superbowl.

Methodology

This survey was conducted online within the United States by Harris Interactive on behalf of IAB from January 23-25, 2012 among 2,217 adults, ages 18 and older. This online survey is not based on a probability sample and therefore no estimate of theoretical sampling error can be calculated. The IAB selected eight data points from the survey to comprise its “Mobile Sports Savvy Index. It looked at smartphone and tablet ownership, and weekly or more frequent smartphone or tablet use of the following: posting to social media, accessing sports content, checking news, e-mail, text messaging, and viewing video. For Giants fans and Patriots fans, the IAB indexed each of these data points relative to the national average, and then aggregated the individual index values via a weighted average giving the most weight to accessing sports content and posting to social media, and equal, lesser, weight to the other six criteria. For more information please contact mobile@iab.net.

About the IAB

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) is comprised of more than 500 leading media and technology companies that are responsible for selling 86% of online advertising in the United States. On behalf of its members, the IAB is dedicated to the growth of the interactive advertising marketplace, of interactive’s share of total marketing spend, and of its members’ share of total marketing spend. The IAB educates marketers, agencies, media companies and the wider business community about the value of interactive advertising. Working with its member companies, the IAB evaluates and recommends standards and practices and fields critical research on interactive advertising. Founded in 1996, the IAB is headquartered in New York City with a Public Policy office in Washington, D.C. For more information, please visit www.iab.net.

comScore Reports December 2011 U.S. Mobile Subscriber Market Share
Smartphone Penetration Climbs Over 40 Percent during December Holiday Shopping Season

RESTON, VA – comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, today released data from the comScore MobiLens service, reporting key trends in the U.S. mobile phone industry during the three month average period ending December 2011. The study surveyed more than 30,000 U.S. mobile subscribers and found Samsung to be the top handset manufacturer overall with 25.3 percent market share. Google Android strengthened its lead in the smartphone market to reach 47.3 percent market share.

OEM Market Share

For the three-month average period ending in December, 234 million Americans age 13 and older used mobile devices. Device manufacturer Samsung ranked as the top OEM with 25.3 percent of U.S. mobile subscribers, followed by LG with 20 percent share and Motorola with 13.3 percent share. Apple continued to gain ground in the OEM market with 12.4 percent share of total mobile subscribers (up 2.2 percentage points), while RIM rounded out the top five with 6.7 percent share.

Smartphone Platform Market Share

97.9 million people in the U.S. owned smartphones during the three months ending in December, representing 40 percent of all mobile subscribers. Google Android ranked as the top smartphone platform with 47.3 percent market share, up 2.5 percentage points from September. Apple maintained its #2 position, growing 2.2 percentage points to 29.6 percent of the smartphone market. RIM ranked third with 16 percent share, followed by Microsoft (4.7 percent) and Symbian (1.4 percent).

Mobile Content Usage

In December, 74.3 percent of U.S. mobile subscribers used text messaging on their mobile device, up 3.2 percentage points. Downloaded applications were used by 47.6 percent of subscribers (up 5.1 percentage points), while browsers were used by 47.5 percent (up 4.6 percentage points). Accessing of social networking sites or blogs increased 3.8 percentage points to 35.3 percent of mobile subscribers. Game-playing was done by 31.4 percent of the mobile audience (up 2.6 percentage points), while 23.8 percent listened to music on their phones (up 2.9 percentage points).

About MobiLens
MobiLens data is derived from an intelligent online survey of a nationally representative sample of mobile subscribers age 13 and above. Data on mobile phone usage refers to a respondent’s primary mobile phone and does not include data related to a respondent’s secondary device.

About comScore
comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR) is a global leader in measuring the digital world and preferred source of digital business analytics. For more information, please visit www.comscore.com/companyinfo.

Research finds “huge untapped potential” in social advertising

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – With Facebook’s initial public offering last week, the social networking giant can look ahead to a potentially huge new source of revenue from “social advertising,” according to new research by MIT Sloan School of Management Associate Professor of Marketing Catherine Tucker. Tucker says that Facebook itself is only beginning to recognize the “untapped potential” of this kind of advertising fueled by its own technology.

Tucker’s research counters the prevailing view of recent years that social network websites are unfruitful venues for paid advertising. Instead, she finds that social advertising has been under-valued and underrated as a revenue stream and as an effective way to deliver messages, though only if those messages are delivered the right way.

“Facebook has only recently figured out what is unique about all the data they collect,” says Tucker. “Facebook knows who peoples’ friends are, which can be hugely valuable to marketers. Feeding that social network into the Facebook algorithm creates huge and under-exploited profit potential.”

In social advertising, marketers use online social relationships to target and improve their ads. For her new research paper, Tucker examined data from an experiment in which a nonprofit charity used both traditional and social advertising on Facebook. Tucker found that the social ads, which were targeted to friends of `fans’ of the nonprofit on Facebook, attracted far more clicks than those that were not. “When you target ads based on who is friends with whom, you can double the number of click,” she says. “This is because advertisers can uncover consumers who could also get excited about their product.”

“Social advertising is not necessarily replacing display advertising,” adds Tucker. “Rather, it is a different and more effective form of targeted advertising that still remains unrefined, even on Facebook.” So far, Facebook’s algorithm appears to treat all Facebook friends equally, Tucker explains. “But among your friends, certain people have more influence; they are the `gatekeepers’ whom you tend to follow more closely. When Facebook refines its algorithm to incorporate such gatekeepers as part of social advertising, we will see ever greater improvements in advertising response.”

But Facebook must be careful about how it uses such powerful information, Tucker cautions. “There is a level of intrusiveness that no advertiser should cross. Advertisers must avoid being overt in their attempts to exploit social networks in their advertising. If Facebook too explicitly takes advantage of your friend, it could cross that line.” For example, in her study she finds that an ad that states explicitly, “Be like your friend” deters users, who could resent that Facebook or any other company is openly commercializing friendship. But if the consumer is simply informed that “Susan likes this,” it is not seen as a personal intrusion. “Speculatively, the results suggest that intrusive or highly personal advertising is more acceptable if done algorithmically by a faceless entity such as a computer than when it is the result of evident human agency,” Tucker writes.

These are the kinds of issues with which Facebook itself is grappling as it gets more deeply into social advertising. “Facebook is not giving much guidance to advertisers about how to use this new technology, partly because it is so new. But the results of my research suggest that social networks will be able to exploit their unique data on who is friends with whom to enlarge their share of advertising dollars.”

Study reveals gap in brands’ perceptions of local digital advertising activity compared to reality of implementation; calls attention to need for education and assessment of localized business strategies

ST. LOUIS – GMS Local, a service of GroupM and provider of local online services for national brands, announced research revealing a gap in the perceived local digital media activity expressed by national brands with brick and mortar locations versus what is actually being implemented. While 69 percent of marketers surveyed indicate they spend greater than the national average of 25 percent of budgets allocated to local marketing, 33 percent have yet to implement basic local digital efforts that positively impact business performance, such as online business directory listings. An exploration of the research is detailed in the white paper “Perception vs. Execution: Examination of Brands’ Local Business Strategies Reveals Gaps to Act On.”

As the Internet speeds to the forefront of local advertising, marketers are bullish about their current and future investments in local advertising – particularly in local digital media, the research revealed. Eighty-three percent of marketers surveyed expect their local online spending to increase at a greater rate than the projected national growth (25 percent) over the next three years. Such growth supports the expansive consumer activity happening in the local digital marketplace, where up to 20 percent of searches conducted have local intent (jumping to 40 percent on mobile devices), and the adoption of location-based check-in services is happening in the masses, with companies such as Foursquare topping 1 billion check-ins. According to Borrell Associates, local digital advertising is expected to grow 18 percent in 2012, with local online spend projected to surpass all other channels by 2015. This growth, compared to the gap in what marketing executives perceive their brands are doing at the local level and the reality of their execution over the past 12 months – and into 2012 – shows national advertisers are missing the opportunity for sizeable gains.

“Every single data point we see shows consumers becoming more mobile and reliant on digital for their local information. This rapid consumer shift has created challenges for brands as they attempt to keep up, and we are seeing a willingness to invest, as validated in this research,” said Chris Copeland, CEO, GroupM Search. “The research also shows a clear disconnect between what brands believe they are doing with those investments and what is actually being done. We speak to advertisers daily that have enormous blind spots in local digital coverage, and who welcome the education and strategy needed to resolve their willingness to spend and target which is hindered by the inability to determine what to do first and next.”

Additional insights from the research include:

- One of three national brands has yet to invest in the basic local digital effort of online business directory listings.

- Only 55 percent of national brands surveyed have initiated geo-modified paid search campaigns.

- While half of all consumers are making business selections off consumer ratings and reviews, less than 50 percent of national advertisers invest in local online review sites.

- Thirty-two percent of marketers attribute their insufficient engagement to a lack of awareness, with respondents specifically stating they are unaware of offerings, don’t understand them or believe them to be unnecessary.

- Fifty-eight percent indicate that funding prevents them from engaging more in the local digital space.

Brands will continue placing big bets on the online local space given the consumer shift to this space for their discovery efforts, with 70 percent of marketing executives for national brands reporting their local online investments as a percent of total local advertising outpace current national averages. As detailed in the whitepaper, national advertisers can overcome these challenges with deeper education around opportunity in the local digital space and self-assessment of the reality of their allocation and programs.

Additionally, following a three-step action plan will help advertisers reach optimal performance and local digital success:

- Conduct an online local listing business audit

- Diagnose the ‘local storefront’ for your brand by applying social media tools that listen to consumer sentiment at the local store level

- Practice education, innovation and experimentation

“Technology and mobility have opened the gateway for national brands to be able to create personalized experiences with consumers at the local level,” said Steve Scherfy, Local and Mobile Manager for GMS Local. “From business location listings to local social intelligence, managing the entire digital storefront is key.”

For the study, marketing executives and managers of national brands with a minimum of 500 physical locations were surveyed. The comparative study, conducted between September and November 2011, set forth to investigate the challenges that brands within the digital marketplace face, including the ability to understand emerging technology, analyze what is relevant and act on these tools based on their business needs. It also explored how engaged each national brand is with local marketing. Survey questions with local digital marketing averages and best practices from national data were utilized to gain reaction and comparative “self-assessments” against those averages by participating respondents and brands.

About GMS Local

GMS Local is a service of GroupM, and comprehensive digital solution focused on creating meaningful connections between brands and consumers at the local level. Using paid, earned and owned media solutions, GMS Local maximizes local consumer engagement opportunities for national advertisers with an extensive local footprint. Local digital marketing perspective can be found at www.gmslocal.com, or on the GMS Local blog.

The game may be over but the talk about the Super Bowl 2012 ads goes on. Social video ad company Sharethrough (www.sharethrough.com) has just released some interesting findings: the extended cuts and teaser videos for the Super Bowl actually generated nearly five times as many views as the actual ads themselves.

The graphic below shows that the teasers and extended cuts have reached ~55 million views (and counting!) while the actual TV ads recorded ~12 million views.

Allan Johnson, Content Strategist at Sharethrough, has kindly agreed to give us further insights.

Otilia Otlacan: What are the main drivers behind such a discrepancy and behind the viral quality shown by most Super Bowl ads?

Allan Johnson: The discrepancy has a lot to do with expectations. What’s great about Super Bowl spots is that people are conditioned to experience them as content they want to watch, not interruptive ads. People expect them to be good because historically, they are. They have big budgets and big cameos, and there’s way more creative freedom offered to the agencies producing the spots. Brands set out to entertain as a priority. Still, everyone knows that the spots themselves are going to have to be :30 or :60 in order to air on TV. So if you know the content is going to be great and there can be an extended cut which might run another 47 seconds longer, but which tells a story unconstrained by the :30 intervals, then viewers naturally know that the extended cuts will be the more entertaining format. Viewers are smart. Watch the Seinfeld ad that was edited for the Super Bowl and then watch the extended cut and it’s clear that the extra time makes a big impact in being able to properly set up the jokes.

Otilia Otlacan: What is the shelf life of a Super Bowl ad, can you comment on how quickly the online buzz vanishes post-game?

Allan Johnson: For a truly viral ad that really impacts the culture, the shelf life of a Super Bowl spot can last for months, even years. Probably the best, most recent example of such a spot was last year’s “The Force” for VW. That spot continues to perform exceptionally well. In addition to still being used on TV, it has steadily added millions of views each month and has collected over 50 million as of today. It will be interesting to see if such an impactful spot exists from this year’s crop. Both the Seinfled Acura spot and the Ferris Bueller Honda spot are showing signs of long lives. “The Bark Side” also looks as if it might stay relevant for month’s to come. “The Bark Side” is currently outperforming VW’s actual Super Bowl spot, “The Dog Strikes Back,” by 2 to 1, even though it was released as that spot’s teaser.

Otilia Otlacan: The top 5 most viral Super Bowl ads of 2012 were all car commercials. Is this a coincidence, have these campaigns been managed better, or is there an organic affinity between cars and the Super Bowl?

Allan Johnson: This was clearly a dominant year for the auto industry. What’s interesting to note, is that just 5 years ago, Audi was the only car manufacturer even advertising in the Super Bowl. They’ve come a long way fast. I think their preeminence was a direct consequence of VW’s success last year with “The Force.” That was such a runaway success that all their direct competitors in the auto industry felt that they needed to catch up, and it turned into an arms race. It’ll be interesting to see what happens next year. Will the other industries feel left in the dust themselves and come back with a vengeance? I wouldn’t be surprised to see this happen.

About Sharethrough
Sharethrough provides brands with a repeatable, scalable and transparent approach to distributing video content that guarantees viewership and maximizes shared engagement. Sharethrough drives engaged audiences for brand videos through its social video ad products, unique publisher network and proprietary targeting and optimization tools. Sharethrough is used by many of the world’s leading brands, including Sony, Microsoft, General Motors, Victoria’s Secret, Nestle and LEGO, as well as top agencies such as Pereira & O’Dell, Universal McCann, Evolution Bureau and Goodby, Silverstein & Partners. Founded in 2008, Sharethrough is a privately held company based in San Francisco, Calif. For more information about Sharethrough, please visit www.sharethrough.com.

White paper outlines the best and worst metrics for optimizing display media campaigns

SALT LAKE CITY – mediaFORGE, a dynamic display media provider, released a white paper detailing its position on why optimizing campaigns for impressions, post-impression attribution, and click-through rate (CTR) does not give an adequate understanding of campaign performance, and how post-engagement is able to substantiate performance with much more meaningful results.

Given the influx of media coverage around online ad measurement, and the creation of the “Making Measurement Make Sense” (3MS) initiative by IAB, ANA, and 4As, it’s clear that advertisers are consensually dissatisfied with current performance metrics. What’s less clear is how to identify the best solution.

mediaFORGE’s white paper was written to empower advertisers to make the right decisions when exploring campaign metrics amidst the growing clamor of proposed solutions.

“Optimizing campaigns is about much more than identifying a metric to report against,” explains mediaFORGE CEO, Tony Zito. “It also determines the design of your campaign, including who you’re targeting and how. It’s important that advertisers understand the implications of the metrics they choose, and we hope this paper will give them a step in the right direction.”

The full whitepaper can be downloaded from the mediaFORGE website at mediaFORGE.com/resources. Some of the paper’s key conclusions include:

- Limited viewable ad inventory challenges validity of attributed view-through conversions.

- Narrowing target audience to optimize campaigns for clicks leads to substantial opportunity cost.

- Campaigns should be optimized for engagement to maximize yield.

- Tracking ad engagement validates that impressions were viewable.

- Clicks are not the exclusive indicator of purchase intent.

About mediaFORGE

mediaFORGE is a dynamic display media company that delivers a personalized and interactive ad experience designed to capture prospects and increase revenue. Its pioneering shared-revenue model charges marketers according to measured engagement that can be attributed to incremental revenue – never for impressions or view-throughs. With mediaFORGE, online marketers can employ the best aspects of display advertising with a low-risk business model, transparent data reports, and best-in-class account managers, making it the most compelling and efficient paths to optimal return on ad spend (ROAS). For more information, visit mediaFORGE.com.

CPG Brand Website Visitors Spend 37% More on the Brand and 53% More on Product Category in Retail Stores

Website Features that Attract Visitors Include Compelling Brand Value Messages Updated on a Frequent Basis Along with Content that Engages Visitors

RESTON, VA – A groundbreaking study from Accenture (NYSE: ACN), comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), and dunnhumbyUSA aimed at helping consumer packaged goods (CPG) marketers better understand the link between consumers’ usage of brand websites and their in-store brand buying behavior found that visitors to CPG brand websites buy 37% more in retail stores than non-visitors to the brand site. The study, Are Your CPG Brands Maximizing the Return on Your Digital Investment?, also concluded, that to maximize impact, website content needs to be updated regularly and contain brand value messaging that both engages visitors while also providing compelling reasons for them to purchase the brand at retail.

“CPG marketers currently invest millions of dollars in their brand websites, and the results of this study confirm the importance of this investment. Brand websites can attract and influence the behavior of the most valuable segments of any brand’s franchise,” said comScore vice president Mike Zeman. “But it’s clear that the content and utilities on these sites need to be highly engaging if they are to attract a meaningful numbers of visitors. Marketers who do this successfully stand to gain an attractive return by growing their brands’ sales in retail stores.”

Brand Website Visitors are Heavier Buyers of the Brand and Category at Retail

The study found that visitors to CPG brand websites are valuable and frequent buyers of the brand in retail stores, completing 41 percent more transactions than non-visitors. As a result, brand websites are able to attract heavier-than-average brand buyers, who spend 37 percent more on the brand in retail stores than non-visitors. Website visitors also are also heavier buyers within a brand’s product category, spending 53 percent more category dollars than non-visitors.

John LaRocca, Vice President, Strategic Partnerships at dunnhumbyUSA, noted: “The Accenture / comScore / dunnhumbyUSA research highlights the significant yet underutilized potential of brand websites and digital communications as key drivers for building customer loyalty and preference for CPG brands. Since website visitors have higher affinity to the brand and the overall product category, there is an opportunity for brand marketers to drive loyalty through personalizing the website experience, catering to the preferences of their best customers.”

Compelling Features of Successful Brand Websites

The length of time that visitors spend on a brand’s website was found to be a key determinant of their likelihood to buy the brand in retail stores. The study identified three important characteristics of brand websites that are associated with a higher likelihood that visitors will buy the brand in retail stores:

1. Brand value messaging that provides a persuasive reason for a website visitor to buy the brand

2. Fresh content updated on at least a weekly basis, such as “pulse surveys”, user generated reviews, status on weight loss plans, etc.

3. Content that engages visitors. This can include promotions, philanthropic appeals, demonstrations, live chat, apps and games.

Jerry Lohse, senior director, Accenture Interactive said, “Marketers who create compelling CPG brand website experiences for consumers are extremely effective in driving incremental and profitable in-store sales.” To illustrate his point, Lohse said, “Analysis shows that consumers visiting the best of the ten CPG brand websites evaluated in the research study, spent over 200 percent more on the brand than non-visitors. Moreover, the research shows that the price paid per unit of the brand at the best of the ten CPG brand websites in the study was two percent more than for non-visitors in brand.”

Research Study Design

The study was based on an integrated panel of one million U.S. Internet users who have given comScore explicit permission to have their online activities continuously measured and matched to their in-store brand buying behavior provided by dunnhumbyUSA. This integrated panel provided a single-source, privacy-protected data mart containing each panelist’s online activities and their in-store buying behavior. Using the comScore-dunnhumbyUSA database, the study examined ten individual food and household product brands with annual sales between $40 million and $3 billion. These brands had at least 100,000 unique visitors to their websites and as many as 2.3 million per month. The study covered the time period from September 2010 through February 2011. Leveraging comScore’s knowledge of the digital user, dunnhumby’s shopper understanding, and Accenture’s experience in operating and maintaining consumer packaged goods websites, the study quantified the linkage between CPG brand buying at retail and digital behavior by comparing the in-store purchase behavior of website visitors and non-visitors and identifying the common components of successful CPG brand websites. For website performance scoring criteria, the Accenture Web Evaluator was used for this survey. The Accenture Web Evaluator provides a comprehensive assessment of how well companies use their websites to attract and retain customers, support and reinforce their brand, deliver services and generate sales.

The research was conducted with the endorsement of the Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA) and the Food Marketing Institute (FMI), and the results were presented January 29th at their joint board meeting in Orlando. “Creating a better understanding of the relationship between a brand’s online presence and real-world shopping is important, relevant and timely to our membership and their future growth potential,” noted Denny Belcastro, Executive Vice President, Industry Affairs and Collaboration, GMA. Patrick Walsh, Senior Vice President, Industry Relations, Education and Research, FMI, added, “Finally some tangible observations pointing to a return on our members’ brand digital spend… looking forward to the next phase that adds social media as well.”

Additional Information

To obtain a copy of the study report, Are Your CPG Brands Maximizing the Return on Your Digital Investment? please visit any of the following links:

- www.accenture.com/us-en/Pages/insight-cpg-brands-maximizing-return-digital-investment.aspx

- www.comscore.com/cpg_brands_maximizing_return_digital_investment

- www.dunnhumby.com/us/cpg-brands-maximizing-return-digital-investment

A follow up study is planned for 2012 to help CPG brand marketers better understand the difference between brand websites, social networks and other digital marketing channels, including display advertising, in their ability to reach specific types of in-store brand buyers. CPG brand marketers interested in participating in this research study should contact the following:

- Mike Gorshe, Senior Director, Accenture Consumer Goods & Services at michael.a.gorshe@accenture.com or (312) 693-5818

- Mike Zeman, Vice President, comScore CPG Marketing Solutions at mzeman@comscore.com or (312) 775-6630

- John LaRocca, Vice President, Strategic Partnerships, dunnhumbyUSA, at john.larocca@us.dunnhumby.com or (513)-632-0613.

Deadline to participate is March 31, 2012.

About Accenture
Accenture is a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company, with more than 244,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries. Combining unparalleled experience, comprehensive capabilities across all industries and business functions, and extensive research on the world’s most successful companies, Accenture collaborates with clients to help them become high-performance businesses and governments. The company generated net revenues of US$25.5 billion for the fiscal year ended Aug. 31, 2011. Its home page is www.accenture.com.

About comScore
comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR) is a global leader in measuring the digital world and preferred source of digital business analytics. comScore provides syndicated and custom solutions in online audience measurement, e-commerce, advertising, search, video and mobile and offers dedicated analysts with digital marketing and vertical-specific industry expertise. Advertising agencies, publishers, marketers and financial analysts turn to comScore for the industry-leading solutions needed to craft successful digital, marketing, sales, product development and trading strategies. For more information, please visit www.comscore.com/companyinfo.

About dunnhumbyUSA
dunnhumby is the leader in personalizing the world’s experience of retailers and brands. Analyzing data from over 350 million people in 28 countries, we help companies put customers at the center of every decision. We use our insight to improve customers’ experience of stores and communications to earn their lifetime loyalty. Our work with some of the world’s biggest retailers and brands has demonstrated that companies which deliver value to customers through personalization become and stay their customers’ first choice. This strategic approach to putting the customer first in business improves our clients’ like-for-like sales and profit margins – or, put simply, their brand value. dunnhumbyUSA is a joint venture of The Kroger Company and London-based dunnhumby. Employing more than 1,900 people in 30 offices in Europe, Asia and the Americas, dunnhumby serves a prestigious list of companies including The Kroger Co., Tesco, Coca-Cola, General Mills, Kimberly-Clark, Macy’s, Panera Bread Company, PepsiCo and Procter & Gamble. dunnhumby also includes the word of mouth marketing experts BzzAgent and price optimization company KSS Retail. For more information, visit www.dunnhumby.com.

Leading Search Syndication Network Boosted By Direct Advertiser Growth

NEW YORK – Powered by increased spend from direct advertisers, adMarketplace, the leading search syndication platform, posted its fourth consecutive record quarter as revenue increased 78% in the fourth quarter over the same period in 2010.

“The Internet’s largest search advertisers are demanding search performance at scale outside of the major engines and these results show that adMarketplace delivers,” said Chief Executive Officer James Hill.

Direct advertiser spend increased 115% year over year while the average cost-per-click increased 44% from the year-ago quarter. This was driven by exceptional performance on adMarketplace’s platform.

adMarketplace published three case studies in the fourth quarter documenting outstanding performance results that it delivered to Volvo, ADT and CreditCards.com.

“We are seeing increased budgets from 85% of our direct advertisers who pass us sufficient, relevant performance data,” said Adam Epstein, President and Chief Operating Officer. “This gives us the ability to scale our search syndication platform.”

adMarketplace expects continued growth in 2012, aggressively hiring engineers and salespeople. The company hired 25 new employees in Q4.

adMarketplace’s success comes amid mixed results from the other major search syndication networks. In their recent fourth quarter results, Google reported a paltry 15% gain in network revenue and Yahoo reported that search revenue declined 3%. Last week, InfoSpace purchased TaxACT for a reported $285 Million, diversifying itself away from its search syndication business.

About adMarketplace: The Internet’s largest marketers and agencies rely on adMarketplace to deliver search performance outside of Google, Bing, and Yahoo. With over 250 million searches each day across distribution channels worldwide, and backed by powerful, easy to use tools and expert account specialists, adMarketplace is the leading platform for search syndication advertising.

- Mobile Content & Access Was Largest Mobile & Social Media Sector in 2011 at $39.2 Billion, with Revenues from Business Segment Accounting for 58% of Total

- Mobile Advertising & Marketing was Fastest Growing Sector in 2011, Expanding 53.7%, Led by Advertising Segment’s 60.9% Growth

- Online Social Media Was Smallest Industry Sector at $2.83 billion, with Social Networks the Largest and Fastest Growing Segment

STAMFORD, Conn. – Total U.S. mobile & social media revenue – including consumer and business access, content, advertising and marketing – increased 30.2% to $45.38 billion in 2011, according to new data released by PQ Media (www.pqmedia.com), the leading provider of media econometrics. Mobile & social media revenue rose at a compound annual growth rate of 28.7% from 2006-2011, and is expected to grow at an accelerating 30.8% annual rate in 2012, according to the PQ Media U.S. Mobile & Social Media Forecast 2012-16.

PQ Media released the new U.S. Mobile & Social Media Forecast 2012-16 last week at MediaPost’s Mobile Insider Summit in Key Largo, FL, where CEO Patrick Quinn provided attendees with an exclusive State of the Industry presentation. A free executive summary and table of contents, as well as the full report for purchase, are available here. PQ Media’s new Forecast goes well beyond other mobile & social media research reports, most of which track only advertising spending. PQ Media for the first time collected, analyzed, defined, segmented and forecast the entire mobile & social media landscape, providing the most comprehensive and detailed perspective on the fastest-growing communications industry segment.

PQ Media identified 3 broad sectors of mobile & social media – mobile advertising & marketing, mobile content & access, and online social media. Within the three sectors, there are seven segments – mobile advertising, mobile marketing, consumer mobile content & access, business mobile content & access, social networks, blogs, and podcasts. Further, PQ Media identified 44 distinct revenue streams, such as mobile search advertising, mobile coupon marketing, paid mobile video downloads, business data access fees, social network advertising, blog marketing, and podcast business content, among many others.

Mobile content & access was by far the largest industry sector in 2011 with revenue of $39.17 billion, up 27.8%, as the business segment accounted for 58% of the total and the consumer segment, 42%. Mobile advertising & marketing was fastest growing sector in 2011, expanding 53.7% to $3.39 billion, as the advertising segment soared 60.9% and marketing surged 46.2%. Among the fastest growing mobile ad revenue streams were in-game, search and video. The marketing segment will grow faster than advertising from 2012-16, fueled by the location-based, coupons and marketing apps revenue streams, according to the PQ Media U.S. Mobile & Social Media Forecast 2012-16.

“The mobile media sector alone reached the $1 billion revenue mark faster than any communications industry in history in 2008, taking only five years compared with 16 for the internet,” said PQ Media’s Quinn. “Mobile will also reach the $100 billion mark in 2015 faster than any other communications industry, driven by several key growth drivers, including strong growth in overall mobile device penetration, the transition to smartphones and tablets, the torrent of new mobile content launches and the continued growth of consumer and business time spent with mobile media.”

Meanwhile, online social media was the smallest sector of mobile & social media in 2011, with $2.83 billion in revenues, but grew at a very strong 42.1%. Social networks was the largest and fastest growing segment by far, increasing 45.9% to $2.28 billion in 2011, according to PQ Media.

Together, mobile & social media accounted for 4.1% of overall communications industry revenue in 2011, up from only 1.3% in 2006. Eleven of the 44 mobile & social media revenue streams exceeded $1 billion in 2011, and 23 will do so by the end of 2016, according to the PQ Media U.S. Mobile & Social Media Forecast 2012-16.

About PQ Media

PQ Media (www.pqmedia.com) is the leading provider of global media econometrics and pioneer of emerging media research. PQ Media’s proprietary econometric research methodology and custom consulting services deliver actionable strategic intelligence to help its clients grow their media, entertainment and communications businesses. PQ Media partners with private equity firm Veronis Suhler Stevenson on the VSS Communications Industry Forecast, the U.S. industry’s benchmark for spending, consumption and growth data for 25 years. For more information, contact Gabriella Kallay at gkallay@pqmedia.com, Tabor Ames at tames@pqmedia.com, or call 921-0368.