INDIANAPOLIS – Are you thinking to yourself, “another social network in 2012? Why should I consider using it for my business?” The short answer: Google+ is tied to Google search, so by using it skillfully, you can improve your website’s findability. Google+ for Business: How Google’s Social Network Changes Everything, new from Que Publishing, helps business professionals leverage this new social network for promotion, customer service, community building, referrals, and collaboration.

Launched in July 2011, Google+ is currently adding 625,000 new users a day, and may reach a total of 400 million members by the end of 2012.* In Google+ for Business, author Chris Brogan explains why Google+ is the next big thing, how he sees Google’s popular applications linking together for stronger business appeal, and how Google+ is built to make sharing content and information easy and effective.

Brogan shows readers the ins and outs of this social network in order to:

- Take advantage of links between Google+ and Google search

- Design a business page that attracts new paying customers

- Integrate Google+ into current online/digital strategies

- Learn how customers are using Google+–and give them what they’re looking for

- Master Google+ tools such as Circle and Hangouts

-Create Google+ posts that draw attention and spark conversations

- Google+ for Business is part of Que’s Biz-Tech series, designed for executives and marketers to gain skills in emerging technologies for their business needs. The title is available in print and eBook formats (for Kindle, NOOK, iPad and other e-readers) through book retailers, Safari Books Online subscription (http://safari.informit.com), and Que Publishing (http://www.quepublishing.com/store/product.aspx?isbn=0789749149).

About the Author

Chris Brogan is the New York Times bestselling co-author of Trust Agents, a professional speaker, and president of Human Business Works. He has been involved with social networks since the BBSes of the 1980s, and began blogging in 1998, when it was still called journaling. Brogan co-founded the international unconference experience, PodCamp, which teaches media making to individuals worldwide, and has keynoted many major corporate, technology, and web culture events. Featured monthly columnist for Entrepreneur Magazine, Brogan consults with Fortune® 100 companies such as PepsiCo, GM, and Microsoft on the future of business communications and social technologies.

About Pearson

The world’s leading learning company, Pearson is home to such respected brands as Addison-Wesley Professional, Cisco Press, Exam Cram, IBM Press, Prentice Hall Professional, Que Publishing, Sams Publishing, and VMWare Press, which have as their online publishing arm, InformIT (www.informit.com) -The Trusted Technology Learning Source. In addition, Berkeley-based Peachpit (www.peachpit.com), the publishing partner for Adobe Press, Apple Certified, and others, publishes best-selling books for creative design professionals. Pearson is also co-founder, with O’Reilly Media Inc., of Safari Books Online (http://safari.informit.com), the premier on-demand digital library providing thousands of expert reference materials through a single point of contact, including expert technology, creative and design, business and management resources in video and text formats. Que is part of Pearson (NYSE: PSO), the world’s leading learning company.

For example via Good Buys Media’ weekly e-blast to 5,000 media buyers, Context Logic offered inventory on WISH, a social recommendation engine built on top of Facebook that surfaces up goods and services relevant to the consumer based on the consumer’s interests, friends, and context, well below its standard rate card cost. Similarly, See Jane Fly offered inventory at half-off for a limited time period on Wayfare a brand new quarterly online magazine that celebrates the journey of travel, offering endless inspiration, instant trip solutions, and the intersection of home, style, and travel.

“For publishers we provide an incremental bump in sales revenue, access to customers they may not currently be working with and a way of testing new inventory against established advertisers,” says Chris Arens, Partner and Client Services Director at Catalyst S+F. “For buyers we provide access to special opportunities for opportunistic budgets, access to innovative, exclusive deals they wouldn’t otherwise see and new testing opportunities without taking hundreds of meetings.”

Catalyst S+F (www.catalystsf.com) is a “Marketing Capital” firm that helps clients combine selling a product or service (Marketing) with sources of profit or benefit vs. the competition to produce ideas, intelligence and insights (Capital) that achieve an advantage in the areas of marketing, sales or consumer insights. A hybrid marketing services consultancy, structured like no other firm, Catalyst S+F brings intelligence, ideas and insights to sales, media and marketing for the purpose of providing an advantage in the marketplace for its clients.  The privately-held San Francisco-based company was founded in 2007 by John Durham and Cory Treffiletti, who together, have nearly 40 years of marketing and sales experience, much of it in the digital media industry. Catalyst S+F, where the S+F stands for Strategy and Fundamentals, has grown substantially in the last year and currently has 12 clients.

SAN MATEO, Calif. – BrightEdge, the leading site, search and social management platform for global enterprises, today announced release of its BrightEdge Adobe®Genesis™ integration with the Adobe Digital Marketing Suite. Through Adobe Genesis integration with BrightEdge, customers will now get side-by-side views and deeper insights into critical marketing information including BrightEdge SEO performance metrics, Adobe web analytics, and both organic and paid search results across both companies. The solution is Adobe Genesis Accredited on the latest Adobe Genesis 3.0 release.

The BrightEdge and Adobe Genesis partnership gives customers integration across BrightEdge SEO and both Adobe® SiteCatalyst® and Adobe® SearchCenter+. BrightEdge-Genesis combines global enterprise BrightEdge SEO technology & breakthrough social media tools with Adobe’s industry-leading Digital Marketing Suite in a streamlined integration to deliver maximum impact and higher ROI. This collaboration will allow customers insight into competitor traffic volume and enable them to successfully stay at the forefront of SEO, web analytics, and paid search.

“Digital marketers can seamlessly integrate site traffic, conversion and paid search marketing data with organic search marketing tools,” says Christopher Parkin, Strategic Alliances and Genesis Solutions at Adobe. “By combining the comprehensive search engine coverage and international support BrightEdge S3 offers with the Adobe SiteCatalyst, marketers can easily align organic search traffic data with other key business metrics. This value is further amplified for search marketers using the integration between the BrightEdge S3 platform and Adobe SearchCenter+, as they can now easily create bid strategies based on both paid and organic keyword activity as well as deliver unified reports and rich keyword expansion opportunities.

“We commend BrightEdge on its Adobe Genesis Accreditation, which is a rigorous process that has become the industry ‘gold standard’, ensuring the joint solution is technologically sound, repeatable, and proven to deliver tangible ROI to our mutual customers,” added Parkin.  “The BrightEdge team was great to work with throughout the joint development and successful, multi-customer beta.”

“We are excited to work with Adobe, as this partnership and integration will make it easy for marketers to gain global insights into their site, as well as paid and organic search marketing,” says Jim Yu, CEO of BrightEdge. “Additionally, it will also yield improved site and search performance and help customers gain a competitive edge in the long run.”

Feedback from customers has been very positive. Jason Price, Executive Vice President at Hospitality E-Business Strategies who has been testing the integration for a leading hospitality industry client said, “The integration of organic and paid search plus web analytics delivers a complete picture of what the data really means.  With this integration, SearchCenter bid rules can return higher ROI because we better understand the true value of a keyword, rather than just its paid search value.”  And for Nathan Janitz at Resolution Media “Genesis’ integration of BrightEdge S3 into the Adobe Digital Marketing Suite allows us to have one interface to manage our clients SEO and analytic performance.”

The BrightEdge and Adobe Genesis collaboration will provide customers new capabilities, including:

- 2-way integration of web analytics and SEO, combining Adobe SiteCatalyst and BrightEdge SEO so users can see paid and organic rank, onsite engagement or conversions metrics in one report

- Paid and Organic results integrated so users can better optimize Adobe SearchCenter+ paid search bidding rules

- Support for the latest Genesis release ­ – Genesis 3.0

- Support for unlimited numbers of SEO keywords, keyword groups, and business units

- SEO results for over 40 countries and major search engines from the ISO-security-certified BrightEdge platform

The integration is available today for all customers. For more information, please visit the Adobe Genesis Showcase, go to www.brightedge.com, or contact your BrightEdge sales representative.

About BrightEdge

BrightEdge is the leading site, search, and social management solution for global enterprises, helping more than 1,100 of the world’s largest brands stay ahead in the rapidly evolving Internet landscape. BrightEdge S3 drives more than $4 billion in organic search across industries, harnessing the power of analytics to drive revenue from web sites, search engines and social networks across the globe in a measurable, predictable way. BrightEdge is based in San Mateo, CA and is privately held with financing from Battery Ventures, Altos Ventures and Illuminate Ventures.

For more information, please visit www.brightedge.com, friend us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/seoplatform or follow us on Twitter at www.twitter.com/brightedge.

SAN JOSE, Calif. – Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) announced the immediate availability of Adobe® AudienceResearch, a new audience measurement tool that provides publishers and digital marketers with certified metrics on the size and engagement of digital audiences for websites, mobile applications and digital magazine editions. These key metrics are captured by Adobe SiteCatalyst®, an industry leading online analytics application, and provide publishers with the information most critical to attract advertising dollars. AudienceResearch is available at no additional cost to SiteCatalyst customers. In conjunction with AudienceResearch, the company also announced the general availability of the Adobe Audience Certification Program. Under this program, publishers become Adobe Certified Publishers, meaning Adobe has certified that their digital audience data meets certain criteria regarding the accuracy of data collection and reporting. Adobe Certified Publishers can contribute their data to the AudienceResearch tool.

AudienceResearch provides census-based measurement of metrics, meaning that the metrics are generated by counting all relevant traffic, a method considered more accurate and representative of actual traffic and behavior than panel-based methods. Panel-based methods monitor the behavior of a small group of volunteer consumers (i.e. the panel) and then use statistics to generate estimate metrics. The statistically generated results from panel-based estimates often differ significantly from census-based results and have been a point of controversy in the advertising industry. Adobe Certified Publishers can arm their direct sales teams with these certified, census-based metrics, including metrics that have been accredited by the Media Ratings Council, and advertisers can rely on these metrics as they make media planning decisions.

“We count many of the world’s largest publishers as our customers. With this strong customer base and pent-up demand for census-based metrics, we anticipate strong adoption of AudienceResearch,” said Brad Rencher, senior vice president and general manager, Digital Marketing Business Unit, Adobe. “AudienceResearch has the potential to provide the industry with a reliable, cross-channel currency for measuring digital audience size and engagement, bringing greater confidence into the digital advertising planning, buying and selling process.”

Today’s announcement builds on Adobe achieving MRC accreditation for key SiteCatalyst metrics. To achieve accreditation, Adobe has put in place innovative methods of auditing site implementations of SiteCatalyst as well as cleansing and certifying raw site traffic, giving advertisers and publishers the most accurate view of digital audience metrics. Additionally, publishers using the Adobe Digital Publishing Suite to create digital magazine editions for tablet devices may elect to have their metrics automatically certified as analytics is natively built into the Digital Publishing Suite. This native integration ensures the integrity of data collection.

Become an Adobe Certified Publisher

Publishers currently using Adobe SiteCatalyst can become an Adobe Certified Publisher, which assures advertisers that the certified digital audience size and engagement metrics provided by the Adobe Certified Publisher have met certain requirements for data collection integrity and reporting accuracy. Adobe Certified Publishers can contribute these key metrics to AudienceResearch. Participation in the Adobe Audience Certification Program is complimentary for existing SiteCatalyst customers. To participate, contact an Adobe account manager.

Publisher Support for Census-based Measurement via AudienceResearch

Chris Reynolds, executive director of analytics, Condé Nast

“Condé Nast is leading the market by taking our world-class brands into the new digital age using the insights garnered from our long-standing relationship with Adobe SiteCatalyst and the technology from Adobe Digital Publishing Suite. We’re excited to see Adobe bringing together the content creation and delivery workflows with measurement and monetization solutions that will help us highlight the value of our brands to our advertising partners.”

Kim Vignola, vice president, research & analytics, E! & G4, NBC Universal

“Many online publishers feel that their traffic is underrepresented in panel-based services. The Adobe AudienceResearch tool is enabling advertisers to have confidence in the internal data that we know to be stable and accurate. The set-up is quick, and minimal traffic was filtered out through the accreditation process.”

Heather Idema, corporate research director, Bonnier Corporation

“As the digital landscape continues to rapidly advance, consumer’s expectations are revolutionizing the way publishers supply the demand for quality content. Publishers and media buyers are constantly seeking measurement solutions that provide our digital mediums with an ‘apples to apples’ comparison that is credible and simplifies audience measurement. The certification of Adobe’s syndicated platform offers us a stage to help better represent our digital venues, ultimately opening the flood gates to more business.”

Ryan Whittington, senior vice president, digital revenue at The Business Journals

“With the rapid increase in the consumption of digital content across mediums and on many devices, publishers face the difficult challenges of providing a unified view of the audience. We need content and measurement solutions that meet the needs of the audience however they choose to consume, which is why we’re excited to see Adobe stepping up to the challenge of simplifying digital audience measurement..”

About the Adobe Digital Marketing Suite

The Adobe Digital Marketing Suite, powered by Omniture®, offers an integrated and open platform for online business optimization, a strategy for using customer insight to drive innovation throughout the business and enhance marketing efficiency. The Suite consists of integrated applications to collect and unleash the power of customer insight to optimize customer acquisition, conversion and retention efforts as well as the creation and distribution of content. For example, using the Suite, marketers can identify the most effective marketing strategies and ad placements as well as create relevant, personalized and consistent customer experiences across digital marketing channels, such as onsite, display, e-mail, social, video and mobile. The Suite enables marketers to make quick adjustments, automate certain customer interactions and better maximize marketing ROI, which, ultimately, can positively impact the bottom line.

About Adobe Systems Incorporated

Adobe is changing the world through digital experiences. For more information, visit www.adobe.com.

ORLANDO, Fla. – Gartner, Inc. highlighted the top 10 technologies and trends that will be strategic for most organizations in 2012. The analysts presented their findings during Gartner Symposium/ITxpo, being held here through October 20.

Gartner defines a strategic technology as one with the potential for significant impact on the enterprise in the next three years. Factors that denote significant impact include a high potential for disruption to IT or the business, the need for a major dollar investment, or the risk of being late to adopt.

A strategic technology may be an existing technology that has matured and/or become suitable for a wider range of uses. It may also be an emerging technology that offers an opportunity for strategic business advantage for early adopters or with potential for significant market disruption in the next five years. These technologies impact the organization’s long-term plans, programs and initiatives.

“These top 10 technologies will be strategic for most organizations, and IT leaders should use this list in their strategic planning process by reviewing the technologies and how they fit into their expected needs,” said David Cearley, vice president and Gartner fellow.

“Organizations should start exploratory projects to look at promised candidate technology and kick off a search for combinations of information sources, including social sites and unstructured data that may be mined for insights,” said Carl Claunch, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner.

The top 10 strategic technologies for 2012 include:

Media Tablets and Beyond. Users can choose between various form factors when it comes to mobile computing. No single platform, form factor or technology will dominate and companies should expect to manage a diverse environment with two to four intelligent clients through 2015. IT leaders need a managed diversity program to address multiple form factors, as well as employees bringing their own smartphones and tablet devices into the workplace.

Enterprises will have to come up with two mobile strategies – one to address the business to employee (B2E) scenario and one to address the business to consumer (B2C) scenario. On the B2E front, IT must consider social goals, business goals, financial goals, and risk management goals. On the B2C front, which includes business to business (B2B) activities to support consumers, IT needs to address a number of additional issues such as surfacing and managing APIs to access enterprise information and systems, integration with third-party applications, integration with various partners for capabilities such as search and social networking, and delivery through app stores.

Mobile-Centric Applications and Interfaces. The user interface (IU) paradigm in place for more than 20 years is changing. UIs with windows, icons, menus, and pointers will be replaced by mobile-centric interfaces emphasizing touch, gesture, search, voice and video. Applications themselves are likely to shift to more focused and simple apps that can be assembled into more complex solutions. These changes will drive the need for new user interface design skills.

Building application user interfaces that span a variety of device types, potentially from many vendors, requires an understanding of fragmented building blocks and an adaptable programming structure that assembles them into optimized content for each device. Mobile consumer application platform tools and mobile enterprise platform tools are emerging to make it easier to develop in this cross-platform environment. HTML5 will also provide a long term model to address some of the cross-platform issues. By 2015, mobile Web technologies will have advanced sufficiently, so that half the applications that would be written as native apps in 2011 will instead be delivered as Web apps.

Contextual and Social User Experience. Context-aware computing uses information about an end-user or objects environment, activities, connections and preferences to improve the quality of interaction with that end-user or object. A contextually aware system anticipates the user’s needs and proactively serves up the most appropriate and customized content, product or service. Context can be used to link mobile, social, location, payment and commerce. It can help build skills in augmented reality, model-driven security and ensemble applications. Through 2013, context aware applications will appear in targeted areas such as location-based services, augmented reality on mobile devices, and mobile commerce.

On the social front, the interfaces for applications are taking on the characteristics of social networks. Social information is also becoming a key source of contextual information to enhance delivery of search results or the operation of applications.

Internet of Things. The Internet of Things (IoT) is a concept that describes how the Internet will expand as sensors and intelligence are added to physical items such as consumer devices or physical assets and these objects are connected to the Internet. The vision and concept have existed for years, however, there has been an acceleration in the number and types of things that are being connected and in the technologies for identifying, sensing and communicating. These technologies are reaching critical mass and an economic tipping point over the next few years. Key elements of the IoT include:

- Embedded sensors: Sensors that detect and communicate changes are being embedded, not just in mobile devices, but in an increasing number of places and objects.
- Image Recognition: Image recognition technologies strive to identify objects, people, buildings, places logos, and anything else that has value to consumers and enterprises. Smartphones and tablets equipped with cameras have pushed this technology from mainly industrial applications to broad consumer and enterprise applications.
- Near Field Communication (NFC) payment: NFC allows users to make payments by waving their mobile phone in front of a compatible reader. Once NFC is embedded in a critical mass of phones for payment, industries such as public transportation, airlines, retail and healthcare can explore other areas in which NFC technology can improve efficiency and customer service.

App Stores and Marketplaces. Application stores by Apple and Android provide marketplaces where hundreds of thousands of applications are available to mobile users. Gartner forecasts that by 2014, there will be more than 70 billion mobile application downloads from app stores every year. This will grow from a consumer-only phenomena to an enterprise focus. With enterprise app stores, the role of IT shifts from that of a centralized planner to a market manager providing governance and brokerage services to users and potentially an ecosystem to support entrepreneurs. Enterprises should use a managed diversity approach to focus on app store efforts and segment apps by risk and value.

Next-Generation Analytics. Analytics is growing along three key dimensions:

1. From traditional offline analytics to in-line embedded analytics. This has been the focus for many efforts in the past and will continue to be an important focus for analytics.

2. From analyzing historical data to explain what happened to analyzing historical and real-time data from multiple systems to simulate and predict the future.

3. Over the next three years, analytics will mature along a third dimension, from structured and simple data analyzed by individuals to analysis of complex information of many types (text, video, etc…) from many systems supporting a collaborative decision process that brings multiple people together to analyze, brainstorm and make decisions.

Analytics is also beginning to shift to the cloud and exploit cloud resources for high performance and grid computing.

In 2011 and 2012, analytics will increasingly focus on decisions and collaboration. The new step is to provide simulation, prediction, optimization and other analytics, not simply information, to empower even more decision flexibility at the time and place of every business process action.

Big Data. The size, complexity of formats and speed of delivery exceeds the capabilities of traditional data management technologies; it requires the use of new or exotic technologies simply to manage the volume alone. Many new technologies are emerging, with the potential to be disruptive (e.g., in-memory DBMS). Analytics has become a major driving application for data warehousing, with the use of MapReduce outside and inside the DBMS, and the use of self-service data marts. One major implication of big data is that in the future users will not be able to put all useful information into a single data warehouse. Logical data warehouses bringing together information from multiple sources as needed will replace the single data warehouse model.

In-Memory Computing. Gartner sees huge use of flash memory in consumer devices, entertainment equipment and other embedded IT systems. In addition, it offers a new layer of the memory hierarchy in servers that has key advantages — space, heat, performance and ruggedness among them. Besides delivering a new storage tier, the availability of large amounts of memory is driving new application models. In-memory applications platforms include in-memory analytics, event processing platforms, in-memory application servers, in-memory data management and in-memory messaging.

Running existing applications in-memory or refactoring these applications to exploit in-memory approaches can result in improved transactional application performance and scalability, lower latency (less than one microsecond) application messaging, dramatically faster batch execution and faster response time in analytical applications. As cost and availability of memory intensive hardware platforms reach tipping points in 2012 and 2013, the in-memory approach will enter the mainstream.

Extreme Low-Energy Servers. The adoption of low-energy servers — the radical new systems being proposed, announced and marketed by mostly new entrants to the server business —will take the buyer on a trip backward in time. These systems are built on low-power processors typically used in mobile devices. The potential advantage is delivering 30 times or more processors in a particular server unit with lower power consumption vs. current server approaches. The new approach is well suited for certain non-compute intensive tasks such as map/reduce workloads or delivery of static objects to a website. However, most applications will require more processing power, and the low-energy server model potentially increases management costs, undercutting broader use of the approach.

Cloud Computing. Cloud is a disruptive force and has the potential for broad long-term impact in most industries. While the market remains in its early stages in 2011 and 2012, it will see the full range of large enterprise providers fully engaged in delivering a range of offerings to build cloud environments and deliver cloud services. Oracle, IBM and SAP all have major initiatives to deliver a broader range of cloud services over the next two years. As Microsoft continues to expand its cloud offering, and these traditional enterprise players expand offerings, users will see competition heat up and enterprise-level cloud services increase.

Enterprises are moving from trying to understand the cloud to making decisions on selected workloads to implement on cloud services and where they need to build out private clouds. Hybrid cloud computing which brings together external public cloud services and internal private cloud services, as well as the capabilities to secure, manage and govern the entire cloud spectrum will be a major focus for 2012. From a security perspective new certification programs including FedRAMP and CAMM will be ready for initial trial, setting the stage for more secure cloud computing. On the private cloud front, IT will be challenged to bring operations and development groups closer together using “DevOps” concepts in order to approach the speed and efficiencies of public cloud service providers.

About Gartner Symposium/ITxpo

Gartner Symposium/ITxpo is the world’s most important gathering of CIOs and senior IT executives. This event delivers independent and objective content with the authority and weight of the world’s leading IT research and advisory organization, and provides access to the latest solutions from key technology providers. Gartner’s annual Symposium/ITxpo events are key components of attendees’ annual planning efforts. IT executives rely on Gartner Symposium/ITxpo to gain insight into how their organizations can use IT to address business challenges and improve operational efficiency.

More exclusive content, expanding multi-media coverage, including Twitter feeds and comments from the Gartner Blog Network are available Gartner’s SymLive at www.gartner.com/us/symposium.

Follow Gartner Symposium/ITxpo

Follow news, photos and video coming from Gartner Symposium/ITxpo on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/GartnerSym, on Twitter at http://twitter.com/Gartner_inc and using #GartnerSym, on flickr at http://www.flickr.com/photos/27772229@N07/.

Upcoming dates and locations for Gartner Symposium/ITxpo include:
October 25-27, Sao Paulo, Brazil: www.gartner.com/br/symposium
November 7-10, Barcelona, Spain: www.gartner.com/eu/symposium
November 14-17, Gold Coast, Australia: www.gartner.com/au/symposium
November 21-23, Mumbai, India: www.gartner.com/in/symposium

About Gartner

Gartner, Inc. (NYSE: IT) is the world’s leading information technology research and advisory company. Gartner delivers the technology-related insight necessary for its clients to make the right decisions, every day. From CIOs and senior IT leaders in corporations and government agencies, to business leaders in high-tech and telecom enterprises and professional services firms, to technology investors, Gartner is a valuable partner to 60,000 clients in 11,500 distinct organizations. Through the resources of Gartner Research, Gartner Executive Programs, Gartner Consulting and Gartner Events, Gartner works with every client to research, analyze and interpret the business of IT within the context of their individual role. Founded in 1979, Gartner is headquartered in Stamford, Connecticut, U.S.A., and has 4,500 associates, including 1,250 research analysts and consultants, and clients in 85 countries. For more information, visit www.gartner.com.

This announcement comes on the heels of the appointments of Nielsen’s Rob Holland as General Manager, DLX CPG and comScore’s Ashley Grace as head of CPG, Client Solutions, as Datalogix continues to build out its talent base to address the growth in demand for its industry leading cross-channel data products.

In his new role, Faldi brings nearly 20 years of senior management experience in both start-ups and public technology companies. Most recently, Faldi held P&L and operational responsibilities in excess of $1 billion of Yahoo!’s global revenues, with specific ownership of its ISP, Mobile and Search Affiliate, and Toolbar businesses. At Datalogix, he will assume responsibility for operations, analytics, product, and marketing, as well as the Datalogix digital network.

“Datalogix’ business requires a blend of enterprise and media savvy that is seldom found in the same individual,” said Eric Roza, President, Datalogix. “Following a year-long search, we met Finn and knew he was the perfect fit to serve as our COO. He has been recognized as one of Yahoo’s most successful senior executives in each of the past four years, and has repeatedly shown an ability to add value in dynamic, highly-competitive environments across both start-ups and public companies. His deep domain knowledge and network within the digital media industry were the icing on the cake for us.”

Faldi joined Yahoo! As Vice President Global Broadband in 2007 and, within a relatively short time, was promoted to manage a number of other product lines, most recently mobile. Prior to Yahoo!, he was a senior executive for start-up Solidus Networks (SN), where he was instrumental in adding more than 100,000 small to mid-sized merchants. Before Solidus, he co-led the business development and sales teams for United Online, Inc. (UOL) – at the time, the third-largest ISP in North America – and was credited as instrumental in their business turnaround in 2002. Finn is also an active investor and advisor to a number of leading digital media companies, including The Search Agency.

“Finn is an exceptional executive and has been a trusted partner to our organization” said Mandy Ginsberg, President, Match.com. “This is an exciting time for the online advertising industry and Datalogix, and I have no doubt with Finn’s leadership and passion for delivering results, he will play a critical role in shaping its future”.

“With the inflow of brand dollars, digital advertisers are becoming more demanding,” said Faldi. “More than any other organization, Datalogix truly understands how to bridge the gap between consumer purchasing and media consumption, a critical link in the chain. I’m looking forward to bringing my operations expertise to a company that’s setting the new standard for how the digital advertising industry will create audiences and measure results moving forward.”

About Datalogix™

Datalogix is the leader at integrating database marketing and digital media. Its mission is to leverage the power of purchase-based audience targeting to drive measurable online and offline sales. The company offers audience segmentation and integrated programs directly and through all leading digital media companies. Datalogix is based in Westminster, CO, with offices in New York, Boston and Chicago. For more information, visit www.datalogix.com.

SES Chicago 2011
CHICAGO – At SES Chicago, taking place November 14-18, 2011 at the Hyatt Regency Chicago, Incisive Media is programming an Accelerator Track consisting of presentations and panels on the latest trends in e-commerce. Given by experts in analytics, site usability, and other aspects of e-commerce, SES Chicago attendees will gain best practices on improving their ROIs.

One of the sessions, “Pagination for e-Commerce Sites,” is structured as a workshop and is being led by Eric Enge, President of Stone Temple Consulting. He will examine a few of the attendees’ own websites and describe the latest tools available for facilitating a more effective match between users’ needs and search engines.

The second panel, called “e-Commerce Analytics: 3 Reports You Can’t Live Without,” will feature e-commerce experts sharing their top three most valuable results – results that drive better, more profitable decisions.

“With Chicago being an important center of e-commerce and the etail industry, we loved the synergy of presenting what’s new for online businesses that depend on staying current to improve their sales and increase their profits,” said Matt McGowan, Managing Director of Americas at Incisive Media. “I’m looking forward to reconnecting with our previous Chicago colleagues and welcoming new attendees – and yes, with our huge program, we’ll have something for everyone at every level.”

SES Chicago, the leading event for marketing, social media, and search engine optimization professionals, offers over 70 sessions designed for those with any range of experience in online marketing. In addition to its informative presentations, intensive training workshops and tracks, and large exhibit hall, SES Chicago fosters a great environment for networking with industry peers – both formally and informally – that lead to valuable business outcomes.

Incisive Media is offering a special savings of up to $400 for those who register for SES Chicago prior to October 21.

About SES

Incisive Media’s SES Conference & Expo is a leading global conference and training series focused on search engine marketing. Other Incisive resources include ClickZ, which provides digital marketing news, information, commentary, advice, opinion, and research and Search Engine Watch, which covers news and information about search, analysis of the search engine industry, and offers tools for improving search marketing effectiveness.

Incisive Media is a leading global provider of specialized business news and information in print, online, and in person. The company’s principal markets include financial services, legal services, commercial real estate, marketing services, and risk management. Incisive Media’s market-leading brands include Accountancy Age, Computing, Investment Week, Legal Week, Post, Risk, and SES Conference and Expo. For more information, visit www.incisivemedia.com.

For more news and event updates visit the SES press room.

WESTMINSTER, Colo. – Datalogix, the leader at integrating database marketing and digital media, has expanded its commitment to the CPG vertical with the hiring of Rob Holland as General Manager and Ashley Grace as head of Client Solutions.

“The opportunity to help CPG companies more precisely reach online audiences with relevant offers, while measuring the resulting sales lift, is massive,” said Eric Roza, President, Datalogix. “Over the past three years, Datalogix has cracked the code on leveraging Point-Of-Sale data to address this opportunity. I’m thrilled to have two of the CPG industry’s brightest minds leading the charge to bring the power of purchase-based, 1:1 marketing into the digital era.”

Most recently Nielsen’s SVP, Global Retail and Shopper Practice, Holland previously oversaw the HomeScan Panel business among numerous executive positions within the consumer product groups across North America for The Nielsen Company. He also held senior positions at both Safeway and The Clorox Company.

As General Manager, Consumer Products, Holland has full ownership of Datalogix’ suite of audience and measurement solutions for the CPG industry, serving retailer and manufacturer advertisers.

Ashley Grace, formerly VP of the Advertising Research Systems division for comScore, will report to Holland and lead Datalogix CPG and Healthcare client solutions. In this capacity, Grace will partner with manufacturers to create and execute digital programs which drive measureable in-store sales lift through purchase-based audience definition and reach.

“Datalogix is making that critical connection between online advertising and in-store sales that is essential for companies investing in digital,” said Rob Holland. “As marketers continue to shift more dollars online, Datalogix will improve their effectiveness by finding the right audiences and providing real accountability with the measurement of in-store sales impact. I’m thrilled to help lead the industry through this game changing transition.”

About Datalogix™

Datalogix is the leader at integrating database marketing and digital media. Its mission is to leverage the power of purchase-based audience targeting to drive measurable online and offline sales. The company offers audience segmentation and integrated programs directly and through all leading digital media companies. Datalogix is based in Westminster, CO, with offices in New York, Boston and Chicago. For more information, visit www.datalogix.com.

SAN DIEGO – Anametrix (http://anametrix.com), the leader in cloud-based business marketing intelligence, today announced the immediate availability of its SiteVantage™ next-generation web analytics solution. Built on the new InstaVantage™ platform by the original creators of Hitbox/HBX real-time web analytics, SiteVantage will be used by customers to meet ‘Big Data’ digital measurement demands.

SiteVantage™ offers enhanced data insights across channels and is designed to help digital marketers more effectively understand customers to subsequently increase acquisition, engagement and retention. Disrupting the legacy web analytics landscape, SiteVantage™ offers revolutionary capabilities and benefits:

Connect All Marketing Data: For more robust reporting and analytics, a core design feature enables SiteVantage™ to integrate with any online or offline data source including Point of Sale (POS), Social Media, Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Video & Audio, E-mail Campaigns, Market Research Surveys, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and Loyalty Programs combined and relative to each other.

Customizable Dashboards for Interactive Visualizations: SiteVantage™ offers highly intuitive drag-and-drop custom report creation with unlimited segmentation in addition to industry standard web traffic reports.

100% Native Cloud Environment: Industry leading scalability to handle unlimited domains and traffic in real-time and without roll-off requires minimal SiteVantage client IT involvement.

Patent-Pending Breakthroughs: To optimize campaign results, SiteVantage™ immediately sends predictive alerts when data is trending outside established confidence intervals. Further, an exclusive bi-directional spreadsheet synching function enables users to work between SiteVantage™ and Excel seamlessly.

More for Less: By utilizing the latest technology platforms and proprietary breakthroughs, Anametrix reaps tremendous cost savings that are passed along to its clients. SiteVantage is available for organizations of all sizes to effectively measure and optimize digital efforts. Pricing is not site or user-based to ensure access to all employees that can benefit from robust reporting.

Key client feedback during SiteVantage pre-release has been extremely positive. Mike Hodges, General Manager and VP Interactive at The SanDiego Union Tribune stated, “We have been leveraging Anametrix technology for over a year to effectively support our ‘Digital First’ initiatives across multiple channels and media types. Our switch to SiteVantage™ [from Omniture] extended our capabilities beyond traditional web analytics, enabling us to better monetize engagement and loyalty while also enjoying significant cost savings.
SignOn San Diego requires cutting edge technology as San Diego’s largest print and online publisher, so we particularly appreciate the continuous innovations and custom solutions that Anametrix offers.”

“You can’t transform a decade-old brick of a cell phone into a smart phone. Likewise, you can’t add-on to web analytics technology that originated in the 90s to address current digital measurement requirements,” stated Blaise Barrelet, Anametrix Founder and CEO.
“Anametrix has leapfrogged the competition by building SiteVantage™ on a cutting-edge business analytics platform with exclusive capabilities for web traffic and touchpoint analysis.”

Web analytics veterans know Anametrix’ Blaise Barrelet as the founder of WebSideStory, which is recognized as the premier industry leader of real-time web analytics with acclaimed Hitbox and subsequent HBX product lines. WebSideStory went public in 2004, and after merging with Omniture in 2007 was acquired by Adobe Software for $1.8B in 2009.

For more information about SiteVantage, email: sales@anametrix.com or phone: (858) 558-8230.

About Anametrix, Inc.
Anametrix, Inc. is a privately funded, next-generation business analytics company whose InstaVantage™ platform utilizes proprietary connectors to seamlessly correlate data from multiple sources, both online and offline, for quick and precise decision making. A high-performance data management infrastructure handles metrics integration to offer data visualizations on customizable dashboards.
Founded in 2009 by analytics industry experts Blaise Barrelet and Anders Olsson and led by a world-class advisory board, Anametrix provides cloud-based solutions that integrate vast amounts of data from disparate sources including web analytics, social media, search engine marketing (SEM), video & audio, e-mail campaigns, market research surveys, point of sale (POS) and customer relationship management (CRM). Self-directed business insights are readily accessible across organizations, from sales staff to C-level. For more information, please visit http://anametrix.com.

INDIANAPOLIS – ExactTarget announced that Chief Executive Officer Scott Dorsey will outline the company’s vision and introduce the next generation of the marketing cloud in the opening keynote Tuesday of Connections ’11, the world’s largest interactive marketing conference.

The three-day event, which is expected to welcome more than 3,000 ExactTarget clients and partners, will feature keynote addresses from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, CNN’s Soledad O’Brien, author Aron Ralston and executives from Facebook, Adobe, Yahoo!, Best Buy, Klout and Foursquare.

“Consumers’ rapid adoption of mobile and social technologies along with continued reliance on email is changing the dynamics of marketing,” said Dorsey. “Connections provides a powerful three-day experience for marketers to collaborate and learn how the evolution of marketing is creating new opportunity to better connect with consumers in real-time across all online channels.”

Centered on the theme of “The Power of One,” Connections ’11 will challenge attendees to explore the power of one consumer to change a brand, one technology to change an industry and one person to change the world, Dorsey said. The conference will also feature:

- 50+ Educational Sessions: Courses range from interactive marketing best practices and case studies to hands-on sessions to build engaging cross-channel campaigns across email, social media, mobile and the Web.
- Award-winning Marketing: ExactTarget will award the industry’s top eight interactive marketing programs in its annual Subscribers’ Rule! Awards.
- New ExactTarget Products: ExactTarget will unveil a host of new products and global solutions to provide marketers expanded real-time, cross-channel marketing capabilities.
- Industry Certification: More than 400 marketers from around the globe will earn industry certifications from ExactTarget Academy.

To view the complete agenda for Connections ’11: The Power of One, visit www.Connections2011.com.

Connections ’11 follows ExactTarget Connections ‘10, which welcomed more than 2,000 marketers to Indianapolis and featured a lineup of industry titans including Virgin Group Founder and Chairman Sir Richard Branson, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo and a private concert from Grammy Award-winning band Train.

About ExactTarget

ExactTarget is a leading global provider of on-demand email marketing and interactive marketing solutions. The company’s Interactive Marketing Hub technology provides organizations a single solution to connect with customers via email, integrated text messaging, landing pages and social media. Supported by collaborative global services teams, ExactTarget’s technology integrates with more sales and marketing information systems than any other in the industry, including Salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Omniture and Webtrends among many others. ExactTarget powers permission-based multichannel communications for thousands of organizations around the world including Expedia.com, Best Buy, Papa John’s, CareerBuilder.com, Gannett Co., Inc., The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, The Home Depot and Wellpoint, Inc. For more information, visit www.exacttarget.com.

WASHINGTON – SocialCode, a full-service Facebook agency working with top global brands and agencies to translate their marketing goals on to Facebook, today announced results from a new Facebook advertising research study. The research examined over four million data points across over 50 clients from a wide variety of industries to get a better understanding of how age and gender affect click-through rates (CTR) and ‘Like’ rates on Facebook. Results show that for ads with a ‘Like’ button, older Facebook users have a higher CTR while younger Facebook users will tend to click ‘Like’ directly within the Facebook ad.

“In general, younger Facebook users are more comfortable using the ‘Like’ button than older users at this point,” said Laura O’Shaughnessy, CEO, SocialCode. “With inline fan ads on Facebook, older users have a high level of interaction and curiosity about the ads as evidenced by their high CTRs, whereas younger users have a higher propensity to click the ‘Like’ button right in an ad on Facebook. We assume that while older users are adopting Facebook at a high rate, they are also the newest subset to join the social network, meaning they may not have high friend numbers so ads are less likely to have social context in advertisements.”

AGE FINDINGS

The SocialCode study found that while age has a strong positive effect on whether a user will click; it oftentimes has the opposite effect on the likelihood of the user becoming a fan of a page.

- 50+ year-old users, the oldest segment in the study, are 28.2 percent more likely to click through and 9 percent less likely to ‘Like’ than 18-29 year-old users, the youngest group observed
- Versus the rest of the younger population on Facebook, 50+ users see a 22.6 percent higher CTR and 8.4 percent lower ‘Like’ rate

GENDER FINDINGS

When broken down by gender, age has a much more pronounced effect on CTR for women than it does for men, whereas for men there is a stronger effect on ‘Like’ rate than women.

- Overall, women are 11 percent more likely to click on an ad
- ‘Like’ rates are almost even for men and women; men are actually 2.2 percent more likely to ‘Like’ an ad than women
- For women, CTR is 31.2 percent higher for the 50+ age group versus 18-29 year olds, men only see a 16.2 percent difference between the age groups
- Versus all age groups, 50+ women’s CTR is 22 percent higher versus a 16.4 percent difference for males
- The oldest male segment has an 11.7 percent lower ‘Like’ rate than the youngest segment, and 9.5 percent lower ‘Like’ rate versus all age groups. Women only see a 7.2 percent and 7.9 percent difference respectively

The age and gender research study conducted by SocialCode examined over four million data points for ads containing a ‘Like’ button across over 50 clients in different verticals for the past ten months. While performance varies greatly based on multiple variables, this study looks at the aggregate trends for gender and age seen in the marketplace.

About SocialCode

SocialCode is a full-service Facebook agency specializing in performance marketing. SocialCode’s unique tools are built on a research engine that offers analytics and information for advertisers that far surpasses what they could get anywhere else. With advanced quantitative methods, SocialCode specializes in building targeted communities, engaging those audiences and monetizing potential customers all while conducting research to inform strategy.

Today’s consumers are increasingly connected across a broad spectrum of devices such as smart phones, tablets and wired computers. The recent study Welcome To The Era of Agile Commerce by Forrester Research reports that consumers don’t interact with channels. Instead they interact through touch points such as a brand’s website, the call center, mobile apps/sites, in-store, and social media (Source: Forrester Research). They demand easier ways to connect, research, engage and purchase. The key to creating successful advertising campaigns is making it seamless for the consumer to engage across these touch points. Giving consumers the option to connect from their mobile devices direct to an advertiser’s call center is key to creating this seamless experience.

“Our goal at Epic is to give our clients a comprehensive package that addresses all of their advertising needs. For many types of products and services, especially big-ticket items, consumers want to speak with someone live,” said Don Mathis, President and CEO of Epic Marketplace. “RingRevenue’s call performance marketing platform allows advertisers and agencies to create call-based campaigns that not only encourage and measure phone engagement but also deliver more customers and, ultimately, revenue to their business. We’ve seen how quickly the call-based channel is exploding and their team has a proven track record of success in this space.”

In addition to advanced call tracking capabilities, RingRevenue’s call performance marketing platform brings real-time call analytics, performance-based pricing controls, search keyword call tracking, SMS campaign integration and more to Epic’s mix of technology, giving them the ability to deliver more revenue and better ROI to advertisers and agencies.

“We are pleased to be partnering with Epic to deliver high-value inbound calls to their client base in the US and UK. Integrating call performance marketing together with their already powerful technology platform and award-winning marketing team is a combination that is sure to deliver brands more customers and more revenue,” said RingRevenue CEO Jason Spievak.

To sign up as an advertiser or publisher and begin promoting call-based campaigns click here: http://epic.ringrevenue.com/signup

About Epic Marketplace

Epic Marketplace (www.epicmarketplace.com) is the leading integrated multichannel digital marketing solutions provider leveraging social media, mobile, display, and video. Through Epic Marketplace, the top brands and agencies can engage, persuade, influence and communicate with their best consumers and prospects helping to grow and enhance their brand while boosting sales and creating sustainable relationships.

About RingRevenue, Inc.

RingRevenue® improves every marketing campaign with better quality leads, higher conversions and increased ROI. By tapping the power of the phone, RingRevenue’s patent-pending call performance marketing platform captures and converts more high-value customers. RingRevenue’s comprehensive tracking and analytics consistently increase revenues from mobile, print and other “offline” media while also improving the performance of online campaigns such as search, email and display. RingRevenue powers many of the leading performance marketing networks and agencies. To learn more about RingRevenue or to request a demo, please visit ringrevenue.com or call 866-943-6426.

NEW YORK – The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) called on the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to withdraw its controversial new domain-naming plan, saying that the program to assign hundreds of thousands of new domain names would cause incalculable financial damage to brand owners, including the hundreds of media brands in its membership. These “top-level domain” addresses, which could include domain endings that focus on specific trademarked brand names such as .coke, .jetblue, .cnn, .facebook or .verizon, would come at an extremely high cost to publishers and advertisers, and would also offer “cyber squatters” an opportunity to harm a brand’s integrity and/or profit greatly from their bad-faith domain registrations.

“This could be disastrous for the media brand owners we represent and the brand owners with which they work. We hope that ICANN
“ICANN’s potentially momentous change seems to have been made in a top-down star chamber. There appears to have been no economic impact research, no full and open stakeholder discussions, and little concern for the delicate balance of the Internet ecosystem,” said Randall Rothenberg, CEO and President, IAB. “This could be disastrous for the media brand owners we represent and the brand owners with which they work. We hope that ICANN will reconsider both this ill-considered decision and the process by which it was reached.”

The IAB move followed strong criticism of the ICANN plan by the Association of National Advertisers (ANA). The ANA has labeled the plan as economically unsupportable, stating that it is likely to cause irreparable harm and damage to its membership and the Internet business community in general. At the same time, according to the ANA, the program contravenes the legal rights of brand owners and jeopardizes the safety of consumers.

Unless the IAB, ANA and other organizations can effectively defeat plans for ICANN’s “top-level domain” program, these new domain endings are expected to roll out in late 2012.

About the IAB

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) is comprised of more than 500 leading media and technology companies who 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.

Ybrant Digital has official access to the Facebook Ads API, which allows developers to integrate into the Facebook Ads system and provide marketers with new solutions to manage Facebook Ads.

HYDERABAD, India – Ybrant Digital, the global digital marketing company, was officially chosen as one of Facebook’s Marketing API Partners. An exclusive list of worldwide partners including Ybrant Digital was selected to integrate the Facebook Marketing API, in order to help advertisers scale their Facebook presence. Official marketing partners can develop proprietary third party tools that offer advanced Ad creation, Campaign Management, Reporting, and further areas of specialization.

Facebook launched its Marketing Program on July 3rd, 2011 in order to improve the marketing efforts from brands and agencies in the entire Facebook Platform, as well as spread the voice about new features and best practices for digital marketing on Facebook. Ybrant Digital, which provides Facebook Ads solutions since 2009, successfully met a demanding threshold of requirements established by Facebook’s Marketing API team.

Ybrant FBM , the flagship Facebook Ads product, is an in-house tool that leverages the Ads API to serve an enhanced advertising solution. Combined with additional social networks in the Ybrant Social package, and cooperation with third parties such as application developers and page designers, this creates a complete solution for advertisers seeking to engage social network audiences effectively.

“After all the fruitful efforts in co-operation with Facebook, this announcement encourages the Ybrant team to keep establishing new standards in technology and best practices for ad serving, targeting and optimization. It also validates our position in the market as a leading global digital marketing provider.” Said Suresh Reddy, Chairman and CEO of Ybrant Digital.

The Ybrant FBM service successfully serves large-scale advertisers on Facebook’s Social Ads system. In parallel, Ybrant’s QCC is an attractive offering for publishers interested in quality display inventory running on their Facebook Applications. These services are fully incorporated with Ybrant’s Ad Center which centralizes management of the full range of digital media platforms, including social networks, display inventory, mobile advertising and more.

About Ybrant Digital: www.ybrantdigital.com

INDIANAPOLIS – Global interactive marketing provider ExactTarget launched a new guide today that provides marketers practical advice on how to create effective cross-channel marketing campaigns across social media, email, mobile and the Web.

Entitled The Field Guide to Cross-Channel Marketing, the new guide features channel-specific best practices and offers actionable insight on how to connect channels to create successful cross-channel campaigns.

“Regardless of their industry, interactive marketers must be able to deliver optimized, relevant and customized experiences as customers become more difficult to engage,” said Tim Kopp, chief marketing officer at ExactTarget. “This guide gives real world advice and direction to help marketers meet and exceed customer expectations, and achieve cross-channel marketing success.”

Featuring insights from ExactTarget’s acclaimed Subscribers, Fans and Followers series and industry thought leaders including MarketingSherpa, the guide includes advice for marketers across several industries including retail, financial services, technology and publishing among others.

The guide includes:

- Actionable advice on how best to engage customers at the right time using the right mix of interactive marketing channels;
- Proven tactics to boost revenue using social media, email, text campaigns and websites; and
- Real-world examples of successful cross-channel strategies for B2C and B2B marketers.

The free Field Guide to Cross-Channel Marketing is available for download by clicking here.

The launch of the new guide follows a recent Forrester Consulting study commissioned by ExactTarget that found 48 percent of interactive marketing executives rank understanding customers’ cross-channel interactions as one of the top challenges facing marketing today. Entitled “The New Campaign Management Mandate,” the June 2011 study found marketers’ lack of cross-channel insights result in brands interacting through disconnected channels that fail to deliver seamless brand experiences and the real-time, relevant dialog consumers expect.

Based on a survey of nearly 160 marketers, the study identified key challenges marketers face to meet the new reality of cross-channel engagement and offered persona-based recommendations to help marketers evolve their interactive campaign management capabilities.

About ExactTarget

ExactTarget is a leading global provider of on-demand email marketing and interactive marketing solutions. The company’s Interactive Marketing Hub technology provides organizations a single solution to connect with customers via email, integrated text messaging, landing pages and social media. Supported by collaborative global services teams, ExactTarget’s technology integrates with more sales and marketing information systems than any other in the industry, including Salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Omniture and Webtrends among many others. ExactTarget powers permission-based multichannel communications for thousands of organizations around the world including Expedia.com, Best Buy, Papa John’s, CareerBuilder.com, Gannett Co., Inc., The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, The Home Depot and Wellpoint, Inc. For more information, visit www.exacttarget.com.

CARY, N.C. – Dex One Corporation (NYSE: DEXO) and Google announced a strategic agreement that will elevate Dex One to a select group of companies around the world who serve as Google AdWords™ Certified Partners. This partnership is part of Dex One’s overall efforts to drive the company’s digital sales to 30 percent of total revenue by the end of 2012.

Through the partnership, Dex One customers will be better positioned to optimize their lead generation activities, leverage local search, enhance their digital presence and better compete in a changing marketplace.

As a certified partner, Dex One will receive integrated marketing support, training, engineering support, optimization services, and access to new products from Google. This will allow Dex One to strengthen customers’ marketing efforts by providing state-of-the-art technology and provides a strategic relationship where experienced Google consultants will provide technical training to Dex One marketing consultants who can create programs that provide a marked competitive edge.

“This powerful combination of technology and customer access leverages the Google AdWords platform and delivers it to local businesses through our network of 1,500 local marketing professionals and brings our ever-increasing suite of digital products to the next level,” said Dex One Chief Executive Officer Alfred Mockett. “Success in today’s marketplace requires a simple, yet highly effective way to navigate increasingly complex and fragmented digital possibilities. We fully expect this partnership will meet and exceed these needs.”

“Dex One has relationships with local businesses throughout the country, which is what made this partnership attractive to Google,” said Ben Wood, head of Google’s Americas channel sales partnerships. “This partnership will help local businesses benefit from the proven reach, relevance and return on investment of Google AdWords.”

Dex One continues to roll out best-in-class digital product offerings that optimize customers’ digital presence and drive more cost-effective leads to its local channels.

Google AdWords is a cost-effective, efficient way for businesses of all sizes to advertise online by delivering relevant ads when users search for specific products and services on Google properties and/or the Google Display Network. With Google AdWords, advertisers can find new customers online and better connect with them at the precise moment they are searching for specific products and services on their desktop or mobile devices. Google Display Network is comprised of hundreds of thousands of high quality websites and allows advertisers to choose how to communicate their marketing message using text, video and image ads.

About Dex One Corporation

Dex One Corporation (NYSE: DEXO) is a leading marketing solutions provider helping local businesses and their customers connect wherever and whenever they choose to search. Building on its heritage of delivering print-based solutions, the company provides integrated products and services to help its clients establish their digital presence and generate leads. Dex One’s locally based marketing experts offer a broad network of local marketing solutions including online, mobile and print search solutions, such as DexKnows.com. For more information, visit www.DexOne.com.

HOUSTON – A record 570+ people attended the American Marketing Association Houston Chapter’s 25th Annual Crystal Awards event last night, including representatives from 76 Houston-area finalist companies and organizations, where they watched 40 companies win 55 awards for Houston’s best marketing work. The event, which broke all attendance and entry records, drew the who’s who of Houston companies and organizations including Accenture, Cameron, Reliant Energy, Deloitte, Halliburton, the Houston Symphony, Houston Texans, Houston Zoo, M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, Metro, Microsoft, Schlumberger, Shell, Texas Children’s Hospital, Transwestern and Weatherford.

Marketers from 162 companies and organizations watched as Axiom and Weatherford International tied with a leading five awards each. The Houston Rockets won the Maverick award while Accenture walked away with the Crystal Award’s coveted Judges’ Favorite award. Special guest Nancy Costopulos, CMO of the American Marketing Association, attended the event to recognize AMA Houston as the association’s 2009-2010 Chapter of the Year. The chapter has won this top honor an unprecedented five of the last several years.

Crystals Awards helps nonprofits

Part of the proceeds from the Crystal Awards goes to AMA Houston Gives Back, the chapter’s philanthropic arm that assists local non-profit organizations with costs associated with their marketing efforts. Three organizations receiving funds at the event included Girls on the Run, O’Connell College Preparatory School, and SEARCH Homeless Services.

The event, the largest marketing awards show in the region and one of the largest in the country, was chaired by Suzanne Fehrenbacher of Enbase Solutions, and Jared Houser of LivingSocial. They led a team of 38 volunteers plus local firms providing in-kind services in support of the event. A record number of cash sponsors helped fund the event.

For a complete list of Crystal Awards winners and to see photos of the event, go to www.crystalawards.org.

About AMA

AMA Houston is the area’s premier professional marketing organization and the nation’s largest chapter. AMA Houston provides marketers the ability to remain competitive in today’s business environment through networking events, special interest groups and real-world educational programs. Named Chapter of the Year five times in the last seven years by AMA’s international headquarters, AMA Houston serves more than 1,100 members with diverse marketing expertise from a variety of industries.

SAN FRANCISCO – NetShelter Technology Media, the largest tech influencer network with over 150 million readers globally*, announced that it has won two awards in the Web Marketing Association’s 2011 Interactive Advertising Competition. NetShelter was the recipient of “Outstanding Online Campaign” and “Best Retail Online Campaign.” This prestigious accolade is awarded by the Web Marketing Association to honor excellence in online advertising, recognize the individuals and organizations responsible, and showcase the best in award winning Internet advertising.

NetShelter won for its work on the “LG Optimus S Influential Stories” campaign, which was created to help the technology giant launch their latest smartphone during the 2010 holiday season. NetShelter created a highly interactive social experience, which brought together brand messaging and video around the LG Optimus S smartphone with the most influential and engaging editorial articles from NetShelter’s mobile and consumer electronics publishers.

In addition, NetShelter was awarded for its innovative “RadioShack Gift Guide” campaign, which helped position the retailer as the preferred consumer electronics shopping destination for gifts during the 2011 holiday season. NetShelter created the “Gift Guide Review,” a customized, interactive ad experience that aligned RadioShack’s featured mobile and consumer electronics products with objective editorial content and expert product reviews. At the campaign’s conclusion, NetShelter delivered a 200% lift in CTR compared to standard IAB units.

“We are honored to be recognized by our peers with this year’s IAC award win,” said Peyman Nilforoush, CEO and co-founder of NetShelter Technology Media. “NetShelter’s success with the LG and RadioShack campaigns demonstrates the power that integrating engaging and objective editorial from influential publishers delivers to digital marketing campaigns. We look forward to helping even more tech-related brands realize the performance benefits that NetShelter’s unique influencer marketing approach brings to their marketing initiatives.”

The Internet Advertising Competition (IAC) Awards are produced by the Web Marketing Association to honor excellence in online advertising and to recognize the individuals and organizations responsible for the best in Internet marketing. The IAC Awards are the first and only industry-based advertising award competition dedicated exclusively to online advertising. The Competition web site with a complete list of winners is located at www.IACAward.org.

*comScore Media Metrix January 2011

About NetShelter Technology Media:

NetShelter is the leader in technology media, generating over 150 million global unique visitors monthly across nearly 300 independently published partner sites in the CE, IT, mobile and sustainability categories. NetShelter empowers brands with powerful marketing opportunities designed to align their communications with engaging content from highly influential topical experts. These influencer marketing programs yield higher levels of quality engagement that amplifies the impact of a single marketing message many times over.

NetShelter is headquartered in San Francisco with offices in New York, Toronto and the United Kingdom. NetShelter Technology Media is backed by venture funding from Rho Ventures, Rho Canada and JLA Ventures. http://www.netshelter.com.

INDIANAPOLIS – Global interactive marketing provider ExactTarget launched a new guide that offers practical advice on how to transform consumer research into effective marketing campaigns across email, Facebook and Twitter.

Entitled Top 5 Things Consumers Want from Marketers, the guide pairs findings from ExactTarget’s consumer research with clear step-by-step advice on how to create engaging interactive marketing campaigns that deliver on consumers’ expectations and drive new business.

“Consumers’ expectations of brands have never been higher,” said Tim Kopp, ExactTarget chief marketing officer. “Our new guide brings together the best of our research with real-world ‘how-to’ recommendations designed to help marketers create powerful interactive marketing campaigns that build brand loyalty and increase customer lifetime value.”

Featuring insights from ExactTarget’s consumer research, including its acclaimed Subscribers, Fans and Followers series, the new guide includes practical advice on how to:

- Expand an email marketing program to include Twitter and Facebook;
- Coordinate interactions across all online channels to create a seamless customer experience;
- Allow customers to select the best channel and frequency for brand interaction; and
- Optimize campaigns to increase engagement and overall performance.

“As consumers continue to evolve into digital media multitaskers, the rules of marketing will be irreversibly changed,” states the Nov. 2010 report by Forrester Research Inc. entitled “CMO Mandate: Adapt or Perish”. “In this new world, there is greater demand to consume media across multiple platforms, causing exponential growth of content — both branded and user-generated — but unfortunately consumers will become more difficult to engage.”

The Top 5 Things Consumers Want from Marketers briefing is available for free download at www.ExactTarget.com/ConsumersWant.

The launch of the new guide follows news that ExactTarget’s next generation of interactive marketing technology – the Interactive Marketing HubTM – has been named the “Innovation of the Year.” Awarded by technology trade association TechPoint, the honor recognized the Interactive Marketing Hub’s unique strength and ability to enable marketers to plan, monitor and track real-time interactive marketing programs from a single dashboard. By aggregating all customer interaction data as it happens, the Interactive Marketing Hub allows marketers to instantly take action on data across all online channels in real time.

About ExactTarget

ExactTarget is a leading global provider of on-demand email marketing and interactive marketing solutions. The company’s Interactive Marketing Hub technology provides organizations a single solution to connect with customers via email, integrated text messaging, landing pages and social media. Supported by collaborative global services teams, ExactTarget’s technology integrates with more sales and marketing information systems than any other in the industry, including Salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Omniture and Webtrends among many others. ExactTarget powers permission-based multichannel communications for thousands of organizations around the world including Expedia.com, Best Buy, Papa John’s, CareerBuilder.com, Gannett Co., Inc., The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, The Home Depot and Wellpoint, Inc. For more information, visit www.exacttarget.com.

The April 2011 qSearch data reflect the impact of Yahoo! Search Direct, Yahoo!’s new feature that delivers search results in real-time while users type their query. Yahoo! Search Direct was available only on Yahoo! U.S. Web Search for the month of April.

U.S. Explicit Core Search

Google Sites led the U.S. explicit core search market in April with 65.4 percent market share, followed by Yahoo! Sites with 15.9 percent (up 0.2 percentage points) and Microsoft Sites with 14.1 percent (up 0.2 percentage points). Ask Network accounted for 3.0 percent of explicit core searches, followed by AOL, Inc. with 1.5 percent.

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

More than 16.2 billion explicit core searches were conducted in April. Google Sites ranked first with 10.7 billion searches, followed by Yahoo! Sites with 2.6 billion, Microsoft Sites with 2.3 billion, Ask Network with 491 million and AOL, Inc. with 248 million.

U.S. Total Core Search

Google Sites accounted for 64.2 percent of total core search queries conducted (up 0.1 percentage points), followed by Yahoo! Sites with 17.9 percent and Microsoft Sites with 13.8 percent (up 0.2 percentage points). Ask Network comprised 2.7 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 more than 18.0 billion total core search queries in April. Google Sites ranked first with 11.6 billion searches, followed by Yahoo! Sites with 3.2 billion and Microsoft Sites with 2.5 billion.

comScore Total Core Search Query Report
April 2011 vs. March 2011
Total U.S. – Home/Work/University Locations
Source: comScore qSearch
Core Search Entity    Total Core Search Queries (MM)
Mar-11    Apr-11    Percent Change
Total Core Search    18,886    18,089    -4%
Google Sites     12,113     11,609     -4%
Yahoo! Sites     3,405     3,239     -5%
Microsoft Sites     2,576     2,501     -3%
Ask Network     520     491     -6%
AOL, Inc.     272     248     -9%
“Powered By” Reporting

In order to accurately represent the continued evolution of the search landscape, comScore is providing insight into the share of algorithmic explicit searches that are powered by Google and Bing, and branded as such to the consumer. Google’s “powered by” share is composed of searches conducted at Google entities, as well as branded searches at AOL and Ask. Bing’s “powered by” share is composed of searches conducted at Microsoft entities as well as branded Yahoo! entities.

In April, 67.8 percent of searches carried organic search results from Google, while 26.5 percent of searches were powered by Bing organic results.

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.

LONDON – The Fournaise Marketing Group, one of the global leaders in Customer Acquisition through Marketing ROI, released its 2010 Global Marketing Effectiveness Report – to share with CEOs, management decision-makers and Marketers across the globe how ROI Marketers delivered 24% incremental customer demand in 2010 and generated business growth for their own organisation.

“CEOs around the world have always wanted their Marketers to deliver top-line growth for the business. But they have often been frustrated with their Marketers’ inability to quantify the effectiveness of their spending and the positive impact it has on the top line. ROI Marketers are the new breed of Marketers. They think business. They mean business. They track and maximise to grow the business. They focus on business-related KPIs. They speak the language of their management and stakeholders” said Jerome Fontaine, CEO & Chief Tracker of Fournaise.

Best known for its cloud-based Next Generation Marketing Effectiveness Tracking solutions, Fournaise analysed a wide pool of 2,000 cross-channel B2C and B2B ads it tracked for its ROI Marketer clients across 12 countries worldwide in 2010, to give a glimpse of how ROI Marketers operate to deliver measurable top-line business growth:

1) ROI Marketers are 100% pragmatic and take decisions based on effectiveness
They noticed last year that Traditional Ads beat Digital Ads by 5% in effectiveness, and adjusted their strategies and campaigns accordingly with proportionately greater focus on Traditional Ads.

2) ROI Marketers are not afraid to go against popular marketing trends if their tracking results say the contrary
Despite the consumption explosion of everything digital, they tracked that the overall effectiveness of the Digital Ad category fell for the first time in 2010 for them: by 4%. Unlike many Traditional Marketers, they reduced their Digital Ads spending and only focused on the formats where they saw acceptable ROI results in terms of customer demand generation.

3) ROI Marketers invest in the areas where they know they will get business results
Take social media for example: they saw excellent results for customer service, customer experience and overall buzz creation, but they did not see enough solid or consistent demand generation results to consider social media their new frontier or to make it the centre of their strategies.

“ROI Marketers focus on one single currency – incremental customer demand – and build their strategies and campaigns around that currency. Their CEOs know they are the very people they need to grow the business. And that sends a strong warning to Traditional Marketers: become ROI Marketers or run the risk of becoming obsolete” Mr Fontaine added.

The Fournaise 2010 Global Marketing Effectiveness Report (and Top 5 Marketing Effectiveness Tracking Results Fournaise tracked for its ROI Marketer clients) is available at www.fournaisegroup.com/2010-ROI-Marketers

NEW YORK – Yodle, a leader in local online marketing, announced the launch of its full-service Search Engine Optimization offering for the franchise industry, Yodle FranchiseSEO. Yodle FranchiseSEO was developed to deliver on a set of best practices for website development, maps optimization and custom content creation that are designed to drive prominent rankings for franchisees on top search engines. Yodle is also proud to announce that Meineke Car Care Centers has rolled out Yodle FranchiseSEO to 950 of its locations across the country.

“Yodle’s full service SEO solution has resulted in first page exposure for Meineke,” said Don Rauch, Director of Marketing for Meineke. “The type of results we continue to receive show great progress is being made in getting us ranked where we want to be and among the keywords we have targeted.”

Yodle FranchiseSEO, Yodle’s second custom solution for the Franchise community, optimizes for the most relevant local keywords at the Franchisee level while building on and reinforcing the ranking authority of the Franchisor web site. Features include:

- Franchisee Site Creation: Yodle creates professionally designed websites that showcase the franchise brand and are developed with SEO best practices.
- Link Building: Yodle builds links to franchisee sites from local, social, and video websites by creating and syndicating custom content tailored to the franchisee’s services.
- Maps Optimization: Yodle claims and builds out each franchisee’s map profiles on Google Place, Bing Maps and Yahoo! Local.
- Corporate Site Optimization: Yodle works with the Franchise corporate site to ensure it is optimized to pass along online ranking authority to franchisees.

These features, along with our advanced reporting and premium customer service, were designed to deliver relevant traffic to franchisee sites and generate new customers and positive ROI to the Franchise systems.

“The launch of Yodle FranchiseSEO represents yet another major investment in developing products that fulfill the unique needs of the Franchise community,” said Yodle CEO Court Cunningham. “We will continue to invest and build on our best-in-class suite of products to help Franchise systems solve complex marketing challenges in an ever-changing online marketing landscape.”

Yodle, a leader in local online advertising and named #35 on the INC 500 List of fastest growing private companies in the U.S., connects thousands of local businesses with consumers in a process so simple and cost-effective that business owners can’t imagine any other way to advertise. Yodle has developed an integrated approach to signing up and serving local businesses that are transitioning their marketing budgets online. Yodle is headquartered in New York, NY and serves a national customer base from six local offices across the United States.”

Meineke: Meineke Car Care Centers, based in Charlotte, N.C., is one of the nation’s largest car care franchise businesses, with approximately 950 locations in 146 markets.

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. – Advertising Age has ranked Acxiom® Corporation (Nasdaq: ACXM) as the No. 1 U.S. agency for the third year in a row, confirming Acxiom’s focus on innovations that deliver customer value for clients globally.

Acxiom also ranked No. 1 in “Top Direct and CRM Agencies in the U.S.,” No. 2 in “World’s Top CRM/Direct Marketing Agencies” and No. 9 in the “World’s Top 50 Agency Companies.”

Leveraging its consumer data and analytics, superior technology and talent, Acxiom is uniquely positioned to deliver customer insight across channels and media, identifying customer preferences and allowing marketers to engage with them with the highest level of certainty. At the same time, consumers are provided with the choices they need to interact with their favorite brands and companies.

“The traditional definition of an agency is evolving, with brands expecting partners to share their values of accountability and focus on driving shareholder value,” said Acxiom Chief Marketing Officer Tim Suther. “In this rapidly changing environment, Ad Age’s ranking validates our focus and the sentiment of our clients.”

In 2008 and 2009 Acxiom was the first No. 1 leader in Ad Age’s ranking that was not a traditional full-service shop or a conventional advertising agency. Advertising Age’s rankings are based on revenues.

About Acxiom

Acxiom is a recognized leader in marketing services and technology that enable marketers to successfully manage audiences, personalize consumer experiences and create profitable customer relationships. Our superior industry-focused, consultative approach combines consumer data and analytics, databases, data integration and consulting solutions for personalized, multichannel marketing strategies. Acxiom leverages over 40 years of experience in data management to deliver high-performance, highly secure, reliable information management services. Founded in 1969, Acxiom is headquartered in Little Rock, Arkansas, USA, and serves clients around the world from locations in the United States, Europe, Asia-Pacific, the Middle East and South America. For more information about Acxiom, visit Acxiom.com.

Entries for the 2011 David Ogilvy Award for Excellence in Advertising Research from research suppliers, ad agencies, media companies and advertisers throughout the world, were judged by a panel of industry experts under the Advertising Research Foundation’s (ARF) direction. Winners were announced March 23rd.

When International Delight and Horizon Media launched their “CoffeeHouse Inspirations Skinny” campaign, they turned to Vizu for the technology needed to ensure the brand-building effectiveness of the initiative by measuring and optimizing the campaign’s performance against its primary marketing objective – building awareness for a new product line – in real-time. Leveraging real-time Brand Lift metrics from Vizu, Horizon compared Brand Lift performance across all exposure frequencies, creative units, targeting segments, and site placements, and in so doing identified some creative units and targeting segments that were driving less Brand Lift than others. Horizon then reallocated impressions to better performing units and segments, increasing Brand Lift against the awareness objective by 34.4% and the campaign’s effective media spend by over $100,000.

“The launch of a new product line is always an anxious time for any company,” says Aaron Simpson, Associate Brand Director for International Delight. “As a brand advertiser, it’s great to know technology exists that allows you to maximize the value of your online brand building investment, using relevant Brand Lift metrics. Between Horizon Media’s overall direction and Vizu’s brand advertising technology, we were not only successful at driving awareness, but also won a prestigious award in the ARF’s highly competitive Beverages category.”

“We use Vizu’s technology to measure the Brand Lift generated by our campaigns, replacing click-through rates with a much more appropriate metric for brand advertisers,” says Sarah Bachman, Associate Director at Horizon Media.  “The real-time nature of the solution also enables in-market optimization of campaigns. For International Delight, we leveraged Vizu’s intuitive dashboard to assess and optimize different creative executions, targeting, and frequencies to quickly evaluate and adjust the campaign, ensuring both awareness of the product and our return on advertising spend were maximized.”

“Leading brands and media agencies are beginning to realize they can leverage real-time Brand Lift metrics to not only measure the impact of their campaigns, but also to actually shape a successful outcome,” says Dan Beltramo, Vizu’s CEO. “These results speak for themselves.”

Here is a link to the case study: http://brandlift.vizu.com/knowledge-resources/case-studies/vizu-wins-david-ogilvy-award/)

Founded in 1936 by the Association of National Advertisers and the American Association of Advertising Agencies, the ARF (www.thearf.org) is dedicated to aggregating, creating and distributing research-based knowledge that will help members make better advertising decisions. ARF members include more than 400 advertisers, advertising agencies, associations, research firms, and media companies. The ARF is the only organization that brings all members of the industry to the same table for strategic collaboration.

Vizu Corporation (www.brandlift.com) brings the same metrics used to measure and optimize brand advertising effectiveness in the offline world to the online medium. By providing the first real-time, enterprise technology platform that allows brand advertisers and their partners in the digital media ecosystem – publishers, ad networks, exchanges, and demand side platforms – to collaborate around measuring and optimizing Brand Lift metrics, Vizu enables its customers to move their target audience through the purchase funnel, from building awareness to creating intent and preference.  Vizu’s brand advertising effectiveness platform is used by over 60% of Advertising Age’s Top 100 Brand Advertisers and Comscore’s Top 50 Media properties to support all key aspects of the advertising lifecycle, including media buying, audience profiling, and Brand Lift optimization.

WAKEFIELD, Mass. – SEMPO announced results of its 2011 State of Search Marketing Report. With over 900 companies and agencies participating in the global online survey conducted by Econsultancy, the report estimates that the North American search marketing industry will grow by 16% in 2011 to a value of $19.3B, up from $16.6B in 2010.

A significant percentage of companies are now using Facebook. Just under half of respondents say they use Facebook for pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns – 47% in North America and 45% outside the US and Canada. The rising popularity of Facebook is even more apparent within agencies. Nearly three quarters of North American agencies (74%) and two thirds of those outside the U.S. and Canada (69%) say their clients use Facebook.

The rise of the mobile internet is the trend which is having the most impact on search marketing, according to the survey. Local search is the next most significant trend, yet primarily from the perspective of agencies. Respondents also indicated the growing importance of behavioral targeting. The number of companies doing SEO, paid search and social media in-house, has decreased, with more marketers seeking help from service providers.

“The healthy growth reported for the industry in 2011—surpassing the 14% growth in 2010—is gratifying,” commented SEMPO president Chris Boggs. “The industry is evolving to encompass much more than the search engines. The increasing role of social media is re-shaping the industry in surprising ways.”

Other top findings include:

Mobile internet

* 40% of company respondents said that the growth of the mobile internet was “highly significant”, an increase from 26% last year. A further 39% said it was “significant”.
* Agencies are feeling the impact of the mobile internet even more strongly, with almost half of supply-side respondents (47%) describing its impact as highly significant.

Local search

* The next most important trend is local search, according to agencies. Forty-three percent (43%) of supply-side respondents said this was highly significant. A further 41% say that it is significant. According to agencies, 34% of client search budget is spent on local PPC advertising (i.e. at a regional, city or sub-market level).
* Client-side advertisers are not yet affected by local search as much as their agency counterparts. Only 26% of company respondents say that the impact of local search has been highly significant. Local, on average, represents just under a quarter (23%) of client-side search budget, which is significantly less than the agency average (34% of client budget).

Use of social networks, including Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn

* Beyond PPC, the percentage of companies using Facebook more broadly for promoting themselves now stands at 84%, up from 73% last year.
* Three quarters of companies (75%) use Twitter to promote their companies or brands, while 52% use business networking site LinkedIn. More than a quarter of North American companies now run PPC campaigns on LinkedIn.

More companies outsourcing SEO, paid search and social media

* Only 44% of companies are now carrying out search engine optimization in-house, compared to 51% last year.
* Only 38% of companies are doing paid search marketing in-house compared to 47% last year.
* Only 55% are doing social media marketing in-house, compared to 62% last year.

Behavioral targeting

* The proportion of company respondents who say that behavioral targeting is highly significant or significant now stands at 78%, up from 68% last year.

This year’s annual SEMPO study – now in its seventh year – is an aggregation of information provided by organizations from 66 different countries, from marketers across a range of business sectors and types of agency.

“Once again the SEMPO survey has collected a rich set of data that provides valuable industry perspective and insights as seen through the eyes and dollar investments of both advertisers and agencies,” said Marc Engelsman, VP Client Programs and Services at Digital Brand Expressions and the lead for this SEMPO initiative. “All marketers, not just search marketers, should want to leverage this information as they look to improve the performance of their digital engagements.”

“A mature industry maintains a balance between today and tomorrow,” said Stefan Tornquist, U.S. Research Director at Econsultancy. “Search engine marketers have learned how to roll with algorithm shifts and price increases and are constantly improving their efficiency. At the same time, they’re taking the time to focus on the emerging opportunities where search, social and mobile meet.”

The report is based on an online survey, conducted in February and March 2011, which SEMPO and Econsultancy promoted to their respective members and to search marketing professionals. A complimentary copy of the report is provided to SEMPO members and those who participated in the survey. A total of 920 total respondents from 66 countries took part, including 325 advertisers and 595 agencies or consultants conducting search marketing on behalf of clients.

To obtain a copy of the SEMPO 2011 State of Search Marketing report, visit: http://econsultancy.com/reports/sempo-state-of-search

About Econsultancy

Econsultancy is a community where the world’s digital marketing and e-commerce professionals meet to sharpen their strategy, source suppliers, get quick answers, compare notes, help each other out and discover how to do everything better online. It was launched in 1999 and since then has grown to a dominant position in the digital marketing industry with more than 100,000 members worldwide. Its website and blog attracts more than 300,000 unique users per month and its range of training courses and conferences are attended by more than 5,000 marketers every year. For more information, visit http://econsultancy.com or follow @econsultancy on Twitter.

About SEMPO

SEMPO is a global non-profit organization serving the search marketing industry and marketing professionals engaged in it. Its purpose is to provide a foundation for industry growth through building stronger relationships, fostering awareness, providing education, promoting the industry, generating research and creating a better understanding of search and its role in marketing. SEMPO includes thousands of professionals across 50 countries. The organization’s mission is to represent the common interests of companies and consultants worldwide and provide them with a voice in the marketplace. SEMPO’s education and outreach initiatives are funded in part by Google, American Express Open SearchManager, and Baidu, and supported through partnerships with SMX, SES, OMS, and MediaPost. For more information or to join the organization, visit http://www.SEMPO.org.

SUNNYVALE, Calif. – The first quarter of 2011 started off strong in the U.S. for digital marketing, with search engine marketing growing by 17% Year on Year (YoY) due primarily to solid increases in the retail and finance categories. Facebook advertising is also getting more competitive, with Cost Per Clicks (CPCs) increasing by 40% Quarter on Quarter (QoQ). Display advertising also showed positive signs with a 300% increase in exchange ad inventory and a 30% Cost Per Thousand (CPM) decline, indicating greater gains in reach and efficiency within the ad exchanges.

This is according to Efficient Frontier, a leading performance marketing company managing more than $1 billion in marketing spend annually on behalf of advertisers worldwide. This data and specific industry trends were released in the company’s Q1 2011 Digital Marketing Performance Report.

“The strong showing for digital marketing in the first quarter of 2011 was in line with our prediction of a 15% to 20% increase in spend in 2011,” said David Karnstedt, President and CEO, Efficient Frontier. “We’re also seeing great demand for Facebook’s ad products as the social networking giant’s ad offerings continue to evolve. This is all solid evidence of an economic recovery, and that marketers are seeing tremendous results when they intelligently allocate their marketing spend and optimize across channels.”

Report Highlights

Digital marketing continues to show strength in the first quarter of 2011. While search marketing decelerated as expected off of a big Q4 2010, YoY growth remains robust at 17%. Advertiser demand for Facebook’s ad products increased significantly with spend rising sharply on 40% QoQ CPC growth. The display ad exchanges also rapidly expanded with Efficient Frontier’s advertisers accessing more than 300% more inventory than a year ago at 30% lower Cost Per Thousand (CPMs). This means that display advertisers are gaining both reach and efficiency as new technologies like Real Time Bidding (RTB) become more prevalent.

Broad-Based Search Growth Across Nearly All Sectors

The retail sector was the big winner this past quarter, as retail impressions grew by 30% YoY, showing higher consumer interest in retail products. The Finance sector also fared well, growing at 18% YoY. The travel sector was the only sector that saw a decline in spend as CPCs remained flat.

Retail: Spend was up 22% YoY on increased consumer demand
Travel: Spend is down 13% YoY as CPCs are flat
Finance: Spend was up 18% YoY on CTR gains
Auto: Spend was up 10% YoY on CPC gains as well as increased in consumer demand
Bing-Yahoo! ROI Increase

Google continues to have the majority of overall market share in SEM spend and clicks post the Bing-Yahoo! integration. However, Bing’s ROI is currently higher than Google’s ROI. Bing’s ROI has increased 10% YoY while Google’s ROI has decreased by 12% YoY. While the revenue per click (RPC) on Bing is 12% lower than Google, the CPCs on Bing are also lower than the CPCs on Google, which is driving Bing’s higher ROI.

Facebook Becomes More Competitive

Efficient Frontier saw tremendous momentum in Facebook advertising throughout the last several quarters. Advertisers are eager to take advantage of the full capabilities in the Facebook Marketplace to engage with their fans and promote their brands. Because of this, spend on Facebook is growing. Our analysis shows CPCs have grown by 44% QoQ, indicating that Facebook is becoming more competitive as advertisers realize its tremendous value.

International SEM Analysis

United Kingdom

In the United Kingdom, spend grew 9% YoY, reflecting increased confidence in consumer consumption power. ROI in the U.K. increased by 6% YoY. Google dominates the SEM market with a 91% market share. Unlike the U.S., where the travel industry has declined, the overall demand for travel has increased in the U.K., with spend in the travel sector growing by 8% YoY due to impressions and click growth. ROI in travel has increased 14% YoY, indicating strong consumer buying intentions.

France, Germany, Australia

SEM market share is dominated by Google in France, Germany, and Australia with approximately 93% of the market. Yahoo! comes in second place in Germany and Australia while in France, Bing has a larger market share than Yahoo!.

Japan

Unlike the U.S. and Europe, Japan’s SEM market is more evenly divided between Google and Yahoo!, with Google taking a slight edge at 53% market share. Amidst the horrific crisis in Japan, SEM spend has grown by 13% YoY. The growth is due to a CPC increase of 7% YoY as well as click volume increase of 5% YoY.

Outlook for 2011

SEM Growth Continues

Efficient Frontier continues to be optimistic about SEM growth. Our prediction is that search will continue to grow 15% this year in the U.S. due to the strength in the finance and retail sectors. Our prediction for the U.K. is that search will continue to grow at 10%.

Bing-Yahoo! Market Share Increase

As Bing expands its network, it is likely that the traffic quality will drop. Having a 12% higher ROI puts Bing in a good position to expand its network while giving it a significant margin of error. The higher return on Bing-Yahoo! should cause rational advertisers to shift their advertising dollars from Google to Bing.

Cross-Channel Marketing

Advertisers should allocate their advertising spend across the various digital marketing channels including search, display, and Facebook. Each channel serves a significant yet different role in overall management of advertising campaigns. The ability to manage advertising in a transparent cross-channel manner will give advertisers a leg up in getting consumer attention in a market that is becoming increasingly competitive. Efficient Frontier’s prediction is that channels like display and Facebook will double over the next year.

Research Methodology

This analysis was completed based on data from Efficient Frontier search engine marketing customers and the resulting Efficient Frontier Customer Index. The Efficient Frontier Customer Index represents a subset of the company’s clients with spend data for six consecutive quarters or more, whose resulting SEM metrics are then normalized to average industry category contributions established by multiple third-party data providers. The Efficient Frontier Customer Index consists of a fixed sample of large-scale search engine advertisers across multiple sectors, including finance, travel, retail and automotive. The Efficient Frontier Customer Index sheds light on trends in search engine spending and performance on YoY and QoQ basis.

The complete U.S. Digital Performance Marketing Report: Q1 2011 is available for download from the Efficient Frontier website at: http://news.efrontier.com/Global-Q12011-Report.html

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About Efficient Frontier

Efficient Frontier is a leader in online performance marketing managing search marketing, display and social media campaigns for advertisers and agencies around the world. Efficient Frontier currently manages more than $1 billion in annual marketing spend on behalf of their clients globally. Founded in 2002, Efficient Frontier pioneered the application of modern portfolio theory for search engine marketing and today combines its core predictive modeling algorithms and bidding technology with comprehensive strategic and tactical value-added services. The largest and most sophisticated advertisers and agencies partner with Efficient Frontier to achieve and sustain optimal campaign performance and growth in highly complex and competitive marketplaces. The company is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, with offices in New York, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and India, and technology licensing partnerships in Japan, Hong Kong and Australia. Efficient Frontier is a privately held company with funding from Redpoint Ventures and Cambrian Ventures. For more information, please visit http://www.efrontier.com and subscribe to the Efficient Frontier blog at blog.efrontier.com.

New Content Marketing Platform Provides Companies and Brands with Simple, Scalable, Effective Way to Reach Audiences with Relevant, Highly Targeted Content; Names Tanaka VP of Business Development

Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco 2011
LONG BEACH, Calif. – PostRelease™, the first effective solution for influencing word-of-mouth forum discussions by enabling marketers to insert sponsored posts into targeted online forum discussions, has been re-branded as SponsoredContent (www.SponsoredContent.com). The re-branding applies to both the company and its existing forum discussion product. At the same time, the company announced that the product’s features and reach have been expanded significantly.

Concurrent with the re-branding, the company named Tyler Tanaka vice president of Business Development. Tanaka, an automotive digital marketing expert, previously served as account director for PostRelease. Tanaka has been an active participant in the automotive aftermarket for more than 20 years as an enthusiast and a marketing specialist. He has pioneered the use of social media in helping brands form direct connections with their customers online.

The new SponsoredContent marketing platform provides companies and brands with a simple, scalable and highly effective way to reach audiences with advertiser-generated content, such as viral videos, product announcements and special offers. Content can consist of text, images, embedded video and other valuable content that is automatically distributed and published on relevant websites, forums and blogs.

SponsoredContent’s proprietary algorithm automatically matches marketing messages to the right audiences across hundreds of content-rich sites and blogs – in addition to the hundreds of forums previously available with PostRelease. Advertisers also have the ability to integrate their social media marketing by directly engaging enthusiasts and consumers with links to both Facebook and Twitter.

SponsoredContent complements traditional online banner advertising by allowing marketers to “pull” consumers by telling a deeper story about a brand, product or service. Placements appear in the content area of highly relevant sites, blogs and forums and are designed to be consistent with the appearance, look and feel of the site where they are published. As a result, SponsoredContent posts are 5-10 times more effective than traditional banner ads, according to Justin Choi, founder, president and CEO of SponsoredContent.

“As the amount of ‘noise’ increases online, it is more difficult for marketers to reach their audience through traditional banner advertising,” said Choi. “Our experience with SponsoredContent proves that content marketing cuts through the clutter and generates a far higher percentage of engagement by providing the audience with something of value to them – information they can use to make more informed buying decisions.”

The easy-to-use SponsoredContent content marketing dashboard enables marketers to create, manage and track impressions, read rates and click-throughs. “Once a marketer completes the easy-to-execute three-step campaign creation process, SponsoredContent automatically analyzes submitted headlines, text and visuals, finds sites with similar content, and executes a media buy,” said Tanaka.

“Pricing works like Facebook ads and content placements are optimized based on response rates,” he said. “This automatically maximizes the effectiveness of the media buy. Content marketers set their own budgets and can adjust the pool of sites on which their content is published. They can spend as little or as much as they want to attract new audiences and consumers ready to take action or make a purchase decision.”

While SponsoredContent gives companies and brands of all shapes and sizes a highly effective way to reach their target audiences, it also provides a new, premium revenue stream for publishers of content-rich websites, forums and blogs where SponsoredContent-distributed articles appear. Joining the SponsoredContent network is free and easy. In time, members will receive access to a comprehensive dashboard they can use to monitor results.

SponsoredContent posts are clearly labeled as branded advertising content, in compliance with FTC disclosure regulations, and feature the sponsoring company’s logo and list the company as author.

About SponsoredContent

SponsoredContent (www.SponsoredContent.com) is a comprehensive content marketing platform that provides companies and brands with a simple, scalable way to reach audiences with text, images, embedded video and other valuable content that is automatically distributed and published on relevant websites, forums and blogs. SponsoredContent provides marketers with a medium by which they can tell a deeper story about a brand, product or service. It also provides a premium revenue stream for the content-rich website, blog and forum publishers who opt-in to the SponsoredContent network.

RESTON, VA – comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, announced the global launch of comScore Digital Analytix™, an evolutionary solution in web analytics that enables digital marketers and analytics professionals to conduct in-depth forensic research on site-level activity through this highly agile and flexible data analysis architecture. Powered by the proprietary comScore Atomix™ technology, Digital Analytix utilizes unaggregated data that gives users the ability to run the reports they want, to deliver the insights they need.

“We are very excited to announce the launch of comScore Digital Analytix, the evolution of web analytics,” said Dr. Magid Abraham, comScore President & CEO. “This groundbreaking solution solves two of the most prevalent issues with web analytics today. While many web analytics tools use aggregated data sets that frequently handcuff the user from running the forensic analysis they desire, our Atomix technology maintains an unaggregated data set that can be manipulated from its raw form to address any business question. Secondly, we are introducing a new dimension to the web analytics universe with audience demographics so that users can understand site-level activity within the context of a broader marketing strategy. We believe these advantages combine for a truly unique offering that will deliver cross-organizational insights that help businesses optimize their digital strategies.”

comScore Digital Analytix offers the following benefits:

Flexible reporting architecture
Fast reporting and granular insights
Easy to implement for publishers (with the ability to leverage their existing Media Metrix UDM tag for Digital Analytix reporting)
Campaign-level insights
Cross-platform measurement
Sleek, new, user-friendly interface
The Evolution of Web Analytics into a More Unified View of Behavior

comScore Digital Analytix leverages the product architecture and expertise of Nedstat, a leading European web analytics company acquired by comScore in 2010, and its award-winning flagship product Sitestat. Both the Nedstat and Sitestat brands will immediately be absorbed into the comScore brand architecture.

comScore is also bringing its unique expertise in audience measurement to the web analytics universe in developing a breakthrough technology that combines deep analytics insight with audience profiling. This advancement will enable digital marketers to map the behaviors occurring across their sites to the audience demographics of the people engaging in these activities. This link will enhance publishers’ abilities to tie higher level marketing strategies to actual conversion, providing a truly unified view of digital consumer behavior.

Clients Voice Support
The following Nedstat Sitestat clients, who are migrating to the new Digital Analytix platform, voiced their support for the evolutionary product:

“The evolution in web analytics introduced today in the Digital Analytix platform by comScore is an example of why we selected them as our web-analytics partner early last year,” says Shorful Islam, Head of Business Information and Customer Data Strategy of ITV Online. “Their flexible design and advanced video tracking capabilities were a key criteria for ITV and their continued innovations integrating audience insights will enable us to create even more compelling advertising opportunities for our leading entertainment content.”

“Future prides itself on reaching and engaging prosumers, customers who are truly passionate about their interests. comScore’s new Digital Analytix platform allows us to more easily identify these enthusiasts online and enables us to build international communities for a loyal, committed audience,” says Andrew White, Head of Marketing Services for Future Publishing Ltd. “Fast access to data and behavioural insights allow us to more effectively manage our large portfolio of sites by fine tuning our content to maximize its commercial potential. The innovation of aligning web analytics and audience demographics announced today by comScore is a vital next step for cross-platform leaders like Future to capture the potential of the digital economy.”

“The launch of comScore Digital Analytix marks an important step in the evolution of web analytics. International media groups like Eurosport need to have quick access to reliable site-level customer behaviour data to fully monetise premium content across the multitude of platforms used by today’s digital consumers. With access to granular data and consumer insight we can successfully build efficient content creation and monetisation strategies. This is fundamental and profitable to both publishers and advertisers.” – Arnaud Maillard, New Media Director, Eurosport.

“The speed and flexibility of the comScore Digital Analytix platform has enabled our organization to more easily understand the rapidly changing digital audience that consumes media across a multitude of devices. The innovation to integrate audience insight into the platform is a unique capability and is of interest to euronews looking to better monetize its premium content. We applaud comScore’s initiative.” – Olivier de Montchenu, Managing Director euronews Sales.

”The comScore Digital Analytix platform gives us the insights to improve our customer experience. Their cross media capabilities help us to understand changing consumer behaviours, adapt our digital strategies and ultimately to achieve our business goals.” – Erik de Gruijter, Manager Cross Media Intelligence, Wegener Media BV (part of Mecom Group, a European content and consumer business with over 300 titles and 200 websites)

“The new features of the Digital Analytix platform are very fast. I love the fact that you can quickly edit report items in report builder with one click and that data retrieval happens even while you are in another tab. Good job on the whole.” – Daniel Froud, Customer Insight & Business Intelligence Manager, HostelBookers

“The changes you’ve introduced in the new Digital Analytix platform are simply fantastic.” – Jagjeet Mann, Web Analytics Manager, Ladbrokes eGaming

“The new user interface introduced with the launch of Digital Analytix is fast and easy to use – overall, a very positive move.” – Kelly McClean, Senior Web Analyst, Cantos Communications (UK) LLP

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.

OMAHA, Neb. – West Corporation, a leading provider of technology-driven, voice and data solutions, announced the launch of Campaign Central, a new component of its Alerts and Notifications customer contact solutions. Campaign Central is a Web-based tool that allows users to create, launch and manage their own outbound notifications to their customers via voice, SMS text message, e-mail or fax.

For most companies, launching an outbound campaign can take weeks to deploy. Through Campaign Central’s Web interface, clients can easily take control of their customer contact solutions without the additional costs that are usually associated with professional services fees. Users can also connect with their customers right from the desktop, designing or recording their own messages and deploying them instantly via today’s most effective and preferred methods of communication. Real-time campaign reports and statistics allow tracking of each campaign’s progress so users can measure results and make immediate adjustments to meet business objectives and create meaningful customer interactions.

Campaign Central reduces operating costs and expenses compared to other means of customer contact solutions without the need for additional hardware, engineering support or application setup. In addition, Campaign Central offers auto throttling of outbound voice calls, which helps to streamline contact centers, maximize agent time and increase customer contact rates by connecting customers to agents with minimal queue times.

“This innovative solution greatly improves how businesses interact with their customers. Campaign Central offers tremendous benefits to businesses, from quicker communication to simplifying multichannel outbound strategies, reducing costs and improving efficiency,” said Jennie Hanson, executive vice president of West Alerts and Notifications. “We’re excited about the advancements and opportunities that this solution, combined with West’s experience and expertise, will bring our current and prospective clients.”

About West Corporation
As a leading provider of technology-driven, voice and data solutions, West Corporation offers a broad range of communications and network infrastructure solutions that help organizations manage or support critical communications. Our customer contact solutions and conferencing services are designed to improve our clients’ cost structure and provide reliable, high-quality services. West also provides mission-critical services, such as public safety and emergency communications.

Founded in 1986 and headquartered in Omaha, Neb., West serves Fortune 1000 companies and other clients in a variety of industries, including telecommunications, banking, retail, financial, technology and healthcare. West has sales and operations in the United States, Canada, Europe, the Middle East, Asia-Pacific and Latin America. For more information about West Corporation, please call 1-800-841-9000 or visit www.west.com.

INDIANAPOLIS – Global interactive marketing provider ExactTarget announced a new partnership with Return Path, giving global marketers access to the industry’s largest and most complete suite of email delivery and testing technologies.

Powered by Return Path, ExactTarget’s new Inbox Tools allow marketers to preview and monitor inbox placement and test email and mobile messages across 165 global Internet Service Providers (ISP) including Yahoo!, Gmail and AOL, ensuring messages are optimized for delivery across providers in more than 35 countries.

“Consumers are interacting with email campaigns around the clock on web-based providers, desktop clients and smartphones,” said Scott Dorsey, ExactTarget’s chief executive officer and co-founder. “Through our partnership with Return Path, marketers now have access to the industry’s most powerful solution to ensure the messages they create are delivered to consumers in the best possible format.”

Fully integrated into ExactTarget’s on-demand application, the new solution allows marketers to preview email rendering in webmail and desktop clients such as Outlook and Hotmail, as well as on smartphones such as Android, iPhone and Symbian. The solution also identifies the most popular platforms subscribers are using to view emails, allowing marketers to optimize design for future campaigns.

The seamless integration between ExactTarget and Return Path provides real-time status reports on email delivery to an ISP and identifies whether the message was delivered to the inbox, a bulk folder, junk folder or not delivered at all. The solution also allows clients to automatically include an ISP “seed list” with each campaign to ensure deliverability statistics are captured and relevant.

“Improving email deliverability remains one of the most significant challenges to email marketing in today’s growing global market,” said Matt Blumberg, chief executive officer of Return Path. “ExactTarget’s new Inbox Tools is a world-class integrated product that gives marketers a great solution to their email deliverability challenges.”

According to Return Path data, an average of 20 percent of legitimate, permission-based email does not get delivered to the inbox of the intended recipient. This often happens when senders fail to monitor their sender reputation or use tools and best practices to help optimize deliverability and email response rates.

The announcement of ExactTarget’s partnership with Return Path follows the launch of ExactTarget’s latest research brief, The Social Breakup. The study, which is the latest from ExactTarget’s Subscribers, Fans and Followers research series, found that more than 90 percent of consumers have “broken up” with at least one brand on Facebook, email or Twitter because of irrelevant, too frequent or boring marketing messages. For more information about the study and to download a complimentary copy of The Social Break-Up and prior reports, visit www.ExactTarget.com/sff.

About Return Path

Return Path makes email work better. We certify email senders from around the world. Our trusted sender registry protects brands and retains trust in the email channel. We help marketers, publishers and other large-volume email senders increase their response rates by providing the world’s leading inbox deliverability solution. Return Path helps mailbox providers and email administrators at ISPs and enterprises block unwelcome and malicious email by providing near real-time IP reputation scores and other data-driven tools. Taken as a whole, these tools and services improve the consumer experience of email by protecting them from spam, phishing and other abuse. Return Path offers free access to Sender Score, the email reputation measure compiled through our cooperative data network of ISPs and other email receivers, at our reputation portal: www.senderscore.org. Information about Return Path can be found at www.returnpath.net.

About ExactTarget

ExactTarget is a leading global provider of on-demand email marketing and interactive marketing solutions. The company’s Interactive Marketing HubTM technology provides organizations a single solution to connect with customers via email, integrated text messaging, landing pages and social media. Supported by collaborative global services teams, ExactTarget’s technology integrates with more sales and marketing information systems than any other in the industry, including Salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Omniture and Webtrends among many others. ExactTarget powers permission-based multichannel communications for thousands of organizations around the world including Expedia.com, Best Buy, Aurora Fashions, Papa John’s, CareerBuilder.com, Gannett Co., Inc., The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, The Home Depot and Wellpoint, Inc. For more information, visit www.exacttarget.com or call 1-866-EMAILET.

Adobe Omniture Summit 2011
SALT LAKE CITY – Adobe Omniture Summit 2011 — Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) introduced Adobe® SocialAnalytics, a new product within the Adobe Online Marketing Suite, powered by Omniture®, enabling marketers to monitor, measure and monetize social media. Adobe customers now have a single application that aggregates all relevant activity from social networks and online communities and identifies how that activity impacts key business metrics and brand perception, ultimately guiding social activity across channels and driving ROI. Adobe SocialAnalytics has been previewed at Adobe Omniture Summit 2011.

“The social Web is the largest focus group on the planet and marketers are striving to figure out how best to listen and participate,” said Brad Rencher, vice president and general manager, Omniture Business Unit, Adobe. “What marketers have been missing is a solution that helps them identify the most relevant voices and activities, tie social activity to brand and business impact and then take action to optimize that impact. Adobe SocialAnalytics can inform how a company participates on the social Web, removing guesswork and replacing it with strategies or experimentation built on insight.”

With Adobe SocialAnalytics, customers can monitor and measure popular platforms, including Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, blogs, forums and any place where social conversations are occurring to see their valuable social data in context with all of their online initiatives. This helps marketers get quick answers to business questions such as: What is social media’s impact on my business? How are our social initiatives and conversations driving conversion of revenue? Who are the social influencers for my business? When positive social sentiment peaks, does our Web traffic peak or are our conversion metrics positively impacted?

Adobe SocialAnalytics augments the company’s existing, innovative social measurement and optimization capabilities, including:

Facebook Measurement

Marketers can utilize Adobe SocialAnalytics to understand the effectiveness for some of the unique elements of Facebook such as Facebook Pages, fan demographics, likes and shares, etc. Seeing this data in context with the actual conversations occurring on Facebook can deliver insights into how best to engage your customers on Facebook.

Facebook App Measurement and Mobile App Measurement

Using Adobe SocialAnalytics, marketers can view their app usage data in context with other social activity. This helps marketers further identify the effectiveness of their social and mobile app strategy and how this strategy affects or is affected by other social activities.

Viral Video Measurement

With viral video measurement, customers get insight into the performance of viral video campaigns across video sharing sites and are able to further refine how they use video across the social Web.

Twitter Measurement

This capability allows online marketers to measure brand activity on the popular microblogging site. Within the context of Adobe SocialAnalytics, marketers can see how spikes in Twitter activity affect other channels, including site visits and other onsite behavior.

Availability

Adobe SocialAnalytics is currently in beta and will be generally available in Q3 of 2011. For more information, please contact your account manager.

About the Adobe Online Marketing Suite

The Adobe Online Marketing Suite, powered by Omniture, offers an integrated and open platform for online business optimization, a strategy for using customer insight to drive innovation throughout the business and enhance marketing efficiency. The Suite consists of integrated applications to collect and unleash the power of customer insight to optimize customer acquisition, conversion and retention efforts as well as the creation and distribution of content. For example, using the Suite, marketers can identify the most effective marketing strategies and ad placements as well as create relevant, personalized and consistent customer experiences across digital marketing channels, such as onsite, display, e-mail, social, video and mobile. The Suite enables marketers to make quick adjustments, automate certain customer interactions and better maximize marketing ROI, which, ultimately, can positively impact the bottom line.

About Adobe Systems Incorporated

Adobe is changing the world through digital experiences. For more information, visit www.adobe.com.

Adobe Omniture Summit 2011
SALT LAKE CITY – Adobe Omniture Summit 2011 — Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced that it has received Media Rating Council (MRC) accreditation for a new report within Adobe® SiteCatalyst®, powered by Omniture®. The following Adobe SiteCatalyst metrics are now accredited: Page Views, Visits, Daily Unique Cookies and Time Spent on Site. These metrics measure digital audience size and engagement.

The MRC was formed at the request of the U.S. Congress and audits and accredits audience measurement services on a voluntary basis, helping to ensure that the advertising industry has valid, reliable and effective advertising metrics. The MRC’s digital audience measurement accreditation encompasses the Audience Reach Measurement Guidelines established by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB). As a result, these four SiteCatalyst metrics are also IAB compliant.

“Our customers rely heavily on Adobe to give them insight into their online businesses and have asked us to certify these SiteCatalyst metrics,” said Brad Rencher, vice president and general manager, Omniture Business Unit, Adobe. “Meeting standards backed by the MRC and the IAB means that publishers and advertisers can rely on these metrics to accurately measure and discuss digital audience size and engagement throughout the media planning, buying and selling process.”

To ensure a high level of data integrity, Adobe has put in place innovative methods of cleansing raw site traffic from events that could compromise the accuracy of the accredited metrics. Events filtered from raw site traffic include spider and robot activity. Adobe also provides facilities to remove traffic generated from customers’ internal employees.

Receiving MRC accreditation gives advertisers and publishers census-based measurement of key site metrics, meaning the metrics are generated by counting all relevant traffic to the site. These metrics can be relied upon as a more complete measurement of actual traffic and behavior since they are not based on statistically projected panel-based estimates. The statistically generated results from panel-based estimates often differ significantly from census-based results and have been a point of controversy in the advertising industry.

MRC’s Executive Director, George Ivie, said, “We congratulate Adobe for achieving accreditation of its SiteCatalyst metrics, which required implementation of several important new data filtration and accumulation practices. This commitment to quality and transparency is admirable and will serve Adobe customers well by informing them of traffic counts and other metrics more accurately.”

“Having reliable metrics that report digital audience size and engagement is critical to the growth of the interactive advertising industry,” said Sherrill Mane, senior vice president, Industry Services, IAB. “The IAB applauds Adobe for its commitment to transparency. Adobe’s completion of an audit by the Media Rating Council brings greater clarity and consistency to digital audience measurement.”

SiteCatalyst is Adobe’s flagship online analytics solution within the Adobe Online Marketing Suite.

Availability of Certification from Adobe

Adobe customers can have their digital audience size and engagement metrics (Page Views, Visits, Daily Unique Cookies and Time Spent on Site) certified by Adobe. The Adobe Audience Certification Program will be initiated via an opt-in process in the next few months. For more information, please contact an account manager.

“Scripps Networks has been a long time customer of Omniture and has depended on our Adobe SiteCatalyst numbers to give us insight into the size and engagement of our online audiences,” says Cheryl Brink, VP Interactive Research & Analytics, Scripps Networks. “Becoming an Adobe Certified Publisher will give our advertisers an added level of confidence that Scripps Networks can help them reach a highly engaged audience in a quality lifestyle environment. We’re pleased that Adobe is helping the industry evolve toward a more comprehensive approach to measurement.”

About the Adobe Online Marketing Suite

The Adobe® Online Marketing Suite, powered by Omniture®, offers an integrated and open platform for online business optimization, a strategy for using customer insight to drive innovation throughout the business and enhance marketing efficiency. The Suite consists of integrated applications to collect and unleash the power of customer insight to optimize customer acquisition, conversion and retention efforts as well as the creation and distribution of content. For example, using the Suite, marketers can identify the most effective marketing strategies and ad placements as well as create relevant, personalized and consistent customer experiences across digital marketing channels, such as onsite, display, e-mail, social, video and mobile. The Suite enables marketers to make quick adjustments, automate certain customer interactions and better maximize marketing ROI, which, ultimately, can positively impact the bottom line.

About Adobe Systems Incorporated

Adobe is changing the world through digital experiences. For more information, visit www.adobe.com.

Adobe Omniture Summit 2011
SALT LAKE CITY – Adobe Omniture Summit 2011 — Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced a new, next-generation platform for the Adobe® Online Marketing Suite, powered by Omniture®. This new platform dramatically improves how the Online Marketing Suite processes data and derives insight, powering the Suite’s analytics products with new capabilities and setting the stage for deeper, more valuable integrations between the products across the Suite. Adobe also announced a new version of Adobe SiteCatalyst®, which includes enhancements that directly result from the new platform capabilities.

Social, mobile and video have become mainstream digital channels and the new platform has been engineered to power next-generation analytics with deeper analysis and faster time to insight around these types of data streams. Additionally, the platform is extensible to new channels of interaction that are unforeseen and will blend those data elements into the overall analytics infrastructure.

Other benefits of the new platform include:

Performance Improvements – Complex reports process more quickly, reducing valuable seconds, minutes or even hours off the time required for customers to obtain insights from these reports.
Common Data Sets and Consistent Reporting – The new platform creates a common data set for the following analytics products within the Suite: Adobe SiteCatalyst, Adobe Discover™ and Adobe DataWarehouse™. This ensures a consistency of reporting.
Enhanced Data Sharing across the Suite – An audience segment built in Adobe Discover or Adobe DataWarehouse can now be shared with SiteCatalyst and reports can be filtered by these segments. Audience segments within SiteCatalyst can be used to build Adobe Test&Target™ campaigns from directly within SiteCatalyst, making it easier for marketers to test content or run campaigns against high-value audience segments.

Adobe SiteCatalyst Enhancements

The new version of SiteCatalyst is the first version built on the new platform. SiteCatalyst has been enhanced with new features and functionality made possible by the new platform, including:

Real-Time Segmentation – SiteCatalyst customers can now run any report, in real time, filtered by segments such as Facebook users, mobile traffic, visitors who have watched a video or any other custom-defined segment, quickly getting the insight they need to make timely decisions. For example, an online marketer could run a report showing how all Facebook visitors interact with their site or quickly build a segment that evaluates repeat visitors who have purchased and come from Facebook.
Ease-of-Use and Faster Time to Insight – A new user interface displays customizable, interactive overview reports immediately upon logging in. New search functionality enables SiteCatalyst users to quickly find a specific report by name or type without sorting through the menu system.
New SiteCatalyst iPad App – This new analysis app has been optimized for the capabilities of the iPad and enables marketers to manipulate SiteCatalyst data for deeper analysis and insight while on the go.

Availability

Currently in beta, the updated version of SiteCatalyst will be generally available in Q2 of 2011 for new customers. Existing customers will be migrated to the new platform over time. For more information, please contact your account manager.

About the Adobe Online Marketing Suite

The Adobe Online Marketing Suite, powered by Omniture, offers an integrated and open platform for online business optimization, a strategy for using customer insight to drive innovation throughout the business and enhance marketing efficiency. The Suite consists of integrated applications to collect and unleash the power of customer insight to optimize customer acquisition, conversion and retention efforts as well as the creation and distribution of content. For example, using the Suite, marketers can identify the most effective marketing strategies and ad placements as well as create relevant, personalized and consistent customer experiences across digital marketing channels, such as onsite, display, e-mail, social, video and mobile. The Suite enables marketers to make quick adjustments, automate certain customer interactions and better maximize marketing ROI, which, ultimately, can positively impact the bottom line.

About Adobe Systems Incorporated

Adobe is changing the world through digital experiences. For more information, visit www.adobe.com.

CARY, N.C. – SAS, the leader in business analytics software and services, is acquiring Assetlink, a pioneer in marketing resource management (MRM). Combining SAS® Customer Intelligence offerings with Assetlink’s leading marketing resource management solutions into an integrated marketing management platform will make it easier for marketers to plan, create and optimize marketing programs.

The integration of SAS with Assetlink is a boon to customers already using SAS in the marketing department. Marketing organizations are increasingly challenged to execute more sophisticated marketing programs while holding staffing levels flat. Assetlink brings needed workflow management across multiple channels to help marketers avoid potential bottlenecks. With Assetlink, SAS helps manage and optimize marketing operations through more efficient asset management, increased measurement capabilities and improved financial reporting.

“This combination makes perfect sense for both partners — and, more importantly, for the marketers they serve,” commented David Raab, Principal at Raab Associates. “It allows SAS to offer the full range of marketing planning and execution features that are part of high-end marketing automation suites.”

“SAS’ powerhouse analytics help companies identify areas to improve marketing, build stronger customer relationships and increase profitability. Bottlenecks in budgeting, planning and resource allocation can hinder effective marketing,” said Jim Davis, Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer at SAS. “Combining Assetlink’s marketing resource management capabilities with SAS’ leading customer intelligence solutions helps organizations identify what’s working and what needs improvement. Marketers can be more efficient, while delivering smarter campaigns on a larger scale than would otherwise be possible.”

The integration of SAS and Assetlink addresses areas not currently supported by other solutions in the market:

- Capability to manage inbound marketing and access real-time analytics, essential for choreographing relevant communications within the call center, website, and mobile and social media channels.
- Advanced analytics, including the ability to predict customer attrition, calculate customer profitability, and discern topics and sentiment from consumer reviews and complaints.
Marketing optimization, including the ability to select the best combination of customer, offer and channel to maximize a given business objective, such as profit.
- Data management and cross-channel data integration capabilities portable to any data warehouse platform, essential for a single, accurate view of the customer across all channels.

“Data collected by marketing operations management solutions is a rich source of information,” added Chetan Saiy, CEO of Assetlink. “By applying powerful SAS Analytics to the data captured by Assetlink, CMOs and marketing professionals can discover how to get more out of their marketing resources and identify new opportunities from which to wring value.”

The acquisition positions SAS as a leader within integrated marketing management (IMM). First described by analyst firm Gartner, IMM refers to an increasingly prevalent strategy of integrating people, processes and technologies.

According to Gartner, by 2014, organizations that develop an integrated marketing strategy “will deliver a 50% higher ROMI [Return on Marketing Investment] than those that don’t.”1

SAS and Assetlink customers will benefit from SAS’ commitment to continually strengthening its products. Thirty-five years of uninterrupted revenue growth allows SAS to reinvest more than 20 percent of its revenues in R&D each year, resulting in expanded offerings related to cloud computing, unstructured data and grid computing, for example. In addition, SAS has more than 11,000 employees in more than 50 countries and 400 SAS offices to provide local, hands-on support for customers.

About SAS

SAS is the leader in business analytics software and services, and the largest independent vendor in the business intelligence market. Through innovative solutions delivered within an integrated framework, SAS helps customers at more than 50,000 sites improve performance and deliver value by making better decisions faster. Since 1976 SAS has been giving customers around the world THE POWER TO KNOW®.

SAS and all other SAS Institute Inc. product or service names are registered trademarks or trademarks of SAS Institute Inc. in the USA and other countries. ® indicates USA registration. Other brand and product names are trademarks of their respective companies. Copyright © 2011 SAS Institute Inc. All rights reserved.

1 Gartner, Inc. “Focus on Integrated (Rather Than Enterprise) Marketing Management” by Kimberly Collins, Oct. 6, 2010

INDIANAPOLIS – Global interactive marketing provider ExactTarget launched a new executive briefing defining a new framework to help organizations break down organizational and operational barriers between email, mobile, social media and Websites.

Entitled Unsiloed: Breaking Down Barriers to Fuel the Digital Dialogue, the briefing defines a three-step process that incorporates best practices in strategy, technology and operations to help marketers realign interactive marketing efforts around consumers instead of delivery channels like email or social media.

“Effective interactive marketing isn’t about which channel is better – it’s about the unique needs of the consumer,” said Tim Kopp, ExactTarget chief marketing officer. “’Unsiloed: Breaking Down Barriers offers a practical blueprint for marketers to create more effective data-driven interactive programs.”

Featuring real-world examples and insight from industry experts, the report includes advice on how to define an interactive marketing strategy and highlights key issues facing marketers looking to connect with consumers across email and emerging social channels. The 12-page report also offers recommendations on how best to build, equip and operate interactive teams across multiple organizations, brands or geographies.

“As consumers continue to evolve into digital media multitaskers, the rules of marketing will be irreversibly changed,” states the Nov. 2010 report by Forrester Research Inc. entitled “CMO Mandate: Adapt Or Perish”. “In this new world, there is greater demand to consume media across multiple platforms, causing exponential growth of content — both branded and user-generated — but unfortunately consumers will become more difficult to engage.”

Marketers can download Unsiloed: Breaking Down Barriers to Fuel the Digital Dialogue report free of charge by clicking here.

The launch of Unsiloed comes nearly a week after ExactTarget unveiled its latest interactive marketing research The Social Breakup. The study, which is the latest from ExactTarget’s Subscribers, Fans and Followers research series, found that more than 90 percent of consumers have “broken up” with at least one brand on Facebook, email or Twitter because of irrelevant, too frequent or boring marketing messages. For more information about the study and to download a complimentary copy of The Social Break-Up and prior reports, visit www.ExactTarget.com/sff.

About ExactTarget

ExactTarget is a leading global provider of on-demand email marketing and interactive marketing solutions. The company’s Interactive Marketing HubTM technology provides organizations a single solution to connect with customers via email, integrated text messaging, landing pages and social media. Supported by collaborative global services teams, ExactTarget’s technology integrates with more sales and marketing information systems than any other in the industry, including Salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Omniture and Webtrends among many others. ExactTarget powers permission-based multichannel communications for thousands of organizations around the world including Expedia.com, Best Buy, Aurora Fashions, Papa John’s, CareerBuilder.com, Gannett Co., Inc., The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, The Home Depot and Wellpoint, Inc. For more information, visit www.exacttarget.com or call 1-866-EMAILET.

Fort Lauderdale, FL – In response to new levels of growth in the online advertising industry and the need for more and better-trained interactive advertising and marketing staffs and executives and innovative, cost-effective training alternatives, The Laredo Group, Inc. announced the launch of a complete suite of Webinar course offerings. The company is the leading sales, agency and marketer training and consulting firm dedicated to helping clients increase sales and decrease costs of interactive and integrated advertising.

In addition, for the first time in its history, The Laredo Group will offer, as one of the Webinars, a course in Traditional Media (TV, radio, magazine, newspaper, etc.), for those who are new to the media or advertising industry and need a broad and basic understanding of traditional media concepts, terminologies and businesses in order to better approach integrated and interactive media and advertising.

Any company or industry professional needing to improve their digital and online advertising IQ and job performance can now subscribe to instructor-led web-based video training from the world’s leading provider of such training for over 14 years.  As of today’s launch, 8 individual courses and 3 Professional Development Programs and Certifications are available.  During March, 2 more courses, and 2 more Professional Development Programs and Certifications will be added to the suite of offerings.  By May, 12 courses and 10 Professional Development Programs and Certifications will be available. The company is offering a 10% discount to those who wish to buy any courses or programs pre-release.

Interactive Advertising & Media Professional Development Certification can be earned in any of the Professional Development Program disciplines included in the series.  The Laredo Group’s new offering not only covers all levels of training in selling, planning and buying of interactive advertising as well as numerous specialty disciplines and management topics – but it does so in a way that is easy to navigate, digest and incorporate into busy work and travel schedules. The subscription fees are far lower than the cost of registering for and attending any of their highly regarded in-person seminars given in major markets nationwide.

New Webinar courses for salespeople, publishers and advertising/website marketers include:

- Essential Media Terminology and Concepts;
- Fundamentals of Interactive Advertising and Digital Media;
- Intermediate Advertising Sales;
- Advanced Advertising Sales.

…with packages of the above courses offered as complete Professional Development Programs and Certifications including:

- Media Basics;
- Intermediate Interactive Sales;
- Advanced Interactive Sales
- Marketing Partnership for Media Sales Professionals

New Webinar courses for agencies, planners, buyers and product marketers include:

- Essential Media Terminology and Concepts;
- Fundamentals of Interactive Advertising and Digital Media;
- Advanced Interactive Media Planning & Buying;
- Intermediate Interactive Media Planning & Buying;
- Search Engine Marketing;
- Social Media Marketing;
- Intelligent Mobile Marketing;
- The Digital Ecosystem;
- How to Build & Manage a Digital Agency or Division.

… with packages of the above courses offered as Professional Development Programs and Certifications including:

- Media Basics;
- Intermediate Interactive Planning & Buying;
- Advanced Interactive Planning & Buying;
- Basic Interactive Marketing;
- Intermediate Interactive Marketing;
- Advanced Interactive Marketing;
- Interactive Agency or Division Management.

Webinars can be purchased online today at www.laredogroupwebinars.com for immediate use.  Any of the many thousands of professionals who have taken in-person Laredo Group Seminars recently or up to 3 years ago can also subscribe to the just Certification Programs and take the exams needed for certification.

“The Laredo Group will continue to develop live training courses for both agencies and marketers, both for our very successful public seminars series and for private training sessions for individual companies — but now they also will be available via Webinar and within expanded, complete professional development programs and certification options. We are committed to bringing the highest quality and style of training possible to buyers and sellers of interactive, to help them get up to speed and stay current on the industry,” says Jeff Leibowitz, CEO of The Laredo Group.

“These new offerings distinguish our company even further,” says Laredo Group Founder and President Leslie Laredo.  “By making world-class training even easier to access – from anywhere in the world – we can now bring our courses to anywhere they are needed and given the growth of interactive advertising abroad, that is just about everywhere.  While many have traveled from all over the world to attend our seminars held here in the United States, many more around the world who cannot afford the time and or expense of such travel can now finally benefit from our courses.”

Participation in Laredo Group courses has long been regarded by many media industry human resources VPs, directors and managers, as well as other hiring executives, as de facto certification that the person truly knows what they need to know to be a very productive employee.  Now, with more courses than ever before and the introduction of these new Webinars, The Laredo Group is positioned to formally award Interactive Advertising & Media Professional Development Certification to thousands more industry professionals, even more swiftly and cost-effectively, ensuring that the industry is staffed with knowledgeable professionals that can help marketers achieve their online marketing goals and generate exceptional returns and profits for their companies.

The Laredo Group (www.laredogroup.com) is the globally recognized leader in interactive advertising and media training, and interactive media business consulting, helping clients increase sales and decrease costs in online advertising buying and selling, digital marketing, and online publishing monetization and optimization.  The company provides standard public training seminars around the U.S. and world, as well as customized sales training for companies, and media training for agencies, planners, buyers and marketers.  It also offers custom consulting services designed to increase the revenue potential and production of staff and products for online and cross-platform/integrated advertising and marketing products and programs. The client list of The Laredo Group includes many of the world’s largest and most successful companies as well as smaller firms, start-ups and many industry associations. Founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1996 and, now headquartered in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, with additional operations in New York City, the company’s services are available worldwide.

SAN FRANCISCO – iPost, a leading provider of on-demand email and cross-channel marketing solutions, announced that it has integrated the ability to spark conversations and cross-promote campaigns on Facebook and Twitter into its iPost Mailing Manager (iMM) connected digital marketing platform. The company’s vision to evolve its iMM beyond an email and web marketing tool into a connected multi-channel platform began in October 2010 when it added mobile marketing (SMS) capabilities. With advanced new Facebook and Twitter functionality, the iMM now unifies email, social, mobile and web marketing in a single platform, allowing digital marketers to cross promote campaigns, manage subscribers, fans, and followers, analyze and understand their customers’ behavior across multiple channels, and engage in customer conversations where they occur.

The new features in iMM allow marketers to automate, optimize and analyze highly dynamic campaigns. For example, when scheduling an email offer, marketers can also schedule a post to the company’s Facebook wall including the relevant link that will automatically notify fans when that email campaign launches. Similarly, on Twitter, they can schedule tweets with links to offers that go live when the corresponding email campaigns do.

In the creative department, the iMM now enables easy transformation of email copy into Facebook notes. In the analytics department, a set of reports allows companies to analyze the engagement and sharing behavior of their fans and followers.

The iMM already included the basic capabilities to cross-pollinate email and social media with follow us, share-with-your-network (SWYN), and forward-to-a-friend (FTAF) links.

John Janetos, iPost’s vice president of business development and marketing, believes that email marketing remains the backbone of digital outreach due to its ubiquity and ROI. “However, in today’s multi-connected world, marketers need to forge deeper and more relevant relationships by conversing with their customers in multiple ways wherever they are.”

About iPost

iPost provides an on-demand connected digital marketing platform and professional services that let marketers manage, execute, analyze, and optimize customer conversations where they occur, including email, mobile, social, and web. Customers include O’Reilly Media, Ogden Publications, and Kimpton Hotels. To contact iPost: 899 Northgate Drive, Suite 200, San Rafael, CA 94903; 877-934-7678; 415-382-4000; info@ipost.com; www.ipost.com.

RESTON, VA – comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, released The comScore 2010 U.S. Digital Year in Review. This annual report recaps key trends in the U.S. digital media landscape, including e-commerce, social networking, online video, search, online advertising and mobile, with an emphasis on how digital marketers can capitalize on these trends in 2011.

“2010 was a very positive year for the digital media industry, highlighted by a strong rebound in e-commerce spending , significant innovation and increased demand for online advertising, and an explosion in digital content consumption across multiple platforms,” said comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni. “As we embark on a promising 2011, marketers must have a sound understanding of the digital media landscape and how it is changing if they hope to capitalize on key trends that can drive their business into the future.”

To download a complimentary copy of The comScore 2010 U.S. Digital Year in Review report, please visit: http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Presentations_Whitepapers/2011/2010_US_Digital_Year_in_Review

2010 Marked Resurgence for Digital Media Industry in the Wake of the Recession
As the economic environment showed signs of improvement in 2010, the digital media industry responded with significant growth across various media platforms. Industry innovations brought an unprecedented number of options to consumers as digital media continued to weave itself even tighter into the fabric of Americans’ daily lives.

The report provides a comprehensive view across the fixed Internet and mobile sectors to uncover this past year’s important consumer trends. Key findings highlighted in the report include:

Following 2 years of depressed consumer discretionary spending, the economy showed signs of improvement, leading to positive growth for the e-commerce market. Total U.S. e-commerce spending reached $227.6 billion in 2010, up 9 percent versus the previous year. Travel e-commerce spending grew 6 percent to $85.2 billion, while retail (non-travel) e-commerce spending jumped 10 percent to $142.5 billion for the year.
·         Social networking continued to gain momentum throughout 2010, with 9 out of every 10 U.S. Internet users now visiting a social networking site in a month, and the average Internet user spending more than 4 hours on these sites each month. Nearly 1 out of every 8 minutes online is spent on Facebook.
·         The U.S. core search market grew 12 percent overall in 2010, driven by a 4-percent increase in unique searchers and an 8-percent increase in the number of search queries per searcher.
·         U.S. Internet users received a total of 4.9 trillion display ads in 2010 with display ad impressions growing 23 percent in December 2010 versus December 2009. Social networking sites, which now account for more than one-third of all display ad impressions, were a significant driver of growth in the display ad market in 2010.
·         In December 2010, the average American spent more than 14 hours watching online video, a 12-percent increase from the prior year, and streamed a record 201 videos, an 8-percent increase.
·         Major milestones in mobile were crossed during the year as smartphones reached 1 in 4 mobile subscribers and 3G penetration crossed the 50 percent threshold. Approximately 47 percent of mobile subscribers are now connected Internet media users (via browsers, applications or downloaded content), up 8 percentage points from the previous year.

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.

Facebook has recently rolled out a major overhaul of their Facebook Pages product, which, along with numerous other much-awaited features, includes the possibility to running iFrames as tabs. In fact, the old Static FBML way of building Facebook Pages tabs will be retired in March 2011. The only way of having custom tabs afterward will be to use the new option involving iFrames. Since the new way of building these tabs is not the most straightforward thing for all those page admins out there who are not web-development savvy, we thought of sharing with you an illustrated, step-by-step guide to make your own iFrame tabs for your Facebook page.

PREREQUISITES

1. Upgrade your page to the new format of Facebook Pages

Unless you have already done so, you will need to upgrade your page to the new format of pages launched yesterday. To upgrade, simply visit your page on Facebook (either type its URL, such as www.facebook.com/adops, or access your pages through the Ads and Pages link from the left sidebar on Facebook), look up the upgrade notification (see image below), click the “Upgrade This Page” button and follow the indications.

Take moment to familiarize yourself with your new page layout and options.

2. Ensure you can create a pages and directories / folders on your website’s hosting account

In order to use the new iFrame tabs for your Facebook page, you will need to create the content you wish to include within the iFrames. You can now display any regular HTML page as a Facebook page tab, however it will need to be created and styled first.

Facebook requires that iFrames for tabs are pulled from directories, therefore you will not be able to pull the content directly from a page such as www.yoursite.com/fbtab.html. Instead, you will need to make that page’s content available from www.yoursite.com/fbtab/ (note the trailing slash). There are many ways of achieving this, and we’ll show you a very straightforward one below.

In the meantime, make sure you have access to your website’s hosting account and that you can create directories and upload files.

BUILDING AN IFRAME TAB FOR A FACEBOOK PAGE

Now that you have upgraded your page on Facebook and have a website where you can create directories and upload files into, you can start creating the iFrame tab.

1.  Create a Facebook app for your iframe tab

iFrame tabs for Facebook Pages must be created as standalone Facebook apps, which you will then add to your page.

To create a Facebook application, go to http://www.facebook.com/developers/apps.php. You will be taken to the “My Apps” section – click the “Set Up New App” button found on top of the page.

In the example below, we will create a custom tab for our page on Facebook, that will display the Advertising Events Calendar we maintain at http://www.adoperationsonline.com/events/. For this, we will need to create the associated Facebook app, name it, and accept the Facebook T&Cs:

Once you click the “Create App” button and pass the captcha verification that follows, your app will be available for further edits via the “My Apps” section from your Facebook account, at http://www.facebook.com/developers/apps.php.

Feel free to fill in the basic information for your new app: description, contact and support email, upload a logo and an icon if you have them handy (you can also come back later for the finishing touches). Click “Save Changes” and do not edit anything else for the time being.

2. Create the page that will be displayed in your iFrame tab

As previously mentioned, you will need to prepare in advance the content you wish to display in the iFrame tab of your Facebook page – you will not be able to pull it from a regular web page URL and will need to have it available via a directory instead. While you can achieve this through mod_rewrite, we found that most non-technical Facebook page admins would be uncomfortable using it. Instead, you can do the following:

a. Create a directory on your website and give it a relevant name

For our Advertising Events Calendar, we created the directory adoperationsonline.com/fbcalendar/.

b. Create an index file for your directory

The HTML content you want to display within the iFrame tab of your Facebook page will need to sit in the index file of the directory created at step 2.a. above. This content can be any standard HTML, JavaScript, another iframe etc.

Open a notepad file, save it as index.php, and fill it with a simple structure such as:

<head>
<style type=”text/css”>
body
{
font-family:sans-serif;
font-size:11px;
}
</style>
</head>
<body>

</body>

Drop your page’s content between <body> and </body>: it can be anything from a widget code, script, or simple plain HTML, whatever it is that you wish to be then displayed on your Facebook page. Since the calendar that we wanted to display was a Google Calendar widget, our content was actually the widget code supplied by Google. We added a bit of extra text, which was very basically styled as shown in the <style></style> section above, to avoid have it displayed in large Times New Roman. You can define your own style, of course, or a fully developed css.

Save your file and upload it in the directory you previously created. Check that when you type the directory URL in a browser (in our example, http://www.adoperationsonline.com/fbcalendar/) it correctly displays the content you wanted. Style the content ahead as needed, add further code, until you get exactly what you want to display in your Facebook page’s new iFrame tab. Don’t forget to save and re-upload the file to the directory.

3. Assign the web content to the Facebook app

You will now need to instruct the Facebook app you have already created to pull this web content. To do so, go back into your Facebook account, access the “My Apps” section, and select the app you created. Click “Edit Settings”, then click “Facebook Integration” from the left sidebar.

In the Canvas area, define a canvas page name and enter the canvas URL, as in the example below:

For canvas page, define anything that helps you remember what the app is for and what is going to be displayed. For canvas URL, enter the URL of the directory you have created. Make sure canvas type is set to iFrame.

In the Page Tabs section, create a tab as you want it displayed on your Facebook page.

In our case, we have named the tab “Ad Events” (you are limited to 16 characters). Make sure the Page Tab Type is set as iFrame. For tab URL, specify index.php, as shown above. This is an URL relative to the canvas URL you have entered already. The Edit URL can be left empty. Save changes – this is your new app!

4. Add the iFrame tab to your Facebook page

All that is left to do now is tie your app to your Facebook page. To do so, go to your app’s profile page (go to “My Apps”, then select the app you have just created). Look up the links below and click “Application Profile Page”.

Once on the app’s profile page, click the “Add to my page” link from the left sidebar menu, then, in the window that opens, click the “Add to page” button corresponding to the Facebook page where you want to display the tab.

Your new tab will be available in the left sidebar of your upgraded Facebook page and should be displaying the content you have created in the index file of the directory URL you associated with the app.

See more examples of iFrame tabs for Facebook Pages at www.facebook.com/adops, where we have created a tab for job openings and one displaying our media kit, using the method described above.

IRVINE, Calif. – Kofax plc (LSE: KFX), the leading provider of document driven business process automation solutions, announced the creation of a new industry solutions marketing program to better target key vertical markets on a global basis.

The industry solutions marketing program will focus on expanding opportunities for vertical market solutions utilizing Kofax software to meet the needs of banking, insurance and government customers worldwide. The team will be led by Denise Rueb, Senior Director of Industry Solutions Marketing at Kofax.

Rueb joins the company with more than 25 years of leadership experience in software and solutions marketing. Prior to Kofax, Rueb worked for IBM for a number of years where she served as the executive responsible for creating and leading several global industry specific marketing solutions programs, including one of the initial enterprise content management programs. Such programs resulted in more than $150 million in annual revenues. Along with her wealth of marketing expertise, she brings extensive business process development expertise having managed multiple Fortune 1000 client accounts in government, insurance, utilities and manufacturing. Additionally, Rueb has worked in marketing and business development leadership roles for professional services provider Ernst & Young and information technology services firm James Martin & Company.

“Denise is a proven software solutions executive with unmatched expertise in industry marketing, further proving Kofax’s ability to attract the best talent in the information technology industry,” said Martyn Christian, Chief Marketing Officer at Kofax. “Backed by Kofax’s dominance in the information capture market, as well our global reach and financial strength, our industry solutions marketing team is primed to achieve positive results very quickly.”

About Kofax

Kofax plc (LSE: KFX) is the leading provider of document driven business process automation solutions. For more than 20 years, Kofax has provided award winning solutions that streamline the flow of information throughout an organization by managing the capture, transformation and exchange of business critical information arising in paper, fax and electronic formats in a more accurate, timely and cost effective manner. These solutions provide a rapid return on investment to thousands of customers in financial services, government, business process outsourcing, healthcare, supply chain and other markets. Kofax delivers these solutions through its own sales and service organizations, and a global network of more than 700 authorized partners in more than 60 countries throughout the Americas, EMEA and Asia Pacific. For more information, visit www.kofax.com.

PRINCETON, N.J. – How did businesses tell their story before the Internet? Ads, direct mail, radio and TV commercials, brochures and other means of communications allowed them to tell a part of their story. Then came websites giving organizations large and small the ability to present themselves without limitation, to customers and prospects, employees, vendors and investors. The synchronization of robust website content with sophisticated web-crawling technology that can extract and organize that content for marketing purposes is the fuel behind ALC’s new database, 3D eBusiness Intelligence (3DBI).

3DBI now provides data acquirers the opportunity to identify, segment and target businesses (and their executives) according to their “digital presence.” Digital presence is defined as an organization’s “commitment to the web” that takes the form of the depth and scope of its website or sites, the traffic it generates and the activities it performs on line.

3DBI currently contains unique data sets on some 10 million key executives at approximately 4 million U.S. based companies, who have made an investment in their digital presence. No longer bound by antiquated and restrictive data formats and rigid uniformly coded information, 3DBI integrates both structured and unstructured data nowhere else available, including:

• Metadata company descriptions (that are far more insightful than typical SICs or NAICs codes)

• Comprehensive set of firmographics such as employee size and sales volume

• Exact executive titles and biographies, searchable by key word

• URLs for 100% of records

• Website complexity (i.e. number of pages, broken links, etc.) and volume of traffic

• eCommerce capabilities (i.e. presence of shopping cart, credit cards accepted, keyword profile etc.)

• Website platforms and site maintenance technology

Data accuracy is certain because information is obtained directly from website content that is maintained by the organizations themselves. Plus, web crawling for updated information happens 24/7/365, ensuring timeliness of the data.

The 3D eBusiness Intelligence database is organized into five key data sets, each specifically designed to facilitate actionable insights into key market segments

3D eBusiness Intelligence Datasets:

1) 3D eBusiness Intelligence: Corporate Extracts

In addition to standard firmographics including type, employee size, and sales volume 3D eBusiness Intelligence delivers self-described, detailed company data deciphered from metatag terminology and the site’s content. This up-to-date information goes well beyond rigid SICs and can be searched by key words for more expansive reach or pinpoint refinement of the marketplace. Up to 3 executive contacts are included in these records.

2) 3D eBusiness Intelligence: eCommerce Businesses

Accessing eCommerce functionality extracted from online stores, this dataset provides detailed information about companies conducting sales on the internet.

3) 3D eBusiness Intelligence: Key Word Advertisers

Analyzing a company’s website complexity and popularity, this data provides a unique view into those corporations who engage in key word advertising to promote their goods and/or services on the web.

4) 3D eBusiness Intelligence: Technology Extracts

This unique data offers an inside look at the technology powering company websites. From the operating system to website popularity and complexity, information includes SSL certificates, number of incoming links, audio/video supported, website size, client/server side technologies, and much more.

5) 3D eBusiness Intelligence: Executive Extracts

The executives that a company features on its website indicates their influence over corporate direction and strategy. Therefore, this dataset provides the individuals most likely to be leaders and decision-makers. 3DBI captures exact titles, along with biographies and other executive descriptions extracted from websites. The data is comprised of much more information about executives than a static job function or title can convey, such as prior positions and current responsibilities, alumni data, professional associations, and more.

To learn more about 3D eBusiness Intelligence, please contact Annemarie Swingle at (609) 580-2754.

AMERICAN FORK, Utah – OrangeSoda, a leader in localized online marketing (search, mobile, social), announced the official launch of CitrusBlast, a solution designed to help Internet users find small and multi-location businesses. CitrusBlast optimizes recent changes to Google Places, the feature set in Google that presents maps, listings, locations, addresses and contact information based on a user’s search.

CitrusBlast helps businesses increase their prominence in Google Search and supports similar feature sets in Bing and Yahoo! that organize search results by clustering around specific locations. CitrusBlast combines a customized website, mobile microsite and maps to quickly and effectively place businesses in front of potential customers looking online for their products and services.

“Google’s recent changes in displaying localized searches are having a profound impact on locally-focused businesses and CitrusBlast is helping them to leverage these changes to build their bottom line. This is especially significant as more Internet connections are coming from mobile devices”

“When you consider that 80% of consumers search online before buying within a 10-20 mile radius, it becomes clear that the Internet is the single most important avenue for every business to market themselves locally,” said Jay Bean, OrangeSoda founder and CEO. “Google’s recent changes in displaying localized searches are having a profound impact on locally-focused businesses and CitrusBlast is helping them to leverage these changes to build their bottom line. This is especially significant as more Internet connections are coming from mobile devices,” Bean continued.

OrangeSoda partners with many leading small business aggregators and large media companies which resell their services under their own brands. The San Diego Union-Tribune will be the first of their partners to launch CitrusBlast with rollout in February 2011.

“We have worked with OrangeSoda for a number of years on our SEM efforts, and they have proven to be one of our strongest partners. We believe that CitrusBlast will create new revenue streams for the San Diego Union-Tribune,” said Mike Hodges, Vice President Interactive, San Diego Union-Tribune.

About OrangeSoda

Founded in 2006, OrangeSoda offers online marketing to local businesses with a unique blend of intelligent service and simple technology. OrangeSoda provides the best return on marketing investment, by blending social, mobile and search with insider analytics on how consumers use the Internet to find local business offerings. With its proprietary advertising technology and service platform, OrangeSoda enables its partners including CityGrid Media, YPG, and Freedom Communications Inc., to provide the best social, mobile and search services to their customers.

IRVINE, Calif. – Small businesses achieved more in search in the fourth quarter of 2010 by increasing their keyword portfolios and diversifying ad spending across the major search engines, according to a report released by WebVisible (www.WebVisible.com), which tracks small business search advertising trends.

“Looking ahead, we believe successful campaigns will be those that combine the best creative, most dynamic media buying strategies, and smartest use of keyword targeting all working together, which is what WebVisible does best.”

The average small business advertiser spent $2,126 in the fourth quarter of 2010, while average keyword counts reached an all-time high of 87 root keywords, a 30 percent year-over-year increase from the last quarter of 2009. Small-business advertisers also took advantage of the slow migration in October of Yahoo advertisers to the new Bing adCenter platform and shifted their spending away from Google – a strategy that appears to have at least temporarily bolstered both click-through rates and clicks leading to phone calls.

Costs-per-click were 23 percent lower on Yahoo-Bing than on Google in November and 29 percent lower in December. At the same time, click-through rates for advertisers with ad programs on the Yahoo-Bing platform were 10 percent higher than those on Google during December, according to the report, while the percentage of clicks resulting in phone calls rose from 3.9 percent in the fourth quarter of 2009 to 6.1 percent in the final quarter of 2010 – a dramatic 56 percent increase.

“We’re pleased to see that our robust technology and years of experience are clearly helping small business advertisers achieve greater efficiency and conversion rates, and they’re achieving these results with manageable ad budgets,” said WebVisible CEO Ron Burr. “Looking ahead, we believe successful campaigns will be those that combine the best creative, most dynamic media buying strategies, and smartest use of keyword targeting all working together, which is what WebVisible does best.”

These results and others are included in The WebVisible Report: State of Small Business Online Advertising, which examines trends among WebVisible advertisers from Q4 2009 through Q4 2010 and represents more than $54 million in U.S. small business advertiser spending by more than 10,000 individual advertisers during that period.

The report, which each quarter provides the definitive snapshot of how small businesses are deploying search and online marketing tools, revealed that Google’s share of total search ad spending among WebVisible clients dropped from 56 percent in the fourth quarter of 2009 to less than 38 percent of total spending in November before climbing back to 52 percent in December.

Home Page Video Usage Continues to Grow

The fourth quarter results continued to show that small business advertisers consider video to be an important component of their online advertising presence. Twenty-six percent of advertisers used video on their landing pages in the fourth quarter, up from 19 percent in the previous year’s fourth quarter. Video views increased 85 percent year over year, rising from 3.7 percent of landing page actions a year ago to 6.7 percent in the final quarter of 2010.

The Q4 2010 report, as well as reports from previous quarters, is available by request here: http://www.webvisible.com/wvreport. Members of the media may also contact info@edgecommunications.com or call (818) 990-5001.

About WebVisible, Inc.

WebVisible has been the leading provider of local online marketing software and services since 2001. WebVisible was among the first to pioneer the use of search as a reliable, measurable avenue to connect directly with a buyer’s needs, providing solutions through some of the world’s largest Interactive Yellow Page companies, directories and other media vendors. The company has served over 100,000 customers from 4,000 industries in 14 countries. The company also delivers solutions directly to small businesses throughout the United States. WebVisible is based in Irvine, California with offices in Los Angeles, Charlotte and Mumbai. For more information, visit www.webvisible.com or call 949-255-9677.

When Facebook introduced its newest iteration of “social advertising” in 2007, it had already tried and failed with a number of interest-based targeting products. But the company kept upgrading its ad platform, and its ad revenue reached nearly $1.9 billion in 2010 — double what it earned in 2009. The SocialTimes Pro report reveals trends and best practices for optimizing Facebook’s targeting platform and creating effective Facebook ad campaigns. SocialTimes Pro also announced a new virtual goods report entitled ‘Virtual Goods in Free-To-Play MMOs: Opportunities and Advice on Monetization.’

SocialTimes Pro offers monthly reports on topics related to Facebook and Virtual Goods. SocialTimes Pro is associated with Mediabistro’s AllFacebook.com and SocialTimes.com. For more information, visit www.socialtimespro.com.

About WebMediaBrands Inc.

WebMediaBrands Inc. is an Internet media company that provides content, education, trade shows, and online job board services to media and business professionals. The Company’s online business includes: (i) mediabistro.com, a leading blog network providing content, career and educational resources about major media markets and industry verticals including new media, social media, Facebook, TV news, advertising, public relations, publishing, design, and mobile; (ii) SemanticWeb.com, providing industry leading content on Semantic Web technology; (iii) Brands of the World, Ads of the World and other related websites, providing industry leading content for creative, advertising, and design professionals; and (iv) e-commerce websites including Freelance Marketplace and StockLogos.com. The Company’s trade show and educational offerings include conferences, online and in-person courses, and video subscription libraries on topics covered by the Company’s online business.

SAN FRANCISCO – Global interactive marketing provider ExactTarget announced an agreement with Japan-based global ICT solution provider NTT Communications Corporation (NTT Com) to bring CoTweet, ExactTarget’s social media management platform, to the Japanese market by end of first quarter 2011.

“By partnering with CoTweet and ExactTarget, we can provide NTT Com customers the scalable technology and global expertise they need create, manage and measure social media engagement with customers around the world.”

The partnership will make CoTweet’s enterprise Twitter and Facebook management, engagement and measurement application available in Japanese and will rely on NTT Com’s existing Online Marketing Group sales team to sell the localized application.

“Consumers around the world are interacting with brands in real-time via social media, and corporations need an enterprise solution to authentically and efficiently manage the growing number of online conversations,” said Peter McCormick, general manager of ExactTarget Global and company co-founder. “Through our partnership with NTT Com, we can bring the power of CoTweet to the Japanese market and help organizations across the region better serve their fans and followers online.”

Trusted by thousands of enterprise customers around the globe including Coca-Cola, Ford, McDonald’s, Microsoft, SunTrust and Whole Foods, ExactTarget’s CoTweet application gives companies the power to publish updates from multiple Twitter and Facebook accounts, collaborate on responses, track and measure engagement and analyze campaign results.

“Social media is rapidly growing in Japan, and enterprises need a solution to help their teams manage the online conversation with consumers,” said Yoshie Tsukamoto, head of the marketing solution office, NTT Com. “By partnering with CoTweet and ExactTarget, we can provide NTT Com customers the scalable technology and global expertise they need create, manage and measure social media engagement with customers around the world.”

A September 2010 report from Forrester Research Inc. entitled “A Global Update of Social Technographics” found 36 percent of Japanese adults are active creators on social networking sites and 75 percent of online Japanese adults view content on social sites as spectators.

The news of the partnership between NTT Com and ExactTarget comes less than a year after ExactTarget acquired San Francisco-based CoTweet to create the industry’s first complete solution for managing communications across all interactive marketing channels including social media, email, mobile and the Web.

About NTT Communications Corporation

NTT Communications provides a broad range of global networks, management solutions and IT services to customers worldwide. The company is renowned for reliable, high-quality security, hosting, voice, data and IP services, as well as expertise in managed networks and leadership in IPv6 transit technology. NTT Communications’ extensive infrastructure includes Arcstar™ Global IP-VPN and Global e-VLAN, as well as a Tier-1 IP backbone reaching more than 150 countries in partnership with major Internet service providers, and secure data centers in Asia, North America and Europe. NTT Communications is the wholly-owned subsidiary of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation, one of the world’s largest telecoms with listings on the Tokyo, London and New York stock exchanges. Please visit www.ntt.com/index-e.html.

About ExactTarget

ExactTarget is a leading global provider of on-demand email marketing and interactive marketing solutions. The company’s Interactive Marketing Hub TM technology provides organizations a single solution to connect with customers via email, integrated text messaging, landing pages and social media. Supported by collaborative global services teams, ExactTarget’s technology integrates with more sales and marketing information systems than any other in the industry, including Salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Omniture and Webtrends among many others. ExactTarget powers permission-based multichannel communications for thousands of organizations around the world including Expedia.com, Best Buy, Aurora Fashions, Papa John’s, CareerBuilder.com, Gannett Co., Inc., The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, The Home Depot and Wellpoint, Inc. For more information, visit www.exacttarget.com or call 1-866-EMAILET.

“2011 promises to be another exciting year in the evolution of the digital home,” says David Mercer, Principal Analyst. “Many of the key elements of the next generation home are now in place, such as connected devices, high speed broadband and advanced user interfaces; it’s up to key players to pull these together to create compelling experiences and drive added value.”

He continued: “The battles between content owners, technology vendors and service providers for access to consumer revenues will continue. The field is still wide open for any of these players to take a leadership position in the emerging ecosystem. And there will always be opportunities for new players like Facebook to appear from nowhere and threaten established positions.”

The report, “Digital Home Predictions for 2011: The Year of Facebook TV, CloudTunes and Wii2?” is available for complimentary download at www.strategyanalytics.com.

Analyst Blog: http://blogs.strategyanalytics.com/blogs

About Strategy Analytics

Strategy Analytics, Inc. provides timely and actionable market intelligence focused on opportunities and disruptive forces in the areas of Automotive Electronics and Entertainment, Broadband Connected Home, Mobile & Wireless Intelligent Systems and Virtual Worlds. Headquartered in Boston, MA, with offices in the UK, France, Germany, Japan, S. Korea and China, Strategy Analytics works with clients through annual multi-client services, management team workshops and custom consulting engagements. For more information, please visit http://www.strategyanalytics.com/

NEW YORK & RESTON, Va. – Epic Media Group (www.theepicmediagroup.com), the preeminent privately-held global digital marketing solutions company and the operator of Traffic Marketplace, announced that it has finalized a strategic technology partnership with LucidMedia (www.lucidmedia.com), a leading digital advertising management platform, that will allow Epic Media Group to deploy interactive advertising campaigns leveraging the LucidMedia demand-side digital advertising management platform. This announcement comes on the heels of months of collaboration between the two companies.

The new partnership will allow Epic to add LucidMedia’s Real Time Bidding (RTB) technology and advanced semantic contextual targeting to its suite of services and capabilities. Leveraging LucidMedia’s proven platform, Epic will immediately bolster its ability to help agencies and advertisers more intelligently and cost effectively reach consumers across multiple pools of inventory via Real Time Bidding. Epic will also utilize RTB and semantic contextual targeting capabilities both within its own network of premium inventory, as well as across every major exchange and Supply-Side Optimizer such as AdMeld, PubMatic and Rubicon, in a fully integrated approach to campaign delivery. Combining LucidMedia’s capabilities with Epic’s existing ad platform, sophisticated campaign analytics, and integrity assurance capabilities will allow Epic to continue to solidify its position as the market leader in offering the most advanced integrated digital marketing services available today.

“Epic’s deep expertise in managing a full spectrum of advertising services, combined with LucidMedia’s transparent and comprehensive demand-side RTB management platform as well as its advanced semantic-based contextual targeting engine, is a powerful combination,” said Don Mathis, President and Co-CEO of Epic Media Group. “This technology partnership will further unlock massive scale, allowing Epic to enhance our suite of services and improve the performance and efficiency of our interactive solutions on behalf of our clients.”

“After extensive testing on both sides, Epic has recognized that the depth and breadth of LucidMedia’s platform capabilities can significantly advance their ability to get maximum value for their clients. Epic has confirmed that our platform will not only complement but also enhance its existing platform,” said Ajay Sravanapudi, President and CEO of LucidMedia Networks, Inc. “We have spent a decade building and fine-tuning our demand-side platform for scalable ad operations and we have been working closely with Epic to integrate our capabilities in a way that will give their clients the flexibility and access they need to succeed online.”

About Epic Media Group

Epic Media Group (www.theepicmediagroup.com) is the preeminent privately-held global digital marketing solutions company, with deep expertise in managing a full spectrum of advertising services, from brand-building and engagement to performance-based customer acquisition solutions. The company relentlessly focuses on delivering the most comprehensive and cost-effective strategic digital marketing campaigns for advertisers of all sizes, across all industries and around the world. Epic Media Group intelligently and cost effectively accesses consumers across multiple traffic distribution channels through integrated campaigns which include display, search, social media, rich media, mobile, video and more.

About LucidMedia

LucidMedia (www.lucidmedia.com) is the most comprehensive and transparent digital advertising management platform for targeting and optimizing display campaigns. The LucidMedia demand-side platform (DSP) with ClickSense® page-level contextual analysis and intelligent real-time bidding (RTB) is available as both self-service and managed service to interactive agencies and brand advertisers. LucidMedia’s platform employs an easy-to-use interface to deliver proprietary optimization, consolidated buying across the Internet’s largest repositories, unique insight into real-time inventory availability, preemptive brand safety, universal frequency capping, and reach into 95% of the online population. Founded in 1999, LucidMedia processes more than one billion impressions daily for hundreds of major brand advertisers.

The report discusses the impact of new technologies, social changes and the developments in online marketing channels on the planning, execution and measurement of marketing campaigns next year. Strange has looked at what the future holds for search, social media, mobile and tablets, data protection and email as well as what the launch of web TV could mean for brands and the future of paid news content.

The report also looks what custom typography and new browser developments means for web design next year. Each topic is explained with tips on how to optimise each of these to retain a competitive edge.

To incorporate some Christmas spirit into the launch, Strange as also designed and built an online advent calendar (www.strangecorp.com/xmas) which reveals a new trend each day. This will be supported by a social media strategy to drive more visitors to the site.

Paul Honey, Managing Director at Strange comments, “In these challenging economic times, we are seeing more brands investing in digital channels to make their campaigns work harder and smarter. Following the success of our ‘Online Marketing Trends for 2009’ article, we decided to expand this year’s piece and integrate it into our Christmas campaign.”

Visit www.strangecorp.com/xmas throughout December, to view the calendar or download the full report from http://www.strangecorp.com/news/view/online-marketing-trends-in-2011.

About Strange

Strange is a creative digital marketing agency. We deliver exceptional performance by developing outstanding websites and online campaign strategies. Our services cover digital strategy, creative, technology and online marketing.

Specialising in travel, fashion, media, consumer goods and ecommerce, Strange works for local, national and international clients from a wide range of sectors. The agency works with, MTV, Google, Friends of the Earth, Universal Music, Brittany Ferries, Climate Week and Animal clothing.

To find out more about Strange, please visit www.strangecorp.com

NEW YORK – Millward Brown’s Dynamic Logic, the leader in measuring digital advertising effectiveness, released new insights for retail marketers to get the most out of their online ads this holiday season.

“In looking closely at retail ad effectiveness in aggregate, it became apparent that retail ads are a different animal than the average online ad,” said Aaron Katz, Director of Dynamic Logic’s MarketNorms. “In fact, retail online advertising tends to perform slightly under the online average in its ability to shift most key brand impact metrics, with the exception of message association.”

Based on research from its MarketNorms® ad effectiveness database, Dynamic Logic offers the following tips for improving online retail campaigns’ effectiveness this holiday season:

1.           Men are just as important as women when targeting holiday ads. Although women have higher baseline awareness of retailers and higher baseline likelihood to visit, men’s ability to associate a brand’s message with its advertising after exposure increases more than women’s.

2.         While rich media helps achieve ad awareness, its ability to persuade retail store or site visitation is not significantly different from static ads.

3.         Retail “intent to visit” does not vary much as frequency increases. Even at exposure frequencies of 10+, there is only a 1.3 percentage-point improvement in likelihood to visit vs. a 1.0 point improvement at 4-9 exposures. The benefit of a high number of exposures is in awareness, not store or site visits. If visits are the objective and budget is a concern, consider static images vs. rich media, and put less emphasis on frequency.

4.         Celebrities and rich media help improve brand favorability for retailers. A celebrity or child in an ad can generate a 3.0 point increase in brand favorability. Compare this to only a 1.5 point boost for celebrities in CPG ads or 2.3 point gains in entertainment ads. As a bonus, kids generate a healthy 1.7 point improvement in likelihood to visit a retailer compared to a statistically insignificant 0.7 percentage-point increase for adults.

For more on online advertising effectiveness, please view a sample of Dynamic Logic’s Retail Industry Normative Report at http://www.dynamiclogic.com/na/research/DL_MarketNorms_Retail_Dec2010.pdf. In addition, a recent Millward Brown study reveals top reasons why people continue to shop in stores despite the convenience of online shopping.

About this Research

This research is based on more than 120 online advertising campaigns by retailers over the past three years from Dynamic Logic’s MarketNorms® database, the most extensive benchmarking database for online advertising in the industry with data from over 6,000 online campaigns.

The results cited have not been adjusted for exposure frequency, demographics, ad size, Web sites, advertiser industry and other factors that may contribute to brand lift. These findings are aggregate in nature, reflect past results and are not a guarantee of future results for individual campaigns.

About Dynamic Logic

Dynamic Logic (www.dynamiclogic.com) is a leader in providing advertising effectiveness insights across all digital platforms and the broader media mix. As a Millward Brown company, Dynamic Logic offers advertisers, agencies and publishers the unique combination of world-class expertise on brand building and media coupled with normative insights from its database of thousands of digital campaigns, the largest in the industry. Founded in 1999, Dynamic Logic pioneered online branding measurement and has grown with the digital age, developing innovations across 27 digital platforms and establishing specialty practices in cross-media, social media, mobile, gaming and custom solutions.

NEW YORK – Social media marketing is growing among small businesses (SBs) in the U.S., but true breakout growth in this category is being challenged by SB owner inertia.

According to a new report by AMI-Partners, “2010 U.S. Small Business Marketing Activity and Spending Study: Where and How U.S. Small Businesses are Spending Marketing Dollars,” marketing program decisions are largely driven by business decision makers, such as owners, who are responsible for managing many other aspects of their business. This limits the amount of time they can devote to exploring and engaging social media. Consequently, a majority of U.S. SB marketing activities are likely to be on an automatic renewal cycle, benefiting traditional vehicles such as printed telephone directories.

AMI predicts that the effects of the recent economic downturn will lead to an acceleration of U.S. SB social media marketing adoption in the near term. “Overall these SB’s marketing activity in 2010 was down in comparison to levels in 2007,” said Don Best, VP at AMI-Partners in New York. “The greatest declines were in print, broadcast and outdoor media advertising; conversely, online media experienced an incline.” While a significant number of U.S. SBs are finding value in online media advertising, factors like variable costs, lack of understanding and the need for proactive management act as hindrances to widespread adoption. At the same time, however, more U.S. SB decision makers are expressing high interest in social media marketing.

The minimal cost of social media marketing has emboldened some U.S. SBs to experiment with this medium. “As the popularity of search and social sites continues to magnify among their customers,” said Best, “AMI expects U.S. SBs to become much more strategic concerning their online marketing activities, including social media.” Given the 6.3 million SBs that currently exist in the U.S.; this presents significant opportunities for vendors that can offer these SB decision makers tools to better utilize the web for marketing.

About the Study

AMI’s 2010 U.S. Small Business Marketing Activity & Spend Study provides an in-depth analysis of the marketing mix used by U.S. SBs including over 20 marketing channels with specific spending information for each. In addition, the study identifies trends around social media marketing and e-commerce activity.

The overall market sizing data in this report has been determined through an extrapolation of survey finds, secondary research information, and AMI-Partners’ proprietary small and medium business (SMB) Global Model and U.S. small business marketing forecast model.

This report includes:

- SB Marketing Activities and Spend Analysis
- Usage (Current & Planned) and preferences for traditional (e.g. direct mail) vs. new media (search engines, Facebook, Twitter, etc.)
- Current & Planned marketing spending on over 20 marketing vehicles
- Importance of internet/online media in advertising and promotional mix
- Analysis of marketing activities and spending based on firmographics such as employee sizes, verticals and other attributes
- How SB marketing spend will evolve in the future
- How the marketing spending changed over 2007-2010 and predictions of how they will continue to evolve
- Identification and analysis of top small business marketing vehicles moving forward
- Opportunity analysis providing guidance related to where and how IT manufacturers and service providers can help address the growing needs of small businesses

For more information about this study or AMI’s partner targeting solutions, please call 212 944 5100, e-mail ask_ami@ami-partners.com or visit www.ami-partners.com.

About Access Markets International (AMI) Partners, Inc.

AMI-Partners specializes in IT, Internet, telecommunications and business services strategy, venture capital, and actionable market intelligence — focusing on global small and medium business (SMB) enterprises. The AMI-Partners mission is to empower clients for success with the highest-quality data, business planning and go-to-market solutions. AMI was founded in 1996. Since its inception, the firm has built a world-class management team, each with ten to fifteen years’ experience in IT, telecom, online communications or multimedia.

AMI-Partners has helped shape the go-to-market SMB strategies of more than 150 leading IT, Internet, telecommunications and business services companies. The firm is well known for its IT and Internet adoption-based segmentation of the SMB markets; its annual retainership services based on global SMB tracking surveys in more than 30 countries; and its proprietary database of SMBs and SMB channel partners in the Americas, Europe and Asia-Pacific. The firm invests significantly in collecting survey-based information from several thousand SMBs annually, and is considered the premier source for global SMB trends and analysis.