According to Vogue UK, a new survey shows that over 82% of their readers actively pay attention to ads on their sites, and many value ads as much as the content!

As reported in Digiday, here are some of the key findings in the report:

So perhaps the panic about ad-blocking is overblown, especially for premium ads, and especially for mobile. A recent JP Morgan study reported that ad blocking was only half as prevalent on mobile as on desktop. And they concluded, “Blockers remove low-quality ad clutter.”

Katie MacLennan, Digital Business Director at Manning Gottlieb OMD was quoted in Digiday saying that “with the continued emergence of greater user choice, personalization and dynamic ads, advertisers should present a compelling story which invites users to engage, rather than imposing content upon them.”

Now, Twitter has announced new features and renamed their service to broaden the appeal to an even wider base of advertisers.

The mobile advertising service is now called Twitter Audience Platform, and it reaches over 700 million people globally.

The Twitter Publisher Network was launched so advertisers could run ads not only on the Twitter website and app, but also with the publishers working sintomasdelsida.org with Mopub, the ad platform that Twitter had acquired.
(see: A new way to promote Mobile Apps on Twitter)

The first big change that Twitter Audience Platform brings is that it has expanded beyond simply pushing app installs. Now advertisers can also drive two additional objectives: Tweet engagements and video views. Both are now available for the first time in beta to all managed clients globally.

The second major change is the addition of new creative formats to help advertisers better engage with their in-app audience.

According to Twitter: “On the Twitter Audience Platform, we transform your Promoted Tweets into one of our immersive ad formats including video, native ads, banners, and interstitials.”

For example:

The Twitter Audience Platform is now available globally to all managed clients driving Tweet engagements and video views. To get started, reach out to your Twitter account team. To create a Twitter Ads account, visit ads.twitter.com/getstarted.

In its last quarterly report, Facebook reported almost 1.5 billion monthly users, generating over $4 billion in revenue!

The amazing fact is that most of that revenue growth results from mobile advertising.

In the three years since the IPO, revenues from desktop advertising and payments have stayed almost exactly level. The the massive growth from $1.2 billion to $4 billion has been entirely due to the growth of mobile advertising, which now represents over $2.9 billion per quarter!

If there has been any doubt about Facebook’s primary business, this chart should clear up those doubts immediately.

Some other very interesting facts about Facebook from their quarterly report:

Also about Facebook:

• Facebook Uses Beacons To Enable Local Content Delivery

• Facebook “Retargeting” study: Mobile Ads not only work better, they are cheaper too!

• Mobile App Marketing: Facebook and the Heavyweights

And it turns out that these two new technologies are already being adopted and having an influence on the digital marketing activities of many companies.

If you aren’t yet using these in your business – or at least familiar with the trends – perhaps it is time to get started.

2nd Watch helps enterprises make the shift to public cloud infrastructure, and as such are in a good position to see how new technologies are being adopted.

Recently they surveyed of 500 IT and marketing professionals in medium and large companies to understand their use of big data, Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud-based technologies to support digital marketing.

According to 2nd Watch, “the results indicate growing confidence in the use of these technologies and success deploying them…massive data volumes, sourced from websites, apps and machines, enable marketers to develop highly targeted digital campaigns and promotions.”

The study found that IoT and Big Data are already very much in use or in the planning for many companies.

Some of the other key findings from the study:
(an infographic is below, click to enlarge)

Here is an infographic with the full study results, click to enlarge

Mobile apps are no longer really optional for leading retailers, having a mobile app is now virtually a necessity. But a new study shows that it’s not enough to have just any sort of app – today a consumer’s overall view of a retailer is determined by their app experience.

AppDynamics is an application performance management company that recently survedy 4,000 smartphone and tablet users in US, UK, Germany, and France to understand more about the linkage between mobile apps, brand credibility, customer satisfaction, and loyalty.

The group of consumers who participated in this study are strong supporters of e-commerce. In fact, just over a third said that they make more than half their purchases online. So clearly this channel is critical to their overall spending pattern.

The survey found a strong connection between the app and brand credibility, with almost three fourths saying that the performance of an app would impact their perception of the retailer.

More importantly, over two thirds of the respondents said that a negative experience with an app or website would deter them from engaging with the retailer in the future.

But what makes an app good? These days it has to be more than just a mirror of the existing online site or a simple product catalog. Today’s consumers expect a variety of advanced features to increase convenience and improve the shopping experience.

And increasingly thishat involves features that bridge the gap between multiple shopping channels. Some examples of this include:,

As Marco Blankenzee, Manager of Mobiquity Europe puts it: “Digital technologies have empowered consumers. They are sharing their retail
experiences with peers and comparing prices, products and delivery options more than ever before. Consumer expectations of retailers are set sky-high by innovative, digitally native brands. Everyone else in the market is expected to keep pace. This is widely known as the ‘expectation economy‘ whereby consumers know what the best-of-the-best looks like and want all retailers to deliver on this, now.”

But although users clearly love apps, it is getting harder and harder for app marketers to get noticed in this highly competitive market.

In order to understand more about the dynamics of app discovery and engagement, Google ran a very interesting study on consumer app acquisition and usage behavior.

The latest reports of consumer app usage are quite impressive:

To delve into this more deeply, Google and Ipsos MediaCT ran a survey where over 8,000 respondents filled in an online survey. To be included in the survey, the consumer had to be a smartphone user and had to have used an app within the past 7 days.

A download link for the full study is at the bottom of this article, but here are a few of the interesting results.

App Discovery

People may assume that the main place for consumers to find out about new apps is the app store. However, quite surprisingly, most app discovery goes on outside the app store.

Ads for Apps

Mobile advertising is another strong way to influence the download of apps. According to the study, there is no overwhelming favorite type of ad for downloads, in fact many forms of mobile advertising perform just about equally.

Frequent App Engagement

Clearly the second major objective – once a marketer has convinced a consumer to download an app – is to have them continue to use the app frequently. This can be difficult, especially for retail apps where up to half of those downloading an app to make a purchase said they are likely to remove the app once the transaction is complete.

The key is to make the value of the app clear to the user. For example, “making my life easier” was an attribute that almost 2/3 of the respondents identified in the apps they use.

In addition, app users may need an extra incentive to reengage with an app that they have abandoned. The most popular incentives are seen to be discounts & coupons, as well as access to exclusive content.

The full study includes much more information including consumer views on app pricing, use of apps for making purchases, as well as some sector specific detail.

As with any new marketing-focused technology, the key question is always “what is the reach?”

A new release from beacon platform company inMarket shows that beacons seem to be reaching a critical mass of addressable consumers.

Beacons
Beacons are small, BLE (Bluetooth low energy) devices that are able to connect with specific, partnered mobile apps when the smartphone comes in proximity. The beacon and the app communicate even if the app is closed and the phone is in the user’s pocket.

When the app receives a beacon signal, the app then wakes up and can provide a location-based mobile experience. This might be, for example, a welcome message when entering a store, a coupon, or a targeted mobile ad such as the examples shown below.

Millennials
Millennials are rapidly becoming the prime marketing target for many companies in the US. Although there doesn’t seem to be any consistently defined age span for Millennials, in general the group is defined as those people born between 1982 and roughly 2000.

Millennials now represent the largest generation segment of the population, having recently passed the “Baby Boomer” group. There are approximately 83 million millennials in the US, of which 41 million are women.

This 15 to 32 year old demographic is very desirable for many marketers as they both have a lot of purchasing power in their own right (and it will be increasing), but they also tend to be the trendsetters which influence the other generational segments.

Millennial Moms and Beacons
Mothers tend to be one of the preferred segments of the millennial generation.

According to Todd Dipaola, CEO and founder of inMarket, “Millennial moms have become the most coveted part of the 18-34 demo due to their leadership role in family spending. Brands know they need to reach these mobile natives on the medium they use most intimately.”

The latest study from inMarket shows that 38% of millennial moms are currently using mobile apps and “are reachable via beacon proximity engagements in stores every month.”

For all the women in the millennial generation, the reach of beacon technology is about 20%, significantly less than for mothers.

38% is quite an impressive figure given the newness of beacons, and it may be a good predictor of future potential. However, there are still some open questions as reach does not necessarily guarantee that these millennial moms are actually buying more as a result. Some case studies have shown strong increases in factors such as purchase intent or brand awareness which are very encouraging, though we will keep watching for reports of effects on actual sales.

IoT is taking off, and in a big way, evidenced by the massive amount of IoT solutions and applications shown at MWC.

The rapidly falling costs of key IoT building block sensor technologies combined with creative mobile software development is enabling new innovative IoT solutions in literally all use cases, from personal to business and across fixed and mobile networks and devices.

At the same time, the expected phenomenal growth in devices connected to the internet through either direct or mobile connections will drive up the level of “background noise” on the internet. IoT solution providers and Operators need to plan for managing the increases in network loads to ensure capacity requirements are met while providing an optimal user experience to customers and subscribers.

Opportunities will be plentiful for solution providers and Operators to target certain application areas, and to find ways to create smooth user experiences and minimize network traffic load.

Some of the most interesting that we saw this year at MWC included:

The area of IoT will certainly continue to be a hot topic for the mobile industry, and we expect to see even more focus next year at Mobile World Congress 2016.

However, search on mobile devices is developing into quite a unique proposition, with differences in content, user expectations, and technologies.

Venture Capitalists are now betting that Google might well be vulnerable in this new area of search. And so they are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars of investment into start ups that are targeting mobile search.

These mobile search start ups have each taken a special angle to try to differentiate themselves. For example, many are trying to extend search into the inside of mobile applications using “deep links”. Others are working to utilize the additional “contextual” information that is provided by mobile – such as location – to try to provide more complete answer to what the user would like to do.

One such startup is Vurb, based in San Francisco. When a Vurb user does a search for a film, the service provides a complete listing with movie reviews, list of cast members, locations to see the film, links to purchase tickets, and even a link to call a cab to get there!

Bobby Lo, founder of Vurb explained, “If I’m searching for a movie, chances are I want to do a couple of things related to that.”

Based on figures from CB Insights (a key source for Venture Capital data), VC’s financed 33 search companies in 2013 and 27 in 2014, with many of them focused on mobile search.

John Lilly is a partner at Greylock Partners, a leading VC firm. He feels that while search is not broken, it certainly can be improved. Quoted in the NY Times, he said “If you ask 100 people whether search is broken or not, 99 would say Google is perfect, it’s everything I need. But if you ask them, ‘How are you going to figure out what you want to watch on TV tonight or where are you going to dinner?’ they would say Google wouldn’t know that, that’s not search.”

(for a more in depth discussion of this topic, read this article in the New York Times)

In mid-April, Google implemented a major change, one that was focused on the mobile-readiness of websites.

While this may seem to be a small technicality, in fact it can have huge impact on anyone that depends on customers finding them through Google.

Here are the key points of the change that went into effect on April 21st, 2015.

This change is different from many Google algorithm updates, in that it is actively encouraging good business strategy. Google’s changes often are implemented primarily to limit – or some would say punish – certain web practices that Google wants to discourage. For example, one such discouraged practice was hiding text on a page by making it the same color as the background.

However in this case, Google is actually encouraging companies to think about their mobile strategy, and to put the resources into making their website “mobile friendly”.

As a large and growing proportion of web traffic, especially web commerce traffic, is coming from mobile devices, this is actually a very good thing for most companies.

As Matthew Tulett, one of the organizers of UnGagged London, said, “I would urge businesses large and small to use the mobile friendly update to take stock and asses their mobile strategy… rather than a headache, this particular algorithm change should be seen as helping businesses focus on ways to achieve growth in areas that, until now, might otherwise have been ignored.”