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When and how do people use their iPhones and iPads?
This probably won't come as a surprise, but gaming eats up the most time on people's iOS devices. Here's the breakdown using data from Flurry Analytics, as compiled by BI Intelligence. Read more
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An Oreo cookie marketing campaign delivered almost twice the user interaction with mobile ad units that focused on swiping, tapping and scrolling compared to standard mobile banner ads, according to a new study from the Interactive Advertising Bureau.
The in-market study shows how ad units that enable brand marketers to tell bigger, bolder stories on small mobile screens can drive better results. In addition to driving higher interaction rates, such ad units also produced higher brand and message recall for the Oreo campaign.
Photo Credit: Mobile Marketer
“Marketers must look beyond the standard mobile banner ad because it’s a non-optimized advertising experience that fails to deliver an innovative experience that has positive impact from a branding perspective,” said Cella Irvine, CEO at Vibrant Media, New York.
“Above all else, brand marketers must consider crafting campaigns that leverage ad experiences that deliver interactivity and creativity at scale,” she said. “That should be top-of-mind for any brand marketer when trying to engage a user in today’s multiscreen world. ”
The
in-market study of the Oreo Cookie vs. Creme marketing campaign was
conducted in partnership with Vibrant Media and comScore. READ MORE
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The US-based online restaurant reservations firm OpenTable Inc has acquired Mumbai and Silicon Valley-based mobile payments startup JustChalo, run by JustChalo Technologies and JustChalo Inc, for around $11 million.
“Mobile is increasingly important to our business and the JustChalo team’s expertise will help accelerate our development efforts in this area. We are looking forward to integrating JustChalo’s engineers into our team and continuing to enhance the mobile experience for diners and our restaurant customers,” said Joseph Essas, CTO of OpenTable in a statement.
In the first quarter of 2013, reservations booked on mobile devices accounted for 36 per cent of the 34 million diners OpenTable seated in North America, as per its statement.
Techcircle.in tried reaching JustChalo for more details, but did not get any response at the time of posting this article.
JustChalo was co-founded by Kashyap Deorah and Rishi Deshpande. Prior to JustChalo, Deorah was president at FutureBazaar.com, an e-commerce portal of the Future Group. Earlier, he was CEO of Mumbai-based Phone Commerce, which was acquired by FutureBazaar and got merged with it.
Recently, JustChalo secured undisclosed funding from Ash Bharadwaj and Rakesh Mathur
In less than a decade, social media has evolved from an innovative, albeit fairly casual digital connection between friends to an all-consuming business and marketing powerhouse that can quickly overwhelm with the sheer number of options and data available to both the end user and brands of all shapes and sizes.
Did you know, for example, that in any given minute more than half a million comments are posted to Facebook, 347,000 tweets are submitted on Twitter and 3,600 photos are shared on Instagram? For businesses looking to embrace all aspects of social media this can quickly lead to an information overload… and it’s the customer who suffers the consequences. READ MORE
Photo Credit: Media Bistro
Photo Credit: BloombergBusinessweek.
Photographer: Nir Elias/Corbis
Google Inc. (GOOG) has acquired map-software provider Waze Inc., seeking to keep competitors such as Facebook Inc. and Apple Inc. (AAPL) from eroding its lead in mobile-navigation programs.
Terms of the deal for Waze, with offices in Israel and Palo Alto, California, weren’t disclosed in Google’s blog post announcing the purchase today. The price was about $1.1 billion, a person familiar with the transaction said earlier this week.
As consumers shift to smartphones and tablets and away from personal computers, Facebook and Google are increasing efforts to court customers on the move. Waze, whose mobile app solicits input from almost 50 million users to improve directions and display traffic and road-hazard details, would provide social features for Google’s navigation tool. It may also help Google extend its dominance in maps over rival Apple. Read More
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When Vine was first announced in late January, the initial reaction was lukewarm and filled with uncertainty about what it would mean for marketers and brands as they attempted to weave to the videos into their social marketing mix.
But time has shown the tool can provide a good change of pace and be an effective engagement tactic for any brand.
One of the most compelling reasons that brands should pay attention to Vine is recent research has shown that branded Vines are shared four times more often than branded online videos. The key here is sharing – aside from some examples like K-mart’s hilarious commercials that have gotten a lot of attention lately, fans may be reluctant to share full-length videos – they don’t want to look like shills to their friends, colleagues, or families.
Vine, on the other hand, is likely less disruptive to fan’s Tweeting habits, with the short videos capturing the same amount of attention as a 140 character tweet. They load quickly, and get to the point right away – a perfectly digestible nugget of content. The sharing also goes both ways, and Vine makes it easy for fans to share videos with brands as well. READ MORE
“The art of good business is being a good middleman. Putting people together.” – Layer Cake, 2004 film
I’ve always loved that line because it’s about building relationships. A few weeks back I was at a high school entrepreneurship competition. The judges were VCs and at the end one of them said to the students and audience, “the most important thing in business is margins.” Now that is something I expect from a first year university professor, not an experienced VC. Margins can be optimized later, but never sleep on developing relationships.
Have a relationship with your customers, not your metrics
In the high growth start-up world, you are always chasing the next set of numbers that will make you look big in front of a VC. You raise a little bit of money, execute on some things, get some traction, raise more money, and do it again. You never take time to develop a long term relationship with anyone, because anything that takes time does not look good to a VC. This can hurt your business in the long run. READ MORE
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Marketers are backing up the excitement around mobile, social and video with more ad dollars. Of the 20 major US brands surveyed by the Association of National Advertisers in March 2013, 65% said they were increasing their investments in mobile—the highest percentage of marketers upping investments in any channel studied. Only 10% planned to decrease mobile spend.
And marketers seem to have no hesitations about social, as 55% of respondents said they were putting more dollars to the format, while no advertisers reported decreasing social investments.
Video rounded out the top three channels with the greatest number of marketers increasing spend. Two out five marketers were upping their investment in video.
All three advertising formats are being aided by a broad audience who advertisers want to reach and engage. Growth in the number of social media users and online video viewers is reaching maturity in the US and has dipped to the single digits, according to eMarketer estimates. Meanwhile, the mobile internet is still set to see double-digit user increases during the next couple of years. READ MORE
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The rise of the chief customer officer as a key position at brand-oriented organizations is intricately linked with the growth in mobile marketing as marketers recognize that the engagement channel of choice for customers is increasingly becoming smartphones and tablets.
The CCO position was relatively unheard of not too long ago but is quickly growing in importance, as evidenced by the news that Michelle Gass, a former Starbucks’ executive has been named by Kohl’s as its chief customer officer. Ms. Gass is credited with creating the Starbucks Rewards loyalty program, which is one of the big success stories in mobile over the past few years.
“The core responsibility for a chief customer officer is to ‘walk in the customer’s shoes,’ said Dr. Gary Edwards, chief customer officer at Empathica, Mississauga, Canada. “The emergence of this role parallels the increasingly complex path that a customer’s shoes take. READ MORE
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Seamless and GrubHub, America's two largest online food delivery services, have announced plans to merge. Together, they boast an impressive roster of 32,000 restaurants and more than 90,000 orders a day.
In 2012, Seamless and GrubHub brought in well above $100 million in revenue on nearly $900 million in food sales, says the Wall Street Journal.
Though the companies are waiting to officially tie the knot before announcing details (such as how much money exchanged hands, and what they're planning to call the new entity), CNBC says GrubHub co-founder and CEO Matt Maloney will take the title of chief executive, while Seamless CEO Jonathan Zabusky will be the company's president.
But the deal's not done yet. "This whole shebang is still subject to regulatory approval, so it's possible someone could raise... anti-competitive concerns down the road," says Chris Valazco atTechCrunch. Combining rosters does give the two delivery giants considerable heft over the competition. One of their main rivals, Delivery.com, for example, offers services of just 10,000 restaurants in 50 cities.
If the deal does go through, other delivery sites aren't the only ones who may struggle to battle this new heavyweight. Bloomberg Businessweek's Sam Grobart thinks Yelp, the increasingly popular online review site, could feel the burn as well. READ MORE
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The Facebook generation is fed up with Facebook.
That's according to a report released Tuesday by the Pew Research Center, which surveyed 802 teens between the ages of 12 and 17 last September to produce a 107-page report on their online habits.
Pew's findings suggest teens' enthusiasm for Facebook is waning, lending credence to concerns, raised by the company's investors and others that the social network may be losing a crucial demographic that has long fueled its success.
Facebook has become a "social burden" for teens, write the authors of the Pew report. "While Facebook is still deeply integrated in teens’ everyday lives, it is sometimes seen as a utility and an obligation rather than an exciting new platform that teens can claim as their own."
Teen's aren't abandoning Facebook -- deactivating their accounts
would mean missing out on the crucial social intrigues that transpire
online -- and 94 percent of teenage social media users still have
profiles on the site, Pew's report notes. But they're simultaneously
migrating to Twitter and Instagram, which teens say offer a parent-free
place where they can better express themselves. Eleven percent of teens
surveyed had Instagram accounts, while the number of teen Twitter users
climbed from 16 percent in 2011 to 24 percent in 2012. Five percent of
teens have accounts on Tumblr, which was just purchased by Yahoo for $1.1 billion, while 7 percent have accounts on Myspace. READ MORE
Photo Credit: Bloomberg.com
GrubHub Inc. and Seamless North America LLC, two of the top food-delivery websites in the U.S., have agreed to combine their companies to take on rivals in the growing market for online meal orders.
GrubHub Chief Executive Officer Matt Maloney will become CEO of the merged group, and Seamless CEO Jonathan Zabusky will serve as president, the two said in an interview. Neither company is paying to acquire the other, Maloney said, declining to share financial details of the agreement. The deal now awaits the approval of U.S. regulators, he said.
Food-delivery sites and mobile applications are gaining in popularity as more people order their meals online, instead of calling or picking up orders at restaurants. That’s also driving consolidation, as startups join forces to head off competition from review sites such as Yelp Inc. (YELP) The merger will help the combined company accelerate the addition of users and restaurants, said Maloney, who co-founded GrubHub in 2004.
“This has nothing to do with cost savings; it has everything to do with increasing growth,” Maloney said. “We’re totally focused on the top line and how we continue to drive more orders for our restaurants.” READ MORE
Continuing its aggressive push to convince the world that YouTube video content is better than TV, the online video giant is rumored to be launching paid subscriptions for specialist video channels as soon as this week, the Financial Times reports.
Photo Credit: Brand Channel
YouTube has said it was “looking into creating a subscription platform that could bring even more great content to YouTube for our users to enjoy and provide our creators with another vehicle to generate revenue from their content, beyond the rental and ad-supported models we offer.”
The preeminent global video site has long-since evolved from its user-generated roots into a platform that every major company and marketer is looking to leverage with professional-grade content. With an audience of one billion, YouTube and its content partners are looking to create another revenue stream besides the site's burgeoning ad platform. "This is a whole new form of content, content delivery and content consumption," said DreamWorks CEO Jeffery Katzenberg in Business Insider. "It's the medium of the future and the future has already arrived. Video is becoming the global shared experience."
Rumors began circulating in January after the site reportedly asked a handful of content creators to sign-on for the subscription plan. At the time, a YouTube rep told Mashable, "We have long maintained that different content requires different types of payment models ... The important thing is that, regardless of the model, our creators succeed on the platform. There are a lot of our content creators that think they would benefit from subscriptions, so we’re looking at that." READ MORE
Frozen yogurt is not a new concept. It’s been done before and it’s been done well, so starting a new froyo chain in an already saturated market could have been a risky move. But former investment banker Daniel Kim was used to risk, and waded right in, opening his first Red Mango (www.redmangousa.com) location in 2007 at the age of 30. His youth or former occupation might have been the more notable things about that launch, but now with more than 200 locations nationwide, the meteoric rise of Red Mango to one of the major players — not just in the frozen yogurt space, but in the quick-serve space in general — is what makes his story truly impressive.
So how did a money man launch a yogurt empire? Before the first Red Mango even had a plot of land to break ground on, it had a definitive presence. This was a shrewd move on Kim’s part, who knew that in order to make the brand successful he needed to make potential customers love the product. No big deal, right? Business owners always seek customer loyalty, but the difference was Kim started that process before he really had a brand.
“This was my first restaurant venture so I really didn’t know what I was getting into in terms of building awareness,” Kim admits. “Everything we did was related to making the product. There was a lot of R&D and I had a general idea of when the store was going to open, so I knew I had to build awareness before that.” READ MORE
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Groupon is once again expanding its portfolio of mobile payment services, putting it in closer competition with the likes of Square and PayPal’s here targeting local merchants: today it has released Groupon POS, which appears to be an iPad-specific version of its mobile payments service aimed at local merchants, working as a dashboard to make and track payments.
This is the latest development in Groupon’s payments strategy and helps fill out founder and now-ex-CEO Andrew Mason’s strategy of Groupon becoming the “operating system for local commerce.” It shows that while Mason is now gone, the direction that he envisioned for how the company would diversify beyond daily deals remains.
It is also a sign of how the company is continuing to push mobile services. Last week, in its Q1 earnings report,
Groupon noted that it had 41.7 million active users (meaning those that
have purchased a Groupon offer in the last 12 months). In North
America, still the company’s largest single market, some 45% of
transactions were completed on mobile devices, up from 30% a year ago.
In Q1, the company said that more than 7 million people downloaded
Groupon mobile apps worldwide. READ MORE
Photo Credit: Forbes
It’s rare that you get to watch – up close – as a massive industry changes.
But this week Television, as we know it, ended. And the world of connected, curated, community TV began.
It was breathtaking to behold.
AOL . Yahoo . YouTube. Three huge players – each took a stand and claimed a spot in the new video landscape. Each of them came with a passion and focus to win. And each of them came away with a prize – unique, and meaningful to the emerging marketplace.
Let’s begin with Yahoo. Marissa Mayer led off the proceedings, having been just hours earlier on stage at Tech Crunch Disrupt. After an upbeat introduction – she handed the stage over to Yahoo’s head of video content, Erin McPherson. From there Yahoo let unfurl a stream of stars, brand partnerships and series that could only be described as first class. With a slate of six new shows and deals with content leaders like ABC News, Conde Nast, and WWE - Yahoo wowed the crowd. READ MOREFast Casual has certainly given other segments in the restaurant industry a run for its money within the past few years, and it’s no surprise that this segment has become the fastest-growing. The combination of fresh, made-to-order, customizable and less costly food is more appealing in terms of healthiness, transparency, and cost-saving options. But most recently, we’re seeing Casual Dining trends increase as well, with consumers visiting Casual restaurants even more than Fast Casuals, proving that a little competition can be a good thing. In terms of LBA (location-based actions) activity, such as check-ins and geo-data via smartphone, there’s been a huge jump in casual dining LBAs, from -23.4% in 2012 to now 4.8% more than fast casual consumers. By taking notes from its quick and fresh counterpart, Casual Dining has stepped up its competitive game in terms of quality, menu, performance and innovation.
Bottoms Up
Casual Dining upturn can be attributed to a few things, but ultimately boils down to offering consumers things that the Fast Casual sector does not. One of the biggest differences is that most Casual restaurants offer liquor menus beyond beer and wine. While some Fast Casuals offer the standard beer, wine and wine-based margaritas, it’s certainly no full bar.
Most Millennials - those born between 1982 and 1998 - which are the largest generation to date (read: the most influential for brands and marketers), are now of drinking age, where it’s cool to get a drink with dinner, or even to just meet up with friends at a restaurant bar.
“Millennials are absolutely driving some of the biggest trends in adult beverage and will continue to do so for the next few years,” said David Henkes, VP at Technomic, a Chicago-based market research firm for the restaurant industry.
According to the 2012 Technomic Report on Special Trends in Adult Beverage for Millennial Consumers, this group contains a lot of frequent drinkers, with eight in 10 survey respondents admitting to having had at least one drink within the past week in a restaurant or bar. And though Millennials are known to be willing to pay more for better quality items, they are still a bit frugal on spending, which is why Casual Dining additions, such as cheaper bar bites, 2-for-1s, and happy hours, are winning this generation over.
Mobile Madness
Two of the Top Five Casual Dining brands with the most mobile-friendly consumers are Yard House (No. 3) and Red Robin (No. 2). Research data pulled for this segment is based on Super Users for the restaurant business - those who have a minimum of five mobile actions per month with a casual restaurant brand.
Whether their own mobile offerings are related to this data or not, both brands have nailed their mobile presence. Red Robin’s app allows guests to customize their meals, and provides up-to-date nutritional values. Yard House’s mobile site includes a beer finder, a Chalkboard Beer Series, and features music playlists from specific Yard House locations.
Flavors of Love
Though social and digital strategies are vital for consumers to indulge in a full 360 brand experience, at the end of the day, your brand must deliver a quality product. The Casual Dining Social 100 Report lays out the Top 10 Brands with the “Best Food Sentiment.” Sentiment is broken down into three categories that resolve against tens of thousands of key words based on Service, Food and Overall Brand Experience. The score is then averaged for an overall sentiment.
At No. 10 is Yard House, with a 58.94 sentiment score. Whether it’s their food or beer menu, Yard House covers the whole gamut. They boast one of the largest selections of draft beers in the country, with everything from ciders and floral ales to spiced and malty varieties. The food menu houses offerings from sushi, truffle burgers and ribs, to street tacos, salads, and a full selection of vegetarian options.
For an in-depth look at the other Top Brands, make sure to check out DigitalCoCo’s 2013 Casual Dining Social 100 Report, where we dive into the Big Data of Casual Dining brands, including which have the most mobile-connected consumers, what the top consumer demographics are for the segment, and more. To view the full report, please click here.
DigitalCoCo is the proprietary owner of the largest consumer index for the restaurant and hospitality industry at over 42 million social consumers related to the industry, and tracking more than 4,700 restaurant brands.
You can see the infographic and get the FULL Casual Dining Social 100 Report here.
Photo Credit: TechCrunch
Snackchat! Taco Bell tweeted, “We’re on Snapchat” last night, urging their Twitter followers to add them for a “secret announcement” sometime today. This is the first major brand to use Snapchat to reach customers, and could signal the beginning of Snapchat’s monetization.
Snapchat is an ephemeral photo messaging application that raised a $13.5 million Series A in February. Taco Bell reached out to Snapchat on Twitter yesterday; after a couple of responses from Snapchat (below), Taco Bell announced that they’re on Snapchat at the handle “tacobell.”
In December, when Snapchat co-founder Evan Spiegel told me the company was prototyping monetization features, I wrote about the most likely ways the company could monetize:
With a very captive audience, Snapchat could have very profitable ads. Imagine a picture snap once a day or every 10 snaps where you have to hold the image and view the ad for five seconds before using the app more. Or an advertising video snap that played on its own for 10 seconds, instead of you holding it down to view. READ MORE
Photo Credit: Huffington Post
Inside Bai Thong Thai restaurant in San Francisco, a sign brandishing the words, "Stop the Bully! -- Boycott Yelp," was posted on its door. Bai Thong Thai currently holds a 3 out 5 star rating on Yelp, yet the sign suggests that their score would be higher if the site didn't manipulate rankings.
The restaurant claims that when it approached Yelp regarding the disparity between their positive customer reviews and actual score, the company replied, "Perhaps if you paid to do Yelp ads we could help you with this." READ MORE
Photo Credit: Mashable
For those who frequently use the free public Wi-Fi in coffee shops such as Starbucks and Dunkin' Donuts, you're likely already aware of how easy it is for hackers to steal your personal and financial information over the shared network.
But what you may not realize is how cybercriminals could gain access to sensitive data in other ways that might not be on your radar.
According to ThreatMetrix,
a provider of cybercrime prevention solutions, some hackers even leave
malicious USB drives on tables for curious customers to plug into their
devices. This allows them to retrieve personal information and even
social network passwords. Although this may seem unlikely, ThreatMetrix
says the scenario actually occurs. READ MORE
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