Yahoo has agreed a deal to buy social blogging platform Tumblr.

The deal was first rumoured last week and is set to be officially announced later today. Read More »

Despite predictions of the demise of email, figures from the Radicati Group show that there were around 2.1 billion emails users in 2012, with the number set to grow beyond 2.8 billion in the next four years. Read More »

Parks Associates recently forecast that by the end of 2013, connected TVs will be present in 32 per cent of all Western European homes. By 2016 this is expected to have risen to 54 per cent – and when you consider how “new” this technology is, such adoption rates really should make industries such as advertising stand up and take notice.

When you look at the capabilities of these platforms it’s easy to understand why – connected TVs provide the opportunity for users to engage with content in ways previously unheard of on these screens. Users can download apps such as BBC iPlayer and ITV Player, get recommendations for the discovery of new TV shows and search for existing shows and connect to other viewers online. Read More »

In the week that it was shown that users only visited the planet Google+ for less than 7 minutes a month it’s interesting to look at how a contemporary rock artist brand goes about using social media in their marketing and the different levels of interest on different platforms.

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For an industry supposedly in demise, the music business is leading the way when it comes to generating social currency.  And, for the savviest of social marketers, generating sales as well.

Back in the good old days when I spent a fair chunk of a gap year behind the counter of Our Price, the mainstream music industry’s sales formula was a simple one:  the major labels gave radio stations (and record shops) pre-release singles they wanted played, essentially to advertise the forthcoming albums they were taken from  – which made them the money.  Read More »

Bricks and motor retail business is under huge pressure and technology sometimes seems to be its enemy. But in fact technology could be offline retail’s saviour.

A challenge is to know what technology to invest in when it everything changes so fast. In such circumstances, it is a great help to root oneself in the way consumers make decisions and consider how technology can best be used to persuade them. There are three key principles of persuasive decision interfaces and in each case digital technology can give the offline retailer an edge: Read More »

Can Yahoo get its “cool back”? As that is what it is trying to do according to CFO Ken Goldman and one of the ways it might try and achieve that is to buy Tumblr.

Tumblr would give it much better and badly needed access to the key 18-24 year old demographic.

It desperately needs to create or buy something to make itself relevant again and while deals like adding Twitter to its service will help it on along this path it will not solve its problems. Read More »

The marketing world is a very different place from what it was fifteen, ten or even five years ago. The impact of technology on how marketers approach and engage audiences is something that is still in a major state of flux and, with the current speed of technological development, this isn’t likely to change soon. But this is familiar ground.

In response to these shifting sands, our industry has fallen back and divided into two camps, revealing different opinions about whether to let creative insight or technology and data lead the charge in the development of effective brand communications. Read More »

We’ve heard this before: we need to get serious about mobile as game-changer, especially in retail. And, yes, we’ve heard it because it’s impossible to ignore. The rapid developments are particularly acute in the UK. We love our smartphones: the average UK mobile connection used 424 megabytes of data per month, ahead of Japan (392 megabytes) and the US (319 megabytes), despite being 4G newbies.
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Yahoo! will integrate Twitter into its news frontpage, continuing its battle to be relevant in the social age. Certain tweets will now be included amongst the aggregated news headlines, although it’s not yet clear how they will be selected.

It is somewhat ironic that Yahoo! chief exec Marissa Mayer is bringing Twitter into the fold, as her previous employer, Google, had a major fall out with it.

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