Modern Metrix

Surveillance Cameras as a Source for Consumer Research Data

Think Google Analytics for brick and mortar stores, using in-store surveillance cameras:

"Prism's software can count people that come into a business, measure the length of the line at checkout, and produce static or animated visualizations showing how people moved around a store. It is designed so that it cannot identify or track individuals. One national wireless carrier is already using Prism's technology to generate heat maps of where visitors go in their showrooms, to compare the level of interest in different devices—valuable data to them and to the device makers."

I personally believe that data collected this way is more reliable than when using mobile phones to log and track people's behavior inside the stores.

Creatives vs. Quants in Advertising

Interesting article in Fortune on how number crunchers are gaining influence in advertising industry

 

NYT on personalized online ads

Great article in NYT about personalized Internet advertising:

"On the old Internet, nobody knew you were a dog. On the new targeted Internet, they now know what kind of dog you are, your favorite leash color, the last time you had fleas and the date you were neutered."

Do Birds of Feather Really Shop Together?

Auren Hoffman discusses the future of social-graphic targeting, and cites a study from University of Pennsylvania on social network-based marketing (PDF).

Mapping Mobile Internet Users

Interesting article in Business Week about behavioral mapping of mobile Internet users and what this could mean for marketers.

"Much can be learned, it turns out, from the patterns of those dots moving across the maps. It's possible to see clusters grow around a popular restaurant or retail store. It's also easy to learn about each dot. Business travelers tend to congregate in certain spots in each city. The newly unemployed often shift from the clocklike routine of work to far more random movements. And Sense can flesh out these digital stick figures with additional data. By noting where dots appear to sleep, the company can assign an average neighborhood income to each one. It then becomes easier to predict whether those spending time near car lots are in the market for luxury brands or economy models."

Google to Introduce Ads Based on Users' Interests

Unlike other BT solutions, Google's program will allow users to edit ad categories and other information via the feature called Ads Preferences Manager.

"Google said that it planned to segment users along 20 categories and nearly 600 subcategories, and would not create categories for certain “sensitive” interests, including race, religion, sexual orientation or certain types of financial or health concerns."

The users will be assigned to these segments based on the content of the pages they visit.

Facebook (re)introduces Engagement Ads

ReadWriteWeb reports:

"Starting this spring, companies will be able to selectively target Facebook's members in order to research the appeal of new products through a polling system called Engagement Ads..

Some thoughts on interactive/personalized ads

Interesting article by Yahoo! on recent advancements of advertising technologies that track and measure the audiences..

I was always wondering what if cameras focused on shopping bags carried by people, not the people themselves? Imagine cameras on Time Square counting number of bags from "Armani Exchange" or "Abercrombie" currently on the streets and adjusting the video to stream ads for apparel that appeal to those psychographic categories ("urban disco hipsters" and "suburban golden youth" - just made those up myself)?

Subject Line Lenght and E-mail Performance

According to results of study conducted by Epsilon, shorter subject lines of promotional e-mail messages result in higher open and click rates. In particular, average correlation between the lenght of the subject line and response rates for e-mails from the consumer services companies was -.23.  Among the other factors that affect performance of the e-mail campaign are the order of words, word choice, and brand and audience awareness. The white paper (PDF) is available here.