Did you know…

That Brazil has 10 million more internet users than India? But that it still has less than a 5th of the internet users of China?

Or that the US has 136 million 3G users at a penetration of 48%, the UK has 29 million 3G users and a 38% penetration rate, while China has 14 million at 2%?

Or how about the fact that the iPhone, iTouch and iPad platform has sold 120 million units world-wide in its first 12 quarters. For comparison: Netscape Navigator, the web's first mainstream browser achieved 32 million downloads in the same period during the first years of the web.

Or that by 2012, smart phones will outsell desktops and laptops together. Laptops will sell almost double the amount of desktops.

Or that in the US time spent on print is a mere 12% of time spent on all media, yet it still gets 26% of all advertising. Time spent on the internet stands at 28%, while ad revenue spent on the net is only 13%.

All this and much more come from an informative report by Morgan Stanley.

Social browsing

For some young demographics social browsing has completely over taken other forms of casual browsing. In other words users sit for hours imbibing the status updates of Friends in the News Feed.

Will this bother Google? Probably not, because people normally use their site with the intent to search. Or will it?
 

PageRank and EdgeRank

Most marketeers have familarised themselves by now with how Google ranks pages (PageRank). But very few have an understanding of how Facebook Ranks content in the News Feed. Behind that link is a primer .
 

Digital publishing pays better for authors

By 2015 eBook sales will top $3 billion according to PaidContent.Org. And says the Indie, the margins publishers will get for these sales will be lower, while authors will get more.
 

The real barriers for marketers in the UK in terms of investment in social media

The Internet Advertising bereau (IAB) has conducted an open-ended, anonymous survey with around 50 ISBA members. And the results make for an interesting read.

In terms of general usage, the most popular use of social media amongst ISBA members was found to be:

- As a PR tool to reach bloggers and online influencers (69%);
- To extend brand websites via social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter (63%);
- Over half (52%) were using social media as a research tool to find out what people are saying about their product or service;

This would suggest that few brands are ready to follow the Old Spice route to social media glory.

The main challenges for using socia media were:
1. Monitoring and control
2. Measurement and ROI
3. Policy and regulation
4. Social media strategy
5. Where social media sits within organisations
 

Getting sentimental

Sentiment analysis is a holy grail for marketing folk. The idea? Monitor a brand and see how positive and negative sentiments fluctuate depending on events. But this well-argued and considered post by Tim Whitlock points out that the technology is still not up to the task.
 

Creative of the week – Han Hoogerbrugge

Sure. We're biased because we've worked with him before. But Dutch animator-slash-webartist Han Hoogerbrugge makes us laugh every time we see one of his creations. Read more >>

Hoogerbrugge is no stranger to the self-publishing powers of the web. Already back in the late 90s, he applied his interactive minimalism to Gif-animations and made a series of  weird and wonderful self-portraits called Modern Living / Neurotica. It garnered him a cult following and a spot in the London Design Museum.

These days he splits his time between ‘real’ exhibitions (you know, the ones in galleries), commercial illustrations and animations (yep, the Pet Shop Boys are fans) and his online cartoon diary called ProStress.

ProStress has now been turned into a book, but if you want to get your daily dose of Hoogerbrugge’s surreal look at the world, just follow him on Twitter or Facebook.

Pros: It was nice to see that everybody was open to creative ideas. TBWA even stimulated Han to apply his usual weirdness. In the past, commercial clients have said that before and then rapidly changed their minds, but these guys were actually disappointed with our  initial thoughts. They were too ‘normal’.
Still, we had to balance the more ambitious requests from the creatives (“can he jump across the bed, then do a somersault”?) with the key message of the spot. We wanted to keep the message clear and not stuff 100 ideas in 20 seconds and not let interesting visuals take the attention away from the core text. We think we did fairly well. And the tone of voice was nicely continued in the web animations, produced by Else.
Kyriad was very happy with it, which is always a good sign.

Trivia: I couldn’t help but crack up when we went to TBWA’s Paris office and saw all the Cannes Lions awards etc prominently on display. Very old-school.

Cons: It’s still a tv ad and some animated web banners, isn’t it? So it did feel like a lot of time and effort for possibly-not-that-much result.
From an awareness point of view, I’m sure it worked ok. But with Raak, we’d love to talk directly to the client and explore other routes to back up that increased brand awareness with a Twitter campaign or a website or …