Do you know what ghosting is? It started with online dating, but the practice of disappearing in the middle of a project you’re working on, or a job interview you’re in the middle of, is now widespread. It’s a sickening trend and its end is not now in sight. The LinkedIn post I made about […]
The post Oddly, Workplace Ghosting Is The Trend That Reveals appeared first on Adpulp.
Imagine if all you ever ate was free food that you found floating by in a fast moving river? In this dystopia, you don’t have time to assess what you’re eating—if it looks like food you eat it without question or hesitation. Of course, only a desperate or crazy person would live this way. But […]
The post When You Decide To Support Quality, You’ll Find A Way To Pay appeared first on Adpulp.
How are you feeling about tax time this year? Corporations, for the most part, are feeling good about reduced tax burdens, but what about individuals operating a business in today’s gig economy? Boulder-based Made, a marketing agency specializing in brand transformation, partnered with TaxAct to help freelancers and contract workers manage their tax needs and […]
The post With A Little Help from Made, TaxAct Targets Today’s Workers appeared first on Adpulp.
Cindy Gallop takes names and zero shit. For the sexual harassers in the ad industry, you best run and hide. For everyone else, here’s compelling documentation about just how degrading it is to be objectified at work, and then asked to objectify women in ads. “The biggest issue facing our industry today is not diversity,” […]
The post Dear Bad Men of Advertising, Your Reign Is Over appeared first on Adpulp.
The stock market is on fire. So, why are advertising agency stocks are languishing on the vine? According to The New York Times, WPP, which owns agencies including Y&R and Ogilvy & Mather, said annual net sales may be flat or grow up to 1 percent as it reported that the measure shrank in the […]
The post Is Adland A Risky Place for Investors? appeared first on Adpulp.
Real estate prices in many major U.S. markets are totally out of hand. This leads to stiff competition for the most desirable properties and in some cases, multiple bids, cash offers, and the waving of the inspection period. Realtor.com is in its own death-match with Redfin. Redfin has native-to-the-web usability, which may lead users to […]
The post You Need A Realtor To Get The Deal Closed appeared first on AdPulp.
Unlike larger and more mainstream online publications, AdPulp has the ability to reject online advertising in its current state. Like thousands of other independent publishers across the globe, we pay no rent for an office, no salaries, and no dividends. Having said that, removing advertising from this website is much more than a financial move. […]
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This year, AdPulp.com moved away from being an ad-supported site. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we currently carry no ads at all. We are now 100% publisher supported. We no longer take paid posts, although the offer is there to do so literally every day. And we no longer place banners or text […]
The post A Dime for Our Thoughts appeared first on AdPulp.
The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) today announced that U.S. internet ad revenues have set a new first quarter high at $15.9 billion in Q1 2016, outpacing last year’s Q1 record-setting $13.2 billion. T he 21 percent year-over-year jump represents the sharpest spike in four years when compared to other first quarter earnings. “These landmark revenues […]
The post Client Dollars Are Flowing To Digital In A Big Way appeared first on AdPulp.
For years, you had a dream. Your vision was that you were going to leave the company that you worked for since you graduated college and start your own business. In your vision, your business would be large enough to outcompete your former employer and become the No. 1 business in your industry in your hometown. Last […]
The post Should You Expand Your Business? appeared first on AdPulp.
Once upon a time, I lived in Chicago and I spent some time freelancing for Frankel. Bud Frankel was a pioneer in sales promotion, and I thought it was pretty cool to see him walking the halls as Chairman of the firm he founded, led and eventually sold. The sales price in 2000 was estimated […]
The post Brand Activation Is A Global Movement appeared first on AdPulp.
The whole world shops online. Before you purchase your product on an online merchant’s site, you have probably noticed that it is listed in the site’s cart. The notion of cart functionality sounds simple, but understanding the technology supporting this platform requires some prior knowledge. Simply put, a shopping cart is an online business’s content management system (CMS). This CMS interfaces with your browser to handle online transactions for your company.
A advanced online shopping cart system provides youeverything you need to start, processing credit cards and fulfilling orders on your website. Manage the content, page navigation and images all from your dedicated Content Management System (CMS).
Simple to Use, Pretty to Look At
The easier your CMS is to modify and develop, the fewer headaches it will cause you in the long run. A good CMS has a Dashboard, or front of system operating panel. It really is just a way to click easily on the features and pages of your site, without having to be code-proficient. And then when it comes to code – the less you have to use, the better. Make sure your CMS offers themes or templates you can customize for the look and feel of your site. Finally, what is the customer support team like? A great online shopping cart CMS provider also has an awesome team to help with all your design and development needs.
How Do Customers Choose Which Products to Buy Online
How do you choose which products to buy online? Most shoppers would answer that they view a product’s picture, its product description, and any comments/ratings provided by users. All of these details are features of your shopping cart platform. When choosing a shopping cart CMS, a key feature that should be customizable is your online transaction system. It’s best if it allows for customizable product images and support for consumers to enter their comments and ratings of products.
Drill-Down Capabilities
Drill-down capabilities is geekspeak for leveled-navigation on a site. The top-level domain is the site’s home address – for example, Amazon.com. The levels, or tiers, beneath that level are what the user drills down. On Amazon, for instance, the second-level domains include departments, such as Books & Audible; Movies, Music, & Games; Electronics & Computers; Home, Garden, & Tools, and so forth. Beneath each department are more levels. If you click on Books & Audible, you will see the choices for Books, Kindle Books, Children’s Books, Textbooks, and Magazines. The more specificity your shopping cart’s CMS allows in drill-down capabilities (also known as layered-navigation), the easier it will be for users to locate their products when browsing the site.
Key Features of the Checkout Page
You have probably purchased products online and become frustrated by how long it takes to complete your transaction. We’ve all been there. It’s best to limit the number of page-clicks a customer has to sit through to buy a product. A customizable CMS optimally allows you to configure a one-page checkout. Also, when customers return to your site, an Archive feature of the shopping cart will allow them to review their previous purchases. In addition, the CMS you choose for your shopping cart should have a Refund option that is easy to add to the checkout page. And for you to track purchases and sort them by client or product, other key features of the checkout page include Export to CSV (spreadsheets) and a Sort and Filter capability.
Promotions
When choosing your online shopping cart CMS, make sure it has couponing, discounting, and gift card platforms available. Several hub coupon sites exist these days (Groupon, for example). Simplifying the entering of coupons and discounts on your cart is essential. Also, your online store may offer gift cards. An excellent shopping cart CMS tool will allow customers to purchase and redeem gifts cards. Also, the CMS will track the amount spent on the gift card, so the customer can return to the site and use their card again if money is still on the card. An even better plus is if you have the ability to make the gift card look pretty by designing it with a unique template.
Product Inventory
Perhaps this feature should be the first one listed. If your online shopping cart does not have a way to track the location, price, and quantities of products, customer may end up ordering items that are actually not in stock. Also, as a business owner, you need top-notch import and export functionality so you can use third-party software, such as Excel or Quickbooks, to track sales. Finally, is your inventory system integrated with analytics?
The hot word in today’s technosphere is data. The ability to track sales and customer profiles using a platform such as Google Analytics allows you to develop your business plan and marketing campaigns. Analytics help you to identify your customer base, target how to promote and discount hot products, and generate sales reports.
Now that you have an understanding of the key features of online shopping carts, it’s time to narrow down your search for the best provider. Make sure you have your domain, Web host, and a dedicated IP address registered for your site. Explore the different online shopping carts available. Do this before deciding on the design of your entire site. It is best to work from that final transaction page and move backwards so you can review all the details of the “guts” pages as you go. Think about how you want your home page to look, the number of levels (or tiers), you’d like to build out. Once you have a good picture of what your online store will look like and how you want transactions conducted, find the shopping cart CMS that hits all the key features outlined in this article. Good luck on building your online business.
The post Narrowing Down the Necessary Features of Your Online Shopping Cart appeared first on AdPulp.
Do you smell that smell? I believe a degree of odiferous air has been let go from the social media bubble.
According to USA TODAY, LinkedIn reported a 46% rise in first-quarter revenue, to $473.2 million, but a loss of $13.3 million. The news sent LinkedIn shares down 2% in after-hours trading, to $159.02. Its stock, meanwhile, is down about 40% from its all-time high of $257.56 per share in September.
Warwick Business School Professor, Mark Skilton, believes the problem is lack of attention to mobile. “LinkedIn seems to be treating the mobile trend as just another channel but this might prove problematic as members seek consistent multi-device experience.”
That’s one theory. I have a different evaluation. People may be beginning to realize that the never-ending act of promoting oneself in digital channels is tiresome in the extreme.
Twitter Inc., LinkedIn Corp. and Yelp Inc.all have lost more than 20 per cent of their market value this year. Only Facebook, which is up 2.6 per cent, escaped the downward trend.
The Nasdaq Internet Index as a whole is down by almost 20 per cent, hovering close to the threshold for a bear market.
The post LinkedIn Stock Price Down 45% from All Time High Last Fall appeared first on AdPulp.
Taco Bell encouraged real men with a famous name to testify! “I am Ronald McDonald and I love Taco Bell’s new breakfasts,” several real Ronalds repeat into the camera.
This new campaign from Deutsch LA is not exactly brilliant, but it may breakthrough. And breakthrough is what it is going take to loosen McDonald’s grip on the morning hours—McD’s currently dominates with 31 percent of sales. Egg McMuffin ain’t no joke.
Ad Age’s reading of NPD data indicates that breakfast in 2013 logged its fourth consecutive year of growth for restaurants, while lunch and dinner continue to decline. Fast food, which accounts for 80% of total restaurant morning meals, showed the strongest growth, with a 4% increase over the prior year. And the forecast looks good: NPD estimates that fast-food breakfast will grow a cumulative 9% over the next nine years.
According to Nation’s Restaurant News, the hot item on Taco bell’s breakfast menu is expected to be the waffle taco—a waffle that cradles scrambled eggs and a sausage patty and is served with a packet of syrup for $1.79.
An Instagram post by a customer who stumbled across the waffle taco went viral, sparking about 4 million impressions.
UPDATE: The Ronald has responded on Facebook in a visually stimulating way.
Previously on AdPulp: A Smothering Jewish Mother Smothers Son With Taco Bell, Son Eats It Up
The post Real Ronald McDonalds Agree: Taco Bell’s New Breakfasts Taste Good appeared first on AdPulp.
I don’t always look at bar graphs, but when I do…
I look at bar graphs from Marketing Pilgrim depicting digital ad spending, which is up 18 percent over last year’s first-half revenues of $17 billion, according to IAB.
What story does this bar graph tell?
One big story is how little brand advertising there is in the digital camp. Digital is dominated by search advertising. The rest of the digital ad pie is split between display, video, mobile, classifieds and various lead generation activities.
No question, display ads are improving in quality, and publishers are finding better ways to feature them on the page today. But of all the categories in digital advertising, video is the most brand-focused medium. A brand can offer commercials, episodic content, consumer-generated content and much more in video.
Another big story is how mobile continues to experience a massive rise in spending. Mobile is the fastest growing of all digital advertising types.
The opportunities for brands to grow their digital advertising capabilities (and see greater returns) is enormous. The opportunity for agencies to get digital right and make good money doing so is also at hand.
My contention is digital is so much more than direct marketing and data analysis. Just because you can measure it, is not reason enough to make measurement the principle yardstick of success.
Digital advertising, like any great advertising has to do more than inform and perform. For brands to be built, digital advertising also must move people emotionally. There’s no metric to measure love, but love is real and getting people to love your brand is the ultimate result of any marketing effort.
The post Search Advertising Is Digital’s Big Dog appeared first on AdPulp.
Digital advertising will account for 22.7% of all worldwide ad investments this year, or about $117.60 billion — up 13% compared with 2012, according to estimates from eMarketer and Starcom MediaVest Group.
I’m not certain this is a good thing. Unless, brands and their agency partners clearly know what they’re doing with all that money.
I posted this new Adobe commercial from Goodby Silverstein & Partners on my friend Bob Hoffman’s Facebook wall. Hoffman is a champion of common sense and logic in the face of much digital advertising speculation. Recently on his Ad Contrarian site, he pointed to a Solve Media study that claims 46% of the viewership reported by websites seems to be fraudulent. That’s a lot of ghost traffic.
As someone with feet in both the media and marketing worlds, I can say it’s not all that simple to say exactly how many people are visiting your site, where they’re coming from and if they are real people or not. Yes, there are tools aplenty, but tools are biased. How you choose to measure something impacts the data and flavors the results.
If we can’t trust the data, or the people who willfully manipulate it, what or who can we trust in terms of getting value for our ad dollars? We can’t trust the traditional ad guys who are invested in making TV. We can’t trust the digital demigods either. This is not a good situation for the ad business, nor for the clients who need to trust someone to help them reach their communications objectives.
My take is create a media plan that makes sense for your particular business situation. I often drive by a large lot of shiny Airstream campers, and I think here is a company that desperately needs well-made TV to tell the story of weekends in the mountains. Naturally, a client like this would also be well advised to develop its digital assets. Thus, the divide between TV and digital is a false divide. Companies need to spend on both TV and digital and apply the best metrics available to each, while keeping in mind that persuasion is an art.
The post Whether Perpetrated By Bots or By Babies, Click Fraud Is A Crime appeared first on AdPulp.
Congress has been getting up in Apple’s face about its offshore tax havens, but is it a problem for the brand?
I think it is, because a brand is the sum of a company’s parts. A brand is what a company believes and what a company does; therefore, Apple’s brand is tarnished via its tax avoidance problem, whether the moves are technically legal or not.
According to CNET, “Congressional investigators released a report last week documenting how Apple had reduced its tax bill by tens of billions of dollars through the use of a legal, albeit complicated, network of offshore subsidiaries. The report said that between 2009 and 2012, Apple had at least $74 billion in offshore cash that went untaxed.”
Tim Cook replied, “We don’t depend on tax gimmicks. We don’t move intellectual property offshore and use it to sell our products back to the United States to avoid taxes… We don’t stash money on some Caribbean island.”
True. Ireland is nowhere near Cuba or Jamaica.
Richard Harvey, a Villanova University law professor, told the hearing that his analysis showed Apple shifted 64 per cent of its 2011 income into Ireland into a “shell corporation” which had “no employees, no real activity, basically an entity on paper.”
As far as I am concerned, Apple has more than tax issues on its hands. “Designed in California” isn’t all that Apple can be. “Designed and manufactured in California” is more like it, especially given that Apple has already established a premium price point.
Apple was created to change the world, and their products have a role in this. But Apple can actually change the world by rejecting offshore assembly of its products. As Samsung and others come on strong, I don’t think Apple’s prices, nor their market share, will hold for much longer. Manufacturing in American changes that for good.
The post Offshore Tax Shelters A Problem For Apple, But Not The Only One appeared first on AdPulp.
Jaron Lanier, author of Who Owns The Future?, asserts that the rise of digital networks led our economy into recession and decimated the middle class.
Looking forward, he says it is time for ordinary people to be rewarded for what they do and share on the web.
In an interview with Nieman Lab, Lanier argues:
If you have universal backlinks, you have a basis for micropayments from somebody’s information that’s useful to somebody else… Every backlink would be monetized. Monetizing actually decentralizes power rather than centralizing it. Demonetizing a network actually concentrates power around anyone who has the biggest computer analyzing it.
Monetizing decentralizes power. Perfect! Americans love freedom and money.
I also love to provide information that might be useful to somebody–like this very article–thus, I am fully behind a workable micropayments system that rewards me (and others) for being prolific and readable.
The post Transition To The Modern World, Give Markets A Chance appeared first on AdPulp.
Remember when the call was put out to accelerate our processes and get up to Internet speed? I think we’ve done it, because today a huge company can emerge from a dorm room to become a major Silicon Valley-based player in just a handful of years. Said company–Facebook–can then go public (after which its officers may begin to get their fortunes out, before the whole thing fizzles).
According to San Francisco Chronicle, Mark Zuckerberg took $2.3 billion in stock options last year, while Cheryl Sandberg earned $822 million in cash-outs. Whether the two top people at Facebook need some walking around money, or whether they’re reading the tea leaves, who can say?
What I can do is point to this article in The Guardian, which suggests that FB’s expansion in the US, UK and other major European countries has peaked.
In the last month, the world’s largest social network has lost 6m US visitors, a 4% fall, according to analysis firm SocialBakers. In the UK, 1.4m fewer users checked in last month, a fall of 4.5%. The declines are sustained. In the last six months, Facebook has lost nearly 9m monthly visitors in the US and 2m in the UK.
Users are also switching off in Canada, Spain, France, Germany and Japan, where Facebook has some of its biggest followings. A spokeswoman for Facebook declined to comment.
Are we growing weary of our own Walls, and hearing about life’s little and sometimes major events via our friend’s Walls? Clearly.
As people look for new experiences online and in real life, Facebook’s challenge is to provide them, particularly on the mobile handset. Which brings us to Facebook Home.
According to Reuters, Home lets users comprehensively modify Android, the popular mobile operating system developed by Google, to prominently display their Facebook newsfeed and messages on the home screens of a wide range of devices – while hiding other apps.
I don’t own an Android device, but I like the boldness in this move. Facebook is “improving” one of it’s most significant competitor’s products. That’s not something you see everyday.
In other news, Google Now is now available on iOS.
The post Create Compelling Mobile Experiences, Or Facebook Falls Apart appeared first on AdPulp.
Since I moved to Seattle, I’ve become much more aware of environmental issues and groups that draw attention to them. But where I came from, it’s another story.
We’ve seen many attempts in recent years by marketers to capitalize on a growing awareness by consumers of environmental issues. Today’s New York Times reports on the efforts Clorox is making with its line of Green Works products. And up until now, the bottom line seems to have gotten in the way:
When Green Works was first launched, it came out of the gate with a lot of investment by Clorox,” said Jason Gere, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets. “Initially it started to do well, but then the macroeconomic environment took over. Clorox realized that in this consumer-led recession, having products even as environmentally friendly as Green Works’ are, but charging a 20 percent-plus premium to conventional cleaners, was not working.
Green Works has launched many digital and social initiatives, including its “The Green Housewives” web series:
It’s hard to tell anyone on a tight budget to pay more for environmentally-friendly products. But marketers will keep trying to push “green” products. So does the environment really matter to consumers when they’re shopping? Is more, or different, consumption really the answer? Or are we becoming simply too jaded for all the marketers’ green efforts?
Marketing with a focus on the environment is tricky. There are arguments to be made for less energy consumption, use of better (or recycled) raw materials, or even reducing a lengthy supply chain in making products. But consumers don’t often take those into consideration. And as we’ve seen, quite a number of politicians and supporters refuse to believe there’s even a problem, or a need to be more sensitive to how we treat our earth and its natural resources.
If you’ve had any experience with clients or brands looking to push their environmental efforts, leave a comment and let us know how much success you’ve had.
The post It’s Earth Day. Do Consumers Really Care about “Green” Products? appeared first on AdPulp.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
