Digital

New-car sales virtually never take place online, despite growing interest among consumers and manufacturers, according to a new eMarketer report, “Automotive Ecommerce: Late to the Party, Industry Will Adapt.”

Worldwide, digital ad spending passed the $100-billion mark for the first time last year, according to new eMarketer estimates, and will increase by a further 15.1% in 2013 to $118.4 billion.

When we hold smartphones in our hands, we are in effect grasping miniscule computers. Their capabilities far outpace those of desktop units of yore, and their perpetual state of connectivity mean that smartphone users are almost never disconnected from the Internet. But even if they are at least somewhat comparable to full-fledged computers, are they used comparably?

A survey of a wide-ranging mix of U.S.-based arts organizations shows that the internet, social media, and mobile connectivity now permeate their operations and have changed the way they stage performances, mount and showcase their exhibits, engage their audiences, sell tickets, and raise funds.

US audiences for mobile games are growing rapidly, while audiences for more mature categories such as social and online casual gaming are expected to grow more modestly in the next few years, according to a new eMarketer report, “Gaming for Marketers: Let the Mobile Games Begin.” As a result, advertising in mobile will expand faster than in other venues.

Hispanic Millennials, who are a highly mobile and digitally connected generation, are the prime movers of smartphones and tablets. This group helps drive the dominance of social and networking sites such as Facebook, Google+, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube. Latinos, known for their sociability, have firmly established their presence in the online world. By Insight Tr3s

Online video is becoming an increasingly important marketing channel, with significant numbers of brands leveraging this platform.

The rise of the internet has meant big changes for customer service, according to a new eMarketer report, “Multichannel Customer Service: Best Practices for Building Retail Loyalty.” Consumers today have an array of digital customer service tools at their disposal, the newest of which include live chat, social networks and smartphones.

After being little more than a blip on the radar in 2007, social media is now essential to marketing in the retail industry.

In his fascinating new book The Signal and the Noise, New York Times political blogger Nate Silver discusses what he calls the “prediction learning curve,” a model for mapping the relationship between effort and prediction accuracy. Not surprisingly, the relationship strongly resembles the well-known Pareto Effect—i.e. about 20 percent of the initial effort (time, money, effort) yields about 80 percent of the prediction accuracy.

Google began a campaign last year to help Get American businesses online by giving free webites to businesses, and hosting events to teach individuals how to create their site, learn Adwords and other Google platforms.

To assemble an accurate portrait of consumer behavior is highly complex, and possibly the biggest challenge in marketing today. Companies must overcome hurdles not only limited to the technological difficulty of collecting disparate data sets from traditional and digital platforms.

As content creators look to keep audiences interested and clicking on more assets, they would do well to consider audience composition, as research suggests demographics can have a substantial effect on how web users behave once they have found interesting content.