Digital

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.

Consumers in Latin America are making more and more travel purchases online as individual markets begin to see higher internet penetration. In “Internet & Media 101” from September 2012, Barclays Capital forecasted that Latin America will lead all world regions in online travel sales growth through 2016, increasing by more than 30% on a yearly basis through 2013.

Evidence for the effectiveness of mobile advertising keeps rolling in—and goes beyond clickthroughs and any question of “fat fingers” vs. real engagement.

US Digital Media Usage: A Snapshot of 2013, an infographic report from eMarketer, illustrates key digital media usage trends that are critical for marketers to understand as they develop campaigns to target the growing online and mobile populations.

The study shows that more than half of large brands are now using custom brand videos in their marketing, and when it comes to distribution, most favor “native advertising” approaches where content is visually integrated into the organic site experience, as opposed to running in standard display ad formats. The study also shows that the majority of marketers now prefer choice-based formats over interruptive formats.

VOXXI announced the launch of a new tech channel devoted to educating and providing Latinos with all the cutting-edge technology, social media, and mobile news.

Americans’ television viewing options continue to grow. First cable, and then satellite services, expanded the amount and variety of content Americans could expect to find in their living rooms. More recently, DVRs, cable- or satellite-provided on-demand programming, along with digitally streamed programming, have allowed Americans to watch what they want, when they want, wherever they like and on whichever device they choose. But how are all of these possibilities really affecting Americans’ overall TV viewing habits? And how are they likely to change in the near future?

There’s marketing gold in Big Data—nuggets of information buried in customer profiles, social media, campaign results, and third-party lists that can help us better understand, target and ultimately connect with our optimum online audiences. By The Team | Yahoo! Advertising Solutions

As the promise of “Big Data” plays an increasingly significant role in the digital marketing landscape, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and Winterberry Group released “The Data Management Platform: Foundation for Right-Time Consumer Engagement,” a white paper revealing that DMPs could potentially serve as a principal technology solution for multichannel data aggregation, integration, management and deployment. DMPs are technology tools that normalize disparate data sets so that marketers can better understand and utilize data from multiple sources.

The Online Publishers Association (OPA) has released “Branding on Display”, a study providing insight into the role branding plays in online advertising as well as agency and marketer preferences of media for achieving their branding objectives.

Reports of high mobile click rates seemed too good to be true. Industry-watchers quickly adopted the “fat fingers” theory: that many clicks on mobile ads were accidental, and due to the small screen mixed with clumsy hands and hard-to-avoid placements.

According to The NPD Group like many technology-focused activities overall digital video consumption is mainly the purview of young adult men; however, when it comes to free television program streaming, young women are capturing their fair share, thanks to growing comfort using Hulu and YouTube.

Although cord cutting may be playing a significant role in some consumers downgrading and cutting their cable TV services, TV viewers as a whole are upping their streamed content consumption compared to last year. TVGuide.com found that 42% of US TV viewers watched more streamed content in 2012 than they did in 2011.