Disruption Tour --- Run To Survive

"Never underestimate the profit opportunity that comes with adding ShoppeSimple's TransactionalRSS to your shopping cart. Just add a ShoppeSimple gadget and you will see an increase in product sales and average order value." For more information check out RSSCheck.com for more information or email info@rsscheck.com. Phone 612.349.2740

Catalog Brands vs Multi-Channel Retailers Valuations

A Multichannel Marketing Rally?

This article makes the case that multichannel marketing, cross-channel marketing, bricks & clicks, whatever you want to call it, is one of the secrets to sales growth.

It's an interesting argument, supported by metrics.

There are other metrics to look at.

Back on March 16, 2007, I selected two groups of stocks ... one set of stock represented online and online/catalog brands, while one set of stocks represented "multichannel" brands, brands with a retail channel to support the online/catalog brands.

Online Brands: Amazon, Blue Nile, CDW, Dell, Drugstore.com, eBay, Overstock.com, PC Connection.

Retail Brands: Best Buy, Cabelas, Circuit City, Coldwater Creek, Eddie Bauer, J. Crew, J.C. Penney, Nordstrom, Office Depot, Office Max, Talbots, Williams Sonoma.

I compared the price of the stocks, on March 16, 2007, and today, July 27, 2009.
Kevin Hilstrom Minethedata.com

Online/Catalog Brands: The average value of these stocks decreased by 17% during the last 28 months.

Retail Brands: The average value of these stocks decreased by 65% during the last 28 months. Excluding two bankruptcies (Circuit City & Eddie Bauer), the average value of these stocks decreased by 58% during the last 28 months.


There are many ways to slice and dice data. In many cases, sales are aggregating among larger companies. This doesn't mean this is the best way for a business to be more profitable. Run your multichannel forensics analytics carefully, so that you thoroughly understand how your customers interact with channels. The right answer lies in your own customer data, not in the analysis of stocks, or in the analysis of aggregate sales totals.

ChaCha raises $4 Million in latest round of funding

Sardar Mohkim Khan 

Forrester Interactive Report

The latest forecast from Forrester Research predicts that interactive marketing in the US will hit nearly $55 billion by 2014 and will grow - at a compound annual growth rate of 17% - from 12% of overall ad spend in 2009 to 21% over the next five years.

According to Forrester’s Five-Year Interactive Marketing Forecast Report, search marketing - which now composes more than half of 2009’s overall interactive spend, will continue to make up the biggest portion of interactive dollars, rising from $5.4 B in 2009 to $31.6B in 2014 at a compound annual growth rate of 15%.

Social media marketing and mobile marketing will experience the highest growth rates among the digital tactics, the report stated. Social media, which represents only $716M today, is expected to balloon to $3.1B by 2014, and grow at the highest compound annual rate, 34%. Forrester noted that owned social media assets (such as internal blogs, community sites) are currently the only emerging media getting traction in today’s economic climate.

Similarly, mobile marketing, which accounts for $391M in 2009, will grow to $1.3B in 2014 at a compound annual growth rate of 27%.

Email marketing, which expected to grow at a compound annual rate of 11%, will experience the least growth proportionately, though the amount of spending on it will still rise from $1.2B to 2.1B in five years.

Ad Budgets to Shrink

Forrester also believes that advertising budgets overall will decline over the next five years as dollars migrate from more-expensive forms of traditional media to less expensive, more efficient and more measurable interactive tools.

Despite this shift, Forrester VP and analyst Shar VanBoskirk believes that many marketers will find ways to hold onto their hard-won budgets.

Rather than relinquishing their marketing dollars, smart marketers will “allocate unused advertising dollars into investments like innovation, research, customer service, customer experiences, and marketing-specific technology and IT staff, in order to further marketing’s strategic influence within their companies,” she said.

Q2 Quarterly Online Sales Flash Survey Results

2009 is proving to be one of those contrary years, especially in retail — a mix of stops and starts, alternating signs of recovery and stagnation, perplexing (if not outright maddening) metrics.  As we have said before, we have no crystal ball here at Shop.org – but the collective insight of retailers in our most recent Shop.org/Forrester Quarterly Online Sales Flash Survey give us some directional clues at very least. 

59 retailers participated in the Q2 Online Sales Flash Survey, conducted from July 1 to 7, 2009.  Respondents represented a mix of business type (variations on multichannel, branded manufacturers, pure plays) and annual Web business size.  As usual, we asked simply, “How did your gross online sales (top line) for the period April 1, 2009 through June 30, 2009 perform relative to the same period last year (April 1 through June 30, 2008)?” 

Shop.org Members can download the full data and PowerPoint summary results from the Web site; following are a few highlights:   

• Fully 59% of retailers surveyed reported that their gross online sales had indeed grown for the quarter compared to the same quarter in 2008.  9% reported flat sales (in this economy, nothing to sneeze at), and one third (32%) reported sales decreases. 
• Average YOY quarterly growth across all retailers surveyed was 11.8%
• Close to two thirds of large retailers ($100+ million in annual Web sales) reported revenue increases for Q2 2009 vs. Q2 2008.  Ditto for mid-sized retailers (defined as between $10 million and $100 million in annual Web sales).  Smaller retailers (under $10 million) struggled somewhat more, but half of those surveyed in this segment did in fact realize sales growth. 

Thanks to all retailers who participated in this quarterly (and entirely anonymous) survey!  We look forward to your participation in our next quarterly results survey the first week of October, shortly after the Shop.org Annual Summit.  And, as always, we welcome your comments and thoughts.

The demographic has shifted dramatically over at Facebook

http://seekingalpha.com/article/147593-facebook-s-demographic-aging-that-s-great?source=email

The demographic has shifted dramatically over at Facebook and that change could lead to billions in revenue, according to one prominent board member.

iStrategyLabs spent the last six months collecting user demographic data and discovered the number of users over the age of 55 soared from 1 million to nearly 6 million. During the same 6 month period, high school and college users dropped by as much as 22%!

Here’s the breakdown:

At the same time Facebook continues to gray, Silicon Valley entrepreneur Mark Andreessen–a Facebook board member–suggests the social network could realize revenue of $1 billion if it would only push harder with its advertising.

"This calendar year they’ll do over $500 million..If they pushed the throttle forward on monetization they would be doing more than a billion this year…There’s every reason to expect in my view that the thing can be doing billions in revenue five years from now," Andreessen said.

What’s interesting is that the 15-24 year olds are the ones that helped Facebook become the juggernaut it is today, but when you have champagne revenue goals while your audience has a beer budget, you need those with established incomes to pay the bills–or in this case, click on the ads.

Perhaps the key question is can Facebook continue to grow while losing its vocal youth? Arguably, high school and college users were the ones that evangelized Facebook to their older friends and family. Without them, will Facebook’s growth–and revenue–stall?

The 5 Things People Pitching VC's Don't Usually Know

http://startups.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/07/the-5-things-people-pitching-vcs-dont-usually-know.html

Image via Wikipedia

Here they are:

1. We see a lot of ideas, all the time, week in and week out.  Most say, if you make an investment in our company, we'll really be able to make progress on all fronts.   Some say, we haven't had much money to date, but look at what we have been able to achieve with little money in a small amount of time.  People that can make progress without money tend to be the ones who make the most progress when they have money.

2. Our scope and interests are limited.  We focus our plans on stage of investment, types of technology and specific geography.  We win by staying close to our plans.  We won't make an exception for you because any off plan successes are considered luck.  Any off plan failures make us look stupid.

3. Market timing can be the most important factor in success.  More important than management or product.  Again, not all the time is this true.   But, if you're late, we are likely to consider it game over.

4. We're in a hurry to produce returns but not necessarily in a hurry to invest as we need to be careful.  Careful in a number of ways including your idea, team and timing.   Your need for the money right now isn't often a factor in our investment process.   Repeating that you need the money now frequently, doesn't change that.

5. Sometimes, you may need to consider that your storyline needs to change.  What you focus on in the pitch is important to proper interpretation.   Commonly, people emphasize the product over the market and the team over the business.   We are investing in the business that will be derived from a market.

op-google-advertisers-april-2009

http://seekingalpha.com/article/141369-top-google-advertisers-april-2009?source=email

Media Deals Announced Today

Personalization company MyBuys receives $7 million in funding

 

MyBuys Inc., a provider of personalized product recommendation technology, has raised $7 million in venture capital funding, completing its series B round with Lightspeed Venture Partners and Palomar Ventures, the company announced today.

 

The company says it will use the funds to invest in product development, client services and market expansion.

 

MyBuys also announced today that so far this year it has signed 30 e-retailers to its web and e-mail personalization services including Delia*s, No. 145 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide, and Peruvian Connection, No. 382.

 

"The sheer number of customers that MyBuys launched in Q1 is evidence that personalization is a hot space. It was an easy decision to increase our investment in MyBuys," says Amanda Reed, partner at Palomar Ventures.

 

Peruvian Connection’s director of e-commerce Erik Martinez and MyBuys CEO Robert Cell are speaking at the Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition in a session June 16 entitled Making product recommendations work for maximum conversion.

 

beeTV Raises $8 Million For Stunning Personal TV Recommendation System

on June 3, 2009

The TV guide doesn’t know who you are, what your favorite movie genre is, what you’ve watched in the past, what your mood is, and so on. Because of that, it is incapable of providing you with any recommendations about what to watch on your TV, or which videos you’re likely going to enjoy consuming right now on your PC or even your mobile phone. With the sheer volume of available channels and VOD content out there, that’s becoming quite a problem for many people. But if beeTV has its way, that problem could soon become a nuisance from past times.

The Milan, Italy-based startup founded in 2006 by an international team of experienced technology and media experts, has just raised $8 million in Series B funding from Italian VC firm Innogest, the largest investment this fund has ever made. BeeTV aims to use the capital to ‘change the way we watch TV’ by pioneering what it calls a Personal Content Channel (PPC), a personal TV suggestion engine that helps you find your way in the ocean of VOD titles and channels out there by surfacing the best choice for you based on your profile and even the mood you’re in.

Here’s how they pitch it:

“beeTV offers the platform operator’s subscribers their own Personal Content Channel (PCC), which resides in their set top box (whether IPTV, cable, satellite, mobile or DTT), their mobile phones and their PC. This unique Personal Content Channel identifies the subscriber, searches all the content sources, including broadcast TV, subscription TV, VOD, SVOD, PPV, and PVR/Catch-up and pushes the relevant content to that subscriber.”

The company’s recommendation engine comes in three flavors: beeSTBox is its flagship product which was launched at the recent DEMOfall 08 conference in San Diego (see video below). It’s a solution designed for multicast distribution platforms including cable, satellite and IPTV. To manage, control and share your online TV viewing experience, the company created a product called beeWeb, and it’s also bringing the PCC to mobile devices to enable always-on connectivity and the ability to interact with set-top boxes on the go. It currently has an iPhone application in the works that will allow TV viewers to control their STBs, get recommendations for shows & movies that are relevant to them and available in their specific TV subscription, and also enable them to watch trailers and set their STBs to record or create notifications for the shows they would like to watch.

BeeTV is currently focusing on finalizing its 1.5 version and claims to be engaged with some of the leading TV providers in the world for trials that are expected to roll into their commercial phase by the end of 2009 and beginning of 2010. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was actually a lot of interest for this type of technology coming from content owners, publishers and media companies.

This one looks like a winner, and that was even before I knew who is spearheading the algorithm team that’s responsible for the powerful recommendation technology behind the platform: Gavin Potter, an experimental psychologist formerly responsible for IBM’s Centre for Business Optimization in Europe, who you might know as “Just a Guy in a garage” from the Netflix Prize competition. See this Wired profile for more background on the man.

I’m just hoping beeTV and their investors are in it for the long run and don’t get acquired by one of the majors before they have the chance to expand their platform on a worldwide scale through partnerships and white-label distribution deals. Because everyone deserves the right to stop wasting time looking for content they want to consume thanks to sophisticated technology that relieves us from the need to make choices for ourselves. 

OpenX Keeps On Growing, Raises $10 Million More

TechCrunch

by Robin Wauters on May 26, 2009

We’ve talked about online ad server OpenX quite a bit in the past, and for good reason. The company, formerly known as Openads, is led by former AOL CEO Jonathan Miller (Chairman) and ex-Yahoo exec Tim Cadogan (CEO) and has in the past shown it’s serious about growing fast and making money in the process.

More recently, we covered the launch of OpenX Market, an alternative online ad exchange platform operated by the Pasadena, CA-based company.

Today, OpenX is announcing that it has raised a Series C venture capital round to the tune of $10 million, which brings the total of funding raised by the company to a healthy $30+ million. Worth noting is that the extra financing is coming from a new lead investor, which is increasingly rare in these troubled times: DAG Ventures led the round, with existing investors Accel Partners, Index Ventures, Mangrove Capital and First Round Capital participating. Jonathan Miller, who recently was appointed as the new Chief Digital Officer of News Corp. also chipped in.

OpenX CEO Tim Cadogan in a brief interview didn’t want to go into detail about the valuation of the company after this round, other than that he was pleased with it. He did say that there was still large part of the Series B round ($15.5 million, closed in December 2007) left on the company’s back accounts and that there was no real need for them to raise money, “which of course is always the best time to raise money”.

Cadogan also told me the company is focused on making OpenX Market a success and to continuously add new publishers to its open ad technology platform Ad Server. To date, it has attracted over 38,000 publishers representing 150,000 websites for the latter, and Cadogan also informed me that Market has doubled since it launched a little over a month ago, with a current monthly run rate of over two billion impressions.

More strong figures: OpenX claims that from December 2008 to April 2009, the monthly run rate of impressions for the OpenX Hosted product grew more than 500% to 7.5 billion impressions, with the number of sign-ups for the new product now exceeding 10,000 in six months since its debut on the market.