eMarketing Association

NYC had a bomb scare caused by someone who has provided Amazon Prime Day an unexpected and brand unsafe product placement. Clearly, some brand-unsafe advertising just happens. Guess you take your product placements whenever and wherever you can get them since you can't control them. Just think of all the product placement visibility the AK-47 has gotten.... Hmmm.

Remember "portals?" Back in the 1990s, becoming a "portal" was what web-based media companies did to resist losing users to 3rd-party sites whose advertising revenues were not under their own control. So you had sites such as Yahoo loading up on all kinds of (sometimes) useful features such as email, chat, forums, internal search, etc., so that -- ideally...

Sometimes a pizza says a lot. Politicians seem drawn to pizza, and for Pete Buttigieg, there's an alliteration to be had... So, when I got a Facebook ad for a "Pizza with Pete" (I happen to like him, a few years ago he would be considered a centrist), I clicked. Ends up the pizza in the Pizza with Pete landing...

One can easily make a case that customer service should be owned by marketing. Billions of dollars in marketing budget are deployed to get the message out there regarding the superiority of one product, service or platform over another. Great technology and features alone can't make up for a poor customer service experience. I decided this weekend to terminate my two-line...

SoulCycle is much in the news this past week as it struggles to address a growing viral consumer boycott of itself, along with Related Companies-related brand Equinox, by customers angry about the decision by brand owner Stephen Ross to host a $100,000-per-plate fundraising event for Donald Trump in the Hamptons. Consumer boycotts such as this -- whether you agree with...

Got an interesting press hit today as a result of my prior interest in Gawker. (As it happens, that NY Post story is apparently "brand unsafe," perhaps not for every advertiser and reader but, possibly because the title includes the word "stalker," the text may have triggered the ad-replacing clouds (see my recent article on brand safety). The Post story...

The digital advertising ecosystem spends a fair amount of time and energy discussing and addressing the issue of "brand safety; several studies have been conducted and are summarized in this eMarketer article. The concept of brand safety is fairly simple: brands don't want to have their ads shown in places where consumers might have a lesser opinion of the brand...

Advertising Age reported that Amazon has rolled out audio advertising.  While the test advertisers and their agencies weren't blown away, the key to understand is that, compared to Spotify, Pandora and IHeartRadio, the targeting that Amazon can bring to audio advertising will DRAMATICALLY increase what brands and manufacturers are willing to pay for it. Sure, some brands want the reach...

Econsultancy.com – a UK-based marketing consultancy firm – recently published a report enumerating the many beneficial effects of personalizing paid search campaigns. The report’s data, gleaned from a survey of some 600 respondents active in paid search in the UK, shows that 48 percent of respondents reported a “major lift” in conversion rates thanks to personalization, with another 43...

Voice search query volume is rising. This form of search has been waiting in the wings for many years (arguably, it’s been waiting to make its entrance since the 1960s, when Star Trek’s voice-responsive computer serviced the information needs of the Enterprise’s crew). Now that smart, microphone- and speaker-equipped mobile devices are practically ubiquitous, voice search is finally having its...