A marriage would clearly be made between advertisers and content providers when smartphones appeared on the scene and users began to spend more and more time staring at their little devices, particularly as more and more content has become available for smartphones. After all, advertisers always want to be where the eyeballs are.

However, the mobile world is starting to fracture into different categories and there are some that consumers remember more than others, another key ingredient to building up advertising dollars. A new study from Compete shows that mobile users remember advertisements within apps more than ads that are simply in mobile websites.Continue reading...

America’s love affair with tablets is growing. 

According to a just released study commissioned by the Online Publishers Association, 12% of the U.S. population between ages 8-64 now own or use a tablet, and that number is projected to rise to 23% by early 2012, representing 54 million people.

The study — “A Portrait of Today’s Tablet User” — was commissioned by the OPA to gain fresh understanding of consumers' usage of tablets, content preferences and implications for advertising.Continue reading...

Eager to reach "the next billion consumers," BBDO, Microsoft and Ipsos have joined forces "for a proprietary study of multi-platform campaigns leveraging both creativity and technology to identify a ground-breaking framework for marketing success," which they released at the Cannes advertising festival this week.

What's unique about this study, according to Microsoft Advertising's blog post — is the methodology and findings:

"Unlike other digital advertising multi-screen research, we took an approach that has never been done before and applied psychological archetypes—or models of a person or behavior—to put personalities to each device. (These archetypes were pioneered by the influential psychiatrist Carl Jung.) With the study, we set out to determine what’s going on in people’s psyche and understand their emotional connection and response to each screen – the PC, TV, Mobile, etc. For instance, we found the mobile phone is like a ‘lover’ – it’s the most intimate of all the devices you interact with each day, therefore ads should be highly relevant and appeal only to you."

Above, watch BBDO's worldwide CMO, Simon Bond, and Microsoft's global advertising VP Marc Bresseel discuss the research. Bond had more to say after the panel, below.Continue reading...

The influential annual Initial Quality Survey of U.S. auto manufacturers by J.D. Power & Associates is out this afternoon, and it’s got some crisp verdicts for specific brands: Ford is stunningly in the dog house, while Toyota has drawn some relief.

Ford swooned to 23rd place in the 2011 rankings of brands, as graded by consumers for quality issues within three months of ownership, from a heady 5th-place finish last year. Interestingly, the main culprits in Ford’s fall were two technology sub-brands that it has been promoting vigorously over the last year: Sync and EcoBoost.Continue reading...

Even though Google just hit an astounding benchmark of one billion monthly unique users, a milestone the search giant passed in May, another tipping point in the US is worth noting: consumers are now spending more time on mobile apps than on the web.

Underlying this behavioral shift to mobile is a platform shift, as the number of smartphones and tablets shipped in 2011 exceeded those of desktops and notebooks.Continue reading...

Brand marketers, take note: There's a new family segment called "Tech Fast Forward" (TFF) that represents new opportunities for the future.

According to a just-released study by Ogilvy & Mather in partnership with Communispace, this emerging demographic is a household that uses more sophisticated technology than the average person and includes children ages 3 to 12.Continue reading...

Facebook, not surprisingly, is a hotbed for political brand advertising — particularly as the 2012 race heats up.

SocialCode, a subsidiary of The Washington Post Company, just completed a Republican political message study on Facebook (between May 23 and June 4) in which random users in Iowa and New Hampshire were asked to show their support by clicking “Like” in response to randomly displayed image combinations of seven declared or prospective candidates (or the GOP's iconic elephant) with five common Republican messages.

So how do Facebookers fare for GOPDA?Continue reading...

Michelle Obama may have her vegetable garden at the White House  and the state of Delaware’s parks may be acting as a testing ground for the national-park system this summer by "balancing" its menus to offer fewer sweets and more valuable sustenance, but that doesn’t mean America doesn’t still like its snack foods.

In fact, Americans love their snack food more than ever.

Research firm Packaged Facts reports that Americans spent  $64 billion in 2010, an increase from $56 billion in 2006 for a compound annual growth rate of 3%. “Sales are expected to continue upward to $77 billion by 2015,” the researcher states in its report.

"The boundaries between meals and snacks are growing ever blurrier, creating consumer consumption habits that will resonate for generations," said David Sprinkle, research director and publisher of Packaged Facts.Continue reading...