It’s a little-known but impressive fact: Despite the rise and seeming ubiquity of e-commerce, a stunning 90 percent of consumer purchases are made in-store. That’s feet-on-the-street, brick-and-mortar, shopping cart, cash register, old-school type buying.

Yet retailers and CPG (consumer packaged goods) brands still rely largely on print circulars to spur traffic and sales, despite off-the-cliff print media circulation.

This week, I published research on the topic of how forward-looking retailers and brands can drive in-store traffic with digital media, most specifically with content marketing in digital channels. The full report, “From Web Traffic to Foot Traffic: How Brands and Retailers Can Leverage Digital Content to Power In-Store Sales,” is available here as a PDF download.

Retailers and CPG brands aren’t having an easy time adapting digital marketing to their goals, particularly when it comes to creating seamless omni-channel customer experiences. We learned that only 60 percent of them have implemented strategies that are geared toward creating a local or in-store outcome, such as making a brick-and-mortar purchase.

In fact, only 59 percent say driving an in-store sale is a goal.

While nearly all of the 200 executives we surveyed recognize mobile’s growing importance — in fact, dominance — just half (51 percent) use mobile to bridge the online and offline customer experiences. Far fewer (37 percent) plan a seamless experience across channels, e.g., mobile, the Web, social media and in-store.

What’s to blame for these strategic shortcomings? Measurement is one big problem. Most retailers and CPG brands still measure traffic and clicks in digital, rather than linking metrics and KPIs to desired outcomes, such as foot traffic and purchases.

Their budgets are limited, and they’re unsure of where to invest the digital dollars they do have.

“Local” is insufficiently defined, and it can be so much more than a ZIP code. It can mean proximity messaging via beacons and sensors, or it can be tied to a customer loyalty program to generate personalized offers or promotions on-site, such as coupons for items consumers repeatedly purchase.

Additionally, retailers and CPG brands lack content strategy, as well as skilled digital talent and the interdepartmental ability to coordinate promotions, offers, content and advertising across paid, owned and earned media teams.

So how can retailers and CPG brands make a shift and leverage their digital content to bolster in-store sales?

Here are the recommendations that emerged from my survey of more than 500 retail executives, as well as interviews with close to two dozen senior retail and CPG executives. (I conducted the research, which was sponsored by Cofactor, for Altimeter Group.)

Tips For Using Digital Content To Drive In-Store Sales

• Incentivize visits to retail locations, with features such as order online, pick-up in store and store returns. These can be used in addition to sales, coupons and other promotional activity designed to attract foot traffic.
• Be mobile first, or at least primary, when it comes to formulating a content engagement strategy. When it comes to reach and opportunities for right-time and location targeting, few channels are better than mobile.
• Leverage the mix of paid, earned and owned media to maximize value from the budget, and engage customers outside the usual realms.
• Think online-to-offline when mapping the customer journey.
• Rethink the print circular. While it can’t yet be wholly discounted, the circular can provide more value when used in conjunction with other modes of communication. Circular content can be amplified across online channels to reach customers where they are actually gathering information to make a decision, rather than remaining static in one medium.
• Plan for online cross-channel content with similar teams and processes that are in place for delivering offline content. This enables a coordinated strategy across paid, earned and owned channels, without having to start completely from scratch.
• Eliminate silos. The biggest challenge is to break down silos between departments and between channels. This makes it easier to get a unified effort for the best customer experience.
• Reconsider budget allocation to devote more towards digital spending, and identify the digital marketing tactics that give the most return on investment.
• Implement a measurement plan to track the effectiveness of local multi-channel campaigns. Discard vanity metrics like impressions to focus more on customer actions.
• Leverage loyalty data to personalize/contextualize offers.
• Define local at every stage. Does it refer to 
a region, city, state or ZIP code? This can vary by the business, but also on a campaign level. More importantly, is “local” restricted only in the geographical sense, or can it be applied to Who, What and When, in addition to Where?
• Remain sensitive to customer privacy by not bombarding them with overly personalized messages. It’s important to balance relevance against creepiness.

This post originally published on MarketingLand.

When it comes to mobile, businesses are at a tipping point very similar to the one they found themselves in 12-13 years ago with the internet. It was here, a healthy majority of consumers used it, yet businesses found themselves challenged by any and all aspects of the digital revolution: getting online, shifting strategies and business models, designing digital experiences, and generally, with meeting the expectations of digital consumers.

It’s déja vu all over again. As a new report from my colleagues at Altimeter Group, “The Inevitability of a Mobile-Only Customer Experience,” points out, mobile is no longer delegated to second screen status by many consumers, a trend that will only accelerate. According to comScore, which uses “time spent” to gauge online consumer retail activity, 56 percent of all time spent on U.S. online retail occurs on a mobile device. Yet a mere 16 percent of companies strongly agree they are completely prepared to meet customers’ mobile expectations, according to a 2014 study by the CMO Council and SAS. Additionally, some 90 percent of consumers move between devices to accomplish a goal, using an average of three different screen combinations daily.

Consumer needs and expectations have changed, and brands have no choice but to change correspondingly. No longer can they be asked to return to desktop computers to complete tasks there, in a fully functional environment. Mobile experiences must be seamless and stand-alone.

Yet overwhelmingly brands regard mobile as a separate channel, often at a far remove from the customer experience, metrics, brand, and commerce goals or requirements that apply to the rest of digital.

The report (available for download at no cost) provides recommendations for organizations working to overcome the often formidable budgetary, organizational, and most of all, strategic obstacles to becoming not just mobile-first, but eventually mobile-only businesses.

As business shifts digital strategy to mobile strategy, so too will content strategy and content marketing have to realign.

Of the three types of content marketing, utility content, or content that helps consumers achieve a task, is a mobile natural. Sure, we see it on the web (e.g., mortgage calculators, calorie counters), but mobile applications can be stunningly on-brand and creative. From Charmin’s on-brand trusty Sit or Squat for finding a nearby and accessible public restroom (with user reviews) to robust real estate apps that not only deliver available inventory but also neighborhood data from pricing to schools to crime rates, mobile is useful, hyper-relevant and contextually meaningful.

The other two content marketing buckets: entertaining content and content that’s educational and/or informative, also translate naturally to mobile — but with major shifts from the desktop environment.

Mobile means providing content in form factors native to mobile devices and intuitive to users; swiping, for example, rather than keyboard inputs.

It also means reimagining brand content for mobile platforms. It’s no accident that services like Instagram and Tumblr have been ascendant in the wake of mobile’s rise — they’re image-based, and on small screens pictures are worth the proverbial thousand words. It’s a real estate issue. Content will continue to become more visual — and audio-visual — as screens shrink in size.

Mobile is also a determining factor in converged media; the collapsing of paid, owned, and earned channels into just “media.” With mobile real estate at a premium, mobile-first means ad, content and social teams will operate seamlessly and in lock step.

Consumers’ shift to mobile necessitates a shift in business, and correspondingly in digital, strategy. Content permeates this entire system.

This post originally published on iMedia

For most of digital marketing’s relatively short history, personalization has been the ne plus ultra of sophisticated marketing. Addressing the customer by name, knowing their age, gender, date of birth, purchase history – all these data points help marketers deliver messages that are more meaningful and more relevant – and that, by extension, result in higher conversations and deeper loyalty.

Personalization is now being supplanted by technologies that can drive even deeper marketing and experiential relevance. Context’s untapped opportunity is to get an extremely granular understanding of customers, then to anticipate their needs, wants, affinities and expectations, and develop unique insights to power better marketing across all devices, channels, localities, and brand experiences.

Context, in other words, takes not only the ‘who’ into account, but also the when, where, why, and how. Simply put, it’s deeper targeting and more on-point messaging.

Under the auspices of our client SDL, I recently authored a white paper, Why Context Is Essential to Digital Marketing (PDF download) that looks at marketing beyond the right message, to the right person at the right time. Contextual marketing goes further by considering the platform consumers are using; their physical location (perhaps, using iBeacon technology, down to the store shelf level); even real-time information such as atmospheric conditions (is it raining?) or geo-spatial movement (whether they are in a vehicle stopped at a red light, for instance).

What type of coupon should a customer receive? When, and for what type of offer? MGM Resorts makes these determinations contextually; sending offers to guests’ smartphones based on where they are on the resort property (which restaurant, shop, show, or casino) as well as in the context of their individual loyalty member status and stated interests.

Context in marketing can only be fueled by powerful, integrated technologies. Its components range from semantic technologies to machine learning and predictive analytics, customer data, product/service data, flexible, dynamic content, and journey-mapping.

Without a doubt, context is complex. Moreover it is growing in importance, not only because it’s increasingly technologically feasible and effective, but also because newer technologies (the Internet of Things and Beacons, for example) will enable additional layers of context to meet consumers’ growing expectations for contextually relevant experiences and messaging from the brands they interact with in an increasingly digital world.

The written word seems to be on the decline, at least in the online space. Articles and white papers have morphed into blog posts and status updates. Hashtags, acronyms and emoticons stand in for sentences. OTP, BRB, LMK, OK?  

How low can you go? In a year or two, 140 characters — a miserly allotment now — will seem a luxury, a vestige of an era marked by logorrheic verbosity.

If you doubted it before, believe it now: a picture really is worth the proverbial thousand words. Maybe more.

Opinion? Sure. But the facts bear this out. Facebook keeps redesigning to feature bigger, bolder images. Oh yeah, and the company bought Instagram for a cool million. Videos now auto-play on the platform. Yahoo, meanwhile, snatched up Tumblr. Twitter continues to make images and videos a more prominent part of the user experience. And don’t forget the increasing popularity of Pinterest, YouTube, and SnapChat — you can easily see where all this is going.

Research, too, bears out the hypothesis that visual (and audio-visual) content is subsuming the written word. As an analyst, when I ask marketers about the types of content and media channels they’re leaning toward in the future, all forms of written content are on the decline, from press releases to blog posts.  Investment is around multimedia and images.

The chart above highlights the reason behind this shift in the we communicate online: mobile. Simply put, no one’s about to read War and Peace on a smartphone. Mobile means a lot of things, but mostly it means that screens are getting smaller. The smaller the screen, the pithier information must be in order to be comfortably communicated and absorbed by its target audience.

Ease of use is key here as well. Platforms like Facebook and Twitter don’t create content, rather they enable its dissemination — and if no one updates their status, then these platforms don’t stand a chance. Clearly, it’s a lot easier to upload that shot of your Hawaiian vacation (or delicious lunch, or mischievous puppy) than to narrate in detail why such things are interesting — especially while using your thumbs and combating auto-correct.

Content Strategy Implications

That content is becoming shorter, less verbose and more visual obviously has tremendous ramifications for content strategy. Here are three major points to bear in mind.

Please read the rest of this post on MarketingLand, where it originally published. 

Longtime readers know not to expect a list of annual “predictions” so prevalent in trade publications this time of year. After all, I’m an industry analyst. Un-endowed with the psychic abilities that would enable me to read crystal balls or entrails, I must instead rely on my innate powers of observation and analysis.

That’s not said casually. Observation and analysis of digital marketing and media is what I do.  Based on industry movement, technology developments, and industry trends, these are the areas I’ll be watching most closely in the new year.

1. Enterprises Organize for Content  The hue and cry up to a year or so ago from content marketing evangelists was “hire a chief content officer!” The sentiment behind this exhortation was and remains correct: content strategy is the foundation of content marketing. To create, maintain and enforce strategy, guidelines, processes, governance and guardrails are entirely necessary. However not every board is disposed to create a new C-level position. That’s why companies are taking seriously the need to organize for content marketing.  Last spring we identified six real-world models. Expect to see companies begin to adopt these with some alacrity in 2014.
2. Native Advertising Will Surge Brands, publishers, agencies, technology vendors – virtually the entire digital advertising ecosystem has a stake in the ground when it comes to native advertising. The IAB and the FTC have chimed in with the beginnings of defining the space and the rules of engagement. Virtually all the members of the Online Publishers Association now offer some form of native advertising, and major brands are allocating budget for serious experiments. You’re going to hear a lot more about this form of converged media (paid + owned) in the coming months.
3. Real-Time Marketing Another form of converged media is real-time marketing,  the strategy and practice of reacting with immediacy in digital channels.  As more channels and media operate in real-time, and as real-time events such as television converge with digital channel on mobile and social media platforms, virtually all marketers will be challenged this year to define a real-time marketing strategy, and indeed to determine what real-time means for their organization and marketing efforts.
4. Content Marketing ‘Stacks’ Emerge It’s already happening. Adobe has formally announced what we’ve long known they would: their Marketing and Creative Clouds will merge. Oracle bought Compendium and Eloqua (expect Salesforce to do something very, very similar quite soon – ExactTarget isn’t quite in the content bucket).  This trend indicates 2014 will usher in an important new chapter in content marketing maturity: end-to-end, cloud-based technology solutions similar to ad stacks, rather than the boutique array of much more limited solutions that are currently available. This matters not just as a technology play, but as something that will make content a safer and more integrated enterprise investment.
5. Media Continue to Converge Paid, earned and owned media continue to collapse into blended forms of marketing. This trend is only accelerating with consumer trends such as cord-cutting, that make platforms such as television even more digital than they formerly were. Concurrently, OOH signage and other forms of media are more digital, too, allowing owned content and forms of shared media such as tweets to circulate freely through media ecosystem.
6. Breaking Down Silos If number 6 comes as a surprise, you clearly haven’t read the first five trends. Media converging, a greater emphasis on content marketing, native advertising, real-time marketing and other blended forms of marketing means teams must collaborate more than every before. Goal alignment, resource sharing, and content portability – none of this happens internally, much less with vendor and agency partners, unless barriers and divisions are smashed.  There’s no more time to wait. Silos must be abolished now.
7.  Interoperability Much more than a byproduct of convergence, apps, gadgets, devices are becoming interoperable – seamlessly interoperable. AS a for instance, my personal fitness monitor smoothly syncs with my Android phone, laptop computer, iPad, Walgreen’s loyalty card, stand-alone weight and food trackers, and (if I wanted, which I don’t) with all my social media accounts. All this at the flick of preference radio buttons. The days or “either/or” “Mac/Windows” customer experience are over. Customers expect – and demand – seamlessness from their digital life.
8. More Mobile Yeah, we hear this every year, but mobile really has come to the fore. More smartphones and tablets are flying off the shelves than PCs and laptops, and mobile finally commands more consumer time than the boob-tube.  This means new experiences, media strategies and (looping back to the top of the list) more content, real-time and native in marketing plans.  “Mobile first” is no longer a hollow mantra. It’s really, actually true.
9. Measuring What’s Undefined  Is this really a genuine trend? I hope it will be. There’s this unrealistic expectation in digital that everything’s measurable. It is, but not necessarily right out of the box. That’s why publisher metrics are applied to native advertising campaigns (though goals are widely divergent), and way too much stuff is measured in terms of “engagement,” which means something different to everyone who utters the term. A trend I’d really LIKE to see in 2014 is, in additional to all kinds of good metrics such as the ability to attribute ROI and measure accountably and aligned with goals, is a readiness to admit that it’s just too early to apply hard-and-fast, unalterable metrics to brand new stuff we’re all still trying to figure out. Square pegs, round holes.

Transcript

JEFFREY BROWN: And we turn to the blockbuster deal announced today in the tech world: giant, but troubled Yahoo buying the popular blogging site Tumblr. The purchasing price: $1.1 billion dollars. The prize: a fast-growing social media site that features more than 100 million blogs in its network and reaches several hundred million people worldwide.

It was started just six years ago by David Karp, who dropped out of high school to work in the tech field. He will remain as head of Tumblr.

This is the biggest move yet by Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, who joined the company just 10 months ago from Google. Today, she wrote on a Tumblr post, “We promise not to screw it up.”

Rebecca Lieb is research analyst of digital advertising and media for the Altimeter Group and joins us now.

Welcome to you.

So, why does Yahoo want to buy Tumblr? What’s the appeal?

 

READ: 5 Questions: Why Yahoo Hopes Tumblr Will Expand Its ‘Coolness’

REBECCA LIEB, Altimeter Group: There are several appealing things about Tumblr. There’s certainly the size of the audience, as you just mentioned, but also, perhaps more than that, the demographics of Tumblr’s audience.

Yahoo has been losing users, losing eyeballs for years now. Tumblr represents the millennials, those 20-somethings who didn’t abandon Yahoo because they probably never aligned with the platform in the first place. This is a group that is incredibly important to the advertisers Yahoo is trying to attract.

JEFFREY BROWN: Explain for our non-Tumblr users in the audience what it is. How has it been able to rise so fast and appeal to so many people?

REBECCA LIEB: Tumblr is a blogging platform that is very, very image-centric. It’s very focused on users uploading photographs.

And this younger demographic is a very, very mobile demographic. These are people who have their smartphones with them at all times. And as anybody with a smartphone knows, it’s much easier to update your status with a quick photo of what you’re doing or what you’re eating or what you’re seeing than it is typing with your thumbs.

We saw a very recent move like this when Facebook acquired Instagram last year, also for a billion dollars, which raised some eyebrows at the time. And Facebook has subsequently redesigned its news stream to focus more on these images, as its users migrate to mobile platforms.

I believe that Yahoo is trying to do very much the same thing. And, in fact, since the announcement of the Tumblr acquisition, Yahoo has announced that they will be giving users substantially more free space on Flickr, also a Yahoo property.

So we’re seeing a big move towards images and a big move towards mobile on Yahoo’s part.

JEFFREY BROWN: In all of these new deals, and this one in particular, the question is still, how do you make money out of it, right? I mean, what would happen in this case? Is it likely we’d see money made through the advertising on Tumblr or what?

REBECCA LIEB: I think that this is a very interesting two-way street.

Yahoo, of course, is a traditional new media company, if you can — to coin a phrase. In other words, they have very interruptive display advertising, the “click here, buy this now” type. Tumblr has been experimenting with what’s called “content marketing” and forms of what’s known as “native advertising.”

This is — these are marketing messages, but they’re more subtly integrated into the interface. They don’t shout at the user. They don’t interrupt the user. They’re part of the stream and they’re meant to attract, rather than to interrupt.

Yahoo for the time being will leave Tumblr alone. If they slap these interactive ads up on Tumblr, the users will probably abandon the property. At the same time, Yahoo is going to learn from these Tumblr products and try and incorporate them into Yahoo’s more traditional properties.

JEFFREY BROWN: When you — go ahead.

REBECCA LIEB: At the same time, Yahoo can introduce Tumblr to larger brands and more traditional advertisers, the P&Gs of the world, the McDonald’s of the world. So, this does have the potential to benefit both parties monetarily.

JEFFREY BROWN: I was thinking, when you were referring to the possibility of users migrating or leaving, apparently, there’s reports that already some of that is happening. But that just shows how fragile this whole system is, right, this ecosystem of companies and where users go.

REBECCA LIEB: Absolutely.

You know, we have seen companies like Yahoo stumble and lose their luster, AOL, MySpace, in periods of times that are less than a decade. It took companies like Pan American Airlines or Ford Motor companies perhaps a century to rise to ascendance and then to lose their luster.

Internet companies can do it seemingly overnight. Marissa Mayer is trying to bring Yahoo back from the brink, as her former Google colleague Tim Armstrong is similarly trying over at AOL.

JEFFREY BROWN: And just briefly, when she writes that post, “We won’t screw it up,” she is writing that because she knows a lot of people remember Yahoo apparently just — doing just that, right, with other acquisitions.

REBECCA LIEB: Not on Marissa Mayer’s watch.

JEFFREY BROWN: Right.

REBECCA LIEB: She is relatively new at the company. She’s been there less than a year.

But, indeed, Yahoo has made acquisitions and screwed them up. So did News Corp. when it acquired MySpace. One of Yahoo’s real challenges is going to be how to keep Tumblr cool when it’s owned by what is very easily perceived by its very young, very hip user base to be a corporate overlord.

JEFFREY BROWN: Rebecca Lieb, thanks so much.

Watch Yahoo Makes Bid for Reboot With $1.1 Billion Deal for Tumblr on PBS.

One reason it’s so hard to pin down mobile advertising is due to the fact that “mobile” is quite possibly the most imprecise term there is when it comes to adverting and media. Tablet? Yes. Phone? Indeed. E-reader? Laptop? Phablet? Sure. Also, that must-have thing that’s coming down the pike next.

The sizes, functions and purposes of a multiplicity of mobile devices vary greatly, meaning there literally cannot be a one-size-fits-all solution to mobile advertising. However is there is one universal truth about mobile, that will hold as true in the future as it does today, it’s that real estate is limited on mobile screens – much more so than on other digital devices. And that’s what’s limiting mobile advertising.

Mary Meeker’s most recent state of the internet presentation proffered the much-cited statistic that ten percent of media consumption now occurs on mobile devices, yet mobile commands a scant one percent of digital revenues. Yes, this is where internet display advertising once languished, back in the day. Eventually things evened out.

Will mobile advertising repeat the pattern? Don’t be so certain that straight display advertising will ever gain the traction on mobile devices that it enjoys on devices connected to monitors and other, larger screens.

Disparate as the world of mobile hardware is, all mobile devices are linked by a common factor: real estate is scarce. Display advertising on mobile screens is proportionately more intrusive, annoying and unwelcome.

The “year of mobile” we’ve been talking about for more than a decade has surely arrived already (heck, an estimated 17.4 million iOS and Android devices were activated this past Christmas day alone). But the year of mobile advertising? It’s still a ways away.

What we’re waiting for is the rapidly growing trend of native advertising to spread more effectively to mobile devices and platforms, and we’re not there yet. Currently, most forms of branded content as advertising occur on publisher sites that help to create them (think Buzzfeed, New York Times, Boston Globe, Gawker Media). Technology from companies such as OneSpot and InPowered that pushes relevant, branded content into ad units are pretty nascent on the internet and don’t yet have mobile strategies. Facebook (as everyone knows) is working on the issue. Some have posited large-scale mobile players such as Samsung and Yahoo may tackle mobile native advertising this year.

In other words, hurry up and wait.

Will 2013 finally be the year of mobile advertising? I don’t think so, but that long-awaited era may be on the horizon. The solution to ads on mobile devices that consumers accept and value (as opposed to the 50 percent of clicks on mobile ads purely attributable to “oops“) will be content, not advertising driven.

Predictions can be fascinating, but let’s face it. No one I know is in possession of a working crystal ball, and digital marketing and technology move way too quickly and too erratically to do much more than keep us guessing (not that that isn’t half the fun).

I’m an analyst, not a psychic. So rather than play the “what’s next?” guessing game, let’s instead focus on “what’s important?”

These are the areas I plan to keep a close eye on in 2013. What would you add — or subtract — from this list?

1. Media Convergence The blending of paid, owned and earned media will continue and intensify in 2013 spawning new technological solutions, necessitating new skills, new workflow systems and new partnerships. As the lines continue to blur between what’s paid, owned and earned in digital (and soon, traditional) media, this will be the trend that governs nearly all other major change in the digital marketing and media landscape.

2. Native advertising Between banner blindness and the fact that display, search and social advertising has largely moved toward programmatic buys that are much less profitable for publishers, we’re seeing a number of technologies and solutions emerge to facilitate native advertising, one of many terms for plonking content (often, unbranded content) into ad units (a manifestation of media convergence). Products and solutions in this area will continue to emerge, more publishers will accommodate it, and no doubt we’ll see some interesting, large-scale media partnerships emerge as a result.

3. Demand for broader skills and tighter workflows will intensify intensifies Looping back again to media convergence, the increasing overlap between paid, owned and earned channels is creating a demand to bring in new skills and more closely integrate workflows within disciplines. Take PR, for example. Traditionally, public relations has specialized in owned (content) and earned (in the sense of traditional) media. Throw in native advertising and suddenly PR agencies are faced with the prospect of media buying, a skill that’s always been the exclusive domain of advertising agencies.

And with media buying come other skills such as media optimization and analysis. Put otherwise, digital, which has become increasingly siloed and Balkanized in recent years, will no longer be able to pull the “that’s not my table” routine. All players must develop an understanding of related digital channels (search, social, email, analytics), as well as come together around a table and really, truly play as a team.

4. Real-time marketing & listening platforms Real-time marketing demonstrably works — not just in social channels, but across the marketing spectrum. A recent GolinHarris study finds real-time not only positively impacts standard marketing goals — word-of-mouth, attention, preference, likelihood to try or buy — but it also turbocharges other marketing initiatives, including paid and owned media effectiveness. Event- and news-driven marketing will become increasingly vital as brands work to become more relevant. This requires sophisticated listening and monitoring platforms, and often 24/7 staffing. Teams require tools, and training to respond in accordance with social media policies and in the brand’s voice. They must also be permitted to work in an agile environment, free of the chain-of-approval strictures that are antithetical to real-time marketing.

5. Organizing for content marketing & content strategy As brands recognize the necessity of adding content to the marketing mix, they quickly realize something else. Precious few organizations have a Content Division. In 2013 brands will begin to address this deficiency in earnest. They will hire, reorganize and make room on the org chart for effective content marketing operations that work in concert with existing marketing functions from social to communications to brand, creative and advertising.

6. Visual information takes precedence Research I published in early 2012 demonstrates that when marketers are asked what kind of content they’ll be investing in going forward, anything visual takes precedence over the written word. The unfettered growth of Pinterest, infographics, Instagram, and Tumblr, not to mention the always-growing popularity on online video, bears this out. Visuals capture attention. In a world in which brand messages clamor for consumer attention across screens, devices and channels, a picture is worth the proverbial thousand words. Keep your eyes open in 2013. It’s going to be a colorful and visually arresting year.

7. Online/offline channels converge, i.e. everything becomes more digital As media become more digital, we’re seeing digital messages appear in new places: out-of-home channels such as billboards and digital signage, as well as TV screens, are hosting streaming and social media.

The above are my top seven, but I’ll be keeping an eye on some other trends next year. Mobile is always changing rapidly, gamification is developing and interesting, so is wrangling and making sense of big data.

The single most interesting trend in 2013? Easy. It’s the one we don’t even know about yet.

Characters on packaging sing and dance. Retail inventory “knows” where it is in the store, and when it needs to be restocked. Invisible coupons can be snatched from the ether, and    mobile devices can lead shoppers to items that match pre-selected criteria (low-fat, gluten  free and strawberry flavored). Open the car door and, as the heat and engine automatically start, the seat slides to your preferred position.

The sentient world is no a radical future vision, it’s present reality. Readily available technologies such as smartphones, Google Goggles (and soon, Glass), augmented reality (AR), smart keys and fobs, even laptops make it increasingly easy to apply layers of content, images and information on top of object, products, and places. And at the same time, to view and experience these additional layers of content. Technology developments will soon enable more and more objects to become sentient, as Corning so elegantly depicted in its highly successful A Day Made of Glass Video:

Brands, particularly those aspiring to a cutting-edge image, have embraced advertising and marketing in the sentient world. Augmented reality almost seems old hat when you start totting up brands that have tried it, including GE, Nestlé, Lego, Kellogg, Mercedes-Benz, and Tesco. Ben & Jerry’s augemented ice cream lids. Starbuck’s experimented with enhanced coffee cups.

An iPhone app created by Dentsu in Japan allows shoppers to see animated butterflies flitting by. Each butterfly contains a coupon for a nearby business. In-store smart kiosks are becoming popular, as are apps that facilitate shopping. IBM has developed an app that finds what shoppers are looking for by scanning the shelves with a smartphone’s video camera

The sentient world goes far beyond in-store and CPG applications, of course. Destination and place marketing creates enormous potential both for data and for marketing and advertising applications. Kia, for example, a US Open sponsor, put a layer of information over last year’s event.

Unquestionably, as technology becomes increasingly sophisticated as well as cheaper, and as consumer adoption of smart devices soars, the world of places and things will become increasingly sentient. This raises a number of questions marketers must begin addressing now in order to intelligently introduce content – literally – into other dimensions.

1. Whose data surrounds your product? From a marketing perspective, the sentient world fundamentally means Things + Places = Media. OK, but what content is appropriate for which things, where? This is where content strategists and marketers face new challenges. Will they create it? Aggregate it? Allow users to contribute it? What are the paramenters of the “what”? (How comes later).

2. How will user-generated content be considered and handled? It’s already easy for users to add layers of content to the sentient world. How will brands cope with virtual UGC? As with social media, brands face a lack of control in many aspects of the sentient world. AR is something consumers can do already. Smart devices such as keys have been hacked. Negative sentiment is inevitable. UGC will soon literally spill out of the web and into if not everything, then many things that will affect brands.

3. What data should or could be layered on your product, service or brand? What information, images, data and media should surround a carton of yogurt? A cinema box office? A hammer? What goes on the label, the package, and what constitutes an invisible but discoverable layer in the virtual world? Here, content strategy merges with merchandising, packaging, point of purchase and other marketing functions in a highly complex interchange not yet informed with best practices and cases studies.

4. What’s appropriate, in line with marketing and content strategy  and makes sense for the target audience? Currently, augmented reality is the dominant channel for marketing in the sentient world (though technology developments could shift this paradigm, and quickly). AR is opt-in. It requires a call-to-action to impel a consumer to whip out a device, fire up an app and experience the data layer. Will it be worth the effort? What’s the payoff? What’s the appropriate form of the call-to-action? More open questions that will only be resolved by extensive trial and error.

5. Data will be experienced in real-time. Do you have real-time ability? Real time marketing and advertising are becoming commonplace for many brands such as Pepsi and Applebee’s. Their marketers have always-on war rooms in which highly trained social media and analytics teams monitor digital sentiment and interaction 24/7, reacting and optimizing messaging in real time. The sentient world will rapidly become part of this intense, pressurized marketing function.

6. How will workflow be managed? Whose job is it to oversee these virtual layers of data? As with other forms of content marketing, clear roles haven’t yet emerged. The sentient world calls for developers, content creators, multimedia producers, strategist, creatives and more. Staffing, relationships with vendors and outside agencies and technology investments will all be affected – and require investment and ongoing budget.

7. What metrics will be applied to the sentient world? Interactions in the sentient world can be measured, but marketers have always had difficulty determining what to measure, particularly in new digital channels. Very little in this realm conforms to simple direct marketing metrics. Instead, more complex KPIs (key performance indicators) must be developed.

8. Who partners in this ecosystem? Who will brand align with to leverage the possibilities of this new ecosystem? If your refrigerator tells you it’s time to buy a fresh carton of milk, will the alert be accompanied by a coupon? When your car wants oil or fuel, will it recommend a preferred brand? Perhaps your phone will “know” there’s a nearby McDonalds where you can recharge – both the battery and yourself. Brands will soon explore newly-logical alliances.

9. What platforms matter now, and what must be accommodated in the future? A tough but persistent question in mobile has always been around platform. iPhone? iPad? Android, Blackberry, other tablets? What devices will consumers carry, and how will they use them to interact with places and objects? Yesterdays cameras, MP3 players and e-readers are consolidating into phones now. What will tomorrow bring – and how will you bring your data to that platform?

10. After the first wave of doing it because it’s cool, what’s next? As with all new technologies, the sentient world is a novelty now. Any reasonably serious brand initiative is almost guaranteed to have a novelty factor, PR amplification, buzz – the whole first-mover advantage package. More strategic brands will be asking themselves what comes next. How will we work, play, shop, travel and interact with the sentient world when it’s just another part of…the world?

It almost had to happen. Ad stacks are proliferating across the digital media landscape, and corporate behemoths such as IBM and Adobe are refining and growing their suites of digital marketing and advertising software offerings. All the while, Google’s been very quiet on the display advertising front.

No longer. Today at DoubleClick Insights, Google announced its commitment to going full-bore into the stack wars with what Vice President, Display Advertising Neal Mohan described to me in an advance briefing is “the biggest upgrade in DoubleClick history.”

Everything digital advertising at Google: search, the Google Display Network, AdSense, text ads, rich media, YouTube, and mobile advertising (AdMob) will be integrated. A new brand encompassing all of DoubleClick’s platform technology has been created. The components include:

• DoubleClick Digital Marketing Manager – an upgraded version of the DoubleClick ad server, the control panel for ad scheduling, delivery, reporting and more across premium media.
• DoubleClick Bid Manager – a revamp of media buying platform Invite Media. Google promises faster processing and better reporting to manage audience buying across ad exchanges.
• DoubleClick Search (launched last year) enables buying across multiple search engines.
• DoubleClick Studio – a rich media solution that now incorporates Teracent.
• Google Analytics integration.

“It’s a rolling thunder kind of rollout,” Mohan explained. Workflow, reporting and portfolio management components won’t be released for several weeks. “We invested very heavily in building out a unified stack instead of kluging together existing products.”

Mohan identifies three core benefits of turning all Google’s ad products into a unified stack (and DoubleClick is the platform used by most top agencies and advertisers). The first is “giving time back to our advertisers and agencies.”  In a typical week, Mohan estimates, up to two full days are spent in various digital platforms that don’t talk to each other. “By bringing all these pieces together we can save up to  six working weeks per person per year,” he claims.

Unified reporting and attribution is the second benefit. DoubleClick promises its suite will provide perspective and insights across campaigns and channels. How did display influence search, or vice versa?

Finally, Google says it’s offering cross-channel campaign optimization that will encompass bidding and campaign management.

How will Google’s stack differ from the other major players, notably Adobe and IBM? Most notably, DoubleClick includes an ad server – those two players don’t serve ads (AppNexus, however, does). Critically, the stack will maintain an open API to enable integrations of other software packages.

An open API is a desirable feature in any ad technology stack, but here it’s critical as (Google+ excepted), social support is something earmarked for an unspecified future date, not the present. Moreover, it’s hardly a secret that Google’s relationship with Twitter is tenuous, and with Facebook openly competitive. Both can be viewed as significant shortcomings in a truly integrated stack – though clearly no stack out there is all things to all advertisers.

Social isn’t Google’s only long-term goal. “Digital, whether on the search or display side, has been a result of performance marketing,” notes Mohan, “The brand opportunity still remains untapped.”

Smashing silos and making digital processes easier, more streamlined and unified is a good thing.  What remains to be seen is if the digital brand opportunity lies in display advertising, or in social channels including earned and owned media.

Image: DumboNYC.com

A version of this post also appears on iMedia Connection