Author: mybuddypeted

Content Is Critical In The Tech Path To Purchase: Purch And comScore… — NEW YORK, Dec. 9, 2015 /PRNewswire/ —

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http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/content-is-critical-in-the-tech-path-to-purchase-purch-and-comscore-report-examines-key-consumer-influencers-300190351.html

NEW YORK, Dec. 9, 2015 /PRNewswire/ — When it comes to online shopping, conversions are king. But what kinds of searches, ads and content are consumers interacting with before and after a tech purchase? Purch, a digital content and commerce company, and comScore, a global media measurement and analytics company, partnered to determine the answer in a new study released today—PURCHase Report: Consumer Technology. The research examines more than 3,000 qualifying purchases over a 90 day period to track key influences and behaviors of U.S consumers before, during and after a technology purchase. Purchases tracked include popular products such as mobile devices, tablets and wearables from top online retailers and brands including Samsung, Apple and HP. Findings point to inefficiencies in ad delivery and consumer focus on tech reviews and content both ahead of and after making a purchase.

To learn more about the research and share the news, click here: http://www.purch.com/purchase

“It’s critical for brands and marketers to gain a detailed understanding of the many factors that influence a consumer shopping for a tech product,” said Erin Kapczynski, Vice President of Marketing at Purch. “The Purch and comScore PURCHase Report goes a long way toward providing a more comprehensive understanding of the consumer path to purchase and helps marketers and publishers better service them via advertising, search, and editorial. The media landscape is saturated, but tech content stands out as a go-to resource in the month before consumers land directly at online retail destinations to make purchases.”

Data sources analyzed in the study include search, ad exposure, visitation, mobile and e-commerce. Key findings from the PURCHase Report include:

OVER HALF OF IMPRESSIONS OCCUR AFTER A PURCHASE
The majority (52 percent) of relevant ad impressions took place after the consumer had already made a purchase. This indicates significant opportunity to retune ad strategy and messaging to consumers for tech items such as smartphones, laptops and storage devices – to place the right ads at the right phase in the consumer journey.

TECH MEDIA IS CONTENT KING
On the content side, tech media sites are the most widely consumed content throughout the purchase journey (pre- and post-purchase), pointing to trust in product reviews and testing by neutral parties that relay accessible information. Tech media site consumption is followed by multi-category retailer and tech retailer sites.

TECH REVIEWS TRUMP NEWS 
On tech media sites, buyers read 80% more reviews/buying guide pages than news pages.  Both reviews and news article readership were split fairly evenly by platform, with 53 percent of pages views on PCs and 47 percent of pages viewed on mobile devices.

TECH RETAILER SEARCHES RISE AS PURCHASE APPROACHES
As consumers move into the final phases of their research and look to complete purchases, they shift their search behavior to retailers’ sites. The majority of their searches —67 percent – took place on retail sites rather than search engines on the day of purchase.

BEHAVIORS VARY BY DEMOGRAPHIC
Men dominate tech forums and women consume a slight majority of tech how-to pages, but the genders are split evenly when it comes to time spent on reviews/buying guides – indicating that reviews play an equal role in both genders’ decision making processes.

GEN X-ERS BUY MORE TECH PRODUCTS, BUT MILLENIALS OUTSPEND
Gen X consumers (age 35-54) accounted for 45 percent of the tech purchases in this research.  Millennials however, were the big spenders, spending an average of 8% more per purchase than older consumers.

The PURCHase Report uniquely provides in-depth information about relevant online behavior leading up to and following actual tech purchases. The research considers digital influencers holistically, with a look at ad exposure and other types of content important to consumers as they research products, i.e. reviews, news and searches across retailers’ sites, search engines and deals resources. The insight gleaned from this data is a valuable tool for advertisers and marketers seeking to connect with consumers in the right way during the purchase process. View the full report.

Study Methodology:
Purch and comScore partnered on an in-depth analysis of relevant digital activity on desktop and mobile devices by comScore U.S. panelists who purchased a consumer tech product online. comScore’s behavioral measurement software on panelist PCs identified over 3,000 qualifying purchase events in a 90 day period (May 2015 – July 2015), in any of 11 tech product categories ranging from laptops and mobile phones to wearable fitness devices.

To find out more about Purch, visit http://www.purch.com, or follow the company on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

About Purch    
Purch is a portfolio of digital brands that helps make buying decisions easy for 100 million consumers and businesses monthly. Its respected sites such as Top Ten Reviews, Tom’s Guide, Tom’s Hardware, and Live Science natively integrate commerce and content in more than 1000 product categories so consumers can make better choices before, during, and after an important purchase. The company helps marketers achieve their branding and performance objectives in a high-quality, brand-safe context. Its sites connect in-market shoppers with more than 7,000 marketers and sellers, driving industry-leading conversion rates and $1 billion in commerce transactions annually. Purch is a high-growth, privately held company with more than 350 employees and offices across the U.S. and Europe. For more information on Purch, visit http://www.purch.com or follow the company on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

About comScore
Founded in 1999 and headquartered in Reston, Virginia, comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR) is a global media measurement and analytics company that makes audiences and advertising more valuable. We help media buyers and sellers understand and make decisions based on how consumers use different media, such as TV, video, mobile, desktop and more. Through its products and partnerships, comScore helps its more than 2,500 clients understand their audiences, know if their advertising is working, and access data where they want and need it.

Some focus on the user because it’s in their DNA. Others because the have to

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2016 Year in Preview: Ad blocking will force the industry to put the user experience first
Ricardo Bilton @rbilton 11 hours ago
This essay is just one in a series of 10 produced by Digiday’s staff of reporters and editors in which we look to the major trends of 2016. We’ll be releasing a full series download with all 10 essays on Thursday. Sign up here for a copy.

If publishers weren’t thinking about the user before, they will in the coming year.

Spurred by Apple’s introduction of ad blocking to iOS in September, publishers and advertisers spent much of 2015 wavering between muted concern and outright panic over ad blocking’s potential effect on the future of the industry. Over 198 million people globally run ad blockers each month, according to anti-ad blocking firm PageFair, and Apple’s support risked increasing the magnitude of that existential threat even further.

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But while the industry has obsessed over various wrinkles of ad blocking — how to fight the tech, whether ad blocking is unethical, etc — the ad blocking story’s actual importance became clear when it started forcing the hard questions about the role of the user experience in digital advertising, and whether the industry has completely forgotten about the people on the other side of the screen. In 2016, the discussion about ad blocking will expand beyond ad blocking to include user experience overall.

“Digital advertising has grown up a like a weed,” said Quartz publisher Jay Lauf. “We built all these sites and places for ads to live but rather than give real thought to the landscaping, we just let everything grow. Now, everyone is saying, ‘we’ve got kind of a mess here so we need to take a step back and clean things up.’”

Even the IAB conceded that the industry “messed up” by chasing automation and data collection at the expense the user experience. “Looking back now, our scraping of dimes may have cost us dollars in consumer loyalty,” wrote IAB senior VP of technology and ad operations Sean Cunningham in October. At the same time the IAB introduced its “LEAN” program, a new set of creative standards meant to produce ads that are lighter, less resource intensive and, hopefully, less likely to encourage people to install ad blockers. This tack made sense to those who argued that the most effective way to fix ad blockers is to make better ads.

But while intrusive ads have borne the brunt of the industry’s blame for ad blocking’s rise, efforts to improve the user experience have gone beyond just ads. Vox Media, GQ and The Verge, for example, have taken deep looks at their sites, making small tweaks to various features that have had major effects on the sites overall. The result: page loading times for these sites have been cut by as much as 80 percent.

The problem is that spending the time and money to rebuild and optimize their sites is a frill that many publishers don’t feel they have. “When the next 90 days of the quarter are staring you in the face and you have to make numbers, it’s hard to take the long view,” said Washington Post chief revenue officer Jed Hartman. “It can be hard to find that balance.”

In other words, the realities of the business today mean that most publishers are more concerned with optimizing their ad yield than optimizing their site load times.

But the idea that publishers have to think about their bottom lines before their users is a false choice, said Lauf at Quartz. “You have to serve your real customer, your audience, first so you can have the foundation for a solid business. No one has the luxury anymore of ignoring the user experience.”

Few understand that dynamic better than the big tech companies, which have used the “spear of the consumer,” as Lauf put it, to battle each other as they pitch their new publisher initiatives this year. Facebook’s Instant Articles, for example, was premised on the idea that the sluggishness of publishers’ sites is driving users away. Likewise, Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project was created to help publishers speed up their sites by trimming them of slow and unnecessary elements.

All of this should be a lesson to publishers. “The companies that are going to be successful down the line understand that content is a big differentiator but the entire experience is a part of that content as well,” said Digital Content Next CEO Jason Kint. “It’s all about the entire package of speed and performance and technology. The consumer doesn’t differentiate between publishers based on content alone.”

Retail relies on video

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Smartphones are an increasingly important device for video consumption, according to a new Digitalsmiths report. In Q3 2015, 41.1% of respondents from its survey of 3,153 US and Canadian adult consumers said they watch video content from their smartphones, a 4.7% year-over-year (YoY) increase in viewership. And 43.4% watch on a weekly basis, an increase of 2.8% YoY. This growing habit toward mobile video has huge implications for e-commerce brands and retailers.

Consumers like seeing videos when shopping online, which ultimately helps lead to purchase decisions, according to Animoto.

73% of US adults are more likely to make an online purchase after watching a product description video.
These videos also leave an important impression about the company itself — 58% of consumers consider a company with product video content to be more trustworthy.
71% say that they leave a positive impression of a company.
And 77% consider these companies to be more engaged with customers.
One example of this kind of success is British e-commerce pureplay Asos, whose site and mobile app offer runway videos of models walking and moving in the listed apparel product. And its overall mobile presence has gained traction worldwide. The company’s mobile app has been downloaded 5.4 million times — and mobile devices accounted for 60% of traffic and 44% of its total sales as of the end of August 2015, according to Internet Retailer.

MOBILE RETAIL APPS GAINING IN POPULARITY: Mobile retail app usage is growing among consumers, with 84% of US consumers having at least one retail app on their smartphone, according to comScore. In addition to merely downloading these apps, consumers are spending more time using them. Top retailers like Amazon, Walmart, and Target see a majority of their mobile traffic coming from mobile apps.

However, increased time spend does not necessarily mean more money will be spent.

There is still a 45% gap between how much time consumers spend researching retail on mobile and how much is actually spent on mobile.
What is responsible for this huge disparity? Mobile apps are not being developed properly for the space they occupy. Many consumers claim they are inhibited from making purchases on mobile apps because they’re not able to see product details or they have difficulty inputting personal and payment information. Brands and retailers that want to attract more users to mobile apps need to focus on designing an experience optimized for the devices consumers use — rather than simply transferring content made for desktop to the smartphone. This could include options like one-step checkout, vertical videos, or larger text sizes for the smaller screen. Otherwise, smartphones will remain a tool used for research rather than for e-commerce.

Hang W/ launches successful crowdfunding campaign

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https://www.crowdfunder.com/hangwith/invest

Please help spread the word, Hang W/ is an awesome technology.

Disclaimer: I am an advisor.

Hang w/ sits at the intersection of several powerful digital, social and pop culture trends. Live streaming video has burst into the technology scene and is resonating at the next big trend. Monetized digital video and mobile advertising are already a multi-billion dollar industry looking for better engagement with audiences. And the cult of personality is at an all time high. Hang w/ has the technology, the team and the track record to weave all three trends together into a product that generates significant revenue through monetized live content.

What is the difference between Hang w/ and Periscope?

Hang w/ aims to occupy a very different space from Periscope. They are a live social media app with no monetization strategy – and no opportunity for users to generate revenue. We are a live content distribution platform – with an opportunity for users to generate revenue from their own content.

How does Hang w/ make money?

Today, Hang w/ generates revenue in three ways. • Pre- and Post-roll advertising generates a CPM (cost per thousand views) from advertisers and ad networks. • Pay Per View Digital Tickets allow users to sell tickets to digital content. Hang w/ keeps a percentage of all ticket sales. • Digital Tipping allows users to gift one another digital coins with real monetary value. Hang w/ keeps a percentage of the value of gifted coins.

How can a Hang w/ user make money?

Broadcasters keep a percentage of revenue from the Pre- and Post-roll advertising shown on their channel. • Broadcasters keep a percentage of revenue from their own Pay Per View Digital Tickets. • Broadcasters keep a percentage of revenue by redeeming their gifted coins for cash. • All payments are made to users using PayPal.

What will the funds raised be used for?

• Deepen our focus on music and grow the platform where it is strongest with events, sponsorships, and a focused marketing campaign. • Extend the Hang w/ platform into a number of targeted verticals. • Improve platform functionality with new features that can be implemented across the vertical ecosystem. • Build our our sales and business development team and create custom marketing integration opportunities. • Legal, Misc Fees, General Admin • Technology infrastructure, server costs, maintenance, streaming, etc.

What is the exit strategy?

The platform is expected to generate significant cash flow upon scale. The strategy is to exit through acquisition by a major media company, social media company, or content-based technology provider.

Why are you the team to do this?

Members of our team have collectively developed more than 300 mobile applications – with many of them reaching as high as #1 on the Apple App Store. • Our team has collectively driven tens of millions of downloads of mobile applications. • We have been innovating in the live streaming space and fine tuning our product for more than two years.

 

HIGHLIGHTS

  • Backed by 50 Cent, Timbaland, Elton Brand and Larry the Cable Guy
  • Millions of users with more than 3,000,000 live broadcasts
  • Average user session as high as 17+ minutes at 2-3 sessions per day

ELEVATOR PITCH

The most advanced live-streaming mobile platform – with major celebrity endorsement, millions of users and revenue generation built into the model.

TRACTION

Millions of users with more than 3,000,000 live broadcasts

NOVEMBER, 2015

Achieved 1 Million users in the first 9 months – faster than Twitter and Facebook

NOVEMBER, 2015

Average user session as high as 17+ minutes at 2-3 sessions per day

NOVEMBER, 2015

Patents filed over 2 years ago ahead of Twitter’s Periscope and other live streaming services

NOVEMBER, 2015

Users were found to be 361x more likely to “Tune In” on Hang w/ than to “retweet” on Twitter

NOVEMBER, 2015

A Hang w/ 50 Cent concert from SXSW resulted in 50,000+ simultaneous live streams

NOVEMBER, 2015

Official Live Streaming Partner for events such as Style Fashion Week, Cupid’s Undie Run, Bottle Rocket and Mysteryland

NOVEMBER, 2015

WE HAVE BEEN SAYING IT FOR A WHILE NOW- B2B IS STILL PERSONAL

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Few B2B companies are implementing truly effective customer experience programs and achieving higher revenue growth, with the majority surviving but not exactly thriving according to a new study.

An Accenture Strategy report, 2015 B2B Customer Experience, surveyed 1,350 B2B sales and customer service executives in ten countries and found that only 23% could claim to be achieving a strong return on their customer experience investment.

Some 20% were generating little or no return with the remaining 57% somewhere in between.

These three groups were categorised as Leaders, Strivers and Laggards. Accenture’s research indicated that Leaders generated an average of 13% annual revenue growth and Strivers managed 6% while Laggards recorded a decline of -1%.

“B2B companies overwhelmingly recognise the importance of customer experience to their corporate strategy and bottom line, but the majority are wasting their investments on changes that are delivering mediocre results,” said Robert Wollan, senior managing director, Accenture Strategy.

“With consumer-like expectations and a substantial threat from new entrants, B2B companies must be ready to design and execute a transformed customer experience or not invest in such improvements at all,” he declared.

More than three quarters of survey respondents thought higher customer expectations for tailored B2B solutions would have a substantial impact (78%) and that customers are now more knowledgeable, self-directed, and continually evaluating suppliers (76%).

But only one third (32%) of executives felt they were equipped with the skills, tools, and resources necessary to deliver the desired B2B customer experience.

They pointed to a lack of C-suite attention, customer experience processes, and necessary cross-organisational integration as factors that needed to be addressed.

“Strivers are ‘racing to become average’ and average is a precarious position to be in these days,” observed Wollan.

“Leaders see after-sales service as a critical part of the customer lifecycle and they invest not just in new digital technologies, but in traditional customer connection points too,” he said.

“Leaders realize that a multi-channel approach is needed to reach B2B customers seamlessly and consistently.”

NOT SO FAST BRANDS! YOU CAN’T IGNORE VR AND AR

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AUGMENTED REALITY WILL ‘REPLACE THE SMARTPHONE’: The future of mobile technology is in augmented reality (AR) — not virtual reality (VR), according to a recent report by Citi. While much of the recent commotion surrounding wearable headset devices has been focused on VR, AR technologies will likely be the most likely to disrupt major digital markets like e-commerce and m-commerce, gaming, and even smartphone hardware.

Citi estimates that, by 2025, the combined VR/AR industry will represent $674 billion. The AR industry alone is predicted to be worth $120 billion in 2020, while VR will be worth $30 billion, according to separate predictions made by Digi-Capital. Eventually, AR technologies will replace smartphone handsets, notes Citi.

Two reasons in particular explain why AR is a much greater potential disruptor to the current mobile market than VR, according to the report:

Prospects are good for AR applications. While VR content may give users a fully immersive experience for gaming and entertainment, AR technology is better suited to integrate digitized reality into the settings of the physical world; meaning, AR systems can be used without wholly interfering with work and everyday life. This could be compared to using a smartphone to watch a movie, rather than going to the cinema.
AR will prove particularly useful in enterprise settings. Although gaming and other entertainment-oriented content may be the immediately obvious use case for AR technology, enterprise and commercial applications present a much more lucrative industry in the long term. Furthermore, they are much more suited to AR. The benefits of using AR in the workplace could include facilitating work in factories and manufacturing plants, operating machinery and electronic equipment, and in areas such as material handling in warehouses and at distribution hubs.
For the time being, AR hardware is too cost prohibitive for mass consumption. While VR headsets are slightly better, they’re still too expensive for most consumers. The average price of VR headsets will likely range between $350 and $500. This price may not include other parts or the cost of a computer powerful enough to run the headset. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s promising AR device, the HoloLens, is priced at a whopping $3,000. As the prices of these devices decline over the next several years, they’ll become more popular in the consumer market.

Customers want simple…

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http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/261806/smart-homes-74-want-devices-to-be-as-simple-to-s.html?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=headline&utm_campaign=87556

The smart home may be just around the corner but consumers are somewhat leery of what they’ll have to do to make it work.

While most (68%) consumers think smart homes will be common as smartphones within 10 years, they don’t necessarily want to personally do the work to make them possible, based on a new study.

The study comprised a survey of a representative sample of 2,500 U.S. adults by TNS for Intel.

Consumers want things simple. This is how they see it:

  • 86% — Want to manage all smart home devices from one central portal
  • 79% — Want a single sign-on to a central portal where they can manage their entire home
  • 75% — Suffer from password anxiety

However, most (71%) expect that at least one smart home device will be in every home by 2025 and 65% agree that smart home technology will be a standard feature on real estate listings.

But the complexity of different systems has to be resolved before connected homes go mass scale.

The study is yet another indicator that consumers want IoT technology to work and they aren’t necessarily interested in a do-it-yourself approach. Here are consumer views on smart device setup:

  • 83% — Want smart devices bundled with other services
  • 74% — Require smart devices to be as simple to set up as a cable TV
  • 64% — Would rather lease smart devices from a trusted service provider than install themselves

It’s no secret that security is a top-of-mind challenge with the Internet of Things and the access to connected devices. This study echoed many others, with 82% of consumers seeing security as a priority and wanting all devices to be secured through a single integrated package.

Here’s how consumers would want to secure their smart home:

  • 52% — Fingerprints
  • 42% — Voice recognition
  • 37% — In-home smart sensors
  • 10% — Men who would employ a robotic guard

The wave of smart devices that make homes smart is here.

As a follow to its study, Intel even created a working model of a smart home to test what IoT technology can do.

And based on consumer viewpoints, the smart technology better be pretty smart.