Jason Klein says, “Contextual marketing has quickly become a buzz word in digital marketing, but the industry has lacked a detailed explanation of what it means and how it can be applied to new and existing programs. Worse, the term “contextual marketing” is often being used to refer to basic personalization. While it is true that knowing who you’re marketing to, what they like and what they’ve bought in the past provides some context, it is a very limited view and gives no insight into their current situation. Are they travelling? Snowed in? Did they just get married?... [...]

Amanda Hinkle says, “If you’re looking for more ways to reach a targeted set of consumers, but you haven’t paid a lot of attention to Pinterest, now is the time to perk up. The social bookmarking site will be offering advertisers the ability to target consumers with “Promoted Pins” and potentially even couple data in your own database with their algorithm for serving targeted ads on Pinterest. Let’s review a brief timeline of steps in Pinterest monetizing its business. Fall 2013: Pinterest announces they will be testing Promoted Pins, its first advertising concept. Promoted Pins can... [...]

Jason Klein says, “The results of StrongView’s annual Marketing Trends Survey are in and email retains the top spot for increased investment in 2015, followed by social media and mobile marketing. Overall, the majority of marketers (54%) are increasing their budgets in 2015 – and that’s a healthy 17% increase of 2014. The results are also encouraging for email marketing’s long march to one-to-one marketing. The top targets for increased email marketing investment are triggered and lifecycle marketing messages. This emphasis on automated messaging over batch mailings is a welcome development,... [...]

Jen Capstraw says, “I love reading those articles that compare 20th century science fiction to our modern world. This week, I stumbled across a list of author Isaac Asimov’s 1964 predictions for 2014. While we’re still not colonizing the moon, Asimov was pretty spot-on in the majority of predictions, including his descriptions of some of today’s mobile technology. Since it’s that time of year when we marketers like to start opining our predictions for the coming year, I thought it would be a fun exercise to take a look back at the mobile predictions of the past — with a focus on their... [...]