Information Type
Australia Multi-screen Report
New technologies such as personal video recorders (PVRs), Internet-delivered video, tablets and smartphones, coupled with the availability of digital terrestrial television (DTT), are increasingly impacting Australians’ television viewing habits.
Australia’s first National Multi-Screen Report – compiled by Nielsen together with official Australian television audience measurement providers OzTAM and Regional TAM – reveals the extent to which new technologies are stimulating and enhancing viewing of broadcast content beyond conventional television sets.
Traditional viewing of broadcast content via TV remains strong and growing, up four percent (more than 4.5 hours) in Q4 2011 to 113 hours and 38 minutes, compared to Q1 2011. Time shift viewing further augmented TV viewing, and Australians spent an average of 12 hours per month watching playback TV in Q4 2011, up 39 percent since Q1 2011.
Smaller, more portable internet-enabled devices and improved internet connectivity are also creating new opportunities for Australians to view video content. Although viewing via PC and internet-enabled mobile phones remains low in comparison to conventional TV (PC and mobile phones account for 4% of total video consumption, including non-broadcast video), strong growth has been observed in the past year and is expected to continue. Australians spent an average of 3 hours and 27 minutes per month watching online video in Q4 2011, up from 2 hours and 7 minutes in Q1 2011. Video viewing via mobile phones increased from an average of 35 minutes per month in Q1 2011 to an average of 1 hour and 20 minutes per month in Q4 2011.
The availability of DTT is providing Australian viewers with greater choice of content and 95 percent of homes now have at least one DTT-enabled TV set, up from 90 percent in the first quarter of 2011. Further, 70 percent of homes now receive DTT on every working TV, up from 55 percent in quarter one.
Matt Bruce, head of Nielsen’s media industry practice group in Australia, observes that the introduction of DTT and time-shifted viewing, and the speed with which Australians are adopting new technology which delivers video content anywhere, anytime has impacted the way in which traditional television content is accessed. “For media owners, agencies and advertisers, these findings provide valuable insights into the way media is consumed, thereby helping to understand viewing habits and more successfully reach and engage with audiences across multiple screens.”
For more insights, download the complete Australian National Multi-Screen Report.
Privacy. The Next Frontier of Mobile.
Let’s face it, there’s more than just a simple technology learning curve that’s preventing the overall growth of mobile. Privacy will continue to be the single biggest barrier to mobile adoption moving forward. It affects everything from marketing to commerce and thanks to slip ups from companies like Facebook and Google, it has attracted attention at the state and federal level. App developers are going to be affected first, but we expect the change to carry over into other channels as well, e.g., mobile web, etc. The best course of action for any brand or marketer in the mobile space is to embrace a new concept called “privacy by design” which essentially means building a transparent and clearly understandable way for consumers to understand what brands are doing with their personal information at any point during the consumer experience. This concept is already being endorsed by some of the leading organizational bodies in mobile such as the MMA and CTIA and is the best example of “Best Practices” in the mobile space today.
Google to Sell Heads-Up Display Glasses by Year’s End
Source: New York Times, NICK BILTON | February 21, 2012
People who constantly reach into a pocket to check a smartphone for bits of information will soon have another option: a pair of Google-made glasses that will be able to stream information to the wearer’s eyeballs in real time.
According to several Google employees familiar with the project who asked not to be named, the glasses will go on sale to the public by the end of the year. These people said they are expected “to cost around the price of current smartphones,” or $250 to $600.
The people familiar with the Google glasses said they would be Android-based, and will include a small screen that will sit a few inches from someone’s eye. They will also have a 3G or 4G data connection and a number of sensors including motion and GPS.
A Google spokesman declined to comment on the project.
Seth Weintraub, a blogger for 9 to 5 Google, who first wrote about theglasses project in December, and then discovered more information about them this month, also said the glasses would be Android-based and cited a source that described their look as that of a pair of Oakley Thumps.
They will also have a unique navigation system. “The navigation system currently used is a head tilting to scroll and click,” Mr. Weintraub wrote this month. “We are told it is very quick to learn and once the user is adept at navigation, it becomes second nature and almost indistinguishable to outside users.”
The glasses will have a low-resolution built-in camera that will be able to monitor the world in real time and overlay information about locations, surrounding buildings and friends who might be nearby, according to the Google employees. The glasses are not designed to be worn constantly — although Google expects some of the nerdiest users will wear them a lot — but will be more like smartphones, used when needed.
Internally, the Google X team has been actively discussing the privacy implications of the glasses and the company wants to ensure that people know if they are being recorded by someone wearing a pair of glasses with a built-in camera.
The project is currently being built in the Google X offices, a secretive laboratory near Google’s main campus that is charged with working on robots, space elevators and dozens of other futuristic projects.
One of the key people involved with the glasses is Steve Lee, a Google engineer and creator of the Google mapping software, Latitude. As a result of Mr. Lee’s involvement, location information will be paramount in the first version released to the public, several people who have seen the glasses said. The other key leader on the glasses project is Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder, who is currently spending most of his time in the Google X labs.
One Google employee said the glasses would tap into a number of Google software products that are currently available and in use today, but will display the information in an augmented reality view, rather than as a Web browser page like those that people see on smartphones.
The glasses will send data to the cloud and then use things like Google Latitude to share location, Google Goggles to search images and figure out what is being looked at, and Google Maps to show other things nearby, the Google employee said. “You will be able to check in to locations with your friends through the glasses,” they added.
Everyone I spoke with who was familiar with the project repeatedly said that Google was not thinking about potential business models with the new glasses. Instead, they said, Google sees the project as an experiment that anyone will be able to join. If consumers take to the glasses when they are released later this year, then Google will explore possible revenue streams.
As I noted in a Disruptions column last year, Apple engineers are also exploring wearable computing, but the company is taking a different route, focusing on computers that strap around someone’s wrist.
Last week The San Jose Mercury News discovered plans by Google to build a $120 million electronics testing facility that will be involved in testing “precision optical technology.”
The Challenges of Cross-Channel Data Integration
Source: eMarketer, Feb 21, 2012
Marketers fail to deliver real-time customer-targeted brand experiences
Increased consumer demand for more personalized and relevant brand experiences has made customer segmentation and targeting an imperative for companies.
According to a November 2011 survey from Acxiom andDIGIDAY, though the majority of US advertisers and agencies were able to identify and segment their customer base, few were capable of doing so in a way that delivers a personalized experience in real time and across multiple channels.
More than half (58%) of advertisers and 39% of agencies said they were able to track and segment their best customers. However, agencies were more than twice as likely (12%) to be able to incorporate both online and offline data into the segmentation process, compared to just 5% of advertisers capable of this more advanced approach.
By segmenting customers, brands can create the more personalized, relevant experience that consumers now demand—especially from retailers. April 2011 data from the e-tailing group and MyBuys showed 50% of US cross-channel shoppers expect to be offered promotions or merchandise that reflect their past online shopping behavior and purchases. More importantly, 46% of shoppers reportedly would buy more from retailers that personalized the shopping experience across channels.
To accomplish the goal of delivering a truly personalized experience in real time, brands must be able to track activity throughout the customer lifecycle and act on this data immediately across channels. But Acxiom and DIGIDAY found advertisers and agencies have yet to make this work—though many are well on their way.
Less than a third of agencies and 37% of advertisers said they had neither the capability to deliver real-time, personalized customer experiences nor to do so across channels, though nearly half of advertisers and 28% of agencies had the ability to at least perform one of these two tasks.
In December 2011, the Winterberry Group and Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) found many marketers hoped to do better in the coming year. Most marketers worldwide planned to focus more closely on customer behavior analysis, and offer optimization and cross-channel touchpoint optimization—tactics required to meet the goal delivering real-time experiences to customers across channels.
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Check out today’s other articles, “Super Bowl Viewers Had Smartphones Firmly in Hand” and “Social Network Users in Brazil, China More Likely to Engage with Brands Online .”
As Smartphones Get Smarter, You May Get Healthier: How mHealth Can Bring Cheaper Health Care To All
Source: ADAM BLUESTEINJanuary 9, 2012, Fat Company
The average auto refractor–that clunky-looking device eye doctors use to pinpoint your prescription–weighs about 40 pounds, costs $10,000, and is virtually impossible to find in a rural village in the developing world. As a result, some half a billion people are living with vision problems, which make it tough to read and work.
Ramesh Raskar knew fixing this problem would be tricky. It required a new way of thinking about eye tests–and a new kind of device, one powerful enough to support high-resolution visuals, cheap enough to scale, and simple enough to be used by just about anyone. The MIT professor briefly toyed with stand-alone options, which were complicated and costly. Then he reached into his pocket and pulled out an unexpected savior: his iPhone.
“The displays had gotten so good, thanks to people wanting to watch episodes of Lost in high definition,” Raskar recalls. “I was immediately energized.”
By creating an app and attachment for the popular smartphone, Raskar could tap into a huge existing user base and skirt millions in distribution and manufacturing costs. The result: a plastic clip-on eyepiece that uses an on-screen visual test to determine a patient’s “refractive error” (a number doctors then use to dole out prescriptions). When his startup, EyeNetra, begins market testing later this year in Brazil, India, and Mexico–and eventually in the U.S.–its tech will deliver all the functionality of an optometrist’s costly machine for less than $30.
What Dr. Smartphone can do for you
This is the thrilling, disruptive potential of “mHealth,” the rapidly growing business of using mobile technology in health care. Leveraging the wonders of a device that’s fast becoming ubiquitous–two in three people worldwide own a cell phone–a new generation of startups is building apps and add-ons that make your handheld work like high-end medical equipment. Except it’s cheaper, sleeker, and a lot more versatile. “It’s like the human body has developed a new organ,” says Raja Rajamannar, chief innovation officer at Humana. Smartphones can already track calories burned and miles run, and measure sleep patterns. By 2013, they’ll be detecting erratic heartbeats, monitoring tremors from Parkinson’s disease, and even alerting you when it’s prime time to make a baby.
At stake is the future of health care–and a share of the $273 billion medical-device industry, which is dominated by the likes of GE and Philips. Although today’s mHealth market barely tops $2 billion, experts predict that number will skyrocket over the next decade as smartphones get smarter and patients lose, well, patience with the high costs and hassles of health care. “Why prescribe a $1,000 test in the hospital when all you need is a heart rate?” asks Leslie Saxon, a cardiologist who heads the University of Southern California’s Center for Body Computing. With inexpensive new technology, she notes, “I could tell a patient to go to the drugstore and buy an ECG [electrocardiogram] sensor for her phone.”
But can we really trust our phones to dispense medical data? That’s the question facing the FDA, which has spent the past year or so putting pioneering mHealth products through rigorous evaluations. “We had to show that our phone-computing platform and display quality were on par with existing devices,” says Sailesh Chutani, CEO of Mobisante, whose ultrasound attachment was sanctioned in January–after about a year of costly back-and-forth. With this first wave of devices approved and a mobile-specific set of guidelines to be finalized later this year, the FDA expects to streamline its approval process, which should juice the mHealth market. “Regulatory clarity almost always drives investment–provided it’s not a big, clear no,” says Joseph Smith, who helps run the West Wireless Health Institute.
Whether these tools actually make us any healthier, however, will depend on how we use them. Given the ability to record our snacks, thoughts, naps, movements, and more, “we will be overwhelmed with data,” warns John Moore, a lead researcher in the New Media Medicine group at the MIT Media Lab. “We need a holistic vision to make it all meaningful and motivating.” Among other advances, that vision will require a seamless flow of data across myriad devices and platforms–think how the MP3 format transformed the music industry–and a physicians’ movement to adopt electronic medical records. (Right now, only a third of them have.) And even then, there’s no guarantee these tools will change behavior. Will we stop eating sugary foods? Or, as Smith wonders, will we just be staring curiously at “phones that show glucose readings in three colors”? Corporate titans are racing to find out. Johnson & Johnson, the world’s largest medical-device maker, recently invested in sleep-monitoring technology from Zeo, a Massachusetts-based startup. Best Buy is funding earbuds that can monitor your heart rate. AT&T helped seed an employee-wellness program with WellDoc, whose apps help users manage diabetes, among other conditions. And Qualcomm, the renowned chipmaker, just launched a subsidiary that’s helping to develop all kinds of mHealth devices. “Will this nascent technology attract consumers, health-care providers, and health-care payers?” says Don Jones, a VP at Qualcomm. “The entire world is keeping its fingers crossed.”
Anatomy Of A Handheld Hospital
1 Processor that can power a pacemaker
Smartphones run superfast (in excess of 1 GHz) without consuming much power, much like top-notch pacemakers and cardiac defibrillators.
2 Display that can assess an ultrasound
The iPhone 4S’s resolution (300 pixels per inch) is on par with most hospital-grade ultrasound monitors, and small screen size won’t matter once projection tech takes off.
3 Camera that can capture cells
The HD video camera, which shoots 30 frames per second, is more advanced than some of the ones in colonoscopes, which doctors use to seek out potentially cancerous tissue.
4 Accelerometer that can guide physical therapy
The three-axis accelerometer captures the same subtle movements–tilts, shocks, rotations–as APDM motion sensors, which are used to monitor patients’ Parkinson’s disease and help them through physical therapy.
5 Microphone that can hear your heart
Because of its flat-frequency response rate–which drastically reduces noise distortion–a smartphone mic (with help from an amplifying attachment) can detect a heartbeat almost as well as a $500 electronic stethoscope.
Mobile Devices Influence Purchases
Our two cents:
As a retailer you are constantly being tasked with deciding on which mobile technologies to invest in and what kind of overall customer experience to create. When in doubt, our advice is to focus on creating a great research experience, the last touchpoint before the purchase. Sure, there are all sorts of shiny new technologies that vendors will claim add to bottom line sales. But those technologies often suffer from low adoption rates and we know that almost everybody is using their phones to research product information. So make sure that your mobile website and all supporting tactics, e.g., Search, SMS etc., allow the customer to easily research products.
Source: Online Media Daily Mark Walsh, Yesterday, 3:22 PM
New findings from Google suggest that consumers are using smartphones, tablets and desktop computers throughout the purchase process. Based on research conducted with Ipsos, Google found that people use smartphones in particular at different points as they move toward a purchase.
Nearly half (46%), for instance, said they researched an item on their smartphone before going to a store buy it. And 37% researched an item on their phone before buying it online. Four in 10 people who use their mobile phones to shop said they had made a purchase through the device itself.
While people use all three devices- — phone, tablet and PC — to research purchases, some activities are more popular on specific devices. Tablet owners, for instance, read product reviews and looked for product information more from their tablet devices than from their PCs or smartphones (77% compared to 67% and 70%, respectively).
Consumers favored smartphones for contacting a retailer. That’s a natural outgrowth of the ability to make a call directly, as well as retail sites and ads including click-to-call buttons. At the same time, people preferred PCs for comparing prices and looking for discounts and promotions by a fairly wide margin (roughly 20 percentage points).
That indicates that consumers are mostly checking prices and deals before even leaving the house, rather than waiting to do so in-store via mobile. When it came to comparing product information, however, tablets came out slightly ahead of PCs and smartphones — at 65% to 60% and 61%, respectively.
The study suggests that people are relying on mobile devices more for shopping. Among consumers who used their devices to shop last year, 80% of smartphone shoppers and 70% of tablet users said they used their device more frequently this year.
The Google/Ipsos results were based on a pair of surveys — one involving 615 U.S. holiday season shoppers who made a purchase in at least one of 13 retail categories and another of the same size composed of mobile and desktop consumers who made retail purchases across the same range of categories.
Social Media Excites Marketers, but Doesn’t Yet Generate Revenue
Our two cents:
There are two very important points in this post. The first is the underlying principle that all marketing initiatives, regardless of channel need to support the overall business goals of a company. Period. While many marketers love to hide behind this word “engagement“, we find this word to be at times nebulous and lacking of real metrics. The second important point is the trend of social campaigns outpacing the measurement of the campaigns themselves. Lest we forget, in marketing what get’s measured gets funded. Therefore, it’s important to align these marketing campaigns to the appropriate set of goals.
