Regardless of age, roughly three-quarters of Americans (75%) say they have found a commercial on television confusing and 21% say they often find TV commercials confusing, according to a Harris Poll. more

More than one-third of US mobile subscribers (34.5%) browsed the mobile Web as of August 2010, up 2.6 percentage points (PPs) from the previous three-month average, while 22.5% accessed social networking sites or blogs, up 1.7 PPs, according to data from the comScore MobiLens service. more

When searching for products and services online, appearance matters: 48% of search engine users say they are more likely to click on a search result if it includes an image and 53% are more likely to click if a company name or brand appears multiple times on the search engine ... more

Seven categories of mobile applications are expected to dominate the mobile market over the next four years: email, games, social networking, instant messaging, mapping and directions, music and radio, and weather apps, together will account for an estimated 7 billion downloads worldwide by 2014, according to research from In-Stat. more

Worried that your website's inbound deep links—links to site pages other than your homepage or other top-level pages—are distracting visitors from your main advertising or branding page? Or that visitors following these links don't always realize they are on your site (as opposed to the site that linked to you)? Not ... more

You know you could benefit by adding one or another new technology to your branding efforts, but how exactly? Well, it helps to look at existing examples of the latest cool innovations. Case in point: augmented reality (where real-world views through a webcam or mobile device are augmented with techno features that ... more

In a recent post at the Content Marketing Institute, Elise Redlin-Cook asks the timeless question, "How do you find the best keywords for your audience?" Then she offers some timely advice. She recommends several online tools for novice and expert search marketers alike that can help simplify the process of researching keyword ... more

Most retailers say they are emerging from the recession better positioned for strong and sustainable revenue growth, with many planning to increase spending on Internet and mobile channels over the next 12 months, according to a survey from Forbes Insights. In addition, most retailers are planning to advertise more aggressively ... more

As our recessionary hangover drags on, you're probably thinking of evermore-creative ways to engage customers. But Drew McLellan of the Marketing Minute blog offers this caveat: "As you are crafting a new campaign or gimmick that you hope will go viral—always ask yourself, is the juice worth the squeeze for ... more

"Brand identifiability is under the advertiser's control and is a key consideration in ad design," note the authors of a recent research report on the effectiveness of visual ads. But because of rising "media noise" due to competing advertisements and "active ad avoidance by consumers," it has become challenging for ... more

Nearly eight in 10 of the nation's smallest companies (79%) say marketing is a major success factor for their business and nearly one-half (46%) of such firms, or microbusinesses, say they are using some type of social media for marketing, according to a survey from Vistaprint. more

With short message service (SMS) reaching 5 billion mobile phones around the world, marketers can no longer ignore the significance of texting as a marketing channel. Some consumers, however, are hesitant to take advantage of those mobile marketing programs, in part because of the fees associated with branded messages. Enter ... more

As the mobile channel continues its rise to prominence among marketers and consumers, the lines between the digital marketing and the physical marketing worlds have become blurred. If mobile is meant to connect the two worlds, a new approach to data management is crucial for marketing to remain effective and ... more

It's well known in SEO circles that most links created through social media are "nofollow"—and therefore don't help sites rank higher with search engines. Some SEO professionals believe there's no SEO benefit to developing social-media profiles at all. Not so, counters Derek Edmond in a recent post at the Komarketing Blog. To ... more

Despite dismal economic news overall, some business sectors are showing signs of improvement: Fully one-half of industrial-sector companies are expecting annual revenues in 2010 to be higher than they were in 2009, compared with the 24% of companies that reported the same a year earlier, according to a survey from ... more

Google Sites led the US explicit core search* market in August 2010, accounting for 65.4% of total searches conducted during the month, down 0.4 percentage points from July, according to data from comScore qSearch. more

From April to June, luxury shoe vendor Jimmy Choo leapt into tennis-shoe production and social media with a splash: It dreamed up CatchaChoo, a "trainer hunt" that united the real and digital worlds on a quest to capture free sneakers. Inhabitants of London were invited to follow CatchaChoo on Facebook, Foursquare ... more

While most experts will say there's no such thing as the perfect time to send your email offer or newsletter, conventional wisdom holds that Tuesday—generally speaking—is the best day for a campaign, and Friday the worst. "The theory behind the rule of thumb makes sense," notes Caroline Ruggiero at the Marketo ... more

Keyword discovery is a huge component of pay-per-click advertising. You need to find relevant keywords so you can create topical ad groups, text ads, and landing pages. But for truly cost-effective, high-ROI PPC campaigns, it's equally important to find negative keywords—those that aren't relevant to your offerings or customers—so you ... more

Led by television media spending, total measured advertising expenditures reached $63.6 billion in the first half of 2010, up 5.7% from the same period a year earlier, according to data from Kantar Media. Ad spending during the second quarter of 2010 grew 5.4% over the same period in 2009. more

"E-commerce sites can be particularly challenging for search-engine optimization (SEO) because they tend to lack unique, relevant content," writes Adam J. Thompson in an article at MarketingProfs. "Most e-commerce websites contain mostly navigational pages (with little content) and product pages (with mostly duplicate content)." So how can you improve results for ... more

With brand awareness cited as their primary brand-management goal in 2010, most corporate brand executives say online communications and traditional public relations—not social media—are still the most effective channels to reach their audiences, according to a survey from MiresBall and KRC Research. more

Businesswomen deliver a 23% higher click-through rate for online ads than businessmen, who are 53% more likely, however, to take action—such as download a whitepaper, start a free trial, or make a purchase—after clicking on an ad, according to a study by Bizo. more

Texting among US adults has increased substantially over the past year, but still does not approach the magnitude of texting activity among teens: 72% of adult cell-phone owners send and receive text messages now, up from the 65% who did so in September 2009, whereas 87% of teen cell-phone owners ... more

Though consumers say the Apple iPad is "more compelling" than the Amazon Kindle, 64% of e-reader owners say they prefer the Kindle to the iPad, according to a new survey from One News Page. more