Questions? Comments? Interested in contributing content? If so, please
contact Pat Cauley, eMedia editor, at (703) 908-1030 or via e-mail at
pcauley@retailing.org
I recently heard a statistic that 76 percent of consumers don’t trust advertising. Ouch, that’s gotta hurt. This means that your industry’s credibility is only slightly more viable than Hillary’s sinking odds at snagging the Democratic nomination.
There’s a reason why “Saturday Night Live” has consistently come up with relevant material to ridicule the ad industry…we practically spoon-feed it to them.
All jokes aside, enough is enough! Join ERA and Electronic Retailer at our upcoming events, where you have the power to learn about and change the course of your industry.
The seminar will shed light on the most recent FTC developments and offer practical insights and in-depth legal solutions in the area of emerging technologies, notably behavioral advertising.
Discover the fate of paid programming at our Executive Media Summit, followed by a day of relevant sessions geared to keep your business ahead of the game and afloat in times of economic uncertainty.
Finally, if you truly want to be involved and have your voice heard on behalf of the industry, join with your colleagues as we teach you the legislative issues facing your business. You’ll then be paired into groups with a seasoned lobbyist to meet with your elected representatives in Congress on Capitol Hill to voice your concerns.
It’s your industry; perhaps it’s time to take some ownership.
According to ERA’s most recently commissioned paper, Mapping the Path to Purchase, Forrester Research suggests that television drives online sales. Indeed, 44 percent of the study’s respondents went to retail to find a product they saw on an infomercial or home shopping channel and more than one-third of consumers visit engines (eBay, Yahoo, Google, etc.) to compare prices, with more than 50 percent of those making a purchase.
But wait, there’s more; now it’s the consumers themselves who are creating pathways and signposts. It’s interesting, looking at the apparent quick rise of the “consumer influencer.” It seems just yesterday when branding was king and PR, marketing, research and agencies pushed sales. But today, through the power of blogs, online communities, forums, boards, videos on YouTube, Facebook and more, customers are definitely in charge.
I wonder what retailers think about how this will all shake out? How do retailers leverage those consumer influencers?
Sieglinde Friedman is ERA’s vice president of strategy
That is to say, after a 50 plus-year reign of supremacy, has broadcast media begun to slide down a slippery slope to be consigned to history with the telegraph and Morse code? More and more evidence seems to be mounting that broadcast is facing troubled times. First, the market was segmented when cable came of age. The “Big three” were suddenly faced with actual competition and they lost significant numbers of eyeballs. This didn’t do a lot for programming initially, the song “500 Channels and Nothing on” sort of summed up the early cable landscape (with the possible exception of MTV, in the early days). But eventually, the industry found its footing and went the way of the magazine industry with channels dedicated to niche markets—think the History Channel for old men, the Food Network for people who like to eat, the Travel Channel for people who want to see the world without leaving their house, and Animal Planet for people who can sit through six hours of Ron Reagan commentating the riveting action of a dog show.
And while radio has always been a bit of a wild-west environment, the world reacted to the homogenization of content with satellite radio and our friends (soon to be friend) XM and Sirius (maybe Xirius, quick run out and register that URL). Once again we have channels that are designed to appeal to a much narrower demographic based on the inescapable logic that there may not be enough of an audience to make a radio station devoted entirely to the delta blues genre in any one metropolitan area, but if you take all of the people from all of the metropolitan areas in the country and add in the smattering of people in between those places, suddenly you have a potential audience that rivals the legions of Britney Spears fans that used to exist. And Clear Channel had to go running to a judge to make sure its leveraged buyout isn’t plagued by nit picky questions from a lot of bean counting bankers.
So, we see the broadcast universe moving to a model of medium-casting, with content appealing on different channels to smaller groups of people. But where do we go from here?(more…)
-Native Spanish-speaking agents provide for higher quality communication with callers
-Call center labor pools in Spanish-speaking countries are generally more ample than on-shore
-Lower costs per minute and per hour
-Offshore and near-shore centers are oftentimes more flexible in accommodating U.S.- based clients’ requirements compared to traditional U.S. based call centers
-Lower rotation of employees, which allows greater continuity and consistency
-Native Spanish-speaking agents in Spanish-speaking countries are generally more inclined to sell than those that work in U.S.-based centers
Disadvantages:
-Time consuming and more expensive to travel to offshore/near-shore locations for site inspection and training
-Time zone difficulties
-Risk and cost of telecommunications-related infrastructure located outside the U.S. can be higher
-Call centers in other countries don’t always understand U.S. business culture and demands of U.S.-based companies
-Lack of understanding of U.S. addresses and fulfillment requirements
Conclusion:
Most call centers outside the U.S. utilize VoIP telecommunications to reduce the cost of call transmission, which make the cost of long distance inexpensive. Training outside the U.S. can be a little bit more expensive and take more time to travel, but if the marketer has budget, on-site training and site inspection are always worthwhile. Labor costs outside the U.S. are almost always more attractive. Marketers should consider whom the management team is and if it has experience conducting business in the U.S. and is able to communicate effectively with and reports correctly to U.S. marketers. Marketers must consider their level of comfort with each of these items and also take into account their experience or ability in first, managing a call center and second, managing a call center operation outside the U.S.
Do you agree?
Neal Topf is president of Callzilla, LLC, and a member of ERA’s U.S. Hispanic Council
Senator John Kerry is up in arms. And no, it has nothing to do with Clinton, Obama, McCain or even Iraq. Recently, Kerry wrote a post for the popular Huffington Post blog in which he detailed a despicable occurrence that took place at the FCC hearing in Cambridge with Comcast concerning Net Neutrality. As if its move to block certain content a few months back wasn’t bad enough, Comcast actually stooped to paying people off the streets to pack the seats that would have otherwise been given to the hundreds of concerned citizens left literally outside in the cold.
You may be thinking to yourself, “Who cares what John Kerry or the Huffington Post say, I’m a conservative!” Well, don’t take Kerry’s word for it. ERA’s own vice president of government affairs, Bill McClellan, was there in person to witness the entire debacle. As I described in an earlier post, Net Neutrality is one of ERA’s core government affairs initiatives, because keeping the Internet free and open is vital to everyone’s continued e-commerce success. With all this talk about repurposing infomercials and content on the Internet, how would you feel if Comcast decided your site was taking up too much bandwidth and they simply stopped allowing consumers access? They wouldn’t be that shameless, would they?
I can’t stress enough the amount of money, time and energy the telecos spend on Capitol Hill lobbying to take control of the Internet, dividing it into a two-tiered system. Are you concerned but don’t know what you can do to help? I encourage you to join ERA on May 20th on Capitol Hill for our annual Government Affairs Fly-In, where we will brief you on the issues and set you up with your elected representatives so that you can voice your concerns about the vitality of your business and its bottom line’s dependence on an open Internet.
ERA’s eRetailer Summit is off to a great start. We’ve already exceeded last year’s total registrations before the tradeshow floor even opened! Whenever I attend conferences, I always seem to find myself drawn to the education sessions, rather than the tradeshow floor. My instincts proved correct today when I learned more about blogs within an hour than I had learned in the past three months. I’ll begin implementing what I’ve learned moving forward. I hope you check back often as our blog continues to grow and expand in quality and quantity.
Earlier today, I also had the pleasure of eating lunch while listening to a keynote presentation from YouTube’s Brian Cusack. Among many interesting statistics, he addressed the rapidly shifting media consumption habits. It turns out people are spending as much time engaging with online content and videos now as they do watching TV. Don’t believe it? If you’re reading this blog post, you’re part of that statistic.
Since you’re clearly not watching your TV right now, enjoy the following video I came across while checking my email today. It’s definitely not something I want to think about when I board that plane on Wednesday!
How do you think marketers and advertisers will adapt if these viewing habits continue?
Since its founding 21 years ago, Hawthorne Direct has never been afraid to take chances. The company launched a new website—The Hawthorne Videoactive Report—just a little over a year ago that features a brief daily newscast about interactive, video-based advertising.
I caught up with Scot Wilcox, the Report’s writer and editor, to chat about the site—and its relationship to the parent company. Hawthorne has produced about 220 reports to date, and Wilcox thinks that the project is hitting its stride. “The Videoactive Report is pretty multi-faceted,” he says. “It’s a way to share good information, to test new ideas and to ensure that we stay atop the hot trends. That’s not to say that our agency will offer every single tactic we talk about, but you certainly can’t innovate from an information vacuum.”
The project is the brainchild of DRTV pioneer Tim Hawthorne, a founding member of what is now ERA. According to Wilcox, the Report reflects Hawthorne’s creative and community values: “Tim has been out there networking and sharing his ideas for years. The blogosphere is a particularly efficient medium to continue that process. Plus, we’re doing it in video, the most engaging format there is.”
Although the site includes advertising news, Wilcox explains that “the HVR,” as he calls it, is more of a trends and analysis site. “Don’t forget that we’re first and foremost an advertising agency, not the Associated Press,” he says. “We really don’t worry who’s first with a story. What we care about is how these events impact the agencies doing the work.”
Perhaps the site’s most interesting feature is that Hawthorne Direct views it as a hybrid of sorts: part working content site, part test lab. For the daily videocast, the agency has tested different formats, emphases, production software, studio arrangements and distribution options. The website also provides the agency a vehicle to test layout, optimization, ad creative, media buying and social networking. Wilcox says that from the agency’s perspective, The Videoactive Report will always be something of a work in progress, but viewers should still enjoy it as a time-saver. Deputizing someone else to scour hundreds of resources for the critical content should always be appealing.
Pat Cauley, eMedia editor, Electronic Retailer Magazine
I recently heard a statistic that 76 percent of consumers don’t trust advertising. Ouch, that’s gotta hurt. This means that your industry’s credibility is only slightly more viable than Hillary’s sinking odds at snagging the Democratic nomination.
According to ERA’s most recently commissioned paper, Mapping the Path to Purchase, Forrester Research suggests that television drives online sales. Indeed, 44 percent of the study’s respondents went to retail to find a product they saw on an infomercial or home shopping channel and more than one-third of consumers visit engines (eBay, Yahoo, Google, etc.) to compare prices, with more than 50 percent of those making a purchase.
That is to say, after a 50 plus-year reign of supremacy, has broadcast media begun to slide down a slippery slope to be consigned to history with the telegraph and Morse code? More and more evidence seems to be mounting that broadcast is facing troubled times. First, the market was segmented when cable came of age. The “Big three” were suddenly faced with actual competition and they lost significant numbers of eyeballs. This didn’t do a lot for programming initially, the song “500 Channels and Nothing on” sort of summed up the early cable landscape (with the possible exception of MTV, in the early days). But eventually, the industry found its footing and went the way of the magazine industry with channels dedicated to niche markets—think the History Channel for old men, the Food Network for people who like to eat, the Travel Channel for people who want to see the world without leaving their house, and Animal Planet for people who can sit through six hours of Ron Reagan commentating the riveting action of a dog show.
Senator John Kerry is up in arms. And no, it has nothing to do with Clinton, Obama, McCain or even Iraq. Recently, Kerry wrote a 
ERA’s eRetailer Summit is off to a great start. We’ve already exceeded last year’s total registrations before the tradeshow floor even opened! Whenever I attend conferences, I always seem to find myself drawn to the education sessions, rather than the tradeshow floor. My instincts proved correct today when I learned more about blogs within an hour than I had learned in the past three months. I’ll begin implementing what I’ve learned moving forward. I hope you check back often as our blog continues to grow and expand in quality and quantity.
Since its founding 21 years ago, Hawthorne Direct has never been afraid to take chances. The company launched a new website—