Speaker: Geoff Ramsey; CEO, eMarketer, Inc.
What: Tips for Marketers–Reaching & Engaging the Elusive Millenial
When: Thursday, September 30, 2010, 1 PM EST

Join eMarketer CEO Geoff Ramsey to find out about:

• The fluid ways these digital natives spend their media time
• What they really think about advertising
• Why their deep involvement with social media does not mean deep trust
  of social networks
• What brands need to know about the research and purchase habits of these
  device agnostics
• What are the marketing techniques that fail with millennials—and the
  ones that succeed

About Geoff Ramsey
Geoff Ramsey is one of the internet’s most exciting digital marketing visionaries. As CEO and co-founder of eMarketer, Geoff is on the cutting edge of new research statistics, trends and best practices, covering every aspect of marketing in the digital age. He is frequently quoted in The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, CNN, Bloomberg Businessweek and Advertising Age.

A highly regarded speaker with an engaging presentation style, Geoff speaks at major digital, media and corporate events around the globe, including the American Association of Advertising Agencies, Association of National Advertisers (ANA), Magazine Publishers of America (MPA) and the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB).

Sponsored by:

Yesterday’s Apple event was music to the ears of statistics fans. In his usual fashion, Steve Jobs reeled off a long list of millions and billions related to the consumption of Apple products and services. For example, in the time it will take to read this sentence, more than 200 apps will have been downloaded from Apple’s App Store.

Of course, there was a slew of new product announcements as well. Traditionally, Apple’s September events have focused on the iPod (275 million sold to date), and yesterday was no exception. Apple introduced a complete refresh of its line of popular music players. In the “one more thing” department, Apple also unveiled a revamped Apple TV focused on streaming video, including the long-awaited addition of Netflix (nicely complementing the recent addition of the Netflix iPhone app).

But as exciting as these product updates are for music and video lovers, the key announcements revolved around the introduction of the Game Center social gaming platform, and Ping, a social network for iTunes users. These new platforms lay the groundwork for Apple to leverage the growing nexus of mobile, social, content and commerce.

In my just-released report, “Mobile Content: Games, Music and Video Take to the Cloud,” I cite a series of studies by Edison Research and Arbitron that suggest social networking is emerging as a bellwether for mobile content consumption, with frequent social network access leading to higher-than-average indices of gaming, listening to music and watching video on mobile devices.

In many ways, it makes perfect sense: music consumption has always been about sharing (favorite artists, songs, etc.). And while one may bemoan the demise of the mix tape, incorporating sharing mechanisms into the commerce platform and making them available on mobile is a logical move that strengthens the platform and makes it stickier. Social commerce is fast emerging as a key driver of sales, and content marketers benefit by enabling their audience to do some of their marketing for them. In the case of Ping, the platform could also emerge as an effective way for artists to market themselves as well.

Similarly, as gaming becomes a more social experience (e.g. more users playing interactive multiplayer games and using social features to share both games and results), social networks are likewise becoming more game-like, with users competing for status through check-ins.

Yes, social network fatigue is a danger (as is Ping’s current lack of Facebook and Twitter integration), and no, iTunes fans didn’t get the streaming version some had been hoping for, but the combination of mobile, social, content, commerce and cloud points the way to the future.

The marketer-mom blogger love affair is getting stronger and stronger. Pioneered by companies such as Walmart, with its Elevenmoms program (now called Walmart Moms), marketers have realized that moms who blog can be very powerful allies.

The frenzy reached fever pitch at last month’s BlogHer ‘10 conference in New York, which had 2,400 attendees—many of them moms. Brands sponsored special events for female bloggers, gave away merchandise and conducted impromptu surveys and focus groups. Among the activities:

• Pepsico, a lead sponsor, offered the Tropicana Breakfast with an appearance by Bruce Jenner
• Gold’s Gym Manhattan invited all attendees to work out for free during the conference
• Clothing retailer Ralph Lauren hosted an event for selected bloggers to preview “The RL Gang,” a children’s book and online clothing store
• Procter & Gamble’s Tide brand hosted a series of exclusive dinners for bloggers and introduced attendees to a new fabric-care brand, Tide Swash

What benefits do marketers see from creating relationships with moms who blog? Which marketers are doing it right? And how are the recently updated Federal Trade Commission guidelines on disclosure impacting the ways marketers work with mom bloggers? Those are subjects I’m researching for an eMarketer report that’s publishing in October.

According to a Retail Advertising & Marketing Association study conducted in December 2009, 13% of US moms of tweens (ages 8 to 12) maintained their own blog. And more than half (52.2%) said they read blogs.

Although reaching blogging moms seems easy, it’s not. As Jen Drexler, principal at marketing consultancy Just Ask a Woman, wrote in an Adweek column recapping the BlogHer conference: “The blogger universe wants to play with like-minded brands that get it.” There is still a lot that brands need to learn.

Do you market your brand to mom bloggers? Are you a mom blogger who has relationships with brand marketers? I’m seeking interviews and case studies for this report. Please leave a comment or ping me at dwilliamson@emarketer.com.

Image via KelbyCarr.com

Frank Badillo, vice president and senior retail economist at Kantar Retail specializes in analysis and forecasting of economic, retail and consumer trends. He contributes to Kantar’s retail intelligence platform and regularly writes about the economic outlook for the monthly Retail Economist newsletter. He also directs the retail channel and product category forecasts for the annual US Retail Outlook. I chatted with Badillo about the upcoming holiday season and the state of the retail sector.

eMarketer: What is your outlook for the upcoming online holiday shopping season?

Badillo:

What we see that non-store sales and online shopping in particular have been very strong for the last six months. It’s been the strongest channel among of all of retailing. The channel is benefiting, to some extent, from a very weak year-ago comparison period, but it’s pretty clear that there’s strong demand for goods online. Right now through September is going to be key. There’s the back-to-school spurt, but we don’t really know what it portends for the holiday exactly.

A lot of demand we see tends to be skewed toward electronics. There are a lot of hot gadgets out there between the iPad, e-book readers and smartphones. All those things are driving very strong demand. Particularly with the e book readers, there’s a lot of demand among early adopters. The big question is to what extent a lot of that growth can be sustained in the longer term.

I suspect that we’re going to see very healthy growth into the holiday. It just may moderate somewhat from the very strong growth we’ve seen in recent months.

eMarketer: So consumer electronics in particular will have a strong holiday season.

Badillo:

Exactly, and particularly online.

eMarketer: Do you think online shopping behavior will be different this year?

Badillo:

In our monthly Shopperscape surveys, we ask a question about consumers’ spending intentions. The response has been steadily improving over the past year. There was a bit of a blip in our June number, but generally there’s been improvement in spending intentions over time. We expect that to continue and result in much better spending into the holiday than we saw last year.

But at the same time, there is some renewed uncertainty among shoppers that could curb some of the spending improvement in the coming months. I suspect that by the holiday time frame, some of that uncertainty should be cleared up and we’ll see the recovery continue, albeit at a bit more modest pace than we saw in the initial months of the year.

eMarketer: What key challenges will retailers face this holiday season?

Badillo:

Retailers cut prices pretty dramatically last year to draw shoppers and, in the end, it probably did more to weaken their top line sales as well as their profits. They will want to try to avoid the kind of ruinous price competition that they engaged in last year and try to be more strategic about it for this holiday.

Retailers are struggling with the extent to which they need to boost their inventories amid signs of rebounding demand. We’ve gone through a phase where retailers dramatically cut back their inventories. So now they’re slowly increasing those inventories again. The question is, to what extent they should continue to do that? There’s just a lot of uncertainty about whether they should do that.

I suspect we’ll see inventories expand a bit too much, which is going to put some downward pressure on prices for the second half of the year. We’ve already seen some signs of that in the apparel sector. There’s some growing price pressure in the sector after a good year or so of very slight price increases.

The inventory question is huge for a lot of retailers heading into the holidays, as well as the related pricing question. If there’s inventory overhang through the holiday, that’s going to put downward pressure on prices.

But there’s also the question as to when retailers should roll out promotions. Given how much price competition there was last year, I think retailers are going to look all the more closely about what they price-promote and the timing of those price promotions.

eMarketer: What are your projections for overall retail growth?

Badillo:

For total retail sales, excluding autos and gasoline, we’re looking for overall growth in the second half of the year of about 3.5%. The government numbers out today [July 14] show that we’ve had growth averaging about 3.9% for the last two months.

In terms of the government numbers, non-store sales are growing at a double-digit pace. Online probably represents the lion’s share of non-store sales. It’s also going to include catalog sales but I suspect that it’s the online shopping that’s driving the double-digit growth. We’ll continue to see double-digit growth in online sales through the holiday which can only mean that the average market basket size for any given shopper will grow significantly compared to a year ago.

The full version of this interview is available here, to eMarketer Total Access clients only. Every day they have access to new interviews with digital marketing leaders and trendsetting entrepreneurs.

Click here to learn more about how becoming an eMarketer Total Access client can strengthen your business.

Yesterday, Netflix released its long-awaited app for the iPhone and iPod touch, rounding the company’s offerings for Apple’s iOS platform. Significantly, the app works using both a Wi-Fi and a 3G connection. In my limited testing, the quality of the video streaming does take a hit over 3G, but the convenience of anytime, anywhere access makes for a fair trade-off.

This move dovetails nicely with my upcoming report on mobile content, which predicts a threefold expansion of the US mobile video audience between 2009 and 2014. In the report, I point out that attracting subscribers hinges on the right content, questions of cost and the quality of the viewing experience. Historically, these latter two factors have impeded the growth of mobile video.

The fact that the Netflix app has jumped immediately to the top of the charts of the most popular free iPhone apps provides strong evidence of pent-up demand for a video service that combines a deep catalog of content, multiplatform viewing and quality streaming. Netflix recently deepened its catalog with a nearly $1 billion deal with Epix that will add access to films from Paramount Pictures, Lions Gate and MGM.

In the wake of the Netflix launch yesterday and the introduction of Hulu Plus in June, consumers have increasingly rich options that combine online and mobile video streaming, and that is what will propel the market over the next five years. Although ad-supported video will grow more quickly, subscriptions will still account for the bulk of mobile video revenues, more than doubling from $413.4 million in 2010 to $901.2 million in 2014.

Have the issues associated with viewing quality and cost been solved? Not entirely, but let’s consider how these issues might play out.

Mobile bandwidth is certainly more plentiful, more ubiquitous and more reliable, although it may be the case that the amount of data mobile consumers use will always expand to fill the ever-widening pipes. However, Wi-Fi access points and, increasingly, WiMax networks will help alleviate some of the strain being put on the existing infrastructure.

As for cost, the ability to watch across multiple screens helps amortize the expense of a service such as Netflix or Hulu Plus. Of course, there is the looming issue of tiered bandwidth pricing and its potential impact on mobile data consumption. But here again, Wi-Fi is likely to provide a remedy. Plus, there is little evidence to suggest that mobile will become a primary platform for video consumption anyway (according to Nielsen, for example, the amount of time spent viewing video on mobile devices has remained stable over the past year).

In the end, it all comes down to platform integration. Consumers will increasingly expect video content (along with games and music) to be available on demand or via subscription on TVs, mobile and PC. The content owners that will thrive in this digital ecosystem are the ones that understand the need to deliver seamlessly across every possible platform.

Speaker: Noah Elkin, eMarketer Senior Analyst
What: Mobile Marketing Trends, Insights and Best Practices
When: Thursday, August 26, 2010, 1 PM ET

To listen and watch playback of the Webinar, click here. You can view the PowerPoint deck below.

View more presentations from eMarketer.

Join eMarketer Senior Analyst Noah Elkin to find out about:

• How the mobile audience is changing thanks to the steady advance of smartphones and tablet-style computers such as Apple’s iPad
• The outlook for the leading smartphone platforms and the
  “app-ortunity” for marketers
• How the evolving mobile audience is using smart devices to access media and content
• Consumer attitudes toward mobile advertising and marketing
• How companies are succeeding with mobile marketing—both web- and app-based—with specific examples and case studies
• Ways that marketers can take advantage of the growing base of mobile gamers, music listeners and video viewers to reach consumers

About Noah Elkin
Noah Elkin covers trends in mobile marketing, usage, content, devices and commerce. In addition to his analyst duties, Noah is co-founder and co-chair of the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO) Emerging Technologies Committee, which focuses on developing thought leadership around the intersection of search and new content and technology platforms like mobile, interactive TV and social media. He also serves on the Direct Marketing Association’s iDirect Leadership Committee.

Noah writes a monthly column on digital advertising trends for iMedia Connection and has been quoted in the The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, Investor’s Business Daily, DMNews and Internet Retailer. Noah speaks regularly at industry events and conferences, including Search Engine Strategies, Search Marketing Expo, Digital Publishing & Advertising Conference (DPAC), SEMPO roundtables and DM Days.

Sponsored by: Adobe, Featuring Omniture Technology

Healthcare communications expert Bruce Grant testified about pharmaceutical marketers’ use of social media before the Food and Drug Administration in the fall of 2009. Grant has more than 30 years of experience in pharmaceutical promotion, medical education, digital media design and production. Prior to joining Digitas Health, he served as managing director of the pharmaceutical marketing consulting firm eStrategies and director of innovation at Frontier Media Group.

I chatted with Grant about how pharmaceutical marketers can participate effectively in social media and potential scenarios for FDA regulation of social media.

eMarketer: Can you provide a brief synopsis of the testimony you offered to the FDA last fall?

Bruce Grant:

We reported on research results that applied to one of the questions the FDA asked, which was, should special considerations apply to pharmaceutical communications in social media or online banner ads? We had conducted research in the fourth quarter of 2009 on the treatment of risk information in banner ads and suggested that there was a case to be made for the so-called one-click rule that would place the full text of the risk information one click away from the ad.

eMarketer: Are the issues surrounding social media different than the online advertising issues facing pharmaceutical marketers?

Grant:

They’re totally different. Advertising is premised upon the assumption that marketers can tell people what to do and think and that if we tell them often enough and interrupt them in enough different venues, that they will do and think what we tell them to do. Social media is premised upon people turning to each other, not large institutions, to get the resources and the information that they need.

In many ways, social media are used by consumers as an antidote to a particular kind of interruption marketing that consumers, for the most part, find unhelpful. The FDA certainly looks at what kind of communications pharmaceutical manufacturers can make. Under FDA regulations, essentially everything promulgated by a pharmaceutical company that touches on its brands is considered to be either advertising or what it calls “labeling.” Ads are ads. Everything else is labeling and, essentially the same regulations apply to both of them.

If you’re a pharmaceutical manufacturer communicating about a prescription drug, your message has to be fairly balanced between information about the benefits and the risks associated with your brand. You cannot promote uses for your brand that are not on the label. You cannot overstate the benefits of your brand or minimize the risks associated with your brand.

eMarketer: Online hubs including PatientsLikeMe, HealthCentral and WebMD help facilitate a lot of conversations among consumers around symptoms and treatments. What do you make of them?

Grant:

Those are examples of large aggregators of patient communities. I think what’s important to note is that this is not a new phenomenon. The truth of the matter is going back even before consumers had any kind of widespread access to the Internet, there were dial-up services like America Online and CompuServe that offered communities, forums and chat. In some ways, these newer sites are simply carrying those ideas forward and are opportunities to commercialize or provide avenues for pharmaceutical marketers.

eMarketer: What do you think the FDA guidelines on social media will suggest?

Grant:

We believe that the FDA will issue one or more guidance documents probably by the fourth quarter of this year. It won’t provide channel-by-channel instructions for using Twitter and Facebook, but will clarify things for marketers about participating in social media.

In our view, the real barriers to the pharmaceutical industry participating in social media are the same ones we saw in other industries over the last three to five years. The industry needs to start from the premise that social media is about people getting what they need from one other rather than from large institutions.

The challenge is how do marketers relate to this? How do they exist in a world where there’s a big conversation that’s been going on before they arrived on the scene? How do they exist where the level of trust that people participating in the conversation have for each other, is higher than the level of trust they have for any marketer seeking to enter the conversation?

eMarketer: What can marketers do besides creating best practices for participating in social media while they wait for FDA guidance?

Grant:

Marketers haven’t yet fully learned how to listen. That’s the first thing you do. It’s a no-brainer if you think about real-world conversations. You listen to the conversation that was going on before you got there. Who are the participants in the conversation? Who has influence in the conversation? What are their concerns? What are the topics of conversation?

We recommend creating a structured program of listening as an ongoing process. After you’ve been listening for a period of time, and you’ve gotten a sense of the participants and their concerns, there comes a time when there’s an opportunity for you to say something. And in a real life conversation, the most important thing you can say is something that responds to the conversation that’s been going on.

Do you have something to offer? Can you point people to a resource that’s relevant to the needs and interests that have been expressed in the conversation? As you do that, then you pick up credibility. People come to know you. People come to trust you. And you can reach out into the conversation with an idea of your own. You can change the subject at that point because you’re known, because people trust you and because you offered something of value and relevance into the conversation, perhaps repeatedly up to that point.

Listen, respond, reach out. Sadly, there are people from social media properties who are out there just trying to sell ad space, sponsorships or other things.

Look, in contrast, at what AstraZeneca is doing with its Twitter account AZhelps. The company is monitoring Twitter for any mention of the AstraZeneca brand, for people having problems getting the brands under their prescription plan, being able to afford AZ brands and problems with side effects. AstraZeneca is responding to patients with very brief, direct messages on Twitter. For example, “saw your tweet about the cost of Nexium. AstraZeneca may be able to help. Call 1-800” and so on.

The full version of this interview is available here, to eMarketer Total Access clients only. Every day they have access to new interviews with digital marketing leaders and trendsetting entrepreneurs.

Click here to learn more about how becoming an eMarketer Total Access client can strengthen your business.

American consumers have plenty of alternatives to live TV, from TiVo and Apple TV to Hulu and YouTube. Content providers have kept some of the more popular programs off the Internet, so consumers have largely kept to “appointment TV.”

But their patience may be wearing thin. Internet use now rivals time spent with TV, according to Forrester Research data cited in Barclays Capital Internet Data Book August 2010. The idea of watching what they want when they want it is now ingrained in the consumer psych, more of a right than a privilege.

Several stories and research reports published in the past month seem to carry soothing statistics—at least for content providers—that the status quo is not threatened. In fact, a recent story in The New York Times seemed to assure that consumers are still hooked on TV—specifically premium cable content—and are not seriously thinking of cutting the cable cord any time soon. A New York Times/CBS News poll taken in August that found an overwhelming 88% of respondents paid for traditional TV service while just 15% had considered replacing their expensive cable habits with Internet video services like Hulu and YouTube.

Likewise, Comcast’s annual “TV Pulse Survey” showed 80% of consumers said they still regularly watch live primetime TV. Parks Associates’ “Digital Media Evolution II” reported that just 40% of US broadband households watched long-form video content online. And not to worry, content providers: most of it was just time-shifting from normally watched live TV shows.

But a new game’s afoot here: Comcast’s data also showed that 62% of consumers have watched primetime TV shows in time-shift mode in the past year and that use of time-shifting technology increased 61%, via DVRs, on-demand services, online or mobile. The top reason for time-shifting was a conflict with their personal schedules (79% of time-shifters). Programming conflicts claimed fewer respondents(63%).

Back in June, Nielsen’s Q1 2010 Three Screen report  showed the number of time-shifters grew to 94 million, up 18% in Q1 2010 compared with the same quarter in 2009. Although the amount of time Americans spent watching TV also increased by two hours per month during the same period, the average time spent multitasking with TV and a PC rose 9.8%, to 9 hours and 36 minutes per month.

Expect that shift to keep accelerating, as even more easy-to-use Internet-ready TVs reach stores—and living rooms. Some predictions:

• 65% of the 220 million flat-panel TVs sold in 2012 will be web-enabled and eventually connected to the Internet, according to investment firm Piper Jaffray .

• 98 million US broadband households will own web-enabled devices in 2014, for an installed base of 237 million devices, according to In-Stat .

• 57 million of all broadband households will be watching full-length online video programming on their TVs in 2014, In-Stat estimates.

Consumers already have the will to switch from cable and satellite providers. (The most notable part of the New York Times article was the pent-up animosity toward these providers, expressed by interviewees.) What they have largely lacked is the simple technology to make it happen. But the impending launch of Google TV, expected upgrades to Apple TV, Verizon’s recent announcement of an iPad app that streams live TV and many more efforts in the works, it looks as if the time is near—and inevitable.

As consumers plunge into back-to-school fall shopping and well in advance of the holiday shopping season, there’s a new location-based shopping app in town–Shopkick. In case you’re thinking “ho hum, it’s just another app” consider this: By downloading the free app from iTunes, consumers will get direct access to retail offers and earn a currency dubbed “Kickbucks” that can be redeemed for rewards or donated to charity.

Shopkick says it will give consumers who’ve downloaded the app rewards and offers just for walking into participating retailers. When I spoke with Shopkick CEO Cyriac Roeding earlier this summer, he positioned the app as a conversion tool that would enable brick-and-mortar retailers to drive more foot traffic and rev sales.

Last week, Shopkick announced that its geo-retailing service will be deployed at 100 Simon Malls, a big coup, along with previously announced partners Macy’s, Best Buy, American Eagle and The Sports Authority. Best Buy will launch a test-run of the service in over 250 of its stores by Oct. 1. Best Buy, through a spokeswoman told me by email: “This is a part of our broader experiments with technology for consumers, and it’s a facet of our overall, multichannel approach to bridge the physical and digital retail experiences.”

Shopkick says rewards and offers are live now in partner store locations in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles, and will kick-off in Chicago and other cities in the coming weeks. Within the next four weeks, more than 600 individual stores and 100 Simon-run malls will have fully deployed the technology.

Here’s how the thing works: When consumers enter participating retailers, their smartphones pick up a signal (a technology that retailers install) alerting them to relevant store offers. They receive Shopkick “Kickbucks” just for showing up which can be redeemed for rewards or donated to charity. Roeding takes pains to say that Shopkick is unlike regular GPS technology which requires consumers to check in. Instead, this system enables a seamless communication because of the Shopkick signal which doesn’t require check-in.

I think anything, including this app, that can lure shoppers into stores and drive purchases could be helpful to retailers provided that they tie in with smart, relevant offers. The app can be considered a form of multichannel retailing and could, if enough retail chains sign on and enough consumers download the app, become a decent form of in-store communication. Shopkick hopes, no doubt, that the app will keep shoppers in stores longer, browsing, taking advantage of offers and buying on impulse. The findings of a study by e-Rewards and TNS International found that 13.6% of GenY consumers used their phone to access the web for special offers and coupons while shopping.

If that’s the case, the Shopkick app makes it even easier since consumers won’t have to go out to the mobile web for those offers–they’ll get them automatically and seamlessly via the app.

Participating retailers are expected to deliver in-store deals, and/or added bonuses for scanning barcodes of specific products. For example, shoppers will receive Kickbucks for trying on clothes and scanning a barcode in American Eagle Outfitters dressing rooms. They’ll receive additional Kickbucks for scanning and learning about products and services at Best Buy. The faux currency can also be redeemed for Facebook credits to play online games online, download songs, in-store gift card rewards at participating stores, magazine subscriptions, iPods, and charitable donations.

The app has raised concerns among privacy advocates since offers are personalized based on consumer preferences, previous shopping behavior, interests, location and scans. Quoted in AOL’s Daily Finance, Jeffrey Chester, the executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, said via e-mail: “Shopkick should rename their awards currency ‘kickback’ — instead of ‘kickbuck’ — because you are handing them a treasure trove of your personal data. Consumers have to ask themselves — is this a good trade-off for my privacy? Shopkick’s so-called rewards are really digital bribes so you will gave them carte blanche to collect reams of data on you.”

I’ll reserve judgement until I see how easy the app is to use and how retailers decide the kinds of personalized offers they’ll deliver.

Most UK merchants expect mobile commerce to be part of their main strategy within the next 12 months, and more than 40% plan to have a transactional mobile site or application within the next year, according to a survey carried out by eDigital Research for the Association for Interactive Media and Entertainment (AIME), the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) and the Interactive Media in Retail Group (IMRG).

Researchers asked 140 marketers associated with retail, advertising or mobile services about their attitudes to mobile commerce. Of the senior-level representatives from UK retail brands, 94% said they considered m-commerce a significant business opportunity, and 59% said they expected their mobile revenues to increase over the next 12 months.

Current m-commerce revenues in the UK are relatively small; 63% of merchants polled by eDigital Research said they made less than 1% of their total revenues from mobile, or did not even measure income from the mobile channel. But retailers are beginning to recognize the emerging demand for mobile shopping. According to comScore and the GSMA, 4.2 million UK consumers per month are using the mobile internet to visit retailers’ websites.  Moreover, Brandbank’s “2010 mCommerce Content Report” noted that growing numbers of UK smartphone users are engaged in shopping behavior on their handsets; just 19% of smartphone owners surveyed in May 2010 said they did not use their mobile phone to help them shop.

Retailers will also be encouraged by recent growth in UK e-commerce overall. Online spending by UK consumers reached £5 billion ($7.9 billion) in July 2010, according to the IMRG and Capgemini e-Retail Sales Index. That marked a 14% rise on June 2010 and an 18% increase on July 2009—as well as the highest leap in ecommerce spending since 2007.  Average spend per person was £81 ($127).

All market sectors recorded higher sales in July 2010 than in July 2009, the index reported. Wet weather at the end of the month contributed to internet sales by keeping many shoppers indoors. Rain also drove visits and purchases at travel websites as consumers arranged escapes to sunnier destinations. Many travel operators had pushed their prices to rock-bottom, too, because the recession and flagging consumer confidence left many flights and package holidays unsold at the start of the summer.