Christine Carter was 21 when she started Epps Consulting, advising small retailers on their marketing and promotional strategies. Now 24, Carter provides research and consulting services to retailers including marketing, advertising, public relations, promotional and brand support. I took a few minutes to chat with her about the habits and behaviors of kids as shoppers online and offline.

Here’s a snippet from the full interview available on eMarketer Total Access.
(Read more…)

We all knew this day would come but it arrived sooner than some of us had expected. On July 19, Amazon announced it had sold more e-books than hardcover books over the past three months. Further, the growth rate in e-books accelerated during that time. In the month leading up to the announcement, Amazon sold 180 e-books for every 100 hardcover books, compared with a ratio of 143-to-100 during the three-month span.

Amazon also said unit sales of its Kindle reader devices had accelerated every month during the second quarter, both on a year-over-year basis and on a sequential basis. The company further noted that growth in Kindle unit sales had tripled since Amazon cut the price of the device to $189 from $259 on June 21, 2010.

There’s a lot that these numbers don’t tell us, starting with the raw numbers of Kindle and e-book units or the revenue associated with those product lines. Growth rates can be dodgy without broader context, particularly if the trend curve starts at a low point.

What we can glean from Amazon’s update is that the e-book business is a vibrant and fast-growing segment of the digital content universe. Analyst Mike Shatzkin, founder and CEO of the Idea Logical Company, predicted that, within a decade, fewer than 25% of books sold would be print versions.

The Amazon figures also suggest that predictions of a head-to-head battle between the Kindle and the Apple iPad may have been overstated. When the iPad launched earlier this year, The New York Times said Apple was on “on a direct collision course with the Kindle.”

However, in the second quarter, Apple sold 3.27 million iPad units, according to the company’s latest earnings report. While there’s no data on how many consumers own both devices, I’d be willing to bet that the overlap is significant.

Jefferies & Company managing director Youssef Squali suggested as much when he said Amazon’s announcement was “clearly an indication that the iPad is complementary to the Kindle, not a replacement.”

Mike Egan of ComputerWorld elaborated on this point by summing up 13 reasons why iPad owners still need Kindles. The main takeaway from Mr. Egan’s commentary is that the iPad does exactly what the Kindle doesn’t, and vice-versa. As long as this remains the case, there should be room for both items in consumer’s gadget wish lists.

Images courtesy of Wikipedia

Colgate-Palmolive had a unique marketing challenge in launching Colgate Wisp, its new mini disposable toothbrush. Colgate began introducing the mini brush in April 2009 with help from Big Fuel, a social media marketing agency. The mini brush created a new product category for Colgate and meant marketing to a young, urban target—18- to 25-year-old men and women—a demographic the personal care giant doesn’t typically focus dedicated attention on. It was clear that the company needed to figure out how to introduce the product into relevant conversations and contexts where its college student and young professional target hangs out.

Challenge: Colgate wanted to get Wisp into the hands of young, urban consumers who are active daters. The audience is active and mobile and dating opportunities can be created in an instant via text. “Wisp is almost a brand new product category,” said Avi Savar, Founding Partner and CEO of Big Fuel. “It’s an on-the-go product. The biggest challenge for us was making the product and brand relevant to the young consumer market.”

Not surprisingly, Colgate turned to social media to help it launch a multi-pronged campaign. But who wants to “friend” or follow a disposable toothbrush on Facebook? Colgate and Big Fuel tackled the challenge by conducting a lot of research. Big Fuel worked up several creative strategies and testing the concepts. “We wanted to know, what does this product represent or mean to the audience?” Savar said.

Typically, Colgate talks to moms, but with Wisp, the marketer knew it needed unique social media components to introduce the product and seed interest. Big Fuel worked closely with Y&R and VML, Colgate’s creative and digital agencies respectively on the TV campaign, microsite, online banners and social media elements.

Strategy:Big Fuel came up with a “Be More Kissable” creative platform that positioned Colgate Wisp as a kind of technology advancement that it believed would connect with the target audience. The idea centered around self-confidence: “Everyone wants to be more kissable not just within the context of a physical kiss, but all the time. Feeling kissable is about feeling confident. From a social media standpoint, we thought it was a good platform,” Savar explained. Colgate thought so too.

The concept, one of four that Big Fuel developed, was tested in four different markets. The linchpin involved creating irreverent online video content and syndicating it on YouTube and other video-sharing hubs. Along with a strategy focus on online video, Colgate Wisp developed a Facebook application and a Be the Face of Wisp photo contest.

At the heart of the strategy—online video. Big Fuel developed a series of viral videos, partnering with eight different publishers including CollegeHumor and YourTango and Web celebrities like Kip Kay, known for his how-to and prank videos, to syndicate the content. It released eight wacky videos targeting niche interests among the target audience, contextually integrating Colgate Wisp into how-to, comedy and talkshow-genre video content. The goal was to achieve a seamless content integration with no heavy brand sell. Online video syndication offered Colgate the potential to scale its vast consumer target.

The photo contest sought to identify the most kissable person in America: Participants who entered the contest uploaded a photo to colgatewisp.com and received a widget that enabled friends to vote for them. The widget was shared via the Facebook and MySpace networks and via the microsite. “It was like a syndicated version of ‘Are you hot or not?’, Savar said.

Big Fuel turned the contest into a social experience by enabling the widget to syndicate the photo content. Participants uploaded their photo, chose a specific Wisp color and placed it in the photo as an overlay. The contest enabled segmentation by geographic area as well. For example, when a man entered the contest, he could choose to look only at women in Chicago who entered the contest and decide whether they were kissable or not. On average, Big Fuel reports that there were 11 votes cast per person or one individual voting on 11 different people.

To drive brand engagement further, Big Fuel created a Facebook app called Spin the Wisp. Once the app was installed, it had the names of the consumer’s Facebook friends. Consumers could have the app randomly pick Facebook friends for the game or they could handpick up to 16 people to fill it. The Wisp landed on exotic locations and flavors—a woman could send a virtual kiss from Paris to her crush. Spin the Wisp became a novel way to flirt.

Results: Big Fuel reports that a Real Life Twitter video produced with CollegeHumor netted more than 1.7 million plus views. The video featured man-in-the-street style interviews by a standup comic who walked around blurting out things like: “I just found this new wisp. Anybody want a kiss?”

The Kip Kaye video “Quick Draw Gadget” in which Kip constructs a quick draw gadget out of a Colgate Wisp, has generated more than 1 million views. In total, the eight videos in the “Be More Kissable” series racked up more than 4.1 million views on YouTube as of late June 2010.

The two most recent videos for Colgate Wisp are College Humor POV “New Year’s Eve” which logged 1,255,872 views and Michelle Phan’s “Kissable Lips” video which has 1,791,352 views as of late June. All the videos were seeded on multiple video-sharing sites.

The game saw a 10% click-through rate. Each time someone received a virtual kiss, they got a notification that appeared on their wall. The 10% click-through rate was based on the total number engagements vis-à-vis the notifications.

The average number of spins per install on Spin the Wisp was 7.6. There were more than 100,000 engagements and 40,000 + installations of the widget and more than 1 million unique impressions of the widget. There were 500,000 views of a faux Wisp infomercial.

Overall, as of May, 2010, Big Fuel reported 6 million+ total engagements with the Wisp campaign (widget installs, video views, game plays, pass-alongs). Big Fuel considered “engagement” as active participation, meaning someone played the game, shared it, watched a video—there was a 10-second minimum on viewing—and commented on a video, Savar said.

Key Takeaways: Colgate learned the value of what an engagement is, according to Savar. “It was the first time they ever measured anything based on engagements. They are accustomed to the number of impressions.”

Now, Colgate is working to extend the engagement metric to its more mature brands. The brand has begun to understand what the value of video, game and other content is vs. framing content only within the context of an ad buy, Savar explained.

While the campaign was in the market for four months, the videos and game continue to run.

Next Steps: Colgate has moved forward with content marketing and social marketing for others of its product brands. Colgate shot new videos for the Wisp product site and two additional viral video. The brand says it’s looking to turn customers into audiences and its brands into social identities.

Image via Facebook

We’ve covered several mobile efforts from brands and agencies over the past few months. Here’s a collection of the interviews and case studies we’ve conducted on mobile app development, cross-channel strategies and general best practices for mobile marketing. (Read more…)

If there was one thing to be learned during last night’s series finale of LOST and last week’s “Upfronts” for broadcast networks—the annual confab of frenzied, glitzy presentations to advertisers of the new programming lineups for the fall 2010 TV season—it’s that despite ongoing economic woes and extreme media fragmentation, the $8.26 billion television advertising market remains a force to be reckoned with.

Still, there’s plenty of room for digital media, and increasingly, digital media commitments are part and parcel of the Upfronts as marketers look for relevant Web extensions to their broadcast media programs. Take the success of LOST online, for instance: ABC’s online episode player found huge success as the series progressed, and the show’s presence on social media was so pervasive over the final season that fans were clamoring for others to not post updates about the finale on Twitter and Facebook, should they spoil the big reveal.

As the world’s No. 2 marketer of consumer packaged goods, Unilever is one of the many businesses negoiating with networks during the Upfronts. According to Rob Master, the company’s head of North American media, Unilever is also aggressively looking to integrate digital media wherever possible.

The company recently increased spending on digital media by 90% in the first quarter of 2010, according to a report in Advertising Age. In that report, Mr. Master said “TV without question remains an important part of our media mix, but digital is clearly growing with us. It’s not just the year-over-year growth, it’s how digital has broadened for us over the past 12 months in terms of places we’re spending money today that were not nearly as robust 12 to 18 months ago, like search and social and mobile and interactive TV.” Unilever spent an estimated $7.4 billion on advertising in 2009, according to company filings. The $1.4 billion online video market is a hotspot that is bound to shift dollars away from broadcast and cable advertising budgets.

eMarketer’s Tobi Elkin recently chatted with Master and his media agency partner, Ritu Trivedi, managing director at Mindshare, about the 2011 upfront and Unilever’s perspective on digital media and marketing. Here’s a clip from the full interview, available on eMarketer Total Access. (Read more…)