Tim's Picks

Tim's Pick: Beyond the Badge: Big Media Brands Strike Foursquare Deals

Summary: Foursquare is offering another channel through which media companies can reach fans. The opportunity is to extend engagement beyond the screen--both television and computer--and into real life. On Foursquare, "when users are out, they get pings from these show reminding them about it.

Tim's Pick: Zagat Books A Table With Foursquare; Restaurant Maven Reaches For Mobile App’s Cool Factor

Summary: Location-based social net Foursquare is on a roll when it comes to netting high-profile media partnerships. The latest is restaurant reviews guide Zagat, the NYT reports. By hooking up with Foursquare, Zagat may be hoping to bid up its own cool cache.

Tim's Pick: iPad’s Killer App: It Looks A Bit Like A Magazine

Summary: What’s the standout feature of Apple’s tablet that promises a step-change in our app economy? There isn’t one. “It’s really just the bigger screen,” says Colin McCaffery, product director at 2ergo, one of the industry’s leading mobile app developers.

Tim's Pick: Visible Measures Launches 'Trends' Ad Tool

Summary: Brands looking to understand whether their own online video efforts measure up to competitors’ campaigns now have a new resource.

Tim's Pick: Display Ads Stimulate Search, Confirms Eyeblaster Study

Summary: An Eyeblaster study released Tuesday "confirms" that display ads stimulate search by increasing the speed at which people searching enter the purchase funnel.

Tim's Pick: Search & Display: A Powerful Combination

Summary: Contemplating whether to choose search or display for your next campaign? How about both? In a new study, Eyeblaster Research explains how the search and display channels complement each other. Each channel works better on a prospective customer at a different stage in the marketing funnel, thus generating touch points all the way from the initial awareness to purchase.

Tim's Pick: Adify Data Points To Rising Ad Prices

Summary: Highlighting a rebound in ad pricing, the median effective CPM on sites across vertical ad network Adify increased to $6.04 in the fourth quarter of 2009, up from $4.28 in the prior quarter. The minimum espy saw a quarterly increase from $1.55 to $2.36 while pricing at the high end remained essentially unchanged at $8.95, according to the latest quarterly data from Adify.

Tim's Pick: Battle of the Video Ad Formats

Summary: New research has shown that consumers are likely to watch and remember a video ad that they actually choose - as opposed to one that was forced on to them.

Tim's Pick: In Email v SocNet Debate, Harmony is One Answer

Summary: Is Email dead? That has been a favorite topic for debate among marketers that wonder if they are wasting precious resources on this approach when their customers are - seemingly - flocking to social networks.

Tim's Pick: Google Wrap Up: Above the Fold; Gesture Search; Starred

Summary: Google made a number of significant announcements - even for the search engine giant - last week. For marketers three stand out in particular: