Based on the quantity and quality of leads generated, companies said email was their best lead generation program, followed by live events, website registrations and webinars. The effectiveness of online channels, coupled with the fact that prospects indicate the web is the first place they look for more information, makes it natural for companies to be increasing their investments in web design, email marketing and search engine optimization.

See more at www.emarketer.com

See more at www.marketingsherpa.com

The economy may have come back from the brink, but demand for digital coupons appears to be picking up steam, according to new data released by Coupons.com. The company said savings from coupons printed out or loaded to a loyalty card from its online properties doubled to more than $1 billion from $529 million a year ago. The value of savings in June alone hit $110 million, the highest total to date for any single month via Coupons.com. That increase has come despite traffic to the site actually dropping in the last year from 18.2 million monthly visitors to 14.5 million. Read more at www.mediapost.com

According to new data from The Nielsen Company, airing an ad both on TV and online greatly increases its effectiveness. In a Nielsen study of direct-to-consumer drug advertising, exposure on TV and online was more than twice as likely to prompt patients to ask their physician about the drug than on TV or internet alone. Compared to consumers who had only seen a TV ad for a specific drug, consumers who had seen both a TV and online ad were 100% more likely to ask their doctor about it.

Consumers who had been exposed to the ad both online and on TV in the last seven days were 157% more likely to ask their doctor about the drug than consumers who had only been exposed online in the last seven days.

Ad Exposure on TV Plus Online (Index vs. 100)   Internet & TV vs. Internet Only (Past 24 Hours) Internet & TV (Past 7 Days) TV & Internet Exposure vs. TV Only Memorability 89 87 100 Brand communication 88 91 103 Intent to ask doctor 212 157 100 Source: The Nielsen Company, July 2010 Read more at www.mediapost.com

Apparently, in-text advertisements, those seemingly annoying little ads that pop up when someone moves a cursor over a hot-linked piece of text in an article, can create impactful campaigns. According to a comScore study, Kontera’s in-text targeted ads delivered five times greater brand awareness than traditional display ads, and twice as much lift in brand purchase intent.

The study suggests 34% of consumers strongly felt Kontera in-text ads “clutter the page,” compared with 61% for interstitials, 52% for video ads, 45% for rectangle ads, and 36% for banners.

Twenty-one percent of consumers strongly agreed the in-text ads are “related to content,” compared with 14% for rectangle ads, 14% for interstitials, 10% for video, 15% for Google text ads, and 11% for banners.

Thirty three percent say in-text ads a less intrusive ad format, compared with 40% for rectangle ads, 53% for video ads, 63% for interstitial ads, and 29% for banners. Read more at www.mediapost.com

See more at www.marketingsherpa.com

In a survey of shoppers in four states, nearly four in 10 told cross-channel commerce solutions provider CrossView they preferred to receive promotional messages from retailers by email. It was the most popular communications channel, with direct mail drawing about a quarter of respondents and text messaging coming in third with 18%. Just 9% of shoppers were interested in promotional messages on social media.

See more at www.emarketer.com

After coming back strong in Q1, US paid search spending continued to regain strength as 2010 went on.

According to SearchIgnite, year-over-year paid search spending was up 14% in Q2, compared with a gain of 11% in Q1. Spending was down slightly, by 2%, quarter-to-quarter—considered a normal part of the summer slowdown in marketing activity.

See more at www.emarketer.com

Companies in retail, travel and auto industries dug into budgets during the second quarter in 2010 to spend 24% more on paid-search ads overall, compared with the prior year, and 9.7% sequentially, according to the Efficient Frontier Q2 2010 Executive Summary released Tuesday.

See more at www.mediapost.com

CHART OF THE DAY: Microsoft’s Head Of Sales Blames Facebook For Low Online Ad Prices

Social networks, with their massive inventory of page views, have much lower ad rates on a cost per thousand impressions (CPM) basis than the Internet at large. ComScore reports that Facebook and MySpace only get a $0.56 CPM on average, while the Internet at large gets $2.43.

See more at www.businessinsider.com

“By 2014 eMarketer forecasts that figure will leap to $96.8 billion, growing at an 11.9% compound annual rate, despite the slow, uneven and fragile global economic recovery,” said eMarketer’s Jared Jenks, author of the new report “Worldwide Ad Spending.” “These rates will be unmatched by other media.”

Read more at www.emarketer.com

Top Display Advertising Site Categories (April 2010 Total U.S. Home & Work Locations) Publisher Total Display Ad Impressions (MM) Share of Impressions Estimated Spending ($ 000) Cost per Thousand Impressions (CPM) Total Internet Audience 354,636 100.0% 893,681 $2.52 Social Networking 98,176 27.7% 54,684 $0.56 Portals 69,664 19.6% 181,266 $2.60 Entertainment 38,104 10.7% 181,147 $4.75 e-mail 34,327 9.7% 32,370 $0.94 Community 15,884 4.5% 33,435 $2.10 General News 12,542 3.5% 77,055 $6.14 Sports 10,850 3.1% 68,214 $6.29 Newspapers 8,506 2.4% 59,441 $6.99 Online Gaming 7,929 2.2% 21,234 $2.68 Photos 7,391 2.1% 7,953 $1.08 Source: comScore Ad Metrix, June 2010 Read more at www.mediapost.com

Digital Migration Hurts Traditional Media Revenues More than Expected

Digital Migration Slams Publishing, Radio The annual decline in 2009 revenues in several traditional media categories was more severe than originally forecast, according to PriceWaterhouseCoopers research. Most striking was the decline in out-of-home revenues, which fell approximately 13% in 2009, compared to a forecast of about 7%. In addition, radio revenues declined about 9%, compared to an approximately 7% forecast.

See more at www.marketingcharts.com

Mobile TV Revenues to Reach $7B in 2015 Data from “Tuning in to Mobile TV” indicates that global revenues from mobile TV, which totaled $3.2 billion in 2009, should reach $7 billion by 2015. Almost all of this growth will occur in streamed TV services, which currently account for the vast majority of mobile TV revenues. Broadcast TV services will undergo slight but steady growth, while streamed TV services will steadily rise for the next year or so and then sharply accelerate through 2015.

See more at www.marketingcharts.com

Top Search Engines by Share of Visits April vs. May 2010

See more at www.marketingcharts.com

The Internet is the fastest growing segment of the paid product placement industry, according to a new outlook from media industry economic analyst PQ Media. While still one of the smallest product placement mediums in the branded entertainment category, paid product placements grew 11.1% to $40 million in 2009, a year in which the overall marketplace declined 2.8% to $3.61 billion, according to the PQ Media Global Branded Entertainment Marketing Forecast 2010-2014 being released today.Read more at www.mediapost.com

CHART OF THE DAY: Only 40% Of Web Ads Use Adobe Flash

See more at www.businessinsider.com

Many social media marketers are eager to tie a hard number to the value of their efforts. To that end, firms have attempted to analyze the worth of fans and followers on social networking sites like Facebook.

Digital consulting firm Syncapse and research company Hotspex have come up with an empirical formula that puts an average value of $136.38 on the Facebook fans of the site’s 20 biggest corporate brands. Most of that value comes from how much the fans will spend on the brand’s products, with additional dollars coming from customer loyalty, recommendations and earned media.

The study found that people spent significantly more on products they were fans of, compared with consumers who were not fans. In the case of many of Facebook’s most popular food and beverage marketers, fan spending was more than double that of non-fans.

The pattern of increased fan spending held across all of the top 20 brands on Facebook, with differences ranging from 51% for Oreo fans to 168% for fans of Nokia. Read more at www.emarketer.com

Young mobile population eager to communicate and connect

Hispanic mobile phone users are younger than the Hispanic Internet population, according to eMarketer estimates and comScore: 50.7% of mobile phone users are between 18 and 34 years of age compared with 35.6% in the same age group among Hispanic Internet users. The Hispanic mobile phone population skews even more male than the general population: 55.6% of mobile phone users are male, compared with 51% of males in the Hispanic population.

See more at www.emarketer.com

The proportion of online retailers with mobile-tailored sites has tripled in the last year but still remains small, according to a new study. In its second annual mobile commerce audit, digital strategy firm Acquity Group found that 12% of the top 500 Internet retailers had sites optimized for mobile phones, up from 4% a year ago. And despite all the buzz around mobile apps, the share of companies with downloadable mobile apps is only 7%, up from 2% last year. Only 5% had both a mobilized site and an app and only 2% had an e-commerce-enabled app. In terms of specific devices, 11% had apps for the iPhone — up from 1% last year — but few had ones geared to other smartphone platforms such as Android, Palm or the BlackBerry. Only 12% of retailers had mobile sites that allowed customers to complete a transaction through checkout on at least one type of smartphone, and only 2% offered apps with check-out capability. Read more at www.mediapost.com