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

A June 2010 Burst Media survey found that while internet users across age and gender divides felt attached to their technological gadgets like smartphones and netbooks, women ages 35 to 54 were most likely to say they would feel disconnected without them.

See more at www.emarketer.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

CHART OF THE DAY: Here’s What People Are Actually Doing With Their Cellphones

Some 34% of cellphone owners polled this year send and receive email on their mobile devices, up about one-third from 25% last year. Some 38% “access the Internet,” also up from about 25% last year.

See more at www.businessinsider.com

Internet Seen as Positive for Social Relations

While they acknowledge that use of the internet as a tool for communications can yield both positive and negative effects, a significant majority of technology experts and stakeholders say it improves social relations and will continue to do so through 2020, according to the recent “Future of the Internet” study from the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center.

See more at www.marketingcharts.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

According to the results of the 2010 Mom Social Influencer segmentation study by BabyCenter, five unique segments of social moms are broken down into two categories, the Influencers, Field Experts, Lifecasters and Pros, and the Influenced, labeled in the report as Butterflies and the Audience.  The Influencers make up only 18% of social moms, but they wield 78% of the influence.

Tina Sharkey, Chairman and Global President, BabyCenter says “Since 2006, the number of moms using social media has skyrocketed more than 500%… marketers (can) shift their mindset from social media to social marketing by gaining a better understanding of who the mom influencers are… “

Share of Influence by Social Medium    Share of Influence (% of Respondents in Social Category)   Blogs Twitter Facebook BabyCenter Influencer    Field Experts 0 1 18 44    Lifecasters 2 29 47 32    Pros 89% 68 5 2 Influenced    Butterflies 6 5 15 3    Audience 1 3 15 17 Source: BabyCenter 2010 Mom Social Influencer Study, June 2010 (percentages approximate rounded) Read more at www.mediapost.com

‘Power Eye’ Lets Consumers Know Why That Web Ad Was Sent to Them

First Trial of What Some Hope Will Become Online Ad Industry’s Long-Promised Self-Policing System

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Starting this week, AT&T, American Express, Microsoft and dozens of other major marketers will pull the veil off their web ads and show consumers what’s inside.

It’s the first trial of what some hope will become the online ad industry’s long-promised self-policing system designed to stave off the growing forces for regulation in Washington, as well as give consumers more control over how they are targeted by advertisers.

The system, deployed by a start-up called Better Advertising, will place an icon in the upper right-hand corner of the ads that looks like a cross between an eye and power button called the ”power eye.” Consumers who mouse over the icon will get a view of all the data that was used to target the ad, as well as the option to opt-out of future targeting by those companies. Read more at adage.com

Social Networking Study: Facebook Use Continues to Rise; Brand Participation and Engagement Heavily Welcomed by Social Networkers

The study of 3,000 U.S. social network users tackled not only general behaviors and platform preferences for social sites; it delved deeper into how social sites affect family and friend relationships and consumer attitudes towards brands and products. The most staggering statistics include:

Eighty percent of respondents have an active Facebook account, and 23 percent of those without an active Facebook account plan to join in the next six months

Consumers reported a desire to connect with brands throughout the study:

Fifty percent of Facebook users click on Facebook ads to “like” a brand

Thirty-seven percent learned about a new product or service from a social networking site

Thirty-two percent of respondents have recommended a product/service/brand to friends via a social networking site

Thirty-two percent of Twitter users re-tweet content provided by a company or product Read more at blog.performics.com

‘Boomerang’ Consumers Offer Potential Value

The growing segment of adult consumers moving back in with their parents offers marketers a potentially lucrative customer niche, according to a new study from Luminosity Marketing.

Boomerangers Influence Many Purchase Decisions Boomerangers have a large degree of influence on many purchase decisions, both for personal purchases and for household purchases. About 40% of Boomerangers make an independent decision about home furnishings for their bedroom, and close to another 40% make household decisions about home furnishings for their bedroom. Slightly more than 40% make independent decisions about health insurance, and about 35% make household health insurance decisions. Read more at www.marketingcharts.com

Criticism of behaviorally targeted ads by consumers, privacy advocates and the government has led to uncertainty in the market, which eMarketer expects to reach nearly $1.13 billion this year. Research from the Network Advertising Initiative (NAI) indicates the high value of those ads, for both marketers and publishers.

The study, which looked at ads run on member networks during 2009, showed that among users who clicked on a behaviorally targeted ad, 6.8% converted. That compared with only 2.8% of those who clicked on a run-of-network ad. Clickers found behavioral ads more relevant, but the NAI did not study how likely they were to click in the first place, a key component of effectiveness.

CPM rates were likewise significantly higher for behaviorally targeted ads, with the average price of a behaviorally targeted ad 2.68 times greater than that of a run-of-network ad. Retargeting also provided higher CPMs.

See more at www.emarketer.com

See more at www.emarketer.com

The “2010 Digital Marketing Outlook” report found that 81% of the brand executives surveyed expected an increase in digital projects in 2010, and one-half will be moving dollars from traditional to digital budgets. Further, more than three-quarters think the current economy will push more allocations to digital.

Senior marketers reported that social networks and applications were their biggest priority for 2010, followed closely by digital infrastructure. While social media marketing looks set to stay top of mind, a majority of respondents considered a range of digital activities at least “important,” with only games failing to inspire widespread interest.

See more at www.emarketer.com

See more at www.emarketer.com

In the comScore panel, we are able to see cookies passing between Web sites and panelists’ computers; and we are able to see and identify the different persons using those computers at those points in time. We recently conducted a study across some major online ad sales entities to determine how often the identifying cookie is associated with the behavior of a single user. Across 17 major entities — publishers, ad networks, and third-party services — we found an average of 44% of cookies were associated with a single user. Among the 56% of cookies that point to multiple users, if we assume that the wrong user is identified 50% of the time (which strikes as a conservative assumption), then on average, 28% of the time (half of 56%) the cookie involved in direct audience guarantees is pointing to the wrong person. Read more at www.mediapost.com

According to findings from Alloy Media + Marketing’s 9th annual College Explorer Survey, projected annual technology spending among college students (ages 18-30) has reached an all time high at $6.5 billion, ranking 3rd in overall discretionary spending for college students, just below food and auto. When all platforms were totaled, the study found that students are spending an average of 12 hours daily engaged with some type of media. Nine and a half of those hours are spent with their “tech” gadgets, including computers, mobile devices, MP3 players, and gaming devices. Comparing platforms, the study found: Students are spending twice as much time on their computers as compared to television viewing  33% of 18-24 year old students have increased their consumption of webisodes or user-generated videos since last year, and 30% of 18-30 year olds report frequent video viewing on social networking sites 61% of students are watching movies on computers vs. 76% on their television Read more at www.mediapost.com