Friday, January 27, 2012

[InfoGrapghic] Google's 2011 Revenue Break-Up - Top Spenders on Google Ad-Words in 2011

What Industries Contributed to Google's Billion in Revenues? [INFOGRAPHIC]
© WordStream, Provider of AdWords solutions.

Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Samsung’s “We’ve Been Samsunged” Super-Bowl Ad-Teaser denting Apple’s Domination?


Have you been Samsunged?
As much as I love Apple for the brilliance in design, precision and high quality prducts, I am getting wooed by Samsung’s recent ad-camapigns. Clearly Samsung is green with envy by Apple products but then they are trying really hard and I must say it can pay off.
Android activation numbers are mind boggling and especially the two recent ad campaigns shows Apple to be buidling green lock-ups to lock people up with their expensive Apps regime. While it projects Samsung to be the cool open world economic app store through Android MarketPlace! It makes Apple fan boys feel bad about:
- The long waits they have to go through during launch of new Apple products
- Paying for apps that Samsung users get free of charge
- And the launch of Apple iPhone 4S while the fans expected iPhone 5
The two recent Samsung Ad-Camapigns saying: “We’ve Been Samsunged” are really poking fun at Apple
1) We’ve been Samsunged: The ad-campaign teaser that Samsung is running for the Super Bowl.
2) And the previously run ad-campaign making Apple fan boys feel bad about standing in queues.
Do you think Samsung’s efforts are really denting Apple’s smartphone domination?

Who in India is Spamming your Inbox?


I am sure every one hates SPAM and we continue to get SPAM in our inboxes. We try all sorts of ways to block SPAM but then email SPAMMERS find new ways to reach our inboxes.
I recently installed Plaxo for my outlook and I was running some filters on it. I created a filter of people who are not in my address-book and have mailed more than 3 times in past 3 weeks. I hit upon over 100 such contacts and started wondering how is this possible that I have over 100 contacts who have mailed over 3 times in the past 3 weeks and they are not in my address book.
I copied all this data in an excel sheet to see what is happening here. Used some quick excel functions to filter out the email addresses using the LEN(), LEFT(), RIGHT() functions in excel. After obtaining the final email list, I started putting them in categories, spam status and industry type.
The three columns I made were:
1) Category of email – Let’s say I have subscribed to an advertising industry news letter, so I called it industry newsletter. Let’s say Linkedin or Twitter sends me some regular transactional emails about who connected / followed me then I called them as Professional or Social networking updates. Similarly for Banking, Finance, HR, Marketing, Technology, Travel, Food, Airlines etc.
2) Spam Status – I assigned 3 separate statuses to these mails:
  • Subscribed
  • Spam
  • Transactional
So for example, if I have subscribed to a newsletter, I called it Subscribed. If I get a Banking transaction alert, I called is transactional and some crap that hits my inbox, I called it Spam.
3) Industry Type – To generalize and clearly categorize my emails I started putting them under broad industry segment eg:
  • Advertising
  • Airlines
  • e-Commerce
  • Entertainment
  • Finance / Banking
  • Food/Beverages
  • Gaming
  • HR
  • Market Research
  • Media
  • News
  • Publishing – Includes all blogs, online information sources and general publications.
  • Real Estate
  • Technology
  • Telecom
  • Travel
Below is a chart which summaries my findings.
Key findings:
  1. Publishing – Is the highest SPAM generator category in India. Like fake job sites, fake deals site and these new online deals-online commerce sites which are all publishing crap content on blogs and their sites and are acquiring email addresses and spamming.
  2. Finance / Banking – I keep getting a lot of SPAM from finance / banking vertical too. This is mostly about invest here or invest there. Best schemes to make more money and why my life is in danger so I should insure myself crap.
Surprisingly media and other sites are following much better ethics in emailing.
This was my experience. And my guess is that if I monitor this data over a larger sample size and longer time period this will show seasonality eg: Jan-March quarter more finance/banking SPAM as the year is ending everyone wants you to invest and buy insurance. And hence the increased SPAM. VS during Diwali or similar festival season, you would see more SPAM for consumer brands trying to give the biggest discounts on their products.
Where do you get SPAM mails from and what do you do to block / deal with it?

Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Is this what Online Banner Advertisements in India are coming to? #DigitalMarketing #India

Is this what Online Banner Advertisements in India are coming to? #DigitalMarketing #India

Answer here

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