Mediaboss Marketing

By Tim Baysinger -- Broadcasting & Cable, 3/14/2012 6:32:07 PM

Marc Pritchard, head of advertising for Proctor & Gamble, is looking to slash money from his company's marketing budget by leaning heavily on digital marketing, reports The Wall Street Journal.

The report states that the consumer giant aims to save $10 billion by 2016, cutting $1 billion from its marketing budget. According to Pritchard, those cuts will come by thinning the ranks of marketing executives and spending more efficiently, for example by focusing more on lower-cost digital marketing and easing up somewhat on pricey broadcast ads, the report states.

Pritchard, in an interview with WSJ, said that less expensive digital advertising can be more creative than more expensive TV ads, and that he would like to see all of the company's brands embrace the strategy. He said that Pampers, Old Spice and Secret are farthest along, the report states.

Pritchard also said he wants P&G to craft campaigns for multiple brands around the same event, such as the upcoming 2012 Olympics this summer, the story said. He told the Journal that he has over 30 brands doing Olympic activities and consumers should expect to see "heavy-duty" digital activity for their Olympics program, which will include Twitter, Google, YouTube and Yahoo.

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P&G's Pritchard Looks to Market in Digital Space

By: Matikas Santos INQUIRER.net

8:36 pm | Wednesday, March 14th, 2012

John Bessey, Microsoft Philippines Managing Director, and Esther Vibal, Chairperson of the Vibal Group of Companies, shake hands during the Annual Innovative Education Forum organized by Microsoft to seal the partnership between the two companies.

MANILA, Philippines Can you imagine a classroom without chalk and blackboard, manila paper, cartolinas, one-fourth sheets of paper, pencils, erasers, and attendance sheets?

The leading Philippine educational materials publisher Vibal Publishing House Inc. and international computer software company Microsoft have not only imagined it, they are working on making that a reality.

Vibal and Microsoft, in cooperation with the Department of Education (DepEd), have partnered to create a new kind of classroom set to enter the digital era.

They are making this possible through the introduction of e-textbooks that can be accessed by students on tablet computers.

Chris Datol, operations manager of Vibals subsidiary Vibe Technologies Inc., said during the Annual Microsoft Philippines Innovative Education Summit last March 2 that a child becomes smarter when he or she uses a digital device and consumes digital material.

He cited a study conducted by the United Nations who found that students exhibited better performance because of the highly visual and multimedia content that tablets can show to students.

E-textbooks will have multimedia features like educational videos, full-color pictures, instructional audio content, customizable text, interactive quizzes, online connectivity allowing external links to resource websites, study tips, and many more.

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When digital classrooms become reality

The massively-multiplayer online (MMO) gaming industry has proven itself to be a powerful vector for pulling people together to play video games and for the enterprise to capably make money. Families have always been a large consumer of entertainment and MMOs may prove to be no obstacle to this factor of everyday life, as a result, this will be a topic of note at the 6th annual Digital Kids Conference in Los Angeles, California.

Running from April 25-26, 2012, they have invited online gaming industry veterans and Wizard101 creators Todd Coleman and Josef Hall of KingsIsle Entertainment to speak about their experience in bringing the MMO world successfully into the realm of the family. Their keynote presentation will be held at 9:30 a.m. PT, on April 25.

Wizard101 launched September 2, 2008 in the United States and reached the E.U. by 2011. Since then it has received much acclaim as a cartoony, interesting, and family-friendly 3D MMORPG. Players are thrust into a wizarding world facing a dire threat and are asked to help save the world of the Spiral; much like Harry Potter they choose between schools of magic and set off for adventure. It holds an ESRB rating of E for Everyone 10+ although it has notable mild fantasy violence and some crude humor (no doubt the writers of the game knew that parents would be alongand what child can resist crude jokes?) Much of the game revolves around a collectable card game element that provides spells to the players from their deck for use in combat and a simple user interface.

The game recently exceeded 25 million players in the U.S. and receives almost 13 million monthly visitors. While it targets mostly preteens, the game is actually quite appealing to all agesalthough much of the gameplay is designed to address children 8-12, the functionality and expanse of the game world is made to also interest adult family members who might come along with them without generating boredom. While the game currently operates across the U.S. and the E.U. they are looking to expand into the China market later this year with the expectation of a huge pool of potential customers.

Todd and Josef are pioneers in the MMO genre and visionary in their ability to tap both extreme and mainstream concepts and create immersive experiences with truly mass appeal, says Chris Sherman, founder and CEO of Engage Digital. Theyll open our Digital Kids Conference by sharing their winning formula for successfully transitioning from the brutal world of open combat in online gaming to an enchanting childrens title thats enjoying unprecedented growth the world over.

A press release on the subject of Wizard101 noted that it also shows a benefit for education.

According to a recent Trinity University survey of more than 30,000 Wizard101 players, 55 percent of respondents said the game aided their learning of reading, math, and time and financial management skills, the release explained. Additionally, one out of every five respondents said they play the game with their parents or grandparents.

Virtual worlds and MMOs have been sought by educators for some time now and weve seen Fantage step into that role as well with the virtual-world game Fantastic Age. While Wizard101 is not primarily educational, its focus on pre-teens certainly makes it important for its edutainment characteristics.

While its a functionally worthwhile game, and touted as partially free-to-play, Wizard101 delivers a very limited world for freesort of a trial experience in the first world only. Non-member players are trapped in a very small section of the game world and lack access to much of the content. They can unlock all of the content through a small subscription fee ($10/mo. or $7/mo. per family member) or they can permanently open sections by buying into them.

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Creators of Wizard101 to the 2012 Keynote Digital Kids Conference in April

By Jane Genova - March 15, 2012 | Tickers: BKS, CHRS, JCP, JWN | 0 Comments

Jane is a member of The Motley Fool Blog Network -- entries represent the personal opinions of our bloggers and are not formally edited.

No surprise, Barnes & Nobles (NYSE: BKS) stock pricehas beenrising since it hired a tech-savvy chief financial officer. Former cable television finance big Michael Huseby will lead the book chain into its digital future. When announced Monday, the stock, which had nose-dived 7.5% in 2012, rose 1.6% to $13.61. On Tuesday, it closed at $14.38. Not only is Huseby expected to unlock Nooks value, but he's also the guy in charge of how resources are allocated. Down the road, shareholders might well anticipatesome M&A to help push the company ahead of competitors Amazon and Apple, possibly the introduction of more and more devices, and maybe shuttering a lot of the brick and mortar that outside oflarge metro areas.

Barnes & Noble is not the only company to receive a thumbs-up by thestock marketbecause of a digital move. The other parts of retail which got smart earlyabout digital and didnt get complacent also have been darlings among analysts. At the top of the list are:

Last August, the L2 Digital IQ Index for specialty retailers ranked all three as Genius in their digital competence.Check out that term "Digital IQ" in the Index. Remember how, since the mid 1990s, Emotional IQ has been such a key factor in assessing human capital for hiring and promotions? High Digital IQ, or unusual mastery of leveraging digital,seemstobea keypart of what analysts look at indetermining the value of a retail organization.

But measuring Digital IQ entails more thansizing up theecommerce facilitated by the retailer's website. Bright colors. Two daily deals.Coupons downloaded to mobile.Free shipping. Nice, but ecommerce 1.0. In essence,high Digital IQ isabout how competent retailers have become in accommodating customer preferences continually being made possible by technology.According to L2Think Tank, 79% of those with smartphones use them for shopping. In the aisles they can scan barcodes and find out the prices at nearby competitors.So what is being done to keep shoppers from leaving the store without buying?Can brand loyalty as established by the three geniusesdo the trick?

Nordstrom pulls out all the stops on that front. For example, THE NEW YORK TIMES reports, ithas devices positioned around the brick and mortar so that sales associates can electronically check out customers wherever they are. Those who want an e-receipt instead of a paper one get it. Eventually it will probably be possible for customers to check out right in the dressing room. No more gathering up the clothes and hunting for a cash register. That will not onlyadd to convenience, butit saves time, the most valuable commodity in shoppers' lives.

Digital IQ also figures into how retail monetizes its social networks such as Facebook. Very few have made them actual platforms for transacting sales.Other aspects involve that pre-digital ingredient creativity onlyfocusing it on technology. Charming Shoppes (NASDAQ: CHRS) added a new wrinkle to the familiar website feature which allows shoppers to mix and match clothes and accessories. Now shoppers can, as with Google+, have their friendshang outonline with them and give their opinions about the selections.

But what about retailers not aggressively developing digital competence? To analysts that could be a sign, maybe even on a subconscious level,of something off or missing. That creates or adds touncertainty. No analyst likes uncertainty. Take J.C. Penney (NYSE: JCP)for example.When Apple and Target veteran Ron Johnson became chief executive officer, the stock rose to 43.18. Its now at 37.63 and is bound to go lower, warn the shorts like Shmulik Karpf, an economist at the Tel-Aviv Stock Exchange. Some have cut EPS estimates from those early February days of about 50-cents to 2-cents for 1Q and 2Q.

Most of Johnsons focus, at least inwhat he's telling investors and the media,has been on pricing reforms. The one digital piece which made news was his ending the high-profile ecommerce partnership CLAD with ESQUIRE.The fashions featured were cool, the antithesis of what J.C. Penney had become known as: dowdy. The current jcpenney.com website lacks excitement.Just on digital, Macy's could eatPenney's lunch and dinner.

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Retail + Digital = Higher Stock Price

Whether it's the mascots, team colors, or the cool uniforms, everyone wants an edge in filling out their NCAA tournament brackets. And it seems like every year someone comes up with a new formula to predict winning teams.

This year, one expert says he doesn't care how well the teams played during the regular season, all he cares about is how the teams are seeded by the NCAA.

Meanwhile, a Harvard student has put his study time to good use, figuring out a computer model to predict which teams will get upset in the first two rounds of the tourney based on this season's rebounds, turnovers and RPI, a measure of a teams' strength of schedule.

NEWS: Are Math Smarts Innate?

Both are using the logic of mathematics and statistics to predict what many of us think of as a magical tournament of small-conference Davids beating big-school Goliaths, and the possibility of seeing upset-minded Cinderellas dancing at the Final Four.

For University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana computer scientist Sheldon Jacobson, the 68-team NCAA basketball championship is a numbers problem begging to be solved.

"Of course I like basketball being at a Big-10 school," said Jacobson, "but this is really a cornucopia of excitement for the mathematically inclined."

Jacobson is an expert in complex systems that involve humans and technology. He figures out the best way to design aviation security systems or how cellphone use affects traffic accident rates. But for the past few springs, Jacobson has come up with his own science of bracketology, even though he doesn't really make his own picks.

He's looked at win-loss data back to 1985 and has come up with some interesting recommendations. First, don't pick all number ones to reach the Final Four. In fact, it's seven times more likely the Final Four will have zero number one seeds than all four.

Don't go too far the other way either. The odds that a 15th or 16th seeded team will reach the final four is 304-to-1. He says that by the time the "Elite Eight" teams are selected, their prior records or seedings are irrelevant.

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March Madness Bracketology: The Science