Tablets continue to diverge into a ridiculous array of designs – larger than a laptop, smaller than a smartphone, waterproof, equipped with handlebars, etc. But soon the delineation between laptop, Ultrabook, tablet, and smartphone will be completely obsolete. While there is room for multiple winners in this revolution, the industry may want to accept – once again – that Apple did it correctly right out of the gate.

The most prevalent symbol of convergence and connectivity at CES was the iPad. While the device itself is nothing new (by CES standards), its impact across the show floor was unparalleled. Entire companies have emerged based upon the power of the iPad. They use them to measure home energy consumption, to operate companion robots for the elderly, and to drive skateboards. They use them instead of proprietary software because the iOS platform is established and easy to develop for, and benefits from continuous third-party support through Apple. In a word, it is stable.

This single-platform system works well for startups. They often have good ideas, but lack the resources necessary to develop new hardware or software. However, convergence becomes significantly more difficult when dealing with companies that are not accustomed to sharing technology. These companies often do more to hinder the simplification of technology than to facilitate it. The television industry is a prime example of this problem.

Televisions dominated the CES buzz, where every major manufacturer presented a large-screen OLED or 4K resolution model. All were visually impressive, but none are ready for the consumer market – at least not for the typical consumer. As televisions get more and more sophisticated, there are increasing demands on the consumer to take advantage of new innovations. The truth is that Smart TV technology is outpacing consumer adoption by a large margin. These “Outsmart” TVs are loaded with features that neither consumers nor marketers can get their heads around. This is largely a software issue. Every major manufacturer has its own interface design, and often times this design isn’t even consistent between models. This creates a barrier to entry for marketers, application designers, and consumers. While Smart TVs are now equipped with some unique peripheral functionality (such as motion control), adoption will not be widespread until the experience is seamless to consumers. As such, advertisers should avoid creating anything too gimmicky or esoteric and focus their future efforts on applications that have greater continuity across devices.

Enter Microsoft and Google. The most significant software advancement shown at CES was the working interface for Microsoft Windows 8. Whether you love tiles or hate them, Windows 8 is going to change the way users interact with their computers. By porting over the “Metro” design, which Microsoft popularized with Windows Phone 7, Microsoft is aiming to create a consistent user experience across all of its devices. Microsoft accelerated this process this past December, with the release of the new UI for their Xbox 360. Users noticed two conspicuous changes to the interface: 1) video games now take up a tiny amount of real estate on this “video game” console, and 2) advertisements now occupy most of the available real estate. While most of this advertising content is currently related to Microsoft (On Demand video, Windows Phone promotions), the potential is great. Similar advertising opportunities will be available within Windows 8 applications, allowing advertisers and developers to maintain a consistent look and feel across smartphones, computers, and gaming consoles.

Historically, Microsoft has struggled to compete in the smartphone market, which has limited the distribution of their OS on mobile devices. However, the best new phone at CES – the Nokia Lumia 900 – was built on a Windows Phone OS. In addition to a sleek design and brilliant Super AMOLED screen, the Windows software runs brilliantly, with a responsiveness that rivals that of iOS devices. The release of the Lumia 900 should mark the beginning of mainstream success for the Windows Phone OS, which will advance Microsoft in their efforts to connect their services across all screens.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, Google Android is already well-established in both the tablet and smartphone markets, but is looking to simplify their OS distribution. The recent release of Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) now unifies the OS across multiple devices, including tablets and Smartphones. The surprisingly-relevant Lenovo booth presented their K91 Ice Cream Sandwich-powered television at CES, which shows the potential for OS unification across all screens.

Ultimately, we can expect several companies, from Microsoft to Google to Apple to Sony, to vie for this omni-screen experience. Marketers should take note and focus their efforts on developing applications for those platforms which will gain maximum adoption from both a technology perspective and a consumer perspective. It’s still too early to declare any company the frontrunner in this vision, but their progress toward unification will no doubt be the headlining story of CES 2013.

According to GMS Local’s latest blog post, there are four local online developments brands should not ignore as Q2 quickly approaches:

1. The Rise of Google+ As Social for Businesses
2. Social Content Will Continue to Flummox Marketers
3. IYP Sites Will Continue To Stumble
4. Mobile Has Truly Arrived As A Search Device

Read GMS Local’s full blog post – Four Developments in Local to Watch for in 2012 – to get your brand ready to successfully navigate the local online landscape of 2012.

To chat more about local digital advertising, keep in touch with the team from GMS Local on Twitter: @GMSLOCAL

The answer to this question – which for many pharma brands has long remained unknown,  is answered in research we published today, Clicks to Scripts. From this study, a deeper understanding of search’s role as a vehicle for pharma brands is discovered, and even more compelling, proprietary model developed, which advertisers can apply to determine—and predict—the role paid search marketing plays in driving the fulfillment of new prescriptions for their brand.

A few key takeaways from this research include:

• An even deeper linkage between search channel activity and new scripts
• A statistical model advertisers can use to tie search more closely to the key performance indicator (KPI)—prescriptions filled.
• The ability for pharma brands to make more informed decisions on their investment in search marketing in the future.
• Justification of sometimes costly CPCs, weighing the direct ROI versus the a sole proxy metric of on-site activity.

Read more about these insights in the GroupM Search study shared below. If you would like to chat more about the research study with our CEO Chris Copeland, follow him on Twitter at @SearchBoss.

Clicks to Scripts: Search Marketing Model Predicts Pharmaceutical Prescription Fulfillment (GroupM Search R…

With the planning still under development, there are five clear areas that must be addressed by Mr. Thompson and the new Yahoo:

1. What is Yahoo?

Immediately upon Carol Bartz’s firing, two camps emerged around the future of Yahoo: those who believe it is a tech company and has to continue to invest in its stack in an all-out battle against Google and others, and those who believe it is a media company with a future in content. On Yahoo’s conference call with Mr. Thompson announcing his appointment, Mr. Thompson said, “Yahoo’s core business is creating great experiences for users.” He said it is a company that should have “excellent technology and content, not one or the other.” No Internet company has been better at being a jack-of-all-trades, but master of none, than Yahoo. Can the same company that had to get out of search tech really afford to do both tech and content?

2. What to do with Alibaba?

If Yahoo is going to try and do tech and content – and do them both well – then it needs more in its war chest. This points to an obvious answer to the question of what to do with its stake in Alibaba. Jack Ma and Alibaba remain interested in taking the stake back. A late 2011 report from Forbes placed the valuation as high as $17 billion, which certainly gives Mr. Thompson the flexibility to reshape Yahoo. Given past attempts have been reportedly strained by Ms. Bartz’s tact, new leadership may be a boon to the prospects for a sale finally happening. Ken Sena, an analyst at Evercore Partners in New York who has an “equal weight” rating on Yahoo, suggested that “Scott (Thompson) has a great track record in payments and has proven an effective executive at PayPal and has major tech chops and international experience.” That international experience is clearly a plus in this area.

3. How can Yahoo play catch-up in mobile and social?

Mr. Thompson correctly acknowledges that there is work to be done at the company. Yahoo has aggressively added its own social layer in recent months with the launches of Livestand, a tablet app designed to provide personalized content in a singular experience, and IntoNow, a social app built around shared TV experiences. This idea of building on top of the social graph and on existing platforms vs. creating a standalone product feels appropriate for Yahoo today. Mr. Thompson would be wise to leverage the power of Yahoo’s 700 million users to further cozy up to Facebook with such apps. In mobile, while acknowledging a gap in position in the market, Mr. Thompson said, “We will be great across all devices. When they want some piece of information, the Yahoo experience will be the first place they go.”

4. How does Yahoo’s primary revenue business – display advertising – fit into the strategy?

For the last decade, Yahoo has consistently touted the potential of its user data. In terms of scale and depth, few non-governmental organizations can match the breadth of consumer intent and interest that Yahoo can. Mr. Thompson, like every Yahoo CEO before him, indicated that he felt the ability to innovate will come from analyzing the data. It is a daunting task, but a necessary one if Yahoo is to better monetize its inventory and deliver meaningful connection opportunities to advertisers. As it pertains to the Yahoo display business, Mr. Thompson said on the heels of being appointed to his new role, “It’s too early for me to have any informed opinion on the display space and what’s happening there and what’s happening next.” This statement will give many great pause as a new CEO with no opinion on a core business is curious, to say the least. On the topic of display advertising, it is absolutely necessary to give Mr. Thompson the benefit of the doubt and time to assess what exists and how to use his experience from PayPal toward better optimization of the inventory and sales force for the collective good.

5. How does Yahoo become a hot destination again?

No, not for consumers, but rather, how does Yahoo in a hot Silicon Valley market with Google, Facebook, Apple, and emerging IPO opportunities at every turn become a desired destination for talent? There was a time when the Yahoo “Purple People” culture was real and tangible. The digital industry still roots for Yahoo to get it right, but there’s a clear challenge ahead in retaining top talent. Symbolically for the market, this likely starts with Blake Irving and Ross Levinsohn; but as reported in AllThingsD, the issues go much deeper. In an annual survey taken in Fall 2011 and shortly after the departure of Ms. Bartz, nearly 20 percent of all Yahoo employees said they expected to leave within the next year and 31 percent disagreed with the notion that Yahoo is innovative. This is problematic since Mr. Thompson indicated that Yahoo is and should be a technology company with “disruption” and “innovation” at its core.

Less than four years ago the company was offered north of $30 per share in Microsoft’s final acquisition attempt. Since that time, the stock has fallen sharply, trading in the low teens for most of the past two years, while the search engine that once led the industry has desperately tried to redefine itself as it was forced out of the search technology business. Unspoken here is the role the Yahoo’s board of directors has played in allowing Yahoo to reach this place. With Mr. Yang’s departure and rumor of even more moves, it may truly be a new day for Yahoo; whether it returns the exclamation point to the Internet giant remains to be seen.

This article was written by Chris Copeland, CEO, GroupM Search – The Americas, and was  published in ClickZ, Feb. 6, 2012.  Follow Chris on Twitter – @SearchBoss.

Google recently announced a change to their daily deals that aims to do just that. The recent announcement unveiled a partnership with 14 separate daily deals providers changing Google Offers from a single offering into an umbrella destination for deal-seekers.

Daily deals have historically focused on smaller local businesses, but large national brands, especially those with a number of brick and mortar locations, should keep a close eye on Google’s daily deal program. GMS Local’s latest blog post describes big opportunities that may be on the horizon as a result of Google’s change. One of these opportunities includes the possible creation of a local deal, PPC platform.

Read GMS Local’s latest blog – Is Google Setting Up A New Paid Platform? -  for a few recommendations on how large retailers can think, move and act like their smaller counterparts in the online deal space.

To chat more about local digital advertising, keep in touch with the team from GMS Local on Twitter at @GMSLocal

The document specifically speaks to Emerging Electronic Media, a.k.a. Social Media, and provides guidance on responding to unsolicited requests for off-label information about prescription drugs and medical devices. In doing so, pharmaceutical marketing experts believe the FDA is finally willing to let brands get a toe in the water with social media. “This is important, as once recognized, the FDA will be pressed to recognize the remainder of the issues surrounding the use of social media and pharma,” commented Joseph Cowan, Partner and Senior Search Strategist, Pharmaceutics, at MEC. “This is one limited usage of social as detailed by the FDA, but it is a start. However, it is not one step onto a flat plain; rather it is the boulder rolling down the hill. More will have to follow.”

What the FDA has done is give marketers an opportunity to engage with consumers who may not have specifically asked questions of the brand, but rather of the social community, regarding off-label use of a drug. The FDA has acknowledged that brands are capable of responding responsibly regarding their product in an honest, non-misleading and accurate manner, and that a brand’s response would be the best respondent regarding those queries versus other respondents that don’t have the background knowledge of a particular drug and recent clinical trials. This acknowledgement provides clarity on the role a brand can play in this line of questioning and opens up the opportunity for a brand to enter the conversations already going on in a meaningful, but regulated way.

With the FDA’s evolution on the subject, the next step is for brands to map out a strategy for managing this opportunity. Given this is a less-than-complete commentary from the FDA, some brands may choose to remain sidelined. For those who are ready to move ahead with the gift of guidance, there is a three-step process to undertake:

1. Listen to conversation in social media regarding a product. Utilize social listening technologies to monitor for content related to the product in question and terms related to company studies regarding new, off-label usage.

2. A pharma brand’s legal team should create a statement that would provide the querying consumer with a means of contacting the company related to the query, without mentioning the query by name. (Mentioning the off-label usage by name in the company response could be seen as a marketing opportunity.)

3. Pay attention to HCP related social sites where the same desire for information might occur, but the response should be as generic and non-marketing in nature as the above example.

According to Cowan, the reward outweighs the cost and risk. For many brands, he suggests “Such a response would require, initially, no more staffing than is already used to answer consumer queries regarding on-label usage. The advantage to the company is that the consumer query, assuming the forum moderator does not delete the conversation, would remain on the site allowing others who have interest in the off-label usage to see the contact information and access the company source.”

While this guidance may be minor in overall impact, given the broad spectrum of the social media opportunity, it is a critical signal that the FDA is now ready to start making commentary in an area brands are desperate for guidance. What is to come will have far greater impact as the FDA must provide guidance on how to deal with Adverse Event (AE) questions that may arise in social media. The model now exists, per this guidance, on how to transform a social query into a proper FDA-approved response and direction for further guidance. Now, brands need to understand the depths they may be expected to go to take appropriate action regarding AE comments/questions in the space and the infrastructure required to satisfy those guidelines. These guidelines provided by the FDA give brands an immediate action, but now that they exist, pharma companies will be hungry and needing of the remaining guidance required to safely and compliantly engage in social media.

This article was written by Chris Copeland, CEO, GroupM Search , and was  published on MediaBizBloggers, Feb. 9, 2012.  Follow Chris on Twitter – @SearchBoss.

He came to find the owner of the phone was a man whose look of frustration was not due to an unsuccessful shopping trip, long lines or a packed parking lot, but rather his experience with trying to make a purchase on a mobile site. Unfortunately, and as research shows, this man is not alone.

So how do consumers respond to a bad mobile experience?

A study by Harris Interactive reveals:

• 43% say they would abandon the transaction and try again later on a computer
• 16% would be more likely to buy from a competitor
• 12% would abandon the transaction and try a competitors mobile site
• 63% would be less likely to buy from the same company via other purchase channels

The statics above should sound an alarm for brands that are looking to make sales from their mobile site. Is your brand guilty of creating a frustrating mobile experience? Read GMS Local’s latest blog post – Does Your Site Make A Mobile Phone Fly? – for three key recommendations that can help save your brand from a mobile mistake.  

To chat more about local digital advertising, keep in touch with the team from GMS Local on Twitter at @GMSLocal

Marketing executives and managers of national brands, with a minimum of 500 brick and mortar locations, were surveyed and provided with the local digital marketing averages and best practices from national data in order to access their reactions and to have them create comparative “self-assessments” against the national averages. According to the study, one of three national brands has yet to invest in the basic local digital effort of online business directory listings, and thirty-two percent of these marketers attribute their insufficient engagement to a lack of awareness.

“The research shows a clear disconnect between what brands believe they are doing with those investments and what is actually being done. We speak to advertisers daily that have enormous blind spots in local digital coverage, and who welcome the education and strategy needed to resolve their willingness to spend and target which is hindered by the inability to determine what to do first and next,” said Chris Copeland, CEO, GroupM Search.

According to Borrell Associates, local digital advertising is expected to grow 18 percent in 2012, with local online spend projected to surpass all other channels by 2015. This growth, compared with the gap in what marketing executives perceive their brands are doing at the local level and the reality of their execution, shows national advertisers are missing the opportunity for sizeable gains.

As detailed in GMS Local’s whitepaper,“Perception vs. Execution: Examination of Brands’ Local Business Strategies Reveals Gaps to Act On,” national advertisers can overcome these challenges with deeper education around opportunity in the local digital space and self-assessment of the reality of their allocation and programs. Also helpful within the document is  a blueprint to help brands assess their local digital strategy and the three key areas for immediate action.

To chat more about local digital advertising, keep in touch with the team from GMS Local on Twitter at @GMSLocal

1. Personal Results, which enable you to find information just for you, such as Google+ photos and posts—both your own and those shared specifically with you, that only you will be able to see on your results page; 
2. Profiles in Search, both in autocomplete and results, which enable you to immediately find people you’re close to or might be interested in following; and, 
3. People and Pages, which help you find people profiles and Google+ pages related to a specific topic or area of interest, and enable you to follow them with just a few clicks. Because behind most every query is a community. 

The changes show a continued and clear commitment to the Google+ social network as noted by Stephen Hall, Sr. Partner, Director, Global Search for Catalyst online, a GroupM company. “This is a move to help push adoption of G+ on brands.  Growing your community/circles from a brand perspective, as well as increased sharing, should dramatically increase brand usage, given the vast potential increases in traffic from improved rankings.  This gets interesting for many brands as it forces them into the ‘content creator’ category. So for those that are not historically creating content, there is going to need to be a shift in the way that they are marketing their products and services.”

While many expected Google to move in this direction, there was clear unrest in some corners of the worldwide web over this move to a definition of a consumers’ world that is from Google and by Google. Twitter’s general counsel Alex Macgilivray, tweeted, in part, “Bad day for the Internet” and later the company, which once had a relationship with Google, expanded to say “For years, people have relied on Google to deliver the most relevant results anytime they wanted to find something on the Internet. We’re concerned that as a result of Google’s changes, finding this information will be much harder for everyone,” Twitter continued. “We think that’s bad for people, publishers, news organizations and Twitter users.”

Google’s response put all responsibility for any wider reach from Google back on the rest of the companies dedicated to cultivating the social graph. As reported in AdWeek and Search Engine Land, Google Fellow Amit Singhal said, “Facebook and Twitter and other services, basically, their terms of service don’t allow us to crawl them deeply and store things. Google+ is the only [network] that provides such a persistent service. Singhal added that “if others were willing to change, we’d look at designing things to see how it would work.”

For now, Google will begin rolling out these new features to all users and brands are likely to have little choice but to further engage with Google+ and the continued content creation required to distinguish. Dan Cristo, Director of SEO Innovation for Catalyst, advised, “One major thing I would expect brands to look out for is increased competition in the organic space. Previously, your organic search competitors were primarily websites. This is changing to now include anyone in a searchers social graph. Not only will preferences of ‘friends’ emerge in results as an answer to a question before a brand, those friends will be prompted to respond in real-time in this new world. Brands want to be the ones answering consumers’ questions. In order to earn that right, brands need to attain the same intimacy level friends have in the social graph, and act more like a friend as opposed to a brand.”

This article was written by Chris Copeland, CEO, GroupM Search , and was  published on MediaBizBloggers, Jan. 24, 2012.  Follow Chris on Twitter – @SearchBoss.

Recently SEOMoz published the results of an eye-tracking study done in partnership with Mirametrix.  This study focused on local search results and offers one of the first pieces of definitive data on consumer engagement with local search results across several variations of search engine results pages. The participants were shown a variety of Google landing pages that included universal search results. Of the five search types shown in the study, each one results in a SERP with local business listings that revealed that those local business listings garnered the most consumer focus, regardless of where the business listings were placed on the page—the top or the middle.

A compelling takeaway from the study was the participant’s fixation on the ”map pack” that Google displays in local-intent results. The map pack linked in a search received a lot of eye-tracking, as did the map image on the upper right side of the page.

To learn more about the results of Google’s eye-tracking study and the importance of maintaining your local presence on the SERPS visit GMS Local’s latest blog post: Eye Tracking Study Reveals Importance of Local Listings Management.

You can follow GMS Local on Twitter at: @GMSLOCAL