Mediative Blog: The Digital Results People

It is on everybody’s lips and it’s becoming the mantra of 2013 – mobile search in Canada is skyrocketing. As you read this blog post, 13.4 million Canadians currently have smartphones and they are using it to search the web every other minute.

In 2010 there were predictions about the penetration of mobile that would have been hard to believe. And yet, here we are, everything is already happening and even more.

By 2014, in Canada, more mobile phones will connect to internet than computers¹.

In January 2013, the third pillar of Facebook was released, behind News Feed and Timeline: Graph Search, a semantic search engine, allowing a user to execute a natural-language query in Facebook.
At Mediative, we have conducted many studies over the years using eye tracking technology to record where people look on a computer screen or device, and how they interact with web pages. Using a restaurant search as the test scenario, the Mediative team conducted an eye tracking study to help local advertisers understand which elements of the Facebook Graph search results page hold the most interest and what to do in order to maximize the chances of appearing in the results page.

Big Data! Such a promising nirvana with no universal definition of what it means. The killer buzz word comes with a lot of ambiguity that has caused marketing professionals to use it without knowing what it actually is. Sometimes we are all so drawn by the hype that it doesn’t look ‘cool’ to go back and question how the concept got started.

The good news is, unlike its name, Big Data is not rocket science and you don’t need to be a math geek to crack the code! Advertising has always been about ideas and creativity. Going back to the Mad Men era, no matter how much Don or Peggy believed in their ideas, there was no way to prove a proposal would rock the client’s business. However, today creative people in the advertising industry can use big data to support their media planning ideas by ensuring the right audience is being targeted.

IT WILL BE MORE ABOUT SYNCING THE DIGITAL ECOSYSTEM RATHER THAN DIGGING INTO AN OCEAN OF TRENDS. Planning, analyzing the future, and predicting new trends – it’s always a funny exercise that everyone is rushing to finalize by the end of each year. But the reality is not as simple as sitting in front of your PowerPoint presentation and highlighting the next big thing by reading a bunch of blog posts. We learn everyday what’s working and what’s not. In a specific moment all that work can be influenced by a sentence or a study. But it’s not a revelation, or waiting for that EUREKA moment to occur. It’s more the capacity to read a sequence of events and based on that sequence, try to sync with the next sequence of events. I see the crowded digital space more from an ‘approach’ perspective rather than chasing the everyday big silo trends. I want to share with you my view of 2013 simply through 2 approaches, each carrying a multitude of trends. Our market is mature enough now that our job [...]