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After weeks of waiting for shoppers to come out of hiding, retailers are preparing for a surge of activity this last weekend before Christmas. “The psychology of the holiday promotes it to be a last-minute event,” said Mark Cohen, a marketing professor and former chairman and CEO of Sears Canada. “The closer people get to Dec. 24, the more frantic they get. That’s human nature. It happens every year.” This holiday season, retailers have purposely kept their inventories low to escape the markdown mania that took over holiday 2008 as luxury stores and discount chains got caught with too much merchandise following the economic crisis. The slimmer selection means shoppers need to have plenty of backup gift ideas in mind when they head to the mall or get online to shop, experts say. “Retailers are doing anything to create that sense of urgency, to give the customer some motivation to buy,” said Mary Brett Whitfield, svp at market research firm Retail Forward. Read the full article at Chicago Tribune

Research firm Nielsen released its top advertising trends for 2010. Not surprisingly the leading trend is the ability to measure activity that merges online and offline purchasing behavior, addressing the fact that users have expanded options for how they consume content and how they interact with brands. Nielsen data shows that “time spent on each of the three screens--TV, PC and mobile--is increasing. What remains to be seen is which advertising trends are the most efficient and cost-effective. Social networking has been largely aggregated onto a few major sites such as Facebook and MySpace, while other niche sites garner far less traffic (though potentially more per-user dollars.) The biggest opportunity/challenge may actually be in finding a way to make people like seeing advertising. Read the full article at CNET

Email marketers say the recession continues, but nearly 90% will invest as much or more in the platform in 2010 than they did this year. A recent survey from email marketing firm Silverpop shows 41% of marketers are planning to boost spending and an additional 47% are looking at making no cuts. In other findings: 52% said increasing customer loyalty, not necessarily acquiring new customers, is a focus in 2010. About 30% said behavioral targeting and promotional offers were effective for them in 2009.Read the full article at MediaPost

E-retailers were riding high in December 2007, just before the recession began to take hold. But they’re riding higher—at least in terms of total sales—in December 2009, as online retail sales for the week ended Sunday set a single-week record, reports web tracker comScore Inc. E-retailers sold $4.744 billion in the week ended December 13, exceeding the previous high of $4.70 billion recorded during the week that ended December 16, 2007. Last week’s sales represented a 4% increase from the comparable week in 2008. “This most recent week began with five consecutive strong online spending days surpassing $700 million, followed by a fairly upbeat weekend,” says comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni. “Six weeks into the online holiday shopping season and with a cumulative growth rate of 4%, we are tracking slightly above our forecast of a 3% growth rate versus year ago.”Read the full article at Internet Retailer

ClickZ’s Augustine Fou believes in the "demonstrated benefits of behavioral targeting" but wonders if believing in BT’s power is like believing in Santa. One arguments against the power of BT Fou points out is the belief that past behaviors are indicative of future behavior may not be. Fou notes "Click behavior and purchase behavior data sets are very hard to correlate without using identifiers like personally identifiable information, which cannot be shared without violating some privacy covenant with users." Fou also notes he believes that when marketers attribute dramatic lifts in CTRs to BT it may in fact be erroneous: especially because that increase may in fact yield tiny results. Fou notes "it’s actually because the CTRs are usually a rounding error to zero." Fou suggests t one way to improve BT is by letting ""targets" self-identify themselves and come to the advertiser -- they "pull" (i.e., search) for the information when they want and need it; they aren’t offended when the information they’re seeking is delivered to them." Read the full article at ClickZ

Retailers shell out big bucks on holiday ads. And while consumers like them, that doesn’t mean they’re influenced by them. A new survey has found that half (50%) of consumers say they’re not inspired to shop at the retailer whose holiday TV commercial or online promotion they liked best. Only 17% of consumers said their favorite ad motivated them to shop at a particular retailer. One-third of consumers said their favorite ad didn’t have an impact, because they already shop at that retailer. “Read the full article at AdAge

Rob Graham, VP of creative at interactive marketing firm Laredo Group believes the core of a successful ad campaign is getting consumers to buy. How can you do that when many consumers use their online experience to research products. Graham notes, “[Retargeting] reach[es] consumers who are already familiar with an advertiser’s brand because they previously saw an ad or purposely visited the advertiser’s site or landing pages. This generally also means that this particular consumer has already entered the sales funnel (and is product aware) and is ready to be engaged in ways that will help build interest and desire for the offer.” Graham notes retargeting takes time to set up and run, but it’s not uncommon to see retargeting conversion rates that are up to 20X greater than conversions from ad campaigns focused on only driving traffic.Read the full article at ClickZ

“Even with just a few pieces of data, you can do a lot,” said Michael Redding, the global director of development at Accenture Technology Labs when discussing how websites can use someone’s on-site activity to prepare and present personalized content. “People assume everything is trackable on the Internet,” said Samir Balwani, a strategist at interactive marketing agency Morpheus Media. “But the free form of social marketing — how things are passed along and not being sure where visitors are coming from — makes it difficult.” Science may power the technology, but it takes a human sense of subtlety to know when an online ad or recommendation crosses the line from helpful to creepy. This rediscovery of the human element springs from privacy concerns and an awareness of computer shortcomings in understanding consumer behavior. Acenture’s Redding says that if done correctly, new advances such as linking a Facebook account to an online retailer could make personalized shopping a positive experience. Many sites are experimenting with this technology. “Sites are just starting to tap the potential of this connection. It’s a deep experience where every site you go to will feel like home,” said Redding.Read the full article

Nine months ago, when Google first introduced behavioral ad targeting, it also rolled out an ad preferences manager where Web site visitors can edit their advertising interest categories or even opt out of behavioral targeting altogether. As it turns out, relatively few users visit the page, and among those who do only a small fraction opt out, according to Google. Each week, tens of thousands of individuals navigate to the page to Google. Perhaps more telling, the number of people who take no action at all is 10 times higher than the number who opt out of ad targeting. “A good percentage of users are saying they’d rather control [behavioral targeting] than opt out,” said a Google exec. Read the full article at ClickZ

Daniel Greenberg, CMO for TrialPay notes, “With everyone competing for a smaller piece of the pie, it’s even more important for retailers to spend advertising dollars in the right places. Online, they should make sure their investments are not just going towards acquiring leads, but acquiring high-quality paying customers.” Having advertisers pay based on the number of eyeballs, clicks or acquisitions (preceding terms ordered by increasing measurability) is still suboptimal, as there is no real measure of “quality” built in. So Greenberg asks what if advertisers only paid for ads that brought paying customers? He notes “Smart marketers will replace CPM buys with “pay per quality” (PPQ) buys – eschewing flat rates per lead in favor of flat rates per transaction. Using this new PPQ model, advertisers pay the right price for every lead based on each customer’s total lifetime value.” Read the full article at Adotas