Apr 2, 20145 min read

Marketing Day: April 2, 2014

Here’s our daily recap of what happened in online marketing today, as reported on

Marketing Land and other places across the web.

From Marketing Land:

The Email That Microsoft’s Cortana Assistant Won’t & Can’t Read: Yahoo Mail Microsoft’s new cool Cortana personal assistant uses information from within your email to make recommendations and provide predictive suggestions. That is, unless you use Yahoo Mail. As it turns out, Microsoft is forbidden from ”reasoning” on Yahoo Mail for contractual reasons. I’m still gathering more of the details, but Microsoft representatives told me that the […]
Is Marketing On April Fool’s Day Fool’s Gold Or Worth The Effort? Prank idea: don’t. — Denny’s (@DennysDiner) April 1, 2014 Another April 1 has come and gone and we’ve got a few questions. Were you fooled? Were you amused? And most importantly for marketers who targeted the day: Was it worth it? Certainly, it’s one way for brands to show customers that they have a sense […]
Ad-ID Tracking Now Required For All Digital, TV, Radio Ads With SAG-AFTRA Members As of March 31, any advertising that features one of the more than 165,000 members of the SAG-AFTRA union must now incorporate Ad-ID, a web based system for tracking commercial performance across all media. The deal covers all commercials produced for television, radio and digital platforms. The universal identifier, developed in 2003 by the American […]
Google Moves Universal Analytics Out Of Beta Since first being offered in October of 2012, Google announced today Universal Analytics is now out of beta, making all the features, reports and classic analytics tools — including remarketing and audience reporting — available to everyone. According to the announcement: Universal Analytics is the re-imagining of Google Analytics for today’s multi-screen, multi-device world and all […]
Email Marketers Aren’t Ready For Gmail’s Grid View, Yet: What You Need To Know To Stand Out Google is very good at forcing an issue. The company knows visuals are increasingly important for user engagement, so last week, it began testing a new image-rich grid view in the Gmail Promotions tab. The move to make images a key part of the email open rate equation should in turn compel marketers to pay […]
Microsoft Unveils Cortana Assistant At Build Conference Microsoft’s annual Build Conference kicked off in San Francisco today with perhaps the biggest news for marketers being the unveiling of its “Cortana” virtual assistant, a challenger to Apple’s Siri and Google Now. In particular, Cortana — like Siri — may route searchers to particular apps or search services. For local search, Yelp now seems especially […]
Google Takes “SpyView” Wiretapping Appeal To SCOTUS Google seeks US Supreme Court (SCOTUS) review of a US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decision, which affirmed a lower court denial of Google’s motion to dismiss a class action lawsuit brought after the 2010 Street View private “payload data” capture revelations. Plaintiffs argue that Google violated the federal “Wiretap Act” when it intercepted their private email […]
In A Mobile World, Not All Mobile Performs Equally For Advertisers It seems that every time I ride the elevator at my office building, every one of my fellow riders has a mobile device out — checking e-mail, making a restaurant reservation, even booking a trip… Whether I’m at bus stop, in line at Starbucks or dining in the cafeteria, almost everyone I see is peering […]
Bolthouse Farms’ Food Porn Index Aims To Refocus People’s Obsessions Well, here’s a fun one. Check out this bit of genius from Bolthouse Farms, which aims to right the imbalance of food porn that has swept the internet since the advent of social media and, more recently, Instagram. Entitled Food Porn Index, the project, created by ad agency Tiny Rebellion, analyzes the hashtags associated with […]
Infographic: How To Create Great Images For Blog Posts & Content Blog posts without images are like peanut butter without jelly, cheese without crackers, cookies without milk. They’re better together. That’s especially so when Facebook and Google+ both practically demand that any content shared has an image to go with it, in how they present posts to users. Fortunately, getting images right isn’t hard. To get […]
After Period Of Neglect Apple Opens Up iAd To “Filmmakers, Small Business Owners” Apple appears to be reinvigorating its iAd platform in a bid to gain broader advertiser adoption. According to AdAge, “anyone with an Apple ID will be able to open an account with iAd Workbench, the company’s mobile-ad management tool.” Apple hopes that opening up iAd will bring new categories of advertisers and boost interest in […]
Social Media: The Perfect Tool For Spying On Your Customers (Aka Doing Market Research) Marketers need to take a page out of the modern parenting handbook and utilize social media to spy on their customers and target audience. Okay, that sounds bad — but just like parents that keep tabs on their 14-year-old’s Instagram account, marketers should follow people in their target demographic to see where they are, who […]
VIDEO + SLIDESHOW: Email Marketing & The Audience Imperative While we were posting, liking, tweeting and Instagramming, something funny happened. Marketers around the world reawakened to the revenue-driving power of our oldest digital marketing channel: email. What does the future hold for email marketing? That was the subject of a keynote presentation by Jeff Rohrs, author of Audience: Marketing in the Age of Subscribers, Fans […]
Happy Birthday Gmail! The Email Giant Turns 10 Today Picture this. It’s April 1st, 2004 — April Fool’s day. Google launches a press release announcing their new vertical: Gmail. In the press release the Google founders state that search is actually the number two online activity to email and that they’ll offer users a full gig of storage. It had to be one of […]