Carl Howe, Chris Collins and Josh Martin from Yankee Group’s Anywhere Consumer research team join Yankee Group’s Chief Technology Officer Jeffrey Breen to add two more predictions to Yankee Group’s Top 10 predictions for 2009. In this second installment:

#7: The Apple App store will pass 2 billion downloads in 2009.
#6: Streaming becomes the killer app and Netflix finally sounds the death knell for Blockbuster in 2009.

Also in this edition, the secret reason why analysts are not representative of the general population.

Top 10 Consumer Predictions for 2009: #7-#6 podcast (mp3 / 5.1MB / 5:35)

On this Yankee Group Podcast, David Vorhaus, Vince Vittore, Josh Martin and Jeffrey Breen discuss all manner of free content and services, ranging from freemium services, advertsing-supported business models, free muni WiFi and more.

Free Free Free (mp3 / 6.57 MB / 07:10)

It’s a blessing in disguise, but pricing for mobile advertising is falling into a more reasonable realm. This article in AdAge outlines some of the developments in this regard. In the past, I’ve mentioned the challenges of the anecdotal and confusing “average CPM” for mobile advertising. But the good news here is that impression volumes are going up and prices are falling.

For a sage assessment of what’s been really going on with performance-based mobile advertising, I’ll revert to my college classmate, Eric Eller at Millennial Media:

“In the online world, there’s the long tail of medium and small publishers, and in mobile that’s developing as well,” said Eric Eller, senior VP-marketing at Millennial Media. “I think it’s that long tail that doesn’t have enough brand equity to stand on its own. Most of it is aggregated into performance networks, which is sold on a CPC [cost-per-click] basis.”

Of course, this is both a blessing and a curse for a mobile industry that’s pinned many hopes on mobile advertising revenues. With rising impressions and falling prices, will overall market revenues be able to climb to their expected highs? Or are these just the growing pains of a youthful industry.

Without getting into an involved discussion of mobile media, the mobile platform still faces numerous challenges. Even if performance is more integrated in pricing across the funnel, then we must now find a way to cram more impressions onto that tiny screen.

On this Yankee Group Podcast, David Vorhaus, Josh Martin, Vince Vittore and Jeffrey Breen discuss the changing role of piracy in the consumption of digital content, and how operators and content providers can monetize their assets without causing a consumer mutiny.

Piracy…Part 1 (mp3 / 3.58 MB / 03:54)

There are times here at Yankee where I feel that the only platform that anyone notices is the mobile one. But for something as simple as television, the mobile platform drives miniscule audiences and even tinier revenues. Meanwhile, traditional Pay TV platforms such as cable, satellite, IPTV, VoD and DVR tick along, developing their own versions of Anywhere.

We’ve been tracking ad-avoidance behaviors on DVR in our survey products for the past several years, and I wasn’t surprised to see an article in MediaPost about a study that Starcom and TiVo did on the same subject. I was surprised to see such a generic conclusion — that people said that they would be less likely to skip through “relevant advertising.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Over the weekend, I was headed home from a family visit. I’ve been trying to negotiate the best diagonal passage across New Hampshire, and I enlisted the navigation system to make that happen. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve thought for a long time that the enthusiasm around mobile search has been an example of excessive hyperbole. Everyone who works on anything related to the mobile platform seems to have an inferiority complex about PC-based Internet experiences. Without thinking about how media experiences are different on the mobile platform, the accepted logic has become doctrine: Read the rest of this entry »

It’s that time of year again: when experts (*) opine on the year that has been and the year that will be. Other than the pontification excesses attendant on the changeover from the 20th to the 21st century, this year’s bloviation about watershed events, never-anticipated black swans, etc., should reach new heights.

Yankee Group is contributing in its own way, of course: On Thursday this week we’ll hold our annual Predictions webinar, in which we share a few of our expectations for 2009 in the move to Anywhere. Based on pre-registrations to date, it looks as if it will be our best-attended webinar in all of 2008. (Click here for details.)

Today, I helped drop a few more nuggets into the digital drama at a Boston-based discussion for Internet marketing organized by the MITX association. Our panel of experts considered the lessons of the Internet from the last downturn, the new consumer, and where marketing will adapt. Lots of Anywhere-based insights, including these:

•  This recession isn’t the fault of the Internet marketing people — so this time around those in that sector can be the solution, rather than the problem
• This recession will drive advertisers to what’s measurable. One participant pointed out, though, that the bar should be even higher: not only should I be able to measure it, I should be able to say I’ve already tried it once and I know it works.
• The Anywhere consumer, already eager to be more portable with his or her digital experiences, will also be readier to engage in value exchange, a quid-pro-quo trade of information and consideration in return for something they value.
• That same consumer, bewildered or angry about the collapse of the economy around them, will be more cynical of corporate speak and slower to trust. Instead, he’s more likely to seek confirmation of critical information from multiple sources, or to take matters into his own hands.

We wrapped the discussion this morning by trying to fill in this phrase: “2009 will be the Year of (blank)”. Answers proffered included “Accountability” — meaning consumers call all their digital experiences to account for themselves, and brands call marketing to account for its value as well. Also “Survival” — another double-entendre referring both to the need for digital marketing to hunker down while the consumer hunkers down. My word to fill in the blank for 2009 was “Cash” — as in, if you have it, you’ll make it, and if you don’t, you won’t.

Join us Thursday for some real Anywhere insight!

(*) Old joke: If X is an unknown quantity, and ’spurt’ is a drip under pressure, then an expert is ‘an unknown drip under pressure’. Sound about right?

It’s easy to over-emphasize the role of internet video and its impact on television as a mass medium. But it turns out that there’s something there.

A few weeks ago, I was asking myself how many days I needed to postpone my vacation in order to push through the analysis for our 2008 Anywhere Consumer US Entertainment Survey. It turned out that the operative number was three, but something akin to analytical zeitgeist came to be somewhere during the fog of a fourteen hour SPSS session.

It all started with an e-mail from my father — a recently retired engineer with a new iMac and a little too much free time. More on that in a moment.

For the back-story: we’ve been re-designing our 2009 survey products, and during one of our recent team meetings, Chris Collins re-focused a set of aimless questions about social networks into something more specific. Chris argued that we really want to know how social networks, communities and recommendations factor into the decisions that consumers make when selecting communications services, buying electronics and consuming digital media.

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Microsoft continues to tweak the Zune’s music subscription plan, but is it time to pull the plug on the brand? Yankee Group Senior Analyst Josh Martin and Chief Technology Officer Jeffrey Breen discuss the history — and the fate — of Zune.

Zune podcast (mp3 / 2.0MB / 04:12)