Social Commerce,Video Ads and Mobile — 2011 Shakers and Movers

This is a great opportunity for marketers to promote products and services in a much more targeted fashion using the rich demographics and social graph on offer through Facebook and other sites. Facebook by itself delivered more than a trillion ads in 2010! Retargeting and audience targeted placement strategies showed > 5X lift. This has huge implications for social commerce becoming more and more embedded within social networking sites and away from traditional web store fronts. Companies like Payvment, BigCommerce and Shopvisible are leading the charge in enabling 1000s of merchants set up their social commerce store fronts ($30 billion market by 2015).

The online video market is growing significantly with a 12% Y-on-Y increase — a lot of this is being driven by more TV content being made available online (Hulu, broadcast TV sites). The market opportunity for video ads : On average 25% of all TV content is ads vs. just 1.6% of online content.

Smartphone ownership is past 25% while nearly 40% of mobile subscribers accessed mobile apps or downloaded content and 25% accessed social networking sites. This is a game changer for the mobile ad industry given the convenience and ubiquitous nature of this medium. 2011 is being predicted as the mobile commerce year given that more than one-third of all VC investments in 2010 were in the mobile space.

The need for smart embedded real time analytics (working on big data) to serve up targeted ads is critical — to help the ad networks in social and mobile get much higher conversion rates and actual revenues for their brand name companies. Claritics is deeply engaged with its social commerce customers in delivering key analytics insights from the vast volumes of data they collect through their social media applications.