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Tuesday, January 29, 2013

FYI: Social Media

If you read this blog then you know that we were early adopters of incorporating Social Sites in your marketing mix. Especially if you can't find the budget dollars for a more comprehensive approach.
In that regard here are some stats from a recent Nielson study that come as no surprise:
The article was reported by "Media Buyer & Planner"

The study released on Tuesday by Nielsen and Vizu finds that 89% of advertisers and 71% of agencies use tools such as pages, posts, "likes" and "pins," while 75% of advertisers and 81% of agencies say they purchase social media or sponsored content. Also, 64% of advertisers say they plan to spend more on social media in the future.
While paid social media is relatively new, Jeff Smith of Nielsen says, "Advertisers are starting to look at social media as an integrated part of their advertising strategy."

We gotta wonder, are they just now figuring this out? I mean Really!

Monday, January 28, 2013

ITU Approves Low-Bandwidth HEVC/H.265 Video Coding Standard

This just came across the Radar: Post From: Studio Daily.com!
Bryant Frazer/1/28/13

New Technology Is Said to Require Half the Bit Rate of H.264 at Same Quality Levels! 

The ITU has approved the new High Efficiency Video Coding standard (HEVC) for high-quality, low-bandwidth video. The new standard, also known as H.265, will require about half the bit rate of its predecessor, H.264/AVC, the ITU said.
The H.265 standard includes a Main profile for 8-bit 4:2:0 video, a Main 10 profile that adds 10-bit support, and a Main Still Picture profile for using the same HEVC intraframe compression tools for still images.
Expect future extensions to the codec to include support for 12-bit video as well as 4:2:2 and 4:4:4 chroma sampling. HEVC is also expectde to be extended with tools for stereo-3D video encoding. The ITU said HEVC has already been implemented in technology demos from Ateme, Broadcom, Cyberlnk, Ericsson, Fraunhofer HHI, Mitsubishi, NHK, NTT Docomo, and Qualcomm.
However, the smart money is not on H.265 becoming a new universal standard overnight. For one thing, the bandwidth savings comes with an increase in computational overhead, which means that devices that support H.265 will be more costly than their H.264 predecessors. The cable TV industry, as one example, is still wrangling the transition from legacy MPEG-2 video equipment to more efficient H.264 technology.
HEVC may be crucial in any Ultra HD transmission plans, as well as for video streaming where bandwidth is at a premium. But it'll take a few years before the technology reaches a critical mass. In a posting last week at StreamingMedia.com, Frost & Sullivan Principal Analyst Dan Rayburn wrote, "We believe that while token adoptions — such as incorporation into DVB standards for terrestrial broadcasting — will occur in the short-term, and a few channels may also be launched by 2015, a critical mass of adoption will not begin to occur until at least 2016."
For more information: www.itu.int/en/ITU-T/studygroups/com16/video/Pages/jctvc.aspx; hevc.hhi.fraunhofer.de/

Tuesday, January 15, 2013

Back From The Holidays

Well as it happens every year, we are playing catch up after the holidays.
We have some good posts coming up including an insight into "Programatic Buying".  It's  must read information for every advertiser/marketer.

In the mean time this study commissioned by Pitney Bowes Software and published by emarketer came across our radar.
It's supposed to show how Internet Users & Marketers are using Social Media Sites but there is a glaring flaw in the data interpretation as you'll see in a minute. Here's a graph of the "findings"






















Now, What's Wrong with this? As the folks at ReelSEO point out: Although 93% of consumers are using Facebook, do these "marketing decision-makers"  know that 500 years of YouTube video are watched every day on Facebook? Do they know that 53% of consumers are using YouTube and 100 million people take a social action on YouTube (likes, shares, comments, etc.) every week? And do they know that 31% of consumers are using Twitter, and over 700 YouTube videos are shared on Twitter each minute?

Lesson here is that as marketers we have to learn how to interpret the data collected by bean counters into meaningful and real world usable information!