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Only 1 in 3 shoppers visit brand websites nowadays, compared to 3 in 4 visiting retailer websites.*63% of shoppers visit a retailer's or brand's website to make a purchase compared with just 6% through social media.*The main reason for shoppers wanting to reach out to and connect with a company through social media is to find out something new (32%). They were equally as likely to want brand/retailers to connect with them (23%) as they were to want brand/retailers to sell to them (24%). Interestingly 12% also wanted the brands/retailers to help them have more fun.*Just over a third (38%) of 16-24 year olds admitted to already following brands/retailers on social media. This figure reduces as the age groups climb in number to: 29% of 25-34 year olds, 18% of 35-44 year olds, 8% of 45-54 year olds and respondents aged 55+ years said they weren't following any. 56% of the 55+ age group added that they just didn't see the point in doing it.

"Sony's new high-end televisions have a neat trick, enabled by Miracast and NFC, that allows users to simply tap their Xperia device with the TV's remote control to mirror the smartphone display on the big screen. Sony says all of its new high-end televisions (W800 or better) will have Miracast and an NFC-enabled remote control. We got a chance to check out the technology in action on the show floor, and to put it simply, it's really cool; it takes a few seconds of holding the remote to the back of the Xperia Z to connect the smartphone to the television, at which point the TV displays whatever you've got open on the phone. It's one of the best television screen-sharing implementations we've seen, as it makes screen sharing nearly effortless. To disable the mirroring, users just need to re-tap their phone to the remote control."

"How can brands do a better job of fostering these relationships so that they're at the forefront of consumer's minds? 1. Develop a great product. Not to resuscitate the Mac vs. PC argument, but there's a reason many people aren't hesitant to recommend their MacBook or iPhone to a friend. 2. Facilitate social sharing. Brands need to be engaged with consumers via social media, and brands need product sites and marketing programs that facilitate seamless social sharing. 3. Create sampling programs to reach digital consumers. Many influential digital consumers are eager to discuss their love of specific products and brands. Marketers need to reach and engage them in innovative ways, such as via sampling programs, contests, coupons. 4. Get game. Brand can introduce game element through badges, achievements, and prizes to turn their consumers to brand ambassadors and engage them in a fun way."

"A new report confirms the significant and growing influence of the Internet and social media in the shopping decisions of U.S. moms. In preparing to go shopping, mothers are 43% more likely to go online to gather coupons and 38% more likely to look at store Web sites than food shoppers as a whole, according to Packaged Facts' "Moms as Food Shoppers: Grocery Store and Supercenter Patterns and Trends" report.  Further, moms are nearly twice as likely as food shoppers overall to have used social media to plan their most recent grocery shopping trip (20% versus 11%). And in addition to consulting blogs prior to shopping, they are increasingly using mobile apps to ensure that they're getting the best deals while shopping. "

"Here at TechCrunch, we've heard Twitter is reaching out to TV producers and showrunners to find out ways that it can further integrate with the TV experience. That could mean Twitter-based voting, in the case of some competitive reality shows. It could also mean introducing interactive elements in scripted shows that viewers could use to unlock new content or web experiences. For what it's worth, Twitter is hiring for a role just like this: One of the positions listed on its jobs site is a "Manager of TV Relationships" position based in Los Angeles. The purpose of the job is to act as a "Twitter ambassador/evangelist to TV celebrities," getting them to tweet more during their own shows and just in general. But the goal also to work with high-profile showrunners and producers to find ways to integrate Twitter into their programming. One listed responsibility is to "manage and execute a volume of creative content plays with TV talent, such as live tweeting of shows, talent Q&As, and other creative uses of Twitter.""

"McDonalds beacon case study (retail) 26 McDonald's franchises in Columbus, Georgia tested out iBeacon technology with its customers. Over the four week trial, the franchises were pushing special deals for McChicken Sandwiches and 10 piece Chicken McNuggets. The iBeacon powered promotions pushed McChicken Sandwich sales up 8 percent and Chicken McNugget sales up 7.5 percent. Based on the initial results of the pilot it looks as though McDonald's will continue to explore the technology for an additional 263 retail stores in the southeast. "Everyone is looking at their phones, millennials especially, and that's where we've decided to engage," Jack Pezold, a McDonald's franchisee of 40 years, said in a statement. Spotless beacon case study (enterprise) Spotless is an Australian owned and managed provider of integrated facilities management services. In 2014, Spotless partnered with Lighthouse to build and deploy a custom workforce management solution with the goal of reducing litigation claims in the commercial cleaning service line. The solution allowed Spotless to understand when cleaning KPI's are missed in real-time and produce employee location reports that can be used as legal defense against slip and fall litigation claims in shopping malls. Spotless has also been able to optimise their workforce and reduce operating costs by analyzing Lighthouse powered heat mapping of employee movements. The solution has been so successful that Spotless are extending the capability across other service lines including facilities management, security and maintenance. Read the full case study here. Pause Fest beacon case study (events) Pause Fest is Australia's premier digital event, aimed at supporting and showcasing the best in creative and tech from Australia and all over the world. In 2015, Pause Fest partnered with Lighthouse to deploy a network of beacons that delivered proximity based content and experiences to attendees, while enabling real-time event analyt

""I really think there is a need here. Simplicity, efficiency and fun," he said. "There is a lot of power in being able to push coupons, updates to loyalty cards, tickets and payment options right to the lock screen of a consumer's device. Geo-locating passes is an incredibly powerful feature of the Passbook platform. Nothing could be simpler than shopping at a mall and automatically seeing the passes that are relevant to what's around me: 'Oh yeah, I forgot I had that 15 percent off coupon at Bose. I might as well stop in.' " That's exactly the sort of practical perk that Passbook's early adopting brands seem to love. Online movie ticket service Fandango was a Passbook launch partner, and the company president tells Adweek that the brand's iPhone app downloads skyrocketed with the debut of Passbook. While mobile tickets were already available through the Fandango app for select theaters, Passbook simply made them easier for customers to use. When you arrive at the theater before the movie, your mobile ticket pops up on your iPhone lock screen. Swipe the icon to open the ticket in Passbook (without even having to unlock your phone), and you're good to go."

The primary goal: begin to phase out reliance on the ad impressions-served metric and replace it with the viewable impressions metric. Also by that time the Interactive Advertising Bureau and its partners in the initiative expect advertisers and publishers will be using the eGRP metric, which industry players hope will complement the viewable impression metric with a more audience-focused gauge that speaks to brand advertisers. It was over a year ago that the IAB came together with The Association of National Advertisers and American Association of Advertising Agencies to introduce its sweeping project, overseen by the Media Ratings Council, a respected third party with a long history accrediting advertising and media firms. Pilot testing for the viewable impression is near completion, said the organizations during a webinar held this afternoon. The groups also said the creation of a viewable-based eGRP is underway, in addition to the development of a new taxonomy to classify digital ads as they move into this next evolutionary stage. The viewable impression metric would measure only ads that are actually seen by a user, rather than measuring all impressions served even when users don't bother to scroll down to see them. The idea is to count only real exposures of ads online. "The notion of viewable impressions is accepted by buyers and sellers alike," said Sherrill Mane, SVP, industry services for the IAB, during today's webinar.

Goal: The Wild Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to protecting the wilderness, started the Forever Wild Rhino Protection initiative to save Rhinos from extinction due to hunting in Asia.  Problem: Like all non-profits they had no money to create awareness and get support.  Insight: People don't always pay attention to these types of serious causes, but they sure seem to have a lot of time to watch silly viral videos on the internet.  Strategy: Find a way to have the message integrated into these silly viral videos... for free.  Solution: Download the top trending viral videos from YouTube, edit part of the video to include messaging about their initiative, re-upload the video with the same exact title as the original and call it YouTube Interventions. 

The video, entitled 'What's a VIDEO worth?' is designed to show just how big online video has become, how big it is expected to grow and why brands would be remiss not to hop on the online video bandwagon.  Just a few of the statistics that companies and brands will find hard to ignore in the video are as follows: 68% of viewers share video links (and sharing means more promotion for your brand!) More than 50% of the videos on YouTube have been rated or include comments from the community (which means a brand new way to engage with your customers!) Having a video on the landing page of your website makes it 53% more likely to show up on the first page of a Google search (and who doesn't like higher ranking in search results?) The average user's visit to a text and image-based website lasts only 43 seconds; for a website with video, the average visit lasts 5 minutes and 50 seconds (ding! ding! ding!) Customers that watch videos of products or services are 85% more likely to make a purchase (ka-ching!)

"So, how does a Facebook mobile ad network solve this problem? Easy: Evernote allows its users to sign-up using their Facebook account.  Facebook takes this user ID, and checks the cookies the same user's browser had last time he or she logged into Facebook or visited one of the pages tracked by Facebook's data partners. Facebook then takes the anonymized data about this user (really, many similar users) and sells Evernote ad inventory to advertisers trying to reach that kind of user. If the Facebook mobile ad network works out, it is a big, positive development for several constituencies: Advertisers, who will be able to reach customers on mobile, a platform that is going to be bigger than desktop by the end of the decade. App developers, who will be able to monetize through targeted advertising. Users, who will have more and better apps to use because there will be a better financial for developers to make them."

"Here are five lessons in the art and science of storytelling I learned by studying the pros ... 1) Adopt a newsroom mentality Make content development a core part of the way you do business - just as it is in journalism. Embed it in every department. Hire journalists just as LinkedIn, Qualcomm and others have done. Curate voices like we do on edelman.com. 2) Hand-craft your content for each venue Some companies try desperately to create singular pieces of content that can be simply be dumped in different places. That no longer works. Instead, hand-craft your content for each venue. Jonah Peretti, Buzzfeed's co-founder, summed it up best when he said: "Twitter is for your head, while Facebook is for your heart." 3) Cultivate superstars who have a POV News and information, to some degree, is commodity content - it's everywhere. Deep, thoughtful analysis, however, is in high demand. Just as the New York Times has Nate Silver and ESPN has Bill SImmons, you too can grow and cultivate rock stars who create thoughtful content with unique analytical point of view. 4) Be relentlessly data driven Speaking of Mr. Silver, if there's one thing he taught us this year it's that data rules. Follow in his footsteps in not only how you use data to inform and deliver your storytelling but also in how you measure your results. Many newsrooms, for example, now have real-time dashboards that help shape their decisions. 5) Let constraints fuel creativity Finally, it's often hard to convince management to put resources behind content until there's proven ROI. However, constraints can breed creativity. The Wall Street Journal's daytime video network, for example, was challenged to cover the Olympics without footage. So instead it creatively turned to using puppetry - and with great success. Be creative to get around constraints."

While Shazam for TV has continued to grow, Shazam's music footprint still has a big affect on social TV. It's no surprise that many times users take out Shazam to uncover a song they're listening to on TV. Even for a recent WWE  episode there were over 1,000 tags, without any call-to-actions on TV. The most popular songs were:  "Voices," "Break the Walls Down," "Radio" and "I Came to Play," which are the entrance anthems for:  Randy Orton, Chris Jericho, Zach Ryder and The Miz, respectively. Additionally Shazam has shared with Lost Remote some of the most Shazamed songs during TV from June. British dubstep band, Nero, gained 100K tags since 7 June 2012 when the record was first used in the new ad campaign for HP dm 4 Laptop. Keeping with British acts Alex Clare's 'Too Close' gained 312K tags this month thanks to the record's inclusion in Internet Explorer ads. Some of these tags have been driven by radio, but generally we've seen that big spikes in traffic for 'Too Close' coincide with TV play. So far 'Too Close' has been tagged over 2 million times worldwide! Lumineers 'Ho Hey' scored 91K tags this month thanks to the inclusion of 'Ho Hey' in the new Bing commercial. Dire Straits 'Walk Of Life' gained 31K tags thanks to its use in a Burger King ad. TV shows also drove huge engagement this month. Suits (Caught A Ghost 'Time Go' was used and scored 12K tags) and Pretty Little Liars (The Strange Familiar 'Unwanted' 4K tags) both scored highly. The Middle East 'Blood' saw a huge rise in tags when HBO broadcast the film Crazy Stupid Love which uses the track. 'Blood' scored 29K tracks in June.

"News and magazine apps are a segment where the momentum is likely to shift towards the Web within the next two to three years," noted senior analyst Aapo Markkanen. "Since news and media content already account for a large share of smartphone usage and are likely to play an even bigger role in later adopters' usage, changes in this segment alone will make subscribers on average download fewer native apps." The next wave of smartphone owners in mature markets like the U.S., Western Europe and Asia will download fewer apps than the first one-third of mobile consumers who bought smartphones, according to the report on mobile app storefronts. At the same time, ABI expects that in the games and utilities categories, the mobile Web will probably never catch up with native apps, due to the difficulty in matching the user experience. ABI's outlook on the future of apps appears at odds with a separate report released Tuesday by Strategy Analytics, which maintains that the emergence of HTML5 won't put much of a dent in the app economy. Instead, it predicts the Web programming language will lead to the spread of hybrid apps that combine HTML5 with native APIs (application programming interface) to harness the best of native and open standards.

But it's AOL's own properties the company aims to build up as a go-to premium buy for brand advertisers. Display revenue on AOL properties grew by 2 percent. The company is betting on premium ad formats such as its rich-media laden Project Devil units to entice brands to spend more. AOL reported that more than half of the advertisers who bought the ads in Q1 re-upped this past quarter. Armstrong admitted that last year the company's focus was not data-driven, and stressed the firm's renewed mission to ensure that data - meaning results-related numbers proving the value of buying AOL's ad products - is at the heart of its sales approach. People cannot leave the building without data, said Armstrong. Mobile and video ad revenue are key to future growth for AOL, said Armstrong, who said that last summer 75 percent of insertion orders included both platforms. Today, it's close to 100 percent, he said. The company reported that videos, video views, and video revenue rose at double-digit rates, though it did not break out revenues for video advertising.

Almost three-quarters (74%) of smartphone users are what the Pew terms "connected viewers," compared to just 27% of feature phone owners. The most common reason that people turned to their phones while watching TV was to occupy themselves during ad breaks, with 38% doing so. Among other activities people did in the prior 30 days: *23% used their phone to exchange text messages with someone else who was watching the same program in a different location *22% used their phone to check whether something they heard on television was true or not *20% used their phone to visit a site that was mentioned on television *11% used their phone to see what other people were saying online about a program they were watching, and 11% posted their own comments online about a program they were watching  *6% used their phone to vote for a reality show contestant

"Like seemingly every startup currently exploring an ad-supported business model, Waze has gone native for its ad platform. Typically startups wade into advertising by working directly with brands then erecting a self-serve platform down the road. Waze sped things up. The company began testing ads in its U.S. app over the summer, working directly with Zipcar, Best Buy and a number of fuel brands and convenience store chains; at launch it has added Procter & Gamble, Dunkin' Donuts, Wyndham Hotels, Whole Foods, Jamba Juice, CircleK and Kum & Go to its advertiser roster. The direct sales channel continues, but Waze has also set up a self-serve platform for its most basic ad units. The self-serve platform operates on an auction model with floor prices set at $1 per thousand impressions. In addition to a branded search result, marketers can pay to plot branded pins at their locations on the Waze map. When users click on these branded pins, they can click a link to the company's website, a number to call the location or-borrowing the idea of drive-to advertising popularized by driving navigation company Telenav-a button that would navigate them to the location."

"Several companies have successfully built cooperative marketing structures online. Companies such as OwnerIQ, for example, enable online retailers like Crutchfield to retarget people who visit the web sites of electronics manufacturers, offering the flatscreen TVs they were just studying - at a discount. When it comes to driving brick-and-mortar sales from online, though, Facebook appears to offer the best solution yet. CPG brands gladly pay for retail circulars to help sell their products, and there's reason to believe they could buy Facebook advertising to drive consumers into retail locations. One company with which we work, ShopLocal, puts a retailer's circular content into a database, including images and all the sale prices and details. In so doing it makes local data portable and extendable, so retailers can build online-only pages of the circular, or utilize QR codes to generate more content than exists in the print world."

"Facebook is now the second biggest server of online video, behind YouTube. Although Facebook is a distant second to YouTube, that's still huge progress. Facebook now shows more video than Yahoo!, Vevo, Microsoft, AOL and everyone else. Facebook has a partnership with Nielsen, to develop "Nielsen Online Campaign Ratings" (OCR), which measure the audience for Facebook ad campaigns in a similar way to how Nielsen measures TV audiences, by reach and frequency. The result is that it is now a lot easier for big advertisers to compare their TV ROI with their Facebook ROI. Facebook has a partnership with Datalogix, a consumer data company. It allows advertisers - particularly big packaged goods companies like Procter & Gamble and Unilever - to target their own customers with ads inside Facebook, and to compare those campaigns against control groups that did not see them, and thus calculate exactly how many sales any Facebook campaign created."

"Sam Glassenberg, CEO of Funtactix, which develops social games for major motion pictures like The Hunger Games, said the in-game ad market presents both huge opportunities and new risks for brands and agencies. He cited statistics from NPD and said that there are almost 200 million online gamers out there who play games for an average of 13 hours a week. Yet, the majority of ad spend still goes to TV or banner ads and only a fraction to games, he noted. "How are we going to close that gap?" he asked. The discussion was organized by SponsorPay, a Berlin-based engagement advertising company whose application rewards users that watch an ad with virtual currency and other goodies. SponsorPay is one of a handful of companies out there including SocialVibe, Flurry and WildTangent seeking to help games developers monetize their product and brand advertisers engage consumers with such ads. Games entrepreneur Wilson Kriegel, formerly with Zynga, addressed this potential by discussing his involvement with mega-hit Draw Something, an online drawing game developed at his former company OMGPop, which Zynga acquired in March. The game allows people to draw things and share them with their friends. Since its launch early in 2012, it has seen over 90 million installs, 10 billion drawings created and was a top trending topic on Twitter.  Companies including McDonald's, Disney and Sprint have incorporated their ads into the game. Kriegel said that ad features including in-game banners, game features and in-game call to actions seen a clickthrough rate of 1 percent to 10 percent-unheard of in an industry where average CTRs are 0.7 percent."