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Marketing will no longer be just about acquisition: Loyalty and customer acquisition will still be the top two strategic programs for marketing organizations, but by 2020 they are separated from pioneering new and emerging technologies to engage audiences by only 1.6 percent.

Innovation will focus on small screens and no screens: Mobile devices and networks (59%), personalization technologies (45%), and IoT (39%) are the three technology-specific trends that will have the biggest impact on marketing organizations by 2020.

Raising customer loyalty and better brand perception are the two top benefits (both 53%) marketers aim to realize through a more positive customer experience.

when a user gives Facebook a phone number for two-factor authentication or in order to receive alerts about new log-ins to a user’s account, that phone number became targetable by an advertiser within a couple of weeks

I’ve been trying to get Facebook to disclose shadow contact information to users for almost a year now. But it has even refused to disclose these shadow details to users in Europe, where privacy law is stronger and explicitly requires companies to tell users what data it has on them.

To test the shadow information finding, the researchers tried a real-world test. They uploaded a list of hundreds of landline numbers from Northeastern University. These are numbers that people who work for Northeastern are unlikely to have added to their accounts, though it’s very likely that the numbers would be in the address books of people who know them and who might have uploaded them to Facebook in order to “find friends.” The researchers found that many of these numbers could be targeted with ads, and when they ran an ad campaign, the ad turned up in the Facebook news feed of Mislove, whose landline had been included in the file; I confirmed this with my own test targeting his landline number.

“I think that many users don’t fully understand how ad targeting works today: that advertisers can literally specify exactly which users should see their ads by uploading the users’ email addresses, phone numbers, names+dates of birth, etc,” said Mislove. “In describing this work to colleagues, many computer scientists were surprised by this, and were even more surprised to learn that not only Facebook, but also Google, Pinterest, and Twitter all offer related services. Thus, we think there is a significant need to educate users about how exactly targeted advertising on such platforms works today.”

There are certainly creepier practices happening in the advertising industry, but it’s troubling this is happening at Facebook because of its representations about letting you control your ad experience. It’s disturbing that Facebook is reducing the privacy of people who want their accounts to be more secure by using the information they provide for that purpose to data-mine them for ads.

When I asked the company last year about whether it used shadow contact information for ads, it gave me inaccurate information, and it hadn’t made the practice clear in its extensive messaging to users about ads

1. Self-Interest These are your bread and butter subject lines—you should be using them most frequently. They are usually direct and speak to a specific benefit your audience will gain by opening the email.

2. Curiosity If self-interest subject lines work because they communicate a direct benefit of opening the email, curiosity-based ones succeed for the exact opposite reason. They pique the interest of subscribers without giving away too much information, leading to higher opens. 

3. Offer Do you like free stuff? Do you like to buy things? So does your email list.

4. Urgency/Scarcity This is the most powerful type of subject line you have at your disposal. Subject lines that communicate urgency and scarcity tell readers they must act now. 

5. Humanity Don’t forget to remind your list about the person or people behind your products.

Approximately two-thirds of the marketers indicate they will outsource one or more projects involving content creation, creative development, ad unit creation and online production/services.

Event spending will rise sharply as 70% of respondents plan on increases for 2012 with a significant shift to small/local roundtable programs and virtual events.

An amazing 95% of the respondents watch tech videos and three-quarters of them share or post video.  What respondents look for in video varies from one region to another with in-depth product reviews and how-to videos being of most interest.  Most people said they watch on their computers with the majority of viewings after business hours and on weekends.

The company is also debuting Video Ad Sequencing, which will allow marketers to string together a variety of different ad types should they chose. For example, advertisers can show a 15-second TrueView ad (which are the skippable type) to build awareness, followed at the next opportunity by longer spots (because that's what consumers want, right?) to further the brand story and later a 6-second bumper ad to drive purchase.

This year, we expect to see more brands rely on Messenger as a platform to market and sell products to highly targeted audiences.  With Facebook’s new Messages Objective, brands now create ads that allow prospective customers to immediately be connected to a live customer service representative or bot. Sephora, the multinational cosmetics chain, saw an 11 percent increase in makeover bookings with used Facebook’s targeted ads along with Messages Objective.

These days, influencer marketing has been so constrained that there may be no value there for your customer or brand. SEO expert and Moz founder Rand Fishkin noted this last year in a tweet, when he observed that influencer marketing used to mean a brand would "discover all the sources that influence your audience and do marketing (of all kinds) in those places.”