Yin asked not to be identified by her real name. A young addict in her mid-twenties, she lives in Palo Alto and, despite her addiction, attends Stanford University. She has all the composure and polish you’d expect of a student at a prestigious school, yet she succombs to her habit throughout the day. She can’t help it; she’s compulsively hooked.
Yin is an Instagram addict. The photo… → Read More
Crowdtap, a web-based network that allows brands to connect with their most engaged fans and customers through social media, has just expanded to two more platforms: Facebook and mobile. The mobile application comes in the form of an iPhone app which allows fans to participate in the brand’s “challenges” (games and contests) in order to earn rewards.
Meanwhile, the new Facebook tab sets up a… → Read More
A B2B company trying to change the way that marketers procure services for ad campaigns says it has just closed one of Europe’s largest-ever angel financing rounds.
blur Group, which runs a platform called the Creative Services Exchange, says that it has raised $2 million. Bypassing the VC route, the company instead opted for a group of about 20 business names and angel investors including… → Read More
There is hardly a program or ad on TV these days that doesn’t ask its viewers to like its Facebook page or tweet about it. According to a new survey by global consulting firm Accenture, there’s a simple reason for this: those social media symbols actually work. Accenture found that, in the U.S, about a third of TV viewers have liked a show’s or brand’s Facebook page or tweeted about what they saw… → Read More
It’s no secret that most of us put more stock in the recommendations we get from friends than traditional forms of advertising. What’s interesting, though, is that while most consumers also increasingly trust online reviews and ads, trust in paid advertising on television, magazines and newspapers has been declining pretty rapidly. The latest data from Nielsen’s Global Trust in Advertising Survey… → Read More
So you’re in town to follow up on some weak leads and your boss says you’ve got to stay put for a few more days because there’s an old lady out near Patton Road who is looking to buy and you call back and say you got to get back to HQ for some paperwork and your boss says “Make the most of it.” The only thing that counts in this world, friend, is getting them to sign on the line which is dotted. → Read More
Kevin Systrom, the CEO of Instagram, earlier this week spelled out a few ways that Instragram might, one day, make revenue through marketing and advertising around its photo-taking, filtering and sharing service, which now has 27 million registered users. But for now, another company is using some of the big buzz around the mobile startup for its own business gain:
Vitrue has launched an… → Read More
PromoJam, a social marketing platform for the enterprise that allows businesses to create campaigns across Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, LinkedIn, Tumblr, and Myspace, has raised $1.2 million in Series A funding, the company is announcing today. The round was led by NYC-based Golden Seeds, and included participation from Band of Angels. → Read More
The most recent commercial for the BMW i3 and i8 concept cars is a great example of something enlightened marketers have known for years: emotion is the key driver behind purchasing decisions. Yet, today, most businesspeople still follow the old adage, “Emotions and business don’t mix,” relying on rational data to drive decisions instead.
Doesn’t the advertisement make you want to buy a… → Read More
Another big move for Buddy Media as it continues to build out the services it offers as part of its social media marketing business: the company has hired sales supremo Susan St. Ledger as its new president.
She is joining Buddy Media from Salesforce.com, where she had been for the past seven years in a number of key roles. They included (most recently) SVP of industry verticals, where she was… → Read More
Mobile app marketing firm Fiksu has new data today on the effect the post-holiday rush on mobile devices had on the number of apps downloaded throughout the month of January. In short, downloads skyrocketed last month, even beating December’s numbers. iOS downloads reached an all-time high last month, the firm says, up 12% from its previous high in December, when the devices were originally… → Read More
An interesting thing is happening in hardware marketing these days and I think Devin noticed it yesterday when he pointed out that Samsung, in their marketing of the Samsung Galaxy Note, is changing the script when it comes to gadget advertising, a tendency that is becoming more and more apparent in newer ads from many big players.
First, let’s look at the history of CE advertising. For most of… → Read More
Mobile app marketing company Fiksu just released new data revealing the impact the holiday season had on iOS app downloads and user acquisition costs. According to the company’s App Store Competitive Index, a measurement of the average aggregate download volume of the top 200 free U.S. applications, December saw 6.04 million daily app downloads. That’s a nearly 7% increase from November’s 5.65… → Read More
PowerVoice, a new social media marketing company founded by former federal consultant at IBM Ryan Landau and ex-Googler (and brother) Andrew Landau, is launching today. The service compensates users for sharing brands’ messages on social networks in a somewhat similar fashion to Adly. However, unlike Adly, it’s not focused solely on enabling celebrities and other public figures to earn additional… → Read More
As a voracious consumer of Web content since the early days (and an active blogger myself since 2004), I’ve found one of the most important aspects is the interactive component. When readers of content, like TechCrunch, want to learn more, the hyperlink, author’s Twitter feed, and additional headlines are ready.
I often get lost following the bread crumb trails from one blog post to another… → Read More
Promoboxx, a TechStars Boston 2011 company focused on brand-to-retailer marketing, has just closed its seed round of $565,000. The funding comes from individual angels Dave Balter, Peter Bordes, Adam Berrey, Jean Hammond and others. In addition, institutions including SK Ventures, Brand Ventures, and Launch Capital have also committed.
The company’s online service allows retailers to quickly… → Read More
As I’ve written about before, we’re in an amazing period of the consumer Internet. Despite a shaky economy, many web companies are in hypergrowth. This is reminiscent of the five-year period over a decade ago when companies like Amazon, Netscape, eBay, Yahoo, Google and PayPal were built.
One challenge, which isn’t new, is the battle for consumer attention. If you’re looking to… → Read More
A study in the Journal of Consumer Research found that even with all of our Facebooks, Twitters, and Wi-Fi dongles, 25% of us “have no one to discuss important matters with.” What’s more, those lonely people prefer minority-endorsed products over majority-endorsed (Mr. Pibb v. Pepsi, Android v. iOS).
The researchers Jing Wang, Rui Zhu, and Baba Shiv began their study, called “Social isolation… → Read More
TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Alley participant ThingLink is a Helsinki, Finland and U.S.-based startup that lets you add rich media tags to online images. These tags appear as small dots when you hover your cursor over the image, and can link out to a number of services, including Amazon, iTunes, YouTube, EventBrite, Facebook, Twitter, Vimeo, Flickr, SoundCloud, Spotify, Wikipedia and many… → Read More
Tapit is a new mobile advertising startup, founded in March 2011, that enables content sharing and offer delivery simply by tapping an NFC-enabled phone anywhere the Tapit logo can be found.
The company has now raised a seed funding round from Sydney Angels in record time – just 22 days from the pitch until the round was subscribed for. This is the fastest investment to date for Sydney Angels… → Read More
Contently, a platform that connects brands with quality content and gives freelance writers the shot at a regular paycheck, announced today that it has closed a $335K debt round from Founder Collective. This comes on the heels of the news that TechStars had chosen Contently to be one of the 12 startups to take part in its New York City summer program, which began last week.
The startup is… → Read More
Editor’s note: Steven Carpenter is an entrepreneur that writes the TechCrunch Teardown series that looks at the business models of consumer Internet companies.
My last TechCrunch Teardown outlined the multi-billion dollar online brand advertising opportunity. As part of that research, I looked at the top Facebook brand pages to see how some brands were successfully using social media to connect… → Read More
How much should a startup spend on marketing? The answer, according to VC Fred Wilson, is zero. The best marketing for a startup when it is just getting off the ground are kick-ass products. Great products market themselves. If you have a line item in your business plan for marketing, you are doing it wrong.
That is not to say that startups don’t need to do any marketing at all. And, let’s… → Read More
Ever since this whole blog thing started to take off, marketers have been trying to horn their way into the conversation. It started out as crude pay-per-post schemes, and then evolved into more subtle “sponsored conversations”. Once Twitter and Facebook took off, some of those conversations also were for sale. It got so bad, the FTC had to get involved.
Now Six Apart is launching its version… → Read More
As augmented reality apps gain buzz, marketers are jumping on the bandwagon. Last year, we saw augmented reality campaigns for everything from BMW sports cars to TOPPS baseball cards. Usually these involve printing out some sort of barcode or symbol and sticking it in front of your Webcam, which triggers a 3D image on your screen projected into your office or living room.
Now Muscle Milk is… → Read More
Dell has just teamed up with Vice Magazine, they of the Do’s & Don’ts, to create a new news site/blog/coolness injector called Motherboard.tv. After those strange, heady days of the Dell Dude, the company has fallen off the coolness radar. In an effort to right this wrong, Dell hired Vice to create a website and news source – sort of a pop-up web presence – to talk… → Read More
Considering that, on average, some 40 million people walk through Times Square per year, you’ve got to assume that EA has high hopes for The Sims 3. You don’t spend that kind of money on billboards promoting the game—billboard in Times Square, depending on location, costs in the tens of thousands of dollars per day—without thinking, “Yup, this game will carry us right through… → Read More
Marketo, an SaaS company focused on providing marketing automation software for B2B companies, has launched a bigger, better version of its sales and marketing optimization application. The software allows web-based marketing and sales teams collaborate on a single revenue cycle, turning web visitors and sales leads into customers using tools like email marketing, lead nurturing, lead scoring… → Read More
Who ever said having a dual-screen laptop that looks like a tank wouldn’t get you a little strange? Lenovo seems to think so and is saying as much in what amounts to some sort of internal test advertisement for the W700ds, a dual-screen laptop so massive that it should just be called a desktop PC. → Read More
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