Reblogged from VentureBeat:

The social and mobile games gold rush inspired lots of investments in 2011, as venture capitalists tried to find the next Zynga. But the year was also a big one for acquisitions, particularly as big companies such as Electronic Arts tried to outmaneuver the social game giant via acquisitions. In 2011, 77 game companies were acquired for at least $2.827 billion, according to research by VentureBeat and other sources. We didn’t count the numbers for last year, but IHS Screen Digest reported that game …

2011: Top Deals of 2011 in Gaming!

As much as I love Apple for the brilliance in design, precision and high quality prducts, I am getting wooed by Samsung’s recent ad-camapigns. Clearly Samsung is green with envy by Apple products but then they are trying really hard and I must say it can pay off.

Android activation numbers are mind boggling and especially the two recent ad campaigns shows Apple to be buidling green lock-ups to lock people up with their expensive Apps regime. While it projects Samsung to be the cool open world economic app store through Android MarketPlace! It makes Apple fan boys feel bad about:

- The long waits they have to go through during launch of new Apple products
- Paying for apps that Samsung users get free of charge
- And the launch of Apple iPhone 4S while the fans expected iPhone 5

The two recent Samsung Ad-Camapigns saying: “We’ve Been Samsunged” are really poking fun at Apple

1) We’ve been Samsunged: The ad-campaign teaser that Samsung is running for the Super Bowl.

2) And the previously run ad-campaign making Apple fan boys feel bad about standing in queues.

Do you think Samsung’s efforts are really denting Apple’s smartphone domination?

I recently installed Plaxo for my outlook and I was running some filters on it. I created a filter of people who are not in my address-book and have mailed more than 3 times in past 3 weeks. I hit upon over 100 such contacts and started wondering how is this possible that I have over 100 contacts who have mailed over 3 times in the past 3 weeks and they are not in my address book.

I copied all this data in an excel sheet to see what is happening here. Used some quick excel functions to filter out the email addresses using the LEN(), LEFT(), RIGHT() functions in excel. After obtaining the final email list, I started putting them in categories, spam status and industry type.

The three columns I made were:

1) Category of email – Let’s say I have subscribed to an advertising industry news letter, so I called it industry newsletter. Let’s say Linkedin or Twitter sends me some regular transactional emails about who connected / followed me then I called them as Professional or Social networking updates. Similarly for Banking, Finance, HR, Marketing, Technology, Travel, Food, Airlines etc.

2) Spam Status – I assigned 3 separate statuses to these mails:

• Subscribed
• Spam
• Transactional

So for example, if I have subscribed to a newsletter, I called it Subscribed. If I get a Banking transaction alert, I called is transactional and some crap that hits my inbox, I called it Spam.

3) Industry Type – To generalize and clearly categorize my emails I started putting them under broad industry segment eg:

• Advertising
• Airlines
• e-Commerce
• Entertainment
• Finance / Banking
• Food/Beverages
• Gaming
• HR
• Market Research
• Media
• News
• Publishing – Includes all blogs, online information sources and general publications.
• Real Estate
• Technology
• Telecom
• Travel

Below is a chart which summaries my findings.

Key findings:

1. Publishing – Is the highest SPAM generator category in India. Like fake job sites, fake deals site and these new online deals-online commerce sites which are all publishing crap content on blogs and their sites and are acquiring email addresses and spamming.
2. Finance / Banking – I keep getting a lot of SPAM from finance / banking vertical too. This is mostly about invest here or invest there. Best schemes to make more money and why my life is in danger so I should insure myself crap.

Surprisingly media and other sites are following much better ethics in emailing.

This was my experience. And my guess is that if I monitor this data over a larger sample size and longer time period this will show seasonality eg: Jan-March quarter more finance/banking SPAM as the year is ending everyone wants you to invest and buy insurance. And hence the increased SPAM. VS during Diwali or similar festival season, you would see more SPAM for consumer brands trying to give the biggest discounts on their products.

Where do you get SPAM mails from and what do you do to block / deal with it?

While searching, he ended up seeing an ad (screenshot below). Now can you guess what is this ad going to link to?

This is what I call crappy online banner advertising to generate shitty traffic to the site which leads to nothing.

No conversions, no revenue almost nothing. Though, it does eat up your marketing $$s.

These are being run by DMG media , DSNR media group. I wonder sometimes if they really mean what they say on their sites:

Results Based Performance Advertising

If the result expected is to generate crap traffic, sure, this will do the job. But I thought as entrepreneurs and businessmen would like to generate traffic which converts and leads to a fruitful customer and a relationship that lasts, where does such banner advertisements stand?

BTW: Any guesses still to which site’s ad is this? If you are in India and visiting Piratebay.org, you might just see the ad, click on it and see where you end up… and do share what you think about this…

Here’s an excerpt:

A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 6,100 times in 2011. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 5 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

I particularly like the point that Joe Zawadzki makes:

There’s no unringing a bell: math and technology are part of [the] future of marketing.

But it’s not art or science, people or machine. It’s mad men AND math men.

I think it has to do with the speed of new businesses, the impatience of failing fast or learning faster. With the evolution of fast growing business models and the pressures to deliver sales and ROI or even profitability, it’s imperative to run experiments and figure out what works the best for your business. The online media provides that ability, the ability to run experiments and to be able to learn about your customers, to understand the customers and the ability to make changes in communication messages with controlled audiences. All this is provided by automated frameworks that are agile and helps you focus on finding out what matters.

In earlier days, we used to see brands believing the “Mad Men” on the positioning routes that they thought was right and brands spending tons of money to back that up. However, the ROI or “responsibility” to deliver that ROI was less significant. In today’s world, these data models, advanced neural ad-networks, real time bidding and likes help you test the market to really find out what works and what doesn’t. It makes the mad men think harder than earlier times.

I have statistically significant data that suggest that the creatives done by the in-house brick and mortar team of 20 somethings focusing on data and maths (focussing on better Call to Actions, weight of creatives, direct message etc) performed 25% better to drive sales VS the creative agency’s creatives which were more focused on the design and creative messaging.

I think a lot of work that mad men did can now be done by experimentation by math men. I understand that this puts a lot more pressure on the mad men to own up and bring more responsibility to the table along with their creative hats. Is that too much to ask for in the world where you can measure things?

I would add on to Joe’s point and say: It’s math men AND “responsible” mad men.