‘Tis the season for Christmas shopping hype. The ads are everywhere, so are the lights, the endless music, and daily wave of hype numbers about how great the web is for online shopping. Unfortunately, it’s a fountain of hype with almost no explanation.

Black Friday records.... blah, blah. Holiday shopping up dramatically... blah, blah.

In case you missed it...

• Online retailers saw market share of Thanksgiving Day traffic grow by around 18.8% from 2004, while the proportion of visits to those sites on Black Friday grew by 20.9% year-over-year (Hitwise)
• Online shoppers will spend $19 billion in November and December, a 24% rise over last year, (comScore forecast)
• The online ad market is set to hit at least $55 billion globally by 2010 (Piper Jaffray)

Am I the only one who is noticing these announcements have almost zero substance? Little analysis, and almost no discussion as to why or what the average guy can do to help reap some of the reward.

I did however come across one meaningful announcement... lost in the shuffle of press releases waves from dueling analysts offering almost no analysis but lots of numbers. Yahoo! and Aegis Group, a Connecticut marketing company, are working on a new metric – a metric that links online advertising with store sales.

Yahoo! is using Aegis Group for their savvy measurement and their expertise with econometrics analysis. Aegis likens econometrics to a branch of economics that “uses complicated mathematical calculations to measure the relationship between different events.” Aegis claims to “weigh myriad factors such as weather, price cuts and advertising quality in determining how sales are affected.”

Under the partnership, Yahoo! advertisers will pay extra for the service. Ah ha, another way for Yahoo! to boost its hungry revenue to satisfy the even hungrier analysts who demand more growth, more margin, more earnings!

Of course we have many, many different metrics for measuring online effectiveness (click through rates, conversion rates, cost per click, etc.) but this is the first one I’ve seen linking online efforts to offline sales. Though apparently comScore has something that few rely on.

Yahoo! and Aegis’s plan builds on an existing model to include data from Yahoo! showing users' exposure to online graphical and search advertising. This new model provides a focused assessment of online programs on Yahoo!, measured next to programs on other media, and gives insights and recommendations to marketers on both online and offline marketing spend. Marketers can choose to provide Aegis with data from other online sites, including direct marketing campaigns and Web site data, to get a broader view of their total marketing programs.

"Marketers need to be able to measure and make decisions about online and offline marketing campaigns with a holistic view," said Wenda Harris Millard, chief sales officer, Yahoo!.  "Providing this new service with MMA (Aegis) is a key step in Yahoo!'s continued commitment to providing marketers with leading tools to enhance and optimize their marketing spend."

"In many ways, online marketing can be more accountable than many offline marketing tactics, but there is still a real need to understand the total sales impact of online and offline programs on a common ROI basis so that optimal budget allocations can be made," said John Nardone, MMA Chief Client Officer. "Clients are shifting more and more of their total spend online, and need to move beyond measurement of clicks and page views to understand what is really working to drive sales."

Anyone come across a credible model for linking real world advertising with online use and sales?

INTRANETBLOG:

’Tis the season for retail to be to top of mind, whether it’s because you’re making your list and checking it twice, fighting crowds or anxiously watching sales data to gauge the health of consumer spending, the main driver of our economy.

In the Internet world, retail is particularly fascinating now because analysts are trying to gauge on-line versus bricks-and-mortar purchases in the wake of U.S. Thanksgiving, the accepted start date in the frenzied race to acquire goodies to cram under the tree. This year, the story has been about how “Cyber Monday” would compare to “Black Friday.”

The latter phrase was coined to capture the importance of Thanksgiving Friday, the biggest shopping day of the year in the U.S., when retailers enter “the black” after months of luring semi-disinterested shoppers into their stores with discounted pricing.

The former phrase has only been in usage for a few weeks. It’s the day when shoppers return to the office and start shopping on-line, the location from which 58% of us make our on-line purchases according to comScore Networks.

The phrase also provides more insight about how savvy manipulation of hype-driven media gains attention, rather than providing an accurate measure of retail trends, according to BusinessWeek. 

The article reports that Shop.org, an association for retailers that sell on-line, coined the phrase in a November 21 press release claiming Cyber Monday to be “one of the biggest on-line shopping days of the year.” It is, in fact, the 12^th busiest day according to comScore and even trailed November 22 for sales this season.

So should we accuse the on-line retailers of living in a past era, one in which behaviour is driven by hyped events? Not all. This savvy industry understands as well as any that the Internet changes the rhythm of our lives, and is at the forefront of developing web tools that fundamentally change the way we shop.

In its new ranking of the Top 50 Retail Sites, Internet Retailer provides an interesting list of the innovations these companies have developed, including:

• Musicnotes.com developed software that displays a page of music, then plays the piece being shown while a cursor indicates which notes are playing.
• Peapod.com is equipping its delivery fleet with GPS navigation devices and providing customers with an update on delivery time with an e-mail, text message or phone call when the truck is 10 minutes away.
• BestBuy.com offers a kitchen and laundry planner that allows shoppers to create on-line plans of their rooms, then populate them with appliances. They can e-mail the resulting plans to friends, family or builders and print them out to take to the store when they buy the appliances.
• Circuit City Stores Inc. guarantees that items bought on-line will be ready to pick up in the local store in 24 minutes.

What the “Cyber Monday” phenomenon demonstrates is that much of the media will respond to a well-written press release with as much alacrity and obedience as parents will to a child’s demand for a hot toy. That approach, and the growth of blogs it helps fuel, is the topic for a different article.

In the meantime, I have to find a pink guitar for a three-year old girl. And I don’t care if I find it on-line or in a store, as long as I find it in time to put under the tree on December 25^th.