Apple’s iAd platform launched to great fanfare in April, with the promise of revolutionizing mobile advertising. In June, Steve Jobs further excited industry watchers by announcing that Apple had booked over $60 million in iAd commitments for 2H 2010 from brands the likes of Nissan, Sears, JCPenney, GEICO, Target, Best Buy, GE and Unilever, as well as longtime partners Disney and AT&T.

The first iAd campaigns started to trickle out in early July, and in general, the platform has been slow to pick up steam. Wired reported in mid-August that “control issues” (something with which Apple is synonymous) were hampering the iAd rollout. On the other hand, most advertisers have professed themselves to be pleased with their iAds as well as the initial results of their campaigns. In a conversation we had earlier today, Chad Stoller of BBDO referred to this as the “return on innovation” – the benefit of associating your brand with something perceived as leading edge.

How long this effect will last is a matter of open debate. Jami Lawrence of Publicis Modem told the audience at this week’s Digiday Mobile conference that iAd lacks the reach brands are looking for, calling an iAd campaign little more than a PR move. And in a recent Reuters interview, Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz said with her usual candor that iAd will “fall apart” for Apple.

That long-term prognosis remains to be seen. For now, conversations I’ve been having with industry leaders as preparation for my annual look at mobile ad spending trends indicate widespread agreement that iAd has a) benefited the mobile advertising space as a whole, and b) underscored the effectiveness of mobile as a branding medium.

Just to cite a few examples, Maria Mandel, vice president of marketing and media innovation for AT&T Advanced Ad Solutions (NB: AT&T is an iAd advertiser) and North America Board Chair of the Mobile Marketing Association told me:

What Apple did was that they were able to brand and build a tremendous amount of awareness around in-app rich media advertising. And the success that they had with the upfront is evidence of that. They’ve really helped build out that market where now there are a lot of advertisers that are aware of in-app rich media advertising and are interested in doing it. And I think that’s a good thing for everybody in this space.

This sentiment was echoed by Frank Barbieri, chief product officer for Transpera:

With iAd in the market, it got everybody talking about the power of mobile as a branding mechanism, and that’s a rising tide that we’ve seen float all boats, including our own.

Eric Litman, CEO of Medialets, described what he’s seen as “a significant uptake in both the level of activity and the velocity of transactions happening on the premium ad side,” citing the launch of iAd as a key factor in this development.

The positive impact of iAd even extends to Apple’s closest rivals. Tony Nethercutt, vice president of sales for AdMob, the mobile ad network Google acquired in December 2009, explained:

We’ve benefited in a number of ways. First and foremost, from the attention it has brought to creative, and mobile, in general.

Apple undoubtedly faces challenges with iAd. Considerations such as cost, longer campaign development cycles and the necessarily limited reach that comes with a siloed network are readily acknowledged. But even firms that ostensibly compete with Apple in the rich media, premium ad space appear to have benefited, either directly or indirectly, from Apple’s entrance into the market.

Image via Apple

No sooner are we out of the back-to-school season than the fourth quarter holiday retail frenzy beckons. The drumbeat has already started as retailers try to read the tea leaves from back-to-school shopping and recent earnings reports as a sort of rough holiday guide. Retailers of all types are casting a sharp eye on inventory management, product mix and timing of promotions as they prepare for holiday sales.

Rob Heller, founder and CEO of DealYard, an online retailer of discounted brand name home goods, spoke with me recently about his company’s preparation for holiday sales, SEO, use of affiliate programs and social media strategies. DealYard buys excess and closeout inventory directly from manufacturers of housewares, tools, personal care items, kitchen appliances, bath fittings and small electronics.

Heller manages DealYard’s strategic direction, along with its operational, technical and financial activities. Previously, he was a founder of MaterialNet.com, a strategic sourcing software provider for Fortune 1000 companies and worked on Wall Street.

eMarketer: What is your outlook for the upcoming holiday shopping season?

Rob Heller:

It’s difficult to gauge. So far, for the first half of this year, we’re up over 10% vs. last year. We’re anticipating solid growth during the holiday season with at least a 20% increase over last year.

eMarketer: What is DealYard doing to prepare for the holiday shopping season?

Heller:

We’ve already begun preparing our direct marketing plan which entails direct mail to our existing customer base with special deals and promotions. Since we recently joined the Commission Junction affiliate program, we’re going to be aggressively trying to bring more affiliates into our program. We’ll be offering them exclusive coupon codes for use on some of the coupon sites.

We’re also becoming more active with social media programs, posting more to the blog which we created a couple of months ago. The blog posts automatically post to our Facebook and Twitter accounts. We anticipate using Facebook and Twitter to offer limited-time exclusive coupons and promotions. For example, for the next three hours customers can use a specific coupon code and save 15% on any order. We also plan to place product reviews and video product reviews on Facebook.

We’ll do deals of the day, directly from our homepage. We’ll promote those through our email program, as well as social media.

eMarketer: What are some of the challenges you face in planning for the holiday season?

Heller:

There are a few challenges because sales are about five to six times greater than they are during the regular season. We have to make sure we are getting all our orders out within a day. With customer feedback being as important as it is, we need to make sure that we get positive feedback from across all of our different channels. That’s always a challenge.

Another challenge is making sure that our customer service department answers customer questions and concerns within a timely manner. We are planning a phone system that will integrate directly with our CRM application so when a customer calls, their information will automatically come up on the computer. We’ll know who they are and that’s going to help us be much more effective.

One of the other real challenges is remaining price competitive on the items that we sell because every few days, our competitors will undercut us and become the low seller. We see a drastic reduction in sales when we get undercut on pricing.

We’re constantly monitoring our competition and seeing where we stand and analyzing our sales per item. If we see a slowdown in our turnover for individual items we try to understand what’s happening. Is it something about the product description? Is the image not clear?

eMarketer: Which product categories will have video reviews?

Heller:

All of our categories. For instance, if we sell a coffee maker or a quesadilla maker, consumers can shoot video of themselves in the kitchen using those items. They would post them to our site.

eMarketer:Do those kinds of product videos or tutorials really help drive sales?

Heller:

Video and written product reviews are very strong. When customers see other customer reviews on the products, it definitely helps drive sales. If there’s a video on the product, and it shows how easy it is to use, combined with well-written customer reviews, that will help drive sales.

eMarketer: Do you think consumer shopping behavior and attitudes will be different this year?

Heller:

They’re going to be very similar to last year. The economic recovery has been very slow and unemployment is still very high. Consumers are still going to be very prudent and price-sensitive. They’ll be looking for the best value and deals they can find.

eMarketer: Have you noticed any patterns in how customers use DealYard? You mentioned customers love the product reviews.

Heller:

Yes, we place reviews on our site powered by PowerReviews and they definitely influence customers’ buying patterns and behavior. Positive reviews combined with good value help drive sales. We’re also finding that for more of our sales, customers are using coupons they access from coupon sites.

For a while, we were telling our customers to either register on our site, or just go through the one-page checkout process. We’re finding that about 85% of them are choosing not to register, and create a username and password. So we recently implemented a one-page checkout to make it easier for our customers.

eMarketer: What are the pitfalls to avoid in preparing for the holiday season?

Heller:

Some of the pitfalls are marketing expenses because during the holiday season, a lot of the comparison shopping engines increase their PPC (pay-per-click) rates by as much as 50%. And if you’re not constantly monitoring and analyzing your ROI, you can waste a lot of marketing dollars. When they raise their CPC (cost-per-click) rates, we put on additional filters and don’t submit as many products to them.

eMarketer: What is DealYard’s approach to holiday advertising and promotions?

Heller:

We dramatically increase the amount of direct email pieces that we send out. We are generating a lot of incentives and coupon codes to our affiliates and to our existing customers. We’re constantly tweaking our organic SEO and trying to increase the amount of PPC campaigns through Google AdWords.

We use a lot of email with our existing customer base. It’s opt-in and we don’t go out and buy lists. We generate new customers through affiliate programs like Commission Junction and ShareASale.com and ongoing organic SEO efforts.

We’re constantly increasing our product base by differentiating our product offerings. We’re on a dozen different marketplaces and comparison shopping engines. We’re looking to add about four or five more marketplaces. It’s really just a matter of submitting a product feed to them and then marketing your products to their customers. They also do organic search to help things along.

eMarketer: Do you have a mobile e-commerce program? If so do you expect mobile shopping to have a significant impact on business this holiday season?

Heller:

About three months ago we implemented a mobile e-commerce platform with our AspDotNetStoreFront application, which makes it so much easier for our customers to transact business via their smartphones. It’s very user-friendly. We didn’t have this mobile platform enabled last year.

Last year, if customers had an iPhone, they could go to DealYard.com and transact but it would be difficult. And for any other smartphones, such as the BlackBerry, it would be nearly impossible. Images appear and instead of rendering horizontally like they’re supposed to, they were vertical on the application. Now that we have a mobile e-commerce platform enabled, it’s easier to transact business. There’s also a live chat mechanism and email capability. You just go to a browser and type in Dealyard.com and the software automatically recognizes that you’re on a smartphone browser.

eMarketer: What have you noticed since the implementation?

Heller:

More people are using it to browse and search for products and they’re also transacting business. You can’t really compare it to last year, because it wasn’t a very significant form of revenue for us. The more people use their smartphones to go to all the different comparison shopping engines they’ll see DealYard’s low prices and be able to do business with us straight from their phones.

Speaker: David Hallerman, eMarketer Senior Analyst

To listen and watch playback of the Webinar, click here. You can view the PowerPoint deck below.

While search advertising makes up the bulk of the online advertising market, its share is set to decline over the next four years as display advertising spending surges. According to eMarketer, the US display advertising market is set to grow 12.9% to $8.56 billion this year, up from $7.6 billion in 2009. By 2014, display spending is expected to reach $14.71 billion and take an estimated 40.5% share of the overall online ad market, up from 34.1% this year.

In this session, you’ll find out:

Sponsored by AdReady.

Healthcare communications expert Bruce Grant testified about pharmaceutical marketers’ use of social media before the Food and Drug Administration in the fall of 2009. Grant has more than 30 years of experience in pharmaceutical promotion, medical education, digital media design and production. Prior to joining Digitas Health, he served as managing director of the pharmaceutical marketing consulting firm eStrategies and director of innovation at Frontier Media Group.

I chatted with Grant about how pharmaceutical marketers can participate effectively in social media and potential scenarios for FDA regulation of social media.

eMarketer: Can you provide a brief synopsis of the testimony you offered to the FDA last fall?

Bruce Grant:

We reported on research results that applied to one of the questions the FDA asked, which was, should special considerations apply to pharmaceutical communications in social media or online banner ads? We had conducted research in the fourth quarter of 2009 on the treatment of risk information in banner ads and suggested that there was a case to be made for the so-called one-click rule that would place the full text of the risk information one click away from the ad.

eMarketer: Are the issues surrounding social media different than the online advertising issues facing pharmaceutical marketers?

Grant:

They’re totally different. Advertising is premised upon the assumption that marketers can tell people what to do and think and that if we tell them often enough and interrupt them in enough different venues, that they will do and think what we tell them to do. Social media is premised upon people turning to each other, not large institutions, to get the resources and the information that they need.

In many ways, social media are used by consumers as an antidote to a particular kind of interruption marketing that consumers, for the most part, find unhelpful. The FDA certainly looks at what kind of communications pharmaceutical manufacturers can make. Under FDA regulations, essentially everything promulgated by a pharmaceutical company that touches on its brands is considered to be either advertising or what it calls “labeling.” Ads are ads. Everything else is labeling and, essentially the same regulations apply to both of them.

If you’re a pharmaceutical manufacturer communicating about a prescription drug, your message has to be fairly balanced between information about the benefits and the risks associated with your brand. You cannot promote uses for your brand that are not on the label. You cannot overstate the benefits of your brand or minimize the risks associated with your brand.

eMarketer: Online hubs including PatientsLikeMe, HealthCentral and WebMD help facilitate a lot of conversations among consumers around symptoms and treatments. What do you make of them?

Grant:

Those are examples of large aggregators of patient communities. I think what’s important to note is that this is not a new phenomenon. The truth of the matter is going back even before consumers had any kind of widespread access to the Internet, there were dial-up services like America Online and CompuServe that offered communities, forums and chat. In some ways, these newer sites are simply carrying those ideas forward and are opportunities to commercialize or provide avenues for pharmaceutical marketers.

eMarketer: What do you think the FDA guidelines on social media will suggest?

Grant:

We believe that the FDA will issue one or more guidance documents probably by the fourth quarter of this year. It won’t provide channel-by-channel instructions for using Twitter and Facebook, but will clarify things for marketers about participating in social media.

In our view, the real barriers to the pharmaceutical industry participating in social media are the same ones we saw in other industries over the last three to five years. The industry needs to start from the premise that social media is about people getting what they need from one other rather than from large institutions.

The challenge is how do marketers relate to this? How do they exist in a world where there’s a big conversation that’s been going on before they arrived on the scene? How do they exist where the level of trust that people participating in the conversation have for each other, is higher than the level of trust they have for any marketer seeking to enter the conversation?

eMarketer: What can marketers do besides creating best practices for participating in social media while they wait for FDA guidance?

Grant:

Marketers haven’t yet fully learned how to listen. That’s the first thing you do. It’s a no-brainer if you think about real-world conversations. You listen to the conversation that was going on before you got there. Who are the participants in the conversation? Who has influence in the conversation? What are their concerns? What are the topics of conversation?

We recommend creating a structured program of listening as an ongoing process. After you’ve been listening for a period of time, and you’ve gotten a sense of the participants and their concerns, there comes a time when there’s an opportunity for you to say something. And in a real life conversation, the most important thing you can say is something that responds to the conversation that’s been going on.

Do you have something to offer? Can you point people to a resource that’s relevant to the needs and interests that have been expressed in the conversation? As you do that, then you pick up credibility. People come to know you. People come to trust you. And you can reach out into the conversation with an idea of your own. You can change the subject at that point because you’re known, because people trust you and because you offered something of value and relevance into the conversation, perhaps repeatedly up to that point.

Listen, respond, reach out. Sadly, there are people from social media properties who are out there just trying to sell ad space, sponsorships or other things.

Look, in contrast, at what AstraZeneca is doing with its Twitter account AZhelps. The company is monitoring Twitter for any mention of the AstraZeneca brand, for people having problems getting the brands under their prescription plan, being able to afford AZ brands and problems with side effects. AstraZeneca is responding to patients with very brief, direct messages on Twitter. For example, “saw your tweet about the cost of Nexium. AstraZeneca may be able to help. Call 1-800” and so on.

The full version of this interview is available here, to eMarketer Total Access clients only. Every day they have access to new interviews with digital marketing leaders and trendsetting entrepreneurs.

Click here to learn more about how becoming an eMarketer Total Access client can strengthen your business.

Evenflo, the marketer of child car seats, infant feeding products and other baby gear has done little, if any online marketing until this summer when it launched “The Savvy Parents Guide” campaign. The primarily digital communications platform seeks to position Evenflo as a savvy and empathetic partner in the frequently overwhelming business of parenting.

After all, trying to remove the baby from the car seat without dislodging the entire apparatus from the backseat can be rather daunting. Even Bethenny Frankel, reality show and real-life mom on Bravo’s “Bethenny Getting Married?” had trouble figuring it out.

In “The Savvy Parents Guide”, Evenflo thinks it’s found a fun and engaging approach to helping first-time parents along. The company targets millennial parents with a series of tongue-in-cheek webisodes that offer tips on child safety while also illustrating frequently hilarious parenting moments. For example, “How to Repair Your Husband’s Bruised Ego” shows a dad’s struggle to install a car seat (it sounds a lot like sex), then offers the “Savvy Parents” way to install Evenflo’s Momentum 65 convertible car seat.

The webisodes are anchored by a microsite that includes bloggers highlighting their unique approaches to parenting, parenting tips, time-saving hints and resources, tweets, product information and an opt-in newsletter. The campaign is supported with paid advertising on parenting websites, as well as editorial links and coverage on forums, blogs and communities. The dive into webisodes is rather bold considering the brand hasn’t done branded entertainment, let alone online video before. But millennials are online and they’re consuming plenty of video.

In fact, 25- to 34-year-old US online users consumer the most video of any age group with bits of incremental growth through 2014. After millennials, the 35- to 44-year-old age cohort are the next big consumers of online video.

Evenflo’s decision to leverage video content and tie it to specific star products like its car seat makes sense–75% of millennials tap into video and 71% buy stuff online, according to a study by Microsoft Advertising conducted by Survey Sampling and Russell Research. Sure, Evenflo wants to sell more product but it’s also showing it can entertain and relate to the many trials-by-fire of millennial parents.

I spoke recently with Chris Craig, Evenflo’s chief marketing officer, about the company’s efforts to reach and cultivate relationships with millennial parents using online video, a first for the company. Here’s a snippet from the full interview available on eMarketer Total Access.

eMarketer: What are you trying to achieve with “The Savvy Parents Guide campaign”?

Chris Craig:

Evenflo is seeking to engage our consumer, and we chose video as the primary means of engagement. A key insight for us is that parents take the role of parenting very seriously and sometimes we forget about the fun and pleasure that’s involved in raising kids. The insight for us was you do all this work, read all these books, ask for all this advice and then you’re a parent and it’s never anything like you expected.

The campaign is a communications platform that we hope will help consumers understand Evenflo. We’ve been in the baby products business for 90 years and have a terrific amount of expertise in the category. We want to help new parents.

Evenflo doesn’t have all the answers, but we know where to find them. “The Savvy Parents Guide” is also an advertising platform that can come alive in a variety of product categories. The webisodes attempt to inject humor into the challenging situations you find yourself in as a parent. The goal for us is to stimulate conversation. Webisodes are perfect for an online and social-media-driven campaign. They are conversation starters online and off.

eMarketer: The target audience for this campaign is millennial parents. How do you define that demographic?

Craig:

Our overall audience is 22 to 35 and millennials are a smaller slice of that—about 22 to 30 or so. For Evenflo, the defining psychographic or demographic is this is an online generation. They’re very comfortable digitally. Our objective is to find millennial parents where they want to be found, where they expect to be found and engage them the way they expect to be engaged.

eMarketer: What kind of digital media and marketing has Evenflo done?

Craig:

Evenflo experimented with banner advertising about two years ago, but otherwise has not done much digital advertising.

eMarketer: Are the webisodes destined for television?

Craig:

No, this campaign is an online campaign. This is branded entertainment. Using online and print, millennial parents are remarkably targetable. Outside of online and print, it becomes much more difficult for us to justify the spend. We’ve done mostly trade-based media until now.

eMarketer: Have you purchased media to promote the webisodes?

Craig:

We’re doing paid media for the first phase of the campaign to get the word out about the webisodes. Our ad buy is on parenting- and mom-oriented sites. We have purchased specific areas on several online hubs, including iVillage, Nickelodeon and Disney Parenting, as well as WebMD, Babble, Parents and CafeMom. Our ads will appear in approximately 500 blogs as well.

In subsequent phases, we’ll use earned media and work closely with independent bloggers. We have a blogger ambassador who has the savvy, knowing voice of Evenflo.

The full version of this interview is available here, to eMarketer Total Access clients only. Every day they have access to new interviews with digital marketing leaders and trendsetting entrepreneurs.

Click here to learn more about how becoming an eMarketer Total Access client can strengthen your business.