Promo Trends Report 2008.

Do look at this latest Trends Survey done by the Promo Magazine. Great to see as much as 61% allocation towards consumer and trade promotion. This is a must read and it is a free download.

Intelligent marketing in a slow economy.

Here is a link to an article which I wrote recently on areas to focus on given the current economic state. It's not a time to cut back, rather a time to re-focus. Read the article here.

Do share your views.

Tools to measure ROI of the marketing dollar.

PULSE SUITE is one of it’s kind collection of marketing services tools which should be used by marketers to improve productivity, enhance brand coverage, better understand the brand presence in the last mile and have a comprehensive control on the marketing dollars being spend by any brand.

These are tools which allow a better “feel of the pulse” of their respective area of focus, and are a combination of brand diagnostic tools and process improvement tools.

Last mile - which is also the place when any customer make the key brand specific decision, is indeed very complex for all brands across categories. We have ensured that all our tools are able to report this complexity by way of easy to understand and interpret intelligence. Additionally these tools are “live”, thus ensuring that the clients have access to simple to understand dashboards which transmit real time intelligence from the “street up”.

Market Pulse, Shopper Pulse and Event Pulse are the first in a series of Pulse tools which will be available to the discerning marketer across Asia. For more information and demos on the tools, please log in to www.pulsesuite.com

Music & web at its best : musicovery

OK, this post has nothing to do with marketing, but I am sure it will go a long way in helping you enjoy music the way you want to. Superb digital web app called "musicovery", allows you to choose music as per your mood and play on by way of association. Try it and I bet you will be hooked.

Click here for music.

Potentially malicious sites' search results - labled.

If you search using Yahoo, you would have noticed SearchScan service in it’s beta format on the right-hand top corner – it already in use in some of the geographies and I believe will have an effect on the ranking and click thru’ rates of the defaulting sites. While Google has had the service for a few months now, the Yahoo service which is powered by McAfee is far more prominent and will keep the user away from the site for sure – making it critical for sites to rectify their processes, be it viruses, malware, spam or other harmful software, especially in case they are depending heavily on SEO traffic.

Listed below is an example of things going a little awry for Agency FAQS. With the kind of warning, even I was wondering if it was safe to venture on to the site and I have been using the site for ages.

This is a simple search result, notice the RED.

Afaqs has just been declared a proclaimed spammer.

The process being followed by Google or Yahoo is not clear yet, as neither has published its classification technology, which makes it difficult to determine how alike the two services are. The one visible difference is the prominence of the warning in case of Yahoo, while on Google; you do get a text link “This site may be harmful to your computer”.

The service makes a lot of sense for the user and will prompt the site-owners to clean up their acts or be listed “harmful to search”.