Biggest Cyber Monday Ever

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This year’s Cyber Monday was the biggest ever. Impressive as they are, the numbers for sales only tell one part of the story. The other is which brands invested in ads in kicking off the holiday shopping season and how customers responded and reached out to them.

Crunching through the numbers, Adobe Analytics reported that this year’s Cyber Monday Sales broke US sales records, thitting  $7.9  billion, an amount that represent 19.3 percent YOY growth and which exceeded the predicted spend of  $7.79 billionthat would have translated into 17.6 percent YOY growth  for the day.

Those represent just online sales, but some of the same people also spent money in stores over the Thanksgiving weekend. According to the National Retail Foundation(NRF)  over 89 million gave business to both online and physical retail outlets, which represents an increase of close to 40 percent over last year.

Investing in the technology that enables multichannel shopping had a real payoff, according to the NRF. “The multichannel shopper outspent the single-channel shopper by up to $93 on average.”

So what role did marketing play in the billions of dollars of spending? Working with DialogTech, 4C Insights put out a report that presented the data on ads, social lift, and phone calls. What they found was that the top 10 advertisers were made up not just of retailers but also financial services, automotive and other industries. The impact of their TV ads appears in the increase in social media engagement that immediately followed their ads...

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Why Cyber Monday 2018 Was Biggest Ever

Related posts: http://writewaypro.blogspot.com/2018/11/time-to-say-tis-season.html

http://writewaypro.blogspot.com/2018/08/capitalizing-on-holiday-marketing.html

AR gets real and social

“We're making the camera the first augmented reality platform,” declared Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook's F8 developer conference. That's where he showed off some of the AR effects the social media giant is making accessible to anyone on a mobile device. Whether you want to break the boredom of breakfast by setting some virtual sharks to swim around your bowl, see people's faces replaced by emojis, or turn a tabletop into the site of a video game, you'll be able to do it with just your smart phone. You can hear him and see the effect in this Cnet clip:

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AR Takes Off on Facebook

Don't you recognize my voice?

What's your mother's maiden name? 
Which street did you live on when you were growing up? 
What's the name of your first pet? 
In what city was your parent born?

Sound familiar?
These are standard identity authentication questions that all have to be answered before you get to bring up what you really called about. Certainly, we want measures of security, though it is possible to authenticate the caller other ways.

Voice biometrics is becoming increasingly popular. It's not a complete solution on its own, as all security experts insist single-step authentication are not secure enough for anything you really wish to protect. But it offers the advantage of convenience and likely better security than questions whose answers can often be obtained with some online searches and a view of your Facebook profile.

Read more in  Securely Yours: Voice Biometric Authentication Gains Traction

Related: Detecting Fraud With Voice Analytics

Cellphone tracking: a matter of protection or loss of privacy?

With the right equipment, anyone can trace where we are through our phones. Whether and how this technology is used has been a source of controversy for years.

One of the latest flare-ups is police use of Stingrays. In this context, it's not a type of fish but the brand name of an International Mobile Subscriber Identity tracking device.

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Cellphone Tracking: Protection vs. Privacy