According to Tesco.com chief executive Laura Wade-Gery, the company will open one new 'dark store' annually for the foreseeable future. She claims the format could account for 15% of online turnover by 2014.

The first two stores have been opened in Croydon, Surrey, and Aylesford, Kent, and the third is due to open next year in Greenford, Middlesex.The Aylesford unit handles 8,000 orders every week and employs 500 staff with around 200 working at any one time.

Explains Tesco spokesman Tom Hoskin: "The dotcom stores are much the same as standard supermarkets. They work in a similar way but the only people in them are Tesco staff. There are no checkouts and there's not the same point of sale advertising but they are set out in the same way so our staff can find things. These new online-only stores are about raising capacity."

Tesco currently handles 475,000 orders online per week placed by 3.4 million visitors to the Tesco.com website and delivered by its 2,000 home delivery vans.

Wade-Gery maintains that with profits of £109m on sales of £1.9bn, Tesco's online operations are not only sustainable but capable of considerable growth. Tesco is "systematically tackling the barriers to shopping online" among consumers, and forecasts that uptake for online shopping in the UK will grow from 3% to 5% over the next five years.

Factual data only is sourced from the original attributed article. The data is then enhanced by additional research and comment.

The locally bought portion of the market, which primarily comprises small and medium-sized businesses, will see the highest growth, at a CAGR of 66 percent. The segment will grow from $45 million in 2008 to $565 million by 2013. Further, the SMB market will swell from 5 percent to 30 percent of the total geotargeted market over the same period.

“The basis for growth of the geotargeted ad market is rooted in the economics of existing search resellers,” said Matt Booth, senior vice president and program director, Interactive Local Media, BIA/Kelsey. “The effective strategy for companies like AT&T, ReachLocal, Yodle and others will be to use geotargeting to increase margins by shifting spend from paid search to geodisplay. Simply, if a lead from search costs $30, these companies will shift to display where similar quality leads can be obtained for less. The display ad networks have so much excess inventory; they will run whatever impressions are needed to meet reseller targets.”

Factual data only is sourced from the original attributed article. The data is then enhanced by additional research and comment.

In an interview with the Financial Times, Google president of sales operations and business development  Nikesh Arora predicts: “The whole idea of online advertising is going to go away in the next few years.”

"We’ll stop talking about online advertising and talk about advertising. Radio, print, TV are all getting distributed over IP [internet protocol], so those distinctions will vanish at some point in time.”

Google is already seeing a “transformation” of display advertising, Arora claims. Online advertising has been sold on a site-by-site basis, but behavioural data and the Ad Exchange marketplace Google acquired with its DoubleClick purchase make it easier to target customer groups across several sites.

In future, a media owner may still sell space on its online front page “but there’s a lot of inventory which is extremely inefficient for every site owner to sell separately”.

Eager, perhaps, to distance Google from Sir Martin's Sorrell's characterization of the internet titan as a "frenemy“ of the advertising industry, Arora touted his employer's eagerness to be seen as a partner. "We give $5bn-$6bn away to partners of the $20bn we make,” he claims, adding that Google has stepped up its “research online purchase offline” studies, which analyse how search behaviour affects buying.

Still in über-hype mode, Arora told the FT: "We are going to be hiring a lot more across the organisation than we have in the last six months”. But he stressed that the Mountain View monster has no plans to enter the content business.

“Fundamentally, we’re a tech company . . . You show up with a huge technological problem, we’re going to get totally turned on by it.”

Factual data only is sourced from the original attributed article. The data is then enhanced by additional research and comment.

Customers of the nation's third largest burger chain who sign up for the promotion and provide their cellphone number will receive a discount by showing their mobile device to a Wendy's cashier.

Options Media Group is running the program for Wendy's International Inc. OMG chief executive Scott Frohman said the mobile coupon campaign will have a tryout in the Northeast before a planned rollout nationwide.

Frohman said advertisers are spending more on marketing that involves mobile devices, as opposed to traditional media.

Factual data only is sourced from the original attributed article. The data is then enhanced by additional research and comment.

Credit card providers like MasterCard and Visa were among the earliest users of computer technology, building decades ago what were in effect small private Internets to connect stores, restaurants and ATMs to their well-fortified central computers.

On account of the real Internet, though, it is increasingly easy for start-ups to provide lower-cost alternatives to the 2% or 3% charges attached to every purchase. Call it the "disintermediation of money," since the Web is doing to consumer financial services the same thing it did to stock trading, travel reservations and telecommunications.

The latest indication of this happened Wednesday, when American Express ( AXP - news - people ) bought, for $300 million, Revolution Money, a start-up associated with Steve Case, of AOL fame. Since being founded two years ago, the outfit has attracted considerable attention on account of its intention to provide a new kind of card that is universally recognized like a traditional debit card, but which can be easily and cheaply purchased, like the "value cards" used by some pay phones or long distance plans.

It is unclear how many people actually use the service; the company hasn't disclosed the number of cardholders. Equally uncertain is how true American Express will remain to the cheaper-is-better founders' ethic of Revolution, especially considering American Express' long association with high-end corporate expense accounts.

The obvious big player here is PayPal, the online money transfer system owned by eBay ( EBAY - news - people ). PayPal has aggressively expanded well beyond its original role of being the settlement house for eBay auctions. It is actively promoting itself as a credit card alternative; indeed, some analysts want eBay to spin off the unit, so it can pursue this mission without having to concern itself with eBay's own cluster of issues.

Google wants to play in this game, too; it started Google Checkout, which many Web shoppers have found to be an easy-to-use system for handling online purchases.

The general trend here is clear. Because early entrants were forced to work hard to solve what for them were new problems, like consumer fraud for PayPal, they forged a trail that the next person had an easier time following. It's therefore getting easier and easier to start companies that compete in this "micropayment" space.

The notion of micropayments have been around as long as the Web. Early Internet advocates gushed back then about the way micropayments would give people the incentive to create useful, high-value Web sites. If everyone who visited your Web page on, say, healthy cats could effortlessly give you a nickel or dime when they did so, you'd be inclined to spend the time making the page as useful as possible.

Fast-forward to today, when all manner of print media are suffering; micropayments are presented as the solution to that problem, too, as they would allow news sites and others to make a little bit off of each person that chanced upon them. (Because online ad rates have dropped so much in the last 18 months, a lot of traffic is now worth nearly nothing.)

Whether micropayments will lead to so edifying a social goal is, to say the least, unclear. More likely, they will probably be used most to buy virtual guns and ammunition in online videogames. But they have the promise to take advantage of a technology change to reduce transaction costs, which tends to be a good thing for an economy.

Factual data only is sourced from the original attributed article. The data is then enhanced by additional research and comment.

He will create a new digital unit based in Euston with a team of fifty. Meantime, in mutual back-scratching mode, Lewis waxed lyrical: “It is a tribute to our chairman, Aidan Barclay, and the Barclay family that they have invested millions of pounds in this exciting venture, which will help us rapidly expand our digital operations.”

Murdoch MacLennan, ceo of Telegraph Media Group, said it represented the next stage of the group’s digital transformation.
“Using the Telegraph’s powerful brand and reputation, Will[iam] has been charged with building a digital unit designed to capitalise on cutting edge ideas, driving new revenue streams by better serving our customers.”

Factual data only is sourced from the original attributed article. The data is then enhanced by additional research and comment.

The US attracted about $52bn (€35bn, £31bn) in private capital for renewable energy technologies between 2000 and 2008, said a report from the Breakthrough Institute and the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.
China was catching up rapidly by the end of that period, with a total of $41bn in private capital invested.

But the report said that over the five years to 2013, China, Japan and South Korea would between them invest a total of $509bn in clean technology under current plans. China had already earmarked $177bn in stimulus funds for green projects including high-speed railways.

US investment over the same period was likely to be about $172bn if projected spending based on the economic stimulus package went ahead. If the US was to remain competitive, the government must increase its planned spending on clean energy “R & D” and on stimulus measures to boost clean technology.

The report said China was “poised to replicate many of the same successful strategies that Japanese and South Korean governments used to establish a technological lead in electronics and automobiles”.
In depth: Green technology

An FT series analysing how clean technologies and the companies behind them are coping with the economic downturn, government policy and public expectation.

The strategy includes providing fledgling companies with low-interest loans, funding industry-wide R&D, ensuring that government procurement is geared towards domestic companies and providing subsidies for private groups to buy advanced clean technologies.

The advantage gained by these “clean-tech tigers” will make it difficult for later-to-market companies and countries to take advantage of the growing demand for low-carbon goods, which is set for a further boost if governments can put in place a new framework on controlling greenhouse gas emissions.

According to some estimates, the global market for low-carbon goods and services is already nearing $3,000bn and set to reach $4,500bn by 2015.

Some signs of China’s potential future dominance of clean technology markets are already evident. The country is the world’s ­biggest exporter of solar power components and has one of the biggest wind ­turbine manufacturing industries.
This year, according to the report, China will export the first wind turbines destined for use in a US wind farm, for a project valued at $1.5bn.

The report found the US relied on foreign-owned companies to manufacture most of its wind turbines, produced less than 10 per cent of the world’s solar cells, and was “losing ground on hybrid and electric vehicle technology and manufacturing”.

Factual data only is sourced from the original attributed article. The data is then enhanced by additional research and comment.

The touching-and-improving mantra flows off lips at P&G these days with the eerie ease that "consumer is boss" did nearly a decade ago. The catchphrase rotation has been the most obvious manifestation of the transition to CEO Bob McDonald. He and Global Brand-Building Officer Marc Pritchard frequently answer questions about everything from growth strategy to the role of a brand manager by citing that touching/improving theme.

But P&G is far from the only practitioner of mission-statement marketing. The recent Association of National Advertisers meeting in Phoenix was a veritable parade of companies crediting a renewed focus on corporate or brand missions with turnaround or continuing success.

At the same time, P&G alum and Unilever CEO Paul Polman noted on a conference call this month that his company, too, has been touching and improving a lot of lives lately -- 2 billion in all -- albeit in the more specific way of helping consumers look good, feel good and get more out of life.

As Unilever looks to step out more from behind its brands, expect to hear more of that message, including through its e-mail and web relationship program Making Life Better.

Keeping culture
It's not just behemoths managing the culture to massage the marketing message -- and vice versa -- these days. To help preserve its culture as it grows, comparatively tiny Method has each prospective employee do a homework assignment during the interview process that includes answering: "How will you keep Method weird?" The company rejected all three finalists in the first round of a CEO search last year when none could answer that question satisfactorily, co-founder and Chief Brand Architect Eric Ryan said.

Walmart is perhaps the most direct example of a mission-statement message. The company credits much of its brand turnaround to distilling a mission statement first uttered by legendary founder Sam Walton into its ad-selling line from the Martin Agency, Richmond, Va.: "Save money. Live better."

In another sign that the same things that used to motivate employees can work with consumers, Walmart CMO Stephen Quinn noted in an ANA presentation that a video created for employees on the "Save Money. Live Better" theme had scored well in consumer copy testing with ARS, too.

Mission-statement marketing goes hand in hand with cause marketing, with such brands as Macy's, Dove and Pampers making it a centerpiece of their marketing efforts. Cone Inc. last year found 79% of consumers said they'd switch to a brand associated with a good cause, up from 66% in 1993, and 38% said they'd bought a product associated with a cause, compared with 20% in 1993.

Still, the jury's out on how much mission marketing is rekindling growth. The parent company reported its second consecutive quarter of top-line numbers below analyst projections on Nov. 12, with same-store sales at the U.S. flagship down 0.5% despite a 1.5% increase in customer traffic. Walmart executives blame accelerating grocery price deflation, though top-line performance at Costco and Target actually has improved lately.

Employee help
Regardless of the numbers, getting employees to embrace the mission has taken on added importance in the age of social media, when they make up much of the content.

A big part of the scale advantage a company such as General Mills can have is the word-of-mouth from its employees, said CMO Mark Addicks. But that power has to be cultivated. General Mills' "We Nourish Lives" motto has helped, he said, and so has testing products and ads with employees, either by generating buzz or preventing mistakes -- such as when African-American employees torpedoed an ad as "white people for black people advertising."

Companies are probably talking about their missions more because times are tough, so "it's important for employees to believe they're doing something bigger than what their quarterly results would suggest," said Sanford C. Bernstein consumer products analyst Ali Dibadj.

But not everyone is sold on mission-statement marketing. One analyst noted a former senior P&G executive told him: "They should stop improving lives and start improving market share."

Mission statements can provoke eye rolls nearly strong enough to cause head trauma among journalists, not to mention the more cynical or maverick elements within corporations. So will getting everyone on the same page end up driving out mavericks and nonconformists and, by extension, creativity?

"If you're force fed it too aggressively," Mr. Dibadj said, "it certainly has the possibility of stifling creativity."

Factual data only is sourced from the original attributed article. The data is then enhanced by additional research and comment.

YouTube today said it would conduct an experiment that would give viewers of a select number of videos the opportunity to forward through pre-roll spots.

Google is opting-in advertisers running video campaigns via AdWords for the test. It will display a small text option in the right-hand corner of the viewer, reading, "Skip this ad." Clicking that text takes users directly to the videos they wish to play. YouTube is running the experiment on clips produced as part of its partner program with creators who have elected to include in-stream ads.

On its face, this seems like a harebrained notion. After all, it would stand to reason that most users would immediately hit the forward button. Google sees an opportunity, however, to collect valuable user data that could contribute to the development of a quality-score system similar to the one it uses to determine the placement and pricing of search ads. The company is already testing user-choice pre-rolls to gain information on ad popularity.

"The long-term vision is more of a pay-for-performance model," said Phil Farhi, product manager at YouTube.
The idea, according to Farhi, is that advertisers could come to Google with a video, a target-audience number and a maximum price it would pay for each view.

Google would crunch data based on user habits and the ad's performance to determine how to reach the advertiser's target. Rates would be higher for ads likely to be skipped compared to ads users elect to watch frequently.

Such an approach would mirror Google's search ad system, which determines placement on results pages based on the amount an advertiser pays for clicks combined with a quality score that's heavily influenced by those click rates.

"We're looking for the signals that indicate whether someone is going to skip an ad," said Farhi. "We'll use that as the equivalent of a click-through rate."

That system also resembles experiments being made in engagement-based pricing by ad networks Videoegg and Meebo, as well as social news venue Digg. (See also: "Thinking Beyond the Online Banner.")
YouTube already has a variation on this model with its "promoted videos" option that displays related clips on YouTube searches. Advertisers pay only when users elect to play those ad videos. Google also runs click-to-play videos in banner space across its ad network.

YouTube is already collecting data on in-stream ad performance. It has found, unsurprisingly, that users are far more likely to abandon videos when pre-roll ads run 30 seconds as opposed to 15 seconds. The surprising finding, Farhi said, is how much more likely: double.

Based on information Google has gathered from its TV ad platform, which tracks channel changes during commercial breaks, the company has concluded that Web video viewers are also more sensitive to ad quality: creative has three times the influence on abandonment compared to spots on TV.

"People are treating ads online differently than they treat an ad on TV," Farhi said, hypothesizing that they're less conditioned to ad interruption and enter a "lean-forward" mode of darting among pieces of content. Still, YouTube has found 15-second ads do not decrease viewership much. On average, a 15-second pre-roll ad results in a 15 percent abandonment rate.

The figures were better than when Google initially tested in-stream video ads on YouTube in 2007, when pre-rolls led to 70 percent abandonment rates by users. Fewer 30-second spots and better, more relevant creative helped, Farhi said.

"Advertisers like in-stream ads because they look and feel like TV ads," he said. "We're still in the early days of figuring out how they work for users."

Factual data only is sourced from the original attributed article. The data is then enhanced by additional research and comment.

In what is believed to be the fledgling medium's biggest dedicated ad buy, Schering-Plough and its media agency, Havas' MPG, and its out-of-home division, Chrysalis, met with more than 30 member companies of the Out of Home Video Advertising Bureau in the spring to discuss which networks would be the best demographic and creative fit for seven of its portfolio brands.

Participating brands in the digital out-of-home buy were Claritin Liqui-Gels, Claritin For Kids, Dr. Scholl's for Her, Dr. Scholl's Massaging Gels, Tinactin Chill, Lotrimin Ultra and Dr. Scholl's Pain Relief.

Digital out-of-home -- an industry that includes everything from taxi TVs and in-store retail networks to digital panels at malls -- has long been touted for its promise as an ad medium but has shown little signs of earning a full-blown commitment from marketers. Aside from cinema, which has positioned itself as the most seamless way for marketers to shift their TV budgets into alternative venues with comparable scale, many networks are too fragmented to accommodate a TV-equivalent buy on their own.

Although $8 million to $10 million may seem like a drop in the bucket for a brand like Claritin, which spent nearly $150 million on TV in 2008, according to TNS Media Intelligence, it's an investment necessary for digital out-of-home to meet the growth patterns projected by PQ Media in a new report issued this week on spending in the medium from 2009 to 2014.

For Ray Rotolo, Chrysalis' senior VP-managing director, proving digital out of home's efficacy against other media for big TV spenders such as Claritin and Dr. Scholl's was a top priority. So the first step was to determine how often consumers interact with out-of-home ads. A study conducted with Arbitron compiling 1,035 interviews across 25 locations and four participating networks found that 47% of consumers were exposed to digital out-of-home media on a weekly basis, on average twice a week with and with an average dwell time of 40 minutes. That placed it second only to TV (with 87% of consumers) in terms of overall media exposure in a given week. "This was a pretty powerful profile for us," Mr. Rotolo said.

Pricing cuts
After whittling down OVAB's candidates to 17 participating companies, Schering-Plough began rolling out its campaigns with a variety of vendors throughout the spring and summer. Because each network was ultimately a cog in a very large wheel of TV ad dollars, some adjustments had to be made to accommodate such a big buy, including pricing cuts. According to three participating vendors who spoke with Ad Age, normal cost-per-thousand viewer rates were slashed by as little as 10% and as much as 40% to secure inventory for Schering-Plough, often with networks helping to create customized creative for the participating brands.

But much in the same way that Reckitt-Benckiser's $20 million online video buy earlier this year was seen as a way to prove that medium's worth, most participating networks were happy to make short-term adjustments for what they consider a worthwhile experiment for the long-term.
"Our normal, everyday pricing is much higher, but we certainly wanted in on the buy and to make it attractive for the client," said Bob Martin, chief marketing officer for RMG Networks, which includes recently merged networks Danoo and Ideacast, both of which ran ads during the Schering-Plough campaign. "I really don't think [the price cuts] mattered. We wanted it as a blue-sky plan in order to truly learn this new medium."

Bill Ketcham, exec VP-chief marketing officer, Adspace, a mall-based network that ran repurposed TV ads for Claritin Liqui-Gels for two months across its full footprint of 105 malls, said engagement with Claritin's ads stood out in a recent custom study the company did with Nielsen. Awareness of the ads was registered by 37% of the malls' viewers, a figure that was significantly higher than most campaigns, he said.
"A lot of commercial awareness depends on the target, so when you have a movie targeted at teens like a Jonas Brothers movie, of course it's going to be higher," he said. "But this was way above our average."

Schering was pleased enough with the early results that the company is already in discussions with Adspace to renew its buy in spring 2010, Mr. Ketcham added.

Promising numbers
Overall engagement metrics with Claritin's ads were first shared at the OVAB Summit in New York two weeks ago. Purchase intent for the two brands went up 26% among those surveyed, with 73% of allergy sufferers reporting more likelihood to buy the product. Ad recall also showed promise, with unaided recall reported among 9% of respondents and aided recall at 36%.

However, some challenges still remain, said Mr. Rotolo. "What it didn't change was top-of-mind brand awareness. But we looked at this from a pretty broad perspective, so we didn't expect it to change dramatically," he said. "The other thing that really struck us from a business standpoint was that 68% of consumers surveyed saw the screen, [but] only 38% of them interacted with the screen. So only a third of the people actually watched the ad. We can now use this in how we negotiate, because we have to understand where it fits. We can also use this as a challenge for the industry to say, 'Your ads can work here and here's how.'"

Patrick Quinn, president of PQ Media, said spending on non-ambient digital out of home is expected to rise 3.2% in 2009 to $1.91 billion, down from an 11.2% gain in 2008. But most of the bigger players -- cinema vendors like Screenvision and National CineMedia, retail networks at Walmart and Target, and others -- are doing the heavy lifting, as only 2% of the 661 companies tracked by the study reported revenues between $25 million and $100 million, and a mere four are producing revenues upwards of $100 million.

Still, he said of the digital out-of-home vendors, "They're faring well for their first recession. This is low single-digit growth, but compared to newspapers, radio and local TV, they're doing quite well," he said. "But history has shown that media with strong audience metrics will perform well during and after a recession."
Suzanne La Forgia, OVAB's president, said the Schering-Plough ad buy has already helped establish a precedent for marketers to look at the industry as a planning and buying alternative to other media. "It allows brands to do some research around it to look at it from a broad perspective without losing the benefits of the individual pieces," she said. "We got some great learnings from both sides, and it will continue to be a point of education for us from an OVAB perspective to improve the buying and creative process."

Coincidentally, four of the participating networks have already gone through major changes in the three-month period since the ad buy ended. ProLink, a network comprising screens on golf carts, recently ended its OVAB membership to pursue a new advertising strategy; OnSpot, a mall-based network, was acquired by Access 360; and lifestyle networks Danoo and Ideacast merged to form RMG Networks.

"There were some networks that were more flexible than others in working with us to create the program we wanted to do, but part of that has to do with [the health] of each individual network," Mr. Rotolo said. "But we really do see a place for digital out of home in the media mix. It may not be at the top-end of the purchase model, but we have a bunch of clients that are interested and are looking at it from a very different perspective than they would have before."
 

Factual data only is sourced from the original attributed article. The data is then enhanced by additional research and comment.