ECMOD - what does it actually mean?

At the annual ECMOD conference in London (ECMOD 2004), we were asked repeatedly what the letters ECMOD stood for.

Tony Hawks, the comedian who MCed the event, brought the house down when he surmised that ECMOD stood for European Community Ministry of Defence.

He then commented that surely the assembled masses (the catalogue and mail order industry) did not look fit to take on that responsibility.

ECMOD in fact stands for European Catalogue & Mail Order Days. Screen Pages was an award winner at ECMOD in 2001 and 2003, as Supplier of the Year.

Googlezon and what online media will be like in 2014

We chanced upon this inspiring, scary, thought-provoking and well-produced online movie from the Museum of Media History.

What happens when the skillsets of Google, Amazon, Blogger and TiVo are combined in a media context? (You get Googlezon).

What becomes of Microsoft and the New York Times? You can just about see how this vision of 2014 can come about...

Spare this movie 8 minutes of your life and have a good, hard think!

Online retailers exploit catalogues for recruitment

Catalogues are now being adopted by online businesses as a way of recruiting new customers.

An article from Silicon.com provides a case study.

Rumours of the demise catalogues are premature: a view confirmed by several speakers at ECMOD 2004 (including the White Company).

Price comparison websites

Silicon Valley reviews different price comparison approaches, includimg Froogle.

We, of course, are not massive fans of such services, as they encourage a crude price-based search at the expense of brands.

Mail order businesses will thrive because of unique products and excellent service: many do not have the scale to compete on price.

Catalogue/mail order sales moving online

According to the DoubleClick Holiday 2004 Shopping Report, there is a continuing channel shift towards online sales in catalogue-driven purchases.

35% of catalogue-driven orders in 2004 were recorded at call centers (vs. 54% in 2003), 36% were recorded online (vs 22% in 2003) and 29% in stores (vs. 24%).

When the direct channels are analyzed in isolation, the number of orders by channel has gone from 70% at call centers versus 30% online in 2003, to 50% through each channel in 2004.

Do search engine rankings matter?

Dave Chaffey summarises some very useful statistics about the effectiveness of pay-per-click advertising relative to "natural" search (the left hand side).

Basically, people click on the left hand side (i.e. not the ads): 60.8% for Yahoo! and 72.3% for Google.

Also: 81.7% will start a new search if they can find it in the first 3 pages (typically 30 results). Make sure you come on the first page