HEMA website

You gotta have a look at this Holland departmental store's website. Interesting and innovative web marketing. Take a look at HEMA's product page. wait a couple of seconds and watch what happens. Don't scroll... the page moves itself...

HEMA is a Dutch department store. The first store opened on November 4, 1926, in Amsterdam. Now there are 150 stores all over the Netherlands. HEMA also has stores in Belgium, Luxembourg and Germany. In June of this year, HEMA was sold to British investment company Lion Capital.

This is a gimmicky promotional website and you probably be puzzle as to how you can view or buy their products. In fact, you can't do your shopping at this website. To do your shopping, you will have to go to its normal website at http://www.hema.nl/

Video Marketing via Video Sharing Sites

Video sharing sites for example YouTube and Metacafe seems to be the biggest hits in town especially with the younger and modern generations. These video sharing sites have also become the next advertising medium for many marketers. Marketers have been producing commercial videos for the purpose of marketing and promoting their companies' brands and products/services. Google, Apple and many other small to large companies have ride on this wave of utilising this new form of advertising vehicle and most have found it to be an effective marketing tool as these video sharing sites have a phenomenal high traffic circulation. Internet Outsider reports that YouTube now accounts for 28% of total minutes spent on Google worldwide and an astounding 35% of global users; This is indeed an astounding level. The biggest success of video sites such as YouTube is because it 'empowers' users making them feel that they are content producers themselves. Below is a list of video sharing sites that are popular worldwide now.

Google Video
BrightCove
PhotoBucket
YouTube
DailyMotion
iFilm
Myspace
Vimeo
BuzzNet
Flixya
GoFish
Kwego
Lulu 6
MyHeavy
PutFile
StupidVideos
Vmix
ZippyVideos
CastPost
Dotv
Famster
MeraVideo
Porkolt
VideoWebTown
Vidmax
Metacafe
Blip.tv
Blinkx
GodTube
Ourmedia
Vimeo
Tudou.com (Chinese)

Brand Lift of Search

For us marketers, we all do know or speak about as to how search marketing helps in increasing brand awareness or ‘lifting’ your brand. For the sales guys, this has been used constantly to get prospects to advertise in the search engines. However, there has never been any research to prove that “Yes, search marketing does lift your brand”. Finally, Enquiro has proven this last year. The research company ran an online survey and interact with a mocked up Google Search Engine Results Page (SERP) in order to test the effects of branding through Search.

The results were staggering:

• A 16% increase in Unaided Brand Recall by having a brand presence in both the top sponsored and top organic listings of a SERP.

• Users are 5% more likely to recall your brand if you have a top sponsored listing in addition to your organic listing (for non-branded queries).

• The gap between your brand and a competitors grows if your brand is in both the top sponsored and organic positions and theirs is not.

• When the brand was in top sponsored, subjects spent 22% of their total sponsored fixations time on the brand.

• When the brand was in the top organic position, subjects spent 37% of their total organic fixations time on the brand.

• When a brand is in both the top sponsored and top organic listings a subject is 10% more likely to recall the brand when asked specifically whether or not they would consider it as a purchase.

• There is less brand lift from the top sponsored listing amongst subjects with a natural affinity for the brand; however, having the brand in the top sponsored listing garners a 10% lift over not having the brand anywhere on the SERP.

• There is a higher purchasing intent for the brand in the group with an affinity, by nearly 7% - and this gap is carried forward until the top sponsored listing is factored into the equation.

• A branded query seems to have a 50% brand lift effect - making the query itself the largest contributor to any brand lift via the SERP.

• There is no statistical difference between the brand recall - whether or not the brand was in both the top sponsored and top organic or top organic only - so long as the query is branded.