It’s been a long time coming, but with the recent announcements of over $150 million in new funding sources, Vermont is now positioned to make universal broadband access a reality in the state.

Last week, the USDA awarded a $116 million broadband stimulus grant to Vermontel’s Wireless Open World (WOW) initiative. And in late July, the Vermont Telecommunications Authority received an additional $33.4 million in federal dollars to extend Vermont’s existing fiber optic network. That’s a huge amount of funding granted in a very short period — a game changer by any definition of the term.

How to Please All of the People All of the Time

One hundred fourteen thousand people — almost 19% of the population — cannot access broadband in their homes. Of the 251 cities & towns in the state of Vermont, 41 have less than 10% broadband coverage. A look at the VCGI’s Broadband availability map shows that most towns are currently under-served, and if the map’s overly optimistic assessment of towns in the Mettawee Valley is consistent with their conclusions about the rest of the state, we’re in really deep trouble.

Vermontel plans to deliver broadband to the 114,000 unserved homes and businesses via WOW — that’s about a quarter of all households in the state. Through the VTA grant, Sovernet will build a 773-mile fiber optic backbone running the length of the state, connecting 342 community institutions in Rutland, Bennington, Windham, Windsor, Orange, Washington, and Caledonia Counties. Working from this newly extended backbone, it’ll cost substantially less to deliver door-to-door broadband.

In Business, Nothing Succeeds like Access

For Vermont businesses, the opportunities are looming large for those with the right carrier. The new network will operate via 4G/LTE (Long Term Evolution) wireless broadband. This is the next-generation broadband format that’s already been adopted by Verizon and AT&T; Sprint and Clearwire are betting on the similar but incompatible 4G/WiMax.

With the pending availability of highspeed data access regardless of location, innovative small businesses throughout the state can begin now to leverage the web more fully. Strategies need to be rethought. Limitations must be reexamined. Who (and where) will your customers be? How (and why) will they want to do business with you, when the entire world is a click away? Clearly, the people who start the hard work now will be the ones who create success from access.

Over lunch at a recent conference, a marketer complained about her design team. Their revamped web site was very well designed – perhaps too well. Highly interactive, thoughtfully scripted and artfully presented, the team relied heavily on Flash to achieve what was, to their eyes, a compelling online experience.

The marketer was concerned that the site’s usability was now impaired, that revenue from organic traffic would suffer. Meanwhile, her efforts to voice these concerns were falling on ears that cherished their own creative ideas over the input from other stakeholders. Lacking a clearly defined common understanding of the website goals, people were measuring success with different rulers.

In her case, the creative team was an outsourced agency, although this scenario can play out just as easily between inhouse departments. In either case, bringing all team members to a shared set of goals is the only way to ensure that everyone is pushing in the same direction. Clearly defined KPIs have a lot of value here.

Once the site’s key metrics are defined, communicated, discussed and reviewed, every member of the team needs to be able to understand how their work has an impact on these goals. The diversity of training, background and responsibility that comprises most working ecommerce groups brings with it the potential for a variety of perspectives on how these goals should be measured. But by distributing relevant analytics data to all members of the team, and providing everyone with the tools to objectively measure the results of their own efforts against the larger site goals, you’ll see your group begin to function with greater cohesiveness.

As goals, concepts, strategies, successes and stumbles are shared across silos, the feedback loops grow successively richer and more valuable. Copywriters start identifying the elements of a consistently strong subject line. Designers can quickly test whether a hyperlink style revision works as good as it looks. In fact, given access to good analytic data, many creative teams become downright obsessive on multivariate testing.

Just as creativity is a requisite skill in any successful marketer, you’ll find keen analytical minds in your creative department. By giving everyone an opportunity to assess their work objectively, the creativity that should run rampant throughout your team is more easily focused on the bottom line.

“Please DONT get me a Vermont Teddybear.”
“Vermont teddy bears? No bloody way Dude!”
“Vermont teddy bears do not make good vday gifts for women.”

For a company that does the vast majority of its business in one short intense holiday season, Vermont Teddy Bear is inadvertently taking social media to a brand new level.

Its latest advertising campaign, an old-school TV spot complete with pandering voiceover, tired script, maudlin acting, and poor production values, has created a vibrant and vocal online community of alienated people who take pride in affirming their intention to avoid the products at all costs.

If Twitter traffic is any indication, the campaign annoys or offends over fifty people for every one who responds positively. The crowd is split over which is more offensive: the ad’s content or its incessant repetition.

So far, no feedback or response from the brand.

Among the slew of analysts looking back to the 2008 holiday season, comScore has estimated that online sales from November 1 through December 23 were actually down 3% from the year before. Apparel was one of the bright spots, with an online increase of 4%, compared to a 19-21% decrease in the category overall sales. Other hot online performers included Sports & Fitness (up 21%) and Video Gaming (+14%).

Another interesting note: online spending by HHI grew only among the over-$100k crowd, and there by a mere 7%. Compare with Hitwise data which shows a 3.7% lift among households earning $100-149k, but notes traffic drop of 12% from households over $150k.

Seems like an opportunity where high-quality mid-ticket merchants — those working somewhere between Walmart and Prada — had the greatest opportunity to reconnect with their core customers.

At first I thought ElasticPath’s post “Should Your Use Large Images on Category Pages?” would shed light on the size of thumbnails, but the discussion is about the importance of testing big-footprint lifestyle imagery. Does a large banner above the thumbnails add a sense of place to the page, similar to display banners in the retail environment? Or is there a sense of redundancy, pushing the products below the fold?

A few thoughts on what constitutes an effective category banner:

• Since so few visitors enter from the home page, any opportunity to demonstrate the brand through lifestyle imagery should be explored. If your product images are primarily laydowns (as opposed to model shots), the potential value from adding a model to the page is even more significant.
• It’s important to establish the correct relationship between your lifestyle image and product shots. The goal is to balance your lifestyle banner sizes with the monetary value of the site’s real estate. 
• Use compelling copy to create action. Promote the style on model, and always be sure that your lifestyle images are imagemapped to the corresponding style page(s).
• Photography may be optional. Have a compelling promotion? A well-designed type copy treatment might do the job, and download quicker.
• Track your clickthroughs and conversions.

I’ve probably missed some good ones, feel free to add more.

Leaving user generated videos and the world of YouTube aside, video over the web is, by most accounts, either:

1. the next biggest thing that’s about to break or
2. the thing that’s most broken or
3. that which has broken the most hearts or
4. all of the above

In spite of the sorry state of commercial video distribution over the web, the market is expected to explode in the coming years.

• Informa Telecoms & Media forecasts that by 2013, US online TV and video services will generate revenues of $7.9 billion. In 2007, the market was already worth over $1 billion and by 2008, that figure will leap to $4.7 billion. [link]
• On-demand media services will generate $1.1 billion in consumer spending by 2012, from $33 million this year in the US and major European markets, according to Screen Digest‘s “On-Demand Media: Re-Inventing The Retail Business Model” report. [link]

As more viewers look to access their video via the web and IPTV rather than from cable and satellite, the friction factor grows larger and larger.

Streams and downloads offer the promise of increased freedom — letting you shift time, location, and player. The promise is one of greater flexibility, where anyone can easily fit media and entertainment choices into their life. But the reality, at least now, is far from that promise.

The current state of online commercial TV and movie distribution is in a startling state of disarray. Options for consumers are at best limited and confusing, and quite often subject to sluggish speeds, poor video quality, broadband throttling, limited selection, proprietary software and non-integrated component hardware. You can also add limited network capacities and increased broadband traffic to the list, but the perhaps biggest long-term threat is the range of constraints placed on consumers by the content owners through excessively strict DRM schemes.

The studios and networks would do well to take a closer look at the music industry. They’re already learning the sometimes difficult lesson that restricting usage just increases customer frustrations. In 2007, Apple introduced a selection of DRM-free music in iTunes, Amazon upped the ante and introduced its catalog of 2 million songs unencumbered by DRM. The music industry is slowly coming to grips with the fact that consumers now control the market in a way never before possible. Unfortunately, the film and TV industries don’t see the connection.

Sure, the music industry has historically been less attached to DRM; just look at CDs vs DVDs. As Steve Jobs noted,

“Video is pretty different than music right now because the video industry does not distribute 90 percent of their content DRM free; never has, and so I think they are in a pretty different situation…” [link]

Tru enough. But as video consumption continues to shift from TV to the web, consumers will grow more and more weary of content that’s fundamentally out of sync with their needs. Marketers who allow and promote engagement with their customers will see the opportunity to thrive; those whose products produce more frustration than satisfaction will watch their market share slip away.

The initial numbers for the holiday season are already coming in. Comscore reports a 19% increase in online revenue for the 2007 holiday season (November 1-December 27), to $28 billion. Spending for the peak holiday season (Black Friday – Christmas Eve) increased by 21% over the same period, although an extra day between Thanksgiving and Christmas 2007 skews the results slightly. In any event, with the economy being hit by changes in housing & energy costs, this late-season rebound is great, even though it raises questions about some of the early season promotions that were so highly publicized.

Comscore lists a 20.5% annual growth — to $123 billion for 2007, up from $102b in ’06. Their base numbers are a bit off from the Forrester/Shop.org report issued last May, which came up with 2006 online retail sales of $146 billion.

But let’s not quibble. After all, give or take twenty billion, it’s worth noting that both sources agreed on a projection of 19% online retail growth for 2007, so 20.5% is welcome news.

Congratulations to all who met or surpassed their online sales goals in 2007. From here, the prospects for 2008 look bright.

Another end-of-year post: a selection of images taken during 2007. If less is more, here’s a lot. Fewer shots this year than in the 2006 set, and all locations within a 5 mile radius. See the slideshow or click a tnail.

A list of the best marketing books I’ve had the pleasure of reading during the past year. There were others that were professionally important but overly technical, more that made the effort but not the grade. Each of these combines a fresh approach to thinking about eComm with clear and often entertaining writing skills.

Have a recommendation? Feel free to post it here — I’ve got some travel time booked and would love to catch up on the latest.

The algorithms used by larger Pay Per Click advertisers can produce some less-than-stellar ads — and, we can assume, sales results to match.
ROI Revolution has posted their second Funny Adwords Contest. This time, contenders include “Quality Low at Amazon.com” and “Sell Your Soul on eBay“. Vote for your favorites, or check out the Round 1 Winners.