From the moment a consumer encounters one of EA's 30 or so mobile games, the tech giant is desperately trying to get him or her to spend money. That's because only 2-3% of mobile gamers actually pay to play -- and spending early is the best indicator of a willingness to spend often -- according to Kady Srinivasan, Senior Director of Player Engagement at EA Mobile. The goal is to "get them to go into a conversion cycle," Srinivasan told attendees of MediaPost's Cross-Channel Marketing Insider Summit, on Friday. It's "important to get them to spend as early as possible." …

Speaking at MediaPost’s Cross-Channel Marketing Insider Summit, Jim Spaeth, chief product officer at RealityMine, says the holy grail for marketers continues to be getting the right ad to the right person at the right time. “But it not always easy to do,” says Spaeth. He says there is increasingly a complicated mix of factors to consider such as location, social setting, activities, emotions and the sequencing of events. Spaeth talks about an example of where a brand manager of a quick service restaurant is analyzing lunchtime behavior -- in particular how to expand weekday lunch traffic to …

It's hard enough to blog a summit. It's doubly hard to blog them while you're moderating a session during a summit. So my way of covering the panel I just moderated with three content marketing gurus -- Mindshare's Chrissie Hanson, The New York Times' Shannon Marcotte, and Scholastic's Kathleen Chambard -- was to take a selfie of me moderating them on stage. The reason: It was my first-ever all-woman panel I ever moderated. The significance of that is probably a blog post for another day. But something else they had in common is more relevant for this post. They all …

The problem with many cross-channel approaches to marketing is that they get a little hung up on the channels they are crossing and forget about the thing they're supposed to be channeling. That's more or less what Sears Holdings Corp. DVP-Digital Marketing Ryan Deutsch told Cross-Channel Marketing Insider Summit attendees at Lake Tahoe this morning. To illustrate this point, Deutsch showed an infographic delineating the way SHC looks at its cross-channel channels. "Fundamentally, what makes all of these things work is what's at the center -- the member," Deutsch reminding attendees that it's all about the customer. In this case, …

"Ashley Madison!" Boom! Greg Paull, principal at global consultancy R3, just made reference to the ill-famed site and its unintentional data dumb, while on the topic to best cross-channel campaigns. Chairing a panel at MediaPost's Cross-Channel Marketing Insider Summit, on Thursday, Paull wasn't seriously suggesting that Ashley Madison deserves recognition for anything. Brands that actually deserve kudos for their cross-channel efforts include Airbnb and Marriot, said Richard Mastriani, Director of SEO at Wyndham Hotel Group. "Marriot has always led the way," he said on Thursday. Airbnb, meanwhile, has done a great job with its digital sites, which are mostly made …

That's what the former agency exec (Leo Burnett) found when she joined the client-side, Molly Garris, senior manager-digital marketing at Neutrogena, told Cross-Channel Marketing Insider Summit attendees during her opening keynote in Lake Tahoe this morning. "When it comes to beauty, digital is not super high," she said showing data on digital marketing by the beauty and skin care category. "A lot of the sales are happening inside the store."

There are few things that brands love more than their own names. That made Neutrogena's latest cross-channel marketing insight particularly hard to swallow. Consumers, they found, weren't going to a marketing micro-site -- which was advertised on in-store displays -- because they couldn't spell the name Neutrogena. "Neutrogena isn't easy to spell," admits Molly Garris, Senior Manager of Digital Marketing at the beauty brand. "Lesson learned," she told attendees of MediaPost's Cross-Channel Marketing Insider Summit, on Thursday. In response, the Johnson & Johnson brand changed its micro-site's Web address to solvemyacne.com. The only problem, as Garris noted, was that that …

When your brand is Neutrogena and an important part of your target audience are young people who are, how shall we say, not exactly the best spellers in the world, you've got a digital marketing challenge. One solution, Molly Garris, senior manager-digital marketing at the skincare product marketer, told Cross-Channel Marketing Insider Summit attendees during her opening keynote this morning, has been to leverage search engine optimization and easier-to-spell URLs to redirect consumers to neutrogena.com, lest they spell it incorrectly.

If you're not a programmatic (or an attribution modeling) geek, you can skip the answer to this question. If you happen to be one, you might be surprised to learn that, despite all the hemming and hawing and finger-pointing going on around programmatic display's "viewability," bot and fraud issues, it actually does pretty well in most attribution models. The reason, Morgan Vawter, programmatic marketing lead at Accenture, told Programmatic Insider Summit attendees this morning, is because of all the great meta data available in programmatic display campaigns.

Speaking at MediaPost’s Programmatic Insider Summit, Morgan Vawter, programmatic marketing & data management lead of North America for Accenture, said marketers are increasingly using competing algorithms to find a better algorithm. Vawter calls this “ensemble” method modelling. She notes that Netflix, for example, uses this well when it comes to figuring out what a TV consumer might like to see. “When you look the way your recommendations are served on Netflix, and how you are going to rate something, it’s not just one algorithm making those decisions. It’s a number of algorithms competing against one another. And …