According to a job placement firm out of Chicago, Challenger Gray & Christmas (interesting name given the time of year), employers could lose a total of $488 million in productivity today. This estimate is based on 68.6 million employees spending 12 minutes at work buying holiday gifts online.

Thankfully, this consulting firm is not completely anti-consumerism, stating that although some productivity will be lost, employees are not expected to be productive every minute of their work day. Additionally, according to John Challenger, cracking down today is a bad idea. “Doing so could negatively affect morale and loyalty, which ultimately will have a greater impact on the bottom line than a few minutes of cyber shopping.”

All of us can breathe a collective sigh of relief as shoppers continue to contribute to a 21% increase in online sales as compared to last year.

Here are some stats for the typical online shopper (according to Shop.org):

• Men more likely to shop at work than women
• Adults 18-24 more likely to shop at work than any other age group (73%)

Given the fact that the internet will make up 30% of holiday shopping purchases, there is no reason for agencies or clients to fear Cyber Monday. In fact, embracing the day by running promotions, specifically reaching out to consumers during that day (and black Friday) will prove to be more and more profitable each year.

Excuse me while I go squeeze in my 12 minutes of consumerism today.

We had the pleasure to recently review and evaluate the new product (still in Beta) from BuzzLogic called BuzzLogic AdTargeting. Wow, what a great product.

If you are a company like many of our clients that wants to advertise on blogs, yet have no idea about the results, don’t want to risk, don’t have the time to research which blogs to advertise on, search no more.

BuzzLogic’s ad targeting product allows you to run a search on the top influential bloggers for your industry (Say you are TravelPod (an old client of ours) your top 50-100 influencer blogs/social media sites could include About.com’s Europe section , ReadWriteWeb, Kattie Fehrenbacher from GigaOm, Emily Chang’s eHub - all of whom have written about travel and travel start ups ). From there, you can select the sites (that offer Google Ads now, but I am sure they will add ad networks such as Blog Ads, Text Ad Link, Ad Brite, etc. more later) on which you want to place a Text Ad or Visual Ad. You create the ad. Then you launch.

Now not only this takes the work out of figuring out which blogs to place your ads on since the tool identifies for you, the influential bloggers that have covered your product/service (or competitors’ product), but it also brings forward two strong things in BuzzLogic’s favor:
- Through the development work they have done with Google, they are able to allow us agencies and advertisers to do site targeting on sites that usually you can not target through Google’s content network (I am not talking about site targeting here, we are talking about being able to target sites in the “content network” of Google)
- Because you are placing ads on blogs that have covered your product or service (or competitors), your ads on such sites are VERY relevant, and therefore will perform that much better because your ads are going to be VERY relevant to your target audiences.

We are launching a few test campaigns and am sure we will see great results.

Congrats to BuzzLogic for being innovative.

Jai Decker and Pleo attended Ad-tech in New York last week, ok so Pleo and Jai attended a few parties as well. We were honored by Josh Greene’s blog post who said that Pleo’s appearance at the show was a great viral marketing tactic, we are blushing….thanks Josh.