Mario Götze. Repeat it; again and again. It is the name of the German midfielder whose extra-time goal closed the curtain on World Cup 2014, handing a well-deserved victory to his country and putting an end to four weeks of football-dominated headlines.
Brazil, you have been a joy, but it should be nice to get our Twitter feeds back to returning something other than countless memes, .Gifs and blogs related to the kicking of what is essentially a bag of wind.
Sure enough, the week that followed Sunday’s final between Germany and Argentina turned out to be a fruitful source of news for the performance marketing industry, as you are about to find out.
US takes on UK… UK wins (this time)
Seven days of exciting news started on Monday, when eMarketer backed the UK to become mobile advertising’s new main investor by 2018.
The US currently holds this title with 33.8% of all ad spend assigned to marketing on smartphones and laptops. However, Britain is primed for huge growth in this area, and the 27.9% of UK digital ad spend currently dedicated to mobile will reportedly rise to 70.4% over the next four years, above the US on 67.8%.
If things could not get worse for our friends on Stateside, data released by Adobe later in the week indicated that Britain would also outpace the US in terms of growth in paid search spend.
Time for Britain to relax, sit back and watch the good times roll? Not according to the Internet Advertising Bureau’s European ad spend league for 2013, which saw the UK rank fourth with a 16.2% lift in spend from 2012. Russia topped the table on 26.8%, with Turkey (25.3%) and Slovakia (17.3%) following closely behind.
AOL seeks TV ROI
Elsewhere our news feed weighed in with its fair share of company-focused scoops. AOL made headlines on Thursday by patenting a new service aimed at better measuring ROI from TV commercials.
The actual technology is thought to be in a very early stage of development, but there is a hope that it will bring TV closer to digital by gauging whether an ad can encourage someone to visit an online store.
We also caught up with Online Media Group to hear more about its plans for international expansion. It seems having operations in Eastern Europe, Asia and South America just is not enough for some, and the performance agency plans on adding another hub within the next year.
Last-click lives on
As for updates in the affiliate space, a fresh batch of features from our expert contributors shed light on topics such as the death of the cookie and the top challenges for publishers around the world.
Insights from Affiliate Window hinted that last-click attribution is far from on its last knees in the US. It seems the vast majority of affiliate-influenced conversions see consumers interacting with just one publisher on their way to the checkout.
To reaffirm the belief that single-source attribution models have a future in performance marketing, results from our weekly poll showed that over half of you believe last-click can stand the test of time.
We have now turned our attentions to establishing when mobile could become a greater source of ad revenue than desktop. You can pledge your votes here.