It’s hard to believe we’ve rounded the corner to the final week before Christmas. This year, for the first time ever, I’ve joined the throng of panic-stricken fools who have yet to start our holiday buying. And what else is there for a crowd-averse computer geek to do in the dwindling shopping days before Christmas but avoid the mall and muse about the year that is just about to pass?

2006 has been a banner year for online marketing. The industry has rebounded with vigour as companies of all sizes jumped on board the integrated marketing bandwagon. It feels a lot like 1999, but much less tenuous. My prediction for 2007 – that the online marketing boom of 2006 is really just the beginning of a real paradigm shift in the entire marketing industry.

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1. Media In Canada: Canwest Papers available online in 12 languages
2. Advertising Age: Sony uses fake blog to “flog” the PSP
3 ClickZ: Image Blocking Scorecard
4. DMN.ca: Advertising on your TIVO?

1. MSNBC: 78% of all Internet users have broadband
2. Media In Canada: How to market accounting software? With reality television and an online contest…
3. HotelMarketing.com: Travelocity parent company sold for $4.45 billion

Dear Aunt May,

How come nobody’s taking up my special awesome amazing offer? I email them all the time and still no one clicks.
Signed,

Dazed & Confused

Dear Dazed,

I went Christmas shopping yesterday to spend too much money on my lousy relatives. To one of those “nicer” department stores, you know? Wasn’t terrible inside – not too filthy, not the ugliest displays I’d ever seen, staff that weren’t especially rude, and I found all the junk I was looking for pretty quickly. Things weren’t going too badly.

Then I started looking for the cash register…

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In today’s inbox environment more than 50% of readers use the preview pane to decide if they want to read your message. The horizontal preview pane is most popular by a margin of 3 to 1. As well over 95% of email clients block images. This means the most valuable real estate in their inboxes is going to be at most 650 pixels wide by 225 pixels high positioned at the very top.

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