Most Hated = Highest Return on Investment

Friday, March 2nd 2012
Published by: StreetAuthority (Austin, Texas)

The Most Hated Company on Earth Is Making Investors Rich   I can't think of a stock that's more hated. I've written about this company several times before. And I've personally owned it for years. But every time I mention it, I get nasty emails criticizing me for even covering this stock... let alone recommending it. In fact, it happens so often that I instruct our staff to mention that this investment isn't for everyone whenever they cover it. If you don't want to invest in this stock, I can certainly understand. But if you have an open mind toward this black sheep, then you're likely to appreciate what it can do for you. Simply take a look at its performance in the last 12 months... Last year, a year marked by credit downgrades, the European debt crisis and stagnating growth, the most hated company on the planet still made investors rich. And in the first few months of 2012, the stock has continued its stellar performance. In fact, this company touched a new 52-week high on Tuesday, Feb. 22. Unfortunately, I've noticed that far too many investors think investing has to be complicated. But stocks like this one prove that making money doesn't have to be hard. This company doesn't have a complicated business model. It is simply one of the most dominant and shareholder-friendly companies on the planet. Its products cost pennies to make, they sell for dollars and there's fantastic brand loyalty. The company does business in 180 countries and owns seven of the top 15 brands in its business. Most important it has made a mission of rewarding its shareholders. It has raised its dividend every year since the firm was founded. In the past three years alone, it has returned more than $12 billion in dividends while increasing the payments per share by 43%. Today, the shares yield close to 4%. Then there are the buybacks. Since May 2008 the company has repurchased more than $20 billion in stock -- or nearly 20% of the outstanding shares. All of these moves make the stock more valuable, even if earnings don't rise a cent. And as you can see, that's showing up in the share price. I must admit, I'm a bit biased. I personally own this company -- Philip Morris International (NYSE: PM) -- and also selected it as one of my "10 Best Stocks to Hold Forever." Nothing is 100% certain in investing. But when you can find companies like Philip Morris that dominate their market and are returning billions to investors, you've got a stock that can plow ahead in nearly any market -- including this one. -- Paul Tracy P.S. -- You don't have to invest in tobacco to make "forever" profits. I've uncovered  nine more investments that are strikingly similar to Philip Morris in my latest research: 10 Best Stocks to Hold Forever. They dominate their markets, pay increasing dividends and repurchase billions in stock. To learn more about these ideas, including several names and ticker symbols, I invite you towatch this video below.

The 10 Best Stocks to Hold Forever Warren Buffett, Goldman Sachs, John Kerry... maybe even YOUR own Congressman already own many of these stocks. Now regular Americans like you and me can pull back the curtain and buy these "forever" ideas. My advice: Buy them, forget about them, and hold them forever. Watch below to get started right now...

Source:http://web.streetauthority.com/m/tts/TTS05/hated-company-ob-vid.asp

Marketing Report: Localize to Optimize Sales Channel Effectiveness

Localize to Optimize Sales Channel Effectiveness

Despite the homogenization of markets, media channels, and brand experiences globally, localization of messages, images, creative executions, offers, deals, and interactions is still critical to marketing effectiveness and customer relationship building across many business categories. It is enabling marketers to truly localize and customize campaigns by community and to accommodate factors such as climate, geography, ethnic composition, demographics, shopper-graphics, psychographics, politics, and even neuro-sensory influences. Clearly, localized marketing is becoming a critical area of strategic focus and competitive advantage for brands. "Localize to Optimize Sales Channel Effectiveness" reveals that the majority of national marketers surveyed intend to look for ways to better modify, adapt, and localize their marketing content, messaging, and prospect engagement practices, as very few feel their campaigns are highly evolved on a local level. This report focuses on helping marketers optimize the delivery of localized marketing support through multiple media channels to best meet consumers where they are.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Despite the homogenization of markets, media channels, and brand experiences  globally, localization of messages, images, creative executions, offers, deals, and interactions is still critical to marketing effectiveness  and customer relationship building across many business categories. While the Internet may have eclipsed the trusty  Yellow Pages book as the primary  go-to resource

for finding  things locally (and providing third-party validation), consumers  still desire a very local buying and service experience  from a trusted  community participant and presence.

The advent of multi-channel, digital marketing is transforming customer  engagement,both globally and locally. It is giving local businesses a global presence, and it gives global businesses a local face and pipeline  into micro-populations,prospects, and continuity customers. Local marketing

automation platforms and solutions are enabling national or regional marketers to produce, package, distribute,and digitally  repurpose  multiple versions of content, collateral, advertising, direct mail, promotional, and in-store  merchandising materials  very cost-efficiently and effectively.

It is enabling marketers to truly localize and customize campaigns by community and to accommodate  factors such as climate, geography, ethnic composition, demographics, shopper­ graphics,psychographies,politics, and even neuro-sensory influences.

Media companies  in the cable,broadcast,print, mobile, Internet, outdoor  display, and digital signage sectors are introducing more targeted zone, ZIP code, and even location-based messaging and media-buying capabilities. And the same is true at the point  of sale, with behavioral targeting leveraging the transactional histories  of loyalty and rewards club members shopping

at supermarkets, drug stores, and mass merchant  outlets. Downsizing the World  Wide Web to a neighborhood locator  network is transforming the classified advertising and local listings business and bringing localized search marketing innovations  to the demand-generation and traffic-building capabilities of field networks, sales channels, service locations, and merchant  outlets of national brand marketers. These include local agents, dealers, franchisees,branch offices,manufacturer reps, consultants, brokers, restaurants,hotels, and retail stores. Localized social marketing is also harvesting the audience reach and viral value of hundreds of millions of active and addicted social gamers, personal content  publishers,brand and personality  fans, as well as community networking enthusiasts.

Advances in media, buying, tracking, and reporting systems using the Internet are also introducing higher levels of transparency, accountability,reporting, and measurement to co-op,localized,

and network  marketing programs on a grassroots level. Centralizing the origination of localized marketing content and programs also delivers significant  cost savings, assures greater brand integrity,reduces errors, and improves time-to-market. In addition,localized marketing support drives participation,interest, and enthusiasm  in the field,boosting sales effectiveness  and closure.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY  OF KEY FINDINGS

The "Localize to Optimize Sales Channel Effectiveness" study  by the CMO Council reveals  86 percent of national marketers surveyed intend to look  for ways to better modify, adapt, and

• localize their  marketing content,messaging, and prospect engagement practices. Clearly, localized
• marketing is becoming a critical area of strategic focus and competitive advantage for brands.

Most do not rate their capabilities very highly, and many  are exploring new channels and modes  of localized marketing content delivery. Only  52 percent of marketers are satisfied with the leadership, innovation, and effectiveness in this area. At the same time,marketers recognize the  value of localized market and community engagement and how it can drive  lead flow, differentiate brands, and create  more  lasting relationships for their  channels, field  agents, and sales representatives.

Just 12 percent of marketers believe they  have highly evolved campaigns and analytics on a local level in contrast to nearly  50 percent who  see themselves as underperforming or needing new strategic thinking and capability development in local  marketing. Findings from  the online survey  of 300-plus members across all leading industry sectors indicate traditional print and broadcast/cable media  are losing ground to more  targeted, personalized, interactive, and measurable forms  of local engagement across diverse  audiences and communities.

The most  preferred channels for localized marketing are experiential and relationship-building events, direct mail, localized websites, social networks, and electronic messaging. These were far more  popular selections than cable  and broadcast television, radio,local magazines, and even daily  and weekly  newspapers. Surprisingly, the Yellow Pages (online and offline) and local  online deal delivery networks, such as Groupon and LivingSocial, lagged behind all channels of localized marketing choice for national brands.

Significantly, the study found that:

Nearly 49 percent of marketers believe  localized marketing is essential to business growth and profitability,particularly as it relates to demand generation and sell-through of products and services.

Just 30 percent of marketers have embraced local marketing automation platforms, resources and tools compared to 62 percent who  either don't have them or only  now evaluating these options.

A sizable  23 percent of marketing respondents allocate over 50 percent of their  marketing and merchandising budgets to local  programs; another 41 percent spend between 20 and 50 percent of the budgets on local  marketing.

Only  36 percent of marketers have a formalized process  or system for tracking the impact of national brand advertising on local market development and customer acquisition. Some 61 percent either don't measure this  or have an ad hoc system for tracking national advertising effectiveness.

For those  who do track  the impact of national brand  advertising on local  business performance, the most  common methods include response  to offers or deals (45  percent); awareness and recognition studies (41 percent); lead and prospect flow  (37  percent); web site analytics (37 percent); field  and channel feedback (31 percent); local  inquiries and calls (30 percent) and share of market data  (28  percent).

Cable and broadcast television,local magazines, and radio  reportedly deliver  the lowest return on spend, compared to top  performers like local  events, direct mail or FSis,local partner or channel web sites,social networks and electronic messaging.

Factors that  most  influence localization of marketing messages include demographic (45 percent); geography/location (44 percent); socioeconomic (28  percent); psychographic (27 percent); cultural (22  percent); shoppergraphic or buying history and behavior (19 percent); as well  as language (19 percent).

Major obstacles or challenges to marketing localization include understanding local market dynamics or variables (30 percent); determining the right  cost/benefit models when  it comes  to spend  (24 percent); and measuring and evaluating campaign effectiveness on a local  level (23  percent).

• Top benefits and competitive advantages from localized marketing strategies and programs include:

1. greater customer relevance, response and return (67  percent);
2. better customer conversations and connectivity (39  percent);
3. improved loyalty and advocacy (29  percent);
4. brand  differentiation, distinction and preference (27  percent).

Marketers are looking to make significant changes and improvements in how they implement local marketing activities. These changes include efforts to:

•    Automate the development and delivery of local marketing materials and content

Explore and test  localized marketing approaches and strategies Embrace more  localized channels of targeting and market access Expand localized marketing budgets and programs

A good percentage  of respondents believe localized  marketing platforms and systems can be most beneficial  in areas like:

• Handling the logistics and intricacies of localized marketing Creating relevant and meaningful versions of content Controlling brand  assets and uniformity of brand messaging

Measuring and evaluating campaign effectiveness and content usage

Ownership of localized marketing programs and budgets tends  to be fairly distributed across different functional areas. Just 33 percent of CMOs personally direct and control local  marketing efforts, while  in the main cross-section,middle managers take responsibility for local  marketing. These include those  with ownership of channel/field marketing or merchandising, key accounts, district/territorial sales, business development,regions/countries, communications, marketing operations, and lines of business.

This CMO Council engagement program reveals  huge upside  potential for brands implementing localized marketing strategies that  enable  their sales and customer-facing networks to be more adept  in connecting and communicating with consumers and prospects on a more  personal and relevant level. Early adopters of hosted platforms and cloud-based services  in this area will gain competitive advantage in their ability to execute  campaigns more  effectively, provision their channel and field  organizations more efficiently,better control their  brand  assets, and track  the performance of their  marketing content investments.

Source: http://www.cmocouncil.org

The Long Haul to Capitalizing on Web Trends

By Geoffrey A. Fowler and Emily Steel

November 2nd, 2011

Web companies often upend industries. But they can labor for years to fully make money on their revolutions.

Take Google Inc. When the Internet titan came onto the scene in the 1990s, the company first focused on building technologies for searching the Web before considering its advertising prospects, recalls Rishad Tobaccowala, chief strategy and innovation officer at Vivaki, the digital advertising company owned by Publicis Groupe SA.

It wasn’t until a competitor, GoTo.com, created a pay-for-placement search product in 1998 that Google got serious, he says. The way that service worked, a company would make a bid to appear at the top of a search results page then pay if a consumer clicked. Google launched a similar advertising product in 2000. The key difference was that the system took into account the relevance of the ad to decide its placement on the search engine results page, not just the amount that the advertiser paid.

But the company’s early successes didn’t come from major corporations, but rather the so-called “long tail” – smaller, often local businesses. Gradually, search advertising gradually grew in importance across a wide spectrum of marketers, especially those in the automobile, tech and finance industries where online research became an important factor in people’s decision to buy a product or services, Mr. Tobaccowala says.

Google gradually expanded to selling a wide range of ad formats, including search to display to mobile. Today, Google leads the Internet advertising business. The company is expected to capture 40.8% of the U.S. Internet ad market this year, or $12.8 billion, according to research firm eMarketer Inc.

Similarly, Facebook’s earliest success with paid advertisers has come from that “long tail” with the businesses largely using the site’s demographic targeting abilities to reach a niche audience.

According to comScore Inc., almost 62% of the ads shown on Facebook in the July through September quarter came from advertisers that are not among the top 1000 digital advertisers in the U.S.; on Yahoo Inc., just 23% come from such small advertisers. These sorts of Facebook advertisers range from nail salons marketing to people who live a particular town, to recruiters targeting employees at a specific company.

“Facebook has the great opportunity to change the way that people think about advertising. Now, if only they can make it happen,” says Sean Corcoran, an analyst with Forrester Research Inc.

Lately, Facebook has been amping up its pitch to Madison Avenue by touting the capabilities of ads that incorporate information about users’ friends, and even their names and photos. It has invented out a new genre of paid advertising formats, dubbed “sponsored stories,” that let marketers spend money to republish user comments involving companies as ads.

The idea is that customers can be turned into promoters.  “The most effective way to influence someone is through word of mouth marketing,” says David Fischer, who runs Facebook’s ad department. Stimulating and measuring friend referral has long been the Holy Grail for marketers – but it has become tantalizingly possible at scale on a social network like Facebook.

“On Facebook, for the first time, you have the ability for marketers and brands to connect to people — and ultimately to tell their stories through people,” says Mr. Fischer.

Sponsored story ads are exact copies of what a users already post to Facebook – the difference is that the sponsored ones get plucked out and posted again next to other ads.

Facebook tells advertisers that sponsoring a post increases the chance friends will notice it, since new postings in the news feed push others down and off the page.

Only 20% of free messages posted by companies to users ever actually get seen on the site, Facebook says. Buying sponsored stories is a way to dramatically increase the odds that a piece of content will get seen. Moreover, Facebook says that some of the early users of sponsored stories have found that users are more than twice as likely to click on sponsored stories than typical Facebook ads.

To be sure, Facebook isn’t counting its entire future on advertising. It is also nurturing a digital payments business called Credits, in which it takes a 30% cut on consumer purchases of digital goods in social games, such as those made by Zynga Inc.

Source: http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2011/11/01/the-long-haul-to-capitalizing-on-web-trends/

Trends: Demographics & Investment Trends

Matthew Lynn's London Eye

Nov. 2, 2011, 12:00 a.m. EDT

7 billion reasons markets will change direction

Commentary: Five trends for investors to watch as population grows

By Matthew Lynn

LONDON (MarketWatch) — The markets may be full of their usual noise — another twist to the Greek tragedy, poor growth figures, a central bank somewhere printing some more money — but sometimes it is worth raising your eyes above all the day-to-day chatter and concentrating on the really important things that are happening in the world.

When the history books get written, 2011 won’t be remembered particularly for the overthrow of Col. Gadhafi in Libya, nor for the endless wrangling over the future of the euro, or even for the United States losing its triple-A rating, even though all of those events may manage to merit a footnote.

Click to Play

7 billionth person born in Philippines

Hospital workers and family welcome a newborn in the Philippines as the world population reaches 7 billion. (Video, photo: Reuters)

By far the more significant thing to happen in 2011 was the world’s population smashing through the 7 billion barrier — as it did on Monday, according to United Nations calculations.

The world’s population is exploding. How is that likely to impact on the global economy and markets in the next two decades? The West will decline in importance, Africa will rise in significance, commodities will get steadily more expensive, and the world will become more mobile. Despite all that, growth will resume, even if there will be some terrifying bumps along the way.

The world’s population has been on a steep upward trend ever since the industrial revolution taught us how to support more and more people on a planet that doesn’t get any bigger.

It took us from the beginning of time until 1922 to get up to 2 billion people, but these days we add the odd billion to the total faster than the Greeks run up their national debt. We went over 6 billion in 1999, so it has only taken 12 years to add the latest 1,000 million. According to U.N. estimates, by time we reach the end of this century, there will be 10 billion of us.

Reuters

The planet is getting crowded, but there are still opportunities to make money, as these commuters in Hanoi can attest.

In the end, economics is just demographics, with some extra charts and equations. How many people there are in the world impacts fundamentally on what gets made, what gets consumed, and how much you have to pay for it.

So what will be the medium-term impact of the fast-rising numbers of people? Here are five big trends to watch.

One, the decline of the West will accelerate. Europe and the U.S. will account for a smaller and smaller percentage of global population. They may be richer overall, if they follow the right policies, but they won’t be richer compared to the rest of the world, and they probably won’t feel better off either. Their influence will decline, and so will their currencies, as well as their bond and stock markets. Is a world with 7 billion people in it going to use the money of a country with 312 million people as its reserve currency? It doesn’t sound very likely.

Two, Africa will rise and rise in significance. The fastest increases in population will be in sub-Saharan Africa, a region that most investors and companies have mistakenly written off as a basket case. Not so. That is where the fastest growth will be. Industrialization and a rising population are a formidable combination, a lesson that has been proved many times over the last three centuries. They produced rapid growth in the past, and will do again. Some of the biggest winners of the next three decades will be the African markets, and the companies and investors who get into those counties on the ground floor.

Three, the pressure on resources will grow and grow. You don’t have to be a fully-fledged Malthusian to realize natural resources will get scarcer. For three centuries now, technical progress and human ingenuity have allowed us to continually out-wit the prophets of ecological doom. We are good at finding new resources in unexpected places, and at making what we have go further. We’ll carry on being good at that. Even so, there are limits. The rise in population will mean there is less food, less water, less energy, and fewer minerals to go round. That can only mean one thing. Prices will go up. We’ll learn how to live with that — but the bull market in commodities will run and run.

Four, mobility will rise. The developed world will have lots of old people, with plenty of money, but not many young people to look after them. The developing world will have lots of young people, but few well-paid jobs. It isn’t hard to see the fix to that — bring the young people to the old people, and vice-versa. The rapidly aging populations of Europe and Japan, and to a lesser extent the U.S., will all have to overcome their reservations over large-scale immigration. Increasingly, retired people will go and live in the developing world, where the meagre returns on the savings and their devalued pensions, will buy them a lot more than in the countries where they grew up. The world will see mass migration on a 19th-century scale — when huge swathes of the European population moved to the U.S. And every industry — from airlines, to telecoms, to property — involved in that will do well.

Five, growth will get growing again. True, there are lots of challenges ahead. There is too much debt. The currency system is in turmoil. Inequality is rising. Stocks seem stuck in a permanent bear market. But, at the simplest level, more people means a lot more stuff being bought and sold. Which means when that 7 billionth person starts looking for a job sometime in the 2030s, the world economy will be a lot bigger than it is now, and probably richer overall as well.

The markets will rise and fall as they always do, But so long as the human race is still expanding, it will always end up growing somehow. Keep those big themes in mind and your portfolio will remain in decent shape, even if there will be some inevitable bumps along the way. 

Source: http://www.marketwatch.com/Story/story/print?guid=D707A5F6-0498-11E1-B7EF-002128040CF6