Endeavour Marketing & Media, LLC.

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — The latest Facebook breakthrough is coming not from a software developer but from an agency.

Resource Interactive, an Ohio-based digital agency with offices in Columbus and Cincinnati, this month launched “Off the Wall,” a platform that allows consumers to purchase a product directly from a retailer’s wall or their own feed on Facebook without leaving the popular social-networking site.

The product was developed by the agency’s in-house research and development lab, which keeps the company up to speed on new developments in the digital space, while also coming up with prototypes and concepts for a “digital future.”

“We needed a group of people that could take the time and have the focus to look out a little bit ahead,” said Dan Shust, director-emerging media, who heads up the 18-month-old group. “We get caught up in project work occurring right now.”

As marketers look to reign in costs in a tough economy, agencies have felt the squeeze, so ad shops are looking to new revenue streams from product development that have included everything from clothing to widgets to books.

Mr. Shust said he believes product development will become a bigger piece of what the agency does. He said Resource Interactive has determined it made more sense to begin building its own platforms and products that could be used by both clients and others, rather than building customized solutions from the ground up for each client or project.

Opening its products up to non-clients is proving beneficial for the agency, which is adding new clients as a result and has received some interest from international agencies looking to become the exclusive provider of Off the Wall in other countries.

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Endeavour Marketing and Media – A Murfreesboro Advertising Agency

By Andrew Hampp for AdAge

LOS ANGELES (AdAge.com) — When Delta Airlines wanted to reach business travelers just in the New York area last spring, it decided to test the idea of microtargeting with place-based media. So it teamed up with out-of-home vertical SeeSaw Networks to create multiple 15-second spots customized to a wide array of venues across five different digital out-of-home vendors.

Cafes from Reach Media Group’s Danoo, ferry terminals from Affiniti Group Media, Pump Top TV’s gas stations in the New Jersey and Connecticut areas and health clubs on the Netpulse and When networks were all included in the plan, complementing similarly targeted ads in New York-based print and digital media.

Although business travelers in a single market like New York may ultimately amount to a relatively small audience, the campaign represented one of the biggest digital out-of-home outlays to date from a client at Digitas, Publicis’ digital media agency that recently branched out into the emerging outdoor medium.

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Endeavour Marketing and Media, A Murfreesboro, TN Advertising Agency

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — One of the more popular Google searches over Thanksgiving was “Walmart Black Friday store map,” which may go a long way in explaining some of the numbers being reported.

The data coming out today show online retail traffic was either flat or down, depending on the source, while search queries looking for weekend sales skyrocketed. And although web traffic stagnated, consumer spending online rose. Meanwhile, offline data paint a different story. Even as the number of consumers headed to stores jumped from the same period last year — known as Black Friday as retailers look at the start of the holiday sales season to put them in the black — they nonetheless chose to spend less.

The seemingly divergent trends indicate consumers are increasingly using the web as a research tool to help them plan bricks-and-mortar shopping trips and make more thought-out online purchases. Consider the data:

• On Thanksgiving Day, the percentage of U.S. visits to the top 500 retail websites was down 15% compared to Thanksgiving Day 2008, according to Hitwise; on Friday that number dropped 9%. ComScore, meanwhile, reported flat Black Friday web traffic year over year. But the National Retail Federation reported weekend store traffic grew by 13%.
• But Thanksgiving e-commerce sales rose 10% year over year to $313 million, according to ComScore; Black Friday spending totaled $595 million, up 11% over 2008. Meanwhile, the National Retail Federation reported a drop in per-person in-store spending.
• Google searches for retail-related terms were up 49% this Black Friday weekend over the previous year. And searches for “Black Friday” on Thanksgiving and the day after were up 20% over last year; searches for “black Friday sales” on those same days were up 50%.

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From Kenneth Hein at BrandWeek:

In-store marketing is more effective than traditional ads, according to “The Elements Report” released today (Tuesday). Nearly a third (32 percent) of the 999 shoppers polled online in March said that in-store marketing is “very effective.” Only 27 percent said the same about ads living outside of the store.

The report, which is part three of the “Gone in 2.3 Seconds: Capturing Shoppers with Effective In-Store Triggers Series,” found that the shopping experience is crucial for marketers. Sixty-nine percent of those polled called the in-store experience a “make or break” scenario. While 65 percent of shoppers are making lists, brand decisions are still being made at the store, according to 60 percent of respondents.

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