The 2009 holiday shopping season is shaping up to be the battle of retail’s two titans: Amazon.com (AMZN), the largest online retailer vs. Walmart (WMT), the world’s largest brick and mortar retailer. For years, at least online, this has hardly been a contest, with Amazon leaving all rivals in its ever growing wake. This year, however, Walmart has taken significant steps to compete head on with Amazon.

Warner Brothers recently released the movie about a well known children’s story called Where the Wild Things Are. This movie is based on a popular book written by Maurice Sendak that has sold over 19 million copies worldwide since it was first published in 1963. In the months leading up to the theatrical release, Warner Brothers used various forms of advertising to promote the movie. Based on Compete’s data, traffic to the movie site wherethewildthingsare.warnerbros.com peaked in October with over three hundred thousand visitors to the site.

The Death of Newspapers or the Rise of Reddit?

TechCrunch recently pointed out that “Google’s Got Some Suggestions” about what Newspapers are:

Tis the season for your photo to be printed on everything from a card to a calendar to a mug and dispersed to loved ones across the globe. Reflecting the rest of the retail market, the online photo services market garners much of its traffic and revenues in the last quarter of the year. Shutterfly (SFLY) for example, reported 50% of its annual earnings in Q4 2008 alone. A snapshot of two of the leading online photo printing hubs reveals that recent weekly traffic well reflects this seasonality:

Since the summer, analysts have been predicting record low holiday spending. In response, retailers have been promoting special sales since before Halloween. JC Penney (JCP), Target (TGT), and Overstock (OSTK) are among several retailers to offer daily deals to entice shoppers each day. Sears (SHLD) and Toys “R” Us released their Black Friday ads in October in order to whet consumers’ appetites early. A quick look at search traffic reveals extremely fierce competition for “Black Friday” keywords. Target, Wal-Mart (WMT), and Amazon (AMZN), the top 3 retailers capturing “Black Friday” keyword searches, are heavily invested in paid search marketing. Almost 70% of Target’s “Black Friday” search traffic is paid; that is up from 36% last year. Wal-Mart’s paid share this year is 31%, versus 21% last year.

Everyone is waiting with bated breath to see how consumers respond on Black Friday, the “official” start of the holiday shopping season. Here are some findings from a recent Compete study that will shed some light onto expected consumer shopping behavior.

The Motorola Droid is here. And though I’m a little disappointed it didn’t actually arrive via Stealth Bomber, it did come in with a bang. From all of the buzz online and an aggressive advertising campaign, Verizon Wireless (VZ) has declared the Droid as the poster child of its new line of phones running Google’s Android OS.

Speaking of Android, remember the T-Mobile G1 from last fall? There was a ton of anticipation around the release of the G1, which was essentially the poster child of the first generation of Android phones. How does interest in the Droid compare to interest in the G1 around launch?

Apparently October brought a lot of costume searchers online. After several months of declining search query volumes, October query volumes ticked up 4% m-o-m. Total web search activity peaked just shy of 13 billion queries in the US. Among the major market players nearly every engine benefitted from the lift in activity. However behind the rising tide only one engine managed to pull ahead of the pack.

So what’s going on in my house this month that’s forced this Bandwidth vs. TV question? One word: Boxee. I could write a whole post on Boxee (maybe next time) – the short story is that thanks to Boxee, I now have the ability to easily watch videos (Netflix, Hulu, CNN, BBC) through my living room television except my Internet connection can’t handle it. As Captain Kirk would say, “We need more power, Scotty!” So, I’ve placed the order with a new Internet service provider for 4x more speed than I am currently receiving. As a result, I’ll become even less reliant on a television schedule and will bring the instantaneous downloads of Netflix not just to my computer, but to my living room, on the TV, where it belongs.

Naturally, all this got me thinking. We are clearly in the midst of a shift in how media is consumed, but how long will it be until we say something like, “Remember when TV had channels?” The answer may be sooner than you think.

If the Retail world sees the end of the year as the Triple Crown, Halloween would be the Kentucky Derby. It is the initial measure of shoppers’ purchasing power leading into the holidays, and companies are quick to be the first out of the gate with sales of costumes, candy, and decorations. Search behavior offers a unique perspective on how consumers use the online channel for Halloween shopping; being relevant one month out of the year, Halloween shoppers do not have an obvious go-to place to find the necessities, and thus they turn to search as a discovery tool.

When Nintendo first introduced the Wii in 2006, they did so with a lower price point than the competition and a focus on capturing interest from all demographics. Demand for the Wii was so high that finding a Wii in a store was a rarity until earlier this year. Since then, Nintendo has dominated in sales of consoles leaving both the Sony Playstation 3 (PS3) and the Microsoft Xbox360 in the dust. In August, both Sony (SNE) and Microsoft (MSFT) lowered the price of their consoles to $300, but the PS3 came out victorious in September with monthly console sales surpassing Wii for the first time. Interestingly, Nintendo retaliated and lowered the price of the Wii to $200 in September.

Many epic battles have been fought on soil, but far fewer in cyberspace. Leave it to Walmart (WMT) and Amazon (AMZN) to break that barrier. Walmart and Amazon (and newcomer Target (TGT)) are currently locked in an all out price war over online book sales that has culminated into the American Booksellers Association asking the Department of Justice to launch an antitrust investigation.

It all started when Walmart, determined to aggressively drive traffic and sales this holiday season, announced it would allow customers to preorder 10 of the most highly anticipated books for $10 each. Within hours, Amazon matched this low price for all 10 titles. Not to be out done, Walmart lowered its price to $9; Amazon quickly followed suit. By the next day, Walmart lowered its selling price to $8.99. A few days later, Target jumped into the ring by matching Walmart’s price. Determined to maintain its lowest price guarantee, Walmart again dropped its price by $.01.

I think Macgyver is the ultimate handyman. The way he is able to fix, create, or build whatever it is he needs under nearly any circumstances is amazing.

Is online advertising a good vehicle for reaching brand advertising goals? Judged by their actions, more and more advertisers are voting “yes.” During the past several months, we’ve observed a gradual but decisive stride from an ambivalent stance toward a full embrace of online media as a branding tool.

This past week, we witnessed a Ford (F) display campaign that to us represented a noteworthy waypoint in the development of online ads designed for branding objectives: ads that reject the click.

Apparently all the kiddos heading back to school are not turning to search engines to do their homework. Overall September web search activity remained at seasonal lows with no strong indication of recovery. In September, online users submitted 200MM less queries than they did in August. The majority of this decline came from Yahoo (YHOO) (serving 100 MM less queries in September than August or an 8% decline).

Throughout 2009, Boost Mobile has been at the forefront of a prepaid resurgence in the wireless industry. Boost’s distinctive “Unwrong’d” campaigns have been all over the media for much of the year, but have they helped Boost gain any traction in the wireless world?

As it turns out, Boost had the right idea. Not only has its traffic increased significantly over the last year, but the prepaid market as a whole is experiencing a boom. Based on Compete’s clickstream data, overall Prepaid Prospect Traffic (non-Customer traffic to Boost, GoPhone, VZW Prepaid, ToGo, Tracfone, Virgin Mobile USA) has increased 12% Y-o-Y.

Hopes were high when Microsoft (MSFT) introduced the Zune in 2006. As the first MP3 player to feature WiFi and an FM radio, the Zune stood out by allowing owners to share music wirelessly with other Zune users. The concept never took off, and Zune adoption was limited, while Apple’s (AAPL) iPod line continued to dominate the media player space.

In late September of this year, Microsoft launched the latest version of its Zune HD media player. Rather than simply upgrade and refine the original Zune concept, Microsoft seemingly followed the lead of the iPod Touch, building the device around a 3.3-inch touchscreen and adding Internet browsing capability and games/application downloads via the Zune Marketplace. Apple made a series of announcements in the week prior to the Zune’s launch, including improvements to iTunes, the iPod Touch and iPod Nano, providing an opportunity to compare consumer interest in the two media player brands.

2009 is BIG for Back to School: Staples and Office Depot See YOY Growth in Q3

September marked the beginning of the school year and the end of the Back to School Season for office supply retailers. Q3 sales figures have yet to be released, but if site volume is any indicator, online office supply retailers saw a year over year boom. Industry leaders, staples.com (SPLS) and officedepot.com (ODP), each saw huge gains – staples.com up 59% YOY to 23.7MM unique visitors (UVs) and officedepot.com up 21% YOY to 13.3MM UVs in Q3.

Toyota (TM) recently announced an aggressive plan to drive US sales after losing ground to rivals. The plan includes $1 billion in marketing in Q4 2009, which AutomotiveNews reported would rank as Toyota’s largest Q4 spend ever.

We reviewed Toyota’s Share of Market Interest (SMI) to reveal one element of the plan’s baseline: demand relative to the market. Brand SMI is the share of all in-market new vehicle shoppers that shopped one or more models within a given brand; shares across all brands total over 100% because most consumers shop more than one brand.