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.

Those of us that follow the consumer electronics industry have been hearing about the promise of netbooks for quite some time now. The Consumer Electronics Association predicts the netbook category will generate $3.4 billion in 2009. It seems like every major OEM, retailer and wireless carrier has plans to enter the game in some form or another. But until recently, consumers didn’t seem to be getting the message. Based on Compete’s panel of users, we have seen consumer interest in netbooks grow to almost 1 million people monthly (26% growth) between January 2009 and June 2009 at retail websites alone. Online interest at wireless carrier websites, which was non-existent in January, is now reaching over 300,000 people a month.

Last week we looked at how retail king Walmart (WMT) has used online display advertising to drive growth in site visitors at a faster rate than its rivals. So far this year, Walmart has run several prominent display campaigns on high reach placements like the homepages of AOL and Yahoo! (YHOO). Of course the marketing team at Walmart is savvy enough to test and vary the creative, messaging and the format of these expensive ad placements.

We took a look at two executions that Walmart used for two different one-day homepage takeovers on AOL. The first one pictured below is a non-interactive ad unit that ran in late May. A few months later in early August, Walmart ran an interactive ad also on the AOL homepage (pictured on the right below). We define an interactive ad as an ad that shows more information within the unit when a consumer clicks on it rather than immediately directing the consumer to a landing page or a website. Note that in the case of the Walmart interactive ad, it is essentially a mini circular within the ad unit. Shoppers can click on a section (i.e. Girls’ Apparel) which takes you to a different department and they can then scroll through the products. What better way to really engage shoppers in the shopping process as well as accommodate a broader spectrum of audience? So what were the results of these two campaigns?

On August 12th, JetBlue (JBLU) announced an All-You-Can-Jet promotion which allows travelers to fly anywhere JetBlue flies as often as they would like within a month for $599. JetBlue ended the program sooner than expected as response was stronger than anticipated. The program had a number of quirks that make it challenging to track the drivers of its success. For example, you could enroll and book only via phone. The phone-based system may have also facilitated enrollment in JetBlue’s frequent flyer program—required if you were not a member already.

While enrollment and booking was limited to phone, consumers could still visit JetBlue.com to learn more. Compete measured the potential interest by trending daily reach of JetBlue.com before, during, and after the promotion. Reach equals the share of all US Internet users that visited a website.

With the credit market still in a state of disarray, traditional credit card companies are looking for ways to diversify their sources of funding. Two of the industry’s largest competitors in the card arena, Discover (DFS) and American Express (AXP), have recently begun to offer a portfolio of savings products that compete directly with longtime leaders in this space like ING Direct, and relatively new entrants such as Ally Bank. This is similar to the tactic employed by Capital One (COF) nearly 10 years ago as it spawned the Direct Banking division which offers online only accounts with highly competitive rates. What makes this push even more intriguing is the fact that both Discover and American Express are offering rates that exceed competitor products during a time when the overall rate environment has been declining steadily. The below table illustrates the rates for high yield savings accounts at the end of August. Having a high rate, especially in this difficult rate environment, is one way to grab a lot of attention in the marketplace.

While having a best in class rate is all well and good, these two companies realize that getting the word out about their new products is even more important. One of the best ways to do this in the online forum is through utilization of key search terms. In this particular case, non-branded search terms are important since these will be used by prospects without an affinity toward a specific company. Otherwise they would have just gone directly to that company’s website or at the very least conducted a search using a branded term.

In July, BarnesandNoble.com (BKS) launched the e-books section of their online bookstore with the intention of capitalizing on the growing market. Consumers have increasingly been turning to e-books that equip a reader with added conveniences and often a chic electronic device. Although Barnes & Noble lacks, at least for the time being, an e-reader similar to Sony’s e-reader or Kindle, Amazon.com’s industry leading e-reader, digital bookworms welcomed the new e-bookstore with open arms.

The e-books section of BarnesandNoble.com was visited by more than four times as many people as Amazon.com’s (AMZN) Kindle Store (and over 75x Sony’s eBookstore) in its first week. However, their successful launch cooled rather quickly after a few weeks.

When it comes to brick and mortar retailers, Walmart (WMT) is clearly the market leader just by its sheer size. In fact, Walmart’s dominance transfers online where it received 33M visitors in August which was 10% more than the next closest brick and mortar rival, Target (TGT). Not only does Walmart attract more consumers but it is also growing at a faster rate than Target. For the past 6 months Walmart.com has seen double digit year-over-year growth in site visitors, outpacing the growth rate for Target.com.

One might wonder how a giant like Walmart continues to maintain such strong growth. One reason is their aggressive online advertising campaigns. In the past six months, Walmart has run several prominent display ad placements on the front pages of large portals like Yahoo! (YHOO) and AOL.

Search Share

Since its launch at the beginning of June, Microsoft’s Bing has been gaining traction in the search realm, and is proving itself to be a viable competitor to Yahoo! (YHOO) and Google (GOOG). Bing has seen increase in its search volume for the past three months straight. Out of the “big five engines” Bing and AOL are the only ones who can make that claim. In terms of core search growth, Bing stands out.

What terms drove the greatest query volume spike? Let’s take a look at some of the fastest growing terms since this time last year to get a better idea of the trend in consumer search interest.

Findings:

Last summer, I wrote about the growing interest in Unified Communication Solutions and the implications for telecom providers. As a refresher, we think of Unified Communications (UC) as technology that offers users choices in how they manage communications from home phones, voicemail, video services, email, etc. Since last year, I have seen the likes of AT&T (T), Google (GOOG) and Comcast (CMCSA) introduce and announce UC solutions that are simply posing as very cool apps for your mobile phone. Today these apps operate on your Smartphone and allow you to manage content across your home phone, voicemail, video service, email, SMS text and PC.

Comcast’s new converged mobile application for the iPhone and iPod Touch provides a great example of on-the-go converged mobile apps. This Comcast app will provide one-stop access to key features of Comcast Digital Voice, Digital Cable and high-speed Internet services. This includes giving customers the ability to read and compose emails from Comcast.net, listen to home voice mail from one mailbox, manage landline voicemail through a visual interface, forward home calls to the iPhone, check TV listings, watch on-demand movie trailers, synch all universal address book contacts to the iPhone and add pictures to their favorite contacts. Wow!