Phil's Blog

Consulting For You -- A Fourth Anniversary

This blog celebrates its fourth anniversary this month. Hooray!

To celebrate, here is my very first blog post from November 2005:

“My greatest strength as a consultant is to be ignorant and ask a few questions.” --Peter F. Drucker After I retired from 30 years at General Mills, Six Flags and, on the agency side, from Campbell-Mithun (Minneapolis) and my own advertising agency partnerships, I traveled, I relaxed and I taught for a semester at the University of Florida. But I became a little bored. What to do? I love capitalism and, especially, marketing and advertising. So I became a part-time marketing consultant, part-time retiree. In the first two years of this new consulting career, I have been hired to coordinate ad agency (and PR firm) reviews. I have also helped advertisers (aka "clients") to negotiate better, often less expensive compensation agreements. I love it. If you and your management want to improve your marketing, conduct an agency review, negotiate a better compensation agreement, please call or email me. Let’s talk. Thank you. Phil Schwartz

Phil's List of Enlightening Stats - Part 89

5 billion - Number of tweets on Twitter since it went live. This level was achieved this week. 

2.6 billion - Dollar spending forecast for 2009 for Digital-Out-Of-Home (DOOH) advertising. This encompasses advertising on digital media in retail stores, malls and movie theaters.

3.4 percent - Portion of US population who posted a blog entry in the last 30 days. 

10 percent - Portion of US population who read a blog entry in the last 30 days.

1.6 million - Number of ning.com social networks. Total active members: 32 million.

45 percent - Estimated market share of Amazon's Kindle. Sony is in second place with a 20 percent share. In 2010, Apple is expected to introduce a competitor.

240 million - Dollar investment by Microsoft in 2007 to acquire 1.6 percent of Facebook. This relationship helps explain the new Microsoft Bing agreement to provide real-time search results for Facebook status updates. Bing will also provide the same for Twitter tweets.

Phil's List of Enlightening Stats - Part 88

6.3 - Number of years that US life expectancy increased during the Great Depression.

25 percent - Average portion of annual sales represented by the holiday period for retailers. Last year, that figure was just 18 percent of their annual sales.

8 - Number of years the United States has been fighting in Afghanistan. 779 American soldiers have been killed in the war. $223 billion has been spent by the US on the war. Today is the first day of the 9th year.

21.8 million - Number of viewers of the Minnesota Vikings (with 39 year old quarterback, Brett Favre) vs Green Bay game this past Monday night on ESPN. That is the largest audience to ever watch a program on cable television beating the prior record by 3 million viewers.

5.3 percent - Decline in online advertising spending in the first half of 2009.

Phil's List of Enlightening Stats - Part 87

2.8 million - Cost of 2010 Super Bowl thirty-second commercial. CBS says they are 70% sold out.

37 - Number of missions to date for Space Shuttle Discovery.

61 percent - Market share of Internet Searches in China by Baidu. Google is number two.

18 - Number of variations on Twinkle Twinkle Little Star written by Mozart.

1,400 - Additional annual dollar cost per person for medical care for obese Americans.

55 percent - Portion of the world's population that has never made or received a phone call.

53 - Number of Lego pieces for every person in the world.

.83 percent - Latest non-mobile clickthrough rate (of 92 million impressions). Not surprisingly, the mobile rate was 58 percent of the non-mobile rate. (Chitika) (When was the last time you clicked on an ad you saw on your mobile device?)

3.5 trillion - Total dollar amount in US money market accounts. (To give you an idea of what a trillion dollars is, it is the equivalent of laying dollar bills end to end from earth to the edge of the Milky Way four times then twice around the constellation Orion and back to the moon on Saturday night.)

40 - Hourly rate in dollars that I've seen in recent ad agency compensation proposals for some services. If that isn't a sign of the times, I don't know what is.

Phil's List of Enlightening Stats - Part 86

2,366 - Population of Bethel, New York in August 1969. 

400,000 - Estimated number of attendees at Woodstock festival. (Other estimates range from 350,000 to 450,000.)

6.50 - Dollar price of one day ticket (if purchased in advance; 8 dollars if purchased on days of show).

221,000 - Dollar cost of raising a child in the US to the age of seventeen.

2 million - Approximate current daily circulation of the New York Times newspaper.

20 million - Approximate current daily online readership of NYTimes.com

20 percent - Portion of annual US health care expenses relating to obesity.

1.3 million - Number of auto mechanics in the US.

25 percent - Portion of advertising agencies with truly effective leave behinds in new business presentations. This is based on personal observations of more than 1600 pitches.

Phil's List of Enlightening Stats - Part 85

76 percent - Interpublic's plunge in year over year profits for the latest quarter.

13 - Record number of earthlings in space at one time. This was on the International Space Station when Endeavor docked with it for almost two weeks.

147 billion - Last year's dollar total for spending in the US on obesity-related medical expenses.

9,000 - Current daily average of US home foreclosures.

100,000 - Official estimate of the number of Burmese pythons in the Florida Everglades. The females can lay up to eight eggs per day and some estimates are double this amount for the snake that has no natural predators.

0 - Number of Web development companies and ad agencies with Web site development service who deliver a client's Web site on the date promised.

Phil's List of Enlightening Stats - Part 84

3.5 percent - Portion of Fannie Mae mortgage delinquencies in April 2009, the highest level ever and rising.

8900 - Number of retailers that closed their door in 2008.

6.8 billion - Estimated dollar value of unused gift cards in the US. (That's the total of all non-used, partially used and lost cards after 2 years of non-activity.)

30 - Number of Obama White House Czars. Reagan had 3, Clinton had 9, Bush II had 12.

56 percent - Portion of US population considered obese by the CDC.

5 million - Number of Yahoo's worldwide viewers of the streaming Michael Jackson memorial. This smashed the prior record of live online viewing of the Obama inauguration which was 1.3 million.

12 - Number of Americans who have walked on the moon. All returned safely.

29 - Number of advertising agencies for whom I've conducted my one-day Business Building seminars. R U next? E.

Phil's List of Enlightening Stats - Part 83

While all those other blogs give you the top tens on this or that, we give you the top eleven.

Here are the top eleven social bookmarking sites (Sources: Compete and Quantcast)

1.  Digg

2.  Yahoo! Buzz

3.  StumbleUpon

4.  reddit

5.  Technorati

6.  del.icio.us

7.  kaboodle

8.  mixx

9.  Propeller

10.newsvine

11.Fark

Phil's List of Enlightening Stats - Part 82

14,000 - Number of McDonald's locations in the U.S. and a total of 31,500 worldwide.

7,600 - Number of Burger King locations in the U.S. and a total of 11,550 worldwide.

6,700 - Number of Wendy's locations in the U.S.

11,000 - Number of Starbucks locations in the U.S. and a total of 16,100 worldwide.

3,400 - Number of Dunkin' Donuts in the U.S.

1,500 - Number of Denny's in the U.S.

75 - Number of Morton's in the U.S. and a total of 80 worldwide.

Phil's List of Enlightening Stats - Part 81

40 percent - Portion of consumers who use coupons more now than a year ago.

45 - Number of Twitter employees up from 21 in January.

32 million - Current number of Twitter users. A year ago, they had 1.6 million.

61 - Number of Internet "sessions" by the average American online in April. (Neilsen)*

108 - Number of domains surfed on average in one month.*

57 - Number of seconds spent on the average page viewed.*

2443 - Average number of pages viewed in April.*

*These online stats are fairly consistent month-to-month in the recent past.