• How will Yahoo manage to retain, and grow, the Tumblr user base while monetizing it? Today, Tumblr is quite unprofitable, and its lack of advertising is one of the many attributes that have made it popular. Yahoo has a very difficult balancing act ahead: It has to keep Tumblr's current active user base passionately engaged and spending time on the site, while also finding a way to add advertising and other revenue sources. Marissa Mayer, Yahoo’s CEO, stated the ads will be “very light” and “really fit users’ expectations”; however, Ken Goldman, Yahoo’s COO, added that Tumblr should "materially contribute to revenues" in 2014 and beyond. If users do not stay with the service, they will have bought a ghost town. 
• Can the Tumblr user base be the next influx of loyal Yahoo users? Yahoo still has a massive user base, with at least 200 million users of Mail alone, and a passionate audience on Flickr. However, it is seeking its next core audience, and Tumblr users could fit the bill.  This is a similar challenge to Facebook's motivation for acquiring Instagram, however Facebook has so far held off on adding advertising to the Instagram platform. 
• How will Tumblr fit into Yahoo’s existing product portfolio? Yahoo has announced it plans to keep Tumblr independent, leaving both its brand and management intact. However, over time, there will be pressure to integrate it more and more tightly with other Yahoo properties. Will existing Yahoo products gain some of Tumblr’s social DNA, or will Tumblr lose some of what makes it unique?

There’s a lot of effort exerted by marketing leaders to turn customers into brand advocates. But their customers have a lot of brand choices and a lot of other things on their minds. What these marketers are overlooking is the potential brand advocates in their own backyard. Their employees. Employees are fundamentally connected to, thinking about, and representing your brand every day. They are often your biggest fans.

Indeed, our research shows that one of the biggest shifts of brand building in the 21st century is that — for leading brands — it is now a companywide effort. A unanimous 100% of marketing leaders surveyed by Forrester agreed that brand building requires all employees to be brand ambassadors. But the companies they lead are not yet living up to this aspiration. While many marketers’ eyes light up at the prospect of tapping in to their employees' Twitter networks, just focusing on social is missing the point. Yes, social is a valuable tool to create conversation. But true employee brand advocacy requires chief marketing officers (CMOs) to go deeper. They need to make delivering a superior brand experience part of the enterprise culture. Brand advocacy can’t be another task on someone’s to-do list. Make brand building part of how employees do their job and guide them by the light of a clear brand North Star so that your powerful new army marches to the same drumbeat. Forrester’s three-step framework guides the way:

• Excite with an inspiring brand experience. A PowerPoint presentation at the company meeting just won’t cut it. Bring the brand to life for your employees. Starbucks invested a staggering $35 million to create an interactive brand lab to bring the brand experience to life for its frontline employees. 

My colleague Reineke Reitsma recently published a blog on the limited but growing uptake of QR/2D barcodes.

Let’s face reality. Usage is low and marketing execution is poor to date, with too many campaigns that lack a clear consumer benefit and that provide a bad user experience by not offering mobile-optimized content. Today, mobile bar codes are an interesting tactic to engage with early adopters.

However, moving forward, we expect QR codes to gain traction and to be increasingly mixed with other technologies (including radio technologies like NFC) to provide extended product packaging solutions. Bar codes do not have to be just cold, emotionless, black-and-white squares. Solutions now exist to personalize QR codes’ designs and seamlessly mix them into a logo or band chart – even merging QR codes and NFC tags, as in the example below from mobiLead solutions.

The 2D bar code market will follow the same path as the 1D bar code market: fulfilling the need for certified and scalable platforms dealing with millions of standard code generation. Mobile bar code vendors will have to move into scalable mobile engagement platforms, progressively integrating multiple access technologies, such as Near Field Communications (NFC) tags, image recognition, or audio tags such as Shazam, and offering deep analytical tools. Beyond the emerging role of 2D bar codes in sales, we expect a growing number of brands — especially in the nutrition and health space — to systematize the use of bar codes on product packaging. Consumers want access to more product information, and brands can leverage mobile technologies to create a consumer relationship.

Mobile ad spending is finally taking off. The Forrester Research Mobile Advertising Forecast, 2013 To 2018 (US) predicts that mobile ad spend (smartphones plus tablets) will represent more than 29% of the total online ad spend in the US by 2018. The forecast looks at mobile device ownership in the US, trends in device usage, and mobile advertising supply-side data to fix the current and future market size for display, search, and social spending.

The drivers behind this take-off of mobile ad spending are:

• Increased device ownership, particularly of tablets. Smartphone installed base growth in 2012 was more than 35%, while tablet installed base growth exceeded 120%. By 2016, tablet sales will overtake the sales of desktop and laptop PCs.
• The intensity of online tablet use. Despite tablets representing less than 30% of the mobile device market in the US, they represent more than 40% of total mobile page views. In addition, the majority of tablet users watch video on their tablet, compared with about a third of smartphone users.