Summit Entertainment wraps up Twilight movie series with epic interactive ad featuring trailers, ticket booth, social links, and a contest

Talk about a grand exit. For the finale of the wildly popular Twilight movies, Summit Entertainment and Yahoo! took full advantage of the digital canvas on the Y! Movies Showtimes & Tickets page with a rich media experience that lets the user watch trailers, listen to music, find tickets, and enter for a chance to visit the vampire covens.

Here’s some back story for those not in the know: The last of the “Twilight” series of movies, based on the novels of the same name by Stephanie Meyer, has finally arrived at a multiplex near you in the darkly cloaked guise of “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 2.” Adapted from the fourth and final novel, the movie sees Bella and Edward, with their baby daughter Renesmee, under attack by the vicious Volturi, who are convinced Renesmee represents a threat to the vampire race.

This interactive ad gives Twilight’s passionate fans plenty of special content and features to sink their teeth into. Here’s how it works.

What will make news in digital marketing, mobile and video next year?  Here’s what some pundits are prognosticating.

With 2012 winding down, it’s time to shine up the old crystal ball and predict which trends will shape the digital advertising scene in 2013. Actually, we’ll let industry pundits make like Nostradamus. Given the Mayan calendar’s missed call (you know, the world ending today), the prediction biz seems pretty risky, and it’s doubly difficult in the ever-morphing, roller-coaster world of online marketing.

So we revved up our favorite search engine (Yahoo!, naturally), and came up with some expert picks for next year’s top trends in digital marketing, mobile and video advertising.

7 Digital Trends to Watch in 2013: Media convergence, or the blending of paid, owned and earned media, will intensify in 2013, spawning new technology and new partnerships, says Rebecca Lieb of iMedia Connection.  Other predictions include a boom in real-time marketing and the convergence of online and offline channels.

8 Insightful Marketing Predictions for 2013 and Beyond: HubSpot asked a legion of leading experts for their forecasts of what’s hot next year, and here’s a sampling: email marketing will grow and become more personalized; marketing will be held more accountable for generating revenue, not just growing traffic and finding leads; and CMOs will ramp up investments in technology that compiles better customer data.  (May we recommend Genome from Yahoo!?)

Take the official Ad Land Holiday Party Bingo Card to your next seasonal shindig

Tis the season for office holiday parties, and no industry loves them more than advertising.  Agencies, clients, production companies, all the players hold their own seasonal shindigs. Our David T. Jones goes to lots of them and noticed he kept hearing and seeing the same things at each one.

That inspired this week’s Ad Land cartoon---an ad party Bingo game that you and your cohorts can play at the next holiday party.  First one to check off a line of boxes wins.  (No points for saying or doing any of these things yourselves.)  

See the entire official Ad Land Holiday Bingo Card after the jump.  As an added bonus, we’re sharing 23 Rules of the Office Holiday Party from Yahoo! Finance, and to scare you into safe and sane behavior at your next holiday bash, here’s probably the most embarrassing office party clip of all time.

Happy Holidays from the Yahoo! Ad Blog! 

152 million Americans use the Yahoo! Bing network each month, and 45 million use it exclusively

Why is search so important to brand marketing campaigns? Because 63% of online Americans use search engines every day, and nearly 1/3 of them use the Yahoo! Bing Network.

This new video shows why so many searchers choose the Yahoo! Bing Network, highlighting its exclusive audience, innovative search formats, and ace account team. Here are some excerpts:

•  Yahoo! Bing users conduct 5 billion searches a month---29% of the U.S. search market
• That equals 152 million people in the U.S.---and 45 million are unique to Yahoo! Bing
• They spend 22% more than the average U.S. Web consumer---and 7.4% more than a Google searcher

Updates part of Yahoo!’s push for products that delight users, and Flickr’s got 85 million of them

Flickr is the app that pioneered online photography, and over the years it’s become a daily habit for a passionate audience of some 85 million photo-loving Web users. 

To make that passion burn brighter, we announced a major update to our Flickr mobile app last week that adds cool new features designed to delight users, including enhanced filters, geotagging, and the ability to push photo updates to friends on Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr. Judging from the media’s enthusiastic reaction, our update hit the mark.

The following quotes are taken from reviews of the enhanced app that ran in leading publications. Click on the links to read the full stories, which offer much more detail on the new enhancements. And click here to get the app and try it out for yourself.

• “Flickr announced a new iOS app today for shooting, editing, sharing and discovering photos. Based on the demo Wired saw, this is exactly the kind of gorgeous application that Flickr users have been longing for and that Flickr has always needed.” – Mat Honan, Wired
• “Long story short, it’s the best mobile photo app out there at the moment. Sorry Kevin Systrom and Instagram. Even with your latest update to your app, which gave it a snappier looking photo button, you just got lapped by Flickr.” – Eric Jackson, Forbes.com 

Fun with online slot machines, brand accountability, and being adopted by Tina Fey

Editor's Note: What's on the minds of media planners?  That's what our "Meet a Media Planner" series aims to uncover as we chat with media and search planners at agencies across the country. Today we'd like to introduce Malia Estes, a digital media planner at Mullen in Boston, Mass. Prior to joining Mullen a year and a half ago, Malia was busy experimenting with what she calls "a caveman version of media planning," handling blogging and social media for a smaller start-up. She enjoyed the work so much, she decided to pursue it full-time, and set her sights on Mullen. Since joining the team there, she has helped service clients like Timberland and Emblem Health, but now focuses solely on her favorite airborne brand, JetBlue.  

Yahoo! Ad Blog: You say JetBlue is your favorite brand---do you have a personal favorite JetBlue campaign, as well?

Malia Estes: That's hard, because I love all our campaigns! We had a co-op campaign going a few weeks ago for Samaná, Dominican Republic, and it was one of those situations where the brand planners brought great insight, the creative team brought amazing visuals and taglines, and we media planners just got to have so much fun with it. We got to test out some new partners, and run these big, flashy units.

For example, we had one ad, an interactive slot machine, that connected to Facebook. If you spun the slot machine, it would land on a Samaná activity like whale-watching and also on one of your Facebook friends. So you could share it to that friend's wall and say, "Hey Joe! Let's book a vacation to Samaná and go whale-watching!" It was really cute.

Software company substitutes retargeting for search and finds 4X more leads at 75% savings

When the usual way of doing things has you boxed in, maybe it's time to think out of the box. That's what Marketo did when it found that competitive bidding for popular search keywords was driving its cost-per-click rates through the roof.  The marketing software company wanted an alternative to search marketing that would bring them more quality leads at lower cost.  But was that a possible dream?

Marketo and partner Obility Consulting decided to flip the script and try a whole new approach---delivering display ads to high-value customer prospects with Yahoo! Mail Retargeting. 

Here's how it works: Marketo used Yahoo! Mail Retargeting to identify leads based on the emails and newsletters they received in Yahoo! Mail (the Web's #1 mail service) from firms that provide similar or related services. By targeting the domains of its competitors, Marketo could reach a larger audience of good leads via precisely targeted display ads across Yahoo! for less money than it spent bidding for search keywords.

Make that a lot less money. Marketo cut its costs-per-prospect by a whopping 75%.  Not only that, it found four times more high-quality leads than it found with search keywords.

Only 47% of retailers know how to apply Big Data to their business---here's how to develop your Big Data game plan

Here's a jaw-dropping Big Data factoid: 90% of the world's data has been created in the past two years, fed by a snowballing mass of Internet users, online transactions, social media traffic, and more. Plus, that amount of data will nearly triple by 2015, boosted by the rapid growth of smartphones and tablets.

Clearly, it's time for retailers to get a grip on Big Data---80% of them say they've heard of it, says today's infographic, but only 47% say they understand how to apply it to their business. This finding falls right in line with our own research covered in our recent "Big Data Decoded" infographic.

Where do you start?  Today's infographic lays out the basics of Big Data calmly and clearly: what it is, the challenges to using it, and how retailers are planning to leverage it for marketing, ecommerce, and more.  Best of all, it outlines a five-step approach to begin developing your own Big Data game plan.  

Find out more after the jump. And find out more about we're putting Big Data to work for advertisers with our custom audience-buying solution, Genome from Yahoo!.