Your Boxing Day Opportunity!

Remember, you have three more days to submit your article for inclusion in my "Boxing Day" promotion on December 26. Anybody (bloggers or non-bloggers) who has something to say about marketing or database marketing can submit their content to me, and I will post it on Boxing Day. I have three submissions so far, so there's room for more!

Also, we have five weeks left in our challenge to help the catalog/online industry measure advertising effectiveness. The dataset has been downloaded more than two hundred times, and we already have a valid answer to the challenge. There's still forty days to work on the project, so have at it, and help us do something good for the catalog/online industry!!

Top Four Articles From November

November saw a 40% increase in traffic. Thank you! Here's what you enjoyed reading the most in November.

• Number Four was a tie. "Business Review: Overstock.com", a discussion about profit and loss at the low-cost, low-margin online pureplay. Tied for fourth was "Return on Investment Equation and Copywriting". Google helped this out (do a search on ROI Formula, and see what appears in the top 7 results).
• Number Three was "Mergers and Acquisitions", a discussion about Eddie Bauer being purchased.
  
• Number Two was "Williams Sonoma, Incremental Online Sales and Matchback Analysis". Our multichannel retailing audience enjoyed this post.
• And the Number One article was, in a landslide, "Please Help Our Industry Measure Advertising Effectiveness!". The spreadsheet, which needs to be solved by January 31, 2007 (all valid answers will be published here), has been downloaded by individuals in nearly a dozen different countries. My hope is that a good mix of data miners, and folks from industry leaders like Abacus, Merkle, Acxiom, Unica, Experian, SAS, SPSS and others genuinely try to do good for the multichannel retailing and online industry, and provide a solution to this problem.