the midden

In October, Stores Showed Signs of a Rebound

Over all for the industry in October, apparel sales increased 3.4 percent compared with the period a year ago, luxury goods rose 6.5 percent, jewelry increased 7.2 percent, and department store sales declined 1.5 percent, according to SpendingPulse. E-commerce was the most robust sector, increasing 18.7 percent — the third consecutive month of double-digit growth — because of strong sales of small, low-price goods.

— New York Times

Mastercard MacGyvers a Priceless iPhone App

Nice video interview at AdAge with MasterCard CMO Larry Flanagan this AM. MC had a ton of success with their ATM Hunter iPhone app (doubling total ATM location searches in the first month of the apps’ deployment) so they turned to existing content—their Priceless Picks channel—and converted that experience into an app.

I was especially interested to hear about this turnabout because MC approached me about three years ago to provide content to Priceless Picks. It’s a social site where user generated content reigns (and is posted for free, right?), but they paid me a big chunk of change to post some photos I had originally posted at Flickr (which is where they found them) along with a story clip. I figured if they were paying for user generated content then they were in trouble, but I’m glad to see that I was wrong.

Mastercard’s re-appropriation of existing content is an excellent example of the MacGyver like nature of widgets, which I wrote about recently for Multi-Channel Merchant.

It appears Mastercard has taken the social site down entirely and are now only providing access to that content via the Priceless Picks App. Interesting decision; fascinating evolution.