All Blog Posts from Public Eye

If you turned on the television, checked a news Web site or read a newspaper in the past few days, you would have been introduced to a new term in the world of holiday marketing hype – “Black Friday” has begotten “Cyber Monday.”



On last night’s “Evening News,” correspondent Trish Regan noted in a piece about holiday shopping that Cyber Monday “could be one of the busiest days for Web retailers ever recorded.” “Today is expected to be one of the busiest days of the year for shopping online,” ABC’s “World News Tonight” anchor Elizabeth Vargas said last night as she introduced Dan Harris’ piece on secure online shopping. “Cyber Monday, the Monday after Thanksgiving, is quickly becoming one of the biggest online shopping days of the year,” wrote CNNMoney.com. USA Today wrote on Sunday that “The post-holiday Monday has become a big event for online retailers, who've nicknamed it ‘Cyber Monday.’ Some 43% plan promotions today to fuel the trend.”



And if you were wondering where exactly the fuel for this trend came from, Robert Hof at Businessweek Online has an answer for you:

So what's up with this Cyber Monday idea? A little bit of reality and a whole lot of savvy marketing. It turns out that Shop.org, an association for retailers that sell online, dreamed up the term just days before putting out a Nov. 21 press release touting Cyber Monday as "one of the biggest online shopping days of the year."



The idea was born when a few people at the organization were brainstorming about how to promote online shopping, says Shop.org Executive Director Scott Silverman, who answered his phone, "Happy Cyber Monday." They quickly discarded suggestions such as Black Monday (too much like Black Friday), Blue Monday (not very cheery), and Green Monday (too environmentalist), and settled on Cyber Monday. "It's not the biggest day," Silverman concedes. "But it was an opportunity to create some consumer excitement."

Indeed, Hof argues that historically, online retail sales don’t drastically pick up on the Monday following Thanksgiving:

Contrary to what the recent blitz of media coverage implies, Cyber Monday isn't nearly the biggest online shopping or spending day of the year. It ranks only as the 12th-biggest day historically, according to market researcher ComScore Networks. It's not even the first big day of the season.



For most online retailers, the bigger spending day of the season to date was way back on Nov. 22, three days before Black Friday. What's more, most e-tailers say the season's top spending day comes much later, between around Dec. 5 and Dec. 15.

Read full post…