Greg: People bounced between the office, their smartphones, the stores, and back and forth. Tracking all of this activity is really difficult. Once upon a time there were a handful of mainstream media. They were pretty simple, easy to buy, creative pretty simple in most cases. And we've added to that, multiple digital channels and they're both in use. Unlike some mediums and themes that somehow exist in the world of digital marketing, traditional media is not dead. In fact, outdoor and direct mail are seeing new life in unexpected ways. Television is still very present in some rural markets, the Yellow Pages are still very present and radio is still widely used. But you have to add to that all the digital channels. How to knit them together?
How do you identify those who influence purchase decision-making? This research comes from Ipsos and it supports the employee email database proposition that there are very few online-only buyers and very few offline-only buyers. Most people in the market today either research online, buy offline, or research offline and buy online. This is the bulk of the market. Next slide. One thing that's really important is something that I talk about a lot in different contexts. One thing that's very, very important to understand is that almost all buying behavior is offline. People like to say that 90% of retail spend is still online, which I heard from Ruth Porat, Google's chief financial officer, on the earnings call this week.
But if you kind of expand the frame, what you see is that e-commerce online transactions are really just a very small piece of all the commerce that takes place when you combine the retail spend and services, which is a huge part of the economy. Billions and billions of dollars are all processed offline. But what it doesn't say is that the… what I should say is that the Internet is influencing a growing percentage of that. So it's very rare that somebody doesn't use the internet, a mobile device to do some kind of research, some kind of research before making a decision. This is a hypothetical purchase journey for a consumer today. Start on mobile, watch desktop, go to a store, check out the product, come back on a mobile device, buy in store or online.