NP: Miles Davis Quintet, The Complete Live At The Plugged Nickel

The Wall Street Journal asks if Cyber Monday shopping has maybe shifted to Black Friday. The early returns from the weekend may very well point in that direction, as online spending was way up year-over-year for the day, especially compared to total sales.

Of course, tomorrow is when we'll find out for sure, but Shop.org has released the results of survey that indicate at least the number of people shopping online should be up significantly, based on stated intent. So, the most optimistic reading of all of these numbers is that Black Friday was a good day for ecommerce, and Cyber Monday will be even better. Could we be that fortunate?

On the one hand, I like this scenario a lot, because it's consistent with what I've been predicting for months, and gives the most hope for an online marketing resurgence that will carry us into 2010 and allow me to find full-time employment sooner, rather than later. On the other hand, Shop.org also reported that individual spending was down on Black Friday -- although I can't quite tell if that's for online, offline, or both. This would appear to run counter to Coremetrics, who reported average online order value on Black Friday as being up 35 percent over last year, according to the Sun-Times article.

Back to the original point, is Cyber Monday dead? That pre-supposes that it ever really existed in the first place, and I actually heard an interview on the radio this morning from someone at the National Retail Federation that walked back most of the claims that accompanied their invention of it several years ago. To recap, Cyber Monday was never the biggest ecommerce day of the season, nor did it kick off the online shopping season. The NRF spokesperson had to go with some wishy-washy claim about the online holiday shopping "mindset" that was pretty amusing. I think it may have looked that way at first because they probably only looked at a week's worth of data when they originally came up with the concept.

But, now that it's out there in the public sphere, reality has taken hold of it. One obvious result is that advertisers aren't really interested in two different events within days of each other, so they're not withholding any offers until after the weekend. On the consumer side, you've got ever-increasing penetration of high-speed Internet (also mentioned in that L.A. Times piece), more and more hysterical reports of ridiculous Black Friday crowds, and less apprehension about the security online shopping, identity theft threats notwithstanding. So there's an almost perfect storm of reasons why spending might shift from Monday to Friday.

Of course, this isn't very different from the circumstances last year, which may be why analysis I did for my former employer showed a big Black Friday without really stunting Monday's year-over-year tally. So the notion of Black Friday sales not actually cutting into Cyber Monday growth already has precedent, in large part because the bulk of any cannibalization by Black Friday online sales is likely Black Friday offline sales, and not the Cyber Monday take.

I think tomorrow will be big enough, although I now lack the apples-to-apples comparison necessary to guess a number. Part of me hopes Performics releases the same data for this year, but another part of me knows just how convoluted the data wrangling was that created the six years of results shown in the chart, so I don't think they'll be able to do the analysis. Still another part expects them to call me in to recreate it as a consultant. We'll see.