T’is the season for wrap-ups

By Simon van Wyk

Simon van Wyk ponders the biggest things in marketing this year.

Thought I’d get in really early this year and give you a top 5 list of things that changed the marketing world forever in 2005.

Subservient Chicken

Though the campaign itself started way back in 2004, the frenzy of interest reached a crescendo earlier this year. Subservient Chicken put viral marketing firmly and squarely on the serious brand marketing platform with a deftly executed blend of branding, web technologies, targeting and interaction. The resulting buzz was on a level that had to be seen to be believed.

Advergaming

More than half of young North American online males say that they would rather play games than watch TV. As gaming engages on a level that TV, radio and print cannot achieve, in-video ad placement and advergaming started to turn heads in 2005. With eMarketer predicting that it will be a US$1.5 billion industry by the end of the decade, this is the hot space to watch in 2006.

The year of the business blog

We’d been talking about business blogging emerging as a significant marketing communications tool for some time, and in 2005 the business community in Australia started to listen. Blogs are becoming extremely important marketing tools to cultivate relationships, test public opinion, and provide two way conversations. And now big businesses are taking them seriously.

RSS

If 2005 was the year of the business blog, then RSS was clearly its running mate. While RSS or Really Simple Syndication made it to the big time in 2004 by delivering news headlines and pushing blogs into the blogosphere, this year RSS of course is the technology behind the rise and rise of podcasting. And as Internet users have increasingly more control over the content they receive, savvy marketers are beginning to use RSS as a way to improve corporate brand communications.

Podcasting

Marketers started to catch on to the consumer generated media trend this year, experimenting with ways to make podcasting and marketing work. With Santa’s sleigh heavily laden with MP3 players of every sort this Christmas, it seems that everyone will be podcasting real soon. Quite naturally then, podcasting and marketing is going to be huge next year.