Simon van Wyk takes a look forward at the year in online marketing.
I’m hesitant to make predictions on what the year ahead brings for the world of online marketing. I’m tired of being disappointed by the potential that often ends up being unrealised. Also, with so many marketing writers offering up their own prognostications, I prefer to stand on the shoulders of giants and pass on their collected knowledge. So, with acknowledgement and apologies to publications such as eROI, ClickZ, DoubleClick and BtoBOnline, here are the common themes of what will take off in 2006:
Consumer generated content
There will be blogs, blogs and more blogs this year. Tens of millions of people the world over will start or continue publishing their own personal summaries of events as traditional news sources become less relevant. As bandwidth availability increases globally, more and more people will also add a video component (vlogs) to really personalise the experience, as well as creating their own podcasts.
This doesn’t mean the decline of corporate websites. More and more companies will create their own blogs, using stylish opinion and quirky marketing techniques to (subtly) drive their agenda. Blogs can be used to personalise brands because the blogosphere is an informal, conversational medium, they allow for two-way dialogue with customers and they are, in the words of eROI, “incredibly powerful for search engine optimisation due to all of the inbound and outbound links and keyword-loaded text within each blog.
Businesses are expected to increasingly use syndication technologies such as RSS (really simple syndication) feeds, which provide continuous updates from blogs and podcasts from a variety of sources.
Jupiter Research analyst Gary Stein told eROI, “Companies that seem to be the most successful are those that capture the intellectual capital. They are not specifically doing it to talk about marketing, but they are using designers or engineers behind the product to connect with audiences.”
Video
As I wrote recently, spending on online video advertising will triple in the next two years, with dollars committed to online video ads are expected to climb to US$640 million by 2007 and US$1.5 billion a year by 2010. There is an expected growth of more than 70% in 2006 alone. Most significantly, all of that growth represents money that would have been spent on traditional TV advertising.
Integrated campaigns
Companies will finally start to understand the need to fully integrate their online activities with the rest of their business to maximise results. Nihal Mehta, CEO of mobile messaging company ipsh! Told ClickZ: “Integrated campaigns will be the future, mixing print, online, radio, street marketing, events and the like. Time sensitive campaigns will also thrive, where users would have to text in to win within a certain period.”
In one indication of this trend, Yahoo! has teamed with an offline marketing analytics firm to help its advertisers evaluate the offline sales impact of their online marketing efforts with the portal. Marketing Management Analytics (MMA) has created tools building on their marketing ROI assessment model to include data from Yahoo! Showing users’ exposure to online graphical and search advertising. Marketers can also provide MMA with data from other online campaigns and sites to get a broader view of their total marketing programs.
Simplicity
This isn’t so much a prediction as a beautiful example of how the power of a simple idea can catapult into a raging success via the power of the Internet. We’ve been blogging about the British university student, who, trying to pay off his tuition debt has been selling ad space by the pixel. He has now made at least US$1 million off his simple idea.
Alex Tew, 21, from Wiltshire, sold the first spot on his Million Dollar Homepage in August, and by early January had sold 999,000 pixels at US$1 per pixel. The remaining 1,000 pixels were placed on eBay and at the time of writing were attracting a current bid of US $140,300.
In a classic example of viral marketing, Tew’s site became a huge talking point on the Internet and he was soon signing up a range of local and international businesses. He estimated a few days after Christmas that he was getting 25,000 unique visitors an hour. He told The Guardian that his ambitious dream had been to sell US$1 million worth of space over the three years of his university business degree, but he’s achieved this in less than six months.
Understanding
As Internet use grows and matures, so does the body of knowledge about the consumption habits of different groups. Just looking at studies released at the end of 2005, we now know that:
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Venus and Mars
Men are heavier consumers of news, stocks, sports and pornography, while more women look for health and religious guidance. Men log on more frequently and spend more time online. More men also have access to quick broadband connections than do women. A larger number of men surf the Internet for pleasure, with 70 percent acknowledging they go online to pass time, compared with 63 percent of women. Men are more likely than women to listen to music, view Webcams and pay for digital content. Women, meanwhile are more enthusiastic online communicators and they use email in a more robust way. More women than men send and receive email, and they use it in a richer and more engaging way. Women are more likely than men to use email to write to friends and family about a variety of topics, from sharing news and worries to planning events to forward jokes and funny stories. (Pew Internet & American Life Project)
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The generation gap
Eighty-six percent of women aged 18-29 are Web users, compared with 80 percent of men. But 34 percent of men 65 and older use the Internet, compared with 21 percent of women in that age group. By 2004, 22 percent of teenage girls had started a blog, or online journal, versus 17 percent of boys. Yet boys are far more likely to download music or videos, with 38 percent of boys saying they watch online video versus 24 percent of girls. 51% of online teens report downloading music, compared to just 18% of adults who report similar behaviour. 75% of teenagers agree with the statement that, “Music downloading and file-sharing is so easy to do, it’s unrealistic to expect people not to do it.” About 21 million, or 87% of kids ages 12-17, use the Internet. Half of all teens and 57% of teens who use the Internet have created a blog or webpage, posted original artwork, photography, stories or videos online or remixed online content into their own new creations. (Pew Internet & American Life Project) Consumers 35-54 years old accounted for more than 45% of all online video watched in August 2005. 35-54 year-olds are 20% more likely to watch online video than the average Internet user, while 25-34 year-olds are only 12% more likely than the average Internet user to watch a stream online. (comScore Networks)
Online magic
Again, this is one that is not so much a prediction as a hope – that online advertising and marketing will gain the “X factor” needed for advertising creatives to embrace the Internet with the same enthusiasm they have for TV and magazines (particularly TV).
In a recent column on the ClickZ marketing website, Sean Carton wrote about his incredulity at a recent survey of advertising industry leaders in the US that discovered that many top advertising executives are “worried” about new media, expressing doubts about the effectiveness of advertising in things such as blogs podcasts, etc.
The main reason for this nervousness, Carton reckons, is that “Online marketing isn’t sexy. It isn’t glamourous, has little cultural mythology around it (would ‘Bewitched’ have worked if Larry Tate and Darren Stevens were search engine marketers?), and isn’t something that necessarily captures the public imagination.
“Traditional ad creatives (in my experience) seem to hate online marketing. Just look at the faces of your traditional creative team next time you ask them to design a banner. Budgets are lower, production times are compressed, there are no multi-week expense-account-fueled post-production bacchanals, and your mom’s not likely to tell you how proud she is of your new Flash ad (though she would if she saw your spot on TV)”.
Carton concluded: “The evidence is there: online advertising works. New media work. People watch them, consume them, and interact with them. They’re trackable, measurable, and provide the most realistic way to measure ROI. If that makes you nervous, it should.”
Looking at all these predictions for an “unglamourous” marketing medium, can you imagine what a bit of magic would bring?