Insightful articles, opinion and commentary about mobile and web.

Pontiac is launching its sporty new G5 coupe exclusively online. AdAge.com reports that the entire ad budget for the introduction of Pontiac’s G5 is earmarked for the internet. Pontiac is targeting mostly younger men for the new coupe, and it naturally make sense to use the online medium.

In what is becoming a trend particularly in the big spending auto industry, it looks like the marketing transition from traditional to online could see auto marketers take a huge piece of the US$20 billion that they currently spend to online.

Indeed AdAge.com reports that “Interactive-buying shop Jumpstart Automotive Media, in fact, estimates that within five years auto marketers will get better ad bang for 20% less.”

SABMiller, owner of the Foster’s brand in the US is moving their advertising dollars into the online space, reflecting the changing media tastes of its younger drinkers - putting a huge chunk of it into a deal with Heavy.com and creating an online dating game.

Back home, however, Foster’s Australia for its Victoria Bitter brand, is putting its eggs firmly and squarely in its sales promotion basket and giving away dolls with every slab.

The Sydney Morning Herald reports that a revival of the company’s highly successful David Boon talking doll giveaway will be in place before the First Test of The Ashes series this summer. And this year, he’ll even have a mate.

TIME has just published its list of the 50 coolest websites on the planet with no surprises that it looks like a Web 2.0 beauty parade.

The sites are built on the next-generation technologies and concepts that make the Internet a much better place to live and work and provide dynamic new ways to inform and entertain. All the ususual suspects are there like YouTube, Digg, MySpace and Zillow. But the list also includes serious field reporting like Kevin Sites in the War Zone which is a shining example of digital newsgathering techniques, to clever little gems like Dodgeball which lets your mobile device improve your social life.

There’s a great viral clip by Smirnoff on YouTube called “Tea Partay”. Beautifully produced for the medium, very clever and funny, and it runs for over 2 minutes. It’s a fabulous branding piece.

But where is the response mechanism? Where’s the integration?

What I couldn’t believe is that when you go to teapartay.com it takes you to the smirnoff site with a “Join the teapartay coming soon” banner. Talk about a wasted opportunity.

It seems like the advertising agency, in this case Bartle Bogle Hegarty, worked in a vacuum, uploaded the clip to YouTube and crossed their fingers. They certainly produce fine ads, but seems like they don’t know how to capitalise on the medium.

Everyone has been hypothesising about the huge changes in marcoms strategy, but now we’re actually starting to see what that all means. Here are some examples of how digital marketing is enhancing marcoms strategies in Australia and around the globe:

Toyota Australia

Conducting what the Sydney Morning Herald’s marketing editor called “the biggest overhaul in its marketing communications strategy for years”. The car maker is aiming to reduce its advertising budget (estimated at $70 million a year) while at the same time increase its marketing clout - and it will be relying more and more on digital marketing to achieve those paradoxical aims.

Lynx

The brand has just won a swag of Lion Awards for its Lynx Jet campaign (and just missed out on scoring the top Grand Prix Gold Award). What may not be so well known is that digital was a key component in the campaign, which reportedly drove Lynx to the highest ever market share of male body spray (84%).

Lynx had nearly 600,000 unique visitors to the LynxJet website in two months, more than 10 times the original target. Overall, Lynx used 32 different media channels, which, according to Contagious magazine, “demonstrate(s) the power of integrated marketing in unprecedented ways.”

The next Lynx brand, Click, seems to be going down the same road, with a visit to its website revealing that a clicker offer for the campaign is already oversubscribed.

Axe

Meanwhile, Lynx’s brother brand in the US, Axe, produced a spoof video news story about a fictional town in Alaska where a crop duster sprayed the deodorant over the whole town, which turned it into a huge chick magnet (are we detecting a common theme here?). The spoof was published on several video websites and generated 32 million viewings, and importantly helped propel Axe to the top spot for men’s deodorants in the US.

Rewatchable

Rewatchable is the new buzzword for viral videos. Digital marketing services company Atlas, in its recently-published “On Demand Digital Video Duration” study, revealed that the longer the online video creative, the more likely it was to be watched more than once. A two-and-a-half-minute video used in the study was watched an average of 115%, reflecting extra viewings by people participating in the study.

The researchers noted that performance still varied even among videos of the same length, indicating the important role quality creative can play in keeping users involved. In a separate report on viral videos, Leo Burnett Worldwide reported that the “sendability” factor of forwarding videos to friends and family is even more important than the “rewatchability” factor.

Financial Institutions

Banks in the US are increasingly relying on Web 2.0 technologies to entice Generation Y (18- to 28-year-olds) and lock them in for the long haul, when they will become more profitable customers. New York-based J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., for example, now offers customers up to 17 kinds of alerts, such as “overdrawn account” or “deposit posted” messages, that are transmitted via email or text message. Another bank, Washington Mutual, started a service to instantly open accounts online, using verification technology similar to that used by online credit rating sites.

This push for younger customers is boosted by US research showing that 69% of university students plan to stay with the same bank or credit union after graduation, and only 15% intend to switch. Sixty per cent disagreed with the statement “my relationship with my bank is only temporary”.

General Motors

Last year, vice-chairman, Bob Lutz started a blog, called FastLane. He posted many complaints from outsiders and was praised for his balanced responses. He made reference to the parlous state of the car giant’s finances and complained that media coverage of GM’s financial woes was stopping potentially good coverage of the company. He asked readers for their thoughts and opinions and received hundreds of replies, many of them constructive and useful. Lutz quickly gained a reputation as a fair player and was able to parlay that into a public relations/marketing coup. It’s too early to measure the impact on GM sales yet, but the US auto industry has been buzzing about the success of Lutz’s approach for several months.

M:Metrics

Measurement firm M:Metrics is going back to the future, with the introduction of “people meters” for mobile phones to track mobile content downloads. The company’s plan is to outfit the mobile phones of more than 1,000 users with its metering technology software. M:Metrics will measure the behaviours and mobile content consumed by panellists throughout the US and UK. This will enable mobile marketing to compete on a level footing with broadcast media for advertising dollars.

More and more companies are integrating Web marketing spend into their marketing spending mix as a new report from the Center for Media Design reveals that the Internet is a powerful way of extending the reach of other media.

The web increased the reach of television by 51% in the morning, 39% in the middle of the day, and 42% in the afternoon. With magazine advertising, the impact was even greater — the Internet more than doubled the reach of magazines, including a six-fold increase in the mornings and a four-fold increase at noon and in the afternoon.

Public Relations

PR firm Shift Communications has released a “Social Media Press Release” template that enables companies to send out interactive press releases. Shift is calling it a “re-mixable press release that provides relevant context and content in a hyperlinked format for journalists and bloggers”. It employs social bookmarking websites such as deli.cio.us, Technorati and Digg and links to RSS feeds, photos and PDF documents.

Doing More with Less

One thing all these new digital marketing developments have in common is that they don’t cost the earth. Whenever times get tough (which seems to be all the time) marketing executives have complained that they are expected to do more with less. Online techniques offer the opportunity to do that without sacrificing quality or results.

Simon van Wyk is founding partner and managing director of strategic online solutions company HotHouse Interactive.

PricewaterhouseCoopers has confirmed for Australia what we’ve been seeing in other markets - sharp internet growth, coming at the expense of free-to-air TV, radio and newspapers. PwC’s “Entertainment & Media Outlook 2006-2010 report as widely reported in The Sydney Morning Herald and B&T forecasts that newspapers, TV, magazines, radio and outdoor will see their overall marketshare decline by 11% in the five years to 2010.

Meantime, the internets ad share will grow from 6% in 2005, to 13% by 2010, and pay TV will grow from 2% to 3%.

PwC director Matthew Liebmann said that: “Traditional media will remain the largest form of advertising in our marketplace, but the more rapid form of growth will come from subscription TV and the internet because of its ability to provide personalised messages at the right time for each individual user.”

In a move that is certain to become the trend, Foster’s beer in the US has has decided to stop advertising on television entirely and move its US ad budget online. Although many brands are switching some of their advertising budgets away from TV and on to the Internet - moving the entire budget is certainly a sign of the times and reflects the changing media tastes of consumers.

Part of the budget has been assigned to a deal with Heavy.com to create an online dating game which is being used to launch a new positioning for Foster’s in the US with the tagline: “Crack open a friendly”. According to AdAge, the online campaign is due to launch mid August.

Watch out for a brand new online entertainment channel in the YouTube genre, where people can upload the usual consumer generated media type stuff and be endlessly entertained. Anheuser-Busch which brews Budweiser, has reportedly invested something like US$30 million in its Bud.TV project, which will launch in February next year and aims to connect with the world’s growing online community.

The company’s press release says that the company recognises that adults are spending more time online looking for entertainment to fit their lifestyles, and that this new online entertainment channel will help reach and engage with them.

Podcasts, shared video and declining TV audiences are ringing in the new marketing age writes Simon van Wyk.

Twelve months ago a respected Advertising Age columnist wrote a controversial treatise heralding the online revolution that is threatening to swamp the advertising and marketing industry.

The early warning signs were the dramatic decline in network TV audiences, a tripling of the cost of reaching households through prime time TV, a dramatic increase in the time spent on the Internet compared to watching TV, and an eight-fold increase in broadband penetration on the last five years.

The columnist, Bob Garfield, bemoaned the lack of action on the part of the advertising industry to prepare for the coming change and predicted the appearance of “The Chaos Scenario”, which he labelled, “a period of serious disruption moving like a tsunami through the marketing business as well as the economy and the broader society itself”. This is revolution and first we will be awash in the blood of the old guard.”

That article was written before Rupert Murdoch bought social networking site MySpace and before video-sharing site YouTube was even launched. According to Nielsen/Netratings, YouTube now accounts for 3.9 per cent of global internet traffic each day.

Australian marketers take note

The flood warning has now been issued for the local industry. A recent speech by Kim Anderson, COO of independent television company Southern Star Entertainment, echoes many of Garfield’s themes, particularly regarding the long-term effects of broadband availability on the television industry.

Anderson noted that the official Big Brother website (produced by Southern Star) has had more than 2.2 million page impressions per day and six million live streams downloaded by more than 530,000 registered members since the latest series kicked off almost three months ago. She said this proves that young viewers are demanding more from the TV networks.

She said the Internet is within two years of “completely changing the landscape of television”, but warned that Australia’s commercial TV networks have not prepared for the change.

Quoting recent OZtam figures that show TV viewing audiences have declined by nearly 6% in the past five years (fuelled by a 17% decline in the 16-39 age group), she stated that “television networks as a priority need to develop the standard business model for distribution of their content over the Internet, in order to stay relevant.”

Anderson said broadcasters are also facing the “perhaps more potent movement” of democratised content, represented by sites such as MySpace and YouTube.

The new landscape

I don’t know if she has read Garfield’s article, but her metaphors are identical. “The internet for TV is like an impending tsunami,” she told her audience at the Trans-Tasman Business Circle in late July. “It appeared on the horizon 10 years ago and, like a tsunami, promises to completely change the landscape.”

“I believe the next two years, largely due to the take-up of broadband, will be the time when the existing landscape will no longer be relevant and a new landscape will dictate everything from our approaches to our audiences and advertising.”

She said broker Merrill Lynch expects Australian commercial TV’s share of the total advertising pie to decline from 31.8% today to 28% by 2010. But she said current responses to the threat, such as streaming current TV shows over the net with a few ads attached, do not represent a viable business model, particularly in Australia.

Of the $161 million to be spent on Internet advertising here this year, only 32% is for ads surrounding online content. A 13-part drama series now costs a TV network about $7.8 million, so to recoup those costs on the internet it would take 4 million downloads over the series or 308,000 paying, online viewers per episode.

It’s not only the commercial TV networks being affected by online trends. The Sydney Morning Herald recently reported that podcast (audio archives of past radio broadcasts) downloads from the ABC website are predicted to top 2 million per month by the end of the year - for some programs, more people are downloading podcasts then listening to the live broadcast.

Meanwhile, following a strong recruiting effort, it is estimated that nearly 1 million Australian homes have taken up Foxtel iQ, the digital video recorder that enables programs to be recorded to a hard drive, making it easier to skip past ads during viewing.

Media has changed

I believe these developments show that the definition of media has changed. It used to mean 9, 7, and 10 - now media means your own website. There is a shift from using ‘rented media’ to ‘owned media’. Having your own website means you have more control over your image.

Coca-Cola has moved into the user generated content arena with their new site that invites users to the “Coke Side of Life”. The global site (though not in Australia yet) entices users to take a series of monthly challenges and create videos on a particular theme, view others and vote on them. The first challenge on the site, “The Essence of You,” asks “If you could bottle the essence of you and share it with the world, what story would you tell?”