Screw it. Let's read the paper
A friend of mine was recently hired as the ad director for a mid-market newspaper, owned by the Tribune Company. After he was there about a month I asked him, "so how do you plan on selling ads for a dying media?"
"For starters," he said, "I do something absolutely no one in that office does. Every morning I read the newspaper. Cover-to-cover."
Brands seek order in media chaos
No secret that performance-based advertising is dominating internet marketing. But brands are still trying to find the right mix for all those performance options, email, and a rapidly declining display market.
According to IDC research analyst Caroline Dangson, the display market contracted by 7 percent in Q4 of 2008, and will continue to see decreased spending until the end of this year. With this in mind, several brands are trying to find some balance for all the advertising options available.
Analyst expresses optimism for 2009 ad market
Internet marketing analysts are finding more reasons to be cheerful. Presentations at yesterday's CPL Summit in New York supported the recent theme that conditions for a second half surge are starting to take shape.
The summit, sponsored by Pontiflex, focused on differing approaches to pay-for-performance advertising. Growth in PPC, search, and pay-per-lead are part of the reasons the second half of 2009 could be brighter than many projections that were revised downward over the past few weeks. Imran Khan, Managing Director, J.P. Morgan, singled out three more reasons for cautious optimism:
HP will continue to recruit bloggers
Bloggers. Sometimes they come with negative and descriptive adjectives in front of their names. Sometimes they can move markets with their audience and expertise. For HP's launch of its HDX Dragon notebook last year, bloggers were all good, and still are.
HP's word-of-mouth marketing partner Buzz Corps recently made public the results of its blogger-driven Dragon launch and sales. According to Buzz Corps CEO Chris Aaron, finding influential bloggers in the tech space was easier than trying to follow thousands of tech fans on Twitter or Facebook.
Big ups to Twitter commercial plan
Just like J. Lo said, love don't cost a thing. While the world has shown the love for Twitter, and it hasn't cost a thing, the day of revenue reckoning is upon it. Twitter executives say that it will soon offer paid-for “commercial” accounts to give businesses additional features unavailable to casual Tweeters.
This will not set up a toll gate for the six million people currently using the site. Nor will it stop small businesses from having a Tweeter handle. But it does give some clues as to how Tweeter will be used as a marketing platform and how it will make money. There's a lot to like about this strategy. Among them:
Amazon fuels 2008 ecommerce increase
If you're looking for some good news beyond social media, check out ecommerce. Internet Retailer’s forthcoming 2009 Top 500 Guide reports that sales for the 245 retailers reporting actual 2008 numbers have grown by 15 percent to $55.6 billion from $48.3 billion in 2007.
Before getting too excited, understand that Amazon's $19 billion in 2008 sales wrecks the curve a little bit. Without Amazon online sales, the remaining retailers increased by 8.82 percent to $36.47 billion last year from $33.52 billion in the prior year. During a year when overall retail sales are expected to decline substantially when the numbers are all in, even an 8 percent increase shows that consumers will spend money online.
Not all wireless users are created equal
Though it might seem like everyone in the world is attached to the mobile phone, a new study from the Pew Internet and American Life Project finds that six in ten people could leave home without it.
But the 39 percent who are "motivated by mobility," as the report states, break down into very different usage patterns. As marketers find their way in mobile apps and display ads, its worth noting these segments.
Buy your meat with a Tweet
Now you can Tweet your way to cheaper groceries. Coupons.com has inked a deal with Twitter through which followers of Coupons.com will automatically receive new coupon offers as they become available. The tweets will include links to the printable coupons for quick printing.
Coupons.com launched a Facebook application earlier this year, after acquiring mobile grocery shopping application Grocery iQ to integrate digital coupons into the shopping experience. It currently has 657 Facebook friends and is the leading coupon app. Grocery iQ is available on the iPhone and will be included on Google's Android handsets this summer.
Please don't join the group "internet myopics"
One of the great paradoxes of the internet is that the more information we have, the more myopic we get. This myopia is a dangerous thing. We have brilliant political thinkers and economists blogging every day, yet most people get their news from biased factoids. And from a strictly democratic economic standpoint, businesses need options. But as a business, we're in the middle of a myopia that borders on blindness.
The subject is of course, Twitter, Facebook, and Google. May the internet Gods continue to bless all three. Irrational exuberance surrounds all of them right now. But when they have to live up to those expectations of consistent triple-digit quarterly growth, and they have to face competition, and they have to struggle with advocacy groups that want to brand themselves at their expense, these three will change. Yet, they dominate press coverage and conference events and people speak of them as if they are immune to bad breaks or random events. They're not.
IBM report warns on digital media lagtime
Media and entertainment companies aren't moving fast enough to embrace new business models and the ever-changing needs of digital customers. That's the warning shot fired by IBM Global Business Services in its annual survey of the digital marketing landscape.
"Media and entertainment (M&E) companies need to move beyond traditional advertising: the scenario of the future is consumer centricity," the report states. "Yet content owners, media distributors and agencies have not sufficiently responded to these changes, partly due to significant hurdles. Investment decisions are being hindered by new format uncertainty; the lack of cross-industry standards across formats, processes and especially metrics; and significant internal challenges."
Social media: the best and worst of 2009
Email marketing: six steps to improving customer engagement in 2010
Web 2.0
Graham Charlton
Strategy & Planning
