65% of all marketing spend in 2007 had no effect on consumers, according to The Fournaise Marketing Group's 2007 Global Marketing Effectiveness Report. Estimated wastage rates varied from 45% in business-to-business marketers through to 65% for business-to-consumer, with figures highest in more developed economies such as the UK, US and Australia compared to developing economies like China and India.
To compound the problem, the report revealed that just one in ten of all marketers worldwide have automated systems in place to track effectiveness of their communication spending.
Of the 55% of marketers that even track the results of their spending at all, 80% do so manually, spending hours capturing, compiling and analysing data.
Tracking marketing effectiveness topped the 2008 wish lists of 35% of marketers, and made the top three for 70%.
Find out what 1,038 B-to-B marketers in software, hardware and technology services industries revealed to MarketingSherpa about what works for lead generation.
Includes 11 new data charts and 2007 data on: - Lead nurturing using mobile email, podcasts and RSS. - Optimizing your homepage and lead gen offer form. - White papers and webinars - do they still work? - Office politics behind why the buying cycle is lengthening.
As marketers, we have to BE where our targets are looking. I agree with the report’s conclusions that we can all accomplish that via:
The country's third-largest advertiser is getting ready to shift fully half of its $3 billion budget into digital and one-to-one marketing within the next three years. The goal is to go well beyond the banner -- GM spent $197 million in online ads last year, according to TNS Media Intelligence -- to encompass gaming, search, mobile and a broad array of interactive applications, according to several executives close to the automaker. In the last few years GM has shifted several hundred million dollars from TV and print to digital and one-to-one, and that trend will accelerate, said the executives.
Online product research But a pattern is developing among automakers whereby TV and print are deployed for launches in order to raise awareness, while more of the continuous branding and sales activity shifts online -- as automakers and many of their dealers accept that the purchase process increasingly begins, and sometimes even effectively ends, on the internet.
At a time when a slowing economy is taking a toll on advertising, the prospect of billions of dollars fleeing TV, print, newspaper, radio and outdoor is unwelcome, to say the least.
1. Includes broadcast, cable syndication 2. includes national and local Source: TNS Media Intelligence
comScore has released several key findings from its “Digital World: State of the Internet” report. The study highlights the changing dynamics of worldwide Internet usage, as it has grown from a U.S.-centric medium to its currently global landscape.
In January 2008, the Asia Pacific region had more than 300 million Internet users at least 15 years of age accessing the Internet from work and home computers. This represents an increase of 14 percent versus year ago and makes Asia Pacific the largest of the five worldwide regions. Latin America and Middle East-Africa have also experienced above average audience growth during the past year, while North America and Europe have grown at more modest rates.
The “Digital World” report covers a broad array of topics illustrating the key global trends that underlie how the Internet is used around the world today. Some of the key findings include:
The U.S. now accounts for 21 percent of Internet users worldwide. While growth in the number of Internet users in the U.S. has slowed, several Asian and Eastern European countries continue to add new users at a rapid rate.
Google is the dominant search brand in most countries, including most of Europe and Latin America, with a few significant exceptions — countries where Chinese, Korean, and Russian languages dominate.
Chinese language search engine Baidu currently ranks #3 in worldwide search market share, behind Google and Yahoo!
The number of worldwide visitors to social networking sites has grown 34 percent in the past year to 530 million, representing approximately 2 out of every 3 Internet users. MySpace and Facebook are in a tight battle for the global leadership position, each attracting more than 100 million visitors per month.
Online video has become the dominant online entertainment format, led by the global popularity of YouTube with more than 250 million visitors in January.
The Internet has become an important source of news for most Web users. The top 10 global news brands show great diversity between country of origin, including the U.S., U.K., China and South Korea.
The most fundamental shift in the history of media usage is upon us. Consumers are empowered by new technology and distribution platforms to engage with media and advertising in new ways. They are interacting with content, not just taking it in. PWC believes that instead of attempting to position themselves alongside the segmented lifestyles of mass audiences, advertisers must now aim to position their brands within the lifestyles of individual consumers. This is an opportunity that PWC terms lifestyle advertising.
A new approach that helps consumers maximize their limited time and attention to create a rich, personalized, and social media environment is needed. PricewaterhouseCoopers calls this approach lifestyle media; it is the combination of a personalized media experience with a social context for participation. This report analyzes the impact of convergence on the video content, communications, advertising, and audience measurement industries; incl. key trends and roadmap.
In the recent issue of McKinsey Quarterly, the business journal of strategy consultants McKinsey & Co, James Manyika, Roger Roberts and Kara Sprague discuss Eight Business Technology Trends to Watch In 2008:
Managing relationships 1. Distributing cocreation 2. Using consumers as innovators 3. Tapping into a world of talent 4. Extracting more value from interactions
Managing capital and assets 5. Expanding the frontiers of automation 6. Unbundling production from delivery
Leveraging information in new ways 7. Putting more science into management 8. Making businesses from information
Donal Reddington regularly reports about developments, company announcements, and new technologies in the mass customization and personalization domain. Recently, he posted a great feature on "Customerism", explaining different recent trends in business and technology seem to be converging into a new business model, that includes mass customization but also user innovation, crowdsourcing, and other developments.
Notes and ideas on mass customization, personalization, customer integration, and open innovation -- strategies of value co-creation between suppliers and customers.
Thanks to the Web 2.0, companies are beginning to conceive, design, develop, and distribute products and services in profoundly new ways. The old notion that you have to attract, develop and retain the best and brightest inside your corporate boundaries is becoming null. With costs of collaboration falling precipitously, companies can increasingly source ideas, innovations, and uniquely qualified minds from a vast global pool of talent. The Wikinomics Playbook is another example of how mass collaboration is transforming the economy and society. Wikinomics book was published with 11 chapters, but only the first ten chapters had been written. Chapter 11—the Wikinomics Playbook—was a blank slate with an open invitation for the world to help us write a fitting conclusion on wikinomics.com. Over the course of 2007 something remarkable happened. A community of readers and experts formed and took on a life of its own. Thanks to a great deal of diligent “wiki gardening” the community crafted a compelling and insightful guide to embedding wikinomics concepts and principles in 21st century organizations and business enterprises.
This report demystifies the world of web analytics by answering 14 questions every marketer should ask to apply analytics for better business results. We provide several break-through ideas in the report, such as how to use analytics to find the right mix of advertising dollars for direct reponse and brand marketing campaigns.
The Atlas Institute publishes an ongoing series of Digital Marketing Insights to help marketers improve the results of their online campaigns. These reports are based on anonymous data collected from thousands of online campaigns. Want to get our Digital Marketing Insights? View and download them here.
BXD - Brand Exposure Duration The classic levers of any ad campaign have been reach and frequency. With Atlas BXD, we introduce the missing element of time. This Insight explains what BXD is and its importance for online marketing. The ability to measure BXD will have profound implications for advertisers looking to build their brands online. Planners and buyers will look for sites and placements that can most cost effectively deliver reach, frequency, and maximum BXD for the budget. Similar to Gross Rating Points (GRPs), BXD provides another relevant way for marketers to compare cost effectiveness across different media vehicles.
More than 80% of marketers surveyed indicate consumer insights and behavioral targeting are major priorities, underscoring digital's ability to understand the customer. The findings also illustrate how the 18% of firms characterized as interactive leaders show distinctly different traits from non-leader firms, particularly around their willingness to embrace change. The associated white paper, titled HD Marketing 2010: Sharpening the Conversation was written by Booz Allen Hamilton to summarize the preliminary findings from the first phase of the MME 2010 research. It discusses the key challenges faced by all firms as they embrace interactive media, and suggests core tactical steps needed to address those challenges and successfully reach customers in the new world.
In an effort to promote operational efficiency, accountability and effectiveness throughout the industry, the IAB provides a variety of resources to publishers, marketers, and agencies. These resources are formulated and developed by industry leaders in association with the IAB. These resources deliver far reaching expert solutions that positively affect the interactive marketplace.
Engagement Mapping takes into account for the first time all the various online touchpoints and interactions a consumer experiences before an eventual sale. “The ‘last ad clicked’ is an outdated and flawed approach because it essentially ignores all prior interactions the consumer has with a marketer’s message,” said Brian McAndrews, senior vice president of the Advertiser & Publisher Solutions (APS) Division at Microsoft. “Our Engagement Mapping approach conveys how each ad exposure — whether display, rich media or search, seen multiple times on multiple sites and across many channels — influenced an eventual purchase. We believe it represents a quantum leap for advertisers and publishers who are seeking to maximize their online spends.” Value is assigned and measured on a real-time basis and takes into account the impact that recency, frequency, size and ad format (such as rich media and video) have on a consumer’s online path to action. Engagement ROI is designed to allow advertisers and publishers to manage their campaigns with greater insight and control than previously available through third-party ad serving.
The names, stats and insight you will need for the coming year in marketing
Advertising Age's Annual 2008, published Dec. 31, 2007, offers data on marketers, media and agencies, including a directory of marketing and agency executives for the nation's top 50 advertisers.
The study illustrates that heavy clickers represent just 6% of the online population yet account for 50% of all display ad clicks. While many online media companies use click-through rate as an ad negotiation currency, the study shows that heavy clickers are not representative of the general public. In fact, heavy clickers skew towards Internet users between the ages of 25-44 and households with an income under $40,000.
Further preliminary Starcom data suggests no correlation between display ad clicks and brand metrics, and show no connection between measured attitude towards a brand and the number of times an ad for that brand was clicked. The research presentation suggests that when digital campaigns have a branding objective, optimizing for high click rates does not necessarily improve campaign performance.
“Natural Born Clickers shows us that we can’t count on click-through rate as our primary success metric for display ads; Starcom is more reliant on shifts in brand attitude metrics and analytics tying on-line exposure to sales as the true measures of online advertising efficacy.” "Ultimately, judging a campaign’s effectiveness by clicks can be detrimental because it overlooks the importance of branding while simultaneously drawing conclusions from a sub-set of people who may not be representative of the target audience.”
Google co-founder Larry Page announced the company was rolling out a new product that will allow its advertisers to pay only when they acquire a new customer. Microsoft is also pushing beyond clicks. On Feb.25, the company unveiled an initiative that allows advertisers effectively to pay based on the number of people who watch a video, provide their e-mail address, or take some other desired action.
Thanks to Gillette, the idea that you can make money by giving something away is no longer radical. But until recently, practically everything "free" was really just the result of what economists would call a cross-subsidy: You'd get one thing free if you bought another, or you'd get a product free only if you paid for a service.
Over the past decade, however, a different sort of free has emerged. The new model is based not on cross-subsidies — the shifting of costs from one product to another — but on the fact that the cost of products themselves is falling fast. It's as if the price of steel had dropped so close to zero that King Gillette could give away both razor and blade, and make his money on something else entirely. (Shaving cream?)
Once a marketing gimmick, free has emerged as a full-fledged economy.
The rise of "freeconomics" is being driven by the underlying technologies that power the Web. Just as Moore's law dictates that a unit of processing power halves in price every 18 months, the price of bandwidth and storage is dropping even faster. Which is to say, the trend lines that determine the cost of doing business online all point the same way: to zero.
Among the biggest Web 3.0 (and beyond) buzzes right now is the pursuit of the semantic Web.
What the semantic Web's enthusiasts promise is the transformation of everything on the Web — documents, videos, e-mails, music, images, everything — into elements of a database.
This one database will stretch across, and through, the Web, and will be increasingly searchable in natural language – the language you, and more important, your customers, use.
The goal? Far more effective searches from far more natural queries, generating far more specific and appropriate results from within Web pages, documents, videos, exclusive of the applications in which they were created or housed, rather than the morass of Web sites and pages that searches return now.
Think of it as mashups on steroids. The difference is that the machines — your tools, programs, and software agents — do the mashing for you and your customers.
The findings of our Global Digital Advertising Study 2007 represent a resounding call to action for participants throughout the advertising value chain. The survey also shows that the challenges facing them should not be taken lightly.
Change is coming, and businesses will have to invest and change radically to get in or to stay in the game. But Accenture believes that the rewards will justify the effort. The long-term future of the advertising business — if we will even be calling it that a decade from now — is bright.
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