IBM - Institute for Business Value studies

Traditional advertising players - broadcasters, distributors and advertising agencies – will need innovative new approaches to respond to major industry shifts underway.

The next 5 years will hold more change for the advertising industry than the previous 50 did. Increasingly empowered consumers, more self-reliant advertisers and ever-evolving technologies are redefining how advertising is sold, created, consumed and tracked.

Imagine an advertising world where... spending on interactive, one-to-one advertising formats surpasses traditional, one-to-many advertising vehicles, and a significant share of ad space is sold through auctions and exchanges. Advertisers know who viewed and acted on an ad, and pay based on real impact rather than estimated "impressions." Consumers self-select which ads they watch and share preferred ads with peers. User-generated advertising is as prevalent (and appealing) as agency-created spots.

 Download the electronic version of Business Value Study free of charge.

Advertising Age - DataCenter: Agency 2007

 Download the electronic version of Agency Family Trees free of charge.

Most respected agencies (in UK)

Most influential person (in UK)

Online Advertising Made Simple

Google acquiring Doubleclick, Microsoft acquiring aQuantive, WPP acquiring 24/7 RealMedia and AOL acquiring AdTech AG to go along with what they already own in Advertising.com.

Additionally, there are still some other large players who are also in the game such as News Corp./Myspace/Strategic Data Corp, and IAC/Ask.com.

Obviously this is a big land grab for these large companies, combined with trying to get innovative companies who are pushing things forward in online advertising. The Wall St. Journal talks about the ad exchange concept and how it relates to these acquisitions.
"Exchanges could eventually handle 50% of all display ad sales."
"The underlying assumption to that is you're buying a commoditized product that anyone can sell you."

Who’s Got What?

After the acquisitions are all complete, we need to stack up all the areas that matter in the online advertising battle that’s taking shape. (A checkmark means they have an asset, the 1/2 means they do to some extent but not to the same level as the other companies).

Advertising Marketplaces: DoubleClick, Google, Yahoo, RightMedia, Microsoft, Atlas

Spot Runner

Spot Runner’s online system is changing the way advertisers are thinking about creating, planning and buying all forms of media from local television to online search. Bant Breen interviews Andrew Bloom of Spot Runner about the company’s services and direction. 

It’s an Ad, Ad, Ad, Ad World - New York Times

It is only a matter of time until nearly all advertisements around the world are digital.

The plan is to build a global digital ad network that uses offshore labor to create thousands of versions of ads. Then, using data about consumers and computer algorithms, the network will decide which advertising message to show at which moment to every person who turns on a computer, cellphone or — eventually — a television.

More simply put, the goal is to transform advertising from mass messages and 30-second commercials that people chat about around the water cooler into personalized messages for each potential customer.

Greater production capacity is needed, Mr. Kenny says, to make enough clips to be able to move away from mass advertising to personalized ads. He estimates that in the United States, some companies are already running about 4,000 versions of an ad for a single brand.

Publicis is trying to carve out a niche as a middleman between those online giants and the consumer brand companies that buy advertising.

As the Internet emerged, Digitas developed a platform it calls Dashboards to break online ads into their components and figure out which pieces work for which audiences.

ANA Marketing Musings

Trends to Watch in 2008

A Radical Report Hidden Between the Pages of a Whitepaper
Response to The Advertising Research Foundation report on Idea Engagement, “On the Road To a New Effectiveness Model”
by Verse - The Narrative Branding Company
A new report by The Advertising Research Foundation (ARF) should cause all of us in branding, advertising and marketing to stop, question and re-evaluate the way we see our world. The report is titled, “On the Road to a New Effectiveness Model.” No, it isn’t a revision of the Kerouac novel. But it is no less radical.
The report summarizes fi ndings from a three-year taskforce looking at the underlying principles and theoretical constructs of advertising effectiveness. We actively participated in the taskforce during that time and agree with the conclusions and implications, particularly the statement, “The fi ndings of this project require us to completely rethink how advertising works.” And rethinking advertising isn’t even the half of it. The findings shake the very bedrock upon which advertising, branding and marketing as a whole are built.
The findings indicate that “brand positioning” is perhaps the most misguided marketing idea in the past 30 years.

 Download the electronic version of this response free of charge.

iMedia Connection: iMedia Podcast

Jeff Cole, director of the Annenberg School's Center for the Digital Future, describes five emerging trends to leverage.

The Center for the Digital Future, led by Jeff Cole, studies the impact of online technology on people's lives, and society in general. Its Digital Future Report examines the behavior and views of a national sample of 2,000 internet users and non-users, as well as comparisons between new users -- those with less than one year of experience -- and very experienced users, defined as those with seven or more years of experience.

The World Internet Project is a long-term longitudinal look at the effects of computer and internet technology on all aspects of society, which is conducted in over 20 countries. At the announcement of the project in June 1999, Vice President Al Gore praised Cole as a “true visionary providing the public with information on how to understand the impact of media.”
In today's presentation, Cole describes five new emerging trends that your organization will want to leverage.

 Download the electronic version of PodCast: Digital Future Trends free of charge.

This year's report contains a large module looking at on-line communities and social networking in great detail. Readers can compare the social networking data and correlate it to seven years of attitudes and behaviors on-line. As usual, the report continues to track off-line media use, purchasing both off-line and through e-commerce, social and political activity and a wealth of other data.

 Download the electronic version of 2008 Digital Future Report Highlights free of charge.
 Download the electronic version of 2007 Digital Future Report free of charge.

Now it's personal - Brand Republic News Microsoft is taking a leaf out of Amazon's marketing book, with a focus on customer experience and participation. Alicia Buller talks to global marcoms director, Bill Capodanno.

Mich Matthews, senior vice-president, marketing, at Microsoft claimed earlier this year that 50 per cent of the company's £500m adspend would go on digital by 2010. But, although it was a grand assertion, it was also a true assertion, according to Capodanno. "Microsoft is already allocating 30 per cent of its marketing budget to digital and, when Mich said 50 per cent, it was not some arbitrary delineation. It's based on the patterns of media consumers use. They are making dramatic shifts into the digital space," he says.

The firm is trialling ten large-scale global social-media products, testing the viability of new media such as blogs, 'wikis' and messaging as customer-engagement tools.

"We think about perception-based activity and behavioural-based activity - the world is at a stage when the two things are intertwined. You can't compartmentalise attitudes and behaviour - they are inextricably linked. Our focus is on understanding the behaviour of our consumers. Once we have shifted an attitude, then we look for deeper engagement, usually through behaviour."

"...we're seeing the importance of customers evangelising your products. You have to create situations where those relationships breed loyalty that leads to them evangelising your product."

"There isn't this separation between business users and consumers anymore. People are individuals..."

While Microsoft is currently focused on digital, its long-term aim is that its marketing should be channel-neutral.

"The customers are now in control, whereas, in the past, they were passive. Any marketer that fails to realise this will become ..." he chooses the next word carefully, "irrelevant."

FAST - News & Events - Press Releases

 

Web 2.0 has moved from buzzword to reality in many of the world’s largest corporations, according to a survey of 406 senior executives worldwide by the Economist Intelligence Unit. The survey found that 79% of respondents see the collaborative web as a way to boost revenues and cut costs. Perhaps the most interesting finding is that a full 85% of C-suite executives see the sharing and collaboration aspects of Web 2.0 as an opportunity to increase revenue and/or margins, versus 75% of middle management. These findings point to a possible disconnect between the corner office and the rest of the organization on how to best incorporate Web 2.0 practices into business.

EIU.com

Until a few years ago, marketing was a monologue. Marketers invested time, talent and money to broadcast messages designed to correspond with each stage of a theoretical buying cycle: awareness, research, consideration, testing, negotiation and transaction. The past two years have witnessed the first examples of true two-way marketing "conversations" between customers and some of the world's leading consumer brands. Driven by a confluence of innovation, competition and big shifts in consumer behaviour, the dialogue between brands and their customers is replacing the traditional marketing monologue.

Among the key findings:

• Chief marketing officers (CMOs) will need to rethink four basic elements of their work--branding, integration, measurement and accountability, and internal organisation--in order to conduct online and offline marketing activities that are relevant, measurable, and accountable to the C-suite in terms it understands, such as top-line growth and speed to market.

• In the area of branding, the survey and in-depth interviews with senior marketers reveal that online marketing enables marketers to create interactive brand experiences that also contain a path to action for the consumer. The result is that online branding has the potential to become the central marketing expression for organisations.

• The Internet blurs the line separating creative media and media planning/buying functions, offering marketing executives new scope to integrate these activities. Online tools, especially search engines, help marketers combine two important elements for truly integrated marketing: intelligence into customer thinking and intentions generated by other media.

• Marketers are dissatisfied with their current ability to measure results of marketing campaigns, both offline and online. The ability to measure results will improve, however, given that CEOs are requiring direct evidence of a return for marketing investment. Return on investment (ROI) is accountability by another name and a burning concern of CMOs.

• As the role of marketing expands to affect other corporate activities such as joint ventures, alliances and even product development, top marketers recognise a need to create new incentive structures in order to prepare their internal organisations for the increased level of accountability.

Download the electronic version of The future of marketing free of charge.

Leading companies recognise the growing need to measure the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns, but admit that they spend little executive time doing it, according to a global survey compiled by the Economist Intelligence Unit.

• Half of all respondents think that the level of accountability for all marketing activities is "rising dramatically".

• Executives spend less time assessing the performance of marketing campaigns than either planning or executing them.

• Between a third and a half say they don't know how to measure the impact of several of their online marketing activities either.

Logic+Emotion

David Armano is VP of Experience Design with Critical Mass, a professional services firm with a sweet spot for creating outstanding experiences.  This is his personal blog where he shares thoughts + opinions that are solely his own.  Logic+Emotion exists at the intersection of business + experience design—where passive consumers become active participants.

 Download the electronic version of Approach To Creating Experiences free of charge.

 Download the electronic version of The fuzzy Long Tail free of charge.

 Download the electronic version of Experience Strategy free of charge.

Download the electronic versions of A LOT MORE free of charge!

Havard Business School - Working Knowledge

Evolving from the Marlboro Man in the 1960s to the Subservient Chicken in a recent Web campaign, advertising is undergoing a radical transformation. Harvard Business School professor Stephen P. Bradley, who is cowriting a book on how broadband technologies are remaking many industries, discusses how advertising is responding to the challenges. Key concepts include:

• Traditional advertising vehicles such as television are becoming less interesting to advertisers because of fragmented viewership and inadequate user data.
• Broadband technology is becoming more important to advertisers because of its ability to move the consumer closer to a transaction decision and to deliver clearly segmented audiences.
• The advertising industry is wrestling with this transformation in part by merging with media companies and by launching creative ad alternatives.

Report: Advertising Is In 'A World Of Hurt'

Forrester Research believes today's ad agencies are not well-structured to take on tomorrow's marketing challenges, needing to move from making messages to establishing community connections. ...
Pushing messages would give way to encouraging voluntary engagement, and ongoing conversations would replace time-based campaigns. ...Consumers increasingly do not trust marketing messages. Instead, they rely on advice from friends and others in their various communities to make product decisions, while using tech tools to tune out ad messages they deem irrelevant. Digital agencies have gone farther, in Forrester's estimation, in centering their businesses around "interaction," but it finds them lacking in the branding skills of traditional shops.

Agency v2.0 posts by David Armano on Logic + Emotions Blog

Data Mining: Mapping The Blogosphere

Data Mining: Text Mining, Visualization and Social Media:

Future Shape of Advertising

  
  

The disparity between consumer media consumption habits and advertising spend offers smart marketers competitive advantages, if they move quickly! Utilizing consumer insights, latest technologies and new engagement techniques, while measuring buzz, participation and analyzing conversations they can truly engage in targeted and meaningful ways delivering RoMI.
Looking at the media landscape in the past decades it becomes evident, that advertising has evolved into an era before and after the rise of the internet. Hence I would position the time before the internet as 'Advertising 1.0' and the time after as '2.0'.
With the rise of the Web 2.0 the standard online advertising has and needs to further evolve into a 3rd version or phase.

The emancipation of the consumers powered by global communication platforms (over 1.2b online users) and advances in software services as well as consumer electronics have given way to digital social networking, blogging/citizen journalism and prosumerism, where consumer are taking over control.
Advertising needs to evolve...quickly! 86% of consumers don’t believe what brands say about themselves (advertising), whereas 78% believe what others say about them.

How can brands facilitate and encourage positive conversations among consumers? Easy! By producing great products people will enjoy and talk about!
Unfortunately not all products are created equally (great). Advertising has to work harder to encourage and spark these conversations, by not only attracting the right audience, at the right time, but by engaging them and exciting them. The engagement has to be immersive, interactive (no more 1 message fits all and not advertising monologues, but dialogues) and participatory!

Join me in exploring these exciting times of another advertising paradigm shift...