Why spend thousands to advertise in a top-notch magazine while you can start a whole new publication online for the same amount? That is exactly the current mind-set of more and more companies, which have discovered that targeting your audience with a niche approach pays off better than advertising. Why? Well, who wouldn’t like a brand that thinks creatively outside the box? Printing their own publications The fashion industry seems to be leading the pack with this increasingly popular trend. Marketing director of BLK DNM, Max Vallot has been quoted saying that “the consumer is much more likely to engage with independent...
“My name is Floris Kaayk I’m actually a filmmaker and animator. I’ve been working on an experiment about online media for 8 months...” Now that the Dutch artist Floris Kaayk, also known as Jarno Smeets, the man behind one of the most elaborate internet hoaxes of recent times has come clean, how do you feel? You’re a dreamer and for a moment Kaayk’s project inspired you, you defended it to the hilt. You’re disappointed. You’re a skeptic and you gasped as high-profile news sources reported the story as a matter of fact. You feel vindicated. You were undecided, teetering back and...
In the wake of the firing of its colourful CEO, Carol Bartz, Yahoo! has dominated headlines with stories of boardroom politics and rumours of acquisitions. The latest rumour, from the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), points to AOL, Yahoo!, and, Microsoft forming a partnership to battle Google's web dominance. According to the Journal, ad executives who were pitched a new ad-buying system say that the three internet companies have devised a plan wherein they will sell advertising on each other's sites. The plan is seen as a move by the three to recover market share lost to Google in the lucrative...
Online advertising spending in the United States will overtake spending on newspaper ads this year for the first time, digital research firm eMarketer said on Monday. EMarketer estimated that online ad spending will grow 13.9 percent in 2010 to 25.8 billion dollars while spending on print newspaper ads will drop 8.2 percent to 22.78 billion dollars. Including Internet ads, print and online newspaper advertising revenue will hit 25.7 billion dollars, eMarketer said, still below...
The industrialised model of advertising isn’t working as well as it once did. For many years brands were built by creating performance and emotional associations with the brand in the minds of customers primarily with the weight of advertising. Share of mind was created by share of voice (ad spend), and this equated to share of market. The Internet, whether accessed via desktops or mobile devices such as cellphones and iPads, has changed everything. This is why: The most powerful force in the Internet is that it connects people, and so pools the knowledge of your friends with yours (so you are...
I just watched an episode of Mad Men, but skipped the adverts. There’s possibly an irony to watching a TV show about advertising, but scrolling through the ads in-between. The thing is, I prefer to get my ad-fix online, where I decide what I want to see. ‘Online Branded Entertainment’, that sounds like one of those new marketing buzz phrases, like ‘Social Media Guru’. Yes, branded entertainment is fairly new, if you consider the 1950s recent. That was the era when soap advertisers began sponsoring soap operas. These advertisers knew that they could engage their consumers with one simple technique...
Earlier this year, Miles Young, the global CEO of Ogilvy and Mather Worldwide said: "The great mistake of today's business environment is to believe that digital can fulfil the role of marketing. It will not”. Judging by the barrage of resultant comments, both for and against this profound (albeit somewhat naive) statement, it’s very evident that there are strong opinions both for and against this school of thought. In reality, it’s not about the "replacement" of anything. Nor is it about finding the right "channel". Rather, it’s about identifying the merits of each, and assessing how they can work in...
Just did this interview for the Kulula inflight mag on online advertising and promoting your website. Thought I'd publish it here too: 1. Why does online advertising account for so little of the advertising pie in SA? For various reasons -- and it's not only a story about low internet penetration. Many South African products and services play in local markets that have high penetration, upwards of 80%. I...
I guess it seems a bit negative to define the growth of a medium in the collapse of another, but here's why: For most media organisations, online advertising* currently accounts for less than 20% of the advertising pie, with print still taking the lion's share. My 20% estimate is high. A world-wide, median figure is more like 15% of ad revenue. The question is: why are advertisers still choosing a medium that is...
Quite sometime ago I did a rather entrepreneurial proposal to the World Association of Newspapers (WAN) about a new, non-profit industry-focused search engine and advertising network to rival Google. I know what you're thinking, apart from the general nuttiness of the idea itself: I must be crazy approaching a "newspaper" body? But the idea around approaching an organisation such as WAN and others, was that they're an important umbrella industry bodies for...
Here's a relatively new web service for publishers and developers that's a different spin on the semantic web. Amplify is mostly a semantic web service, although it tries to differentiate itself from other semantic services by saying it focuses on understanding content rather than classifying content -- which is what the semantic web has been all about up until now. It's an interesting spin on things. As an aside, perhaps you could...
Could the online advertising industry escape these turbulent economic times relatively unscathed? Commentators say online advertising may buck an economic downturn, and – controversially – even gain from it. An article in the Financial Times notes that pressure on companies to cut costs as the economy softens could "hasten the switch in spending from traditional media to more targeted and measurable digital forms". Citing the sub-prime crisis in the US, the FT notes...
The Online Publishers Association (OPA) has launched a new online award called The Bookmarks. It's a local online award that recognises the best in creative digital media. These awards have been on the cards for a while now at the OPA (in fact three years!), so well done for getting the initiative launched! The awards also aim to educate and encourage South African agencies, designers and clients around the benefits and possibilities inherent...
Just did this interview with a publication. Thought I'd publish it here. Does a newspaper’s online platform cannabalise the print advertising at all? And what about print readers- will the online platform steal readers away from the print title? It's time to move on from using words like "cannabalise" and "steal" with reference to the print-online relationship. We should stop using these words. A media company's objective is to secure readership and...
According to a report on Reuters last year, world wide mobile phone subscriptions reached 3.3-billion users or half the world’s population. Compare this to television usage (about 1,5-billion users) or desktop internet usage (about 1,1-billion users), and it is not hard to see why there is so much excitement about the potential of the mobile web. In Japan more than 70% of internet access is via mobile phones as opposed to desktop internet...
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