Perspectives on the Digital Marketplace

As a former journalist (six years as a UPI wire guy), I have the utmost respect for the written and unwritten rules that have governed traditional broadcast and print journalism since the beginning of time. In fact, I’m saddened by how much those rules have deteriorated over the years. The day-to-day battles I had during my UPI days with friends and foes at the Associated Press, including the now legendary John King back in the days of Providence, RI, would make for some great posts for another day.

However, this lingering story about NBC’s attempt to delay the news of Tim Russert’s death just bugs me - not because it wasn’t the right thing to do, but it shows the incredible lack of understanding of how much news coverage has changed over the past few years. Without a doubt, attempts to reach Mr. Russert’s family prior to NBC airing the story was the correct course of action. But to chastise an employee at Internet Broadcasting Services for updating Russert’s profile on Wikipedia 11 minutes before the story appeared on NBC is just not right. Like it or not, these are the times we now live in. News no longer waits for anyone.

NBC had no choice but to handle the situation as it did and the network is probably thrilled not to be held accountable for leaking the information early. But to think that breaking news like Mr. Russert’s death will not hit the blogosphere, Twitter and other online sites before traditional media is just insane in this day and age.

Fortunately or unfortunately, I’ve had more than a few front row seats (called jobs) with companies that thought they could stick to their old ways of doing business when times changed, only to find out the hard way that wasn’t such a good idea. UPI was one of those companies. Let’s hope NBC isn’t another.

Mike Spataro

It has been a week of digesting many of the latest papers and data points from IDC, Forrester, and Gartner. Since, I have shared some Forrester and Gartner updates I thought I should post on IDC’s latest figures about Internet advertising revenue which project a doubling from $25.5 billion in 2007 to $51.1 billion in 2012. That will make the internet the #2 advertising medium in five years, growing about eight times as fast as advertising at large. This will make the internet bigger than newspaper, cable TV, broadcast, and second only to direct advertising.

Video advertising will be the principal disruptor of Internet advertising during this time, as its revenue grows sevenfold from $0.5 billion in 2007 to $3.8 billion in 2012 at a compound annual growth rate of 49.4%. Brand advertisers will shift significant amounts of money into video commercials, primarily from broadcast television and to a lesser extent from cable television.

IDC concludes that

• Search ads will remain at the top of the Internet ad hierarchy with revenue at $10.4 billion last year, reaching almost $18 billion in 2012. IDC believes search, now having almost 41 percent of the market share, will have just above 34 percent by 2012.
• Online video ad spending will grow from about $500 million in 2007 to $3.8 billion in 2012 and its Internet advertising share will expand from 2 percent to 7.4 percent.
• Referral and lead-generation services will see the second strongest market share gain, says IDC. Revenue from referral and lead generation services will grow from $2.3 billion in 2007 to $5.9 billion in 2012.
• Mobile advertising will also show robust growth but the segment will still have “just shy” of 1 percent of the overall online ad market by 2012.

Amazing projections, let’s just hope that brands and their agencies are listening to this and paying attention to the consumers that are consuming it.

Blake Cahill

Visible Technologies

Notable analyst’s, Brian Haven and Suresh Vittal, from Forrester Research have just published an outstanding and well-thought out paper about Measuring Engagement. The overall theme of the paper declares that “the metrics marketers use today fail to capture the supercharged social behaviors and intimate relationships people have with brands”. This is very active discussion topic with many of our customers and one of our TruCast platform’s key differentiators - in that enables the measurement of engagement that brands/marketers are having with their customers in the social media space.

Building on the framework that Brian initially developed around the four I’s of engagement: involvement, interaction, intimacy, and influence the authors further detail how to measure engagement and prioritize metrics that are appropriate to customer purchasing processes. Some key highlights/takeaways include:

- Why marketers are failing to take action

- Utilizing an engagement framework for the new social era

- How engagement measurement strategy reinvigorates consumer insight

- Why marketers should prioritize the acquisition of engagement metrics

In sum, a framework and tactical steps are well laid out for marketers in this paper to support why engagement measurement will transform the marketing landscape and require new marketing skills, partners who get it, and convergent marketing technologies.

Well done Brian & Suresh

Blake Cahill

Visible Technologies

Toby Bell, a leading analyst at Gartner Research, has just published a great new paper entitled “Policies and Procedures to Manage Enterprise Internet Reputation“. The Gartner team refers to the space EIRM or Enterprise Internet Reputation Management, which entails both search as well as social sites that can have an impact on corporations and brands. Although, that term is unique to Gartner others in the space like Forrester, Aberdeen, and IDC have dedicated analyst’s leading practices in this area as well. Toby lays out some ground rules and steps that organizations should be actively putting in place to understand and interact with search and social media conversations that consumers are having. I strong encourage brands to take a look at his findings, recommendations, and steps to enlightenment.

Some of the key findings:

- “Social media is an unfamiliar territory for enterprises, with very different rules for engagement”

- “…Social media blurs the demarcations between public and private information, increasing the likelihood that consumers will unintentionally or negligently say publicly what they meant to say privately”

- “Time scales on the internet are more compressed and the implications of a negative event can be far-reaching”

Net-net is that organizations need to understand this medium and have a plan for understanding, interacting, and engaging with consumers that are already talking about them.

Blake Cahill

Visible Technologies

Sound radical? Well, I would have thought so too not long ago, but now I’m not so sure.

When I jumped into the Internet game in the mid-90’s, I was convinced right away that the Web would have a profound impact on communications, but that it would take a long time time for a lot to change. Little did I know how much would change and how fast that change would come.

By the turn of the century the talk about print publications starting to disappear was no longer a prediction, but a reality. The first publications started dropping soon after and then last year NY Times Chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr., hinted that he wasn’t sure the NY Times would be available in print for more than five more years. Now, that’s not to say the NY Times or any of the other national news organization is going out of business, but rather the distribution of its content will change and the business model will be very different than what it is today.

Now, I’m starting to see the same trends that impact print starting to happen with TV viewing, and I don’t mean the latest declining TV viewership stats. What I mean is I’m starting to see a shift in the next generation’s usage of televisions. They are still watching TV and other video programming, of course, but increasingly so on their laptops and not always on the giant high definition TV screens manufacturers want us to keep buying. I’m not sure I would see the day when teenagers walk out of a room with a 50-inch plasma and go into another room to watch a movie on a 17-inch monitor, but it happens more than you know.

I absolutely can see a tipping point down the road when sales of TVs start to decline, just like the decline of readership of daily newspapers and books. Perhaps it takes place when more than half of the current baby boom generation is no longer around, but mark my words I think the time will come when TV boxes could be obsolete.

Mike Spataro