With the looming global financial recession, many businesses are being more cautious about where they spend their money. One of the first budgets that tends to be slashed by big businesses is Advertising and Marketing.
In light of this, more Marketers are investing a higher proportion of their budget into digital marketing solutions – online and mobile.
There are a few key reasons for this:
1. It’s easier to track the results of digital marketing, with simple analytics tools, or pay-for-performance pricing on many channels.
2. Well executed digital campaigns gather momentum and can become marketing assets.
3. Digital campaigns can simultaneously inform consumers, while gathering insight about them
4. Digital channels are two-way, so the call-to-action can be more immediate – leading to higher ROI.
Media owners whose traditional advertising earnings are on the decline are also taking alternative and innovative approaches reader engagement more seriously. See, for example, what the New York Times are doing with their “Prototypes“.
We’ve heard for years that online advertising generally isn’t credible, is an annoyance, and that people are becoming adept at ignoring it. The ideal, we’ve heard (and, admittedly, preached) is to engage people in conversations about your company.
Largely, I’d say that the reason for this is that advertisers are treating online advertising as they would print advertising, very little difference in format, except that it clicks through to a landing page.
IBM is doing something interesting with their online advertising though, which I thought would be useful to model if you’re handling the advertising for a large company that often appears in the press: they’re combining the credibility of PR with the control that advertising offers.
As you can see in the ad below (from the NYT online), the advert basically aggregates some recent articles about IBM:
This innovative ad format takes PR and recycles it into a paid advertising that is quite effective. However it competes with more current editorial a reader is likely visiting the site to consume.
Like similar programs from Google, efforts like these unlock the hidden value in thousands of articles deep inside archives. It takes what’s old and makes it monetizable.
Essentially they’re turning archived content into a form of advertising that’s more credible than static, generally poor-performing banners.
This is one of the most visually awesome adverts I’ve ever seen. It features shots of water balloons bursting in super slow-motion. It’s amazing to watch the how the elasticity of the rubber and the fluidity of the water interact to create breath-taking shapes and patterns.
I'm a Digital Media and Marketing educator based in Cape Town, South Africa.
If you're interested in booking me for a talk or workshop you can check out my formal profile on the
About page.
