Digital's Chief Executive has been a regular commentator in the trade press since the mid nineties. Here are a few recent articles. For a full listing, licenses to reprint, or commissions for your website, magazine or journal simply email the Digital team giving as much detail as possible.
Data & Intelligence | by Danny Meadows-Klue
The figures are in for 2007, showing that online passed the £3bn threshold last year and now makes up 16% of the UK's ad market. In Europe online adspend grew 40% during the year and is on course to overtake the US by 2010. These trends are only set to continue with some analysts now predicting that online budgets in the UK could overtake TV this year.
The long-running Microsoft-Yahoo! saga has also come to a close with the clearest winner seeming to be... Google. Yahoo's determination to avoid being acquired has strengthened the search giant's position even further. It remains to be seen if and when their new ad deal will be rolled out worldwide.
This month also saw Facebook overtake MySpace with astonishing annual growth of 162%. Facebook is clearly no longer the underdog rebel upstart though at present its users seem to be staying loyal.
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Data & Intelligence | by Danny Meadows-Klue
The latest US online adspend data shows continued strong growth as brands continue to move budgets online. New research is also continuing to identify online's specific strengths and role in cross-media campaigns.
Days away from the launch of Apple's new model iPhone it's no coincidence that this month we have focussed on developments taking place in the mobile phone sector. Recent trends and developments suggest the mobile web is clearly on course to reach its tipping point - mobile-based IM and social networking are set to make us more connected than ever before. No surprise then that key players including Microsoft and Vodafone are jockeying for position to give consumers and advertisers the tools they didn't even know they needed a year ago.
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It takes a long time for newspaper paper stock prices to feel the effects of structural change in media, but when they do it makes for depressing reading. Johnston Press's announcement today about a rights issue to raise £212m is just the latest in a ceaseless flow of profit warnings, revenue reforecast and closures that have become the norm in the magazine and newspaper industry. The thing is that it's not that these businesses are doing anything wrong, it's that the landscape has changed so much that their products lack the relevancy to advertisers and consumers that they once had.
Continue reading "Johnston Press rights issue: it's the business model, not the business" »
Data & Intelligence | by Danny Meadows-Klue
As the e-retail economy forges ahead, this month's summary of new research reports upbeat figures for the US and UK, along with a similar lifts in online advertising in spite of the wider concerns about the ad market.
Opinion polls suggest a gradual change in consumer attitudes towards some of the more advanced forms of targeting, endorsing the strong financial results from leading media owners such as Google and Yahoo, as well as middle tier UK publishers.
There's more on the click-throughs we've added, with deeper commentary in our Digital Insight Reports.
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Education & Training | by Danny Meadows-Klue
Every firm has a website these days, but that's only the start of internet marketing. Why do some websites do almost nothing for their companies and others change the perception of a brand or generate massive numbers of leads? Could you be getting more value from the time and money you've already invested in your site? In this article, Danny Meadows-Klue, chief executive of the Digital Training Academy, share a few tips for simple steps firms can take to get more value and engagement out of their existing web presence.
Continue reading "Seven simple steps for getting more from your website" »
Digital Book Club | by Danny Meadows-Klue
After the marketing hit 'Life after the 30 second spot', confrontational author Joseph Jaffe explores the conversational nature of digital marketing and concludes that with the right attitude and something to say, brands can have a big part to play. There's no automatic right though, and Jaffe explores the problems as well as the successes.
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The sudden arrival of in-stream video advertising formats presents new challenges for commercial directors, ad operations teams and media planners. Minor variations in the way video advertising messages are delivered can have a disproportionate impact on the effectiveness of the commercials and the quality of the campaign. These best practice tips for video advertising reflect techniques that have proven to be effective for both media planners and online publishers in getting more value from the media space and creative assets.
Data & Intelligence | by Danny Meadows-Klue
The outlook for digital advertising growth remains strong with new research putting online at 10% of all adspend in the US, and here the UK market topping £5bn by 2012 - that's on top of our own forecasts that now put UK online adspend ahead of TV by the end of next year.
We said that 2009 would be the year mobile advertising accelerates, and new forecasts are already sizing that sector at $4.8bn within five years. Also in our round-up of the last month's research and announcements, we look at MySpace entering the downloads market, how Brits are tuning into TV on the web (even though 22m homes now have digital TV), and the OpenSocial initiative.
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Data & Intelligence | by Danny Meadows-Klue
In 2008 British companies and customers will buy Polish products and services worth 25 bln PLN. Polish export to Great Britain is growing 15-20% a year. To read more go to 'Rzeczpospolita' article (in Polish)
Strategy & Training | by Danny Meadows-Klue
The world of marketing has changed and suddenly brands are having to face up to the reality that not every customer wants to be interrupted by the messages they have. Like an annoying pop-up, even if television, radio and print advertising is hitting the right person, when the messaging is not requested by the user, the effects can be neutral. But if advertising engages with its audiences, then inviting them to take part, then there can have a dramatic effect in the efficiency of the message and the delivery of response. Here are three examples Digital’s team have been tracking:
Nike Run London (Nike) – How the leading sports brand created a massive ‘idea’ that had customers talking and interacting face to face, on the web and accross all media.
Tea Partay (Diageo) – How a leading drinks brand gives its product the edge, gets customers talking, and still enjoys audiences over a year later.
Snowblog (Snowbooks) – How marketing on a shoestring budget can still engage audiences and win the publisher awards.
Education & Training | by Danny Meadows-Klue
Getting to grips with how online advertising works, and the scale of benefit expected from a campaign can be a real challenge to those new to the web. That’s why we developed a simple way of describing the steps in the online advertising sales conversion process. Here you can read through the thinking and download some of the simple notes that are used in the Digital Media Planning Academy to introduce marketers new to digital channels to the models and concepts at the heart of successful online advertising.
Education & Training | by Danny Meadows-Klue
If you’re McDonalds and selling breakfast products, when do you want to advertise? If you’re a coffee chain with an afternoon coffee shop promotion then when could trigger the purchase? If you’re a film company releasing a new blockbuster, when are people most receptive? Broadcast media has always been strong in using the times of day to talk to customers when they are most receptive, but why have web marketers missed the trick? And how can media owners and planners reap the rewards to improve the effectiveness of how they work?
Data & Intelligence | by Danny Meadows-Klue
The acquisition frenzy continues this month with some of the world's biggest internet brands still in battle for taking over each other (and still finding time to buy more smaller internet companies along the way).
The economies of scale mean a service like email or photo-sharing once developed can be rolled out worldwide at very low cost, economics that pressure online services that are only national and trigger the race for growth.
At Digital we said that 2008 was the year television programming would hit the web, and here in the UK the BBC's iPlayer is making headlines with 2.2m people a month watching TV through the player. MySpace has launched video advertising (pre-roll and post-roll formats), helping create a framework for brands to reach video watchers, and with Joost and the IPTV pureplays growing fast, this year is the crossing point for television programming on the web.
For mobile telephony the middle of the year will a big crossing point as the volume of calls made on mobile networks overtakes those on fixed networks according to the latest predictions.
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Education & Training | by Danny Meadows-Klue
From the moment email went mainstream it was clear the internet would accelerate social networks and create a new type of weak, permanent connection between people. The explosion of social media has released completely new forms of community and enabled a new era of participatory marketing. But that doesn't entitle every brand to create its own. Unless there is passion and cohesion among participants, nurturing your own community can be a false promise and dead end. We've been teaching brands across Europe about social media and in spite of our enthusiasm for community, sometimes it's more effective to simply fish where the fish are rather than trying to build the pond. Bandwagons are seductive, but no substitute for strategy.
This short comment first appeared in The Marketing Society forum
Education & Training | by Danny Meadows-Klue
Selling online advertising is harder than selling print. While the Google interface may have made search listings easy enough for anyone to buy off the screen, selling brand building graphical ‘display’ space is tough because it opens up so many questions, often at a time when there just isn’t the knowledge inside the client team or the sales force.
Think of the options in print: whole page, half page, quarter page, strip. Maybe a cover-mount? Maybe a direct mailing piece? Maybe two or three editions? The choices are finite, and also familiar. It’s the familiarity to both buyer and seller that makes the sales conversation fluid and focussed.
Internet publishing coach Danny Meadows-Klue reflects on the second digital congress of FIPP and concludes that while the talk in Berlin is about strategy, getting the right people in place should be the priority. The skills crisis is everywhere and that’s the underlying reason so many classic media brands are haemorrhaging audience and advertiser market share on the web.
Download the notes that accompany this article
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Continue reading "Solving the digital publishing skills crisis with training" »
Education & Training | by Danny Meadows-Klue
As a web publisher, how do you deal with conversations between viewers that descend into a flame war? How do you maintain a thread of comments that are on topic? How do you build credibility in the debates on your site without censoring everything that's written? How do you avoid the legal risk of libel when you are the publisher but your readers are the author? Social media tools are great ways to engage audiences and boost page traffic, but moderation needs to be taken into account from the very start.
Education & Training | by Danny Meadows-Klue
The Digital Training Academy joined the IVCA’s Essential Communications conference this year and found many firms missing big opportunities on the web. Here, their chief executive Danny Meadows-Klue explains a few simple steps firms can take to get more value and engagement out of their Corporate Responsibility programmes.
Danny Meadows-Klue
Everyone knows the internet has changed the communications mix, but why do most firms fail to do anything more than build static web pages and simple corporate brochures? Digital channels hold the keys to powerful relationship marketing that can transform engagement, boost brands and build trust. When Digital’s training team were invited to share their thoughts at Essential Communications 2008, it was clear that most firms were missing some easy tricks in getting their websites to amplify corporate responsibility messaging. Having trained digital marketers for more than a decade, there are plenty of lessons relevant in the Digital Content Academy, and here are some tips any business can look at applying straight away. They are only intended to be a starting point, but are a sure fire way to help amplify marketing messages by building engagement with the right stakeholders on their terms.
Continue reading "Seven steps for getting more from your website " »
Data & Intelligence | by Danny Meadows-Klue
Another exceptional month in a decade of exceptional months: latest financial reports from Google reveal that the UK operation smashed the $2.5bn barrier (£1.3bn) for the first time, accounting for 15% of total worldwide revenues. Business in the UK is up almost 60% year-on-year in turnover (58%), with the pay-per-click activity accounting for the vast majority of all the firm’s revenues.
Digital Insight Report | by Danny Meadows-Klue
Back in 2004 we set up the Digital Media Sales Academy to help portals, magazines and newspapers make a stronger and clearer case for the role of online advertising.
Since then we've taught it teams from over 20 countries and developed advanced strands for sales directors as well as orientations for newcomers.
We're sharing some of the recent course companion notes because they give a sense of the challenges marketers have with online media and reflects what they're missing. These are highlights of some of the questions asked during the last few months, and if you have questions, then we're taking the passwords off the online classroom so you can add yours here.
If you or your colleagues are looking for training this year in online sales, online ad operations, the marketing of online sites, or web media strategy, then why not see if we can help. With some of the world's leading media brands among the existing academy graduates you'll be in good company.
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Newspaper and magazine sites in Spain and the UK get a massive boost of traffic from foreign audiences. It’s been one of the driving forces since the start of online news publishing and the overseas contingent can easily top 50%. ComScore data at the start of 2008 suggested that among the UK media properties The Mail gets 69 percent of visitors from overseas, BBC 59 percent, Telegraph.co.uk 57 percent, Guardian 56 percent and Times 55 percent. The same models and issues are true for the Spanish speaking sites, with media properties from Spain enjoying disproportionate traffic from Latin America. Many media groups miss these dynamics because in print and broadcast, the model has traditionally been about producing and distributing locally. However, with increased globalisation of media savvy directors at the BBC and The Guardian are now actively targeting overseas audiences with special editions, services and content. Look out for the www.guardianamerica.com site launching in early 2008.
Digital Insight Report | by Danny Meadows-Klue
Online marketing presents a richer choice of media formats, targeting and messaging than any other media channel. Harnessing this potential involves building on the principles of traditional media planning and using new toolkits, and matching the right formats and sites with the right media properties - all in a market that offers a daunting array of options. There are new metrics to track that transform accountability, and new models for trading media space. This Digital Insight Report introduces some of the trends, frameworks and viewpoints that describe online media planning today to help planners new to digital channels get up to speed quickly.
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Today was a great day for Croatian internet marketers. 250 of the most digitally savvy gathered for the region’s largest internet congress, to see examples of best practice, the models that work, and get a download of the latest training in digital marketing.
Online ad spend in Croatia (net, EUR). Source: Httpool / Gemius
Continue reading "Croatia: a market mobilising for digital " »
Digital Insight Report | by Danny Meadows-Klue
Blogging has changed the way publishing works.
What started out in a techno ghetto moved to the mainstream of digital publishing over three years ago. These days many small company websites are run entirely by blogging software and many big company CEOs are itching to write their own blog.
That's why in the digital marketing coaching we run it's come up so much that we created a whole training programme just about blogging for business. This Digital Insight Report is a quick starter that participants get, and we thought it worth sharing with a few of the people who asked for our research newswire. If you want to make a comment then mail me back and we'll add it to our own discussions. And if you've come across some great case studies of corporate blogging, then we'd love to see them.
These reports can be useful for explaining the basics of digital marketing to colleagues and as we write one every month, if there's a topic you'd like to see covered then simply mail us back.
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Education & Training | by Danny Meadows-Klue
Danny Meadows-Klue has been teaching digital marketing for more than 10 years. He was one of the first online publishers in Europe and has run dozens of internet businesses before setting up the Digital Strategy Consulting group. When his team were training marketers in 20 countries last year he saw similar patterns among the opportunities firms had missed, and here he talks about some of the experiences from those Digital Training Academies.
First published in Croatian internet marketing titles
Continue reading "Online marketing: massive undiscovered potential" »
Data & Intelligence | by Danny Meadows-Klue
January saw a great start for the digital marketing, media and retail sectors.
Consumer spending was even greater at Christmas than most e-retailers had forecast with a leap of around 50%, online advertising looks set to overtake television spend in the near future as budgets are pulled from classic channels, and the switch to digital marketing is accelerating in Germany and across Central and Eastern Europe younger digital markets.
Our first international projects of the year confirmed the enthusiasm of marketers in New York to boost their integrated strategies with more online activities, and next month we are back in Sweden and Eastern Europe to see if the same trends are strong in those markets.
For details of new digital training and strategy programmes in your country e-mail me back, and in the meanwhile we all hope you enjoy this edition of Digital Intelligence. If you'd like to give a colleague access this year, then simply e-mail us back and copy them in, and we'll do the rest.
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Comment & Opinion | by Danny Meadows-Klue
2008 is set to be another massive year for online advertising product development. A few key players will drive these initiatives because their global economies of scale allow for exceptional research and development resources. Here’s a quick summary of three powerful tools from Google that we feel will capture the market in 2008.
Continue reading "Online ad products: More innovations rolling out from Google" »
Data & Intelligence | by Danny Meadows-Klue
Your final news download as we wind down and wish you the best for the holidays.
The mince pies and mulled wine are waiting, we're almost finished for the year, but I did want to send you the final newswire to complete your archive. 2007 was a transformative year for the digital media and marketing industries, and having coached marketing teams in more than twenty countries since January, we've seen the pace quicken as the latest ideas from the UK , USA and Scandinavia get picked up in Central America, South East Asia, Africa and the Middle East . In our 'flattened' world the best ideas are only a click away.
Digital Intelligence tracked hundreds of the 'crossing points' in the sector's growth this year and this final edition rounds up some of the strongest evidence about how shoppers have switched to the web, the saturation levels of broadband, and the continued acceleration of key companies. We'd like to say a big thank you to everyone who took part in the Christmas appeal - you can still donate to your favourite charity here - and there's details of our charity here: http://www.digitalstrategyconsulting.com/about/merrychristmas.
Wishing you a relaxing 'unplugged' Christmas from all of us @ Digital, and the best of health for 2008.
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Education & Training | by Danny Meadows-Klue
In search engine marketing, by creating a strategy rather than a campaign, brands can build a sustainable rich feed of quality traffic. The effects can be transformative on the business. In professional services from law to accountancy, or business solutions from IT systems to equipment suppliers, search marketing is the key not only to discoverability, but also to unlocking the value already invested in the brand’s existing website.
In the top end of business solutions, search engine optimisation is critical for getting the products found in the right way and at the right time. The web has become the starting point for the majority of supplier searches and while PR and trade press advertising will take some of the messages actively out there, when people are looking for suppliers, their sites need to bubble up in search results pages fast.
Education & Training | by Danny Meadows-Klue
Search engine optimisation is critical for driving traffic and raising audience numbers. Every website wants to increase users and page impressions, but for media sites this is at the heart of their business model. The problem is most publishers fail to give it the attention it needs.
For the internal team’s SEO needs, there’s quite a bit to balance out between look and feel the readers see and what Google needs to deliver the indexing publishers crave. In general media groups face an additional challenge of stakeholder alignment between IT, editorial, marketing and advertising sales. The second challenge is resourcing: skimping on SEO is strategically dangerous for the whole business because the risks and effects are disproportionate: get the SEO right and millions of casual viewers can stumble into your content. Get it wrong and you’ll have to generate all those ad views from just a tiny (albeit loyal) audience. It’s as core a part of the engine of web publishing as the content itself, and yet consistently most media firms fail to prioritise it.
Continue reading "SEO for magazines, newspapers and media sites: processes and tips" »
Education & Training | by Danny Meadows-Klue
This article first appeared in Technology for Marketing and Advertising
If the last time you thought about online was a few months ago, then its time to take a fresh look. It’s a medium that does anything but than stand still and the reason it remains the fastest growing marketing channel in history is the power of its results. Whether their campaigns are to build brands or generate leads, more and more marketers are using the internet to reach new customers in ever-smarter ways.
Continue reading "Online marketing: your customers are still waiting for you" »
Strategy & Training | by Danny Meadows-Klue
There’s been rapid change already, but the pace will accelerate from here. The tools and technologies are now in place, but only in the last few years has the mass migration to the new channels really started in Western Europe. Digital Strategy was set up to help digital media groups find smarter ways to migrate their businesses into the new digital landscapes. Television channels, ratio stations, newspapers and magazines all have to get to grips with fundamental changes in media consumption, audience fragmentation, the nature of content and the media experience. The models that worked unchallenged until the end of the 1990s are now suddenly transforming and both audiences and revenues are changing faster than most media groups can respond.
Continue reading "Digital strategy for a television station, newspaper or magazine" »
Data & Intelligence | by Danny Meadows-Klue
Another massive month for product development at the search engines, as the migration to the mobile web quickens.
Strong financial results from indicator stocks are giving investors greater confidence in the online media sector, and retailers are looking forward to a Christmas that will again break e-commerce records across Western Europe and North America; with the web's role in direct retail dwarfed by its role as the primary place for purchase research.
In this Digital Intelligence we're tracking these trends and sifting through the noise to give you the click-throughs and data that matters. Retailers, consumer brands and media groups who are finalising their plans for 2008/9 are bringing us in as architects and strategists - and through this we're consistently seeing four themes emerge: the challenges in making sense of the landscape are getting worse, social media is moving to the core of every agenda (not always for the right reasons), the risks of getting it wrong have amplified, and there is now an acceptance that training and coaching for senior management is essential to make strong digital decisions.
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Training & Strategy | by Danny Meadows-Klue
Every organisation is investing in digital channels, yet few unlock most of the value they should get because the content simply isn’t discoverable. Sites are too often organised around the linear aims of their owners and the silos of the organisation’s parent company’s structure. By understanding the broader needs of the customer, and reflecting these in the site’s design, the value of the websites to the business can be multiplied, and the real value of the marketing investment already made in the web presence can be unlocked.
Continue reading "Discoverability: the undervalued multiplier in digital marketing" »
Strategy & Insight | by Danny Meadows-Klue
Blended marketing is neither new, nor transient. Integrating your messaging across platforms is a hygiene factor for marketers; it happens intuitively. Using the best media channels to do the job is so elementary we hardly acknowledge it. Yet why do these principles so often fail to retain traction in online?
Continue reading "New frontiers in integration: blended, connected marketing" »
Strategy & Insight | by Danny Meadows-Klue | This article first appeared in Pharmaceutical Marketing magazine
Seven years ago, on a hot and dry afternoon, I found myself rummaging around under desks in a stark concrete basement at the end of a neglected corridor, under a hospital in Addis Ababa. We were laying Ethernet cables next to the pathology lab, connect the first computing network, in the first computing room, of Ethiopia’s first teaching hospital. It was one of Digital’s early corporate social responsibility projects, and although I was there to think about what would come down these telecoms pipes, without them in place, nothing much was going anywhere. In the Horn of Africa things take longer than you expect, and normally need more effort than you can imagine, but the results can be far more rewarding than you dare suspect.
Continue reading "Crossing points in unlikely places: the road to the digital networked society" »
Strategy & Insight | by Danny Meadows-Klue
It’s time for a change in marketing. We’ve seen periods of change many times before, but never on the scale now needed. The legacy of the first digital decade includes placing the absolute control of media in the hands of the audience, the removal of frictions in the access to knowledge, the capturing of conversation and opinion from all stakeholders in ways unimaginable ten years before, a step-change in the scale of media fragmentation, and the arrival of whole new paradigms in communication. It’s a whirlwind of change, at a pace that remains daunting, yet any brand failing to adapt, is assured to fail. Many classic marketing channels continue, but a new type of blended, connected marketing is called for.
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Training & Strategy | by Danny Meadows-Klue
Last week in a digital management coaching workshop, a senior marketer hit a familiar legal dilemma: “Can I use things I don’t have copyright to?” All I could reply was the rather unhelpful “get a lawyer”.
It’s familiar because pretty much every website publisher has to wrestle with it, and it’s a dilemma because there are strong cultural factors on both sides, and that’s why this is a question that just doesn’t go away. Copyright issues are still a nightmare for pretty much everyone in the process. When this crops up with commercial sites and marketers, it reveals that there’s a need to get up to speed with the issues - even if there's no solution, then the understanding of the challenges alone is pretty handy.
Continue reading "Copyright: challenges, models, and getting up to speed with the tensions" »
Insight & Analysis | by Danny Meadows-Klue
When our trainers finished their most recent series of projects in Warsaw - coaching senior management in digital marketing - what we discovered was a polarisation in marketing skills, with most firms in Poland failing to mobilise for the digital marketing opportunities ahead, but some racing away with the same approaches and practices you’d expect in London or New York.
Continue reading "Central & Easter Europe: Digital marketing skills polarise" »
Training and navigating | by Danny Meadows-Klue | This article first appeared in Pharmaceutical Marketing
When audiences change, marketing has to change. The problem with marketing through the web is that there’s never any let up in the insane pace of change since it kicked off at the start of the nineties, so while most marketers are yet to get up to speed with the last digital era of techniques, you can be sure that a new paradigm is already rippling out from deep in the servers of a website you’ve never even heard of. And that’s pretty much what happened with the Web 2.0 explosion over the last three years. While most brands were still getting rid of the mothballs in their brochureware sites, social media was rewriting the rule book for web publishing, creating models of participation, levelling the world and democratizing conversations.
Insight & Analysis | by Danny Meadows-Klue
The trading models for online advertising have always been progressive. A transparency in the data, and a keenness to relate advertiser success to media space, quickly created the Cost Per Click trading model in the late nineties. From this came the Cost Per Action model, and from those the richer models of shared risk. Classified advertising engines have turned the listings market upside down and the new behaviour the marketing industry learned in the search world is breaking out onto the web. Since those early days, sharing the risk has become a regular part of the media buying discussion, and the role of auctioning clicks has become deeply embedded in the trading of search engine advertising.
Delta gets going at MediaTel | Try placing an ad for free with CraigsList | Search fuels online adspend leaps in the UK
Continue reading "Auctions and media: search was just the start" »
Data & Intelligence | by Danny Meadows-Klue
Another cracking month for the internet sector and we held back this round-up of September research to include the two new records set for online adspend in the UK and the US.
Online is taking almost 15% of the adspend cake in the UK and crossed $5bn in a single quarter in the US. The tide of migration to free content is pulling hard and this month we look at how the New York Times, the FT and probably the Wall St. Journal are all getting seduced again to ad funded models; questioning the role of subscription barriers that block audience growth. In our sector focus there's more on the music industry as the Charlatans give away their latest CD and Radiohead let you chose how much their music is worth.
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Strategy & Analysis | by Danny Meadows-Klue
The latest numbers for the US from PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) and the IAB confirm that the world’s largest online ad market is still enjoying the largest annual growth in real terms. Spend surged ahead by 25.4%, crossing the $5 bn mark in a single quarter.
Continue reading "US online adspend: new records set as net breaks $5 bn a quarter" »
Insight & Analysis | by Danny Meadows-Klue
Today's new figures confirm the switch to online continues to accelerate in Europe’s lead media market. The internet's share of all advertising swelled to almost 15% in the first half of 2007, with further record-setting leaps in real growth. Boosted in particular by massive increases in the supply of media from social networks, and the continued switch of acquisition budgets into search, the wider media sector is starting to feel the real impact of the digital networked economy as the models that underpin many print and broadcast players get called into question.
Read on for stats on spend, analysis, forecasts and key actions... | Swiss adspend set for a switch | Mexico hits the tipping point | Italy: On the rise in 2006 | UK: acceleration underway back in 2005
Training & Strategy | by Danny Meadows-Klue
A few of us are talking about how firms can test out this web thing. And one of the agency folks pipes up that “the problem is that these clients want to try, but we just don’t think they can follow through. What happens when they need to pull out, do we just close the blog? Can they do that?”
Continue reading "A blog is for life and not just for Christmas" »
Casestudies | by Danny Meadows-Klue
Over the last few weeks we’ve been preparing a new edition of the Digital Viral Marketing Academy; one focussed on the entertainment sector and in particular the challenges facing book publishers. Along the way I’ve learned heaps about how Harry Potter fans used their own magic on the web, how political diarists levered their influence and how unknown authors have shot to stardom. The folks at Book-Trailers.net have begun exploring Hollywood-style approach to selling movies, authors are now buying into creating their own sites, and Penguin Classics have created the cutest RSS buttons imaginable.
While ambling between the sites of the big sisters of publishing, I was lucky enough to stumble into the home of tiny Snowbooks, and find a small publisher that’s pulled off some big web coups.
Snowbooks.com | Snowblog | Snowbooks.com on YouTube | Books-Trailers.net | Training in viral marketing | Tips in viral marketing | Web 2.0 training and strategies
Continue reading "Snowbooks.com – smart digital marketing by reaching customers online" »
Training & Strategy | by Danny Meadows-Klue
As word of mouth became word of mouse in the mid 90s, the term viral marketing was born. It rests on the changes in the nature of trust as the unquestioned authority of institutions and brands becomes replaced by peer recommendations. It was a trend that began long before the web went mainstream, but the internet’s ability to destroy geography and remove frictions in information has become a catalyst that accelerated that process.
The iconic Dove Evolution campaign | Our favourite viral video content | Viral Marketing training classroom
Continue reading "How to make viral messages infectious: techniques in viral marketing" »
Speeches & Keynotes | by Danny Meadows-Klue
The rules of the marketing game have changed. The command and control television era where big brands delivered heavyweight messaging every night to the nation, has finally melted away. In its place a radically new structure has emerged that will dominate the next twenty years of marketing.
Continue reading "Falling in Love 2.0: Why it’s ‘all change’ in the relationship rules?" »
Insight & Analysis | by Danny Meadows-Klue
If you're trying to hire, then you'll know the challenge only too well. A massive shortage in the labour market that stretches from Singapore to San Francisco. Wage rates are spiralling, contractors are filling critical gaps, whole departments are understaffed. It's just as big a deal among senior directors, where a whole generation of marketing leaders are struggling to grasp the implications and models of the new channels.
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Insight & Analysis | by Danny Meadows-Klue
Here in Switzerland, newspaper advertising still dominates the marketing mix. It has one of the highest shares of advertising spend of any market in the world, and while most countries have seen classified ads begin their heavyweight migration to the web, here the changes are still yet to really get going. It’s an even greater paradox, because with broadband penetration and ad spend per capita among the highest in the world, online should be accounting for 8% or more of the advertising mix. Vested interests? Lack of innovation? New insights about the time the Swiss spend with their media paint a startling picture…
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Insight & Analysis | by Danny Meadows-Klue | Article was published in PERSÖNLICH magazine
Why are Swiss marketers missing out? Danny Meadows-Klue argues that with a country as technologically advanced as Switzerland, the marketing industry is missing a trick. Audiences have moved to the web, but advertising budgets still over-use the classic media channels. For smart marketers that means they're getting a loud voice online and often without their competitors around, but for the Swiss industry as a whole there's an inefficiency that's emerged in the last five years that represents wasted ad budgets. The world of media is changing at a breath-taking pace, and while some parts of the web can justifiably be accused of being over-hyped, internet media is now mainstream media and for the marketers that forget the web from their schedule that means lost audiences and lost engagement.
Data & Intelligence | by Danny Meadows-Klue
Online retail took a major leap this summer, breaking the £4bn threshold for July alone. That’s a staggering 80% growth year-on-year, and well above seasonal expectations (we’re thinking the British ‘Summer’ had something to do with this one). In the social networking stakes Bebo pipped MySpace in the UK, as both saw audiences swell along with FaceBook and YouTube. Meanwhile in the US the crossing point for online ad spend overtaking newspapers is in sight as latest research suggests 2011 as the date when it happens.
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Training & Strategy | by Danny Meadows-Klue
Digital Strategy was set up to help website publishers find smarter ways to work. We've worked for some of the largest newspaper, magazine and television groups in the world, as well as some of the most successful dotcom firms. Why do newspapers, magazines, television, directories and dotcoms ask us to help? Because we know the industry and the web inside and out and can deliver their online advertising strategy, internet content strategy, community strategy, or simply boost traffic and learn about our ways of raising audiences to websites. Here's a list of some common projects we run...
Insight & Analysis | By Danny Meadows-Klue
Thanks to the folks at NetImperative and Weboptimiser, we had a great dinner tonight, with a big serving of Web 2.0 as a side order. It was a chance for a few of us back in London to chat about the new publishing models of communities and online audiences. As conversation expanded from how marketers can use online communities to how you harvest the wisdom of crowds, I figured that writing up a few notes might be handy to help some of the folks who were here tonight, as well as some who weren’t.
Web 2.0 Classroom | www.facebook.com | www.MySpace.com | Google tracks the growth of Web 2.0 searches | Second Life search volumes quick to follow
Continue reading "Web 2.0 in the West End, and the tale of two Tims" »
Insight & Analysis | By Danny Meadows-Klue | This article was written for IDM
Coming back to Mexico, I’m coming to a new country. The billboards from the airport are shouting out web addresses, WiFi internet access seems to be just about everywhere, and it’s not just the USA websites people are logging onto; Mexico’s home grown online media is in boom time. There are 22 million online users in México, with a big slant to upmarket professionals. The web is now about 1% of brand advertising spend in Mexico, and it’s focussed on a narrow group, but this is a gap that will close in the next 18 months. The demographics are broadening fast and the web is no longer just a high-end office worker tool, but thanks to the collapsing price of broadband is opening up to Mexico’s middle classes. 3.4 million people are banking online, and e-commerce is at record levels.
Insight & Analysis | by Danny Meadows-Klue
Read any marketing magazine, and it’s the same message: ‘The web is big’. But where do you start? And if you’re new to online marketing, how can you structure where the web fits in the media mix? Online marketing pioneer Danny Meadows-Klue suggests that looking at your existing media mix can be a great place to start and that you’ll find a perfect ‘mirror’ online.
For the new generation of marketers suddenly having to tackle the internet, our industry can be rather confusing. One problem is choice: online marketing can achieve every goal that marketing through any classic media channel can - from building a brand, to triggering a sale, right through the after sales service process; the internet is there at every step.
Continue reading "Online advertising: knowing where to start" »
Data & Intelligence | by Danny Meadows-Klue
European and US adspend data revealed major leaps forward, as consumer and business brands upped their budgets. The Google family of companies continued to broaden, there was another wave of acquisitions, and the virtual world of Second Life swelled to more than 6 million residents - with over 1.3m of them active in the month. In Europe '1 day a month' is the new magic number. Across the continent the average internet user now spends 24 hours online each month helping put in perspective the scale of the shift in time and focus. UK audiences take pole position, clocking up a staggering 34 hours with the most entrenched online community.
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Insight & Analysis | by Danny Meadows-Klue | This artile is IVCA Book chapter, preface
The world of communications has changed. And the scale and pace of change is as daunting as it is exciting for those of us in the communications industry who have to now weave in this new strand of tools. The internet's sudden arrival in our homes and offices within a decade is creating a change in communications comparable to the arrival of television, yet most British firms have hardly scratched the surface of its potential.
In the mid nineties the effects of the web could have seemed confined to harnessing email and delivering corporate websites, but the ceaseless pace of development in both the breadth and depth of sites, as well as the underlying technologies, has ensured that there is always something radically new. In the last two years the Web 2.0 publishing models have pushed the boundaries forward again.
Continue reading "The world of communications had changed" »
Industry Issues | by Danny Meadows-Klue
“The whole advertising industry needs a good advertising campaign” - Mr Ignasi Guardans Cambo MEP is hosting a breakfast debate on the future of regulation and self-regulation in Europe’s jumbled up, converged media landscape. The text of the Audio Visual Media Services Directive (the Television Without Frontiers Directive for the old hands) has been agreed in The Commission, and the pre agreements mean, in his words “unless an earthquake takes place, there will be a large majority and it will go through the Parliament”. Mr Ignasi Guardans is on fine form with the early risers of the Brussels media lobby (it’s 7:45am CET and 6:45 with those of us nursing UK body-clocks).
Digital Insight: Approaching regulatory challenges online | EASA | Commissioner Reding addresses the Interact congress
Digital Events | by Danny Meadows-Klue
18 months ago a group of the IABs began discussing the potential for a single pan-European congress created by IAB Europe to bring interactive marketing professionals from across Europe together for the first time
Training & Strategy | by Danny Meadows-Klue
That’s the question I put to the Leadership Council of IAB Europe. For the national IABs the answer will shape their plans, for the pan-European agencies and media owners the answer will focus their budgets, and for those new to the industry, the answer will reveal the breadth of the online research agenda.
Insight & Analysis | by Danny Meadows-Klue
Hats off to research stalwart Dr Liz Nelson at Q Research. Their latest insights into mobile phone use not only firm up that for the 11-35s it’s the must-have medium, but also reveal that it’s a channel these audiences want to actively engage with brands through.
Continue reading "Mobile phones: the sure fire way to reach young audiences" »
Insight & Analysis | by Danny Meadows-Klue
That’s the question Roy Patel’s team tackled at Metrix Lab. Let’s face it it’s not an easy one. The theory of combining media channels together may seem simple, but quantifying the effects is a massive challenge. A challenge that these guys have cracked.
Insight & Analysis | by Danny Meadows-Klue
What is engagement with media all about? How can we define it? What does it tell us? What are the relationships between the impact of communication through the different media channels? And why does online appear to be that much more deeply engaging? These are just a few of the questions that appear once you start investigating what engagement means, and while the industry doesn’t yet have an answer, it is starting to uncover the roadmap to getting there. Some new insights from NetRatings are starting to show how you can measure some of the basic metrics for different types of engagement.
Insight & Analysis | by Danny Meadows-Klue
The latest landmark research from i-Level and Yahoo shows how marketing activity on TV triggers a massive uplift in searches online. For the digitally savvy this will not be news, but proving the link with brands such as the AA and Sky is a major step in explaining the new integrated media landscape. The shockwaves from this research spread way beyond the web: television and radio media planners are in for a jolt.
Continue reading "TV is the new key to search engines: time to rethink media integration" »
Data & Intelligence | by Danny Meadows-Klue
Online adspend is already topping 10% of the media channel mix in several countries, and ZenithOptimedia are predicting that worldwide it's now on course to top radio by next year. In the UK our own analysis now puts online above direct mail, and we remain confident in our 2005 prediction that online would overtake TV adspend in the UK by the end of the decade. Although online can build brands as powerfully as it can generate direct sales, the success of search engine advertising continues to be a key driver in the refocusing of marketing towards the web across Europe. That's why this month our Company Focus looks at Google, with a round up of the top ten news stories from the search giant.
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Data & Intelligence | by Danny Meadows-Klue
Online adspend broke the £2bn mark here in the UK and closed 2006 with 12.4% of the total advertising cake. Almost exactly in line with our prediction in the Autumn (12.5%), the growth in search continued to fuel web ads (paid for clicks account for 58% of the total), alongside a broadening of the firms using graphical and banner formats. The increase of 41% sees web adspend overtake national newspapers, and cross the threshold of being half the size of the TV market. With total advertising spend rising only 1.1% year on year, it's clear that the web is now the main driver in the wider advertising economy. The UK may be the largest online advertising market in Europe, but growth has been strong in France, Spain, Scandinavia and Germany. The audit of the Spanish market - also published this month - revealed another massive leap: online marketing in Spain grew 91.38% in 2006, reaching €310.5m and taking 4.25% of all combined Spanish adspend. Search marketing in Spain rose 132,41% (46.58% of all online adspend).
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Data & Intelligence | by Danny Meadows-Klue
In five years 6m of us throughout Europe will go online to find love. In just over ten years nearly half of all purchases will be made online in the UK. Sometimes the predictions can be hard to picture - and they don't always come right - but one thing is certain: the internet will be an even bigger part of all our daily lives. Of course online marketers know this already and the developments in the UK and Australia we cover this month just remind you how fast the digital world is growing. Carrying the internet is our pockets is also increasingly common and the mobile stories cover both Vodafone and Yahoo! working to integrate our online activities into mobile handsets. It's hard to predict what those will look like in ten years!
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Here in Zagreb there’s a gap. 25% of internet users are online several times a day and yet less than 1% of advertising budgets are focussed at them. It’s a crude measure, but one that seems to be consistently accurate as a health check on the sophistication of the market.