6.3% in 2007 & 8.4% in 2008

What’s with 6.3% and 8.4%? Sweet and encouraging numbers. Zenith Optimedia gave these 2 projections on Asia ad spend for the year of 2007 and 2008 respectively.

Global ad spend is expected to climb by 5.5% in 2007 and 6.4% in 2008 with online inching towards 10% market share by 2009. Newspaper, on the other hand, will continue to lose market share.

Source from Media Partners Asia (MPA) research estimates strong growth in all parts of Asia Pacific, some even posting double digit growth such as in China, India and Vietnam.

The advertising scene on Asia looks very promising. More so as more behemoth brands see the importance of online in their marketing mix.

Source : The Asia Media Journal Q2 2007 issue.

Whither The Page View?

If you are in this industry, you probably have heard a lot of news that Nielsen//NetRatings is changing its most important Web media measurement metric, replacing page view with time spent or average session duration in their own terms.

A commentary was published in Online Spin by Dave Morgan.

This battle has been started in the early part of 2006 when AJAX starts surfacing which prompted me to put in my own online marketing blog (see below).

The fact is there's never going to be 1 singular i-represent-all metric for online. Every single metric represents a unique trait of online.

The only way to make sense is to look at all these metric in totality. In my personal opinion,

Page Impression - Important as a comparison metric within the portal. Also an answer to limited ad-serving technology **.

Unique Browser - Important as a metric of measuring the absolute reach of the portal

Time Spent / Average Session Duration (ASD) - Important as a metric to illustrate the stickiness of the portal. The more sticky it is, the higher chance that visitors will interact with the advertising campaign

** Current ad serving technology has not chased up the level of AJAX. In an AJAX-webpage, the ad code does not self-refresh after x seconds. This means that the user will continuously see the same ad from the time he enters the page till the time he left which range from 5 secs to 30mins depending on the portal's content and services. This definitely does not make sense.

Related posts
AJAX - Bane or Boon to Publishers?
Buying media space or interaction time?

Widgets On The Rise..The Next Wave?

A commentary on widgets ran on MediaPost Online Spin today. It started with a brief introduction of Widgets. Dave Morgan, the contributor of this commentary made a statement "..widgets are the most recent embodiment of highly distributable Web media. Widgets permit users to separate the content from the Web page, permitting users to implant them on all types of pages, from personalized portal home pages to blogs to personal pages on social sites like MySpace or Facebook. I believe that over the next three years, widgets will change online advertising as we know it today."

And I think that's very very true.In my opinion, widgets will be a very powerful complimentary tool to content providers as it brings valuable content closer to them, without even having to fire up a browser, not to mention click on bookmarks.

9 out of 10 content providers revenue model is coincidentally advertising, which means chances of advertising appearing on these widgets are very high.

Some may think it's quite unlikely that many people will install widgets that display ads even if the ads and content are intermixed. I say this is true only for widgets that offer nothing more than superficial content/services, for eg weather, calendar, alarm clock etc.

Having said that, there’s no doubt that when too many content providers provide widgets, users will start to choose which widgets are more important to them as desktop space is limited. With or without advertisement.

And that will bring us back to the long-standing fact that in any space, the content provider that offers the best and most engaging content gets the eyeball.

Focus On The Only Metric That Matters

A feature 'Focus On The Only Metric That Matters' was posted in MediaPost recently.

Essentially, it illustrates on the over-reliance of CTR in the online industry. Practically any kind of online campaigns are measured by CTR which bears no correlation to success of campaigns (i have to disagree a bit on this note as I feel if the campaign objective is of acquisition, then CTR does have some correlation. It only have no correlation when it's a pure branding campaign or campaign w/o much call-for-actions)

Interesting quotes from the feature:

• All of us, I am sure, have found ourselves at various times chasing -- and being held accountable for by clients or managers -- a number of different metrics that seem to have no reason for existing except that they could be tracked.
• accountability in online has been a curse and a crutch
• click-through ratios in almost all cases have NO correlation to ultimate conversion rates or changes in brand perception or purchase intent
• (Yet) It (CTR) is almost always one of the first metrics that everyone wants to talk about.

I can't agree more on the last point. I've seen too many agencies/clients who blindly use CTR as a measurement of success. I wonder for these agencies/clients, what kind of metric do they use for their other traditional media to measure success.

Full story here by Dave Morgan in MediaPost.

Air your views here.

Web counting tools 'need change'

Yet again, another feature ran on BBC News on the increasing blurring of pageviews as a metric and the potential double-counting of unique visitor measurement via cookies.

I've also highlighted this point in one of my early post that with the rise of AJAX, page views are becoming less accurate in measuring the activity rate of visitors to a portal.

Nielsen suggested that measuring time spent could be a more accurate metric and I cannot agree any more. This is especially true for branding campaigns where a marketer wants his brand to achieve high brand retention within the consumer. The most direct way is to show the banner/message to a visitor within a site regularly and this is possible only if the visitor spends a considerable amount of time within the portal.

This measurement is coined as Average Session Duration (ASD) by Nielsen//Netratings.
Industy (Portals) has an average ASD of about 5 minutes. www.hardwarezone.com has an ASD of almost 13 minutes (audited in Dec 06). That's almost 2.5 times of the industry standard!

However the biggest barrier to this is how to relate monetary value to the ASD. ASD is currently measured on a portal wide level. It will be quite tedious and redundant to measure ASD on a finer level. This means portals will have 1 ASD figure. This generalization will make it hard to relate monetary value.

Full story here.

Google buys DoubleClick for $3.1 billion - Who will it impact?

Without a doubt, the greatest news in the industy.

Many questions start popping:
How will this acquisition benefit Google publishers?
How will this acquisition benefit DoubleClick advertisers?
How will this acquisition benefit DoubleClick publishers?
How will this acquisition benefit ad agencies?
How will this acquisition benefit end users?

You have to applaud Google in their foresight in these and they actually presented the respective answers in their FAQ

More importantly, the question is will this impact the scene of display advertising, an area where Google is previously not so strong in?

Other than blocking MSN/Yahoo away from this huge advertisers/publishers pie, the other main reason is that Google now practically owns 80-90% of entry points into websites.
Previously with their Adsense/Adwords, they only earn from sites under the Google network sites. Most sites (esp the bigger and more red-tape ones) do not run Adsense as it has the association of small hobbyist websites. CNN.com, Forbes.com, CNBC.com to name a few. With this acquisition, Google is now able to gain entry into these sites via DoubleClick (see 2 of the FAQs below).

Q. Will Google be able to serve ads to non-Google network sites through DoubleClick?
A. Yes. Ultimately, we want to give advertisers maximum flexibility, targeting and reach through Google and DoubleClick services.

Q. Will advertisers and agencies be able to serve ads to Google network sites through DoubleClick?
A. Yes.

Google will earn from Google network sites via Adsense and they will also earn from non-Google network sites via DoubleClick.
At the end of the day, the battle is left to fight between the publishers and agencies/advertisers. They just collect $$.

With their superb search algorithms and indexing, they will inject this capability into DoubleClick and that will make DoubleClick have 1 very strong feature compared to other ad-serving providers around the world. Hence, the impact may be felt more in these providers such as Mediaplex. These providers though smaller than DoubleClick, does add to quite a substantial %. With this acquisition, Google is set to snatch back a portion of this pie and business for these providers are going to get tougher.

For publishers, I do not think there will be any impact in the immediate future.
However without a doubt, Google will be driving efficiencies into the arena of display advertising and this trend over time, will make the price more competitive. not exactly good news for publishers. however will allow publishers with good quality audience to shine out amongst the competition (even though they may be less branded).

Converging In The Digital Element

This is an article I've come across in my inbox.
I would like to share with you this particular quote.

"Digital is the centerpiece for all strategy now and will continue to be even more important over the coming years." The reason is that digital media is the only element that can engage a consumer in more than just a broadcast manner, but digital media is as much a broadcast media as is anything else!

Broadcast Manner is loosely defined as all traditional media such as papers, magazines, tv, outdoor and any 1-directional information flow medium. Traditional broadcast medium is here to stay to reach out to as many pple as possible. What's important is that in today's world, in all marketing strategies, all traditional media placement should converge in the digital element (usually a product website or dedicated microsite).

For clients insisting that they only trust traditional media and their websites nothing more than just an online product catalogue, ask them how are they getting closer to their prospective consumers. Or are they assuming they do not need to get close to consumers?

As some of you may have known, TIME's Person of the Year is 'YOU', the Consumer. In today's world, Consumer is King. He/She dictates what he/she wants to see or hear. For a brand owner to get a slice of his/her attention, broadcasting is no longer sufficient. One needs to engage him/her. And by engagement, we mean getting his attention, getting him involved, getting him to interact and participate. And with survey forms, feedback forms, Q&A, discussion forums, interactive games under its arsenal of tools, Digital/Online is currently the most effective, if not the only, channel for a brand owner to engage a Consumer.

Article Source: http://publications.mediapost.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Articles.showTodaysArticle&art_type=4