Make Digital Marketing Work

Its the season for top tens and predictions for next year.  Never to be one for missing out on a trend we include our predictions for 2010 below:

1)      Digital marketing will come of age and stop focusing on tactical disciplines.  Leading on from this the value of strategic marketing will become better understood by digital marketers and welcomed by clients

2)      Publishing will experience an extremely turbulent year and many publications could potentially be put up for sale discontinued or merged together

3)      Google will stop being viewed as the enemy of publishers and acknowledged as a valued partner

4)      Online broadcast of TV content will become a huge issue for TV companies and lead to similar scenes as we have seen this year for news publishers

5)      The concept of a mobile wallet will become a common thing for consumers

6)      The world wide web and mobile web will converge as mobile browsers become as common as laptops

7)      Wifi in the city streets for everyone

8)      Display advertising will enjoy a short renaissance followed by a larger debate about banner ads use and effectiveness

9)      Offline and integrated marketers will face a huge task as they move from a broadcast media model to one that is customer led.  Not everyone will be able to adapt.

10)   A pure digital agency will secure lead agency status by a times 100 company

Oh and one more for luck

Arsenal will win the FA cup!

What are your predictions and what do you think of ours?

As much as I think any improvement for display advertising is a good thing, I can’t help feeling that geographical targeting is a bit of a waste of time.  On the one hand you have media that makes time and place irrelevant and then on the other you try and segment the audience based on the things that by nature of the media don’t matter.  It’s something that intrinsically feels wrong to me.  Surely it would be better to serve up ads based on site usage, so that if I started to look at online content about financial products then the online ads would be based on financial products, and if I started to look at geographic content then the ads would be relevant to that area.

Essentially I don’t think that display ads are direct response because they are intrusive.  I’m not saying they are a bad thing because they do have a significant brand awareness role to play as part of an overall media multiplier but in and of themselves I cant help but feel that their role is to establish an ambience of brand around the content rather than demanding a click through.

Does this sound strange to anyone or is that how you view banner ads as well?