Make Digital Marketing Work

2010 is under way and already I am seeing articles about increased market confidence and expected increased budgets.  It is almost as if the markets have had a magical touch by the passing of time.

If only life were that simple and a clock was capable of changing everyone’s fortunes.  Even allowing for Boethius views on the mutability of fortune in ‘The Consolation of Philosophy’ you cannot set a clock on when fortune will ebb and flow in any direction.  Whilst I do think that we will have a gentler year than last year in the marketing industry I am not ready to raise the flags up the flagpole and declare the recession over.

Its ten years ago since the heady days of the dot com boom when anyone in digital only had to turn up to work to suddenly find the most incredible budgets becoming available for sites.  I was working in New York at the time and I remember promising my board the most incredible quarter that they had ever seen.  I was right, but hot on the heels of that came a slump that created mass unemployment and removed many of the agency names from the marketplace for good.  I can remember then people were displaying the same kind of optimism in the press but budgets didn’t return for another two to three years.  Back then digital redefined itself with the focus moving from not simply creating sites but to driving traffic.  I believe that the current lean times have caused another shift of focus.  This time it will bring the various disciplines together as an overall end to end digital marketing strategy.

Up until now digital has been a series of tactical tools that people have used to supplement the real marketing and advertising activity that grown-ups did.  When digital marketing overtook TV advertising last year it signalled that clients were ready to take digital seriously.  The only problem was finding digital agencies capable of doing the same thing.

This year will see a continuation of this trend with clients wanting strategic digital marketing solutions and many agencies desperately trying to arrange themselves so that they are able to provide them.

We are obviously looking forward to this quite a lot as it is the reason we created the company.  Times may well be lean but we do think that this year is going to be very interesting indeed.

I spent a day at Ad Tech a few weeks ago in the company of one of my favourite New Media Age types.  We wandered around and caught presentations, discussed technologies and generally got a feel for the marketplace as it stands right now.  One of the big buzzes was about Ad Exchanges.  For those that do not know about them, you can read a good description of what an Ad Exchange is and what it does.

What it amounts to is that display ads are suddenly becoming a lot more targetable.  Ad exchanges let you target your ads based on a series of criteria such as geographical location and connection speeds.  The aim is to cut out the number of wasted impressions that are delivered, and only deliver ads to the marketplace that is geographically relevant and content which connection speeds can handle.  The claims being made are that response rates (click through) are increased by 50%.  Now colour me unimpressed but on a lot of sites I’ve seen this would increase click through from 0.02% to 0.03%.  Still not amazing.

Also I am yet to be convinced by media that still charges by the impression instead of the results it produces.  That’s the acid test and the one that I suspect will shut most Ad Exchange and media owners  up.  Are you prepared to charge on a CPC basis, and if you are how does the price you put on it compare to a Google Adword click?

Suddenly I hear silence across the void.  When the media is of suitable quality that media owners feel able to offer it on a CPC basis then we may have something to talk about.

The simple truth is that whilst this is a very good step forward by display advertising it doesn’t alter the fact that the ads themselves are invasive and distracting for users who are actually there to view the content.  The reason Google works is because it gives me an ad for the thing I am looking for at exactly the time I am looking for it.  Do display ads do that?  Are they spliced at the DNA level to the content they accompany?  Most of the time I don’t think so.  Display advertising still is yet to move beyond the realm of brand based advertising.  It isn’t direct response and despite this leap forward with Ad exchanges it isn’t likely to become direct response any time soon.  It will help your email produce better results and your eCRM campaign will love Ad Exchanges as part of a media multiplier but when it comes to getting clicks.  Our advice would be stick with Google.