Online Marketing Trends and Facts

1. Time to go green - A “green” plan is no longer a luxury, or an option. Every day, another venerable brand commits to a sustainable future.

2. Ads in the great outdoors - This year’s surprise was the rebound of out-of-home advertising, growing faster than any channel except the internet. Outdoor reinvented itself as a technology-rich means of engaging, entertaining and educating commuters.

3. Getting in on the game - Gaming now permeates just about all of society, creating fresh ways for marketers to connect. Millions of non-golfers are swinging virtual clubs as Nintendo’s Wii transformed video games. Senior citizen centres bought Wiis to entertain guests and connect with grandkids. MTV invested US$500 million in online games, on top of the millions it spent for AddictingGames. Even B2B marketers will be smart to give gaming a fresh look while blending in messaging, training or recruiting.

4. Mobile: I can hear you now! - This may be the year in which mobile deserves a closer look as technology improvements create new opportunities. Bluetooth-enabled phones have made it easier for marketers to provide contextually relevant information. Mobile marketing can deliver highly personalised, and useful, information when and where needed and as long as marketers don’t spam, mobile marketing may be the missing link in personalised communications.

5. Join the club - Wise marketers will capitalise on the growing appeal of social networks. Besides the obvious market leaders (MySpace and Facebook), social networks exist in niches from teens (e.g. Pizco and Tagged) to seniors (e.g. Eons) to photographers (e.g. Flickr), do-gooders (e.g. AllDayBuffet) and even B2B (e.g. LinkedIn and Plaxo). This list is almost endless.

6. Rise of the widget - Mini software applications (known as “widgets”) can provide unprecedented access to hard-to-reach targets, as Facebook and MySpace can attest. Even Microsoft’s Windows Vista supports user-written widgets natively. According to ComScore, some 220+ million consumers were using widgets as of May 2007. For example, iLike, which allows Facebook users to share iTunes playlists, grew to over 10 million users in only 10 months. Slide, which creates slideshows and embeds them in social network homepages, claims to be the largest personal media network in the world, reaching 120 million viewers monthly. That’s just the beginning of the widget avalanche.

7. Roll the video - With 70% or more in broadband penetration in the US, streaming video is a “must” marketing tool. eMarketer reported that 123 million Americans watch a video at least monthly, and three-quarters tell a friend about them. Whether a B2B or B2C marketer, video is an enormous opportunity to engage, educate and entertain (those being the new “Three Es” of successful marketing).

8. From behavioural to contextual - Marketers will add behavioural targeting to their contextual search efforts. AOL believes in the future of behavioural targeting, having spent some US$275 million on Tacoda Systems, which claims to reach 120 million people in 31 discrete audience segments each month. eMarketer predicted that behavioural targeting will increase ten-fold over the next five years, growing from US$350 million to US$3.8 billion in advertising spend.

9. Focus on the experience - The need to focus on integrated marketing approaches is not new, but what will be new next year is how brand experiences will move to the top of the integration priorities list, becoming the driving force of marketing communications. Events and online initiatives were once treated as below-the-line after thoughts, but marketers increasingly realise that interactive brand experiences can be far more effective than advertising and should be the starting point of a customer conversation.

10. Marketing as a service - For years, marketers have been more concerned with what they say than what their target hears, resulting in seemingly endless monologues. Those marketers who continually support their customers, providing actual value through each communication, will be the most successful in 2008. The value exchange can take many forms, but only if the marketer understands the needs and aspirations of the customer - and then commits to a genuine dialogue at every point of contact.