Practical Blogging - Digital & High-Tech Marketing

mardi 19 avril 2016

Online Video Advertising is a Big Thing

Introduction

Online video advertising is growing faster than the television advertising market. It's no secret for anybody, video advertising is now a huge market. According to a study, overall revenues for digital advertising amounted for $42.6 billion in 2013. Video advertising represented 9.7% of this amount, so around $4.15 billion in gross revenues. This partially explains why so many Internet companies are fighting in order to acquire video advertising companies. For instance, here are some of the most notable acquisitions and deals of 2014:

Yahoo! bought the company BrightRoll for $640 million.
AOL bought Adap.tv for $405 million
Facebook bought LiveRail for a deal between $400 and $500 million.

Although those major internet companies made those acquisition during 2014, Youtube keeps getting the highest market share in online video advertising. Indeed, in 2013, Youtube generated roughly $850 million in video advertising alone. Those revenues represent around 20.5% of the $4.15 million generated by all of the online video advertising companies. It's important to say that even in 2016 Youtube is still the market leader.

From Television to Digital Video

Nowadays, consumer are cutting their TV cable in order to merge to digital video. The trend is now to use mobile devices and connected televisions (Apple TV for example). eMarketers found that US adult are now watching 1 hour and 16 minutes of digital video each day. Meanwhile, time spent on traditional television is continuously decreasing. However, marketers are now reducing budget on television advertising in order to reinvest it on the online video advertising. We're are clearly shifting our habits and marketers need to profit form this. In fact, digital video space gives more flexibility to marketers and provides more affordable ad options. Here are two graphs that give a clear idea of this major change of habit.

Autoplay is Profitable

Autoplay is now the new norm for digital video. Autoplay is meaning that once you scroll on past a video on your news feed, the video will start playing without sound. Thanks to Facebook who made this autoplaying mode its default way to play video. It didn't take longue before Twitter, Instagram, Youtube and Snapchat follow that path. However, this viewing method is profitable for marketer. Indeed, Twitter exposed that brand marketers found that promoted video were completely watch seven times more with this viewing method. What marketers should learn from this statistic? On the first hand, the video must be catchy in order to stimulate the interest of users and to make them stop scrolling down their feed. That's why the few first seconds are crucial for online video advertising. On the second hand, marketers need to consider that autoplay display the video without sound at first. Therefore, they need to be sure that the content of the video doesn't not completely rely on the audio in order to catch the advertising message.

Conclusion Of My Blog
Since it's my last article for this blog, I wanted to share my global appreciation of this assignment. I found this way to evaluate student very interesting. I mean that we have a lot of flexibility on the subject, time period and so on. I learned a lot during this assignment, especially on advertising. I know, I did three entries on advertising, but my concentration in my hometown university is publicity. So it's a subject that keeps my interest. Last thing, I personally wanted to thank you for giving me the opportunity of working on Digital & High-Tech Marketing.

References

lundi 11 avril 2016

What's up with the Mobile Marketing?

Introduction

Mobile marketing is a relatively new trend for marketers. This type of marketing appears in a large range of mobile devices. Indeed we can think of smart phones and tablets, in fact it’s all of the mobile devices connected on a Wi-Fi hotspot or with a SIM card. Last year, in January 2015, there was 2,7 billions of smartphone connections, which composed 36% of the worldwide population. Obviously this “new” market is very attractive for marketers; it can be exploited with mobile apps, proximity marketing and SMS marketing. These three distribution channels are key mobile marketing approaches. To ensure the profitability of an investment in mobile marketing, it’s critical to use the right distribution channel in order of reaching the target market.

Interesting Mobile Marketing Statistics

Nowadays, mobile devices are the most popular way to navigate the web. Its upward trajectory gave this device the opportunity to overcome the previous most popular way to browse the web, which are desktop.

The Effectiveness of Mobile Marketing

Here are five interesting statistics to help marketers to develop a proper plan for a 2016 mobile marketing strategy:

80% of Internet users own and use a smartphone. - The reason is simple; sales of smartphones are increasing as they become cheaper.
89% of mobile media time is spent on apps. - Users of mobile device will spend an average of 1.8 hours on their smartphones per day, where mostly apps will be use. Therefore, marketers should strongly consider developing an app for their brand.
Nowadays, 68% of companies use mobile marketing in their global marketing strategy.
48% of Internet users start their mobile search with a search engine as Google. - The search performance is now based on the page layout, the content and the product pages for mobile devices.
57% of users won’t recommend a business with a bad designed mobile site. - Website design is no longer only a matter of the look of the website. In fact, now marketers should focus on the user experience.

Effective Marketing Campaigns

Mobile marketing is all about catching up with where the customers are. Therefore, here are two of the most effective mobile marketing campaigns of the past few years.

IKEA catalogue app. IKEA created a mobile app, which transformed their items catalogue into an interactive platform. The interesting perk of this mobile marketing campaign is that this app gives the opportunity to virtually place certain item of the catalogue in a customer room. This is possible by using a camera of a mobile device and by overlaying the product chosen by the customer. This app was downloaded 6,2 million times, which placed IKEA campaign among the top of the list of marketing app downloaded for a brand.

Audi 'Start-Stop'. Audi launched a mobile ad called ‘start, stop’ which was an app that wasn't fully intentional to boost sales. It’s a real simple and efficient app that sends notifications when open apps are not used. Those notifications are kind of a wake-up call for mobile users to close their open apps, in order save battery life, save processing power and making the phone more efficient. This campaign is powerful because the app users associate Audi with efficiency and good customer service.

References

dimanche 3 avril 2016

Ad Blockers: To Block Or Not To Block

Introduction

AdBlocker extension users are more and more common these days. The average Internet user is sick and tired of being interrupt by an ad while surfing on the Internet. It can be an unexpected pop-up, a commercial ad while watching a video, auto-playing videos, so on and so forth. The use of AdBlocking can be very useful for Internet users. In fact, blocking ads and tracking codes benefits users by improving battery life of their computer, increasing page load time, protection privacy and, of course, blocking interruptive ads. This is why nowadays AdBlocking is going mainstream. In fact, 26% of Internet users claim that they are using an AdBlocker and this number should rise at 30% by 2018. The user base causes this increasing of adopters, which recommend to their friends and family this free plugin. Moreover, the installation process is really easy; it’s a matter of five clicks while no risk are taken. Therefore, it's the most use browser extension for both Chrome and Firefox.

AdBlocking users increase over the past years

Cons of AdBlocking

Even though the pros of using an AdBlocking extension are very interesting for the average Internet user, some people maintain the idea that this type of extension is destroying the web. Indeed, advertisement is the most common way for supporting financially free content on the Internet.Here’s a quote that explains well the real impact of AdBlocking: “imagine running a restaurant where 26% of the people who came and ate didn’t pay. In a way, that’s what AdBlocking is doing to us.” In fact, the revenues of a website are considerably affected by AdBlocker extension and, therefore, this issue complicates the way to pay resources and staff for web developers. However, in 2015 publishers have lost around $22 billion with the use of AdBlocking extensions. So it’s a real problem for publishers and marketers.

What Should Marketers Do?

So now it would be interesting to know what marketers should do in order to capture the interest of AdBlocker users. First, marketers need to evaluate the success rate of an ad on their audience. By doing some researches, marketers can find out how customers feel about a certain ad. Therefore, if the customers like advertising campaign, marketers should not worry about AdBlocker user and they should follow the same path. Otherwise, if the audience don’t like their advertising, marketers need to restrategize. Second, marketers should focus on viewability. In fact, marketers should be more focused on making sure that their ads are being seen. If not, they need to restrategize and repriotize. Finaly, marketers need to choose an ad network which will allow a massive penetration on the online advertising market.

Conclusion: Personal Opinion

Personally, I’m a AdBlocker extension user. The usage of this extension gives me the opportunity to increase my global appreciation of Internet. Now, my web searches and my daily usage of the Internet are more efficient than ever. Therefore, I don’t get interrupt by any kind of ad. It may seems like a selfish way of thinking, but really who's not selfish in today's society? However, has an average Internet and an AdBlocker user, I referred multiple times this extension for it benefits, so with this affirmation it's easy to understand why this extension is increasing exponentially in popularity.

References