Marketers Continuing the Shift from Traditional to Digital

Forrester just released a survey about the continuing growth of digital media at the expense of traditional marketing channels, with 6 out of ten marketers surveyed planning an increase in there digital marketing budgets, taking money out of traditional.

In the survey, the increase in digital over the next 5 years, by media:

• Social media (34%)
• Mobile Marketing (27%)
• Online Display Ads (17%)
• Search Marketing (15%)
• email (11%)

This research fits with another recent Nielsen monthly report from June, showing that Facebook, probably the biggest site in social media, had the highest time spent of all web brands, including AOL, MSN, Google, Yahoo!, etc. Twitter is also having an incredible rise, with millions of 140-character updates being posted daily. Marketers are scrambling to develop campaigns to implement the two into current media plans.

Social Media: #1 Trusted Form of Advertising Worldwide

Nielsen recently released a global study of over 25,000 Internet consumers from 50 countries, recommendations from personal acquaintances or opinions posted by consumers online are the most trusted forms of advertising worldwide. 90% of consumers surveyed said that they trust recommendations from people they know, while 70% trusted consumer opinions posted online. Social media is not just a fad, but here to stay, and more and more companies are beginning to add social media strategies to their advertising budgets.

“The explosion in Consumer Generated Media over the last couple of years means consumers’ reliance on word of mouth in the decision-making process, either from people they know or online consumers they don’t, has increased significantly,” says Jonathan Carson, President of Online, International, for the Nielsen Company.”

We have currently implemented social media campaigns for multiple clients of ours; engaging people talking not only about promotional campaigns, but also about the client's #1 concern, the product/service they sell. Tracking Pre and Post campaign “buzz" for our campaigns has only brought the need of social media for clients to fruition for us.

Big Sites, Big Ads, Big Mistake

A recent post on TechCrunch and Mediapost announced that 37 top online publishers including ESPN, Forbes, CNN, and NY Times are going to begin running new, BIGGER ad units on their sites. Bigger doesn't mean better, it just means more of an annoyance for more people.

The three new ad units are named and sized as follows:

- The Fixed Panel (336×700) - remains in view as a user scrolls up or down the page
- The XXL Box (468×648), the extra wide side-of-page ad that expands to 936 x 648 and includes page-turn and video capability

- The Pushdown (970×418), which opens big to display the ad and then after seven seconds rolls up to the top of the page (collapsing to 970 x 66).

I agree completely with Robin Wauters, who wrote on her TechCrunch post "Is it just me or does anyone else think that display advertising units on websites should become more relevant to them instead of just bigger? What are next, 1200×600 ads?" Research upon research is showing that it’s the contextual relevance, and not the size that matters.