Online Business Blog

Whilst advertising in 2009 as a whole has been down on 2008 there have been successes across the board with digital and online advertising continuing to grow and become more competitive. The war of the Internet Search Engines began with Microsoft’s Bing launching globally in June, much to Google’s annoyance. They have teamed up with Yahoo and now have a Market share of 10%, Google is a little worried and has launched its first ever global advertising campaign. The question is will people be coining the new phrase ‘I binged it’ in the new decade?

Internet advertising has been the most innovative marketing medium in 2009 which is supported by the Internet Advertising Bureau (LAB) reporting that it had grown by 4.6% in the first half of 2009, overtaking television spend for the first time ever. Now more than ever people should be looking at utilising the Internet for their marketing and many UK Advertising Agencies are fully equipped to manage campaigns as paid for searches continue to grow and be in demand.

The mobile phone market is also driving innovation in marketing with 2009 being another strong year. In June, consumers camped outside O2 stores across England to get their hands on Apple’s 3G iPhone, a launch which secured a 40% share of the smartphone market. The future for mobiles look set to get bigger and bigger and the medium is now accounts for 11.7% of ad spend.

TV has struggled this year but with shows like X Factor, Strictly Come Dancing and Britain’s Got Talent, TV advertising revenues will be up by 4% year on year this month. The BBC has been suffering with their networks and need to find £75 million in order to kick start its cost cutting programme for the next five years. Whilst Channel four has signed a ground breaking deal with YouTube this year which will make the broadcasters programmes available on demand, in full and free of charge via the video sharing website.

With these new avenues of marketing looking set to grow and continue to be fiercer in competition who knows what other ground breaking deals, new innovations and jaw dropping tactics will be used in 2010 by search engines, phone companies and direct response advertising . Watch this space.

Social networking giants Facebook are hoping that a different onsite advert format will change experts perceptions that advertising on social networks is failing.

Experts believe that because of Google the online advertising industry has become too absorbed by direct response advertising. Thanks to this there is a high expectancy on delivering a high click through or impressions rate, something that doesn’t appear to go hand in hand with social networking sites.

A main reason for this supposed failure in the social networking sector is that users are less likely to want to click on an advert that is likely to take them off of the site and away from talking to their friends.

The new advert idea that Facebook have come up with are to do with encouraging the user to click on a specific brand before passing on that information to their friends who are likely to be interested in the same thing. They are hoping to be able to do this without the user having to leave the site, something that should prove popular with Facebook users.

The idea is to get people to befriend a brand just like they would a peer. Here they can make comments next to a video or static advertisement where they will be informed on any recent news on the brand. (this has recently been tested on Facebook for an up and coming comedy film) This will hopefully in the long term increase the users brand awareness whilst also increasing Facebook’s click through rate.