But why the Web now?
As the Web evolves, regardless of how you might define its unfolding layers, marketing potential resonates. But unlike so-called Internet bubbles of the past, what is driving this particular online renaissance is
more substantial.
The size of the online audience now is vast—global even—and its reach is greater than ever; broadband uptake has great momentum. In Australia, broadband penetration (alone) tickles 15 percent of the population (or somewhere near 3.5 million subscribers ), according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. And as our ability to consume content on the Internet has blossomed, so too has the demand for it, and so too has the opportunities to advertise within it. The ability to engage and interact with a website is what is proving attractive to users and advertisers alike to the Internet.
In addition to online search (which attracts huge numbers of users and is dominated by Google), media sharing, social networking and blogging sites have also attracted enormous amounts of attention. YouTube and MySpace are commonly sited as examples of the explosion in these kinds of sites—with MySpace reaching some 70 million users who seem to spend more time here than just about anywhere else in their day. These sites attract visits and retain them longer than any other, making them immensely valuable advertising prospects.
In Australia, sites such as Yahoo7 or nineMSN are testimony to the shift towards richer, interactive, media-driven sites. Both, of course, feature partnerships between massive media content and online platform
organisations.
Finnegan says at nineMSN people’s hunger for multimedia and video content is voracious. “We think we will probably do about eight million streams in our video player this month. That is double the rate that we saw last month,” he says.
Another factor making online advertising more attractive in recent years has been web analytics. It gives websites the capability to track the behaviour of visitors to a site. It can effectively measure what an ad is worth—a huge plus in marketing where it can be difficult to gauge the actual impact of a campaign. (For more information on web analytics, see “Traffic Patrol”, T&B, October 2006)
Web analytics enables every click on a site to be tracked. And the growing sophistication of analytics means that as the types of content and ways of interacting with a particular website become more sophisticated, analytics is able to reflect back far more useful information about the visitor.
The big search sites and portals are all manoeuvring to offer better advertising prospects based on such metrics and analytics; online ads are being increasingly targeted at the actual user.
By the time this is published Yahoo should have implemented its plans for Project Panama, a platform designed to enhance its search marketing capabilities, drawing on its extensive user data to target ads. This is symptomatic of a change in the Web and advertising. Google already has such a platform and MSN is also about to align its ad strategy with what it calls adCentre—all of these activities are designed to better match the ad with the visitor and provide other benefits such as enablement of cross media campaigns.
These companies are increasingly able to sell a specific audience based on their online activity and profile to an advertiser—and prove it. Behavioural marketing might be the latest catchcry but for advertisers and marketeers alike there are all sorts of tantalising incarnations and inventions to test.
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