INTERACTIVE SOLVES ROI CONCERNS!

A survey conducted by the Association of National Advertisersfound that digital marketers' main concern is ROI. In fact, 62 percent said that their main concern is the inability to prove ROI. The survey also listed which media platforms have increased the most among marketers, like YouTube and other forms of digital growth

However when you use Interactive Marketing Communication, properly executed, you can easily prove ROI!

ACCOUNTABILITY AND INTERACTIVE COMMUNICATION!

With corporations under increased pressure to show that every dollar they spend delivers results, marketing expenditures are now being held to the same level of accountability as other investments.

Clients expect to see detailed, quantifiable results for their marketing and advertising efforts that demonstrate a positive return on their investments.They want to know which elements of their marketing plan helped achieve their goals in the most efficient manner—and which did not—and be able to allocate their budgets on an ongoing basis accordingly.

This corporate attitude change comes just at a moment in time when advertisers face major challenges because:

Consumers are more difficult to reach than ever.

Reasons include:

Media options available to consumers have increased. Technologies that have been designed to suit consumers’ growing desire to be in control of what they see and hear have given consumers

the option to reject advertising messages.To determine what will yield the best results in planning their advertising efforts, advertisers and their agencies turn to research and analytic tools more and more to guide them in making decisions. However, the multitude of analytic options has led to confusion about what constitutes accountability and how to measure it.

With Interactive Communication, properly executed, this confusion ends and proper accountably exists. One exposure to an Interactive Programme is far more effective than "frequency" and allows Clients to cut, substantially, their heavy marketing expediture (s).

Facebook Unconcerned That Advertisers pay for Thousands of Fake "Likes"

Facebook has previously admitted that 5-6% of its 90 million accounts are fake. But this is the first time evidence has emerged that spam accounts are rooking advertisers who pay for campaigns on Facebook that reach no one "real."

The BBC reports:

Michael Tinmouth, a social media marketing consultant, ran Facebook advertising campaigns for a number of small businesses, including a luxury goods firm and an executive coach, they became concerned after looking at who had clicked on the adverts.

While they had been targeting Facebook users around the world, all their "likes" appeared to be coming from countries such as the Philippines and Egypt." Mr Tinmouth asked Facebook to investigate the issue of questionable profiles after one of his clients refused to pay for his adverts on the basis they had not reached "real people".

Tinmouth then created a fake business, "Virtual Bagel," And found that it too gathered Likes from fake accounts. Facebook told the BBC it was not a big deal: We've not seen evidence of a significant problem," said a spokesman.All of these companies have access to Facebook's analytics which allow them to see the identities of people who have liked their pages, yet this has not been flagged as an issue.

Use Interactive Communication, properly executed, and overcome all these problems immediately...and for ever!

MARKETERS LOSE CONFIDENCE IN TV ADVERTISING

Yes, the sky is falling, Major brand advertisers responsible for $20 billion in ad spending are losing confidence in the effectiveness of TV advertising. More than three out of four advertisers -- 78% to be exact -- said they have less confidence today in the effectiveness of TV advertising than they did two years ago, according to a survey released at today's Association of National Advertisers TV Ad Forum. Almost 70% of advertisers believe DVRs and VOD will reduce or destroy the effectiveness of traditional 30-second commercials. Instead, they are looking at alternatives such as branded entertainment within TV programs (61%), TV program sponsorships (55%), interactive advertising during TV programs (48%), online video ads (45%) and product placement (44%). Additionally, 80% will spend more of their advertising budgets on Web advertising and 68% are looking into search engine marketing.
Use Shoppers Voice and solve all your problems in one fell swoop!

Click Fraud

Martin Fleischmann put his faith in online advertising.

He used it to build his Atlanta company, MostChoice.com, which offers consumers

rate quotes and other information on insurance and mortgages. Last year he paid

Yahoo! Inc. and Google Inc. a total of $2 million in advertising fees. The 40-year-old entrepreneur

believed the celebrated promise of Internet marketing: You pay only when

prospective customers click on your ads.

Now, Fleischmann's faith has been shaken. Over the past three years, he

has noticed a growing number of puzzling clicks coming from such places as

Botswana, Mongolia, and Syria. This seemed strange, since MostChoice steers

customers to insurance and mortgage brokers only in the U.S

Fleischmann is a victim of click fraud: a dizzying collection of scams and

deceptions that inflate advertising bills for thousands of companies of all

sizes. The spreading scourge poses the single biggest threat to the Internet's

advertising gold mine and is the most nettlesome question facing Google and

Yahoo, whose digital empires depend on all that gold.

The growing ranks of businesspeople worried about click fraud typically

have no complaint about versions of their ads that appear on actual Google or

Yahoo Web pages, often next to search results. The trouble arises when the

Internet giants boost their profits by recycling ads to millions of other sites,

ranging from the familiar, such as cnn.com, to dummy Web addresses like

insurance1472.com, which display lists of ads and little if anything else. When

somebody clicks on these recycled ads, marketers such as MostChoice get billed,

sometimes even if the clicks appear to come from Mongolia. Google or Yahoo then

share the revenue with a daisy chain of Web site hosts and operators. A penny or

so even trickles down to the lowly clickers. That means Google and Yahoo at

times passively profit from click fraud and, in theory, have an incentive to

tolerate it. So do smaller search engines and marketing networks that similarly

recycle ads.

SLIPPING CONFIDENCE

Google and Yahoo say they filter out most questionable clicks and either

don't charge for them or reimburse advertisers that have been wrongly billed.

That confidence may be slipping. A BusinessWeek investigation has revealed a

thriving click-fraud underground populated by swarms of small-time players,

making detection difficult. "Paid to read" rings with hundreds or thousands of

members each, all of them pressing PC mice over and over in living rooms and

dens around the world. In some cases, "clickbot" software generates page hits

automatically and anonymously. Participants from Kentucky to China speak of

making from $25 to several thousand dollars a month apiece, cash they wouldn't

receive if Google and Yahoo were as successful at blocking fraud as they

claim. "It's not that much different from someone coming up and taking money out

of your wallet," says David Struck. He and his wife, Renee, both 35, say they

dabbled in click fraud last year, making more than $5,000 in four months.

Employing a common scheme, the McGregor (Minn.) couple set up dummy Web sites

filled with nothing but recycled Google and Yahoo advertisements. Then they paid

others small amounts to visit the sites, where it was understood they would

click away on the ads, says David Struck. It was "way too easy," he adds.

Gradually, he says, he and his wife began to realize they were cheating

unwitting advertisers, so they stopped. "Whatever Google and Yahoo are doing [to

stop fraud], it's not having much of an effect," he says.

Spending on Internet ads is growing faster than any other sector of the

advertising industry and is expected to surge from $12.5 billion last year to

$29 billion in 2010 in the U.S. alone, according to researcher eMarketer Inc.

About half of these dollars are going into deals requiring advertisers to pay by

the click. Most other Internet ads are priced according to "impressions," or how

many people view them.

Google and Yahoo are grabbing billions of dollars once collected by

traditional print and broadcast outlets, based partly on the assumption that

clicks are a reliable, quantifiable measure of consumer interest that the older

media simply can't match. But the huge influx of cash for online ads has

attracted armies of con artists whose activities are eroding that crucial

assumption and could eat into the optimistic expectations for online

advertising. (Advertisers generally don't grumble about fraudulent clicks coming

from the Web sites of traditional media outlets. But there are growing concerns

about these media sites exaggerating how many visitors they have -- the online

version of inflating circulation.)

Most academics and consultants who study online advertising estimate that

10% to 15% of ad clicks are fake, representing roughly $1 billion in annual

billings. Usually the search engines divide these proceeds with several players:

First, there are intermediaries known as "domain parking" companies, to which

the search engines redistribute their ads. Domain parkers host "parked" Web

sites, many of which are those dummy sites containing only ads. Cheats who own

parked sites obtain search-engine ads from the domain parkers and arrange for

the ads to be clicked on, triggering bills to advertisers. In all, $300 million

to $500 million a year could be flowing to the click-fraud

　

Failure Of Web Advertising...

We're about 15 years into the internet revolution as a mainstream phenomenon

and by any measure internet advertising has to be deemed a major failure.

While the web itself has been a massive success (influencing virtually every

aspect of our lives) advertising on the web is mostly a bad joke.

Fifteen years into its mainstream life, television had created scores of

powerful consumer-facing brands.The only truly powerful brands I can

think of that web advertising has created are native web brands like Google,

Yahoo, Amazon and Facebook. It's as if the only brands television was good at

creating were CBS, NBC and ABC.After 15 years, can anyone name even

ten serious non-native consumer-facing brands that have been created

primarily by web advertising? Is there a brand of coffee, butter, beer, bread,

chicken, gasoline, soda, peanut butter, dog food, milk, tires, potato chips,

life insurance, lawn mowers...don't make me go on, you get the point...that has

been built primarily by web advertising? Display advertising is a joke.

Remember just a few years ago when they were selling us banner ads on the

promise that "interactivity" would make these ads so much more efficient than

traditional ads? Then they started measuring them and found that fewer than 2

people in a thousand were clicking. Oops.Now they're making the same

lame "branding" argument for online display ads they made against

traditional print ads. However armed with the proper understanding of the meaning of interaction,

properly executed, the web can be made to achieve everthing you have ever wanted

Can we please dismiss the meaningless word "Subliminal" from our advertising jargon!

There was -- and still is -- little proof that these efforts to engineer

action through manipulation of the unconscious led to any behavioral changes

favorable to specific marketers. As for James Vicary's experiment in subliminal

advertising -- it was a hoax: Vicary later admitted that he hadn't done what

he'd claimed. Several subsequent studies of the effectiveness of embedded

messages have shown it to be virtually impossible to use them to produce

specific, predictable responses. Still, faith in the power of the media to

induce millions of people to act contrary to their better judgment or conscious

desires remains profound. More than three quarters of the U.S. population

currently believes that marketers use subliminal messages to sell products or

services, according to the Journal of Advertising Research; consumers

themselves spend some $50 million annually on subliminal self-help products,

such as audiotapes that are supposed to teach one a foreign language in one's

sleep.

There is only one form of effective, accountable advertising and that is Interactive Marketing Communication.