Whether you interpret the market turbulence...

　


...as a source of risk or opportunity, it's inevitable that it creates pressure on marketers.

Interactive Marketing Communication, properly structured, is designed to help marketers develop future-proof strategies and plans, contact the Interactive Guru, Paul Ashby, 01934 620047 or paulashby40@yahoo.com to discover the building blocks of marketing success for 2013 and beyond.

Looking at solutions to some of the biggest challenges that today's marketing professionals face,  share invaluable experiences on:

Planning, measurement and ROI: get to grips with a clear and commercially sound framework for measuring and evaluating marketing performance and ROI.
Joining the digital revolution with confidence: explore how to join up campaigns across multiple channels and integrate digital throughout the marketing mix.
Closing the gap between promise and reality: discover how to deliver a consistent customer experience and align your business around common brand value.
Only on Interactive Marketing Communication!

Failure Of Web Advertising

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!

Interactive Communication

"Interactive Communication, properly executed, is the foundation for improving marketing,
building business performance, enhancing productivity and streamlining critical processes. That is why the drive to embed accountability as a core marketing discipline will only increase.

With it will come enhanced marketing ROI."




And only with Interactive Communication!

The Worst Possible Cure!

Every day you're exposed to more than four hours of media. Most of it is

optimized to interrupt what you're doing. And it's getting increasingly harder

and harder to find a little peace and quiet. The ironic thing is that marketers

have responded to this problem with the single worst cure possible. To deal with

the clutter and the diminished effectiveness of Interruption Marketing, they're

interrupting us even more!

Definition of Diversity

 
The meaning of diversity encompasses acceptance and respect.
It recognises that each of us is unique, as well as recognising our individual differences. These can be the dimensions of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, age, physical abilities, religious beliefs,
political beliefs, or other ideologies. It is the exploration
of these differences in a safe, positive, and supporting environment.
It is also about understanding each other and moving beyond
simple tolerance by embracing and celebrating the
rich dimensions of diversity contained within us all.





Diversity is a huge topic. To comprehend that each of the 7 billion or so people is unique is almost impossible. To be useful we need to have some understanding of the different ways that people are different, in order to be effective at understand and managing diversity.

There are several frameworks available to us when it comes to understanding those differences. Here are a few that might be helpful:
Developmental differences
Cultural Differences
Regilious Differences
Values Differences
Personality Differences
Representational systems
Gender differences
　
What does it mean to live in a diverse community?
Diversity is a group of many different things; gender, race, religion, and ethnicity. So if a community had a variety of all those different things, it would be a very colorful place. I believe that living in a diverse place with people living together harmoniously as a community is something we should strive for

Living in a diverse community also means that different people can see and learn about our different cultures. Then they will understand the cultures and see why certain people do certain things. Also, we will live peacefully as a community.

Despite today's buzz on all things...

...digital, despite global interactive advertising being forecast to reach US$147

billion by 2012 from the current US$45 billion*, and despite three online media

platforms making it to the Fournaise 2007 top 10 marketing Effectiveness Ranking

(or EFFER), in the day-to-day reality of generating incremental customer demand

for their products or services, marketers seem to have a major trust issue when

it comes to the overall reliability and credibility of online advertising.In such a skeptical context, it is

 not surprising that 40% of marketers around the world did not run online campaigns , a figure

reaching 65% in high GDP growth markets such as Greater China, India and

Singapore.The top five concerns marketers have about online advertising

are:

They don't know if they actually get what theypay for

They don't know if they can trust the visitor and/or traffic profile online media owners and publishers

 claim their sites have delivered.

They have the feeling there is a lot of click fraud

They don't know if their ads appear in the sites and/or sites' sections where they should appear

They don't trust the traffic and click-through reports digital media owners give them. This could

explain why marketers globally are planning to still take aprudent approach and to spend a small

percentage of their marketing budgets online Across the thousands of online campaigns audiet for our

clients worldwide through we have been observing consistently poor results: Click Through Rates

(CTRs) have fallen as low as 0.15% (sometimes even lower), Conversion Rates (CVRs) are barely

reaching the 3% average, and as far as Returns on Marketing Investment (ROMIs)

are concerned, our clients are most of the time flirting with the sub-30%

numbers," said Jerome Fontaine, CEO and Chief Tracker of The Fournaise Marketing

Group."One of the main reasons for such poor results is that for more

than 70% of the online campaigns we audit track across all types of online

media platforms (including display ads, emails, paid search, referrals, rich media

and sponsorships), our clients did not get what they paid for: one million

impressions purchased often ended up with 800,000 impressions served; an email

blast to a third party 10,000-record database was more often than not sent to a

7,000-active-email base. The bottom line: the discrepancy between what is

claimed and/or purchased and what is actually delivered is beginning to cast a

shadow on the long-term credibility of the industry. Online media have now the

immense challenge of winning the trust and confidence of marketers and must be

prepared to be audited and be accountable for the results they deliver,"

Fontaine continued

Barriers to Great Advertising

Advertising testing could provide a reliable feedback loop and lead to much better advertising, but many obstacles stand in the way. The first great barrier to better advertising is self-delusion. Most of us believe, in our heart-of-hearts, that we know what good advertising is and that there is no need for any kind of independent, objective evaluation. Agencies and clients alike often think that they know how to create and judge good advertising. Besides, once agencies and clients start to fall in love with the new creative, they quickly lose interest in any objective evaluation. No need for advertising testing. Case closed.

Strangely, after 40 years of testing advertising, we cannot tell you if a commercial is any good or not, just by viewing it. Sure, we have opinions, but they are almost always wrong. In our experience, advertising agencies and their clients are just as inept at judging advertising as we are. It seems that none of us is smart enough to see advertising through the eyes of the target audience, based purely on our own judgment.

A second barrier to better advertising is the belief that sales performance will tell if the advertising is working. Unless the sales response to the advertising is immediate and overwhelming, it is almost impossible to use sales data to judge the effectiveness of the advertising. So many variables are beyond our control, as noted, that it’s impossible to isolate the effects of media advertising alone. Moreover, some advertising works in a few weeks, while other advertising might take many months to show positive effects, and this delayed response can confound our efforts to read the sales data. Also, advertising often has short-term effects that sales data might reflect, and long-term (years later) effects that most of us might easily overlook in subsequent sales data. Because of these limitations, sales data tends to be confusing and unreliable as an indicator of advertising effectiveness.