NEW YORK, NY, (MARKETWIRE via COMTEX) — The online display advertising market is one of the fastest growing advertising segments, according to a new study by Zenith Optimedia. The current global display advertising market is predicted to reach $25.27 billion this year, with a 36% growth to $34.4 billion in 2013.

The display advertising market size was more than $5.5 billion during the same time period, representing 37% of the online advertising market. Banner ads made up the majority of display ads, with $3.414 billion in revenue and 23% of the market. The digital video ad market brought in $891 million with 6% market share. Rich media earned $763 million (5% market share) and sponsorship ads made $467 (3% market share).

Leading the way in this market are your household names like Facebook, who has recently filed for their IPO, Yahoo! (YHOO), Google (GOOG), and Microsoft (MSFT). But with the explosive growth projected, there are plenty of opportunities for companies like FrogAds.com FROG +10.19% and LookSmart (LOOK).

Read more here.

If you are looking for an advertising method that is cheap and at the same effective then banner advertising is the right choice. Banner advert helps in reaching the right audience in the shortest time possible and moreover, the banner adverts also increase the effectiveness of the marketing strategy that is used by the company.

Though banners are effective in advertising, they are not going to bring in the expected results by just placing them over a site. For more effectiveness follow the below mentioned tips and suggestions.

Impressive designs

By impressive designs I do not mean that you should make your ads flashy. Your ads should be designed in such a way that they attract the attention of the viewers and increase curiosity in them leading to click on the banner.

Impressive copy

The copy in your banner advert is also very essential. You should create a stunning copy that will pass on the message in the manner understood by the viewers. Above all, the content that is placed in the banner adverts should be related to the offer or product that is being sold by the advertisement.

Get hold of a strategy that works

As mentioned above, just getting your banners placed over a website will not do the trick. You will have to use a marketing strategy that works most of the time.

You might be a huge firm and would have spent thousands of dollars on advertising. Unless you have used the right strategy success may not be visible. On the other hand with the right strategy and less amount spent, success will fall right into your lap.

Read more articles here.

High digital media usage and device ownership make affluents a tempting digital target

“The vast majority of affluents do not regard themselves as rich, however, and don’t spend as if they were,” said Mark Dolliver, eMarketer analyst and author of the new report, “Affluents: Demographic Profile and Marketing Approaches.” “That’s all the more true when a weak economy has left many affluents feeling their finances are deteriorating. Cutbacks in their spending have become common.”

“Affluents are willing to buy luxuries when they feel the quality makes it worthwhile, but spending on such items is not their default mode,” said Dolliver. “It helps matters for luxury brands that affluents are avid users of digital media, making them less elusive than conventional wisdom might suggest. However, this puts a premium on luxury brands’ sometimes shaky expertise in using social, mobile and other digital platforms.”

Internet usage is nearly universal among affluents, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s (IAB) “Affluent Consumers in a Digital World” study, with 98% of them going online. (The Pew Internet & American Life Project last August put the figure for internet usage among all US adults at 78%.) Affluents far surpassed the general population in average amount of time spent online per week, at 26.2 hours vs. 21.7 hours. By contrast, affluents spent less time watching TV—17.6 hours per week, on average, vs. 34 hours for the general population.

With their extensive use of the internet and mobile technologies, affluent consumers are exposed to a great deal of digital advertising. Brands that target this audience are betting affluents find ads in those venues engaging. Surveys indicate that some kinds of digital ads are more likely than others to make that bet pay off, including email ads, sponsored websites from search results and ads that are highly relevant to what a person is doing at the moment, as well as those tied to demographic characteristics.

The full report, “Affluents: Demographic Profile and Marketing Approaches,” also answers these key questions:

• Going by common definitions, how big is the affluent market?
• How do affluents spend their money?
• What are their patterns of digital usage?
• How do affluents feel about luxury goods, and what are luxury brands doing to reach them?

This report is available to eMarketer corporate subscription clients only. Total Access clients, log in and view the report now.

Read more: http://www.emarketer.com/

The concept of paid, owned, and earned media has evolved. What were once separate notions of media can be integrated in new ways to better serve brands and consumers, and disrupt the traditional online marketing landscape.

As a result, smart marketers are re-evaluating the ability of paid media to serve as a vehicle to amplify the impact of earned and owned media rather than viewing each media channel as a separate and totally disconnected effort.

How are marketers building successful digital marketing campaigns that take advantage of the synergy in a combined paid, owned, and earned media strategy? Based on successful campaigns we’ve seen conducted by some of today’s leading technology brands, there are some important steps to achieving success.

Understanding what it means to integrate paid, owned, and earned media

For years, marketers have viewed paid, owned, and earned as separate strategies: paid (i.e., ad buys) to blast their messages, owned (i.e., branded social media pages, blog, website) to showcase their own marketing messages, and earned (i.e., articles, social media commentary, and engagement) to provide third-party validation about their products.

As paid, owned, and earned media evolved, marketers learned how to break down the walls to get these three distinct disciplines to work as a team. Many of today’s digital and social media campaigns strive to take advantage of the intersection of these media channels.

Earned media is the most coveted because it offers outside validation that a brand is delivering value through its products or services. Whether it comes through as a positive review, a tweet, a Facebook update, or a blog comment, marketers and brands rejoice. The objective is to integrate positive comments, posts, and feeds from earned media into the paid and owned strategy in order to amplify the message.

To illustrate, brands can use paid media (i.e., display, text, or search ads) to broadcast earned media in a scalable and targeted way to reach broader audiences. Likewise, by integrating earned media into owned media properties (website, blog, branded Facebook and Twitter pages), marketers and brands are educating the rest of the community on what resonated with their most engaged and passionate users.

However, if you’re going to spend the time, money, and energy building a strategy around paid, owned, and earned media, the earned media that you integrate should be as influential as possible.

The importance of influencers

The term “influencers” is used a lot today in discussion of the impact of social media, but what constitutes an influencer? What is the influencer’s role in shaping opinion about a brand?

When it comes to considered purchases that require research before commitment, such as an automobile, mobile device, or expensive appliance, consumers are increasingly using the internet to seek out the independent opinions of professional bloggers and influential experts to help guide their purchase decisions.

Integrating paid media with earned media and measuring results

When considering an integrated paid, owned, and earned media strategy, it is important to recognize that paid media, or advertising, can be useful to consumers who are making a considered purchase, especially if it leverages independent influencer content that they are actively seeking to inform or support their decisions.

Consider: If you are in the market for a new television set, which of these two ads would increase your level of consideration or likelihood of purchase: a generic banner ad flashing a picture, message, and price for one brand of television, or an interactive ad unit that showcases articles and social feedback from trusted experts in the television arena?

As a marketer, imagine having the ability to tie your messaging to objective editorial content that an independent expert has written about your brand, and to then use your paid media spend to amplify that message, along with the validating content, across sites that your consumers visit to make their decisions. This approach is unique because it offers relevant and helpful information and allows for a heightened level of engagement to socially drive consideration for a brand’s product.

Furthermore, because marketing online allows for tracking and measurements, brands can learn whether or not an integrated paid, owned, and earned media strategy has succeeded. Today, analytics software can track how brands are viewed compared to competitors and can even identify and measure the influential content that is consumed and shared about a brand.

Of course, one size does not fit all. An integrated strategy that leverages influential content is best utilized in considered purchase categories like technology, automotive, and other big-ticket items. This is because considered purchases are ones in which consumers do research and seek out the advice before buying. It is not as well suited for everyday commodities like paperclips, napkins, or light bulbs.

Conclusion

As the digital marketing landscape has evolved, so have the strategies. Changes in the structure and definition of media have broken apart the silos of paid, owned, and earned media and have spurred marketers to re-examine how paid, owned, and earned media can be integrated for greater success. In doing so, marketers have realized better ways to engage audiences by offering relevant information that informs and helps the consumer make better purchase decisions, rather than a one-size-fits-all message that is simply blasted where consumers happen to be. Integrating paid, owned, and earned media means that marketers are now viewing paid media as a means to amplify the impact of earned and owned media. It also means marketers are putting increased emphasis on the value to the consumer rather than treating each media channel as a separate and totally disconnected effort.

Read more on: http://www.imediaconnection.com

The question this year is how publishers will turn their aggregated audiences into marketing organisations, giving them the best return on investment, says MARCUS STEPHENS of Howzit MSN.

Now that digital has proven its value as a marketing and advertising channel, we can expect to see South African publishers shift emphasis from building audiences and advertising market share towards monetisation of their online properties. The question publishers will be asking themselves is how they can sell their aggregated audiences into marketing organisations in a way that gives them the best returns. This is the dominant meta-trend that is driving many of the other trends and will unfold in the online publishing market during the year ahead. Here are a few of the trends I expect to dominate the sector during 2012.

1. Putting social media to work
Social media may seem like a competitor to traditional online media in the sense that many readers are looking to Facebook, Twitter and other social networking services as their primary news sources. But used wisely, social media is one of the most powerful tools publishers have at their disposal to drive engagement with their audiences and build Website traffic.

Given that search engine marketing has become so competitive, paid search and banner ads are pricy, and email has fallen out of favour, leaving social as one of the cheapest and most effective ways to attract visitors. Publishers must use social effectively and integrate it into everything they do to maximise their traffic and revenue.

2. Becoming a link in the retail chain
Publishers are beginning to accept that they will never make as much money as they’d like to from pay walls or traditional banner advertising. They’ll look to leverage their trusted brands and audience bases in a range of ways, including partnerships with retailers. South African publishers will work hard to get a foothold in the retail ladder during 2012 with the goal of driving more value from their Web traffic.

3. Era of discounting draws to an end
Premium customers (especially the ad networks) can expect to see decreased discounting from publishers. Howzit MSN is no longer offering aggressive discounts to its client base   because we want to defend the value of our audience and data set. Increasingly, publishers are looking to take complete control over their traffic and inventory to maximise their revenues.

4. Marketers will see the branding value of online advertising
In the past, marketers measured the effectiveness of online advertising only in terms of clickthroughs and gave little thought to the value their brands got simply from a user viewing a banner without clicking through. Now they will start to think about how online ads create brand awareness over the longer term.

However, publishers must work to educate marketers about the impact that online ads have, even when the user doesn’t click through. We will need to work with marketers to demonstrate how brand awareness from online ads shines through in their search results, translates into lower costs per action and so on.

5. The mobile land grab will begin in earnest
Mobile Internet subscribers in South Africa are growing at a rapid rate and will soon form a larger audience than traditional PC web users. But to monetise a mobile property, a mainstream publisher will need to capture a million or two million users. This year, expect the focus from online publishers to fall heavily on building mobile traffic as they try to position themselves at the forefront of this important market. Don’t expect to hear about anyone making huge amounts of money from mobile advertising quite yet, however.

6. Video keeps growing
Online video consumption will grow at an exponential rate, thanks to falling bandwidth prices and growing penetration of broadband into the market. This is an opportunity that publishers cannot ignore, so expect to see them invest in generating unique and compelling video content. Online video will be big for advertisers, too: it’s one of the fastest growing ad formats in the world.

Read more on http://www.gadget.co.za

A recent survey conducted by Vizu shows that more than 450 executives and marketers from the advertising industry will be using 60 percent of their online budgets for brand advertising in 2012. They indicated that their spending on online branding could eclipse spending on direct response advertising for the first time in history. Some other findings from the survey include the following:

Online brand advertising budgets for 2012 will be increased by 64 percent of marketers. Twenty-two percent of them say that their budget spending will be increased by over 20 percent.

Fifty-six percent of marketers are planning to increase their online direct response budgets in 2012. Only 15 percent say that they will be increasing spending by more than 20 percent for the year.

The third observation is that 60 percent of marketers are planning to allocate money away from direct response to their brand advertising campaigns.

“These growth predictions are clearly optimistic, but very encouraging nonetheless,” says Dan Beltramo, CEO of Vizu. “There’s still more that needs to be done in order to realize those numbers and make online the medium of choice for brand advertisers. I believe that when brand advertisers understand that their online ads can now be measured and optimized using classic offline brand metrics such as awareness and purchase intent, we will see a further growth in their online ad budgets.”

According to the survey data, most marketers agree with what Beltramo said. When the marketers were asked by the survey what would lead them to increase their spending for online brand advertising, the responses included the following:

Close to 7 out of 10 respondents said, “Improved clarity around the actual return on brand advertising investment.”

Close to 56 percent of respondents also said the, “Ability to verify my brand advertising created the desired result (e.g. increased awareness of my product).”

Close to 53 percent of respondents said the, “Ability to use the same metrics to evaluate brand advertising effectiveness online as are used offline.”

“These issues are all indicative of a ‘metrics morass’ in the online medium, which often leads to information overload for brand marketers when trying to determine the efficacy of their advertising,” said Beltramo. “In fact, 34% of respondents described themselves as ‘drowning in data’ when it comes to the online channel.”

Agencies and brands are agreeing on which metrics they should use for determining the effectiveness of online brand advertising in 2012:

The top response, with 8 in 10 saying that, “Brand Lift generated as a result of the advertising.”

Over 50 percent of both agencies and brands agree on, “Sales generated as a result of the advertising.”

Read more here.

Source: www.advertisementjournal.com

The single biggest challenge Google is facing over the next year is the lack of advertisers with a clear mobile strategy. The growth of the mobile market is exponential and set to take over as the main method of accessing the internet in just a couple of years.

If someone asked you whether you’d rather give up your mobile device or your TV, what would you say? I know what I would give up. I’d stick with my mobile (my kids have taken control of the TV in any case), and if given the same choice, so would roughly 20% of Australian smartphone owners.

Australia is going mobile in a big way. In a recent study with Ipsos Research, Google found that Australia has the second highest smartphone penetration in the world – ahead of the US, UK, and Japan. And the pace of change is revolutionary.

The majority of smartphone owners we surveyed had bought their device in the preceding 12 months.  One in three had bought it in the last six months. This amounts to a dizzying pace of growth: we estimate that every month, 1-2% of the Australian population buys a smartphone and already over 20% of Australian internet searches are now from mobile devices.

If this sounds like a golden opportunity for advertisers large and small to engage with consumers, that’s because it is. But the hard truth is that for digital marketers, mobile advertising is no longer merely an opportunity. It’s a necessity.

Consumers have embraced the mobile revolution – which means advertisers should too. Consider some of our other findings: 49% of the people we surveyed use their smartphone to research and then call businesses – while 45% have visited a business they’ve found using their smartphone. One in four had made a purchase using their mobile phone, while one in five had searched for a house or apartment.

Each one of those actions represents a brand new opportunity for Australia’s advertisers to grow their businesses on mobile. And yet nearly 80% of advertisers don’t have mobile friendly websites. If you asked a business owner whether she’d ignore every fourth customer to walk into her shop, the answer would certainly be no. But with 25% of shopping-related queries coming in on mobile, not having a mobile website is tantamount to the same thing. For businesses looking to go mobile, the rewards for first movers are significant. However, with smartphone growth only set to continue, the good news for both advertisers and publishers is that it’s not too late to be early.

Google’s growth depends on the success of our advertisers, so when our advertisers miss out on opportunities we do too. In order for Google’s horizons to continue to expand, we have to help digital marketers to realise the true potential of mobile. This will be our biggest challenge over the coming year. Advertisers who don’t act are at risk of becoming invisible to their customers.

The good news is that businesses can start with the basics – and that doesn’t mean hiring a developer to design a fancy mobile app, or even advertising on mobile right away. The most basic step is creating a version of your website that’s optimised for visitors coming from mobile devices. But almost four out of five Australian businesses don’t have mobile-optimised websites, which means that even if they do advertise on phones, their customers won’t be able to fully engage with the business or the brand.

The second thing many businesses get wrong is that they think an iPhone app is the same thing as a mobile strategy – it’s not. Businesses need to build and integrate their mobile strategy with their existing campaigns. When developing mobile strategy, marketers need to incorporate all available mobile platforms and devices, as well as the mobile web and tablets. And they need to start by defining what they’re trying to achieve. A restaurant may want to reach new patrons, while a large multinational company may want to find a new way to engage customers with its brand.

Finally, if there is one thing we have learned from the last 15 years it’s that those who react early to big changes in technology and media do so much better than those who are late. Being early carries risks but it gives access to new and unique information about what works and what doesn’t. As is true with other digital mediums, advertisers need to use that data to make informed decisions about their future mobile strategy – and even about their broader business strategy.

For example, when Lexus Australia launched the first luxury hybrid hatch on the Australian market, they wanted to design a campaign that targeted their customer base – people in their late 20s to early 40s, who value style, design and technology – a group of people at ease with today’s smartphones. So Lexus built an iPhone gaming app featuring the car and distributed it via mobile ads on the AdMob network. Rather than clicking through to a static company website, consumers who tapped the ad could download an entire game in a single click. As more people downloaded and played it, the more popular it ranked on the app store, eventually generating downloads without any direct advertising at all. Lexus used the power of mobile to move beyond a more traditional banner ad – engaging their customers actively with the Lexus brand.

With the advent of smartphones, the web has gotten a whole lot bigger. Twelve months ago, the question for advertisers and publishers thinking about mobile was “why should I act?”; today it’s “how do I act?” The good news is that it’s not too late to be early… but it soon will be.

Read more here.

Source: www.bandt.com.au

Bandwidth Blog has grown its local audience by 500% in the past year, establishing itself as one of the leading local technology news destinations. Engagement on popular content has exploded with some articles receiving hundreds of comments, likes and re-tweets.

BandwidthBlog is a leading South African tech news site that focuses on keeping its audience informed of the fast evolving local and international Internet economy.

Publishing breaking news on social media, online trends and the mobile sector, BandwidthBlog distinguishes itself by also offering hands on gadget and game reviews, insight on local internet startups, video interviews with local web entrepreneurs and office photos of leading Internet companies.

“We are very proud to have won two awards in quick succession. Both mean a lot to us – The Silver Pixel at the recent Bookmarks was acknowledgement from top local and international judges of the quality of content, user engagement and our huge audience growth and the Blog Award voted by the public, our peers in the industry and a panel of judges justifies our quick rise to prominence in our local market,” says Charl Norman, founder of BandwidthBlog.com.

BandwidthBlog forms part of the 24.com network and is represented by The SpaceStation. For more information on who the site users are, visit The SpaceStation here.

To check out BandwidthBlog go here or you can follow them on Twitter here.

Effective Measure data in November showed 1 091 603 Unique Browsers across both sites, with very little overlap, which translates into just over one million sport viewers every month that advertisers can talk to (the figures were broken down into 459 878 Unique Browsers on SuperSport.com and 631 725 on Sport24 with an overlap of 13 927).

The recent report also showed that the majority of the users were male (83% for SuperSport.com and 87% for Sport24) with the highest percentage showing household monthly incomes of R70 000+ (14% at SuperSport.com and 15% at Sport24).

“We’re fortunate that these two sites afford The SpaceStation 50% of all sport browsers in South Africa and with only a 1% audience overlap, it presents an ideal opportunity for advertisers to simply and effectively target a million strong, predominately male, affluent audience,” says Gustav Goosen, Sales and Operations Director at The SpaceStation.

Bizcommunity.com

 

Brand marketers who favor creative ads that run at scale should not believe digital media to be the domain of direct-response advertisers and ignore the channel’s capabilities, said the heads of two industry trade organizations at the “Digiday Agency” event on Dec. 12 in New York.

Randall Rothenberg, president and CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), said that for 16 to 17 years the types of ads that could be delivered digitally was limited, but that is no longer the case. “The [digital] medium has more creative opportunities than any preceding medium in the history of the universe,” Rothenberg said. “Anyone who thinks interactive digital media doesn’t present creative opportunities is wrong.”

Nancy Hill, president and CEO of the American Association of Advertising Agencies (4A’s), leveled partial blame for this misconception on online publishers and content providers, who most often work with media agencies as opposed to creative agencies. She said that digital media is viewed as a direct-response channel instead of a brand advertising channel because the media agencies operate on a cost-per-impressions basis. Rothenberg said the expansion of standardized digital ad formats helps to encourage more creative advertising because standardized ad formats are more scalable and digital’s rich-media functionality promotes creativity.

Another obstacle in attracting brand advertisers to digital is measurement, Hill said. The model for compensation within client organizations was built around the TV model, which scores campaigns according to metrics that have been in existence for decades, she said, which restricts the willingness of marketers to test digital media and set budgetary resources for that testing.

A new compensation model will require consensus standards for measuring brand effect, Rothenberg said. “Fundamentally what you’re trying to measure when you measure brand effect is the long-term increase of the premium pricing ability of a brand,” he said. But in order to institute new measurement standards, the industry must achieve agreement throughout digital advertising’s supply chain, the speakers said. “When it gets to digital, the different measurement companies are not willing to say what we’re doing is comparable to what you’re doing… The industry is getting in its own way,” Hill said.

Rothernberg said achieving agreement on standard metrics is more important than creating a mythical perfect metric that can be applied to all media. “We lost sight of the fact that we just need agreement to make transactions flow,” he said.

Read more on: www.dmnews.com