Forget Web 2.0. It’s all about Channel One.
18 May 2007

 

Your audience is on the move. TV, radio, print are all seeing declining audiences, swallowed up by the goliath of the internet. A recent report by Piper Jaffray, a leading US research company, found that over 40% of US TV viewers surveyed were watching less TV today than two years ago. In Australia, the internet is neck-and-neck with radio in terms of ad spend.

 

This erosion of ‘traditional media’ and the dispersal of audiences to web sites, online gaming and social networks has led to ‘fragmentation’ being the current buzzword. In the golden days of marketing, you could track your audience down to TV programs or magazines. Today, we seem to be searching for needles in a billion site haystack. Just look at YouTube. Eighteen months ago, YouTube was just another startup among the myriads that spring up everyday.

 

But the same technology that’s driving this trend is also providing unprecedented data on consumer behaviour. Search marketing has boomed on the back of its ability not only to target large numbers of consumers, but to deliver real, measurable return on investment. Site analytics gives clients unmatched insight and information on how users interact with their site. The very technology that created fragmentation enables us to understand consumers in richer ways. But we ’re still caught up in a time warp on how we manage marketing.

We generally handle major new technologies with old paradigms. In the early days of movie-making, a single static camera would film the actors – without so much as a cut or alternate angle. Moviemakers still thought of a camera as someone sitting in an audience watching a play. It was only later that multiple cameras and angles, and altering the visual concept of time, emerged.

 

Nothing has changed in how we handle new technologies. Microsoft in the mid-90s sunk over a billion dollars into the first version of MSN in the US. Online was perceived to be like cable TV, so naturally cable TV executives were hired to create online ‘programs’ that would remain up only for a short time – an hour or two – just like a cable broadcast. It seems a strange way to do online business only today. But paradigms are hard to shake – and the advertising industry is still dealing with a new world using old paradigms.

Advertising is no longer just about ‘advertising’. Advertising used to be solely about creating an environment to create sales. Brand, mindshare were about trying to shape an environment to influence consumer behaviour. You didn’t have control over the salesperson selling to the customer or product inventory. Stores could be out of stock of the very product you’d be promoting.

 

The online world radically changes everything. In the online world, as an ‘advertiser’, you have the potential to have full control over the entire end-to-end sales process – to actually deliver the sale, not just a consumer.

 

To take full advantage of the new opportunities open to you as a marketer, you need to view digital media as a single channel – ‘Channel One’ - that leads all the way from the first word or image right to the cash register. This seems to go against the concept of fragmentation with its seeming multiple, and multiplying, ‘ channels’.

 

But online games, email, shopping mall plasma display screens, IPTV, banner ads, web sites, 3G mobile phones, are glued together by the same technology. Only small technical tweaks are needed to deliver the same content in the same format through any of these outlets. A Flash-based video can be streamed to a shopping mall screen, a mobile phone or a banner ad. Interactions with that video can be recorded, aggregated and analysed to give you an understanding of the effectiveness of that ad. Data is what binds your ‘fragmented’ audience.

 

How do you manage your marketing under Channel One? Understanding and using data effectively is the key to the new marketing paradigm. There are concrete steps you can take. Get a centralised view of all your digital activity. Say you had a chart showing all your digital marketing – display, rich media, search, creative, site traffic – and overlayed it with campaign start and end dates. You could immediately see the impact and contribution of each to the success of your overall marketing spend. By actively using this kind of information, you could even switch budget allocation to maximise the return on spend or audience reach. You might also look at the referrers for a site and find that several lead to higher sales conversion than the others - then add those sites to your Google Adsense program. This would further increase the performance of your campaign.

 

These methods are just the tip of the iceberg. So tune in to Channel One or you’ll be tuned out of the advertising revolution.

 

By James O’Toole, Chief Product Officer, Facilitate Digital
Published in AdNews 18th May 2007 - Page 29

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