Tuesday, January 03, 2006

Survey: Online Advertising Moves To First Place

As a follow-up to yesterday’s post, the same Credit Suisse survey that raised online advertising growth estimates to 32 percent for 2006, also revealed that leading companies are now allocating more to online advertising than any other category...including magazine and television. Story here. Online advertising was in third place the previous quarter, but the new survey results would indicate that online has clearly reached the tipping point.

The survey involved 90 large companies with annual ad budgets averaging $22 million. The Bloomberg article quotes Rosemarie Ryan, advertising agency president of J. Walter Thompson’s New York office. “It’s a seismic shift for our business. Advertisers know they have to find new ways to get to people.”

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Monday, January 02, 2006

Wall Street Increases Growth Estimate For Online Advertising

Bloomberg, a leading provider of business and stock market analytics, reported recently that Credit Suisse First Boston analyst Heath Terry upped the estimated 2006 growth rate for online advertising from 21 percent to 32 percent.  Terry, who has a five-star rating from StarMine, has proven especially prescient at predicting growth in the Internet sector.

Online advertising will reportedly hit $16.6 billion in 2006. The biggest growth (65 percent) will be in online ads that utilize sound, animation and interactive features.

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Sunday, January 01, 2006

Six Marketing Resolutions for 2006

It is that time of the year when we make those commitments to ourselves: lose weight, exercise more, spend more time with the kids, etc. Here is my suggested list of New Year’s Resolutions if you want to make a substantial impact on your company’s marketing efforts.

1. Measure everything you do. Your credibility is on the line. Management used to cut marketing and advertising a lot of slack. They used to buy the line that some things in marketing are difficult to measure, or that even if you could measure results, you would need long-term tracking studies to see how brand awareness scores had increased.

Management isn’t buying it any more and they shouldn’t. People in the marketing loop need to demonstrate what all those precious company resources are producing for the bottom line. You’re profit or you’re overhead; take your pick.

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Friday, December 30, 2005

Safari Gets the New RSS Icon

Some fine Mac enthusiasts have written a little application called the Safari Standardized Feed Icon Installer that replaces the default RSS icon with the new standardized one I mentioned yesterday. Now let’s hope the kind folks on the Safari team make the icon replacement official the next release.

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Online Holiday Shopping Posts Huge Gains

Internet Retailer posted a story today that revealed huge gains for online shopping volume in November of 2005 over the same period a year ago:
Shopzilla.com...up 48% over last year
Walmart.com...up 47%
Overstock.com...up 43%
Target.com...up 39%
Bestbuy.com...up 30%

More retailers are listed in the report. These kind of numbers seem incredible even to those of us who are associated with e-commerce development. It clearly shows that the brick and mortar stores realize the huge potential in the online component of their businesses and they are putting a great deal of effort into creating and refining their Web-based storefronts.

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