In a report by the Australian Financial Review on 11 August 2008, Neil Shoebridge talks about the surprising trends (to some anyhow) within the On-line Ad Marketing industry of Australia.
A report was compiled for the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) by PricewaterhouseCoopers which showed the online Ad market jumped 28.7% to $797M for the first half of 2008. This sector may have slowed in growth overall this year but remains the fastest growing part of the $12B media Ad market (yes that is Billion in Australia alone). In comparison, the free-to-air TV Ad market only increased by 0.7%. Many Ad executives had only predicted 15 to 20% increase for the 2008 calendar year. Some online executives see the future as being brighter with as much as 30% predicted increases.
With such strong growth in this form of media advertising, opportunities exist for many businesses to investigate how they can better market their products and services. Most SME businesses have yet to fully embrace the use of this technology as part of their overall marketing strategy.
Many see Internet Marketing as simply running Google AdWords or AdSense campaigns. Some more pragmatic advertising agencies, marketing consultants and Internet Marketers are recognising the new opportunities with some well developed advertising campaigns and clever use of technology for developing online Ads. A great example of this type of work is being done by a Melbourne development company called Net Directions Services (/).
An aspect often overlooked is the effectiveness to be realised from not only direct response advertising bu also in brand advertising. In more traditional media such as print and television, brand advertising is quite often too expensive for many businesses but we are now seeing instances where smaller businesses are starting to use the Internet for such brand marketing.
It is my belief that we are about to see the next generation of online advertising delivered with the same sort of impact TV advertising very quickly had on everyone.
