The Kelsey Group predicts local online video ad revenues to hit $1.5 billion by 2012. Who will benefit the most from this revenue increase? Most likely Internet Yellow Pages with thier small-medium sized advertisers that are capitalizing on user demand for local online videos.
Google strengthened its analytics services on June 24th by introducing a new Ad Planner service. The service provides media planners’ visibility into which Web sites are frequently visited by their target audience. Ad Planner provides information on a Web sites traffic and demographics, as well as more specific data such as age, gender, education, household income and even keywords used by visitors during searches.
Google’s efforts are targeted directly at media planners that otherwise might not have had access to Web analytics. Now that the primary roadblock to effective ad targeting has been removed, it is likely that Google will see increased revenue from coming from media planners at smaller agencies.
For eMarketer’s perspective on Google’s new Web analytics service click here.
For information directly from Google regarding their Ad Planner service click here.
I’ve just come off the road from numerous meetings with national and regional advertisers. One common area of interest among advertisers seems to be: how to best communicate to the online audience.
Should a company focus on building their messaging around their brand image, or on driving direct response via their Web site and online media? At the risk of annoying my SEO department, who are happy to pack a keyword into every section of a Web site (no doubt necessary), the answer is both. Branding and direct response messaging can co-exist online, as both are vitally important to short- and long-term sales creation.
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ZipLocal, a Canadian-based IYP, will become the first and only fully integrated North American local search solution. They came to this decison keeping in mind that the US market is 20 times larger than the Canadian market. It should be interesting to see if ZipLocal can compete with the current IYPs that dominate the US marketplace and how they set out to differentiate themself.
As we have mentioned in previous posts (A Brighter Look at an Impending Recession, Recession: Blessing In Disguise) about the recession, online medium seems to be a more robust area that can handle a downturn better than other media types.
Recently research firm, IDC, released a report suggesting the country’s economic slump has not yet impacted online ad spend.
Today’s New York Times discusses a declining online advertising industry and credits the economic downturn for the industries woes. The article cites the following statistics:
While banner investments on ad networks have declined, search engine marketing appeared unaffected. Google’s revenue in the United States was up thirty percent from last year, while Microsoft’s and Yahoo!’s online revenue jumped 29 and 9 percent respectively. A majority of search engine revenue comes from search advertising.
Though it is generally believed that seniors are not online, a report by Focalyst and Dynamic Logic, titled “Matures 62+ On the Internet: An Overlooked Audience”, finds that seniors spend an average of 44 minutes a day online. This demographic is very important to marketers, especially those in the Pharmaceutical and Insurance industries which are indenitified as the top categories that they are most engaged in.