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American Interactive Marketing is our own marketing department within our company
Posted by: | CommentsDino Dondiego
President
Sequence Inc.
“Jonathan has been handling my company’s marketing for several years now. He treats my company as if it were his own, a unique trait every business owner hopes to find. My company, Sequence®, realies heavily on marketing and branding for the long term so I need a full range marketing company with a broad range of branding, marketing knowledge and research capabilities for ongoing growth, American Interactive Marketing provides Sequence® with such knowledge, experience and support.
Jonathan and American Interactive Marketing have a long term perspective in handling my company’s marketing and overall growth, therefore giving Sequence® cost efficient marketing strategies and tactics for consistent long term growth.
Jonathan has maintained a unique and valuable balance between our immediate and long term marketing needs which has proven to be critical to our stability and long term growth. Marketing research, analyzing, tracking, reports, online research and campaign strategies, just to name a few, have been a terrific help to Sequence®.
The combination of broad marketing knowledge coupled with a strong personal interest in our company’s growth makes me feel as if American Interactive Marketing is our own marketing department within our company.”
Search And Banners Lead Online Ad Spend Forecast
Posted by: | Comments| Search And Banners Lead Online Ad Spend Forecast | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Jack Loechner, May 24, 2010 08:15 AM | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
According to a recent eMarketer revised forecast of Internet ad spending, US spending on online advertisements will increase nearly 11% to $25.1 billion, up from $22.7 billion. eMarketer’s previous prediction in December 2009 was for 5.5% growth. A stronger-than-expected search and banner market, along with the rush among advertisers for greater accountability in the still-soft economy, led to the revision.
David Hallerman, eMarketer senior analyst, says “… Google reporting a 21% jump in net US ad revenues for Q1 2010… was a key signal that the tide was turning.” The search market will be up 15.7% year over year to almost $12.4 billion, while spending on banner ads will increase 8.2%. Video will again post the highest growth rate, rising 48.1% to $1.5 billion.
Brand marketers increasingly realize they need to engage their target audiences more and more in the digital space. Mr. Hallerman noted that “Even as the portal’s overall net US ad revenues were down 4.5% in Q1 2010, the display ad component on Yahoo!’s sites were up by 11.7%” As marketers pull dollars away from media such as newspapers and radio, says the report, they are shifting a portion of that spend to the Internet. In addition, growth in online video advertising is bolstered by marketers shifting dollars from their TV budgets. The Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers, eMarketer’s online ad spending benchmark, reported Q1 2010 spending up 7.5% year over year. eMarketer predicts even greater double-digit increases each quarter for the rest of 2010.
“Overall, the US economy is recovering… sooner than last year’s data led us to believe,” Mr. Hallerman said. “… not only did the GDP increase by 3.2% in Q1 2010, but there was a corresponding 3.6% gain in personal consumption expenditures… greater consumer activity is one of the prime motivators for greater advertising spending.” Source: MediaPost Research Brief – Search And Banners Lead Online Ad Spend Forecast |
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Signals Strong For Internet Radio
Posted by: | Comments| Signals Strong For Internet Radio |
| Erik Sass, May 04, 2010 05:52 PM |
| Internet radio is burgeoning, according to a new report from SNL Kagan, which predicts more rapid revenue growth. But the big question, as far as media buyers are concerned, is how much of this future growth will come from advertising sales.Looking at the top Internet radio operations, SNL identified CBS Interactive as the revenue leader, with total revenues of $550 million in 2009, thanks in part to its ownership of Last.fm and ad sales partnerships with AOL Radio and Yahoo. It also has a large number of station Web sites.
Counting other partnerships with CNET, Radio.com and TV.com, CBS Interactive boasted an average 226 million unique users per month in 209. Competitor Clear Channel posted total revenues of $175 million in 2009 — virtually all from advertising — with an average monthly base of 100 million unique users. Among pure-play Internet radio operations, MySpace led the way with $490 million in revenue and an average 70 million unique users per month — boosted “by leveraging Fox’s music-focused TV shows ‘Glee’ and ‘American Idol,’ according to SNL Kagan. In 2009, Pandora had about $50 million in revenue — also mostly from advertising — and 50 million registered users, about half of whom are actually active. Adding up the top players, Internet radio delivered over $1.25 billion in revenue in 2009 — but comparing this figure with separate numbers from the Radio Advertising Bureau, it’s clear that online advertising is still playing second fiddle to subscription and download fees. The RAB reported total digital ad revenues in 2009 of $480 million — or 38% of total online radio revenues. Source: MediaPost News - Signals Strong For Internet Radio |
Borrell: Local Mobile Ads To Double This Year
Posted by: | CommentsBusiness spending on mobile-marketing will more than triple this year as the category starts a soaring 5-year growth trajectory, according to a Borrell Associates forecast to be released this week. And local mobile spending will double in 2010 as it begins a similar 5-year boom.
“If this were a drag race, the pacer car just exited the track and everyone’s hitting the gas,” said CEO Gordon Borrell. “With mobile devices already in the hands of 80% of consumers and devices suddenly becoming more graphical and useful, local mobile marketing appears to be on a very fast jag.”
It’s a breakout year for a new disruptive marketing channel, says Borrell’s 2010 U.S. Local Mobile Advertising & Promotions Forecast. Starting with mobile coupons, mobile spending will eat into print Yellow Pages and direct mail revenue much as the Internet has disrupted newspapers. It may even pull dollars away from the Web-based advertising that spawned it.
Nationwide, mobile marketing will jump from $2.7 billion in 2009 to $9 billion in 2010, the report predicts – and then will rocket to $56.6 billion by 2014. Two-thirds of the spending will be various forms of advertising, but one-third will come from promotions budgets to enable coupons, contests and discounts.
Spending by local businesses will follow a similar path at a slightly slower rate, jumping from $285 million in 2009 to $586 million in 2010 – and then spiking to $14.7 billion by 2014.
“It all begins to look a lot more local,” said CEO Gordon Borrell. “Marketers really understand that the people who are going to buy from them are 5 or 10 miles down the street. Even national marketers are targeting local.
“ Today at lunch I’ll go on my Droid phone and touch an app that will guide me to coupons within 10 miles of wherever I am, whether I am in Orlando or Williamsburg or New York city. It’s much more powerful than a stack of coupons that are only for businesses within a 10-mile radius of my house.“
Adoption of this new marketing medium will be the fastest yet, the report predicts, with several factors driving the growth:
- A pre-installed user base. With 80 percent of the population using cell phones, and 31 percent already switched to smartphones, Borrell believes mobile ad share could reach dominant penetratration faster than any medium before it, including broadcast TV and the Web.
- Ease of use and convenience of portable devices.
- A proliferation of new mobile devices and apps. “Think beyond phones, PDAs, and notebook computers,” the report reads. “Gaming devices, e-readers, cars, and cameras can also be included.”
- What about tablet computers like the iPad? “Yes, that’s what drives a lot of the future growth,” said Borrell. “These projections are for personal interactive devices – but not out-of-home screens that ‘move’ in elevators, taxis or buses.
Borrell Association projections are based on a mixture of media companies’ receipt-level data, plus surveys and other research that tracks business spending. “We dig deeper into more sources and deeper local sources than other projections,” Borrell said. “That’s why our numbers tend to be a bit bigger than other numbers.”
“It’s like trying to count the trees in a forest. You can take an aerial snapshot and get a pretty good count of the big trees, but we’re getting in there and counting saplings and new growth in the forest as well.”
Borrell is bullish on mobile coupons to kick-start the growth, particularly for small- and medium-sized businesses.
“Anecdotal results are already there, big time, for the few SMBs who have tried it.” reads the report. “Redemption rates for mobile coupons are 10x that of mail- or newspaper-distributed coupons. When a restaurant in Texas pays $37 to send out 500 text messages for a “buy-one/get-one-free burger” offer and gets 60 people to walk in the door, for incremental revenue of $1,000 per day, there’s something dramatic going on.”
Beyond the obvious appeal to consumers, Borrell sees coupon functionality growing as devices mature. “The simplest thing – texting – will take hold first,” he said in an interview. “With all the other things like the iPad, what will happen likely is newspapers and other companies will port over all the content and put some ads on it. But the winners in the end are people who come out with completely new applications. …
“The winners in the end will be the people who build the business to the exact specifications of what mobile can do for it.”
The rapid rise of mobile media gives great opportunity to companies that make the most of it, Borrell said.
“Yellow Pages could be big winners if they transfer customers from one medium to another,” Borrell said. “The biggest potential loser in this is direct mail, particularlly with couponing. … Actually, big losers are any local media companies that don’t understand or misinterpret the power of digital marketing.”
Many media companies are shifting from “selling ads” to acting as marketing and research consultants to help business understand the explosion of interactive options, Borrell said. “Local advertisers are even more confused than media because they’re getting so many opportunties thrown at them. We recommend that sales forces explain what’s going on. …
“They’re not saying ‘How much would you like to buy?’ They’re saying ‘How can we serve you?’ …
“Everyone underestimates the confusion for the local advertiser. If you have a local sales force, you have a much stronger opportunity to sell. It’s just much more comfortable for a local business face to face than with someone they don’t know on the phone. Of course, the results have to be there, as well.”
What about media companies who don’t embrace this kind of change?
“It feels like being nibbled to death by ducks.”
Source: NewsCheckMedia LLC. – Borrell: Local Mobile Ads To Double This Year
Twitter Unveils Paid Advertising Platform, Finally, Avoids ‘Hard-Sale Push’
Posted by: | Commentsby Laurie Sullivan
Twitter unveiled a service Tuesday that lets companies tweet sponsored search ads. The announcement represents the first in several planned features the company will introduce during the coming year. The first phase, beginning today, maps out a multiphase release for advertising on the site.
The tool, Promoted Tweets, relies on tweets available in Twitter’s organic search results, which means those appearing in a person’s Twitter stream, but Twitter co-founder Biz Stone promises the ads won’t be intrusive. The technology behind the platform will trigger sponsored tweets at specific times to followers of the brand, explains Stone in a blog post.
People will begin to see Tweets promoted by advertisers at the top of some Twitter.com search results pages. It’s not clear, however, whether the platform would provide advertisers with reports, or how keyword bidding would work.
“It’s likely Twitter will set up an auction system similar to the one used for keywords on Google,” says Forrester Research Analyst Josh Bernoff. “In fact, it would shock me if they didn’t, because these ads will become more successful if they’re not sold to individual companies like a media company does.”
Twitter’s first advertisers — Starbucks, Bravo and Virgin America — have been using the platform to promote products long before Promoted Tweets became available.>
Bernoff says that obviously, click-through rates (CTRs) will depend on the message in the ad. A click-through to a coupon for a free cup of coffee will likely yield higher results than a blast promoting a product. “Any sort of hard-sale push will likely fail,” he says. “It might even generate backlash. The message must fit into the conversational nature of Twitter.”
Before rolling out additional phases to the one-year platform during the coming year, Stone says the company wants to gain a better understanding of the effect Promoted Tweets will have on people using Twitter and the advertisers trying to reach them.
Insight into the long-awaited platform first emerged during the IAB Annual Leadership meeting 2010 in Carlsbad, Calif. in February. Anamitra Banerji, who heads product management and monetization at Twitter, told attendees when Twitter launches an ad platform, it will become “explicitly clear that a sponsor” paid for the ad, and make it “relevant and useful, so the user doesn’t think of it as an ad.”
Twitter on Friday announced the acquisition of iPhone client and third-party application Tweetie from Atebits. Developers still have the ability to tap into Twitter iPhone and iPad applications to create tools and integrations for people who use the service. Some third-party developers began to voice opinions on whether any new applications would compete directly with their own.
But it appears that third-party developers and Twitter co-founders Stone and Evan Williams have competition, as the company attempts to find a business model that generates sustainable revenue. The competition opens business models, not only for advertisers, but ordinary people, musicians, artists, or small business owners who believe they have something important to say.
Paid search on Google or Bing might have some competition for ad dollars, too. On Monday, Idealab founder Bill Gross unveiled TweetUp, a search tool that lets people bid on keywords to move up tweets in search results. The platform combines a bid-based marketplace with algorithm-based triggers that consider the popularity, relevance and influence of tweets and tweeters.
TweetUp Chief Marketing Officer Steve Chadima says the ability to bid on keywords to push up tweets will allow people to swim through the clutter and find the important information. “People are brands in Twitter and they want followers,” he says. “You want thoughtful followers — people committed to you and what you have to say.”
Chadima says TweetUp will generate revenue through a standard impression-based advertising model. The minimum bid is 1 cent, but he says the market will bid up the keywords to its own discretion. “There are some keywords in the ad and the traditional Internet search model that are quite expensive, but if you look at those keywords they represent words like Web-hosting services,” he says.
Source: MediaPost Online Media Daily – Twitter Unveils Paid Advertising Platform, Finally, Avoids ‘Hard-Sale Push’
