Via TheNextWeb.

US Online Video Advertising (source: eMarketer.com)

Online video advertising is still a small percentage of the total online advertising expenditure in US, an eMarketer study shows, and even a smaller percentage of TV advertising expenditure. However, the good news is that video advertising is growing and will increase its proportion in comparison with both total online, as well as TV advertising.

However, if in 2007 and 2008 the growth was quite explosive (over 70% and 126% respectively), the estimated growth rate for 2009-2013 will drop to below 50%. Even though modest, if compared to 2008′s growth rate, the 40-50% growth rates estimated for the following 3-4 years will still be bigger than the growth rate of TV advertising expenditure, making the online video advertising market an interesting market to be in (nothing new here, right?).

Despite the fervent opinions that TV will soon lose to online, the numbers show that there will still be years to come in which TV will remain the crowned king of advertising budgets. “In 2009, for example, for every $100 advertisers spend on television, they will spend only $1.60 for video ads. Even by 2013, that number will only reach $5.50,” said David Hallerman, eMarketer senior analyst and author of the new report, Digital Video Advertising: Where’s the Money?.

So, if you’re looking at doing it right in regards to video advertising, you should be looking at integrating TV, online and mobile platforms since these are the three main screens that the user is connected to.

1. The future of marketing is collaborative
2. The future of marketing is generous
3. The future of marketing is experimental
4. The future of marketing is helpful
5. The future of marketing is playful
6. The future of marketing is personal
7. The future of marketing is honest
8. The future of marketing is participatory

Via Marketing & Strategy Innovation Blog.

F5WebCorp - Digi Cafe

This week there will be a new session of Digi Cafe, at the usual location in Club Loggia, but this time talking about Advertising 2.0 and the efficiency of online advertising campaigns.

During this session, there will also be a prize ceremony for the Advertising 2.0 competition – Best online advertising. The categories explored in this competition are: online ads, online campaigns, rich media banners, e-mail campaigns, campaign sites (landing pages, microsites) and interactive applications.

The guest speakers of this session will be the following, with the note that the Google representative will be present via a Skype conference call:

Via Dragos Stanca .

These days, IAB Europe released the online advertising market size numbers at European level, the 19 markets that they analyzed, including Romania, I assume, since it doesn’t appear on their graphs. The cumulated size of the European online advertising market in 2008, as counted by IAB Europe in collaboration with PwC, amounted to 12.9 billion Euro. As mentioned before, the Romanian online advertising market size was around 20 million Euro in 2008, a figure extremely small even compared with the average size of a European country (if we were to simply divide 12.9 billion Euro to the 19 countries involved in the study).

However, as mentioned before, the growth of the Romanian online advertising market in 2008 was short of 50% as compared with 2007, growth rate that would have placed Romania in top 5 across Europe in terms of growth levels, if only IAB Europe would have included Romania in their graphs (Ionut? Was Romania so insignificant?).

IAB - Online Advertising Market Growth Across Europe (image source: TechCrunch)

If we are to look at the growth of online advertising formats, the IAB Europe study shows search marketing to be the highest growth format, with a year to year growth of 26% in 2008 as compared to 2007.

IAB Europe - Growth of Formats 2008 (image source: TechCrunch)

Also, in terms of share of voice, search marketing remains the top format, occupying almost 50% of the total European online advertising market.

IAB Europe - Formats Share 2008 (image source: TechCrunch)

Taking into account the data at European level, I think it is safe to make some assumptions for the Romanian market as well. If we assume that search marketing is on average 50% of the total online advertising market at European level and if Romania exhibits a similar behavior, we could probably say that in Romania, the search marketing market size was somewhere around 20 mil Euros, with Google owning most of it.

For those not willing to accept this number as a possibility (thus bringing the total Romanian online advertising market size to a sum around 40 mil Euro), I can also tell you that a Google official firmly stated in a public event in Bucharest this week that, in his opinion, the total Romanian online advertising market is definitely bigger than 30 mil Euro.

Thus, if aside the 20 mil Euro clients have been spending in the Romanian online advertising market in 2008 (mainly display advertising, probably more than 90% at least) there were also 20 mil Euro more spent in search marketing, I believe that interactive agencies not fiddling already with Google SEM should definitely look in this direction. Right now, it seems there are only 2 Google AdWords certified companies, thus there is enough room for growth for other companies that want to take advantage of the SEM market in Romania.

Update: Looking also at the classifieds market size, which is almost the same as display, at least on average at European level, we can also assume that there is probably somewhere in between 10 and 20 mil Euro (at least as potential) in the Romanian online classifieds market as well, search and classifieds not really being present in the Romanian IAB study.

Via TechCrunch.

The study gathered data from the largest 11 advertising agencies, as well as from the largest online publishers, both groups representing more than 600 of the largest web sites in Romania. Although a relevant number for the industry, unfortunately the study was unable to gather data about all forms of online advertising budgets spent in, from or for the Romanian market, thus leaving a gray area still uncovered.

More specifically and among others, the study was unable to collect data about Google money spent in or from Romania, since search engine marketing data is not really available, Google keeping its secrets well protected. However, as with all research studies, there is always room for improvement and I think that in the coming years we will get more and more complete data about the online advertising market in Romania.

source: IAB Romania.

Intact Interactive claims to come up with an innovative concept of online 3D advertising for a Renault campaign. Vivi (Octavian Costache) challenges the concept for being over inflated as compared to what the execution really is.

From my own experience, I’ve seen the concept before used in outdoor advertising last year in Madrid (I was at FICOD, The International Forum for Digital Content), when Renault launched its new Laguna campaign. Honestly, the outdoor execution was much better than Intact Interactive’s online execution. See below and let me know what you think about it:

Renault Laguna Outdoor Ad in Madrid

]]> http://www.secareanu.ro/2009/05/18/outdoor-internet-3d-advertising/feed/ 2 http://www.secareanu.ro/2009/03/31/communication-olympics-9th-edition/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=communication-olympics-9th-edition http://www.secareanu.ro/2009/03/31/communication-olympics-9th-edition/#comments Tue, 31 Mar 2009 15:05:16 +0000 Daniel http://www.secareanu.ro/?p=580

Communication Olympics

Between March 23 and April 16 you can register for the 9th edition of the Communication Olympics, the most important national competition for youth interested in a career in Advertising, Public Relations or Political Communication. The competition is the best opportunity for young aspirants to get noticed by the professionals in the industry, because more than 70 of them have been invited this year to be part in the competition jury (you can find more information about the jury here).

For 2009, there are four main themes for the pre-selection of candidates:

Corporate Communication – Campaign to persuade the Romanian employees to do more sports.

Advertising – Campaign to convince the audience to buy mainly products made in Romania, as opposed to imported products

Political Communication – Campaign to convince the Romanian electorate to vote through a referendum for a change of the current republic into a presidential or parliamentary one

Public Relations – Campaign to encourage the population to recycle electronic waste

You can find more information about the competition here.

The teams that will pass the pre-selection process will have the opportunity to work on a real communication project for a company, a brand, a public institution or a public individual. After two weeks of work, the teams will be able to publicly present their projects and the best ones will be recognized and awarded prizes of 4,000 Euro in total. If you want to see examples of successful projects from past years, check out here!

For more information about the event, check out www.olimpiadelecomunicarii.ro.

Update: and a video…

The answer is yes, or at least that’s what Eric Clemons, Professor of Operations and Information Management at Wharton – UPenn, stated in a TechCrunch article, the other day. “The problem is not the medium, the problem is the message, and the fact that it is not trusted, not wanted, and not needed,” he writes, arguing that the Internet is actually shattering all forms of advertising because is a free medium where people don’t need ads to help them make their purchase decisions.

I assume that we all know deep down inside that advertising, on TV, radio or even the Internet, is mostly an intrusive way of capturing a small slice of the customer’s mind. Because of its intrusiveness, the human mind has created natural self defense barriers, such as banner blindness, for example. Even ourselves, as marketers, if we’re not wearing our professional hat that makes us watch ads, we are actually doing our own informative research when we want to buy something.

Clemons states that the reasons why advertising fails are the following:

• Consumers do not trust advertising – and there are books and studies to support this argument (Dan Ariely, Forrester Research)
• Consumers do not want to watch advertising – see banner blindness above or think about how we tend to switch channels on TV during ad breaks
• Consumers do not need advertising – when was the last time an ad (even supported by a product website) was the deciding factor for one of your purchase decisions? (see all websites focused on product reviews or communities focused around a brand or category and how successful they are)

With advertising failing, what is for the web publishers to do, since they do have to sell their virtual wares in order to make a living? Clemons offers suggestions here as well:

• Sell content and information – from digital music to information and news, although assumed free by most Internet users, it can still be sold in a form or another (subscriptions, micro payments, etc)
• Sell experience and participation in a virtual community – much like you sell experience and participation in an offline environment
• Sell accessories for virtual communities – there are models here as well, from Second Life to World of Warcraft, for example
• Sell access to customers – communities formed around common passions or interests are extremely attractive for advertising customers, if only they would be interested in more than just buying ad space

In closing, Clemons makes this statement: “The internet is about freedom, and I suspect that a truly free population will not be held captive and forced to watch ads.  We always knew that freedom comes at a price; perhaps the price of internet freedom and the failure of ads will be paying a fair price for the content and the experience and the recommendations that we value.”

So what do you think, is advertising on the internet failing or will it adapt and find a different form?

Update: Strategist.ro (Cristian Manafu) spotted in AdWeek an IBM study mentioning that marketers are lagging behind digital savvy customers. This might be one of the reasons why advertising is failing on the Internet. What do you think?