The price of oil is affecting almost everything and everywhere people are cutting their marketing budgets. This should at the very least drive more on line marketing. Its more cost effective than tradditional channels and has a better reach. Reducing marketing spending when sales are dropping is obviously only going to speed up the downturn, with fewer $$ to spend and a reducing audience its critical to reach out and connect with your customers.

Interesting, in the offline world creative is king, but online its completely different. User experience, information architechture and technology come before the traddition sense of whats creative. Strategy and planning are king in the digital world. You cant look at an online campaign and compare it to tradditional marketing metrics its all completely different. There are so many moving parts and other things to consider and the canvas is truely unlimited (except by imagination and budget).

I keep hearing that mobile communications, sms, mms wap etc. is for younger people but I use it all the time. there’s no doubt that 18 – 25 year olds make up the majority of the mobile market but that’s not to say that the over 40’s and 50’s don’t use mobile media and that its a growing audience. Some people seem to think that mobile advertising to the over 40’s isn’t an effective market but the truth is that the 18 – 25 yr old audience is saturated at least in terms of usage at over 80%. The growth areas are 35 – 49 and 50 – 64 yr old groups according to Limbo

You have to be impressed by the amount of products that provide one stop shopping for on-line (and even traditional) advertising these days. Take AdReady for example, one place to buy media, create the banner, traffic and monitor performance. Or SpotRunner bringing cost effective TV ad’s in a one stop on-line environment. Couple those with on-line proofreading, content generation, voice talent etc. and you quickly realise that the cost of advertising production is going down as on-line services are added. This makes for an interesting model fo advertising agencies that want to be part of the digital revolution.

It never fails to amaze me how many people assume that anything they can think of will automatically be a great viral piece. Too often we get caught up in the notion of the creative idea rather than the value of the viral piece. The best creative in the world doesn’t matter if no one sees it, without a great strategy, unless youre very lucky, most viral campaigns are doomed from the beginning. There must be thousands of potential case studies on how not to do a viral campaign than there are successes. One of the more interesting things seems to be how individuals not looking to make any kind of viral campaign have enormous success with just their everyday videos, obviously a lesson there somewhere for all of us marketers.

Every advertising agency seems to want to integrate its digital offerings with the traditional side of the house. Its interesting to watch how each agency alters its structure and approach trying to find the optimum balance between driving interactive media, adding digital functionality to production, recruiting great digital planners/strategists and at the same time maintaining revenue stream.  Its hard to figure out the that balance between where interactive is now and the major shift to digital that all agencies must take, preparing for the future is key to the success of any agency and understanding the interactive space is critical.

Well not really digital’s been around for a long time, but if you’re in a traditional advertising role and you haven’t discovered the digital equivalent then you need to get a move on. Its not just online where digital is taking over, its everywhere.  You only have to look at all the great production services that are around to see what’s going on, just about everything is available as an on-line service, voice talent, music, video, campaign management, web to print, content, feeds, its all there. So these services are certainly not one size fits all, but they are beginning to take market share away from traditional production services and offerings. If you’re not already looking at these services then watch out while you’re guarding what you know, what you don’t know is taking all your work away.