netactr

I just stumbled upon this collection of internet-related research and forecasts by Morgan Stanley, your friendly neighborhood i-banker.  The Internet Advertising Outlook report by Mary Meeker is very good, especially because it spells out various assumptions and drivers like Coverage, Click-Through-Rates etc. Not surprisingly, Paid Search leads the pack at least until 2010. Marketers like performance-based tools. It’s all about improving Marketing ROI, isn’t it? 

If you work on marketing campaigns you probably source your creative from either Getty Images or Corbis. I recently attended a small event where Corbis’ CEO Gary Shenk was speaking about the media industry. Traditional suppliers of creative are facing a new threat in the form of cheaper online exchanges such as Veer, iStockPhoto.com and others. These sites usually offer royalty-free imagery for less than $50 and sometimes as low as a few dollars, much cheaper that the rights-managed variety you get from Getty or Corbis. They can do that because they are simply a marketplace where independent photographers supply the stock and grateful customers pick up their creative imagery. Responding to this threat Corbis launched their own discount site snapvillage. We will see some significant innovation in this space in the coming years and, if you think about it, personal photo-sharing sites like flickr could become players too. But one thing is clear. There will always be a need for vendors like Getty and Corbis, for they supply two very important services to marketing professionals that their cheaper rivals simply can’t match. First, they provide editorial services and quality control, making it possible to find that perfect shot among the millions of images available. And second, they offer advanced copyright clearing services and rights-managed purchases necessary for any self-respecting marketing campaign.

So far Google’s foray into social networking has ben largely limited to Orkut, a Brazilian social network. Details are emerging of Google’s grander ambitions - if you read Forrester’s report, you’d know that social marketing is the next big thing. Read about OpenSocial here.

Quebec’s Gatineau is right across Ottawa, Ontario, on the northern bank of Ottawa River. Incidentally it is also the codename of Microsoft’s web analytics competitor to Google’s Analytics. Don’t know if that was a consideration when choosing the name, but here’s an interesting post from Ian Thomas about Gatineau beta launch. 

The sign-up link is here.

Last week Bill Gates launched a new generation of Microsoft’s unified communications software and services. As a former product manager for Live Meeting I am proud to join the crowds in celebrating this major release (the little torchlight in front of Gates is called RoundTable  – it’s a novel 360-degree video camera used together with Live Meeting).

One of the less publicized facts about the new 2007 release of Live Meeting is the amazing value to online marketers and salespeople offered by the new Professional Edition. Consider this: maximum meeting size of 1,250 attendees, VoIP and live video, a registration web site, free storage for recordings for a full year, and free phone support for your attendees. The best feature is the price - $185 / year with no setup fees and only a 5-license minimum. Compare this to offerings like Citrix GoToWebinar where you’d pay $600-800 per license after all discounts and get significantly less features (no Voip, no online storage, no PowerPoint-mode).

All marketers should seriously consider conducting their webinars, lead generation seminars, and sales product demos using web conferencing tools and the new Professional Edition fits the bill.

Forrester Research published their forecast for interactive marketing (US Interactive Marketing Forecast 2007 to 2012, by Shar VanBoskirk, Forrester Research, October 10, 2007). Interactive marketing includes display ads, email marketing, paid search, and emerging marketing technologies such as online video, social media, and mobile.

Interactive advertising comprises 8% of today’s total ad expenditures, while audiences spend 29% of their media time online. One is tempted to conclude that eventually these ratios have to catch up with each other … but they don’t need to. If interactive ads were more effective in engaging the audiences and generating sales, advertisers wouldn’t have to spend proportionately more when they shifted their budgets from offline to online. But it is fair to assume that interactive advertising will continue increasing its share of the overall advertising pie (reaching 18% in 2012 according to Forrester).

Forrester expects Paid Search to continue dominating the interactive marketing category in terms of revenue, showing the second-largest CAGR of 26%. Paid search is an effective awareness vehicle because it allows advertising at a point in time when the prospect is looking for information. Compared to display ads search is more precise - the offer is presented only to those people who are actually looking for information.

Social media, bucketed under emerging channels, is projected to grow at 59% CAGR. Forrester does not show any ground-breaking uses for social networks beyond advertising on MySpace and blogging, but even with such humble goals they project an almost 12x increase in social media ad spend by 2012, making it one of the fastest-growing ad spend category (Mobile marketing comes in first with a 14x increase, but starts with just 1/3 of social media revenue base).

An interesting point is made about the early adopters of emerging marketing technologies (social media and video) coming from the ranks of aggressive director-level marketing professionals taking executive ownership of select marketing technology implementation projects to expedite their path into the CMO seat.