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February 01, 2006: Super Bowl XL Advertising…Big Money (Budweiser) and More Controversy (GoDaddy)

It’s that time again as the big game rolls around. SuperBowl XL will soon be bringing people together for football, parties, and for the advertising. If previous Super Bowls are any indication, this is as close to a mass media event as you can get on television. According to a Harris poll, about two out of three adult Americans will watch the game. That fact is what draws advertisers to the Super Bowl. The Harris Poll also shows that the advertising is a vital part of the event. Of people watching, 92 percent say they like the ads and, for many, it is a primary reason they watch the game.

Here are some notable advertisers in Super Bowl XL:

• Budweiser has purchased five minutes of airtime worth about $25 million. They are also very serious about winning the post Super Bowl advertising polls.

• GoDaddy will be back (or maybe not) with their controversial Super Bowl TV ads and their Web only versions of the same. GoDaddy recently had its 10th submission for an ad rejected by ABC.

January 30, 2006: Television Audiences Will Change

A thorough and interesting new report was just released by IBM Consulting Services. Titled The End of Television As We Know It, the report forecasts a major shift in television audiences in the next few years. Television audiences of the past have often been cast as passive “couch potatoes” that absorb television content in their family rooms within the limitations of how and when it is provided. According to the IBM report, the future television audience will split into two main groups. One segment will be today’s more passive group, but the other quickly growing segment will be a younger audience demanding television (video) content anywhere, anytime, and they will be completely indifferent as to how they recieve that content (TVs, Web, iPods, etc.).

January 27, 2006: The Web Is Now The Fastest Growing Marketing Channel

A post this week in CMO Online reveals just how quickly and profoundly the marketing landscape has changed. The article states, “What started out as a secondary channel to generate traffic for information seekers has now grown into a critical component of any well-designed business or marketing plan. Today, the Internet is the fastest growing marketing channel and is beginning to challenge television and radio for billions of advertising dollars.”

The CMO article cites a Forrester Research report that shows the Web is, by far, the most active remote shopping channel. It predicts this year, the Web will outpace catalogs, direct mail and telephone sales to account for 75 percent of all out-of-store purchases and revenues.

January 26, 2006: Online Activity to Affect Half Of All Retail Sales By 2010

Jupiter Research just released a forecast report that predicts online activity will affect 50 percent of all retail sales by 2010. This includes items that are either bought online or researched online, and bought elsewhere. There is a more detailed story regarding the research on Internet News.

January 25, 2006: Advertising Moving To Interactive Faster Than Expected

A new study by the Winterberry Group seems to confirm what many other marketing experts have been saying. Advertising services are moving below the line quicker than most had predicted.

In advertising, above-the-line (ATL) services are associated with the more publicly visible, mass media brand efforts, and below-the-line (BTL) services are attributed to more specifically targeted, measureable, interactive and direct marketing methods.

January 24, 2006: HD Radio Has Arrived

Most people think of radio as an older technology. However, it is being transformed into the latest and the greatest with new twists that are making it difficult for most consumers to stay current. The latest addition is HD radio, which allows broadcasters the ability to squeeze up to eight separate stations into the frequency that was previously assigned to one station. The result is more variety and more customized content.

Radio, as it was originally developed, came from radio waves, but it has become much more than that. Radio is really becoming an audio portal for analog and digital content. The consumer just wants good audio options and it doesn’t really matter if it comes from an AM, FM or HD signal…a satellite...Internet radio...or music and podcasts ported from an iPod through the radio.

January 23, 2006: Coming Simultaneously To A Theater and TV Near You

What if new movies were released to theaters, home television sets and DVDs all at once. That scenario might not be far off, based on a New York Times story. The article discusses an initiative by IFC Entertainment to simultaneously release 24 films to theaters and cable pay-per-view TV at the same time. Granted, these releases will be to independent theaters, but I think it signals the beginning of some big changes in the movie industry as a whole.

In a related post here two weeks ago, I cited an AP-AOL poll that revealed 73 percent of adults would prefer to watch movies in their homes. The Internet and entertainment industry has time after time witnessed the fact that digital content wants to lose its dependence on the middleman.

January 20, 2006: Some Powerful Numbers…

The information below is from a cogent PowerPoint presentation that Mary Meeker from Morgan Stanley recently presented at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. It underscores the tremendous changes and rate of change that is happening with new media, technology and related fields of study. The complete presentation is here.

Some of the interesting facts in her presentation:

-  In 1995 North America made up 66 percent of Internet users. By 2005, that number had dropped to 23 percent.

- Asia/Pacific now makes up the largest share of the Internet market at 36 percent. China has more Internet users under the age of 30 than anywhere else.

- There were 7.6 billion global searches on Google last year…up 74 percent over the previous year.

- There are 40 million users who have a personalized My Yahoo! page.

- The market cap of Google+Yahoo!+eBay+Yahoo! Japan was $2 billion prior to their 2000 IPOs. As of 11/11/05 their combined market cap was $262 billion.

January 19, 2006: Is Advertising/Print/Radio/TV/PR Dead?

I see variants of this type of headline too often. Insert the appropriate word. Is advertising dead? Is print dead? Is TV dead? Is PR dead? The answer to all these questions is no. Usually, these stories are about the older, traditional forms of the media in question: offline advertising, free terrestrial radio, broadcast TV, etc. Granted, all of the aforementioned are undergoing tremendous change, but anyone who thinks they are dead is mistaking mortality for what is really metamorphosis. In fact, usually when I see headlines like this, it is obvious someone is advertising for you to read the story, and simply using a dramatic headline as the hook.

January 19, 2006: Radio

Why does this not surprise me: Google is now in the radio business. It made news all over the place yesterday. If, as so often is said, content is king, then Google is not only king…it is quickly rising to the rank of emperor. Google gives access to a world of content and now they are starting to control the content channels, too. Maybe they’ll call it Roogle or Radioo.

January 16, 2006: Millions vs. Billions

The United States will soon pass a major milestone. Sometime later this year, the population of our country will reach 300 million people.

It took us 125 years as a country to get to 100 million people, reaching that number around 1914. It was in 1967, about 53 years later, that we passed 200 million. And now just 39 later, we will be hitting the 300 million mark. Experts predict it will only take about 30 more years to swell our population to 400 million. These facts seem impressive when you consider our country’s ever-shortening cycle to add the next 100 million people.

However, I couldn’t help compare our country’s population growth to some recent astonishing statistics I read about worldwide Internet growth. Based on figures from Internet World Stats, the Internet first surpassed 100 million users in 1998. By the year 2000, there were 300 million users, and by 2003, there were 600 million users. Recently, the Internet surpassed one billion users and it is adding a million new users worldwide about every four days. Most of those new users are not from the U.S., and most of those new users don’t speak English.

January 13, 2006: Online Video Advertising To Grow Nearly 300 Percent

The increase in broadband penetration to U.S. homes, combined with the rapidly increasing demand for interactive marketing services, has created huge growth potential for online video advertising. According to an eMarketer report, online video advertising will grow nearly 300 percent from 2005 to 2007. The report also shows by 2009 online video advertising will grow nearly 700 percent over 2005!