Traditional Media and the Internet

Content is the king! Or at least that’s what media experts say! Good content generates a larger audience, which brings advertisers that help to finance new good content.

If we think about the content that the Internet is providing, I can only think that traditional marketing (TV, Radio, printed media,…) is about to face really challenging times. Let’s have a look into traditional media and Internet:

- Radio: last.fm is a perfect example of the Internet potential: no radio ads, personalized music, updated personalized information on their site. Compelling, isn’t it?

- TV: It’s obvious that it’s becoming easier to access the same content that TV channels offer through Youtube, P2P Sw,… even some TV channels are posting programs on the web without ads (i.e from ABC website you can watch episodes of some of the channel’s series).

-Newspapers and magazines: they are probably the ones that have been most damaged by the Internet, or at least those who have not been able to adapt to this media.

If we also consider that Internet will soon be available everywhere either through public wireless networks or 3G, it seems clear to me that the marketing landscape will be quite different from what we see now in only some years.

I think we are about to live an explosion of creativity in online advertising that nobody would have thought of only years ago: ads in virtual worlds (i.e. Second Life), ads geographically relevant (i.e Google Maps).

Searchme.com and other search engines

 Last Moday Mr Gallacher mentioned in class that companies are shifting resources from banner-like ads to search ads. This is great news for Google, since they have 73% of world market share (much higher in Europe) in ads search.

It seems that nobody is threatening Google’s future in the short term. Google’s reputation as one of the best employers makes the company attract some of the best engineers from all over the world. The company devotes 70% of its resources to the search business, which is making its search algorithms more and more sophisticated. This is creating huge entry barriers for other companies. Try to compete heads on with Google is something almost no one will probably dare to do soon.

 
However, economics theory explains that if an industry generates profits, new companies will flourish and capture part of the stake. I’ve been looking to different strategies that try to capture part of the value that search is adding.

 
- Localization: some companies have decided to target only certain countries. This seems to work better in countries where the language or alphabet is very different from ours. For example Beidu has around 62% market share in China.

 
- Vertical search or domain-specific search: they specialize in a particular sort of content. For example http://ahzing.com/ has several engines targeting categories.

- User interface: who said search innovation is dead? Have a look into this website in beta version: www.searchme.com Really cool, isn’t it?

Viral Online Marketing

I have a friend who started up an e-commerce company some months ago. 

When asked about his marketing strategy he mentioned what it seems to be some sort of new silver bullet: VIRAL MARKETING!! This is a magical tool you can use to dramatically increase the traffic of your website for free!! 

There are obviously many different ways to use viral marketing and they are not all for free, but the one he is using is just like that: fast, efficient and free.

My friend used to work for another online startup, and for what I know, they pioneered in using this technique some years ago.

The technique is quite simple: when you order something, you have to accept the terms and conditions of the company, which includes a point that allows them to pull up your contacts emails from a gmail or hotmail account. Don't ask me how but they can do it! The rest is easy to imagine: they send an email to all your contacts letting them know that you bought item X in his website. 

There are obviously some people who didn't like what they did, so they lost some customers along the way but the surprising thing is that the number of customers that they gained was much higher.

Can you imagine the effects of implementing this on a large scale? Millions of websites doing the same!! Thank goodness that our email accounts are not packed with job offers otherwise we would receive hundreds of emails per day!