Published by: Richard on January 13, 2009 5:52 pm
OK. So, we’re (almost officially) in a recession. Everyone knows it’s bad. But…
The online environment is still doing much better than most other types of marketing. Look at the statistics for advertising spends:
According to the latest Bellwether survey from the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA), is down 7 per cent. But this is nothing compared to the drop in mainstream media advertising, which plummeted over 30 per cent. Sales promotions and direct marketing were both down by 10 per cent.
Online still accounts for close to 10 per cent of all ad spend.
Our own publishing clients report print advertising has “fallen off a cliff” (the expression used by two publishers, independent of each other)!
So online is still the place to be.
Want further proof?
Well, while the High Street was in terminal freefall over Christmas with Woolworths closing down and Zaavi in all sorts of trouble, visitors to the UK’s top 10 online retailers was up by an average of 37 per cent, according to Nielsen Online.
Between October and December, the average monthly figures for unique users were:
Amazon - 15.6m
Argos - 8.2m
Tesco - 7.3m
Play.com - 5.7m
With M&S, Littlewoods, Currys, John Lewis and Asda bubbling under 4.5m.
So your web sites, online marketing, viral and email campaigns are more important than ever – and more effective.
So get weaving with the web!
Published by: Richard on October 21, 2008 10:29 am
It used to annoy me back in 1998, so you may be able to imagine my frustration that the internet (and particularly the web) is still seen as inherently EVIL.
Back in those heady days, the web was evil because as many potential terrorists as you could fit in a training camp could simply ‘log on’ (don’t get me started on that one!) to the internet and find out how to make a nuclear bomb. Of course, those same potential terrorists could have gone to any decent library and found out the same information.
It was simply a case of bashing the new technology because in good, old fashioned luddite style, we fear change.
It also seems that old habits die hard.
Last week in EastEnders we had a situation in which a teenage boy was seen by his mum to be spending a lot of time on his laptop “on the internet”. His mum voiced her concerns to the local IT boffin (not someone who actually works in IT or web design or anything, you understand, merely someone who was young enough not to be a torch-bearing yokel on his way to burn something).
Could it be her son was in chat rooms being groomed by paedophiles? Or perhaps he was gay and meeting other gay men? (of course, the idea that this is something you may not want your offspring doing is questionable in the extreme, but then the BBC does have an obligation to raise these issues). “Nah”, said Bradley (the resident IT expert). “He’s a teenage boy, spending a lot of time on the net. Gotta be porn.”
Genius.
And I suppose that Bradley (or the scriptwriter) has never heard of Second Life or facebook? YouTube? Webmail? Even the BBC web site (which one could happily peruse for millennia)? Or indeed its magnificent iPlayer?
No. It had to be something negative.
One day it would be nice to think that when the word ‘internet’ is used that people won’t automatically picture the denizens of hell tapping away on keyboards to pervert society by any means possible.
