Walter Soldierer’s Blog

What will be different 5 years from now? Let’s take a look into my crystal ball…

• More people will use the Internet but the increase will have slowed down in developed countries. Online shopping will continue to grow.
• Internet connections will be faster, also on mobile devices, allowing for more rich media marketing, audio and video.
• Effective marketing campaigns will involve users and put them in control. Interaction, not interruption. Users decide what messages they accept when, where and how.
• Internet ad spending will continue to increase. More budgets will be taken away from TV, radio and print media advertising. This trend will not be over in 5 years though.
• Ads will be more relevant, better targeted. More advertising will be placed on social networking sites and other sites that require registration and thus provide better targeting opportunities. Search engines will therefore have to give up a significant part of their ad revenues. There is better targeting available than contextual advertising can offer.
• Viral video ads with low production costs will compete with traditional TV ads.
• A high level of authenticity and transparency will be required for successful online marketing campaigns
• Recommendations and opinions will play an important role in the online purchasing process.
• Online advertising will be more entertaining, supported by rich media campaigns.
• More “Long Tail ” marketing will be done.
• Measurability of online campaigns will increase. Ads in audio and video podcasts will be measurable.
• Untargeted banner advertising will disappear or become very low cost.
• Marketing campaigns in online communities and virtual worlds will be an important part of the marketing mix.
• Email marketing will be less effective. Click rates will continue to drop, spam will stay.
• Mobile devices will support advertising that is location aware.
• Most Internet users will have mobile phones or similar devices and regularly use them for reading blogs, news, and emails. They will also often use them to update their own sites like blogs, online community pages.

Since I have first dialed up to the Internet in late 1993 I consider myself an “early adopter”. There is one trend that existed ever since Web 1.0 was born: Today’s cool stuff will be tomorrow’s ordinary stuff.

Back in the late nineties it took years for a really cool web feature to reach its expiry date, mainly because Internet users expected less than today and because development cycles were much slower due to technology limitations. Having an Internet presence was cool enough. Today, new web sites and applications can be developed in very short time, and to please the demanding internet audience, a lot more features and frequent upgrades are required.

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Writing compatible markup for web browsers is a tedious process of trying and testing. Doing the same for graphical emails is next to impossible. Some of the most popular email clients and web mail services either support only a rudimentary set of CSS and HTML or render designs very different from others. Coding for web mail makes things even more complicated because certain tags like forms and styles may be removed or overwritten. If only these programs and services would all support web standards. I have recently been involved in the rebranding of email templates.

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If you, like me, have opened a number of social network accounts, you have entered your personal profile multiple times at different web sites. You then have to again search and select your friends. Isn’t it annoying to go through this process over and over again?

When I heard about Google’s OpenSocial initiative, I thought that this had finally come to an end. OpenSocial will make the web a better place and social networking will be much easier than before, they say. Great! Google will enable us to register our profile and friends only once. We would then simply give Facebook our OpenSocial URL and OpenSocial password and they would use an OpenSocial API call to rerieve our personal and friends info. If we add a new friend, we would only have to do this once for all online communities that we participate in. What a wonderful virtual social world this would be…

But… this does not seem to be OpenSocial’s main purpose. (more…)

I have always pointed out that an eMarketer needs to have a good understanding of the technologies involved. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that every eMarketer needs a strong technology background to properly do the job. But it certainly helps a lot. Actually I would not want to do my job without this knowledge. Just a few examples: (more…)

A funnel is often used to illustrate how many of your target audience will finally perform a desired action on the web site. For those who still believe that the mere existence of a web site is enough to get the “e” part of their marketing job done, a funnel is a handy tool to prove how wrong they are.

General marketing concepts can often be applied to web sites, too. One such example is the AIDA concept used in advertising. An ad needs to draw attention, then interest, then desire, and hopefully triggers some action. Web site marketers are constantly looking for methods and metrics to support each of the 4 steps.

Attention can easily be measured by page views. But isn’t there something before the “A”? If a web site cannot be accessed by people with disabilities, it can’t attract their attention at all. So should things like accessibility come before attention? (more…)