Probably the most intriguing marketing event of 2012 was the IPO of Facebook in May. The initial stock offer was priced at $38 a share, valuing the company at many $ billions. Much of the revenue was to be from advertising. It was the first real test for the company - would people invest? Could the huge Facebook membership be converted into money? Well after some teething problems the shares started trading and currently stand at $27. Not the overnight cash bonanza the average investor might have hoped for.
A significant factor in all business models that rely on advertising revenue is the size of the pool of funds available to spend by companies and their agencies. The overall size of this pot fluctuates with the ebbs and flows of the economy. New media opportunities are evaluated as alternative means rather than additional, so someone's gain is generally at the expense of the incumbent media. B2B advertising agencies are cautious about investing client funds in untested media and typically wait to see how a new title or media channel shapes up.
One thing advertising account managers and PR account managers have tended to agree on in the scope of their respective activities, is that display advertising is not in the PR camp. But pretty much anything else in marketing communications can be laid claim to by the rapidly evolving role of PR. The so called 'new rules of marketing and PR' have been to the fore as PR moves into social media. But the anticipated death of the printed media didn't happen in 2012, so the need for traditional press releases to editors remained while also writing content aimed directly at readers without editorial intervention was added to the PR portfolio. But like the size of the advertising pool of money, the pool of genuine news does not grow either. Whether most B2B companies with a Facebook presence have even researched their audiences and their appetite for frequent trivia on the news feed, if 'liking' a news item has any connection to actually buying the company's product, who knows? And what about Pinterest? Great concept, but getting great images from the average client is tougher than getting good news stories.
Meanwhile QR codes largely fizzled out in 2012 as it became clear that the intrusive chequered patches that had exploded over print advertising in 2011 were too much bother for target audiences. Although more and more, but still a minority were viewing social media, emails and web sites via smart mobile devices - not desk top computers. A lot of marketing communications were not designed with this in mind.
Content is king. Not just the written word, but images and video content and not just for information, but the all important search engine optimisation holy grail. Creating compelling content that is authoritative depends on knowledge and insight - not something easily gained or usefully fed out in 140 character tweets either.
Summing up 2012 on the assumption ancient Mayan prophecies of global apocalypse don't materialise rendering this blog irrelevant, things might be changing in marketing communications, but generally slower than advocates of the new rules predict. What is clear is that there are more and more marketing channels, traditional media is proving resilient, social media is joining the mix and Google remains almost the only act in town for getting visitors to your web site. The western economies are still struggling to pick up and it looks like a long haul. We continue to experience the new economic reality. Looking back two years to 2010 the overall marketing situation was much the same and had been in 2009 as well and hardly likely to change much in 2013 I guess.
No comments:
Post a Comment