Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: advertising

Peak Google and the limits of internet advertising
Last week, Google’s share price slumped on news of poorer than expected revenue results and website Asymco has a detailed examination of how the company’s growth might have reached its limits.

Asymco’s warning to the online advertising industry is clear with the warning that revenues might start to decline in 2016.

That online advertising may have reached its peak means even an even more uncertain future for businesses rely on those revenues, and times have been tough for those sites in recent years as returns have fallen.

At the same time online ad spending seems to be peaking, print advertising revenues in the United States dropped a further 8% last year with income at now at 1982 levels. It seems publishers can’t win either way.

So its now wonder that online services like Google and Facebook are looking to payment systems and other ways to generate revenue, for online publishers things are even more problematic.

What is clear is the advertising driven revenue methods that work so well for the broadcast industry aren’t working for online publishers and quite possibly other internet based businesses as well.

The online industries need a David Sarnoff to figure out a model that works.

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April 19, 2014
No country for small business
Facebook’s latest changes to its layout creates more problems for small business using social media as the real estate available on its site for eyeballs gets smaller.

The social media giant has been catching criticism recently for changes to its algorithm that make it harder for businesses to be seen online.

In the hospitality industry, discontent was articulated by the Eat 24 website which closed its Facebook Page down after finding the problems too hard.

With the changes to the online advertising feed, it makes it even harder for small business to be seen on the platform as reduced space means higher prices for the space that remains available.

It’s hard to see small businesses getting much traction with the changes when they’re up against big brands with large budgets.

On the other hand for the big brands, the importance of proper targeting becomes even greater as wasting

A challenge for small business

The big problem now for small business is where do you advertise where the customers are?

A decade or so ago, this was a no-brainer – the local service or retail business advertised in the local newspaper or Yellow Pages. Customers went there and, despite their chronic inefficiencies, they worked.

Now with Facebook’s changes, it’s harder for customers to follow small business and this is a particular problem for hospitality where updates are hard.

The failure of Google

Google should have owned this market with Google Places however the service has been neglected as the company folded the business listing service into the Plus social media platform.

Today it’s hard to see where small business is going to achieve organic reach – unpaid appearances in social media and search – or paid reach as the competition with deep pocketed big brands is fierce.

Services like Yelp! were for a while a possible alternative but increasingly the deals they are stitching up deals with companies like Yahoo! and Australia’s Sensis are marginalising small business.

So the online world is getting harder for small business to get their message out onto online channels.

For the moment that’s a problem although it’s an interesting opportunity for an entrepreneur – possibly even a media company – to exploit.

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April 10, 2014
Shoehorning the advertising model
According to AdAge, Instagram has no advertising rate card but if you have a spare million hanging around the photo sharing service will speak to you.

Dropping a million dollars on a social media campaign isn’t a massive amount for a global brand, but is it a worthwhile investment?

As Vintank’s founder Paul Mabray told Decoding the New Economy earlier this week, the social media services were never invented to be business to consumer advertising platforms.

“I think that every social media platform that’s been developed had such a strong emphasis on consumer to consumer interaction that they’ve left the business behind, despite thinking that business will pay the bills.”

“As a result almost every single business application that’s come from these social media companies has met with hiccups. That’s because it wasn’t part of the original plan.”

With Instagram it’s not clear exactly what those companies are getting for their million dollars a month with its consumer focus, it could well be its the cost of experimenting with the new medium.

In the early days of radio it took nearly two decades to figure out how to make money from the broadcast model — it may take a similar period to understand how to make social media pay.

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April 4, 2014
Facebook’s advertising struggle
Facebook is further restricting the reach of brands on their social media platform reports industry news site Ad Age.

It’s not surprising that Facebook is doing this seeing their stock is currently trading at 120 times current earnings and sixty times estimated revenue. The income has to come from somewhere to justify those prices.

The social media service is quite blunt about it’s objectives in making brands pay more to get their message out on Facebook as Ad Age reports;

“We expect organic distribution of an individual page’s posts to gradually decline over time as we continually work to make sure people have a meaningful experience on the site.”

Facebook’s idea of a meaningful experience though might be very different from its users, who are showing their irritation with the service messing around with their news feed. It remains to be seen just how interested those posting on the site are in clicking on sponsored or promoted posts as opposed to finding updates from those they care about.

For smaller businesses, Facebook’s moves make it harder to use the service as an effective marketing or engagement platform as it means stumping up substantial amounts of money to get your messages in front of your customers and friends.

It’s going to be interesting to see how this pans out for Facebook and the social media marketing community. It may mean that social advertising is monopolised by big brands while small and local business finds other channels to get their message out.

One thing is for sure though, the idea that social media would replace the news media is beginning to look shaky as people’s feeds start to be dominated by messages they don’t want.

The next few years promise to be interesting for everyone in the social media industry, particularly Facebook’s shareholders and advertisers.

For smaller businesses, it’s clear that Facebook is no longer a cheap marketing platform.

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December 8, 2013
Never going to let you go – the failing businesses clinging desperately to baby boomers
Probably the driving factor of the consumerist society’s development was the baby boomers’ growing up.

Through the last fifty years everything from Coca-Cola to baby products and hair loss treatments has been aimed at the cohort born between 1945 and 65.

For many businesses and marketers this group has been so profitable it’s been hard to let them go.

The US motor industry is a good example of this with Bloomberg reporting the over 55 age groups are dominating domestic car sales as younger folk turn away from car ownership.

A similar thing is happening in Australia as TV executives decide that competing with the internet for millennials is too difficult so sticking with the over 50s market is safer.

“We’d go out of business if we stayed with our traditional demographic of 16-39.” Channel Ten CEO Hamish McLennan told the Mumbrella360 conference in Sydney earlier this year.

The problem for both the US motor manufacturers and Australian TV stations is the trends are against them.

For TV stations trying to compete against the internet, the older age groups are following their kids across to the web at the same time that they are beginning to save for retirement.

That need to save is also working against the car dealers, while many boomers fawn over new cars a large number simply aren’t going to be able to afford these indulgences. It’s not a good prospect for the motor industry.

In the meantime, younger people are turning away from the motor car, Bloomberg quotes University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute s researcher Michael Sivak who penned a report on generational shifts in the US motor industry.

“I have a son who lives in San Francisco; when I get a new car and I tell him what I got, he couldn’t care less,” Sivak said. “To him, it’s a means of getting from A to B. He goes into great lengths about taking a BART or bus, even though it takes him an hour longer. He does have a car, but uses it very rarely.”

The movement away from the motor car indicates something much more profound about western society — if the baby boomer represented the age of consumerism, the entire Twentieth Century was defined by the automobile.

For politicians and town planners wedded to a 1950s view of economic development, it may be they are making terrible and expensive mistakes in pushing freeway and other road projects.

While aging baby boomers purr over their expensive cars, the forces of history may be passing them by. Those businesses pandering to those older groups might just want to consider whether they want to be left behind as the economy, and the kids, move on.

It’s comfortable to cling onto what has worked for the last fifty years, but sometimes the lowest risk lies in letting go.

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August 6, 2013