Digital Chameleon Newsletter

We're moving our "Introduction to Digital Media" flagship course online!

Hear me explain what we're doing in an audio file, and download more info on our eLearning product here

Accountable AND sustainable

We're hearing a lot about "the flight to accountability," and the benefits of the online medium for advertisers as media budgets shrink. Many of our clients are selling cross-platform solutions – i.e. a newspaper, magazine, TV, radio brand as an integrated solution. How often we are asked the question, “How do we compete with the performance networks?” The answer is you don’t. In the coming months, I can guarantee the noise level among agencies will increase in regards to demanding performance deals.

If you don’t have the volume of inventory to compete in that arena, you must develop strategies for high value opportunities that move you well beyond the performance conversation. Chances are if you’re a “legacy” brand, you are in this for the long run. Scale and profitability are important. Don’t chase the small, inefficient, hard to execute campaigns – these suck the life out of your salespeople as well as your business. You need to figure out sustainable ways to add value to your advertisers, as well as to your own people.

Glam makes money from Oscar's Twitter feed

Woman's publisher and ad network Glam launched a widget on its homepage that let users tweet their thoughts about the Oscars. It's different from a typical Twitter stream, in that Glam edits it. That way, advertisers can be comfortable that they're associating with appropriate content. Aveeno was the sponsor of the Oscar's widget. You can see the branding here. Good idea by Glam to try and capitalise on user content, but not sure the users whose tweets were edited or cut would feel the same way? This is where publishers' use of user generated content gets sticky - are you taking advantage of the content, or of the users?

Campaign of the Month

We've had no shortage of interesting and controversial campaigns run lately! The Whopper Sacrifice campaign on Facebook was disabled by Facebook because of user expectations and privacy concerns - but not before 82,000 Facebook members deleted over 230,000 "friends"! Locally, we've he had the controversial Witchery viral campaign where agency Naked created a stunt in which an actress pretended she was looking for the man of her dreams whom she'd met in a cafe, to return his jacket. It's still being debated on the blogs whether this was more of a PR strategy than a social media campaign. I think the ad industry is more bothered by the "deception" of this campaign than the consumers may be but this, along with a similar stunt by QLD Tourism, raises interesting questions for marketers. Now the latest Doritos campaign (inviting users to make the next ad) is getting similar press since it looks like some entries were "seeded" prior to start of competition, to which the agency replies they wanted to have some examples in there so users could get an idea of what was expected.

Australian online ad spend hit $1.7B in 2008

The December numbers are out, showing a 27% year-on-year increase in online ad expenditure for 2008 - totaling $1.7 billion. While this is less than 2007's 34% YOY increase, it continues to be strong growth nonetheless. General display advertising has held onto its 27% share from calendar year '07-'08. Classifieds lost one point to Search YOY. In 2008, Classifieds has 26%, and Search comes in with 47% share of spend. See the full report on the newly-relaunched IAB Australia site

NZ online ad spend up 43% year-on-year

The IAB NZ/PWC numbers as of December '08 were recently released and show a superb result for NZ online ad spend. This is the first chance the industry has had to compare two full years of spend data (2007 & 2008). During that time, the market grew an incredible 43% year-on-year, making interactive the fastest growing major medium in NZ. See the full report here.

See you next month!

Patty Keegan, Director

Digital Chameleon