Ten Years of Media Integration

Media Channels

In 1997:

There were fewer than 500,000 Internet Web sites
Google, YouTube, MySpace or the iPod didn't exist
Cell phones were only used for voice calls

In 2007:

There are more than 100 million Web sites and 35 million blogs
Cell phones are hand-held computers that can multitask phone calling, text messaging, photography, video downloading, digital music files and an endless variety of games. It was in 2004 O'Reilly Media coined the phrase Web 2.0--a group of second generation Web-based services.

ENTER

New High Tech Acronyms

CRM, PPC, SEO, MP3, DSL and DVR

Television

1997 - Television was only used to watch TV episodes, sports, news and movies.

2007 - we have TiVo to watch or recall on demand. We can watch TV in our cars, on our computers, MP3 players and cell phones. Cable providers now offer high-speed broadband, as well as local and long-distance phone services.

Marketing

2007 media strategies are focussed on connecting with customers at multiple layers.

Marketing is now in the hands of the people. 'People' has usurped ' price, product, placement and promotion'.

Smart marketers now focus on giving customers opportunities to generate testimonials, feedback and suggestions for product improvements.

Customers expect to be communicated with, rather than talked to. Wikis, e-mails, live chat, bulletin boards, texting and video sharing are being used to promote products.

Reality shows combined with product placement are examplifying the new customer participation model. Customers control the next episode content through voting participants out.

Online rich media is mandatory in today's marketing mix. Newspaper readership and Network TV ratings are both declining.

66 percent of high school students report that they get their news and information from Web portals such as Yahoo! and Google.

Over 55 percent of U.S. broadband customers recently made purchases influenced by an online message (36 percent by shopping sites and 15 percent by search sites), exceeding the impact of TV commercials (11 percent) and magazine ads (6 percent). Source: 2007 study by market researcher Media-Screen.

No business today should be operating without:

E-mail newsletters
Blogs
Interactive Web elements [videos, podcasts, direct response tools]

Despite all the new media technologies, most people average more than 3,000 commercial message exposures a day. Marketing principles remain.

Start with a good product followed by consistent communications. The only difference is, marketers now have significantly more media channels to operate in.