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by Geoffrey McDonald Bowll

on Mar 21

Guerrilla Guide: E-marketing

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Heaven 4U

You can target people precisely. Send them information that warms them up before trying to close a sale. Get the timing dead right – you can send them emails when you know they are seeking information (gathered from cookies you’ve inserted into their computer ready to spring to life the moment they go to a widget website or type a sentence that implies they are interested in a new car…) and get a computerised person to call them and close. The accountants will love it.

But do you want marketing Utopia? Do you want to work in a marketing world that is so perfect? You don’t have much choice.

Where’s it going? I can only give a few directions to keep an eye on. And like points on a compass, there are hundreds more you could name.

Goodbye Mr TV

The Packers are getting out. That tells you everything. Not soon. Not even in three to four years, but the death of the power and influence (and profitability) of TV is coming. This is something that saddens me more than Essendon being on the bottom of the ladder. I feel like I’m going to lose a leg. TV is my friend, my ace in the hole. TV is the best thing ad agencies like Starship can do, because it works fast and influences everyone.

There’s a silver lining on the cloud though – Millward Brown’s 2007 CTV-1 Study shows that marketers can fully engage their target audience by placing ads in full-length TV shows online.

The results show a higher level of engagement among the online viewers – leading to increased communications awareness, brand appeal and consideration. Online viewers were 53 percent more likely to pay attention to the ads during commercial breaks compare to normal TV viewers. The study also shows that ad recall was four times higher among viewers of the online format versus recall of live or time-shifted viewers. That they were probably being shown the same ads in each break may have something to do with it…

All TV will be online in a few years; it will be free, and plentiful. With free to air TV becoming an irrelevant sideshow in the mid-term future, ad agencies will have to work out how to get traction on millions of sites for similar money. Currently I’m only seeing fragmented, quite expensive eyeballs and it’s hard to buy mass cleanly in any volume.

You’re still back on the issue of how TV will die, aren’t you? What will happen with TV is it will slowly fade away in relevance. I’ve got a mate whose plasma TV, with surround sound, is connected to his Mac, which drives all his entertainment and he makes phone calls and emails while he is on the couch. He uses Skype for mobile/international calls and downloads TV via Juice or Apple TV, I can’t remember.

Telephone = mobile TV/PC

E-marketing is super mobile. Soon you’ll be talking to your watch, Dick Tracy style. This has fantastic advantages for marketing as we can hit people when they are in the mood for things, like food or clothing. We can send them messages as they near the juice shop, suggesting a strawberry slider with patented B as it’s been three days since we’ve had any B and we were drinking last night…

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