I do believe performance based marketing has a bright future. For anyone involved in advertising it is very attractive to pay per sale, per lead etc. in stead of just buying reach without any further guaranties.
Publishers have the opportunity to place ads while sharing the revenue. Customers get to see more relevant ads because ads that don’t pay will disappear.
Affiliate networks will however face a hard time to stay relevant. As tracking software will become free and available for everyone. Affiliate networks will have to compete with affiliate managers within the advertising companies to find and built relations with relevant publishers.
Why would you still pay the affiliate network if you can do it yourself.
Google is already offering Pay per Action advertising in beta and I guess it is just a matter of time before Google starts offering this tracking solution for non-Google ads as well (similar to Analytics campaign tracker). By then anyone can start his/her own affiliate program for free.
If the tracking software is for free. Affiliate networks will need to show their relevance by delivering better tracking and/or better publishers then we can find ourselves. In this situation they can’t afford to charge monthly fee’s. They will probably have to work performance based themselves.
Mobile marketing is getting serious. Admobs.com launches a Google Adwords-like service for easy mobile banner advertising. Including a mobile landing page, if you need one. Google offers Mobile image ads since April 23.
This is just a first step. Bannering on mobile is nice but not really intelligent and engaging, unless you target very well. And also then you tend to forget about the specific value of a mobile device for the consumer.
More on this in the following presentation from Mobile Monday Amsterdam
Following my post on Saatchi2.0 I would like to talk more about the subject of agency2.0.
What does a future advertising agency look like? What is its role, its structure? What can we learn from pure digital agencies and other online businesses in general? What can a traditional agency do to stay alive and revive?
In the Businessweek interview I mentioned earlier, I read that Saatchi & Saatchi has tried to buy a digital agency Blast Radius. It didn’t work out since Blast Radius merged with Wunderman, a large direct marketer. What is the real reason behind this? Was it a cultural difference or a pure strategical decision?
After some short research (I will come back to this subject). I found some well known insights digital agencies come up with:
stop annoying customers, start engaging
stop delivering ads for clients, start delivering strategies on advertising
get insights through data, customerinfo and testing
I my opinion the field of advertising is only getting more interesting since agencies must and can focus on their core business “ideas”. And they get more means to generate and spread these ideas.
Looking at how this could look like in practice. I did check the Nitro website. What do they do for a living? As they say, they deliver:
Research from Isobar
found that around 90% of the French online audience ages 15 to 49 had seen at least one video ad in May 2007.
Over half (55.5%) of the respondents to the Isobar survey went on to visit a brand’s Web site, one-third searched online for further product information and over 22% requested further information. What’s more, one in five bought a product as a direct result of seeing a video ad.
