Interactive marketers never like coming across studies that correlate feeble e-business efforts with their country of origin, so you can imagine how I felt when I received an e-mail from research company “eMarketer”:http://www.emarketer.com titled *”Is Canada Losing Its Edge?”*
In short, “the summary”:http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?1003559 from the company’s “new report”:http://www.emarketer.com/Report.aspx?ebus_canada_sep05 (which includes additional third-party research) suggests that Canadian small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are “falling behind international competitors when it comes to the adoption of e-business solutions.” Given that “Statistics Canada”:http://www.statscan.ca says 99 percent of all Canadian businesses fall into the category of SMBs, this is bad news for the Great White North.
Category: Tessa Wegert
How often should you update your online ads? How long can a campaign run before consumers get bored? The phenomenon of declining ad response due to overexposure has been a point of contention among marketers for years. Online, it’s called “banner burnout,” and it’s commonly thought to occur after the delivery of about 10,000 to 20,000 impressions.
Offline, ad burnout isn’t measured so much in terms of volume as it is in time of exposure. A recent test of 2,500 U.S. homes by The PreTesting Company found that “most people tire of TV commercials after just two weeks”:http://www.adrants.com/2005/08/study-measures-ad-viewership-campaign.php.
The obvious solution for both online and offline marketers would be to update their ad creative. Of course, this can be a costly and time-consuming process. But there is a way for marketers involved in cross-media campaigns to save on online costs by stretching their investment further.
With their buying power and trend-making prowess, teens and young adults have always been popular targets for interactive marketers. In the past, we’ve looked to email marketing and instant messaging as our means of connecting with this demographic, but reaching today’s teens requires an understanding of an entirely different online animal.
Social Networks are the newest way for teens to connect with their friends online, partake in online discussions, meet new people, even create their own blogs. Exchanging email and instant messages remains a popular pastime, to be sure, but increasingly it’s these online communities that are receiving the lion’s share of young peoples’ time. For marketers, these sites open up a whole new world of advertising opportunities. Designed around communication and effective at engaging consumers, social networks lend themselves well to such interactive initiatives as contests, quizzes, games, and branded content.