John Battelle moderated Monday’s last session, and opened with his intention to discuss the coming five years in the world of advertising.
Discuss The Horizons Of Advertising at WebProWorld.
He had with him a three man panel consisting of Lanny Baker, CFA, Salomon Smith Barney, Martin Niesenholtz, CEO, New York Times Digital, and Michael Tchong, Founder, Trendsetters.com.
He first presented his view that network television is dying, and with it the chance for advertisers like Procter and Gamble to reach audiences of 50 million people. So, he asked the panel, if you were Procter and Gamble what would you do to reach such a wide audience?
Tchong jumped in first, proposing they create some cool viral campaigns. He didn’t say how they could make cool viral campaigns for Pampers, but I’m sure there’s something they could do.
Baker suggested that they do more work on the various cable channels.
Niesenholtz offered the hypothetically beleagured marketing executives the 80/20 rule, and proposed that they figure out which of their 20% of customers are creating the 80% of their revenue. He suggested that they mine their databases to figure out this information. (I imagine they’re doing this already… but it was a hard question.)
In response to Google’s Image Ads, Niesenholtz observed that the internet merges branding and direct response advertising. Google, he said, is moving so fast that they don’t realize that branding has value too, and thinks that many marketers will take advantage of the cheap branding that Google will offer.
Battelle spoke up here, saying that contextual ads, since they’re rotated and varying, aren’t participating in what he called the conversation between marketing, content, and readers. Ads from marketers that are sold directly to a site are more valuable to the viewers.
Battelle then asked the panel what we can expect besides search in the next five years – will there be anything that achieves search’s success?
Tchong proposed that we’ll see many more viral videos.
Baker pointed out that cable grew from a 3 billion dollar industry to 16 billion in about ten years, and he could see the internet industry rising to as high as 40 – 50 million in the next 10 years.
He also said that the 13 billion dollar Yellow Pages industry is in danger because there’s no way of tracking calls. Since the major search engines are closing in with local search products that are trackable this could devestate the Yellow pages.
Garrett French is the editor of Murdok’s eBusiness channel. You can talk to him directly at WebProWorld, the eBusiness Community Forum.
