An interesting, and positive article appeared in The Economist on November 28th about online advertising and how we will be impacted by the faltering economy.

To summarize, although advertising budgets will likely be cut in the coming months/years, there is a good chance that Internet Marketing will be able to defend its usefulness and survive the turmoil.  SEO and other marketing and branding tactics used on the Internet currently allow for actual data to be tracked, and metrics to be provided to a company so that there is justification for where and how the advertising money is spent.  According to the article, “All this makes spending on advertising much less speculative, so that it starts to be treated instead as a cost of sales.”

This is good news for the Interactive Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, and Google Adword agencies out there.  If these forecasters are right, then even in a recession this sector of the economy can still show growth.  As the article points out, we may need to look for different avenues to reach the consumer, such as a focus on social networking sites, but with creativity it should be possible to weather the storm.

1. Sir Tim Berners-Lee – Here is his blog, and his predictions for the future of the WWW.
2. Professor Nigel Shadbolt
3. Professor Wendy Hall – Her homepage.
4. Kai-Fu Lee
5. Dr. David Belanger
6. Mitchell Baker – Her blog.
7. Mark Bernstein
8. Robert Cailliau – His website.
9. Robert Scoble – His blog.
10. Tim O’Reilly – His homepage.

Not a list to laugh at, at all.  So, where was I among all of this?  Well, thirteen years ago, while Netscape was undergoing its IPO and starting the first "boom," of what we now call, "New Media," I was working in IT at a large advertising agency in Los Angeles.  We decided it would be a good time to demonstrate, to our clients, at the time names like, Vons, Flamingo Hilton, Honda Motorcycles, that we should be doing something with this "WWW" thing.  Well, we built some small products in JavaScript (well, back then we called it LiveScript); we went to the first Netscape Developers Conference in NYC; we impressed our clients with flashy branding stuff.  Then I moved on to a classified service, headquartered in Orange County, CA… We began putting classified ads online, we migrated their flat-file system to a dynamic, server-side database system, then, we moved in on to a Microsoft based database application…
The point of the story, though, is that what was misunderstood fifteen years ago is still misunderstood by a great many people.  Click through to find out what and why…

Misunderstandings…
Well it’s not hard to understand why the WWW is misunderstood by many people in marketing and advertising…
Is it a place for brand advertising?
Is it a place for direct marketing?

What is interactive marketing?
Well, I guess it’s both, if it is used correctly.  It provides marketers with the ability to build their brand in new and unique ways.
Most importantly, however, is that it brings the reality of one-to-one marketing to marketers.
It’s up to us, then, the agencies that provide strategies for our clients, to use the "New Media" environment to most effectively build their brand and communicate with their target markets.  We must coach them with the right marketing mix.  When is it appropriate to have a blog, when is it appropriate to have a MySpace site, when is an online survey a good idea, when should a marketer send email, how many, how often, etc….  Here at DMIdeas that is what we know and that is the experience and skill set we bring to our clients.