October 6, 2009The rise of online advertising
I haven’t blogged for a while. When I don’t blog for a while, it usually means one of two things — I’ve been to busy with paid work, or I’ve nothing useful to say. There’s nothing worse than mindless posts.
In actual fact, it’s been a mixture of both this time. I’ve been doing a lot of copywriting, but I’ve not felt as if I have a lot to add in terms of sharing my thoughts with the world. There’s my random musings on Tumblr, of course… but I’ll spare you those here.
The most interesting thing that’s happened for me recently is the milestone that says more money is spent on online advertising than is spent on TV advertising. It’s linked to what I’ve been saying before — the web is fast becoming dominated by social media and viral video, and these are the two areas every company and advertiser needs to be looking at in terms of securing their online presence.
But this is something you should already know. Unless you’re living in a cave, of course.
Most of my work these days is for tech clients, is writing on the web. Even my offline product launches, the work I do for my “real world” clients in the Home Counties, involves websites and web-work.
The internet has changed everything, and social media and streaming video have changed it again. I really think we’re heading towards a day when other forms of media will be obsolescent. Television — destroyed by Youtube, Megavideo, BitTorrent. Radio obliterated by Spotify. Newspapers — available online through RSS feeds, Kindle readers and syndicated web portals.
It’s a brave new world. What I want to know is, why aren’t more digital design agencies modernizing to support it?
Most web agencies seem to think it’s enough to build websites,
or promote them, or provide content.
They don’t seem to understand the importance of what they’re doing –
targeting potential customers, selling them something…
even if it’s just an idea.
Just as the web is slowly making traditional forms of media obsolete, so too I think the big advertising agencies will make smaller design agencies obsolete. They’ll be squeezed out, at the very least — big clients will want big packages, and total solutions, targeted at their customers. They won’t just want beautiful websites.
I’m not trying to be a web guru here, sometimes I get it wrong. I remember being blown away by the launch of Facebook Lite (because it meant no more mafia wars) but going back to full Facebook 24 hours later when I found I couldn’t put rich content into my links. Having said that, I reckon I still know a good product when I see one. I’m still using my King of Shaves razor, and Frassy seems to go from strength to strength.
But I do think even a blind man can see the changes on the horizon, the changes that increased spending on advertising on the web is bringing — not just to the web, but also to design agencies, and to branding consultants such as myself.
These are exciting times. I think there’s a lot of money to be made out there — if you’re good at what you do…
This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 6th, 2009 at 4:40 pm and is filed under Blog, Branding, Me and my business, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.