New_Media

Introduction In the last decade the rapid take up of internet and wireless communications has changed millions of people’s lives, hugely influencing the ways in which they communicate among each other, they gain access to information, goods and services.[1] Today it is often possible to hear talk about “e-commerce” and “e-business” and how the internet has revolutionised the business world. According to Chaffey (2007), e-business, which is “all electronic mediated information exchanges, both within an organisation and external stakeholders supporting the range of business processes”, has introduced new opportunities for all organisations to compete in the global market place.[2] In this era of audience fragmentation, global presence, data overload and niche marketing, marketers, advertisers and PR consultants have to be able to effectively exploit such opportunities if they are ought to survive. In order to successfully do so they must understand similarities and differences between traditional media (print, radio, TV, etc.), which are pull media, characterised by an unidirectional communication, and the new digital media such as the internet, which are push media with proactive and self-selecting customers.[3] This essay will concentrate, among the new digital media, particularly on the internet, which is a medium with an unprecedented power of communication thanks to its ability to combine images, sound, texts and data, and on the new marketing tools (the focus will be mainly on advertising) emerged with the web.[4] The paper will be divided in three main sections. In the first the differences between new digital media and the old traditional media will be outlined. The second section will analyse some of the most effective online digital marketing/advertising tools (however, in the end of this section, also other new digital marketing tools such as interactive radio and TV and mobile advertising will be briefly considered) presenting some case studies of organisations exploiting the opportunities offered by new media. In the third and last section, Conclusions, the main points made throughout the paper will be summarized and possible future developments of digital marketing will be discussed. 1. Internet and New Media VS Old Media Despite the fact that internet has been around for, more or less, a generation this paper will still consider it as part of the new media category. This choice is connected to the substantial differences between the way marketers exploited the internet in its first decade and the way they use it today. Such discrepancy has been also highlighted by J. P. and D. Micek (2006), who outline the main differences between the first web marketing and the second web marketing. Table 1 – Differences between Web Marketing 1 & Web Marketing 2 [5] | |Web Marketing 1 |Web Marketing 2 | |Communication Avenues |One-way and passive |Two-way and interactive | |Generating action |Limit choices, coerce & trigger |Educate & win trust | | | | | |Immediate goal |Conversion to sale |Stranger to friend | |Perceived control |Company |Customer | | | | | |Positioning |Interruption |Influence | | | | | |Delivery and Consumption |Single channel |Multichannel & multimedia | According to van Dijk (2006), new media can be defined as “media which are both integrated and interactive and also use digital code”.[6] These media are characterised by the process of “convergence”, which is “the integration of telecommunications, data communications and mass communications in a single medium” (for this reason new media are often labeled as “multimedia”).[7] Spurgeon (2008) agrees with van Dijk in identifying interactivity as one of the main characteristics of new media and a key category of comparison between “old” mass media and “new” digital networked media.[8] As asserted by Bordewijk and van Kaam (2003), in fact, the architecture of broadcast mass media is extremely poorly interactive. Such architecture is not built to support exchanges between transmitters and receivers and interactions among receivers. However, this does not mean that old media totally lack of interactivity. For instance, multichannel TV and press can count on a type of interactivity defined as “consultation” because “consumers exercise programmatic control in selecting information from a predetermined menu of content”. Differently, new media are programmed to support different types of interactivity, extending the possibilities of conversational interaction and participation, and facilitating consumer productivity.[9] Another revolutionary feature of new media, which is also strictly connected to interactivity, is user participation. New media audiences cannot be conceived more as passive consumers of the services as they actively participate in advertising, media and marketing processes.[10] Unlike the older ones, new interactive media are able to generate personalised products/services offers. For instance, mypoints.com (www.mypoints.com) and coolsavings.com (www.coolsavings.com) send personalised e-mails to targeted consumers asking them to visit a website and purchase a specific product.[11] Bloom (2000) believes that the purpose of personalisation is to enhance an individual’s perception of elements of personal relevance and, as Howard and Kerin’s (2004) stress, research proved that personalised messages are able to increase consumers responsiveness because it is perceived by them as more relevant to their needs and better aligned with their preferences.[12] Considering what stated above it is possible to argue that digital technologies and in particular the internet determined the dawn of new ways to communicate and interact with consumers,[13] enabling them to be part of a dialogue.[14] 2. Effective Digital Marketing Tools Digital media offer organisations several tools to promote themselves and get in touch with their target audiences in an effective way. As stated in the Introduction this essay will focus mainly on the internet and on the opportunities such medium give to marketers. One of this is surely the “search-engine optimisation” (SEO), which is “a structured approach used to increase the position of a company or its products in search-engine natural or organic results listings for selected key phrase” is paramount.[15] SEO is critical for every small or big organisation that want to effectively operate in the online environment because search engines have become extremely important to the average web user (research proves that eight in ten internet users utilise search engines in order to find information on the web).[16] However, organisations, before of thinking of SEO, have to develop properly their websites because SEO has is foundation on an effective website able to deliver the content the visitors are searching for.[17] The main techniques to obtain SEO are: creating easily searchable content for the website, having links to and from the website the other high profile websites, using paid placements programs and optimising the website’s content encouraging user to stay on the site once visited.[18] The first of such techniques is strictly connected to the concept of keyword density, which is defined by Thurow (2003) as “a measure of the number of times keywords occur within a web page’s text”.[19] One of the ways to be high ranked by search engines is utilised many times specific keywords within the “landing pages”, which are the web pages through which visitors “land” on your website through the search engines.[20] As stated above another crucial element for SEO is getting quality links.[21] Many search engines, the most famous among these is surely Google, use the so called “web crawlers”, which are programs which surf the net looking for links.[22] In order to increase the links to a specific website blogs, which are defined by Hewitt (2005) as “diaries of sorts maintained on the internet by one or more regular contributors”, play a key role.[23] However, blogs are not just tools for getting a top ranking in search engines but they are also able to connect organisations personally with their customers.[24] An example of corporate blog is the General Motors (GM) FastLane blog. Unfortunately for the American company such blog generated a negative perception of the organisation among some consumers. In fact, setting up a blog, GM gave the impression to be open to receive questions and comments. However, the company was not able to answer all the received queries and, despite some bloggers explained this in several posts, because most of the people surfing a blog don’t read all the posts, some costumers felt very disappointed because GM didn’t get back to them.[25] Returning to SEO an example of a company that gain outstanding results through such tool could be Primelocation.com, one of the UK’s leading property portals. Primelocation.com using “Pay-For-Performance” search from Overture, was able to reach over 80% of the UK’s Internet population, appearing in the top search listings of the UK’s major Web sites (AOL Europe, AltaVista, MSN, Lycos and Ask Jeeves) and experienced a big increase in traffic and in leads.[26] The diffusion of the internet enable also the dawn of the so-called permission marketing. Chaffey (2006) defines permission marketing when customers agree (opt in) to be involved in organisation marketing activities, usually as result of an incentive. This approach developed since a low forbidden unsolicited communications stressing that customers must previously notify the senders that they consent to receiving commercial e-mail. This approach is been adopted by many organisations because unsolicited e-mails are both against the law and annoying for customers. Company such as Ryanair and Easyjet use often permission marketing, for instance, informing customers of special offers (be informed of special offers or discount is also the incentive which encourage customers to opt in). Companies can also utilise email as tool to launch out and out advertising and PR campaigns. An extremely successful email based campaign has been surely the one organised by Hotmail, (to describe it Jurvetson and Draper coined the word “viral marketing” in 1996), which involved the tactic of attaching the tag line "Get your private, free e-mail from Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com" to the Hotmail accounts generated messages and which enable Hotmail to exceed ten million users in just seven months.[27] Emails if integrated with other traditional tools such TV and print can also produce outstanding results for companies. An example could be the campaign launched by Mazda in 2006 to promote Mazda 2, Mazda 3 and Mazda 6 special edition, known as the Mazda “Sakata” range. Mazda selected email as the column of the Sakata campaign because of its potential to work in harmony with the above-the-line campaigns and its cost-effectiveness. Such campaigns results were extraordinary and ahead of industry averages, from open rates to click-through rates (£9% of the contacted people open the mails and 46% of those went to the Mazda Sakata microsite).[28] The internet and new media because of their bi-directionality, which Dellarocas (2003) identifies as one of the new media’s main capabilities, allow the birth and explosion of the so called viral marketing. Bi-directionality, in fact, enables the phenomenon of “word-of-mouth” (WOM), which was generally limited to face-to-face communication, to be generated.[29] Considering the internet’s impact on such a phenomenon it is possible to define WOM as a person-to-person communication between one or more receivers and communicators, regarding a product or service or an organisation, which is made available to a multitude of people and institutions via the internet.[30] According to Xia and Bechwati (2008), WOM communications have a stronger influence on consumer behaviour than market-generated communications, such as advertising or personal selling, because it is perceived as more trustworthy.[31] According to Chaffey (2006) it is possible to talk of viral marketing when “a marketing message is communicated from one person to another, facilitated by a different media, such as word of mouth, e-mails or websites” (implies rapid transmission of the messages).[32] The usage of the word “viral” refer to the message ability to reach a large number of people rapidly as natural or computer viruses do.[33] According to Rogers (1995) Viral marketing exploits existing social networks by encouraging customers to share product information with their friends. Previously, a few in-depth studies have shown that social networks affect the adoption of individual innovations and products. [34] An example of a very successful viral campaign is the one featuring Burger King and the "Subservient Chicken". The American company in order to promote their new BK TenderCrisp chicken sandwich introduced a Web site featuring the "Subservient Chicken," an actor dressed in a chicken suit who appeared to respond to any command typed by the visitors. In less than a year, SubservientChicken.com attracted 14 million unique users and sales of the BK TenderCrisp sandwich increased by 9% a week while the campaign was run.[35] The main strength of viral marketing is the possibility to reach a large audience at a relatively low cost while the main weakness is to control targeting, which may damage the brand since users could receive unsolicited messages.[36] Internet also offers to marketers a series of tools enabling them to effectively measure and evaluate the various marketing initiatives. Chaffey (2006) talks of web analytics, which is “the customer-centred evaluation of the effectiveness of Internet-based marketing in order to improve the business contribution of online channels to an organisation”.[37] The most common online metrics collection methods, according to Chaffey (2007), are: server based log-file analysis of site activities, browser based site activity data and online questionnaires. Server based log-file analysis of site activities is a way to obtain this data is, offering registration links, because, once registered, users’ on-site activities can be easily tracked down and classified.[38] Browser based site activity data enables to trace any users’ activity on the website without a need for registration. An example of advanced tracking systems is Google Analytics. It permits to gain information such as how many pages users download, what paths they follow, what goals the website has achieved during their visit, etc (Appendix I).[39] The visitors’ feedback is a central measurement and monitoring tool, which can help to improve websites.[40] Many websites use this feature as, for instance, www.adobe.com. E-marketing does not involve just accessing the internet via PCs, but also other tools such as digital radio, digital interactive TV and smart phones and a series of other tools. Digital radio enables consumers to get information on tracks, buy tracks, interacting with radio shows and voting. This is currently achieved through buttons but future developments will allow this to happen through voice-operating systems.[41] Another very powerful tool is the interactive digital TV, where audiences while there are watching films, sport or other programmes can obtain further information and access to special offers through pressing the “red button”. Interactive TV offers to marketers new ways of reaching their target audiences, through for instance interactive advertising or interactive product placement. Many companies start to exploit the advantages of interactive TV. An example could be, for instance, Renault, Lexus and Nissan, which enable costumers to request a test-drive trough pressing the red button.[42] Because mobiles have today a penetration rate of over 80% in Western countries and the worldwide estimated mobile usage is over two billion marketers cannot ignore the potential of such tool. A way to exploit mobiles for marketing purposes is, for instance, “Bluejacking”, which, according to Chaffey and Smith (2006), consist in “sending a message from a mobile phone (or another transmitter) to another mobile phone which is close range via Bluetooth technology”. Bluejacking can enable viral communications, communities activities such as gaming events and location-based services such as electronic coupons.[43] 3. Conclusions The development and diffusion of new digital media has affected the lives of million and millions of people and, as it is possible to notice from the previous section, has introduced new opportunities for all organisations to compete in the global market place. This is strictly connected to the nature of the new media which promote as various academic and researchers (van Dijk 2006, Spurgeon 2008, Xia and Bechwati 2008) stress, interactivity, participation and personalisation. Among these media surely internet is the most powerful guaranteeing an access to about 1,596,270,108 users, which is, according on Internet World Stats, the whole internet population in 2008.[44] Such monstrous potential can explain why many organisation decided in the last few years to invest on a big scale on online and digital media. For instance, as the IAB Online Adspend Study shows, in 2008, the online advertising sector is the only sector that, despite the economic downturn, continues to show growth, registering an increase of a 17% respect the previous year.[45] Burger King, Hotmail, Mazda and Primelocation.com’s examples show how organisations can achieve great results, in a very cost effective way, through tools such as SEO, permission and viral marketing that became available thanks to the development and diffusion of digital media. It is always very difficult doing predictions but this it is probably just the start of an out and out revolution which will regard the entire marketing world. There is, in fact, a great possibility that conventional ad agencies and media buying companies with their advertising approach will disappear because the way costumers receive information have changed for ever. In order to be effective new marketing campaigns will have to link together numerous media to create a 360° of exposure, with the online channel, with great probability, as the cornerstone of the communication effort. One-to-one interactive marketing will totally replace one-to-any mass marketing and marketing communication will re-invent themselves in order to be more consumer-oriented than ever.[46] Just the time can tell when all this will happen but it is better for all marketers to be ready because the new marketing era is coming… soon. ----------------------- [1] Avery V & Chamberlain E & Summerfield C & Zealey L (2007) Focus on the Digital Age Palagrave MacMillan p xiv [2] Chaffey D (2007) E- Business and E-Commerce Management 3rd edt Prentice Hall p 14 [3] Chaffey D (2007) E- Business and E-Commerce Management 3rd edt Prentice Hall p 404 [4] Van Dijk J (2006) The Network Society 2nd edt SAGE Publications p 214 [5] Micek J P & Micek D (2006) Secret of Online Persuasion: Captivating the hearts, mind and pocketbooks of thousands using blogs, podcasts and other New Media marketing tools Morgan James Publishing p 71 [6] Van Dijk J (2006) The Network Society 2nd edt SAGE Publications p 9 [7] Van Dijk J (2006) The Network Society 2nd edt SAGE Publications pp 6-7 [8] Spurgeon C (2008) Advertising and New Media Routledge p 4 [9] Spurgeon C (2008) Advertising and New Media Routledge pp 5-7 [10] Spurgeon C (2008) Advertising and New Media Routledge pp 2-4 [11] Pavlou P A & Stewart D W (2000) Measuring the Effects and Effectiveness of Interactive Advertising: A Research Agenda l Journal of Interactive Advertising Vol 1 No 1 Fall 2000 http://jiad.org/article6 [12] Xia L & Bechwati N N (2008) Word of Mouse: The Role of Cognitive Personalization in Online Consumer Reviews Journal of Interactive Advertising Vol 9 No 1 Fall 2008 http://jiad.org/article105 [13] Hanson W & Kalyanam K (2006) Internet Marketing and e-Commerce South-Western Pub p 19 [14] Chaffey D (2006) Internet Marketing 3rd edt Prentice Hall p 21 [15] Chaffey D (2007) E- Business and E-Commerce Management 3rd edt Prentice Hall p 412 [16] Michael A & Salter B (2003 ) Marketing Through Search Engine Optimisation: How to be Found on the Web Butterworth-Heinemann p 10 [17] Thurow S (2003) Search Engine Visibility New Riders p 5 [18] Michael A & Salter B (2003 ) Marketing Through Search Engine Optimisation: How to be Found on the Web Butterworth-Heinemann p 1 [19] Thurow S (2003) Search Engine Visibility New Riders p 85 [20] Grappone J & Couzin G (2006) Search Engine Optimisation: an Hour a Day Wiley Publishing Inc. p 14 [21] Grappone J & Couzin G (2006) Search Engine Optimisation: an Hour a Day Wiley Publishing Inc. p 20 [22] Michael A & Salter B (2003 ) Marketing Through Search Engine Optimisation: How to be Found on the Web Butterworth-Heinemann pp 17-18 [23] Hewitt H (2005) Blog: Understanding the Information Reformation That's Changing Your World Thomas Nelson Inc p IX [24] Cass J (2007) Strategies and Tools for Corporate Blogging Elsevier Inc. p 1 [25] Cass J (2007) Strategies and Tools for Corporate Blogging Elsevier Inc. p 36 [26] http://www.iabuk.net/media/images/Overture_PrimelocationCS_368.pdf [27] Porter P & Golan G J (2006) From Subservient Chickens to Brawny Men: A Comparison of Viral Advertising to Television Advertising Journal of Interactive Advertising Vol 6 No 2 Spring 2006 http://jiad.org/article78 [28] http://www.iabuk.net/media/images/MazdaSakata-fullres_1761.pdf [29] Vilpponen A Winter S & Sundqvist S (2006) Electronic Word-of-Mouth in Online Environments: Exploring Referral Network Structure and Adoption Behavior Journal of Interactive Advertising Vol 6 No 2 Spring 2006 http://jiad.org/article82 [30] Vilpponen A Winter S & Sundqvist S (2006) Electronic Word-of-Mouth in Online Environments: Exploring Referral Network Structure and Adoption Behavior Journal of Interactive Advertising Vol 6 No 2 Spring 2006 http://jiad.org/article82 [31] Xia L & Bechwati N N (2008) Word of Mouse: The Role of Cognitive Personalization in Online Consumer Reviews Journal of Interactive Advertising Vol 9 No 1 Fall 2008 http://jiad.org/article105 [32] Chaffey D (2006) Internet Marketing 3rd edt Prentice Hall p 532 [33] Chaffey D (2006) Internet Marketing 3rd edt Prentice Hall p 400 [34] Rogers M (1995) Diffusion of Innovations, 4th edt Free Press p47 [35] Porter P & Golan G J (2006) From Subservient Chickens to Brawny Men: A Comparison of Viral Advertising to Television Advertising Journal of Interactive Advertising Vol 6 No 2 Spring 2006 http://jiad.org/article78 [36] Chaffey D (2006) Internet Marketing 3rd edt Prentice Hall p 401 [37] Chaffey D (2006) Internet Marketing 3rd edt Prentice Hall p 416 [38] Chaffey D (2007) E- Business and E-Commerce Management 3rd edt Prentice Hall p 619 [39] http://www.google.com/analytics/ [40] Jadav A D (2003) Designing Usable Web Interfaces Prentice Hall p 143 [41] Smith P R & Chaffey D (2008) EMarketing EXcellence: Planning and Optimizing Your Digital Marketing 3rd edt Butterworth-Heinemann p 196 [42] Smith P R & Chaffey D (2008) EMarketing EXcellence: Planning and Optimizing Your Digital Marketing 3rd edt Butterworth-Heinemann pp 190-192 [43] Smith P R & Chaffey D (2008) EMarketing EXcellence: Planning and Optimizing Your Digital Marketing 3rd edt Butterworth-Heinemann pp 197-199 [44] http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm [45] http://www.iabuk.net/media/images/Onlineadspendfactsheet-H22008_4293.pdf [46] Linker J (2007) Leaning Forward: Surviving/Winning In the Future of Interactive Marketing Dog Ear Publishing pp 99-100