The Future Of Advertising Gonna Use Wearable Technology?

The rapid advancement of technology has changed our life dramatically including advertisements. The article introduced future of advertisement that leverage new technologies. Reading the article, I feel that the trend of wearable technology is emerging. For instance, the article introduced google's eyewear and LED t-shirts which both shares the concept of wearable technology. In next few years, I personally feel technology trend will shift from mobile tech (ex: Iphone, andrioid) from wearable tech where tech become so close to us that we don't even notice we're using it. The advertising concept introduced in the article, uses actual people as advertisement by making them wear LED T-shirt and display ads on it. I thought this concept was really interesting. To make it more functional, I think companies can use this technology to make homeless people into interactive ads. By using this tech company can advertise at significantly low cost and leverage unused resources for the society's good. One problem is that initial cost of this LED T-shirt is kind of pricy.....

The Digital Campaign : overkill?

The digital media has transformed the way politician persuade the citizen. The presidential campaign is great example of modern marketing. While emphasis is on digital marketing, Obama and Romney's marketing teams are using various mixture of marketing techniques in order to reach and persuade the citizens to attain their votes.  According to the article, digital marketing predicted to reach $160 million and candidates are funding heavily on the micro-targeting. Related to last week's CRM lecture, in political campaign tremendous amount of data is collected to target specific audiences. Using sophisticated algorithms, the marketers process the collected data to examine the voter's behaviour and predict specific traits that correlate to voting decision. They will then use the data to target the specific market in order to increase chance attaining the votes. It's spectacular how specific campaign teams can get. However, the precision of the target marketing are getting creepy in a way. 

The history of presidential campaign portray how the marketing evolves overtimes. How there sophisticated marketing tactics are amazing that companies could learn many from it by investigating their marketing approach. As explained in the past lecture, just like any other digital marketing marketers, presidential campaign are also facing dilemma of creepy/sweet spot. 

Facebook's "Want" and "Collet" buttons: Competing social commerce site?

The social commerce market is growing rapidly this recent years and now it is $1billion market(US). Related to last week's post, it appears to be Facebook is also entering the social commerce market. Facebook introduced a new retail feature "want" and "collect" buttons that enables Facebook users to elect the want button and add selected products to their wishlist. The selected product will be visible on friend's newsfeed. While the feature is similar to existing web service like fab.com and Fancy, I think these existing service could be in stake when the feature launched by Facebook. Because of the huge amount of users Facebook carries they are in great advantage. The existing social commerce websites users might switch to Facebook, since user can have same experience while just Facebooking as usual. Facebook entering in the social commerce market might stimulate the market even more. I wonder how Facebook would position them in the social commerce market and how they will leverage the feature for company's further growth.

The Fancy: A new way of marketing

The Fancy is new social commerce site that has feature to share any products that users are interested. Unlike the Pinterest that only has interest sharing feature, the fancy allows to sale the products via the site. When the product shared by the user is bought by someone, the user who posted the product receives 2% credit from the price of the product. With this new business model the Fancy launched in 2011, has 500,000 post per day making $10,000 sales per day.

The Fancy have done a decent work blending the core essence of e-commerce and social media networking sites and implemented successfully (the idea itself is like a combination of Facebook and Amazon). Browsing the Fancy's website, their user interface does actually looks "Fancy" and make me want to buy the products with authentic and eye catching design. They offers wide-range of products from apparel to travel (relatively in high price range). Because of this characteristic of website, it might be adequate for luxury brands.

The fancy appears to adapt to the current trend of social media networking very well, attracting millions of users and manufactures. While there are competitors like fab.com, I wonder how this social commerce site will grow in next few years.






   

Banner ads: Is it effective?

Talking with my friend working for the ad agency, I was surprised by the price of placing a banner ad on the YouTube's front page. According to my friend, it costs $60,000 a day on weekends and $40,000 a day on weekdays to place a banner ad on the YouTube's front page (only on Japan's YouTube front page). It is much more expensive in the States. The article mentioned that it costs $200,000 to place a banner ad in front page of the States YouTube. As well as the paid search, the Google appears to raising a lot of money from the banner ads. I was wondering whether this banner has the value the Google is charging. Considering the number of traffics the YouTube have everyday, the price might be reasonable, but it is still hard to tell whether the firms are gaining enough profits out from it.  

Browsing through the web I found this article that compares the ROI of paid search and banner ads. The article states that paid search has much higher ROI, where banner ads amounted to four times the cost of paid search. Just looking at this article, paid search seems much more cost effective, however, I think it really depends on the type of business. The paid search is affordable to various type of businesses from small to large, but the banner ads seems to target the larger businesses especially to the business related to broadcasting or apparel. To prove the point, ABC has their banner ad on today’s YouTube’s front page. The Google is really doing a good job of offering different types of ads to satisfy multiple needs.   

In the future, I wonder which ads will be the trend of the internet marketing or new form of internet ads might emerge by that time.

Klout.com introduce a new way of marketing

Because of the drastic improvement of technology in the past few years, various type of IT start-ups with creative business models have emerged. The Klout.com is one of those unique start-ups that attracts businesses with their unique marketing model. Klout measures the online influences of the person by using data points from services such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google plus then they connect the people with high influences to the businesses to spread positive image for them.

I thought the approach taken by Klout really matches the raising trends where everyone in the world is using some sort of social media. The measures of the online influences appears to not reflect the real world influences (Justin beaver had higher score than Barack Obama). But according to the article, they are working on the algorithm of the influence measurement, promising to calculate more precise measurement. Considering the fact that there are many chances of new social media service to emerge in the near future, there are still a lot of potential of growth. 

I'm looking forward how this service will effect the trend of internet marketing. This service might be a game changer, giving more depth in marketing strategies where the service might be more cost effective than marketing approach like paid search where you need to pay decent dollars to the firms. 

"Social Reach" The Facebook's new advertising approach

Providing us no concrete evidence of their ads impact, effectiveness of Facebook's advertisements are questioned these days. Recently, the GM has dropped Facebook ads claiming the ads has low consumer impact. With such criticism, to improve the actual ads effectiveness, Facebook has implemented new method that displays user's likes on the other user's news feeds. More in specific, once you like a certain company's Facebook page, company can now advertise by displaying promotions and ads on your friends news feeds.  They calls this system the "social reach". This approach is actually effective, increasing number of likes, where most of the likes are clicked from smartphones (I couldn't find the source... It was mentioned in some TV program).

Myself being a Facebook user, I really didn't recognize this ads system until I read this article. I understand social marketing is still a new stuff and Facebook is experimenting the approach. However I think Facebook has an obligation to explain the users what they are doing. Facebook should of explain this system in detail to the users, telling them what message you are sending to your friends without yourself knowing it. The user have potential of sending unintentional message to others, resulting you to set wrong image of yourself unconsciously.

Internet Marketing for Luxury Brands

Learning both technical and business side of the Internet marketing, I was surprised by the fact the course covers a lot on technical side. Other than that, I was interested to learn how the marketing strategies evolved in the course of history. 



Browsing through the web, I found this interesting article about the Internet marketing for luxury brands. The article discussed the conflict faced by luxury brands using the Internet marketing. Unlike the normal brands, the luxury brands needs to keep exclusive image. They have successfully kept that exclusive brand image in the traditional marketing, but they seem to have not found sure strategies for the online marketing. In the class lecture, online marketing was described as strategies with low entry of barriers. However, for the luxury brands they seem to hesitate to engage online. For instance, in the article it was mentioned that the luxury brands are spending only 31% of their overall ad budgets online. As an Idea of social media marketing strategy, I thought arranging tie-up with celebrities with the Facebook account might be effective. In this way, the luxury brands can keep their exclusive image and at the same time they can attract new customers.

I'm interested in how the luxury brand will use online social media as marketing strategies in the future.


For more information check the following link.

What’s Next for Luxury Brands Online?

http://blogs.position2.com/online-marketing-for-luxury-brands-simplifying-a-complicated-relationship-part-1