Where is marketing going?

Finnish association for advertisers (Mainostajien Liitto) released their latest advertising barometer (sorry, in Finnish). During it’s 30 year history, these are the worst figures so far. Basically what it says is:

• 49% advertisers will be spending less on advertising
• 43% will remain on same level
• 8 will increase their marketing spending
• 86% are prepared to make further cuts to their marketing budget if neccessary

and further that
• traditional media is really suffering
• 47% will be increasing their internet marketing spending
• 56% will be increasing their email marketing spending
• 40% will be increasing their mobile marketing spending
• 52% will be increasing their search engine marketing spending
• other growth areas are direct marketing and in-shop advertising

so things are looking rather peachy for digital agencies. Or are they?

So what is it that those marketing euros will be spent on? My guess is, that the most immediate stuff is:
• more keyword advertising
• lot’s of banners (auts!)
• some campaign sites (double auts!)

But other than that, what are advertising agencies and digital media agencies offering? Hopefully many different ideas and concepts will be planned and tried. But in times like these, are marketing decision makers brave enough to do something out of kilter? Next time you plan, consider some of these, and please feel free to suggest some more ways to do something else than banners, keywords & campaign sites:

• different forms of viral marketing (more about these in another post later)
• blog sponsoring
• product blogs
• blogs providing full transparency
• sponsored & syndicated content
• recommendation marketing
• transaction marketing
• custom communities
• community participation
• discussion forums
• commenting
• comparison services
• questionnaires
• application
• games
• affiliate marketing
• email marketing
• mobile marketing

… and the list goes on. Of course marketing planning should not start from means instead of business objectives, but means is a fair gauge of how “digitally aware” your marketing is.

Couple interesting findings:
• Taneli’s interesting look at two popular communities and their demographics: Facebook Finland Network revealed + IRC-Galleria comparison

• Osma’s (very detailed) look at how LinkedIn deploys AdSense. This one raises lot’s of interesting questions about the future of targeted marketing: How LinkedIn’s special keyword Google AdSense works