Online spending will increase even more in 2007

Clickz mentions a survey in which 500 direct marketers were asked about they spending plans in 2007. The result? A visible shift towards online.

As many as 85 percent of direct marketers and service providers say they will move dollars to e-mail and Internet channels

Now this is great, but:

Meanwhile, a comparatively meager 51 percent say they will increase their offline budgets.

Hey, that’s still half of the sample asked in this survey! The reason: there will be a general increase of budgets in DM:

“The survey indicated there’s going to be a lot of growth across the board, but especially online and e-mail marketing,” Alterian Director of Marketing Joe Stanhope told ClickZ News.

E-Mail will be the winner, so watch out for even more clutter in your inbox:

Eighty-one percent plan to increase spending on the channel, while 50 percent intend to up their direct mail budget and 45 percent say they will spend more on personalized landing pages.

The last quote once again proves that one of the main benefits of the online channel – the measurability – is yet to be discovered by many. But if they do, they know.

Companies most comfortable with online and e-mail marketing are in large part the ones that have invested in analytics. “There is a correlation between channel integration and analytics,” said Stanhope. “If a marketer has gotten to this sophistication level where they’re doing integrated marketing campaigns, those are the people sophisticated enough to have that kind of infrastructure to carry out analysis.”



Edelman report on the international blogosphere

Martin points us to this PDF by Edelman, which is a report on the state of the blogosphere in 10 countries worldwide. It’s an interesting 40-page whitepaper, but of course I started with the German blogosphere. However, Germany is disappointing:

In comparison to several of its counterparts, the
German blogosphere is still in its infancy. The
Edelman Omnibus Blog Study found that 85% of
Germans never read blogs, which was the second
highest percentage, after Belgium, among the
10 markets examined. Unlike France and the
United States, few of the blog conversations
that originate in the German blogosphere seem
to find their way into offline conversations or into
mainstream media coverage.

Again and again I wonder why this is the case. But sofar, I haven’t found any satisfactory answers. Media influential Geert Lovink says that it is due to the german editors of the mainstream press – not because of a lack of something in our net-culture. But I don’t see how this could be a strong enough influence on the german blogosphere.



Ad Agency of the year: The Consumer

Advertising Age calls out the Ad Age Agency of the Year: The Consumer

After Time Magazine had already named their person of the year to be “You” it was about time to recognise the “agency” who did much of the advertising work during the last year. All the Consumer Generated Advertising that took place during the last year – most of it in the US, of course, but even in Germany we had some. Hey, even I had one project like that and in our agency we had – I think – 3 in total this year. Well deseverd, consumers. And keep up the good work!

Pure voyeurism per webcam – LIVE!

Now you thought YouTube is already a bad site for yoyeuristic nerds. But then I stumbled upon Stickam. This is absolutely crazy. It’s almost like YouTube, but there is one major difference: it’s LIVE!
Live video can feel very strange, I just noticed. The only times I have experienced live video streaming were during skype calls with my brothers in Hamburg or my Cousin in Arizona.

But this is different. You click on one of the links and all of a sudden you end up in the living room of a stranger. So while checking out the live feeds, I actually sneaked into one person from Denmark who started – quite openly – to smoke a selfmade hashpipe or something that looked like it. Made out of a plastic soda bottle. There was the option to chat, but quite frankly, I didn’t want to disturb the guy.

The next live stream I visited was the DJ performance of a breakbeat DJ. In the videostream it seemed that there are two people DJ-ing. But neither of them bothered to answer my question if there is any OK, one just answered. A little later, and he admitted that he is quite drunk. (And I just got reminded of the fact that chat syntax is revolutionary: “lol kwl im goin now sum1 else will tlk soon ok c u l8r m8“).

The most surprising live-surprise: the DJ actually greeted me via the stream! (”wanno make a loif shouuwt ouuwt to roouwlaan”)

Very kwl, m8.

(found here)