Today I attended Digital Now Australia 2009, pulled together by GroupM and Google. The seminar series focused on digital but predominantly social media, mobile and a little search.
Firstly I was so pleased in the shift in priority digital has made. When I joined the digital industry ten years ago we were struggling to communicate that media consumption was shifting, and media budgets should follow. To be fair, targeting, aside from the type of web site your ad appeared on, was limited, and Google was a babe in arms. Times, and consumer behaviour, have changed!
Today 70% of marketers in the room were already investing in paid search. Around 30% were already investing in social media in some form. And it’s not just the Dells, AMEXs and online players of this world. Marketing representatives from Coca Cola and Canon were also on the panel of experts.
So aside from me being impressed with the fact that digital is now a major channel, what else did I learn?
I learned that, according to Jonathan Stinton from tns, Australia is a country of voyeurs. As a nation we’re much less likely to contribute to a blog but will happily and avidly read them. The older we are, the less likely we are to contribute. The one stand out and surprise for me was that apparently 31 – 44 year olds were the most likely to use Twitter.
I learned that, along with being voyeurs, Australians like official information. It varied by industry but consumers like to know that they can trust the information they’re being presented with.
I learned that, while multi-tasking by watching TV and playing online, 61% of people predominantly focus their attention online.
I learned that both the UK Royal Family and the Vatican have official YouTube channels.
As a search marketing professional I didn’t learn, but was happy to hear reported, that 73% of search is stimulated by offline. Research showed that both brand and category searches increased during periods of high TV and offline media, and so companies can benefit from up-weighting their search campaigns whilst they have TV in market, and also when competitors do, to take advantage of the growth in category searches.
I’ve learned that the mobile industry is convinced that 2009 is actually the year of the mobile – that the addressable market in Australia is in the vicinity of 15.5 million handsets and there have been more than 200 mobile campaigns in Australia this year.
I learned that PayPal has a mobile payment platform.
I learned that you should consider having a Dark or Crisis site that comes into play when a crisis happens. American Airlines used this during the recent plane crash on the Hudson River, which Fergus Kibble of Hill&Knowlton used as a show case to outline the role of digital media as this story unfolded in a space of 4 hours (during which time American Airlines uploaded 3 press releases to their web site, streamed a statement from their CEO and reverted to their Dark site. Oh and there were at least 30 Facebook groups dedicated to the pilot).
And I learned that a bakery in the UK is doing a first class job of using social media to drive business by sending out a tweet when their buns are freshly baked from their ovens.
So we need to take care when building fantastically fresh participatory campaigns and work harder to ensure they appeal to a country of voyeurs; we need to strongly align search with TV and offline media; we need to experiment with mobile; we need to plan to ‘lose control of our brands the right way’ (to steal from Fergus) and be prepared to quickly, openly and humanly respond to social media commentary on our brands; and we need to have a real objective and plan when dealing with Twitter.
A couple of things to think about?
Tags: #DNA09, Digital Now, social media
