Looking for advertising options? The choices have become too few in marketing today.

Mon 11 Jun 2018

We at eCentral are always on the look-out for marketing and advertising options that really shoots for that ROI our clients expect for us to deliver. We've been doing this since 1999; while everyone was panicking about Y2K, we were looking for ways to make it relevant to our clients' target market. During those days, it was safe to say that we have a great view of the marketing and advertising spectrum. And then smartphones came.

The things that were safe to say about marketing and advertising ran to the hills and covered their tracks, not even traditional media was safe. That selfie machine you can't leave home without came in and single-handedly assassinated every marketing and advertising medium we were used to having; the newspapers are only used to cover fresh meat from the grocery market, magazines have very limited reach, radio (previously killed by video) is laid in media ICU, and even the major sports programs on TV is gasping for air. Don't get us started on direct mail and letterbox drops, they go straight to landfill even before you can say 'return to sender'. To give you a clearer picture of how smartphones penetrated our lives, marketing intelligence website Newzoo (2018) released a list of countries with the most smartphone users. Australia didn't get first place, but as of May 2018 69.3% of the population owns a Smartphone, that's 17 million people pulling out a handheld device daily to update themselves on their friends and to the rest of the world.

Marketing and advertising is all about gaining thoughts in the minds of your target market or consumers in general, and since the death of traditional media the most precious piece of real estate in marketing and advertising is in literally in the hands of everyone owning a smartphone. So when people's eyes moved away from paper and TV screens, businesses' ad budgets followed along. In this global ad casino, two companies are constantly winning big, you might've heard of them; Google and Facebook, ring a bell? According to Sterling's (2018) presentation of digital ad spending reports in 2017, $40.6B was spent on digital ads with 54% of those can be seen in smartphones. It can be seen in the report that traditional media are still on the board, but it looks so tiny next to its younger brother the Internet.

Obviously, we at eCentral had to adapt and develop. We believe in a range of other methods not mentioned above. Search optimisation, reputation, content, first-rate service, quality, referral networks, customer service and customer retention. All these sales channels are investments with a long tail and long-term results. What do we mean by that, exactly?

If that is your next question, we want to speak to you about the don't knows that you don't know. Call eCentral principle John Nayler on 0407 15 13 11. All these changes in ads and marketing can be daunting, choose your steps well.

Welcome to reality,
John Nayler

Resources:
Sterling, G. (2018). AIB: Search, the largest category of digital ad spending, generated $40.6B in 2017. Retrieved from https://searchengineland.com/iab-search-the-largest-category-of-digital-ad-spending-generated-40-6b-in-2017-298010

Top Countries by Smartphone Penetration & Users | Newzoo. (2018). Retrieved from https://newzoo.com/insights/rankings/top-50-countries-by-smartphone-penetration-and-users/