Half of Australia’s online retail spend heads overseas

43%.
That is how much of Australian ecommerce is spent overseas according to a research paper released by APCA (Online Payments, What’s Next?, 2009).

The report states that ’in 2005, Australian online shoppers reported making 86% of their total spend in Australia, but by December 2008 this had dropped to 57%’ (p.9).

$9.9 billion. Which 43% is in dollars.

It’s a bit of a worry for Australian retailers and if it isn’t it should be. Sure, some of that money is spent on travel and only a fraction (apparently less than 10% is the real amount that is spent on goods), but times are changing. Time to move where the cheese is. .

If you haven’t read it yet…

Do read the Millennium Trilogy by Stieg Larsson. If you want to find out more before you do, read this. 
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MOVE launched in Australia

MOVE, the Measurement of Outdoor Visibility and Exposure was launched today in Sydney. This is the first industry wide measurement for outdoor media in Australia. 
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She's beautiful even when she's a bit angry

Bondi beach today. 
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Google is turning up the heat on display

The title of the World’s Largest Internet Search company is possibly about to change as Google is no longer satisfied with the navigational power of ranked textlinks, but keen to include display, video and mobile in their product offering. With the DoubleClick Ad Exchange system up and running (background on Google’s road to display), they say they are able to match advertisers to audiences through real-time bidding.

What is an Ad Exchange?
’There may be as many as eight or more “exchanges” operating today in online display advertising. That compares with almost 400 “ad networks” of one sort or another. The promise of an exchange is greater efficiency, greater transparency, broader reach for advertisers and better yields for publishers.’ (by Greg Sterling)

Where do online portals / publishers fit into the picture? ’07-’08 saw a real surge in building new technologies for established portals and the rolling out of performance networks in Australia and overseas. By now all online media companies have their own performance product offering (MSDR, Microsoft Direct Response for the MSN sites) or have signed up to an ad network (e.g. Adconion).

Thoughts
While Google claims that this system will help publishers get the most value out of their online content, there is one sticking point. Buying performance media directly from a publisher is usually called a ‘blind buy’ as marketers are given limited (or no) visibility over ad placements in return of a rack rate. Increasing that visibility could pose dangers to CPM rates on premium sites or categories. However, Google ‘only’ being the lead generator, the link in between, they will need publishers to sign up to their Ad Exchange. So there is a glimmer of hope that this will have to work for publishers to really take off.

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Email is here to stay

And with 90 million of them sent last year, probably here to stay for a good while. The total number of users according to Royal Pingdom was 1.4 billion in 2009, and if that doesn’t sound like much, a technology market research firm, The Radicati Group estimates this number will rise to 1.9 billion by 2013.

Email monetisation means that these statistics should make the email service providers and marketers delighted. But wait, there is more.

90% of us (those who are connected) have an email account (what about the other 10%?!), and we tend to favour the ‘big guys’ such as Windows Live Hotmail, Yahoo, and Gmail, popularity of which varies across countries and continents. While the latter two give Hotmail a run for its money, it’s still number one in many markets around the world.

According to a blog post (A peek behind the scenes at Hotmail), by Arthur de Haan Test and System Engineer at Windows Live, Hotmail is a worldwide service, delivering localized versions to 59 regional markets, in 36 languages. Over 350 million people are actively using Hotmail on a monthly basis (source: comScore, August 2009), as they collectively check 1.3 billion inboxes. Every day, Hotmail handles 3 billion messages and filter out 1 billion spam.

Amazing. But wait, there is more still.

Taking all emails into consideration:
- 247 billion emails were sent on average in 2009 every day.
- Out of those a whopping 200 billion were junk, which leaves 47 billion emails daily for the 1.4 billion users worldwide.
- 33.6 emails per day on average is certainly less than half of what I get…

One of the factors that is driving these numbers up is that people who also use social networking keep checking their inboxes at a much higher frequency than those who don’t - probably in part checking notifications that are sent to these email addresses (chart below). However, it’s good news all around, as according to a survey (2nd chart below) 63% of users admitted to using the same email account for permission marketing as email notifications. And that is the inbox that marketers are keen to reach.

 



So where does this all leave us?

Conclusion:
- email is here to stay
- both email usage and number of new accounts are predicted to grow
- those who use social networking tend to check their inboxes almost twice as much as those who don’t and a large majority use this same account for permission marketing

All the above suggests, that email marketing, a highly customisable, powerful and cost effective direct communication tool can still reach large audiences.
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Google’s road to online display advertising

Since Google announced their ‘intention of purchase’ of DoubleClick in April of 2007, CEO Eric Schmidt has been talking about display advertising with great ambition. As he said in the press release following the ‘07 announcement, he believed the DoubleClick acquisition was going to ’accelerate the adoption of Google's innovative advances in display advertising’.

The purchase went through in November 2008, in the press release of which, Schmidt said that ‘DoubleClick gives Google the leading platform for display advertising, enabling [them] to rapidly bring advances to the market in technology and infrastructure that will dramatically improve the effectiveness, measurability and performance of digital media for publishers, advertisers and agencies. In addition he mentioned that ‘the combination of Google and DoubleClick [will] deliver better, more relevant display ads’.

And only last year, at the Morgan Stanley Technology Conference in March 2009 CNN quoted him saying that they are in the process of building an ad exchange that will ‘apply the Google magic’ to placing display advertising online. (additional source Techpulse)

And since Schmidt has implied on many occasion before that display advertising is their next billion dollar business, it’s no surprise that a couple of days ago (February 2010) Google appointed Barry Salzman as Head of Media Platform (including display), who is all about efficiency.

More on that later...
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Advertising in China – 4 tips on how not to break the law

Cultural differences between countries are interesting, intriguing and exploring them are often fun.
Legal differences or something else altogether. Here is a great article by Dan Harris on Advertising Age that explores that in China from an advertising perspective.
The top 4 legal issues that foreign marketers face are:
1. Censorship
2. Corruption
3. Intellectual property
4. Contracts
Read about these in more detail here.
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Murdoch’s paywall gaining popularity among European publishers

And I thought publishers will wait and see if Murdoch succeeds… Instead they are charging (literally) right ahead.

With the ever increasing array of platforms (e-readers, mobile web, smart phone applications, etc.), publishers are jumping on the band wagon to charge for content.

According to eMarketer, new phone launches stole the limelight at this year’s MWC (Mobile World Congress) in Barcelona, with their larger screens and higher resolution, which makes consuming content a much better experience.

’The German publisher Axel Springer has already launched iPhone apps for two of its papers, Bild and Die Welt. Available since December 2009, both now rank in the top 10 selling iPhone apps in Germany, according to ClickandBuy.’ (source: eMarketer) The Guardian’s iPhone App (£2.39) in the UK also enjoyed a successful launch with almost 70,000 downloads in a month.

Paywalls are also becoming commonplace on the web as the Berliner Morgenpost and Hamburger Abendblatt have one already implemented, while others such as the French Le Monde has limited access. .

2010 outlook of digital adspend in Australia

Mass audience migration from traditional media to digital began years ago. Marketing dollars albeit not at the same speed, but have been following suit steadily. This was accelerated recently by the GFC as marketers have become focussed on ROI more than ever.

In fact, in most markets, amid the recession, digital even achieved double digit growth. While in some others single digit, but still growth.

So the optimism and expectation are understandably high. So much so, that according to Paul Fisher, CEO at the IAB (Internet Advertising Bureau), digital’s share of the total ad dollars will equal of the traditional outlets such as TV and print within less than 3 years.

’I expect that by 2013, we will see online, television and newspaper all having about a 23% share of the market.’

Fisher maintains that Search will continue to dominate over Display and will have a double digit growth in 2010 and surpassing the billion dollar mark.
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Blog funnies with a hint of irony…

…on Eclecticity here.
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She secretly loves a bit of a radical

Why wait for Valentine’s Day?

Winter Olympics & internet search tools

Just like everyone takes up tennis in Australia come January (Australian Open), watches the F1 when it’s on in Melbourne in March, internet search results for Winter Olympics will probably be on the rise during the Vancouver Games. People are peculiar.

In preparation the three main search engines, Bing, Yahoo and Google launched a product each to

Searchengineland.com’s ranking based on their thorough review:

1. Bing – gold
Mainly due to their partnership with NBCOlympics, 400 hours of live event coverage, plus 2.5 times that ‘catch up’ content, Bing Visual Search (powered by Silverlight), Bing Map’s Winter Games application with real-time event info, plus a variety of mobile apps.

2. Google – silver
A great new feature is a dedicated site and YouTube channel, real-time news search, and a Games Gadget that can be added to your iGoogle page.

3. Yahoo – bronze
They also launched an official site, gave a boost to regular search results to include Olympics related info, and released a mobile site.

With all these tools at hand, the only thing left for us to do is to sit back and enjoy…
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Toyota’s mistakes and the real lesson

Until recently, Toyota was the glorious example of how to build a brand. The company redefined success while it learned, perfected its product and slowly but steadily grew share against the US car manufacturing giants since their first and humble launch of the not so successful Toyopet in the US in 1958. Since than Toyota has become one of the largest and most successful car manufacturer with a shiny and spotless reputation, quality and brand.

And then disaster struck, as one faulty car after the other hit the media headlines. They now face an unprecedented recall of millions of cars.
Will this be the end of Toyota? Certainly not. The brand is still upheld by decades’ worth of strong reputation. Damage has been caused of course, but what’s the real lesson?

Quality over quantity – in the race to the top Toyota has started compromising and cutting corners. Now they are paying the price.
Have a crisis plan – can you believe that a car giant like Toyota, a global company didn’t have one? Well they didn’t. People want the company take responsibility and show remorse.
Act on your crisis plan – when things go wrong, take control of the problem and offer a solution.
Face up to it – we all make mistakes. Admit to it, fix what you can and don’t make the same mistake again. Toyota was in denial for not days or weeks, but months and even years.

Toyota failed on all of these accounts and more.
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Accents and choices of identity

Although I left my country of birth over ten years ago, and spoke English every single day since, I still have one. And I bet you have one, too – in fact as this article explains, we all have one… Accent.

For someone who is forever making an effort to polish theirs (English), I found this comment, from Felicity Cox, a doctor of linguistics at Sydney's Macquarie University, intriguing: "Accent is about identity, about group membership and how we want to express ourselves". 

Furthermore, while we are influenced by what we hear, she stresses that we make a conscious choice about our accents, which she coins "communicative accommodation". In Dr Cox’s words, "you accommodate with people you want to identify with and be like".

We have the choice to decide who we are. And one of the ways we do that is through our accents.
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Social media translated

I really liked this post by CulturalOffering.com on Social media policies

”I return to my long-held online analogies:  I consider a blog to be like a coffee shop conversation - the parties choose to engage by going to the shop. Twitter is more like a conversation in a crowded bar with informal comments streaming by, while Facebook is conversation at a private cocktail party since we are invited, and must accept that invitation before engaging in the conversation.”
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Why wait?

Mr. Bate, you did it again!
what a simple yet groundbreaking idea:
Why wait for Valentine’s Day?
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Davos 2010

As it was expected, the main topic at this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos was on the global economic outlook.
Among the numerous articles that covered the event, I particularly liked Martin Wolf, the Financial Times’ chief economics commentator’s recent piece that shed more light on some of the key trends (t. What the world must do to sustain its convalescence).
Here is an excerpt:

’So what did I make of this year’s annual meeting of the World Economic Forum at Davos?
(…)
The big questions for this year are how quickly to withdraw the monetary and fiscal stimulus and which should be withdrawn first.
(…)
Yet exit is merely the most immediate challenge. Two somewhat longer-term tasks lie ahead: financial sector reform and durable rebalancing of demand in the world economy.
(…)
But far too many countries are relying on export-led growth as the way to balance their withdrawal of domestic stimulus. This is a recipe for stagnation. The Earth cannot, after all, hope to run current account surpluses with the people of Mars.’

And that last paragraph, my thoughts exactly. How on Earth (literally) will developed countries’ economies recover with a lack of local manufacturing and without raising export tariffs? Surely, developed countries cannot continue to buy cheap BRIC produced goods forever? The BRICs don’t buy European or US made cars, white goods, machinery, electrics, etc. – or do they? One sided trade will not pull the world out of recession. I truly believe that a recovery will require a concerted effort and a rebalancing of the global economy.
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Display media & the magic 22% lift in ROI

I just watched Young-Bean Song’s, senior director at Microsoft Advertising Institute, OMMA keynote speech – highly recommended for all marketing and advertising professionals who are either side of the display media field – selling or buying.

A few interesting notes I took down while listening:

- Marketers have increasingly been concentrating on the end bit of the purchase funnel: where the ‘ROI’ happens. However, there is a whole lot of value before this point; and the next 2-3 years will be about revealing this value that’s already there.

- According to a research conducted by the Atlas Institute, the median number of touchpoints before the purchase is almost 14. Which means that there are some which happen after 1 or 2, but some visitors need twice as much touchpoints, such as 28 or even more, before the actual purchase takes place.

- So there are various touchpoints before the conversion. People are
Multiple advertising messages reach people before they make up their mind and decide to purchase. Yet affiliate and search marketing gets rewarded most.

- There is a ‘magic number’ to assist in this argument. According to the above mentioned research by the Atlas Institute, the overall lift in conversion rates when an advertising message reaches consumers higher up in the funnel, and not only at the end is 22%.

But watch it for yourself, as no one conveys this message quite as well as Young-Bean himself: 

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