The dirty 30s and advertising your way through 2011+

Back in April 2008, Russell Johnston wrote a great article on "Marketing". The article - Opportunity Knocks - tells a great story about the horrors of the Great Depression, and the actions of advertisers.

At its worst point, in 1933, more than one in four Canadians was out of work and the average farm income dropped to less than half its peak from the 1920s.

... radio experienced phenomenal growth despite the hard economic times. From 1928 to 1933-the year before the crash to the depth of the Depression-the number of licensed sets in Canada almost tripled to 763,000. ... the actual number of sets might have been closer to one million ... Radio offered one winning advantage during the depression: once a set was purchased, the programs were free. If you could build a crystal radio, the sets themselves were free.

... the trick of radio advertising lay not in the medium itself but in the careful pairing of product with program.

Fast forward a few years (okay about 80 years), and here we are with more new media in our hands.  The web is getting old, and it is being quickly eclipsed by the small-screen  (a.k.a. the third screen) mobile browsing.  Is this the radio of our generation?  It's a great place to be (and generally pretty cheap) in this economic time.  There is also plenty of opportunity to pair with a product with a "program" - also known as an "app".

Lesson #2 from the Great Depression - Look for opportunities and be relevant.

Are you reading this blog on a small screen?

Did you know that the US is now the #1 consumer of mobile browsing? I wouldn't have guessed it, but the February 2009 mobile browsing rankings compiled by Bango are:

• USA 29.3%
• UK 20.3%
• India 11.1%
• Indonesia 5.5%
• South Africa 5.4%
• ...
• Portugal 1.2%
  
• Sweden 1.1%
  
• and on, and on, and on.

To put that in some context for Canadians ... South Africa has a population of about 44 million. Portugal 10 million, Sweden has a population 9 million. Canada has a population of 33 million. Yet, we don't even rank in this report. Well - I assume we are lumped in with the 198 other countries that make up the 21.6% of mobile browsing traffic.

Why haven't Canadians hit the mobile web yet? It isn't due to a lack of mobile handsets that can browse the web. It is more to do with the outrageous fees that our mobile service providers are charging.

Some interesting statements in the report on MarketingCharts.com:

"Bango also said that this growth in traffic is being matched by a corresponding growth in users paying for content on the mobile web, in part because of publicity behind the Apple iPhone, as well as increasingly improving payment experiences that encourage more people to buy mobile content.

"Though the use of the mobile web is growing quickly, the increase in mobile browsing has taken many businesses by surprise, Bango noted, adding that a large number of companies do not yet have mobile websites.

"The statistics also show that while some countries such as India and Indonesia have a good appetite for browsing on their mobiles, it doesn’t always convert into purchases. In fact, only five countries in the Top 10 browsing chart are also in the Top 10 payments chart - USA, UK, Portugal, South Africa and Spain.

"No matter how high the browsing rate, it is only converted into a high purchase rate where people have a good disposable income and can pay for content on their phone bills, Bango said. In regions such as India, South Africa, Indonesia and Egypt the driver for mobile browsing is a lack of fixed-line broadband and PCs for accessing the internet which means that the mobile device is the only way people can get onto the internet."

For Marketers in the US this report should convince you of the immediate imperative to optimize your website for mobile browsing, and also to start measuring mobile traffic. Perhaps you should check out Bango for the analytics component.

For Marketers in Canada (and the rest of the world) this report should remind you that:

1. The world is round. If some of the 245 million people from the US currently access your site through the web, you can bet they are also visiting it from their mobile devices.
   
2. The wave will hit. It is only a matter of a time before our wireless service providers drop their outrageous fees and Canucks follow the behaviour patterns of the rest of the world. We will be doing some heavy mobile browsing and spending in short order.
   

Trends for 2009: #21. Things that will be a flop (again).

Rejoice, rejoice! This is the last Marketing Trend I see for 2009. To that end, it isn't really even a trend. It is actually a "counter-trend." Anyhow ... on with it.

Here are a couple of things that I think won't reach maturity (again) this year. There is a load of hype around these items, but not a lot of knowledge, practice, or user saturation. At least not enough to make them really usable or useful.

• Analytics: Here's something very important. But, it isn't useful because companies have to invest a lot of effort into setting up, performing, and analyzing numbers in order to begin to understand what the analytics are showing them. Then (yes only then) can they take action on them. By the time you kick off a project to do anything with the analytics, it will be 2010 or 2011, your IT department will have other things going on, you probably won't be in your role anymore, and your replacement will be looking for their own cool project. So, while analyics is very important, there are few organizations that have the fortitude to really do analytics, and very few good people in place to actually build and understand analytics.
• Mobile Marketing: If you've been listening to people in the mobile industry then you may be under the perception that Mobile Marketing is going to rocket next year. Don't fall for it. It won't. Advertisers are still largely ignorant of Search Engine Marketing (which, ironically, is likely the easiest advertising and most effective media going). How are they ever going to figure out Mobile! Besides, mobile browsing is so expensive in North America that consumers don't want to download or click on ads. Mobile Marketing will continue its slow uphill march to effectiveness. So - if you are in advertising ... don't look to mobile advertising as a white knight.

Will I be right? The year will tell!

• Follow this blog and watch for the next marketing trends I'm forecasting for 2009.
• Feel free to contact Market GoGo to discuss this further.

NOTE: Sometime in the coming week I'm going to summarize all of the Marketing Trends I see for 2009, and also summarize all of the strategies. I haven't got that all pulled together yet, and it is going to be interesting to see what it all looks like.