As long as there are brands looking to connect with consumers, and audiences of online content and services, then the internet will always provide a fertile ground for marketers, economic crisis or not.
2008 is coming to a close and everyone is freaking out about 2009.
The press, the trades, your company's finance department, and just about anyone you speak to is obsessed with the worst economic crisis to hit in 80 years. Some believe digital marketing will weather the storm well, others feel it will be hit just as hard as other media, and there have even been those who feel digital marketing will suffer more than traditional marketing.
I'll leave the prognosticating around the macroeconomic trends for digital marketing to others and try to avoid adding to that noisy debate.
Instead, I think it is important to remind ourselves of a rather simple and undeniable truth that cuts through it all, simply, that people love the internet. They do.
More and more people love the internet every day. And the people that already love the internet find more reasons to love it all the time. This may seem obvious, but as you fret about the future of digital budgets in these troubled times, it can be easy to forget.
Of course it isn't really the internet per se that they love. What they love is the communication, connecting, socializing, interacting, entertaining, informing, creating, sharing, and expressing that the internet enables.
Figuring out how to make money, promote a brand, build customer relationships, and generate business from people's love of the internet is of course the challenge, and with potentially tightening marketing budgets, cut backs at publishers, and lower consumer spending in general, it is going to be more of a challenge than ever.
But as long as there are brands looking to connect with consumers, and audiences of online content and services, then the internet will always provide a fertile ground for marketers, economic crisis or not.
In 2008 we saw the unrelenting advance of digital media into the mainstream, but we also got a preview of the monetization challenges that could come to a head in 2009.
In 2008 in the Asia Pacific region, the action of course was in China where major international and local brands put their first significant dollars against digital marketing in support of Olympic campaigns. Early in the year, China jumped to the number one spot in the world with an online audience of over 250 million users, leading the rapid growth in the region as Asia Pacific countries barrel towards an expected 40 percent of the world's online population by 2010 according to comScore.
Another impressive China number that made marketers salivate was the over 615 million mobile phone subscribers, more than 84 million of whom use their phones to access the internet according to China's Ministry of Industry and Information. The APAC region also boasted a 119 percent year-over-year growth in the usage of social networking sites (SNS) in 2008, twice the global average according to comScore.
However, like the rest of the world, the region struggled to find a way to leverage these impressive mobile and SNS user statistics for the purposes of marketing.
Throughout 2008, social networking sites attempted to monetize themselves, working against dissatisfaction with basic banners and hit-and-miss attempts at more involved brand integration. In the end, brands originally excited about the SNS space have been left questioning the platform, despite the massive role SNS play in audiences' lives.
Social networking sites were not alone in the paradox of having huge audiences and buzz with little practical and scalable monetization. 2008 was not "mobile's year" either as some had predicted. Mobile still suffered from a landscape of multiple platforms and standards, unclear value chains, and no killer famous success examples (basically, mobile needs its own "Subservient Chicken").
There were however a few developments in the mobile industry that did point the way to a positive future for its role in marketing. The first was the introduction of Apple's App Store that opened the door for branded utility applications and sponsored tools and content. While successful in the United States and Europe, the jury is still out on the App Store in Asia.
Another move that the jury is still out on is Nokia's significant foray into the mobile content space through its online music services and investments in advertising platforms. Nokia's evolution from a just a maker of little boxes with buttons and screens to a content and service provider is a risky move which could open up huge possibilities for them and ultimately change many of the existing business models around mobile services.
Another sign of progress in 2008 in the mobile space was the aggressive moves made in Japan and Korea around phones with embedded payment technology. While these payment approaches have more to do with offline transactions, keep an eye on them in 2009 as marketers look to use such technologies to bridge the gap between the digital world and the retail world.
These two facets of digital life, SNS and mobile, which embody so well what people love about the internet, could find themselves at a crossroads in 2009. Tightening budgets and a greater emphasis on measurement and ROI might just be the pressure needed for them to deliver in 2009 and ultimately pave the path for their ongoing business models.
Jason Kuperman is Omnicom Group's vice-president for digital development in Asia Pacific.