Our editor at large reports on Black Friday, Cyber Monday, new ad spending numbers and more of the week's events.
As the online senate gets ready to go West for the iMedia Agency Summit next week, the industry didn't disappoint in giving us a whole lot of topics to discuss. First off, last week the IAB released their Q3 tally that put the interactive ad industry at a record $3.1 billion, making it the highest quarter reported and the first time that quarterly revenues surpassed $3 billion. At this rate, we're looking to exceed $12 billion for the whole year, well above last year's record total of $9.6 billion. High fives all around, folks!
Actually, at the 2005 Piper Jaffray Online Advertising and Search Symposium in New York yesterday, Safa Rashtchy, managing director and senior internet analyst, said his team predicts the overall 2005 totals to surpass $13 billion. He also said that by 2010, we're going to reach almost $55.1 billion worldwide, with the United States making up more than half of that. He also said that online advertising and search will draw from both direct marketing and branding budgets, with the online share of overall ad budgets moving toward the 10 percent mark. Additionally, Piper Jaffray predicts that full motion video ads will begin to displace TV commercials and that targeting will take over and advertisers will increasingly switch to one-to-one marketing.
Speaking of video ads, the IAB this week released the final version of their broadband video commercial guidelines, which, as I said back in May when the guidelines were first proposed, leave a lot to be desired. Still, as iMedia's Roger Park reported, the IAB says that these guidelines will improve efficiency and ease of planning, buying and creating online media while developing ad content that is accepted by many interactive publishers. Sadly, I have nothing to add to my previous rant about the inadequacy of this effort, and I won't bore you with repetition. Suffice it to say, I doubt this offering will in any significant way impact internet video advertising spending, which eMarketer predicts will triple to $640 million in 2007 from this year's $225 million in the United States.
Speaking of eMarketer, they also said this week that B2B marketers are increasingly shifting their budgets toward digital media, with 49 percent of them currently using the web for advertising purposes.
On the consumer side, it's worth mentioning that for the third year in a row, Thanksgiving Day registered as the peak day of the year for online retailers and surpassing Black Friday as the busiest day in market share of visits to online stores. According to Hitwise, an index of 100 leading online retailers showed an 18.8 percent growth in visits on Thanksgiving Day 2005 versus Thanksgiving Day 2004, and a 20.9 percent increase in visits on Black Friday 2005 versus the same time last year.
One of the sites realizing the greatest increase in visits during the holiday weekend was Walmart.com. For the first time since Hitwise began tracking U.S. internet users in 2003, Walmart.com has surpassed Amazon.com in market share of visits. Walmart.com nearly doubled its market share of visits by 98 percent from Wednesday, November 23, 2005 to Thanksgiving Day, registering one of the largest increases in the Hitwise Shopping & Classifieds category. Amazon.com registered a 20 percent increase during the same time frame.
Black Friday wasn't the biggest shopping day of the year, though. Cyber Monday was. (Yes, there's a name for the Monday after Thanksgiving now.) According to Nielsen/NetRatings' Holiday eShopping Index, Cyber Monday outpaced Black Friday in online shopping with 15 percent more traffic. eBay, Amazon.com, Wal-Mart, Target, Overstock.com, Dell, Shopping.com, BestBuy.com, Netflix , Shopzilla.com and CircuitCity.com rounded out the top visited sites. I can't say I'm surprised. You didn't really expect people to do any actual work the first day back to work from a four-day break, did you?
In dollars, year-to-year online spending rose 26 percent on the Monday after Thanksgiving, according to comScore, which calculated that purchases for the Thanksgiving weekend totaled $485 million versus $386 million last year.
Finally -- and apropos of very little -- a tidbit about experiential marketing and Gen Y. A new study says that today's tweens, teens and college students, who make up nearly a third of the U.S. population and have an estimated $170 billion in spending power, are increasingly unreachable through traditional mass media. According to Jack Morton Worldwide, "millennials," as they are also called, are highly fragmented in their viewing habits, huge fans of TiVo and spamblockers and are very skeptical of "hard sell" tactics.
No news there, but the researchers found that to tap into this critically important demographic, marketers should invest in nontraditional marketing events that reach Gen Y face-to-face, "weaving products and brands into lifestyle activities that today's young consumers value and welcome."
Data showed that millennials respond strongly to live marketing events, which they prefer over TV and internet advertising. Apparently, 70 percent of respondents said experiential marketing is extremely or very influential on their opinion of a product or brand and 65 percent of 13- to 23-year-olds surveyed say that participating in an event would cause them to act more quickly to purchase a product.
The conclusion? Throw more parties! The source? An event-planning agency, of course!
Sheesh!
Next week I promise to bring you more actionable information from the iMedia Agency Summit.
iMedia Connection Editor at Large Masha Geller is the founder of interactive marketing and corporate communications consultancy Geller Public Relations in New York. She has been covering the interactive advertising industry since 1999 as the former editor in chief of MediaPost.com, and is a widely-published thought leader in the interactive arena.