Advertising is changing very rapidly nowadays. To a big extent, this is connected to social media becoming increasingly popular online content. On one hand, consumers have more control over what they want or don’t want to see, not only on TV but especially online – spam filters, pop-up blockers and other tools give internet users the capability to select the content they are watching. On the other hand, the audiences become more and more fragmented due to the variety of media available. Especially for teenagers, internet and social networking sites become more a common entertainment medium than TV.
Because of that, advertising has to become more creative. It needs to offer higher entertainment value and more variations of the same ad, which – to be possible – must go along with lower costs of producing advertising. These points are connected to social media. Social media has already made tools available that allow consumers to create their own content through much cheaper methods than those used by professional agencies (e.g. video making). These users’ and semi professionals’ content is incredibly creative and more and more visible via services like Current TV, which pays users for videos the company decides to air, or Pitch It, which launches campaigns and asks users to create videos about the topic of the campaign.
According to an IBM study, in European countries like the UK or Germany, ca. 35% internet users visit user generated content sites and ca. 10% of these visitors contribute to them. Consumers are not only creating content, they also influence the choices of other consumers regarding which content to view – 32% of YouTube users are watching particular videos because they were recommended to them by their friends.
Marketers have been trying to engage blogs, networks and discussion forums knowing that social media has the biggest power of creating consumer evangelists from all types of media. A recent study compares spending and gain on different types of media collecting these interesting findings:
- The media costs to deliver 500,000 consumers who are informed about a product range from 400K (television) to $200K (print) to $160K (WOM).
- The media costs to deliver 50,000 consumers who indicate purchase intent range from $2M (television) to $300K (print) to $150K (WOM).
- One WOM conversation carries the impact of 200 television ads.
It is of course impressive how much more impact can be achieved at such a lower cost, but the last and most important part of the changing advertising landscape is the possibility to measure the impact of social media campaigns. Using social media monitoring services allows marketers to not only to identify influential bloggers, platforms and the like that should be targeted with the content achieving the most impact but also to measure how responsive they are to the offered advertising content, if they are spreading the ads, and if so, to which audiences.