The internet is everywhere, garnering a good chunk of consumers'
attention. That automatically means that marketers should sit up and
take notice; but the real test for many will be whether the internet is
diverting consumer attention away from other media. If it is, then
adspend is sure to follow.
According to figures produced on behalf of Yahoo! by BMRB's TGI and
BMRB's Internet Monitor, the average internet user now spends eight
hours per week using the medium. The same average internet user spends
15.7 hours watching television, 11.7 hours listening to the radio, four
hours reading newspapers and 3.3 hours reading magazines - more than
their non-internet using counterparts. The research also indicates that
Yahoo!'s UK site has a bigger and more upmarket audience than any
broadsheet newspaper; nearly 30 per cent of ABC1s in the UK access
Yahoo! sites at least once a week.
And the upmarket bias among internet users in general is still there,
according to BMRB: 69 per cent are ABC1s, compared with 50 per cent of
the population as a whole.
"Television, newspaper, cinema and radio consumption are all higher
among internet users," says BMRB's senior associate director, Paul
Milsom. "That's partly to do with demographics - internet users are
still younger, more upmarket and better educated than non-internet
users, and that's likely to make them bigger media consumers."
And while the gender bias may be disappearing, with women now making up
44 per cent of British internet users, the age profile is still heavily
biased towards youth: 73 per cent of users are under-45, compared with
52 per cent of the whole population. The profile of internet users is
getting closer to the profile of the whole population, but it's
happening gradually, and there's still a long way to go.
Those demographics mean that internet users are bigger media consumers
on a macro level. But on an individual basis, according to BMRB's
Internet Monitor, people that use the internet more tend to use other
media less; as internet use rises, consumption of other media, and in
particular TV, falls.
Research from Jupiter MMXI reaches the same conclusion. In the UK, 20
per cent of internet users said they watched less TV, 12 per cent said
they read magazines less, and 11 per cent said they read newspapers
less.
In the US, cannibalisation of TV viewing leaps to a startling 44 per
cent.
Radio has tended to suffer less than other media up to now because it
has been largely a complementary medium. However, in the post-Napster
era, that's likely to change, especially as broadband proliferates;
there will simply be far more music options on the internet and on PCs
than on radio, and possibilities that radio doesn't have, such as
personalisation and video.
You'd expect use of traditional media to fall as use of the internet
grows. But that would be to assume that overall media consumption levels
remain roughly the same, and history shows us that isn't true. As media
choices proliferate, consumption rises. TV didn't kill off radio, for
example, and the availability of home videos had the perverse effect of
increasing cinema consumption. The issue then becomes whether the
internet increases overall media consumption enough for traditional
media use to hold steady, or whether it eats into it.
In the US, Viacom recently produced statistics claiming to show that in
the youth sector, the average person consumes 27 hours of media in a
given 24- hour period; there's always room for more media to be
consumed.
Manning Gottlieb's head of new media, Jean-Paul Edwards, believes that
the internet is the least of traditional media's worries. "My feeling is
that it's probably complementary," he says. "There are far bigger
factors cannibalising traditional media such as ambient media. The
internet is an information-based medium and it's less interruptive, so
it cannibalises other media a lot less."
Yet evidence exists showing that adspend is following consumer eyeballs
on to the internet. Zenith Media Worldwide puts it at just under 3 per
cent of total adspend globally. The company's chairman and chief
executive, John Perriss, comments: "It's still growing faster than any
other medium year-on-year. There's a quite a lot of money being spent,
but it's still a small percentage of total adspend."
Jupiter MMXI agrees with Zenith's figures as far as the US is concerned,
putting internet adspend there in 2000 at 2.9 per cent of the total. But
in the UK, the research group puts the figure at just 1.1 per cent.
Across Europe, it puts it at 1.2 per cent, with Sweden the highest
spender - 5.4 per cent of the country's adspend last year was on the
internet. Jupiter predicts that the UK figure will rise to 1.4 per cent
in 2001.
"In terms of adspend, there has been cannibalisation," Manning
Gottlieb's Edwards comments. "It's only really a two- to three-year-old
market. To take 2 to 3 per cent of advertising spend in that time is
quite impressive.
"But the internet has been taking a share of a growing market, and we'll
have to see how it does now that we're in a recessionary market. People
know about TV, and they'll always do it - no one ever got sacked for
making a TV ad. They're happy to experiment with the internet in a
growing market, but now they're worried about their jobs.
"There'll be a small increase in the overall size of the market this
year. But for companies that spend a lot of money on advertising, spend
has been gradually increasing. They didn't boom in 1999 and 2000, but
neither is there a bust now.
"The big media owners will increasingly command more of the spend. In
the UK, I expect there will be a big ten or 12."
In line with Zenith, the research company eMarketer puts the internet
cut of overall adspend at 2.91 per cent in 2000. The company predicts
that this will grow to 8.14 per cent by 2005. Over-optimistic
predictions of online advertising's growth have been commonplace up to
now, but eMarketer's projected figure requires compound market growth of
less than 30 per cent each year - eminently possible at the current
rate.
eMarketer points to the youth of the online advertising market.
Advertisers are still in the experimental stage, the company argues; as
they become more experienced, growth will be fuelled by improvements in
targeting, creative and reporting, and by proper integration of online
and offline advertising.
But the days of 100 per cent year-on- year growth have passed. The
exponential growth curve has naturally slackened off; as the market
grows, it becomes difficult to sustain. But growth is still strong: for
2002, it has been variously predicted as being between 25 per cent
(Zenith Media) up to 59 per cent (Morgan Stanley). Even if it's at the
lower end of that range, it's still a sector growing faster than any
other.
As eMarketer suggests, however, a lot of that spending is
experimental.
And that frequently means that it doesn't come from marketing budgets;
it comes from a separate "digital" budget. According to the Yahoo! UK &
Ireland commercial director, Lee Thompson, that's a key reason why
advertising on the internet hasn't taken off to a greater extent.
"If you look at traditional, marketing-led companies, the digital budget
and the marketing budget are independent of each other. Some have
changed, but 60 to 80 per cent of major clients have a separate budget,"
he says.
"So there are structural problems that we face. We're not competing for
part of the marketing budget, but of a much smaller digital budget. I'd
much rather there was a single budget, and the internet was viewed as
just one channel among many.
"If it's not integrated, then there's no chance for the internet to
prove itself in parallel with other media. Unlike all other media, the
internet doesn't benefit from the synergies of integrated media.
"It's true at the agency level as well as the client level. You can't
compare them, because they're not planned together, and they're not
tracked together."
A Jupiter MMXI study carried out in July partly backs up the view that
internet budgets are generally separate from marketing budgets. It
looked at more than 100 of the UK's top traditional media advertisers,
and found that 40 per cent of them didn't advertise online at all. Of
those that did, 50 per cent had a separate digital budget; direct
marketing budgets were the next most popular source of digital spend,
with advertising budgets trailing behind.
"It reflects where that group of advertisers are," Jupiter MMXI's
European online advertising analyst, Staffan Engdegard, says. "More of
them are going online now, and over the next couple of years they'll
work out how to use it better. Procter & Gamble recently announced that
it was cutting its global adspend by more than 10 per cent because it
could find more efficiencies in direct marketing and the internet -
these companies know about spending efficiently. Clients are moving over
to proper budgets, rather than experimental ones."
As the Jupiter MMXI study found, where online advertising spend does
come from marketing budgets, it tends to be from direct marketing.
Zenith's Perriss comments: "Fundamentally, the internet has turned out
to be an addition to the menu of platforms available to clients. It's
found its place at the direct marketing end of things, because that's
how clients want to use it. In the US, we've folded our interactive
agency into our direct marketing agency."
The pigeon-holing of online advertising under DM may be a function of
its need to justify itself, according to Thompson. "People have
different aims, but it's easier to see it as a direct response use of
spend," he says. "People who want to prove that it works look to direct
response, because there are numbers you can use to try to prove it.
"It varies by marketing director. Some of them understand that the
internet works on a number of different levels, and it can fit anywhere
within the marketing mix."
Even when marketers have tried to apply traditional marketing principles
to the internet, the results haven't often been impressive. According to
Jupiter MMXI's Engdegard, that's because frequently, they're
inappropriate.
"There are problems when it comes to branding campaigns and people using
the mass-marketing model," he says. "You get fragmented reach - mass
reach isn't the same on the internet as other media.
"It will take a lot of time before we have benchmarks and best
practices. With other media, it's all there; you know the best practice
for a launch, a brand campaign, a relaunch or whatever. It will take
time for those benchmarks to be in place on the internet."
People measuring the wrong thing has led to a lack of faith in the
internet's ability to deliver results - another reason why online
adspend hasn't been higher. Thompson has several other theories why the
internet doesn't command a greater percentage of overall spend.
"It's partly a function of time - it hasn't been around long enough -
and of a misperception that it's a fringe medium," he says. "Also,
people think that it's unproven, and it is in part, but there's a
growing body of research which shows that it's effective. There's also a
misperception about the level of targeting that's possible.
"What that adds up to is a view that the internet doesn't have its own
value proposition. We haven't been able to determine the value
proposition because we have had problems evaluating its real
effectiveness. Clickthrough has been a treacherous metric for the
industry. People forget that it's a medium of influence, and that it
drives a lot of offline sales. When you include those, the cost per sale
per lead reduces significantly."
He identifies several things that online media owners and the internet
industry need to do in order to command more spend. "We quickly need to
ramp up the number of case studies that show it being successful," he
says.
"If 98 per cent of media is planned according to a reasonably comparable
set of metrics, which broadly speaking are reach and frequency, then we
need to come up with a single trading currency that allows the internet
to be bought in a more comparable way. We need to fall in line with the
way other media is being planned. Media research should be a key engine
driving industry growth. Every other medium has a single means of
measurement, and the frightening thing is that we don't.
"We need to abolish the myth of clickthrough, we need a more forceful
industry body with better representation, marketing departments need to
bring it all under a single budget, and agencies need to integrate.
"The onus is as much on advertisers as media owners to prove it works.
It's about efficient use of media - if it works, then it makes sense for
people to divert more spend online. What we all need to do now is focus
less on the issues and more on the solutions. Over the coming months,
Yahoo! will take the lead on this."
David Patton, the vice-president of marketing for Sony Computer
Entertainment Europe, says he's doing precisely that. "What we're seeing
is a massive fragmentation of media, which ultimately is causing a
dilution of TV spend," he says. "The impact of the internet is
significant. Eventually, something like PlayStation will be delivering
most of its content online. Increasingly, it's the way we seek to
educate and entertain our consumers.
"If you look at TV audiences, they're reducing on a month-by-month
basis. TV and the internet complement each other, but the balance is
shifting significantly in favour of the internet."
But Patton doesn't see the internet cannibalising traditional media in
the sense that spend moves from offline to online advertising. Instead,
the company is allocating budgets to making playstation.com and its
other sites destinations in their own right.
Not everyone has properties that they can turn into destinations. But
marketers with high-information, high-involvement products could move
away from advertising on third-party media, and towards a situation
where the brand's web site is like a media property in its own right.
Patton claims that people visiting the company's sites are happy to
consume marketing messages and they end up seeing the company's ads more
often than they would on TV.
"People are going to a site such as iamthewolfman.com, downloading our
commercial and sending it on. There's no better endorsement than that.
Also, it's a more personal type of communication, so it means that one
ad does not serve all," Patton says. "Traditionally, we did one brand
commercial in the run-up to Christmas; this year, we're producing seven.
We'll put them all on the internet, but not all of them will go onto
TV."
Cannibalisation will cease to be on the agenda if the long-vaunted
convergence of interactive services, such as the internet with TV,
finally happens.
Zenith's Perriss believes that the internet won't command more spend
until it's more TV-like. "The single largest reason it hasn't taken off
more is because it's so slow," he says. "Until the infrastructure is
there to make the internet faster, it won't happen.
"The PC's not a user-friendly medium for entertainment. There's got to
be a quantum leap: the PC has to be in the living room, and there has to
be a merging of the PC and the TV. The consumer benefit isn't so great
that people will put up with boxes stacked on top of each other."
The converse argument is that the internet is capable of being so much
more than an ersatz version of TV.
Its promise is, and always has been, more about interactivity and
engagement with target consumers at critical times than about bombarding
people with messages. The internet is the experience itself, rather than
traditional media advertising's invitation to an experience.
But if the two do become more similar, says Manning Gottlieb's Edwards,
it may not be the internet that suffers: "Online won't kill TV, but TV
will become a lot more like online advertising - you won't be able to
tell the difference between them. And the lessons we've learnt in the
online space will have more value in the networked, multi-channel world
than the lessons TV buyers have learned.
"Once online spend starts getting big enough to hit other media, things
will be bruising. We're quite bad at doing what they do, but they're
very bad at doing what we do."
This could be the greatest hope for the internet boosting its share of
adspend: that it comes out of its ghetto and is integrated with
traditional media at a technology level. Then it will integrate at a
planning level, meaning that audience cannibalisation will no longer be
an issue.
nPOWER BATS FOR MORE CUSTOMERS ON YAHOO!
You may associate coverage of cricket with the sports pages of a quality
broadsheet newspaper. But more and more sports fans want
up-to-the-minute results as well as the ability to tune in live to a
match.
So if you're sat at your desk in your lunch hour and desperate to find
out the latest, Yahoo! Sports can deliver it to you in the time it takes
for you to log on.
Recognising this as an attractive proposition to reach its target
market, nPower sponsored The Ashes cricket tournament on Yahoo! Sport
and boosted its brand awareness and attributes enormously. The utilities
brand took a three-pronged approach:
- Through a straightforward sponsorship deal for the Test Series, nPower
brought users of Yahoo! Sport the latest results as well as running
sports polls asking users to name their man of the match at Lord's.
While users were engaged in that, nPower also offered them the ability
to calculate their savings on a combined gas and electricity deal,
backing up its TV campaign with the same message.
- nPower hosted a Test Cricket Game which attracted 80,000 players and
boosted traffic to the site itself by 2,000 per cent. nPower and Yahoo!
also teamed up with Mazda to offer users the chance to win a Mazda car
after they had taken the Power test during the Ashes match at
Lord's.
- nPower ran cricket auctions which engaged users and kept them active
on the site.
Through its partnership with Yahoo!, and by using a consistent and
relevant approach to its brand marketing, nPower has reduced its cost
per customer acquisition by 60 per cent and is currently planning
further online activity.
