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7 Advertising And Lead Generation Trends To Watch

The electronics company LG recently had an ad pulled from Australian TV stations for a new TV recording device. The commercial touted the benefits of being able to skip commercials.

The original ad featured a line that would have had universal appeal to TV viewers: “When you replay, you can skip the ads.” But after the commercial and pay TV networks refused to run it LG recut it to include the considerably less catchy line: “And when you replay, you can skip straight back to the action.”

The television networks won the battle, but it is obvious that consumers will win the war and they will be the ones able to choose whether or not to watch these commercials in the future.

1. Product placement, sponsors and ads that aren’t ads.

I’ve recently been watching an HBO Drama The Wire and one thing that caught my eye is the omnipresence of Heineken beer, usually featured with the label nicely facing the camera. Obviously some moolah is changing hands there. I’ve also lived in Japan, where I swear almost everything on TV is an ad. Whenever a product, place or event is favourably reviewed, you can bet dollars to doughnuts that money is involved (a fact that is almost never disclosed). Me, I prefer journalistic impartiality, but that’s clearly on the way out.

2. Targeted ad messages.

Following the inevitable rise of TV recording technology, some industry experts have commented that advertising is not dead, but that advertisers will be forced to target their ads more precisely at viewers to make them want to watch the ads.It’s also fairly easy to conceive of a system that serves ads according to individual viewer habits and preferences, perhaps on a “pay per impression” or pay per action” model (mmmm? the Google Adwords of TV marketing?)While this concept would obviously be many times more effective than current mass-broadcast technology, it’s still “push” marketing. While there’s some mileage in this concept, search-based marketing is likely to return higher conversion rates and ROI (cf. Google Adwords Search conversion rates vs Content conversion rates – search is almost always higher).

3. The rise of education-based lead generation and marketing.

Companies are increasingly in the business of giving away (or even selling) audio files, DVDs, white papers, reports and other informational products which allow marketing departments to generate leads while being able to focus the bulk of their efforts on highly targeted marketing campaigns. I myself am now running a number of lead generation campaigns for companies who once wouldn’t have been at all interested in these sorts of direct marketing efforts.

4. Accountable, by-the-metrics marketing will become an imperative.

Any business which does not use accountable, cost effective marketing can count on losing business to the competition. These strategies are coming into use both on and off of the web.

5. Public relations and spin will out-perform calculated brand-building campaigns.

Making products and services into news will be a skill for which companies will pay handsomely.

6. Even narrower niches.

Gaining greater “share of mind” will become even more difficult, and we can expect more focus on more highly-specialised niche markets as opposed to line-extension or diversification strategies.

7. Blue Ocean Strategies.

You can bet that companies are going to spend more of their time and resources on trying to carve out a space in the market where they can dominate rather than trying to go head to head with the competition fighting over a shrinking share of the public at large. This will be the challenge.

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