Last Friday was the day after Thanksgiving in the United States – a holiday for most, but for retailers, essential. It is by far the busiest shopping day of the year in the USA; this is the day that can make or break the Christmas retail season.
Not surprisingly, women are doing the bulk of the shopping. But one surprising statistic is 91% of those women enquire with friends and family beforehand about the best places to shop, and the best things to buy.
These essential women (25-54 yrs old) have very little time for traditional advertising, and tend not to believe it. What they do believe is their influential friends, who they perceive to be experts in a particular segment of retail. It’s a perfect and important cross between word-of-mouth and influencers.
Read the results of the survey by Ketchum.
Turns out the most powerful man in television isn’t the President of ABC, or an anchorman on CNN. Instead, it’s Brian Selter, a 21 year old university student who writes the blog www.tvnewser.com.
One might ask, how can a blogger, whose exam schedule interrupts his job, carry so much weight? That’s the world we live in now, where traditional journalists are no longer opinion-setters, but merely the followers of the real trend-setters: the public.
Mr. Selter’s blog is certainly not the most outstanding piece of written word ever conceived – instead, his strength lies in the creation of word-of-mouth among the ‘right’ people in the television industry. Now those people come to his blog for news before anywhere else.
Simply put, Mr. Selter reached his tipping point, and now has the mobile phone number of the President of CNN in his rolodex. As they say, the pen is mightier than the sword…
Read the full story here.
A recent survey by the American Advertising Federation reiterated what a lot of people already know – that traditional video buys are not going to be getting the money they used to from advertisers and marketers.
‘Industry executives expect a significant share of their broadcast and cable TV advertising budgets to shift to online video buys within the next few years, according to results of an annual survey on industry trends released Tuesday morning by the American Advertising Federation. More than half (53%) of the 168 respondents said they expect 20% or more of their TV advertising budgets to shift into online video by 2010.’
"The determining factor will be the sheer volume of online opportunities," said one agency executive participating in the survey. "Will there be a handful of sites that rise above the fray or will there be so sites to choose from that the media dollars can’t possibly cover enough bases to be effective?"
This is simply more evidence that the best way to reach audiences will not be the same as before…read the full article here.
