Electronic commerce
Due to low prices and great assortment of goods and of
course to convenience of online shopping consumer expenditures have risen to
high levels. According to data for the last 12 months in the USA
Companies which work only with online retail (as eBay, Amazon) were able to
make real business empires due to electronic commerce. For example, Amazon has
110 millions unique visitors per month. But such triumphal march of electronic
commerce means that a regular offline shop is under the threat. In other words,
retailers which can’t hold their market part now will have more and more
difficulties in future.
Different products categories move to online with different speed, and that
makes new difficulties for retailers who work with different categories, for
example, big supermarkets. Nowadays about 30% of electronics are sold thought
the Internet and only 1% of everyday goods.
Moving of whole channels to the online world can have some influence upon
prices and it can promote lowing of them. Internet allows finding the necessary
goods on the lowest price.
Social media
ComScore data show us that part of social media according to the time which
user spend in the web is higher than part of web-portals. Last year in November
in the USA Facebook attracted 150 million unique users. It had 10% part from
the whole number of minutes, which users spent in the Internet. But social
networks are not only Facebook. The same month LinkedIn had 41 million users,
Twitter – 40 million, Google+ had 29 million and Instagram and Pinterest – more
than 25 million.
Users’ activity rise in social networks puts market members before new
challenge: how to use new channels in order to communicate with consumer.
People often expect from social networks a word of mouth effect. But there are
a lot of questions. For example, how much does “a fan” of goods or brand cost?
What is better: paid popularity in social networks or the earned popularity?
How is it possible to calculate the profit which was received from investments
to social media? Today they do a lot of studies in order to have answers to
such questions.
ComScore offers a special service which is called “Social Essentials”, it helps
to measure quantitatively productivity of marketing efforts in social networks,
based on the demographic and behavioral composition of the audience of one or
another brand in social media. Such tool also shows coverage and frequency of
advertising views in social media. These options give a chance to companies to
link their actions in social media with the desired consumer behavior,
including brand involvement and buying activity. They also allow measuring the productivity
of the current campaign.
But social media can be not only a promotional platform, market researchers
think about how to make them a data source about the consumers’ minds. Some of
them even believe that in the next five years social networks will completely
replace the buyers’ surveys.
Increased cost of digital advertising
Spending on advertising is rapidly flowing to the Internet. According to
the IAB data, in the third quarter of 2012 online advertising increased by 18%
compared with the previous year. In the first three quarters of 2012 the growth
was 15% it is more than 3.8% of the general increase of advertising costs during
the same period in all media, in which the research was conducted. The IAB
report points to significant growth in different formats, especially in the
mobile Internet (+92%), video (+18%), search (+17%) and banners (+12%). The
only exception is the multimedia advertising (here we see the recession in 34%)
There is a hypothesis that the high cost of such advertising leads to the rejection
from this format in favor of others, especially video, which allows you to transform
30-second video into 15-second easily and inexpensively. At the same time,
advertisers and agencies are more and more concerned with the limitation of
available advertising space and time. Many say that price for thousand shows of
the video often exceeds the price for ads on TV.
It is clear, however, that the more exact the targeting will be the more
consumers will be involved and the faster the video rate in the Internet will
live behind the price for ads on TV.
Audience targeting or specific publications
The availability of strange platforms and exchanging
them in real time helped to the spreading of such phenomena as buying audience
through the computer via cookies. According to some rates, about 20% of all
display ads views are buying with the help of auctions in real time. This
figure will continue growing. The advantages of methods of buying the audience
are well documented.
But there is a negative side too: publishers are anxious about the trend
towards lowering the prices for ads. This, in turn, led to the creation of
private SSP which make possible the acquisition of specific audiences on web
sites with the help of program. There is a hope that it will help publishers to
protect their premium prices, but giving the opportunity to advertisers to
enjoy some advantages of buying audience at the same time.
