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Here's this week's round up of the news for branded content producers - Facebook can cause brands PR nightmares, Internet ad revenue on the rise, what Facebook learned from Twitter and more.
Last year the Internet overtook magazines and newspapers in the UK in the amount of advertising money it attracts. Now according to eMarketer in 2010 its ad revenue will overtake the whole print sector combined. The research company is claiming that the web will attract a £3.79 billion online ad spend which will make it the biggest advertising medium by revenue in the UK. And it will continue to grow with eMarketer saying that online media will take another billion pounds per year by 2014. The UK became the first major economy in which the Internet takes more money than TV in the first half of 2009. More from Paid Content.
Meanwhile sports publisher, Factory Media, says that the most effective online advertising is pre-roll video. It claims that almost half of viewers have looked for more information after seeing a pre-roll video ad. Its study of more than 1,000 people revealed 49% had searched for more information on a brand after seeing a pre-roll ad for it. According to the research, 15% took an action as a direct result of seeing a pre-roll ad, with 8% visiting the brand's site and 3% purchasing. More from New Media Age.
Social networking sites like Facebook can exaggerate complaints about products and turn them into a public relations nightmare. That's the view of Marc Pritchard, P&G's chief marketing officer, who admitted at a conference in Cannes last week that thousand of people had joined a Facebook group complaining about the performance of the company's Pampers Dry Max nappies. Pritchard said that 'compared with a database of complaints via telephone and mail dating back for many years, the number of Dry Max complaints was smaller than for other product launches. The difference is Facebook had a much higher amplification of the negative comments. That is one of the things we have to deal with in the new world of brand building.' More from the FT.
Pritchard also said that the company was totally committed to engaging with its users through Facebook and welcomed the opportunities it offers. However he added that to minimise future controversy, P&G plans to engage more with its customers online in advance of product launches. 'With the Internet, now you have much more constant real-time connections with consumers and what they are about."
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has admitted that he has learned a lot from rival service Twitter, but thinks that the micro blogging service's huge growth is starting to slow. Zuckerbereg told Inside Facebook 'we learned that they do a lot of things really well. It's a very nice, simple service. They do one thing really well - that's powerful. I looked at their rate and thought if this continues for 12 months or 18 months, then in a year they're going to be bigger than us. I guess I extrapolated too much from our own experience of what was possible, but it just turned out that that their growth rate was kind of unnatural. They got a lot of media attention, and it grew very quickly for a little period of time.' Zuckerberg acknowledges that 'learning how you work with other companies is an interesting thing that I'll hopefully figure out over the next decade, and it was just interesting learning from watching them.'
It has been another huge week for Apple with the launch of the latest version of the iPhone - the iPhone 4. Several UK blogs have however criticised the company arguing that Apple didn't make enough handsets available to meet demand. This lead to queues outside many retail outlets on Thursday. The web is now awash with iPhone 4 reviews the most high profile of which is from Walt Mossberg in the Wall Street Journal. Mossberg hails the device as step forward for smartphones (although many of its key new features; multi tasking, high res camera, video calling, have been available for many years on rival handsets) but says that its performance is likely to be hampered by the networks it is partnered with. 'It has some downsides and limitations-most important, the overwhelmed AT&T network in the U.S, which, in my tests, the new phone handled sometimes better and, unfortunately, sometimes worse than its predecessor. Overall Apple has delivered a big, well-designed update that, in my view, keeps it in the lead in the smartphone wars...'
There are also signs that the iPhone is making progress in the corporate handset market which was until recently largely the preserve of BlackBerry. According to Forrester Research (reported in Econsultancy) while BlackBerrys are still the most popular corporate device, with 70% of IT departments currently supporting the gadget, about 29% of businesses now support the iPhone, up from 17% last year and none in 2007 when the iPhone first launched. There's some evidence that the growth in corporate iPhones is actually been fuelled by employees who are clamouring for the Apple handset and putting pressure on IT departments to invest in them.
Finally Conde Nast may have come up with a idea for what magazine publishers can do with their old content. The company is recycling some of its old titles as iPhone apps. According to the Independent Conde Nast has just relaunched its glossy food magazine Gourmet, which it closed last Autumn, as an app called Gourmet Live and says that other titles that have recently been axed could follow. The app bring together recipes, photos and videos and is available for a wide variety of mobile devices.
