‘World Wide Web’

A recession is generally seen as a bad time. Jobs are lost, banks loan less, and, as the consumer tightens his or her belt, businesses start to suffer. Generally businesses try to counteract the negative consequences of a recession in one of 3 ways:

• By retrenching and laying off workers
• By closing loss making and marginal divisions
• By cutting budgets across the board

Although these steps are often painful, they are necessary to ensure the survival of the company during tough economic times. But lately more and more companies are hesitant to cut their marketing budget to save on expenditure. In fact, Kellogg’s actually increased their marketing budget during the Great Depression and as such their sales increased. Today, more than 80 years later, Kellogg’s is the only breakfast brand of that era that is still in existence and their case study proves the short as well as long term benefit of advertising during an economic slump.

During the recent economic recession (some have even called it a depression) the majority of companies took a hit. In fact,  even those who were considered to be doing well also felt the pinch.

Interestingly enough advertising agencies in South Africa experienced the recession more severely than other industries and many had to retrench employees in order to stay afloat. This was because businesses cut on their offline advertising (radio, TV, newspapers, magazines and billboards) – choosing to spend their advertising budgets on online advertising instead.

Online advertising has allowed companies to spend less on advertising but still build on their equity and solidify their client base; not to mention gain new clients and taking on their competition. Indeed, many progressive companies are finding that when weighing op the two advertising methods, that internet driven advertising has multiple benefits.

Costs

From a purely financial consideration online advertising is far more cost effective than offline advertising. Purchasing airtime for a TV commercial is very costly, especially for the prime time spots when most of the targeted consumers are tuned in, and the risk is always there that the channel might be changed during ad breaks. Online advertising on the other hand works with a fixed cost per click (CPC) budget and website advert. Moreover, an online advertising campaign is far more cost effective (with savings of over 80% for the same results found in offline advertising) and controllable in the short- and long term.

Target Audience

People tend to think that you simply need to design and create a website in order for it to be seen, but business owners need to remember that there are literally thousands of websites in any specific vertical and market. Don’t let this scare you however, because while consumers may read the newspaper or watch television on a daily basis, they are not particularly looking for a product or service. With online searches on Google on the other hand, they are specifically looking for the product or service that you offer, and are therefore much more likely to take the time to read your advertisement.

In this case your advertisement would be your website. With online advertising you can be very particular who your target audience is. Moreover, if your website is set up correctly, you will be able to track your statistics. This will give you the particulars of your viewers, such as their age, location, how they came upon your website, what keywords were used to search for your website, and so forth, thus giving you an edge on your marketing strategy.

Reach

With offline advertisements you can never be sure that your particular target audience paid much attention. Yes you can definitely say that a certain amount of viewers were tuned in, but were they actually noticing your ad and were they the right demographic?  With print ads there is of course the chance that the reader will simply page over. The fact is that online readers look at this form of advertising differently. They typed in specific keywords into the search engine looking for the product or service that your website offers. This is why online marketing plays such a significant role.

When your website is properly optimized, you will be sure that your website will be one of the top search results that the reader finds, and by tracking the readers actions, you will be able to see exactly what pages they went on to on your website, how much time they spent on a page, and even if they left your website directly or clicked through to another page. In the online world this is referred to as the click-through rate (CTR) which is used to measure the success of an online campaign.

Speed of Campaign

Another reason why companies choose internet marketing (online advertising) over offline advertising is the speed at which campaigns run. While most offline ad campaigns can take quite some time before the reader/viewer even sees the ad, advertising online is much quicker. From the moment you publish a new page, story or pay per click (PPC) ad it will be live on the internet and have the potential to be viewed by your targeted audience instantaneously. This means that you have to be much more particular with your timing of running an ad campaign offline, and often you are limited by outside influences, while internet advertising allows you to take that new story or ad live whenever it suits you.

While offline advertising still has its place in the world, the fact of the matter is that online advertising is growing rapidly because of several reasons – speed, cost effective, target specific and reach. Does this mean that you should let go of your offline campaign and go fully online? Not necessarily. But you definitely should include online advertising as part of your marketing strategy. Not only is it much faster, cheaper and targeted, but online advertising is also more flexible and offer you as business owner options to get your message across. At the end of the day you can be certain that even during tough times, you will see a positive ROI.

From the moment it was announced that South Africa would be hosting the 2010 FIFA World Cup the world has been completely abuzz, especially as this was set to be the first time this prestigious sports event was going to take place on African soil. There was another factor that was sure to set this world cup apart from its predecessors though. While the 2006 FIFA World Cup was relegated more towards television media coverage, the 2010 world cup definitely enjoyed a dramatic change as millions of fans turned to the World Wide Web for their full spectrum of world cup news.

As expected Google was at the forefront of keeping a watchful eye on the global search trends as the world cup was nearing. Up to now the results proved to be quite surprising with Botswana, Bangladesh, South Africa, Fiji and Nepal leading the way as the countries doing the most searches over the last 12 months for key phrases such as “FIFA world cup schedule”, “2010 world cup” and other related queries. As far as stars go the one that soon stood out the most was in fact the vuvuzela. Yes, this ubiquitous – and controversial – horn blew its way to the top of the searches, nearly overtaking the official song of the 2010 World Cup, Waka Waka by Shakira.

Apart from the vuvuzela there have been a number of controversies cropping up throughout the world cup which of course sparked a rise in searches. On the 18th of June, for example, the search volume for “world cup referees” surged after a Slovenian goal was disallowed by a controversial offside call during their game against the USA, one that hugely affected their fate within the tournament. As far as participating teams and individual players go the French was sure to make things interesting both online and off. Searches for “Thierry Henry handball” increased as well as “refusal to train” and “anelka” when the French player Nicolas Anelka had to go back home after he insulted the team’s coach.

While the world cup has been providing us with much entertainment, it also attracted cybercriminals, as usual, with their profiteering schemes to pull a fast one on unsuspected fans. In January 2009 these online criminals had their first run with a tried-and-tested technique in which a 2010 FIFA spam led recipients to believe that they had won an online sweepstakes draw. This was soon followed by two separate spam runs leveraging the upcoming world cup. While the one spam sample came with a .DOC file attachment, the second included a .PDF file attachment. The purpose of both these spam emails were to get recipients to open these attachments which would promise great winnings at the price of divulging personally identifiable information (PII).

Social networking sites on the other hand have been pulling out all the stops to reach fans in all four corners of the world with Twitter launching a whole new website solely for the FIFA World Cup and Facebook creating a new page called “Goal Leaderboard”. With the latter the purpose isn’t so much to track the actual goals scored throughout the tournament but to rather keep tabs on the popularity of the participating teams according to Facebook users.

Lastly but most importantly there is the official FIFA website. On this all-encompassing website fans are able to get all kinds of facts, figures and information, from your favourite player’s birthday to photos of yesteryear’s tournaments. As this sports event also draws the biggest crowds FIFA was able to help direct spectators to book their international- and domestic flights, find accommodation in all major cities in South Africa, rent a car, and of course how to buy tickets for the games.

When the tournament officially kicked off on the 11th of June, 2010, every fan around the world was glued to the screen. The celebrations began… and so did the anticipation as to how well your favourite team was going to perform. To ensure that people always stayed up to date FIFA.com teamed up with Google. Even if you do a simple search for the term “World Cup” you will be provided with the latest scores as well as the dates and time of upcoming matches at the top of the search results page. There are also a number of gadgets made available by Google like their Chrome extension where you can get a live feed of tournament’s results. With all this said and done though one can only wonder what is in store for the 2014 FIFA World Cup which will be hosted in Brazil. As the 20th World Cup it will be sure to be an even bigger celebration than before, and with it one can only imagine that it will be bring along a whole new bundle of online features to keep us on the edge of our seat as our teams set foot on the field. We simply can’t wait!