Online Advertising Growth Levels Reach Zenith

July 31, 2008; 05:42 AM

(Austin, Texas) July 7, 2008 – Zenith Optimedia, a leading global media service agency, has predicted a growth of 26.7% for global Internet advertising. The growth of the Internet ad market detailed in the June report is on the verge of breaking the 10% share barrier in 2008, a year early

The growth is attributed in part to the fact that “Western advertisers are shifting even more of their budgets online, where the returns on their investment are obvious, and easy to quantify and fine tune.”

Yet, as Peter Whoriskey notes in his Washington Post article, “Advertisers slow to embrace online spending, “[t]he biggest U.S. advertisers…have not fully embraced the Web.” Whoriskey lists underwhelming figures. Advertising giant Proctor and Gamble, for example, spent less than 2% of its ad budget on the online advertising in 2007, according to a recent ranking by Advertising Age.

If big advertisers “haven’t shown up yet, at least not in force” online, as Whoriskey notes, what should companies conclude about the value of Internet advertising?

The answer may perhaps lie in email marketing, which attracts some of the largest brand names around. Just ask iContact, a leading email marketing company, who boasts clients such as market leaders AT&T, Vonage, Symantec, International Paper, ReMax, Centex Homes and Viacom, as well as a host of small business owners.

Perhaps the draw of email marketing is the fact that, like traditional methods of print advertising, it most often employs the techniques that are familiar to advertisers. Like a magazine or newspaper ad, an email ad can only appeal to the viewer who opts-in in the first place; i.e. a person must buy a magazine or newspaper before he or she can view the ads. A person must subscribe to the sender’s messages (often by using interest-specific check boxes like “Travel,” “Shopping,” “Restaurants” or “Sports”) for the ad to be effective; hence, targeted or demographic-specific email ads were created.

Demographic-specific online ads, as well as demographically targeted email lists, are only one part of the solution to the obstacle that has apparently scared away large advertisers in the past. These tools may be the answer to Whoriskey’s statement that “Penry Price, Google's vice president of North American advertising sales, noted that although it is relatively easy to do demographic targeting in other media, it is more difficult to get precise information about online audiences for a given Web site.”

In actuality, those who have utilized email marketing software have access to a tracked return on investment (ROI), targeted, specific demographics and support for optimizing ad space. The successes of these early online advertisers might have provided reason for Zenith Optimedia to conclude in their June report that “Internet ads are cheap, easy to target and customise for particular audiences.”

As newer online tools emerge in support of more effective advertisers online, big advertisers may soon catch on to the growing trend.

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For additional information regarding online advertising, visit Email-Marketing-Options.com.

Zilker Ventures, LLC is a web publisher that consolidates information and reviews various business and financial products.

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Contact:

Jennifer Silva
Zilker Ventures, LLC
(512) 448-9031