Interaction

All change: marketing in addressable media
Part of the This Year Next Year series

April 2007

Introduction

Welcome to the third iteration of the GroupM This Year Next Year series, this one dedicated to the interactive media. This publication and the data it contains are intended for all marketers and media companies wherever and whoever they are; sellers of branded goods and services, retailers and online merchants, direct and indirect sellers, makers of programmes and owners of the means of distribution. The one thing we intend this disparate audience to have in common is scale: our loose definition is ‘large advertisers’ rather than the host of much smaller enterprises which may now deliver in theory at least 'global' messaging. We hope it gives you a broad view of this increasingly important marketing environment, and that it stimulates some debate and offers some balanced perspective and fresh insight.

The back half of this report is a collection of data and opinions from 28 countries intended to give a sense of scale and direction. But first we should discuss interactive media itself and the fears, hopes, opportunity and hyperbole which surround it. It has created a new lexicon of wikis, social networks, cloud computing, blogs, long tails, click fraud, peer-to-peer, user-generated content and cookies, and an overwhelming sense that nothing will be quite the same.

We must discuss this right now, not some time in the future. In many developed markets online penetration exceeds 60% of individuals, the vast majority having graduated from dial-up to broadband. Online is already a mainstream component of consumer behaviour and media consumption.

In 2007 GroupM will for the first time invest more than $2 billion online on behalf of our clients around the world, much of it with media vendors which did not exist a decade ago. As a result we find ourselves charting new waters for the industry and we think it is time to offer some practical advice on the good, bad and indifferent opportunities which abound.


Download the rest of the report (pdf)