Campaigns in a New Media World

These days, it almost seems cliché to say that traditional advertising is dwindling in importance. However, after WPP's recent purchase of 24/7 Real Media for more than $600 million (in case you missed it), it seems like a point that can't be overstated.

Perhaps the more correct and fundamental way to look at the situation is that there's no longer such a thing as "non-traditional." With seemingly every company in the world starting to pour funds into the online market, it seems that even You Tube campaigns, SEO, Banner Ads, Blog Seeding, Content Management Systems, and Email marketing campaigns are becoming more traditional than a full page print ad. If this is true, the real question is how to maximize your online campaign?

Well, I can tell you from firsthand experience you need to do more than just build website in Flash that aims to "wow" its audience. As You Tube and the Web 2.0 movement have taught us, the Internet is more about engaging your target than wowing them. Visitors would rather actually interact with your website than just sit there and watch it. This means host multimedia, have signups, open forums, allow comments on articles, and more.

If you focus just on the sheer appearance of the site and not on anything else, then you're losing the beauty of the Internet. Use a content management system to keep the site up to date and encourage visitors to return; capture visitors' data so you can see what people are interested in and keep in contact with them. Too often websites are forgetting to be updated and interactive. These are the hallmarks of today's successful web presences.

As ad agencies and companies begin venturing into the new media world, they have to remember to look at it in new ways. The 30 second TV spot was all about grabbing someone's attention, web campaigns are about keeping people's attention. It's imperative that there is some interactivity in your website, even if it's simply that you update it every day and users will always find something new-host a blog, update your welcome message, post articles, upload videos, sell new merchandise, just do something to grab their attention!

Don't worry, we've eaten our own dogfood and do a number of things to keep our New Media Campaigns site interactive. First, we always push people to sign up for an online demo of our backend system and to join our email newsletter. Also, when building this new site, we thoroughly analyzed our old site's statistics and saw that we needed to build out our portfolio section, because that's what most visitors go to immediately. Finally, you're looking at it! We aim to update this Blog section multiple times a week and we hope that you check back frequently and let us know what you think! We want to be responsive to what you're looking for and use this section of the site to let you know what we're thinking and to hear your feedback.