Ninemsn's View

• 7.7 million or 49% of online Australians have made a purchase online in the last 3 months. In the last year the number of Australians regularly shopping online has increased 40% (7.7 million 2011 vs. 5.5 million 2010).*
• Australians are expected to spend around $16 billion shopping online this year; 77% of which will be spent locally. Over the next 12 months online shopping expenditure is forecast to increase by 16% to $18.4 billion.**
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The IAB recently proved that online advertising should be considered as part of the marketing mix for retail and FMCG campaigns by demonstrating that online display advertising impacts not only brand measures but actual conversion to in-store sales.

Several IAB publishers, including ninemsn, partnered with OMD, Johnson and Johnson and research company Nielsen Online on a significant research study to measure the effectiveness of a digital only advertising campaign to launch a new mouthwash product called Listerine Zero. A test campaign was set up where advertising support was limited to NSW and online only activity to measure the impact of the campaign on brand effectiveness and sales for the product by comparing test stores in NSW with control stores in another market.

The reason people go out to the cinema is to watch movies.
This was an assumption I was pretty comfortable with as we embarked on a redesign - that would become a complete rethink - of MovieFIX, ninemsn’s long running movie destination.
Was it so ignorant of me to assume our audience would commonlydecide what movie they wanted to see based on a review, trailer or ad; then go to a movie site to look up screening times; and then go see that movie? Seemingly yes. In the early stages of the MovieFIX redesign project we were given research undertaken by our friends at Channel Nine surveying 800 casual moviegoers. One of many charts in the report stood out to me. It suggested that within the key MovieFIX demographic of late teens and early 20s, more than a third were going to a movie “because someone I know wanted to watch it”.

I have been at ninemsn for almost two months now and during that time I have been out meeting many of you - our clients and agency partners. I have been asking you what challenges you have and how can we help solve these?

I consistently hear that you require fewer points of contact, deeper levels of engagement and relevance from your publishing partners. You are also telling me that there is a data explosion, and you need to interpret vast quantities of data to get a clear picture of the customers.

I believe the face of media in Australia and New Zealand is fundamentally changing and technology plays an ever greater role in connecting advertisers to the best audience.

"The Australian Government believes it is incumbent upon government to ensure regulatory processes and industry structures are sufficiently strong to support the continuation of a healthy and independent media that is able to fulfill its essential democratic purpose, and to operate in the public interest."

The more you think about that statement, the more ridiculous the undertaking seems. The government is going to ensure the government watchers are doing their job properly? It's foolish and dangerous, and it trashes 300 years of liberal democratic history – as has been elegantly pointed out by the ABC's Jonathon Holmes.

I was one of those early digital evangelists, intent on changing the media world, who told all those advertisers and agencies who would listen that not only could we tell them how many people saw their ads (online), but we could even tell them how many had clicked on them. It was called a click through rate, also known as CTR thanks to our industry’s love of three letter acronyms (TLAs).

We believe sharing will drive a new era of journalism. Distribution methods have always shaped content production and resource allocation.
Arresting front pages traditionally sold more newspapers – so news organisations invested in crime reporters, photographers and editors.

As digital media battles for its share of the marketing mix, there are two key challenges faced by advertisers everywhere:

1) How to demonstrate the ROI that a company generates from online advertising.

2) How to communicate that ROI back to the boardroom in a compelling and convincing way.

Behavioural Targeting (BT) is one of the most popular targeting products. It allows you to combine various data subsets to target what people are actually doing online, as opposed to what they say they are doing. After extensive research into advertiser's needs, ninemsn is proud to announce that we are supplementing our BT offering with 10 new segments.