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Despite economic slowdown online advertising market is growing at a good pace.

Microsoft’s revenue from adverting grown 29% despite overall below expected performance. Google beat the street expectation with better growth report; needless to say a lion share of it comes from online advertising revenue.

But analysts feel a shift is happening the way companies are advertising on the internet. Most advertisers feel they are over spending on the ads which are not working. Traditional ways of advertising are not providing enough ROI to marketers. Companies are looking beyond Pop-ups and Banner adds. According to this the report “Online Promotions: The Big Shift”, Borrell Associates feels that growth of pop-ups and banner add spending will fall into negative territory by 2010.Though the real impact is yet to be felt, nonetheless a shift is unavoidable in the way marketers do online advertising.

1. What are the options advertisers have?

• Promotions:

Marketers will increase the promotional activities in the internet like discount, coupons, contest etc. Few days back I read a blog report about HP giving away their latest Laptop for free as a promotional campaign. Check here. According to same Borrell Associates’ report, by 2012, promotional spending approaches $22.8 billion, and will surpass all other forms of traditional online advertising.

• Back to the basics:

Marketers should stick to the basics of marketing, keywords like customer satisfactions, customer retentation, segmentation, brand loyalty are not just keywords, they are crucial in any successful advertising campaign. This study (pdf)of Top Marketing Trends for 2008 by Anderson Analytics reveals that 60% top executives feel that marketing basics are very important in order to make a lasting impact from any ad campaign.

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Now a Days Search engines and social networking sites are two important components in our life. Social Networking major MySpace and Facebook have around 110 million and 60 million active users respectively. Yahoo is coming with its own networking site. Yahoo already has 500 million active users. It will convert MyYahoo and Mesh into social networking sites. Twitter is a great success. Consider this airticle:Student twitter out of jail with one words blog. By sending a simple message “arrested” from his cell phone; James Karl Buck helped free himself from an Egyptian jail. Rampant growth social networking sites come with endless spam, violations of privacy, harassments etc.
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Consumers like to be associated with good brands like, Adidas, Zara, Swatch, Ferrari etc. Companies spend enormous manpower to build brand awareness in consumer mind. How do we define a brand? In layman’s term brand is a promise to deliver good products, services, benefits consistently, time after time. Consumers choose a brand over the rival due to numerous tangible and intangible benefits he or she gets.

Building brand and maintaining it is an uphill task. Nonetheless it’s vital for the survival in competitive world. Few years ago, Gillette was the most powerful brand, today Gillette slipped to 30^th position.

What about brand Google? According to the latest news Google tops the chart as the best Brand in the world, followed by GE, Microsoft, and Coca-Cola. Google is every where in our life, in office desktop, in Blackberries. This tiny little medical shop near my apartment puts a notice board in front door stating- “We are on Google Map!”- displaying a printed map from the internet. Probably no body in our locality uses Google MAP to find out that store. Nonetheless the shop owner finds it important that his little shop has been listed in Google MAP. That’s the sense of pride we feel to be associated with Google. Needless to say Google tops the chart.

Interestingly, Google spend little on traditional way of building brand compare to others in the chart hierarchy. It waste little on advertising or any such brand promotional activities. Its 11kB homepage may the lightest one on the internet. It knows what is important for search engines–giving relevant information to consumers and in the process creating enormous values for consumers, consistently, time after time.

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Sometimes in our career we feel stuck and impasse in a vicious circle of unpleasant and un- happy events. Things don’t come up as easily and as expected. Performance degrades and behavior changes radically from productiveness to unproductiveness. Such times and cycles are common to every human beings particularly to business peoples and technology professionals.

• How do we decouple ourselves from such periods?

Timothy Butler, a professor at Harvard Business School tried to address these issues in his book Getting Unstuck: How Dead Ends Become New Paths.

Impasse reminds us that we must respond according to the situations. We should also know that changes are necessary to survive in competitive world. But changes are not as radical as changing ourselves. We may not succeed in changing ourselves at all, rather we should change the way we work.

• Find the root cause:

Sometime it is difficult to know the root cause of impasses. Conflicting career aspirations may decrease performances. Giving precedence to one aspiration will create others in halt, thus causes anxiety. Unfulfilled wishes and goals create a sense of depressions and frustrations. It’s important to recognize a state of psychological impasse .It shows that this state is in fact the beginning of a necessary change in the way we think and act.

• What are the options?

Though it’s difficult to realize the root nonetheless its worthwhile to sit back and have a thorough analysis. Then we can prioritize goals we need to achieve based on our passion and love. Subsequently can start work on that. Impasses should be treated an impetus to change our outlook to a problems to get us motivated to work efficiently.

In his book Butler talks about 6 steps in recognizing the an impasse and overcoming it–arrival of a crisis, deepening of the crisis, recognizing the crisis, going deep into the crisis by listening more, understanding our own needs and opportunities available, and finally taking actions towards achieving our goals.

Find out more here.

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