Taking it's lead from the US company, Proctor & Gamble in the 1950's, the marketing industry historically described marketing expenditure as either 'above the line' or 'below the line', covering external expenditure on advertising and internal marketing and promotional costs, respectively. This distinction is now obselete and the important features now are:access to multiple channels, so key decisions are about channel mix; 'coupling' between online and offline channels, with potential for each to affect the other; 'hard' commercial models based on explicit metrics versus 'soft' models based on sponsorship and product placement; exploiting interactivity in channels, including blogging, to filter and amplify impact; harnessing related activity to increase visibility, such as search engine optimisation;harnessing content-driven and surrogate channels to drive PR and other messages;and wide range of yield management tools to optimise expenditure. Advertising is covered separately in Catalyzt.
Intuit, the accounting systems and book-keeping solutions player, has confirmed it is moving into the Software as a Service market, with new applications in field services, inventory handling and sales management, which could see the company competing against Salesforce.com.
Simon Fox, 22 September 2008
Google has caused consternation in the media planning and buying community with the launch of its new web audience measurement service. Google's service is intended to help advertisers identify the best places to buy online ads by providing them with data on which web sites their target...
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Simon Fox, 14 July 2008
The Carphone Warehouse Group PLC and Best Buy Co., Inc. have agreed to form a new venture to accelerate their growth by capitalising on the European consumer’s evolving appetite for consumer electronics. The Carphone Warehouse is proposing to contribute its retail business (which includes all...
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Reiko Uchida, 09 May 2008
The impact of Social Networks is growing rapidly in the UK. Social networks now account for more than 5% of traffic and 20% of all page impressions in the UK, and younger users are more likely to use them than web-mail based services. Viral marketing campaigns are also likely to be dominated by...
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Michelle Wong, 25 February 2008
Mobile content distributor IMI Mobile, based in Hyderabad in India is buying digital music distributor DX3 of London as a beachhead to push in to the European and non-mobile markets. The UK company distributes music to white-label platforms like that of UK broadcaster ITV. IMI's delivery...
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Sarita Jones, 25 March 2009