Latest update: Feb 2008 - Avenue A Razorfish 2008 Digital Outlook Report

As a follow-on from my last months posting on digital predictions and trends, on February 24th 2008, major US/European/worldwide agency Avenue A Razorfish released their take on current Internet marketing trends which covers how to manage issues such as digital governance, web analytics, search and of course connecting with the online connected.

• Download the wonderfully produced, inspirational 150 page report and read Guy Kawasakis summary of their 2008 Digital Outlook Report on Guy's blog posting.

Original piece: Jan 2008

It's that time of year again, and in January I have been talking to some of the other researchers and analysts at E-consultancy about the main trends in digital marketing we can expect in the year ahead. See their summary of the latest trends in digital marketing or read my take on their take below...

1. Social networks advertising becomes scalable

Agree with this one, although it will be only the bold few companies who gain the early mover advantage. Most will be scared off by privacy fears spurred by the Facebook privacy furore and misplacing ads served on an inappropriate group like the BNP party.

A cursory inspection of Facebook social ads is underwhelming - we're in sub-prime territory with few major brands. I think MySpace is more advanced and Facebook will evolve it's current primitive targeting.

2. Privacy will continue to be a sensitive issue

This is my top trend following on from Facebook's problem and in the UK, government agencies losing customer data. Remember that this issue nearly all but killed Doubleclick 7 years ago and many journalists and online commentators are gunning for Google.

3. Internet advertising will overtake radio advertising in the US

That's progress I guess.

4. Open Source will continue to dominate

I agree, but would use different examples - not open source software, but rather open standards, ones to watch in 2008 are:

• "Google OpenSocial:"http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/ - integrating applications across social networks - see examples. What social networkers really need though is a top-level view across what's happening across all social networks, like the Netvibes views. Commercial interests and privacy fears will naturally stop sharing of profiles and posts across networks.
• Google Open Handset Alliance (OHA) and Android software standard - this is made up of 34 companies, including chip manufacturers and handset makers. Developer competitions will lead to innovation in mobile apps.
• Attention Profile Markup Language - An effort to share knowledge between different sites about online users interests based on their usage of blogs and tagging of stories (early support was from www.bloglines.com and www.digg.com). The aggregation of attention is then used to summarise trends.

5. The rise of the semantic web - We are still years away from the semantic web as conceived by Tim Berners Lee, but slowly moving there through Google OpenSocial and APML. What we need are metamediaries that sit up above a range of aggregators - i recently booked a multi-centre holiday and had to use several sites and still ended up buying it by phone!

6. Mobile web expected to explode in 2008

Explosion is overstating it - evolution only - see MMetrics for details of mobile adoption and usage

7. Video gains ground as a popular advertising medium

Video does seem to engage better as You Tube and these Internet advertising clickthrough rate statistics show.

8. Local search marketing and advertising platforms can expect growth

A minor trend.

9. Behavioural targeting will become more widespread - and something which is expected

A big yes to this one. Google's acquisition of Doubleclick and Yahoo! acquiring Blue Lithium plus the consortium of UK media owners show the potential. Sequential behavioural targeting across multiple ad touches for an individual seems to work well if you can afford the setup costs.

10. Fear of recession will shift advertising budgets to online media

Yes, but some budget will move out of offline to more cost-effective and reliable offline media!

Personal RSS aggregation and personalisation

One area missed in the E-consultancy report is personal aggregregation - below is my take on some of the latest approaches:

Personal aggregation will be an increasingly popular way of web users managing their interests across different types of information from news and entertainments sources to their contacts in social networks. Netvibes is the best known and well established example of an aggregator and incorporates RSS news feeds, email and Facebook comments. The original aggregators were the personal aggregators such as the venerabable MyYahoo! and the more recent upstarts Windows Live Spaces and iGoogle

• Pageflakes - Personal example of PageCast on Digital Marketing
• Excellent example of PageCast from Cisco
• Flock - The Social Web Browser - Personal aggregators - this is downloadable Application
• NetVibes universe
• Ning personal social networks - Facebook Groups suck currently in functionality - there are other free alternatives

Other articles on Internet marketing trends and innovation

Thanks to E-consultancy for sharing these with me:

• Consumer Labs Top 10 Marketing Trends 2008
• The Digital Media Internet Uber 2008 Prediction List
• Email marketing trends - Email ExperienceCouncil
• ReadWriteWeb 2008 Predictions
• Mobile marketing predictions (Russell Buckley)
• Online PR and social networking (B.L. Ochman)
• Search Engine Marketing predictions (John Batelle)