DreamGrow Social Media

Is Social Media addictive?

Do you have to check Facebook and Twitter every few minutes? Tweeting, texting, posting everywhere you go? A study by consumer electronics shopping site, Retrevo.com went looking for answers on how much control social media has on peoples’ lives. The results:

• 27% of respondents under 35 check Facebook more than 10 times a day.
• About one third of people under 35 tweet afrer sex (36%) and on a date (34%). 40% tweet while driving!
• Twitter is addictive as 39% of people under 35 check updates more than 10 times a day.

I believe that social media will take a very large part of the time we currently use for “web”, TV and other media. But the question of how often do you check a social media site will soon be pointless. Most of us will use it continuously. Nobody asks how many times a day you check TV. Or… better yet, how many times a day you talk to people?

So the answer to the original question is “yes” as much as whatching TV or talking to people is addictive.

IBM Study: The end of advertising as we know it

IBM released a really interesting study about the trends in the advertising and marketing fields and how the internet is going to change them. On a gut level we at Dreamgrow have predicted this change for some years now but it is nice to have such information supporting our views. This ties in nicely with the earlyer post Internet overtakes TV as the biggest advertising sector in the UK. From the study:

The next 5 years will hold more change for the advertising industry than the previous 50 did. Increasingly empowered consumers, more self-reliant advertisers and ever-evolving technologies are redefining how advertising is sold, created, consumed and tracked. Our research points to four evolving future scenarios – and the catalysts that will be driving them. Traditional advertising players – broadcasters, distributors and advertising agencies – may get squeezed unless they can successfully implement consumer, business model and business design innovation.

Based on an IBM global survey of more than 2,400 consumers and feedback from 80 advertising executives worldwide collected in conjunction with Bonn University’s Center for Evaluation and Methods, we see four change drivers shifting control within the industry:

Attention – Consumers are increasingly exercising control of how they view, interact with and filter advertising in a multichannel world, as they continue to shift their attention away from linear TV and adopt ad-skipping, ad-sharing and ad-rating tools.

Creativity – Thanks to technology, the rising popularity of user-generated and peerdelivered content, and new ad revenue-sharing models, amateurs and semi-professionals are now creating lower-cost advertising content that is arguably as appealing to consumers as versions created by agencies. Our survey suggests this trend will continue.

“Consumer-created advertising will have all the appeal of anything crafted by the agencies, and will be ‘coopted’ by the brands themselves.” – CEO, advertiser, Asia Pacific

Measurement – Advertisers are demanding more individual-specific and involvementbased measurements, putting pressure on the traditional mass-market model. Two-thirds of the advertising executives IBM polled expect 20 percent of advertising revenue to shift from impression-based to impact-based formats within three years.

Advertising inventories – New entrants are making ad space that once was proprietary available through open, efficient exchanges. As a result, more than half of the ad executives interviewed expect that open platforms will, within the next five years, take 30 percent of the revenue currently flowing to proprietary incumbents such as broadcasters.

New platform players are offering advertisers the ability to purchase ads via aggregated networks. These capabilities provide key benefits such as: improved inventory management, improved pricing transparency, streamlined buying/selling processes, and improved analysis and reporting capabilities.

Get the full thing by IBM Institute for Business Value or a two page executive summary.

Internet overtakes TV as the biggest advertising sector in the UK

Well, it had to happen. Now the next milestoni is when will this happen in United States. As I said in my resent presentation TV is no a brand maker any more. I believe that future brands will be built on social networks with direct communication.

UK advertisers spent £1.75bn on internet advertising in the six months to the end of June, a 4.6% year-on-year increase, according to a report by the Internet Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers. To put this in perspective, in 1998, when the IAB first measured internet advertising, just £19.4m was spent online. The internet now accounts for 23.5% of all advertising money spent in the UK, while TV ad spend accounts for 21.9% of marketing budgets.

via Internet overtakes television to become biggest advertising sector in the UK. The Guardian .