Replacing Ads with Action in 2010

One day last week I had the ubiquitous CNBC on in the background when something about advertising caught my attention. When I turned to look the crawler at the bottom of the screen read, “Brands Replacing Ads with Action.” That prognostication by Brian Morrissey of AdWeek caught my attention as an apt summary of many things going on.

I scoured many, although not even close to all, of the digital advertising forecasts for 2010, looking for just the ones that specifically applied to social media. I worked hard to synthesize a list of just 5 trends; see if you agree.

1. Everything is going mobile—content and entertainment of all kinds will be available “anytime anywhere,” much of it via apps. Marketers will, as always, follow the eyeballs with advertising dollars. They will have to learn to make that advertising welcome, not intrusive.

2. Location becomes a key factor – for marketers who need to do mobile ads that are localized, and therefore have a better chance of being welcomed, and for consumers who are using services like Loopt to interact with their friends.

3. Sharing of content is pervasive. Apps and sites encourage it in many ways, often without resorting to email.

4. Convergence will be defined by digital + social, hardware essentially irrelevant. Ad Week says that “marketers will look at social as an integral part of their digital strategy.” Hubspot says it will be “the year of integrated inbound marketing.” However you choose to phrase it, social media has become part of the mix.

5. Privacy will continue to be an issue—Marketing Charts described it as a “privacy by design” approach. I’d prefer to describe it as a “be thoughtful” approach to any use of customer data. Ad Age’s view is that “brands will start taking advantage of social graphs” and pointed to Facebook Reconnect With as a good example. Maybe I’ll revise that to “be careful!”

Some other useful links include:

eMarketer’s prediction post
A summary from Online Social Networking
A post from Read Write Web
A good list from David Berkowitz, and an even better post using localization tools

If I hadn’t had my Twitter feed off most of the time for the last couple of weeks, the list would be much longer. It is a social and connected world, indeed!

I’d like to end with a quote from David Armano, writing in the HBS Publishing blog:

4. Your company will have a social media policy (and it might actually be enforced)

Think about it. If social media is pervasive and if it’s part of brand marketing strategies, how should you—how should your employees—interact with social media on the job? That’s an important question that companies of any size should come to terms with early in the new year of 2010!