FOCUS: TECHNOLOGY MARKETING SEMINAR - Industry without a marketing consensus. "Even the experts do not know what the best solution for Internet marketing is."

It was a pleasure to see that even the greatest gurus of the Asian Internet marketing industry do not know where the market is heading. Apart from not being able to quantify the reach of online marketing, there was a lot of talk about the ROI being more important in new models, but a lack of how this can be quantified. This is what I personally missed in all the presentations and panel discussions. Generally, it makes me feel better to know that even the 'experts' do not know what the best solution is. However, what can we tell customers is a good way to market on the Internet? The guerilla marketing tactics mentioned by Mr Joseph Sweeney of the Gartner Group are also interesting. Is street marketing really that effective, or was it another tactic? Since the Technology Marketing seminar, in both Lan Kwai Fong and Causeway Bay, there have been increased street marketing activities for new websites, which Mr Sweeney deemed effective, or not? The essence of this article, though, focuses on the statement made by Mr Gerald Alleva of AIM Asia, who gave a nice metaphoric view of what happened to television versus what is happening on the Internet today. To re-cap, television used to be a novelty and everyone would watch everything, even commercials, when television was new. This may have even been revived with colour television, whereas today people use the commercial break to wash their hands or zap through channels - apart from Super Bowl commercials. This evolution seems to have surpassed us on the Internet already. Studies as those undertaken by MBInteractive.com last August, show that "approximately only 0.5 per cent of users nowadays actually click on banner ads (down from two per cent a year ago), 55 per cent of users claim they do not interact with a banner ad (and) only four per cent claim to have spent more than 30 seconds looking at banner ad information. If banners are so effective or rather un-effective, it seems within a matter of six years we managed to reach a stage on the Internet that TV needed several decades to reach. The consumer on the Internet is managing to accelerate his cognitive behaviour at the same pace as technology advances and information flow becomes more abundant. The next stage in the TV and film industry was strategic product placement. This is what I missed in all presentations of the technology marketing seminar, whilst Euro RSCG's Ms Ruth Stubbs almost hit this point by having her customer use smaller banners without company information in them. However, they are still in banner shape and found where users expect a banner to be. This makes them a banner again, even though, they try to attract in a different fashion. What is the use, if we already know that people block out and do not interact with banners? Yes, there are also, as pointed out by Mr Richard Robinson of Renren.com, hyperlinks in texts. In our view they already have a similar effect as banner ads and therefore are widely ignored by readers, who block out such blue and underlined text. The new model should therefore be subliminal, without distorting the layout of the website. This is a model that can be easily applied by companies on their own websites, having the information built into the site design. In Hong Kong, we only know of one site to date that features this. It is the website of Arts of Asia magazine (www.artsofasianet.com). What they have done is integrate images into the site, which cannot be identified as advertising or banners. Once these images of featured products/vendors are clicked, the user is lead to the advertisers website or information, whilst still being retained in the original site through the menu bar. This type of product placement marketing cannot be detected as an advertisement and gives the 'surfer' information he is really interested in. I am looking forward to next year's seminar and hopefully gaining insights on how ROI and reach can be quantified. Until then, I hope to see more creativity on the design side 'beyond the banner' to use the power of creativity for effective marketing on the 'Net. * i4u2 design is a member of the Virtual Logistics Holding group of companies.

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