<FONT COLOR="#FF0033"><B>Yahoo! Creative Conference I:</B></FONT> Internet is the medium of the future

Gregory Coleman, executive vice-president, Global Media Sales, Yahoo!, said Internet reach will double from one billion people to two billion in the next three and a half years. As a result, it is crucial for marketers to involve the Internet in the marketing mix

At the Yahoo! Creative Conference I, Gregory Coleman, executive vice-president, Global Media Sales, Yahoo!, highlighted the growing importance of the Internet in the marketing mix.

He said that if the marketers want to sell more, it’s very important for them to involve the Internet in the marketing mix. The Internet reaches one billion of the 7.5 billion people in the world today. This huge reach of the Internet is growing even faster and is likely to double in the next three and a half years.

Coleman said 97 per cent of Yahoo!’s revenue comes from Internet advertising.

<FONT COLOR="#FF0033"><B>Yahoo! Creative Conference I:</B></FONT> Internet is the medium of the future

Gregory Coleman

He said the Internet can be both a blessing and a curse, but it is a wonderful medium to involve users and strengthen brands. “It’s a blessing because instantaneous responses from the user can be monitored easily. It’s a curse because the measurability of a campaign in comparison with offline mediums such as TV, radio, outdoor or press can be evaluated with respect to how many clicks the campaign received,” he clarified.

Coleman gave the instance of an American company which boosted its sales tremendously through user generated content from the Internet.

It so happened that last year, Doritos corn chips (produced by PepsiCo) found its sales stagnating. The marketers wanted to experiment with something totally out of the box, which could provide them with fruitful results. Instead of going to an advertising agency, the company officials brainstormed and decided to invite user generated ads for their product. They accessed the user base on various websites and ran a simple contest, which asked users to think about the core qualities of the product and come up with video ads for it. A contest statement said that the chosen ad would run throughout the American Superball matches, one of the largest sports events in the US.

Doritos received 1,250 ads, of which 32 were found to be exceptional. Coleman said that normally, an advertising agency spends more than a million dollars on filming an ad and it costs $2.5 million to buy the time to run this ad during an event like the American Superball. Doritos finally decided to run the best two ads from the 32 short-listed ones by paying $5million for the media time. That’s not all – the cost of filming the ads added up to a mere $24, including the price of the Doritos chips packs.

After this exercise, Doritos experienced a dramatic boost in its sales figures. Although Coleman refused to divulge any figures, he said this was a fine example of how the Internet, coupled with traditional media later, resulted in radically enhancing a company’s profits.

Coleman pointed out that the other medium that will prove very useful for marketers in times to come is the mobile phone. He said this is the only medium that will surely outpace the Internet. There are currently two billion mobile phone users in the world and this number will exactly double in the next two years.

He concluded by saying that the marketplace was changing rapidly and advertising agencies should improve their proficiency in the Internet medium to successfully pitch for new businesses and retain existing ones.

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