Data from a survey by ad:tech and MarketingSherpa produced some interesting results; some of them were surprising while others weren't. One thing to understand when talking about these numbers is that those surveyed are early-adopters so the numbers won't reflect the general Internet marketing audience.
One case in point is when asked about how much they're going to increase their overall ad spending for 2007, the response was only a couple of percentage points, from 47 percent in 2006 to 49 percent in 2007. The reason why the small increase is that they've already entered into the online marketing world in a strong way. Contrary to most other companies that are just starting to get their feet wet in this and will increase their online budgets a lot more than the 2 percent by the early-adopters.
In another finding, which isn't surprising, is that search engine optimization (SEM) increased the largest in 2006 from 2005, while pop-up ads continued to decline in use. Marketers also moved away from rented email lists to focusing more on their own in-house lists.
The biggest emphasis for 2007 will be in marketing to their house lists, along with search marketing.
In response to what they'll try much more that they hadn't in the past was marketing to the emerging blog world, online communities and the use of video ads.
One surprise for me in the survey was that rich media ads drop in performance from 2005 to 2006 by a large 10 percent - 38 percent to 28 percent. I think this reflects the experiemental stage that it's in and the resistance from viewers at this time. This is about to be tested big by YouTube (GOOG) when it begins to roll out its ads sometime this year.
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