Five by Five

With lots of opinions out there on the current financial position, will online marketing spend increase or decrease??.

A collection of opinions are outlined below from eMarketer source.

eMarketer’s latest projections, released in August saw online advertising growing from $24.5 billion in 2008 to $28.5 billion in 2009. For the first half of 2008, the IAB reported 15.2% growth for online ad spending, which is in line with eMarketer’s predictions. Even though the predictions were published before the recent outpouring of negative financial news, there is still a consensus among many analysts that spending growth for online advertising will continue to show double-digit gains in both 2008 and 2009.

According to a June McKinsey & Co. survey of 340 senior marketing executives worldwide, 91% are using online advertising, and over one-half indicate that their companies plan to maintain or exceed current levels where possible. Even more telling, 55% of marketers said they’re cutting expenditures on traditional media, precisely in order to increase funding for online efforts.

Even more-bullish expectations for digital spending were cited by respondents in an Epsilon CMO survey conducted in September. Among 175 senior marketing executives, 63% expected increases for interactive/online marketing spending for 2008; only 14% expected a reduction.

This month, a survey by MarketingProfs, of 600 US marketers, found that 60% planned to increase their spending on online advertising in reaction to the downturn.

Of course, there are analysts and pundits who have a far graver view of the state of online advertising. They see the general bullishness behind online ad spending growth as overblown, misplaced or just plain foolish. As Sandeep Agrarwal, an analyst with banking firm Collins Stewart, recently said in an interview with Advertising Age (October 13, 2008), “Failed banks… job losses and lower consumer confidence now characterize the macroeconomy. We believe this will hurt the Internet sector more than currently believed.”

Even more negative is another banker, Bill Morrison, of ThinkPanmure, who sees online advertising spending sinking like a rock, to only 3% growth in 2009. Said Mr. Morrison, “We believe it is prudent for investors to expect significantly lower growth in Internet advertising next year.”

Lets watch this space

Five by Five has created the first online version of the Autumn/Winter magazine for international fashion retailer ‘New Look’.  New Look wanted a format which will allow New Look customers to interact with the brand online; encourage sales through the website; and increase database registrations.

The solution really brings to life the New Look brand online, rewarding the user for visiting the site and challenges their perception of which came first: the magazine or the website?

Check out the new site and design your dream shoe! http://www.newlookmostwanted.co.uk/

Check out press coverage on our Flickr account http://www.flickr.com/photos/fiveby5/

Only in Japan!

Gardeners have long believed talking to plants can help them grow - but don’t usually expect them to talk back.

A pot plant in a Japanese cafe has been writing her own blog on a computer to keep customers posted on its thoughts.

Engineer Satoshi Kuribayashi, who has been studying how to communicate with plants, helped Midori-san express herself.

He wired up the hoya kerrii, commonly known as a “sweetheart plant”, to a sensor that measures bio-electric signals and translates them into Japanese using a computer algorithm.

A typical blog entry reads: “Today was a sunny day and I was able to sunbathe a lot. I had quite a bit of fun today.”

Customers at the Bowls Cafe in Kamakura, near Tokyo, are taking a keen interest in their green friend’s musings.

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/4/20081021/twl-blogging-plant-grows-big-in-japan-41f21e0.html

In the first of our new series of podcasts of interesting conversations and thoughts with beautfiful people about the wonderful digital world we live in, we talk to Kym Niblock, Managing Director of bbc.com about innovations, the challenges of an international site, social network opportunities, convergence and more.

Listen, download or subscribe using RSS or iTunes right here. We’ve even included a full transcript if you fancy reading rather than listening.

Here’s some snippets:

On learning from others in the digital space

“I think there’s lots that we can learn from some of the things that are coming off those sites around the way they use semantic search, around the way they talk to their users, around the way they’re inclusive, around the way they’re using social networking to broaden the experience. I think all of those things are things we can take away and learn from. That’s part of being in the web space. It’s a symbiotic relationship: once somebody’s learned something, everyone’s learned it.”

On the future

“I think that some of the next big pieces are going to be around the true convergence of what we’ve been talking about for ten years. Things like iPlayer are going to lead the way to do that, you know, how to get those things on to the home TV. At the moment it’s a pretty solitary pursuit doing things in front of your computer – how are we going to open that up and share it with friends in a mainstream way.”

Content also on these spaces:

Original post on The Feed from Five by Five blog on Brand Republic.

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Who to heckle for this post:

Nicholas Gill, Planner | nick.gill@fivebyfivedigital.com | @nicholasgill | bluurb.wordpress.com

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Despite the dream of a perfect utopian Open Web where data flows freely through the tubes there is still a huge chunk of the Web that needs to be kept behind locked doors. Usually for pretty good reasons too, such as protecting your online identity and security. If you’re anything like me, all this top-secret stuff, from your online-bank to your AFF profile it’s all kept locked safely away behind your favourite password. You know, that phrase, sporting team, year, whatever that you enter whenever you encounter yet another password sign up form - type it in hit ’submit’ and go about your cyber-business as normal.

The spanner in the works comes when the site you’re registering on decides that your password is not safe enough and that for your security your password must be constructed from a cryptic mixture of letters, upper and lowercase, numbers and punctuation symbols. A big problem with this kind of password is that they are very difficult to remember. Some tried and tested strategies for keeping them in your mind include listening to the password repeated ad-infinitum on your iPod as you drift of to sleep, an elaborate tattoo across your back in gothic lettering, Post-It notes scattered across your desk for the whole office to see, or my personal favourite, setting it as your Windows screensaver (works excellently for a locked screen password!).

The argument for this kind of password is that it is tougher for hackers to discover your password using a technique called a ‘dictionary attack’, where said hacker quite literally tries every password in a dictionary in the hope that they’ll finally find your password and be free to look at all your private Facebook pictures to their hearts content. Enduring the pain of a tattoo to guarantee eternal internet security might not seem like such as bad trade-off, but the over-paid security consultants have one last trick up their sleeves to make your internet experience a living hell - the dreaded forced password change, where after an arbitrary period of days, weeks or months you’re forced to change your hard-to-remember-but-ever-so-safe password for another, completely different hard-to-remember-but-ever-so-safe password. That you then need to commit to memory using any of the techniques mentioned previously. Which is why I really wish I didn’t get that password tattoo, because laser removal is going to be expensive and painful.