Online

Key Findings

On-line does not especially reach the people that TV finds hard to reach. But fortunately online is also not skewed towards reaching the heavy (easy to reach) TV viewers.
In the future, TV and internet usage will be increasingly independent; watching more or less of one already has little affect on the viewing of the other. This means that the internet will remain a useful complementary medium to use with TV.
It is not the case that there is a group of light (difficult to reach) TV viewers who also seldom use the internet (and hence are difficult to reach via on-line advertising). Rather, there are people who are out and about a lot, and not home very much (who also tend to be younger, with more active social loves). These people find it difficult to watch much TV, certainly at-home TV. They also don’t access the internet much at home, but are as able to access it at work or when mobile as anyone else.

Marketing Commentary

Showing 6 results

Why paid search is like shelf-space

April 2023
Professor Byron Sharp

Paid search is very different from advertising - it is much more like shelf-space. An important implication is that (like shelf-space) it needs to be always on. The effects of paid search can be seen immediately in sales - this is very different from advertising and it has the advantage that spend can be fairly easily optimised.

NOVEMBER 2020
Byron Sharp after discussion & data analysis with Ned Smith, Dr Kesten Green, Dr Bill Page & Prof John Dawes

If the purpose of your advertising and PR is to encourage...
... visits to your website
... visits to your dealerships/branches/stores
... calls to your call centre
... online search for your brand

...then you should use these metrics to evaluate your advertising.

This has been standard practice for many years for any professional marketing department. So I hardly need write about it... but lately it’s been suggested that such metrics might have other uses. In particular, “share-of-search” has been touted as something of a miracle metric: cheap and predictive (but of what?).

In the words of famous scientist Carl Sagan “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”. So let’s have a look at the claims for share-of-search, and some evidence.

October 2018
Commentary
Byron Sharp

Department stores seem to be having a tough time. The blame is often laid on Amazon, yet there are declining department stores in countries where Amazon has negligible presence, and the numbers of department store chains has been declining for decades. The rise of online shopping is also blamed, yet department stores should be one of the beneficiaries of online shopping.
I have another explanation why things are tough for department stores, and importantly, why some department stores aren’t suffering as much as their peers.

28 October 2013
Professor Byron Sharp

Cadbury’s Social Media Manager claims a 7% sales increase in single Creme Egg sales over Easter after shifting from TV to Facebook (paid for and community management). Knowing that Facebook Fans are heavier buyers, do you know how they achieved such sales success?

23 December 2011
Professor Byron Sharp

Shock, how amazing – new ‘research’ from Google shows that advertisers should be spending far more of their advertising dollars online with Google.

In a report that insults the intelligence of the marketing community Google tell us that consumers are doing more on-line product research than they did in the past (when they weren’t online).

20 July 2011
Professor Byron Sharp

I’ve written before about the army of consultants crying
“consumer behaviour has changed radically”
“marketing doesn’t work anymore”
Who then present nothing more than a repackaging of the orthodoxy. e.g. see my comment on Seth Godin’s “Purple Cow”.
There are many marketing assumptions that need to be changed. Yes, practice can be improved. So by all means let’s talk about this, but anyone advocating specific changes should offer supporting evidence, from serious research.