Josh Bernoff from Forrester Research has just posted a piece on AdAge discussing the latest findings of a survey taken in the USA with leading marketers. The results should be alarming for traditional advertising media and agencies.

It strongly echoes our observations here in Australia. I have written a series of posts in the last year pointing to the same conclusion: Advertising shift permanent, What will agencies do when everyone can bypass advertising?, Perfect storm causing traditional media bloodbath, The sound of a marketing revolution, and A turning point in marketing and media history?

Here is what Josh had to say:

In this recession, marketers have learned that interactive marketing is more effective, and advertising less effective, per dollar spent. While budgets for online have decreased, they decreased less than other budgets. Six out of ten marketers we surveyed agreed with the statement “we will increase budget for interactive by shifting money away from traditional marketing.” Only 7% said “we have no plans to increase our marketing budget.”

Unlike the last recession, digital marketing is no longer experimental. Now it looks more like advertising is inefficient, relative to digital. More than half of the marketers we surveyed said that effectiveness of direct mail, TV, magazines, outdoor, newspapers, and radio would stay the same or decrease within three years. In contrast, well over 70% expected the effectiveness of channels like created social media, online video, and mobile marketing to increase.

The result is that digital, which will be about 12% of overall advertising spend in 2009, is likely to grow to about 21% in five years. Along the way overall advertising budgets won’t grow much.

This is huge.

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The 10 July 2009 Issue of B&T Magazine has put the websites of some of Australia’s top digital agencies to the test, with a panel of judges ranking each site out of 40. The criteria used to assess the sites included Usability, Creativity, Employee Appeal & Client Appeal. (The employee appeal was considered from the perspective of job seekers).

While we thought this was an interesting approach to assessing websites, its not the scientific approach we like to employ. So we decided to run all of the sites in B&T through Web ANLYZR to compare results.

Our Web ANLYZR tool is designed to assess sites from a marketing perspective. Web ANLYZR doesn’t use opinions, just raw data and results to score websites out of 100. Here is what Web ANLYZR looks at:

• On-site search engine optimisation
• Off-site search engine optimisation
• Keyword search scores
• Depth of Presence
• Social media
• Traffic conversion

These are the crucial components we utilise and measure for an effective inbound marketing-focused website.

Of course, not all agencies subscribe to this approach, and many achieve excellent results for their clients with alternative approaches. This is not meant to be a critique of various agencies and their sites, merely a comparison of B&T’s appraisal compared to Web ANLYZR.

An interesting aside was that only one site, Bullseye, turned up on the first 5 pages of Australian Google searches for “advertising agency“, “digital agency” or “digital advertising agency“. It was no coincidence then that Bullseye had the highest score with Web ANLYZR.

Here are the results from B&T and Web ANLYZR:

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Quick, you’ve got 30 seconds to decide. If you were offered the option of having the first ad in your category of Yellow (Pages) or first result on Google (organic, left hand side, not the paid ads on right) which would you choose?

10 years ago the answer would have definitely been Yellow.

5 years ago you probably still been swayed towards Yellow, but at least you had to think about it.

But now, what would you choose?

Savvy internet marketers don’t have to even think about it, they’d choose Google immediately because they understand the numbers and know how powerful being on the first page of Google for a desired search can be.

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