Intricacies of online marketing

As the internet grew into the news and entertainment media’s prime habitat, it was only natural for the marketing industry to enter an unprecedented phase of evolution, reorienting the ‘information broadcast’ paradigm to maximise outreach. Traditional media has adopted a fairly straightforward marketing outlook.
Advances from newspapers to radio and then TV incorporated little innovation beyond presentation. Each ‘revolutionary’ breakthrough at best accomplished reaching a larger consumer base and in some sense, measurement of the real impact (ROI) was missing.
The advent of the internet not only dramatically increased the potential target audience, but also provided improved ways of measuring the effectiveness of advertising dollars. Suddenly, the number of visits on websites provided an avenue of measuring user interest and response, opening a vast new horizon and igniting fresh competition in the industry. The information revolution also directed popular attention towards the younger generation, compliant with our demographics since 60 per cent of Pakistan’s population is below 25 years of age.
In keeping with basic marketing principles, corporate budgets quickly started following eyeballs, being forced to tap growing online youth presence, hence the shift away from TV and mainstream news to the YouTube and blogging environment, citizen journalism (as it is popularly known).
Initially, online marketing featured little sophistication over its predecessors and started off as merely fixed rental spaces on the web sold on a monthly or quarterly basis. As the industry grew and more sophistication in technology came in, improved matrices were introduced, forcing the online advertising dollars to shift to websites based on their performance and consumer behaviour.
The current models of cost-per-ad-view and cost-per-ad-click came into practice, which are still largely in place across the world-wide-web. Since buying mere ad spaces on monthly rentals made little sense to advertisers, suddenly with the advent of these new efficient models of buying media spaces online gave way to a major shift in advertising money. Interestingly, newspaper, radio and TV ads had little to ensure or measure impact on sales, therefore the online space provided novelties in numerous domains and gained popularity among marketers.
Despite these innovations, there is tremendous potential as yet unrealised in online marketing. Agencies catering specifically to this sphere have popped up, and their development has been pretty quick in Pakistan. They form the crucial link between products and online portals, facilitating matters for both sides and making healthy premiums.
It bears noting that though only approximately 10 per cent of Pakistan’s total population of 180 odd million comprises active internet users, it is still a sizeable number when compared with countries like Singapore, Japan and Taiwan where small overall population size means less active users. Yet more advertising spending is channeled online in these countries. Facebook alone has more than 4.4 million registered users from Pakistan with more than 80 per cent users lying in the age bracket of 18-34 years.
It is primarily this segment that the online marketing industry was made to initially follow, and now leads in terms of providing advertisement stimuli. The so-called Arab Spring and anti-austerity uprisings in peripheral Europe are potent indicators of the snowballing impact of social media.
E-commerce is shifting consumerism online with increasing pace, creating a new cyber market space, where marketing has also taken centre stage. More than trade, commerce and the Doha Round, the online medium is the driving force and life-blood of globalisation.
This, of course, does not mean that traditional marketing techniques have become redundant. They are just as vibrant, though now they complement the online component as market forces play upon cyber space to create the economic mix of optimal utilisation of limited resources.

The writer Partner and VP of Business at Bramerz