Media buying and the internet

The rise of the internet as a marketing tool has been unprecedented, and has enabled media buyers to look to an entirely new audience as a potentially fresh market. There are many forms of media buying associated with the internet and they range from the ordinary and the mundane through to the innovative and the interesting – let’s have a look at some examples of how the media buyer exploits the internet as a new medium for advertising.

The affiliate revolution

Perhaps the most prevalent example of a new media buying revolution came with the rise of affiliate marketing systems. Devised by the originators of Amazon – the major internet store - a number of years ago the idea grew into what is now one of the most used of media methods on the net, and has proven success to help it along.

Steering away from traditional advertising methods the affiliate idea embraced the community spirit of internet users and gave them the option of clicking freely to links – these are now present everywhere – and given the number of people using the net every day it is no surprise that the level of success has been phenomenal.

Affiliate marketing has, in fact, been instrumental in the growth of the blog phenomenon, and continues to exert a great influence over virtual media buying trends.

Viral marketing campaigns

The modern trend for companies to invest in ‘viral’ campaigns – loosely these are those that take an alternative form and grow by word of mouth, usually viewed on one of the commonly accessed popular sites such as YouTube – is one that is set to become more prevalent as the method is fine tuned.

A recent viral campaign by one major multinational featured a humorous video that was viewed by over a million people in a very short time, yet research revealed that very few of those had actually taken in what the product being marketed was, and equally few realised it was an advertising campaign.

These problems will be eradicated in time as viral marketing features much more strongly in media buyers’ portfolios.

The virtual life method

Among the more interesting of internet crazes of late has been that of virtual worlds; these, according to the users, are not games but multi participant lifestyles in which the participant creates a persona that he or she becomes when in the virtual world. One of the more famous and popular – Second Life – has become something of a byword for controversy; however, the popularity of these ‘worlds’ – in which real money can be made trading objects and property, among other things – has led to a number of major organisations setting up shop on line and performing roll-outs of new products live in virtual worlds.
The publicity garnered by this sort of trend-oriented media buying technique is clearly worth the effort, and the column inches generated in the conventional press are testament to the success.

Media buying is geared towards spending in the right area at the right time, and there is little – if any – doubt that the internet is currently worthy of media buyers attention.