Search Sense

If you’re thinking about how advertising is changing at the moment, can I recommend a little light reading for this Friday?

First off, social network academic Danah Boyd of Stanford kicked off a fascinating discussion earlier this week when she posted a typically provocative and insightful piece entitled: “Who clicks on ads? And what might this mean?”.

Her hypothesis is disturbing.

I suspect that heavy ad clickers in social network sites and other social media are more likely to trend lower in both economic and social capital than the average user. Unfortunately, I don’t have the data to test these hypotheses at all. (Does anyone? Are there any studies on class dynamics and ad clicking?)

A week on and the comments debate on her blog has not yielded any strong evidence to counter her idea. I find this surprising: is there really no study of the demographics of people who click on ads?

Anyway, once you’ve chewed that over, I would direct you to IBM’s recent study, based on surveys of 2,400 consumers and 80 advertising experts, breezily headlined “The end of advertising as we know it”.

The study predicts “greater disruption for the advertising industry in the next five years than occurred in the previous 50″. In itself that’s not news: the only certainty for the industry in the near term is profound change.

Happy reading - and thinking…

We are collecting in excess of 65 million consumers’ data every day at iCrossing. This data includes indications on people’s needs and behaviours - it is a staggering mine of useful information.

We collect it from search marketing, display campaigns and user behaviour tracking in real-time and, when compared with how marketing has been historically measured, with amazing accuracy… We have tools and people who work everyday to mine this data to develop actionable insights, and clients who are building business strategy based on this bigger, better, and faster way of connecting with consumers.

I’m totally convinced digital is not only going to become the driver of marketing tomorrow, but is largely already there, we’re just getting our ducks in a row. As Herzog says, ‘digital at the centre’.

It’s easy for those of us looking at digital everyday to take it for granted. Some days I just have to pinch myself and say ‘wow’, this is groundbreaking stuff…