DaxThink: Digital life

Consumers more receptive to targeted ads (Netimperative)

Emerging digital channels represent a huge opportunity for advertisers as consumers become more digital savvy, according to a new consumer survey.

The study, commissioned by digital marketing provider Bluestreak, reveals consumer behaviour and attitudes towards emerging technologies including podcasts, text messages (SMS), RSS, blogs and message boards as well as the more traditional email platform. Findings show that marketers have a huge opportunity on emerging platforms, as well as email, as adoption rate increases and consumer attitudes towards targeted, relevant, permission-based advertising becomes more accepting.

Doug Anderson, President, Bluestreak, said the study “intends to deliver for the first time a clear understanding of the actual consumer behaviours and attitudes regarding use of each channel. Results from this unique study shed light on which emerging technologies should have first look when a marketer is creating a multi-channel marketing budget.”


Key findings:

Rate of Adoption
The rate of adoption for new communication technologies represents a huge opportunity for marketers to expand their online investments into these emerging channels. 100 percent of respondents currently use email compared to 88 percent using text messaging; 71 percent using message boards; 63 percent using blogs; 36 percent using podcasting and 28 percent using RSS.

Attitudes towards Advertising
There’s a growing acceptance of advertising as the trade-off for good content and a further willingness to accept ads and "sponsored" content as long as the information is relevant and high-quality. This is yet another call for marketers to develop and deliver a one-to-one communication with their consumers. As always, over-communicating can have an adverse effect both on the marketer's brand and their bottom line. The following outlines some of the attitudinal findings regarding advertising on emerging platforms

Ad Quantity
o Consumers mostly feel that the level of or quantity of advertising on these channels is appropriate. When it comes to blogs, message boards and podcasting, the majority of respondents think that the number of ads is appropriate (55, 55 and 61 percent respectively). Slightly fewer, 48 percent, believe the same for RSS

o The proliferation of sponsored channels seems to have little to no impact on consumers’ usage (70 percent would keep reading a blog they know is sponsored, 66 percent would keep reading a sponsored message board)

o However, text messaging advertising is cited as the most unpopular form of advertising communication among these five emerging channels (77 percent of respondents say there is too much text advertising and 80 percent feel negatively towards text message advertisers)
Ad Quality

o The quality of advertising could be improved across channels according to consumers, with a majority feeling the ads are either “random” “get in the way” or “are not directed to me”

o Although consumers accept the existence of advertising, most do not respond unless they feel the offer is "personalized" or "useful"

o Although podcasting is included in this criticism, it also had the highest score among its peer set on relevance/personalization with 25 percent feeling the ads accomplished that goal
Ad Performanceo The strongest performance among these platforms is with permission-based emails (if an email is permission-based, 31 percent of respondents will open it 91-100 percent of the time and 41 percent will open it 61 to 90 percent of the time)

o After opening a permission-based email, 83 percent of respondents said they clicked on the website, 69 percent said they made an online purchase and 56 percent made a purchase in a retail store

o Demographic data revealed that the 35+ age group tends to be more responsive to online marketing offers

The Downside: Spam, Identity Theft and Viruses
Consumers are mainly concerned about viruses, identity theft and spyware as byproducts of using such channels (64, 56 and 53 percent respectively). Spam concerns were listed below these at 44 percent, perhaps demonstrating that consumers have caught on to the real threats of the Web. However, the research shows that the industry needs to do a better job of explaining spam, as respondents still consider “emails they once signed up for but no longer want” as spam.

The Emerging Digital Channels: Consumer Adoption, Attitudes & Behavior report was conducted for Bluestreak in September, 2006 by independent firm ROI Research.

The study was conducted among 1,000 consumers from an eRewards’ panel of over 1.5 million households and includes respondents who use email and at least one of the other five emerging technologies (RSS, Text Messaging, Blogs, Message Boards and Podcasting). At 95% confidence interval, a sample size of 996 has a sampling error of 3.1%.