The Best Digital Marketing Campaigns in the World

Mastering The Art of Customer Engagement

Damian Ryan, Calvin Jones

• Publisher: Kogan Page
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780749460631
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Advertising
• Index: Business

With the enormous growth of the internet and social media sites, digital marketing is now worth more per annum than TV advertising in the UK. Social network advertising spending is expected to increase to a staggering $4.3 billion in 2011 in a bid to attract today's media-savvy consumer. The Best Digital Marketing Campaigns in the World brings together an international collection of the most successful digital marketing campaigns of our time, assessing what they achieved and the business lessons learnt. This practical and insightful book explores how businesses large and small have harnessed social media, blogs, forums, online video and email to boost their brand and attract customers. Damian Ryan and Calvin Jones present a selection of hand-picked case studies, sharing the knowledge and skill of the world's top creative minds. Covering everything from household names such as Pizza Hut and Pepsi to Obama's 2008 presidential election campaign, this book is the must-read guide for all marketers looking to embrace the new digital landscape.

Human nature has a tendency to admire complexity but reward simplicity.

Ben Huh, CEO, Cheezburger Network, addressing the SMX East conference in October 2009

Things move quickly online. New services spring up practically overnight, and trends shift at the drop of a (virtual) hat. As online marketers we’re on a constant learning curve, one that usually gets steeper the higher up it we manage to climb. Keeping on top of everything that’s going on in the digital space is difficult – we know, we live and breathe it every day, and there’s always new stuff to learn. It can be overwhelming, but it’s important to take a step back, a deep breath, and to look at the bigger picture. When you tear yourself away from the day-to-day minutiae you’ll find definite macro-trends emerging that will help you as you embark on your next digital marketing adventure.

Your business, your brand, your customers – a unique combination

Search online or browse a bookshelf on anything to do with internet marketing and you’ll find reams of prescriptive formulas and ‘how to’ guides promising instant success. We’ve never been fans of prescriptive formulae, and here’s why: anything that’s general enough to ‘work’ across the board patently doesn’t. By definition a one-size-fits-all solution is generic; it’s not tailored to your business’s unique needs and so it cannot possibly deliver the best results for your business. Unless somebody knows your business, your customers and your market inside out how can they possibly offer you step-by-step instructions that will work seamlessly in your particular circumstances?

The short answer is that they cannot – and neither can we.

What we can do, however, is explore some of the trends that have emerged in the digital marketing space over the past couple of years, examine where we are today and then, in the case studies that follow, show you how some of the world’s leading brands are using digital marketing to engage more effectively with audiences, promote brand awareness and boost their bottom line.

Where are we now?

As authors we’re very conscious that any book about digital marketing, including this one, is in danger of dating quickly. The topic is among the most fluid and dynamic imaginable, and continues to evolve at a mind-boggling pace. Tools and services appear online seemingly overnight, and many disappear just as quickly, waxing and waning to the rhythm of fickle online consumers. All of which makes it a very exciting field to be involved in, but also makes writing about it in a way that will retain value for you, the reader, a challenging endeavour to say the least. But then, we’re always up for a challenge.

It’s a huge and still rapidly growing market

As we were researching Understanding Digital Marketing in early 2008, global online population statistics (www.internetworldstats.com) put the number of internet users worldwide at about 1.3 billion. The latest stats, as of 30 June 2010, showed that close to 2 billion people across the globe had regular access to the internet. That’s an additional 700,000 people or so, give or take a few million, in just a couple of years, and means that today more than a quarter of the global population has access to the internet. Consider the regional breakdown of internet penetration and you start to see just how crucial it is for your business to connect with its customers online, wherever in the world you happen to operate.

In North America more than 77 per cent of people are online, in Australasia/Oceania it’s 61 per cent and in Europe 77 per cent – although within that subdued European figure of just over half you have Scandinavian states sporting 80–95 per cent penetration, and the UK with more than 82 per cent. Asia’s internet penetration figures stand at around 21.5 per cent, but that doesn’t give the full picture either, because there’s a massive swing from a high 81.1 per cent penetration in South Korea to a very low 0.4 per cent penetration in Bangladesh. Percentages can hide the sheer scale of the potential online market in some of these countries too.

Take China as an example. Only 31.6 per cent of Chinese people have internet access. That doesn’t sound like much, but translate it to actual individual internet users and it represents a massive 420,000,000 people, giving China the world’s largest online population by quite some margin.

A global phenomenon, local impact

In its report Top Predictions for IT Organizations and Users, 2010 and Beyond: A New Balance, analyst firm Gartner predicts that by 2014 more than 3 billion people – or a significant majority of the world’s adult population – will have the ability to ‘transact electronically via mobile or Internet technologies’. That’s a staggering statistic that represents a fundamental shift in the foundation of global commerce.

Widespread internet adoption and the use of electronic media to facilitate commerce is a global phenomenon, but it’s one that even local businesses cannot afford to ignore. Whether people are looking for a plumber to fit their new bathroom suite or using a smartphone...

Table of contents

• Cover page
• Title page
• Imprint
• Table of contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• The rapid evolution of (digital) marketing
• Looking forward to a creative digital future
• Full imprint