Google EMEA Chief, Nikesh Arora on Internet Marketing
Some of the bits from Nikesh Arora’s talk at the Marketing Society Annual Conference in London, 2008 (statistics he uses are not supported here with links, it’s more of a semi-transcript)
Watch it, or have a look at the text below.
He starts with a quick stat: teenagers have more than 200 friends on their instant messaging account, 75% of whom they have never met in real life, yet, he thinks that about 50% of marketers do not understand what’s going on around them.
Nikesh started to work in the phone industry so he recalls a misestimation: 15 years ago the phone industry said that 3% would use cell phones, as there is a phone at every corner, so people won’t need mobile phones. “You look back and you say that it was pretty obvious that people would have a mobile phone.” But it’s very difficult to predict changes. By today, broadband has gone from a nice-to-have to a must-have. Besides, “in ten years, our storage capacity will go up a thousand times” (if you look at how the ipod, iphone capacities grow for the same price, for instance). What will happen? You give ipods and broadband to Africa for $7.5? “Everything you’ve ever created can be on an ipod in 15 years.” Phones will be a “tool of content production” so people are going to get more participatory and involved.
My favorite part is this:
“It’s never been possible in the past to find a billion people on a global platform who are connected by the same need. They are all online, they have very similar attributes (I didn’t get this similarity part), they all know many many similar things. It would be the fifth largest country in the world. No wonder that in the last few years the top three brands - amazon, ebay, google, - developed online.”
What happens on the internet?
(classic statements)
- There’s a billion searches every day.
- The next thing is chatting, communicating. Contrary to the [15 years ago] estimated monthly 600 minutes phone-communication, we now see 1800 minutes a month on average. 23 billion instant messages a day, which means that we are turning into a constant partial attention society.
- The notion of commerce: the European market (130 billion euros) has tripled in the last four years and it is going to double in the next 4 years. Sometimes companies are not putting products on the website in order to avoid their dealers getting pissed off…. Every 5 seconds there is somebody posting a consumer opinion on the web! So even if you are not there, do you know who is talking about what on the web? For example, Cadbury and Whisper story: Cadbury discontinued the production of one of its brands called Whisper but they found that 93 communities was on Facebook who wanted to bring back Whisper [here is a petition site - eventually it has been re-produced]
go up and find entertainment - People are increasingly on the web, spending more and more hours - mostly for community and entertainment purposes. The question is “Are you ready to interact with these people in those forms?”
Back to basics: consumers are blocking advertising, and all that they care about is product performance. People want to know what the ROI of your function is. So if you find a way to make your advertising relevant for your consumer you can go very very far. His example is the ‘Will it blend?’
Have an engaging product (do publish all the 5000 letters to the editor, even if they are not so articulate - don’t pick the annual 5 - let the consumer decide and passionately engage), and don’t forget to put its manual on the web.