Digital marketing has been a key aspect of all the mediums of advertising and has always posed certain challenges and opportunities to the advertisers. However, the changing trends and consumer lifestyles have posed serious concerns for advertisers as the consumers want more privacy and do not want to be disturbed by unwanted advertisements. This has lead to challenge to marketers as to how to advertise the offering while keeping from annoying customers.
With increasing technological advancements, the web users are able to control the amount of ad influx they want, and this paper proves the argument that consumers are able to control the advertisers. Digital Marketing Advertising to the consumers, in this age of technology and innovation, has been one of the biggest challenges to the marketers and advertisers.
With increasing newer market segments and changing lifestyles, advertisers have to keep exploring newer mediums and opportunities, out of which, internet has been a crucial one. The debate here however, is how effective the internet advertising is and whether internet has the power to control and influence consumers or it is the other way; I agree with the latter. Marketers have used the internet medium to reach the customers worldwide; billions of dollars have been spent all over the world for advertising on the Web.
You would hardly come across a website which does not have any form of advertising material. With so much clutter, providing quality and well designed advertising content on the internet is must for a company’s sustainability; and this has to be coupled with the need to maintain consumer privacy (Wong, 2009), as with the introduction of the latest software, consumers are even able to block pop up and control all the other unwanted material.
Therefore, internet advertising is still creating challenges for the marketers; not only it has a limited scope (Serve, 2008), but also has the issues of trust and reliability also exists. A survey by Neilson resulted that while purchasing a product or an offering, 90% of the consumers rely on their friends and acquaintances (Neilsonwire, 2009). Another study concluded that the trust ability of print ad versus internet was 20% to 6% while 21% of consumers read print ads as compared to 7% to internet ads (cited in Marsh, 2009).
A survey suggests that the number of web visitors who click on internet display ads has dropped 50% in the past two years; even worst, out of all those clicks, 85% are done by the same 8% of visitors (cited in Marsh, 2009). In online environments, the control is with the consumers as there are number of choices about how to respond to any advertising messages that the consumer is exposed to (Hoffman, Novak and Schlosser, 2000). herefore, with so much advertising clutter and decreasing internet advertising attention span to 15 seconds (Hawari, 2009), the real challenge is to gain the attention, interest; but even if the attention is drawn, it still is difficult to create a desire to purchase, and the consumers may be put off by an annoying ad and viewer has the option of simply closing the advertisement; this is not the case in tradition media and in internet, the push strategy does not work.
Today, consumers and even non-consumers have taken the role of pseudo-marketers; we see a lot of examples on YouTube where anonymous people with no past history of fame attached, become famous overnight and have millions of views and reviews. Through immense control on internet and social networking, consumers are not only changing the brands and their identity, but they are creating the brands through word of mouth and other techniques (Hales and Yee, 2008).
The consumers now have so much control that if they do not like any ad material, they immediately post a comment, write in blogs, upload a status on face book and the negative word of mouth spreads and billions of investment by the advertiser goes down the drain.
