InSites Blog

Every report confirms the trend: Marketers are shifting advertising budget away from traditional media and into online media.

But not all channels are equal. So what’s a quick and easy way to work out which outlets can serve up your target audiences and where should you be placing your advertising?

To answer that question for Belgian marketers, we launched a free online tool called eScape at the end of 2009. eScape shows the socio-demographic profile of visitors to participating sites, data about site satisfaction, and consumer habits and intentions in sectors that often use online advertising such as FMCG, automotive, finance, mobile and travel.

Since launching, we’ve added extra features and new outlets have joined. Hi-Media, Corelio Connect, Pebblemedia, Paratel, De Persgroep, Roularta Media and Trustmedia were the first participants. They’ve been joined by the blogging network Skynet and Microsoft MSN.

eScape’s features include complex analyses in real time, benchmarking against other sites within an industry sector and a handy portfolio planner. Exporting the data is easy, and you can set the language during data collection to more than a dozen local options.

Publishers, ad networks and agencies are all getting better data thanks to eScape. Why not sign up yourself and find out how this free tool can improve your targeting?

Last week, with the kick-off of the first football match between our very own Burger Boys and SSI’s Sharp Shooters International, the new tradition of the SSI – InSites Consulting Challenge Cup was started. SSI, which actually stands for Survey Sampling International, is one of our partnering panel providers. During the close collaboration over the last months, we discovered a mutual interest and after quite some time of anticipation, a date was finally set for a friendly game of football. So, last Wednesday, we gathered in Sporthal Kralingen in Rotterdam -home town of SSI- for an exciting game, which was won with a golden goal… by us. Final score was 5-6.

Needless to say, fans and supporters were on the edge of their seat right until the end. This ‘jury’ also had the pleasure of electing a ‘Hot Shot’ for the evening -the best player on the field- as well as cast a vote on the nicest goal. Winners were Martin Loedeman of SSI and our own Wim De Wever. All in all, a very successful evening, followed by a nice night on the town in Rotterdam. Thank you SSI, we already look forward to the next challenge!

More pictures are available at our Facebook fanpage!

Yesterday I attended the second edition of the Webvertising Forum, an event for all those who are interested in digital marketing. So as you would expect, the audience was mostly made up of advertisers and digital agencies.

First to present, was Patrick Marcke from IAB Belgium, who said a few words about the internet population and how online advertising budgets are evolving. Most graphs and insights used, were taken from the MC DC study, an extensive internet study which InSites Consulting conducted in partnership with IAB Europe. (http://mcdc.insites.eu) So, from my point of view, that was a very good start to the day

The forum went on to give a good overview of which digital marketing methods are out there and offered the possibility to do some networking over a cup of coffee and a copious lunch buffet. Miech Rolly from The Parking Lot presented the case study of Pearle, focusing on the fun aspect and the efficient way of using Twitter & Facebook for recruitment of actors/models and the promotion of the campaign. You can still check out the campaign on http://www.thesteamyroom.be and you’ll know exactly what I mean by ‘the fun aspect’.

Guy Makmel, Managing Director at Easyconcepts presented a technology, which acts on user intent to dynamically construct the content of an ad. This way, the ads that are shown to you on a certain site, are determined by certain semantic or behavioral factors. Applications for this technology are mostly on e-commerce sites, travel sites, etc. And the main advantage of it, is that conversion and thus ROI are very easy to measure.

David Warszawski from TradeTracker gave his view on performance based advertising with affiliate marketing and Bruno Van de Moortel from Medialogue spoke about crowdsourcing, giving some nice examples of how you can outsource content creation ànd even ad creation to your own audience.

A very interesting presentation came from Isabelle Driege from the digital agency Emakina. Without using research figures as such, she still threw some interesting digits around, speaking about 2.0, the 360° approach, but most importantly the 365 day conversation that marketers need to have with consumers. She explained that it is not so much about your brand site, as your brand presence. A brand needs to create a positive experience for consumers on all touchpoints, be they pre-sale or post-sale. Only by using a good mix of digital channels to market your products or services, can you achieve that. The main take-away for the marketer in this presentation: “it’s all in the mix”.

Kris Hoet from Duval Guillaume also spoke about touchpoints, focusing a bit more on creative ways to create new kinds of touchpoints, which take full advantage of our current 2.0 situation. Last presentation of the day was a duo presentation by Philippe Belpaire and Michel Tubbax from Roularta Media Group. It made me think of a short poem from “Poems on the underground”, that starts with the phrase “Not much cricket in Hamlet, I overheard a man say.” and ending with “To be honest, I like it that way, the absence of cricket is fine. But should you prefer work that includes it, please note that now, there’s some cricket in mine.” And well yesterday, I noted, that there was some “offline” in the presentation of Philippe and Michel… With this audience, it doesn’t seem very straight forward to mention your offline work and mostly focus on content. But it has to be said, they made a very convincing case. The new partnerships that they have with brands are inspiring. They allow the brand to contribute to the content and get visibility in return, but in a very subtle and natural way.

For me personally, the presentation on Online Educational Marketing by Geert Coppens from Instruxion was the most interesting. It’s a method that responds to the need of the consumers, rather than of the advertiser, by creating an online learning experience for the consumer before he or she is redirected to the page of the advertiser. Basically, the idea is that e.g. the bluetooth feature on a mobile phone becomes more appealing, if you give an animated explanation about what it is and what it can do for you, before prompting people to go ahead an buy it. Check out more examples on http://www.animatedexplanations.com/. What strikes me, is that this is a way of advertising that really responds to the insight that we need to start communicating differently with our consumers, ànd that web 2.0 offers limitless possibilities to do exactly that. It may not be the best way to pitch it, but I would say finally, you no longer need ‘sex’ to sell your product

The possibility to conduct studies amongst our own research community, is one way in which InSites Consulting can differentiate. Therefore, we have steadily been building an online research community, not only in key countries like Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, France, UK, etc., but also in important emerging markets as Turkey, Russia, Czech Republic, Poland, Brazil, Mexico, etc. There are currently well over 2 million participants in our community from literally all over Europe, and beyond.

With around 700.000 participants in Western European countries, constituting 34% of our panel, we are quite strong in most key markets. Just under 30% of our research community is from Eastern Europe, where our top countries are Russia, Czech Republic, Slovak Republic and Romania. Besides Spain, Italy and Portugal, the 17% from Southern Europe also feature Greece and Serbia.”

Want to find out more about our research panel? Contact Sam Berteloot (sam.berteloot@insites.eu)