The resources on these pages support marketing teams and planners trying to plan their online media effectively. Whether it’s the Digital Media Planning Academy programmes or online media planning development, ask your Academy Manager or Project Manager if you need more information.
This online learning resource is where you can discuss the issues from your Academy and download the outputs of our workshops.
Your Academy Director and lead tutor is Danny Meadows-Klue: Danny@DigitalStrategyConsulting.com
Welcome to your Digital Training Academy: a great way to boost your knowledge and skills, helping you and your team get the most from digital marketing, publishing and communications.
All of us here at Digital hope you'll enjoy your Digital Training Academy, but we also hope you'll instantly be able to achieve more in your firm.
Find out how Digital Training Academy works
Here is the place you can discuss issues with your tutor and other Academy participants
Is there something you did not understand on the Academy? Is there a new point you would like to make? Are there any new issues that you have discovered now you are applying your knowledge? Use this space to make your comments and to ask your questions.
Try to include the title of the Academy Lesson that your question relates to (if there is one). Putting this at the start will help other participants find the topics they are interested in.
The classroom is open for three weeks following your Academy
In this space we're listing things from the Academy that we feel 'Rock' in online advertising, and things that, if we're honest, 'Flop'. By helping our clients harness the rocks and steer away from the flops they'll produce more powerful communication and enjoy even better results. Remember, it's still a new media for many people and this can help marketers make smarter decisions...
Go to the 'Rocks and flops' page to share your views!
Learn how the explosive growth in the volume of media has created a culture of marketing noise. Reflect on what this means for your own audiences and the implications for your marketing plans. Consider whether the media channels and techniques you use add to the noise or genuinely achieve cut-through.
These notes are a drawn from one lesson in the Digital Consumer Insight Academy.
Continue reading "Lesson: Understanding the consumer - the reality of media saturation and the implications" »
Online marketing presents a richer choice of media formats, targeting and messaging than any other media channel. Harnessing this potential involves building on the principles of traditional media planning and using new toolkits, and matching the right formats and sites with the right media properties - all in a market that offers a daunting array of options. There are new metrics to track that transform accountability, and new models for trading media space. This Digital Insight Report introduces some of the trends, frameworks and viewpoints that describe online media planning today to help planners new to digital channels get up to speed quickly.
Download report
Join the news service so you hear about future reports (include your company details and areas of interest)
This large scale study of advertising effectiveness explores the impact of different ad shapes and sizes on click-through rates and dwell time. Researched by the technology vendor Eyeblaster, it forms a useful guide for digital media planners looking to boost the effectiveness of their online advertising.
Comments and questions? Post in the online classroom
Download Online advertising effectiveness research from Eyeblaster 2009
Whatever your involvement is in internet marketing, it’s useful to have a few great facts at your fingertips, so here are a few we put together based on the UK online media industry. Read through them and share them with colleagues. If you are taking part in a Digital Training Academy then we might have a few more for you as well. Read through them and think about additional cool facts that reflect the growth of internet media or marketing in your sector.
Read further...
Introducing a simple framework for best practice in online advertising and media planning. We use this model to explain the relationship between online advertising, traffic and sales. The advertising process in digital channels mirrors what marketers know from classic channels, and by unpacking the advertising effect into a funnel that describes the steps from ad attention, through advertising persuasion to sales results, marketers can better see the role advertising and the web plays in generating increased business.
Download the lesson handouts | Upcoming public training events you can join | Ask Danny a question about his talk | Ask about in-company training
Why do so many brands waste millions on websites nobody visits? This is one of the tragedies of digital marketing and the rush to create sumptuous, self-indulgent sites is one of the worst examples of how easily the digital landscape can be misread.
Continue reading...
TFM&A Technology for marketing and advertising 2008
Keynote lecture summary notes for participants
The rules of the marketing game have changed. The command and control television era where big brands delivered heavyweight messaging every night to the nation, has finally melted away. In its place a radically new structure has emerged that will dominate the next twenty years of marketing. Cultural evolution, catalysed by technology and typified by the web, has empowered media-savvy consumers with the tools to filter and select in a way never before possible. Customer expectations are huge and brands are failing. Trust has switched from institutions to friends, and the barriers to the flow of information have melted. The smallest of customers can have the loudest of voices. Society will never go back.
Read and download the lecture handouts | Upcoming public training events you can join | Digital Social Media Academy | Ask Danny a question about his talk | Ask about in-company training
A lesson from the Digital Creative Academy about why online advertising delivers impact
We live in a media saturated world. Audiences have become experienced in advertising. Many media are at risk of being screened out; television commercials not seen when they are fast forwarded, sections of newspapers going unread… Yet on the web the advertising is delivered the very moment the viewer requests the next page of content. Rather than an ‘opportunity to see’ that’s a guaranteed view. This means the impact of online advertising can be that much greater.
Download lesson handouts: A lesson from the Digital Creative Academy
The digital networked society is a great leveller. The relationship between brands and consumers has shifted. The structure of communications has undergone this massive leap. While the smart thinking in marketing is leaping to embrace a whole new way of doing things, much of the practice in marketing still clings to the past. That's why it wasn't just gutsy, but a strategically brilliant move for Microsoft to use a television style commercial to make the point for them.
Watch the Bring Back The Love film
The nature of the business objectives an advertiser has doesn’t change if they are advertising online vs offline. The web is just part of the media mix, and although it can satisfy more marketing needs than any other media, it’s still important to be precise about what the needs are.
The closer that media sales and media planning teams can get to the true marketing objectives, the more effectively they can do their job of designing the right campaign strategy, crafting the right media schedule and selecting the right formats.
Types of objectives
To recap, marketing objectives typically fall into three categories
• Brand objectives
• Acquisition objectives
• Retention objectives
Continue reading "Lesson: Setting marketing objectives" »
Learn how online media planning builds on the familiar concepts of reach and frequency from traditional media. Discover how you can get your media space to work harder for you on the web. Find out what’s worth tracking and why there are many false friends when it
comes to accountability. Follow our hints and tips and discover what you need to know.
Download lesson handouts:Selecting your formats
The web offers a massive range of choices to complement marketing in existing channels. For some firms the web has already become their lead medium, while for others it is a support tool for
television and press campaign. Smart digital planners find a wealth of opportunities for different strategic models to build their clients’ brands and generate response. But the starting point is reaching out to audiences in the right place.
Download lesson handouts: Selecting your websites
Just because two sites share a similar audience profile doesn’t mean they’ll share the exact same viewers. Follow the models of media planning from classic media and they will only help so far. To plan online media really well means understanding the role of advertising rotations and the reason why not everyone visiting a site sees all of the adverts. The implication is simple: by adding more sites to the schedule campaign reach increases greatly.
Download lesson handouts: Rethinking media schedules; knowing the reach
The sudden arrival of in-stream video advertising formats presents new challenges for commercial directors, ad operations teams and media planners. Minor variations in the way video advertising messages are delivered can have a disproportionate impact on the effectiveness of the commercials and the quality of the campaign. These best practice tips for video advertising reflect techniques that have proven to be effective for both media planners and online publishers in getting more value from the media space and creative assets.
Read further...
Insight & Analysis | by Danny Meadows-Klue
Today's new figures confirm the switch to online continues to accelerate in Europe’s lead media market. The internet's share of all advertising swelled to almost 15% in the first half of 2007, with further record-setting leaps in real growth. Boosted in particular by massive increases in the supply of media from social networks, and the continued switch of acquisition budgets into search, the wider media sector is starting to feel the real impact of the digital networked economy as the models that underpin many print and broadcast players get called into question. Read on for stats on spend, analysis, forecasts and key actions all follow...
Read Insight & Analysis by Danny Meadows-Klue
This is what we know about media consumption in Europe today:
Western Europe
20-27% of all time with media
Internet: One day a month per person
24 hours a month, 36 hours in UK
Internet bigger than TV
The lead media channel for many European under 34 year olds
Remember: if marketers crave engagement, the part of the media planner's job is to find time where audiences are and when and how their attention can be gained. The massive shift in the role of the web and email in people's daily lives reflects a shift in time and engagement away from classic media channels and to the digital ones.
Hats off to the NetRatings team in London for some really savvy insights into how to crunch audience data. These graphs show new ways to measure the elusive form of 'engagement' based on a blend of the time spent with a site, the number of pages viewed and the involvement of the viewer. As the online industry struggles for smarter ways to think through these issues, this is a real leap forward in understanding.
Web Analytics Academy | Some of the challenges in web measurement for publishers and marketers
Continue reading "New metrics for a new era" »
Ahead of all our Digital Training Academies we're keen to get you thinking about the issues and getting up to speed on the research and the state of the industry. That's why we're sending out two of our Digital insight reports that you can read through before the Academy begins. The first explores online advertising spend to confirm the size of the market and the scale it's grown to so far. The second looks at the bright ideas that marketers have discovered to help them get more from their online advertisnig media space. They should be a simple and fast read, but they each make points that we'll be touching on in the Digital Media Planning Academy. If you have any questions, then post them here...
Download Research Article:UK Media Consumption - Digital saturation drives change
Download_Digital_Europe
Download_Bright_Ideas_Innovations
Great to see the next wave of online ad effectiveness research for Video formats come through. Conclusion? Video works. And it works better than Rich Media, which works better than the in banner flash formats, that works better than the original static formats. Startling? Not at all. But the media community needs the proof points to give the confidence that these ‘truths of media’ work on the web just as they do in classic media. Check out NetImperative for more.
What form of advertising works best? That’s a question you’re always asked in the digital marketing industry, and every genre of websites have their own research to help you with the answer. But new insights from the OPA in the US are firming up exactly how much more impact video gives to campaigns, and why placing them inside content-rich destination sites adds further value still.
Download the research from the OPA
Internet communications have become a routine part of the daily lives of most people in the technically advanced countries of Asia, Western Europe and North America. As part of this, online marketing has already become a mainstream part of the media mix. These facts and landmarks we collated for participants on the Digital Training Academies are a summary of the internet and marketing development Academy lectures and are intended to present a few highlights of the immense changes created through this industry.
Download Digital Rollercoaster Report
There is a vast skills gap in the media and marketing industries. It's holding individuals and companies back. Online can be tough; impenetrable language, constantly changing technologies or suppliers, unclear business processes and evolving models for trading. And the pace means that even if you were up to speed six months ago the game will have moved on. That's why we set up the Digital Media Planning Academy: to help swell the ranks of the planning community and help more planners cross over from traditional media by providing top quality, jargon free, leading edge training. In this Academy you'll learn how online media planning builds on the familiar concepts of reach and frequency, but adds new dimensions. Discover how you can get your media space to work harder for you on the web. Find out what's worth tracking and why there are many false friends when it comes to accountability. Follow our hints and tips and discover what you need to know.
Download _Digital_Media_Planning_Academy_Prospectus
Getting to grips with online advertising trafficking can be a tricky business. It's a workflow process that hinges on having clear data and campaign materials arrive in the right way and meeting the specifications. On this Academy we touched on a few areas and if you'd like more then review the lessons in your Digital Academy packs and maybe check out the Ad traffickers online classroom. You can download some extra materials and post questions to other traffickers.
Download Traffic_Academy_Prospectus
There is a vast skills gap in the media and marketing industries. It's holding individuals and companies back. Online can be tough; impenetrable language, constantly changing technologies or suppliers, unclear business process and evolving models for trading. And the pace means that even if you were up to speed six months ago the game will have moved on. That's why we set up our programme of digital training academies; to provide top quality, jargon free, leading edge training to the future leaders of the media and marketing industries.
Download What_Training_Can_Do_For_Your_Company
Alongside our Digital Management Academy we run more than 40 other Academies to help marketers of all levels of experience get the most from the internet and the new marketing tools.
Download DTA_Prospectus that lists what we're running this term, and email Martin Kilinski with the sorts of topics you feel your team could benefit from more help with.
