Real time marketing

Comscore have this week announced the release of a new tool to measure the reach of online ads, and recent research using the tool shows that Facebook is the biggest display advertiser in the UK, with 12.5billion ad views in April 2009.

This reflects a growing trend, most visible with Twitter users etc, of the internet moving into real time mode, streaming information to users in a dynamic manner rather than from static websites. Users want information **now**, and are increasingly seeking recommendations from their social network to find the information, products etc they want.

For those who have previously avoided display ads etc in their marketing mix, the availability of tools to conduct serious metrics may provide the impetus to reconsider. However, despite FB displaying so many ads, it is still debatable whether the users are clicking on the ads and hence advertisers are benefiting from such exposure.

The question has to be whether the age old advertising medium is still valid in 2009, and whether what is required is to move with the times and for marketing to be much more ‘real time’ eg with Tweets, live news streams, web TV /live video and so on.