Top Advertising Trends for 2010 Nielsen Share by Nielsen

nielsen-logoNielsen have shared their predictions for the advertising marketing in 2010, with smartphone and social networking advertising set to provide new sales channels.

Here’s a look at their top 5 trends from the Nielsen blog:

1. Optimizing media convergence is a top priority. A better understanding of media convergence will manifest in order to deliver a better return on investment. The ability to accurately measure activity and link online ads to offline purchasing behavior will be critical.
2. New models emerge to take advantage of smartphones. Accurate mobile measurement will be required to stay head of the snowballing growth of that media platform.
3. More cross-media ad campaigns surface. The massive growth of online video games played and shared online leads the way for more successful interactive and cross-media advertising campaigns to appear. Growth in the adoption of this innovative advertising across screens and activities will increase.
4. Commercialization of social networking hubs increase. Social media will provide a new sales channel for establishing product awareness and commercializing brands to better support traditional advertising or text-based ads.
5. More interesting and interactive online ads appear. Increased use of more creative advertising and content models online such as video, attention-seeking page takeover ads and mechanisms for greater interactivity will drive the next era of Web development.

Overall online marketing took a step back in 2009, with years of successive growth coming to a standstill with the global financial crisis. However, it was also a year we saw services like twitter and facebook hit the big time, partly thanks to increasing smartphone usage.

For marketers to be successful in 2010, they will need to develop ways to interact with consumers in these environments. Budgets may be moved away from programs like Google AdWords towards maintaining company social media profiles across twitter and facebook.

A small design firm is suing Microsoft over the name “Bing”

A small design firm is suing Microsoft over the name “Bing” after claims that the Bing search engine is infringing on their trademark. Bing LLC has been running since 2000 and has a pending trademark application over the Bing name.

According to the lawsuit, Bing LLC claims that Microsoft’s Bing “causes confusion with regard to the relationship between the plaintiff and the defendant, confuses the public with regard to the origin of the plaintiff’s services and dilutes the value of the plaintiff’s trademark.”

With the Bing search engine being launched in 2009, there’s no doubt Microsoft would have done their research before deciding on the name. Trademark law does allow firms in different industries to use the same name, so I am not confident this case will have a huge amount of merit.

Here’s what Microsoft had to say, “We believe this suit to be without merit and we do not believe there is any confusion in the marketplace with regard to the complainant’s offerings and Microsoft’s Bing,”

Even if the suit doesn’t go ahead, it’s been a good link building exercise for the company, with several media sites now linking to their homepage!