Is Advertising Working?

According to an article in the Business Spectator only 50 percent of advertising is effective, and no one knows which half. This is leading people to question whether or not advertising is even worth it. The London based marketing group has done market research on the topic. Two surveys of 3,000 global marketers in January and March, found that the effectiveness of marketing has fallen to an all-time low and that increasingly sophisticated consumers turn off advertising.

75 per cent of marketers in the UK told Fournaise that they didn’t know if they could trust the visitor and traffic profiles claimed by online media owners and publishers. Thats unfortunate that owners of websites are not being honest with advertisers. The global marketing firm Synovate recently launched a market tracking tool in Asia designed to enable marketers to analyse the barriers they face to getting their products to market effectively. Scott Lee of Synovate said, "One of the things we have been doing is to work out the impact that physical market barriers are having on distribution, visibility, pricing availability and other issues,” He also added that he has, "seen cases where we have pre-tested advertisements and they looked great, but they had a questionable impact because of marketing barriers, particularly physical barriers and particularly on smaller brands.”

Everybody is trying to figure out how to deal with the Internet, and most recently the new genre of viral marketing, which used to be called word-of-mouth. Before information was passed on from one person to another somewhat slowly. Now with social networking tools like facebook and youtube, information about products, companies, and virtually anything can be passed on to millions of people instantly.

With all these problems and uncertainties in the marketing world, marketers are now moving to less traditional media for their marketing and advertising efforts. These media include various social networking websites.