Digital Lifescapes

In its latest market assessment, eMarketer predicts an 8.2 percent decline in U.S. total media advertising spending in 2009, after a 3.6 percent decrease last year. However, some channels continue to grow -- including word-of-mouth marketing. According to PQ Media, much this growth is due to the rise of new media channels, such as blogs, social networks and other social media sites. The research firm also found that U.S. word-of-mouth marketing spending on online communities increased 26.6 percent in 2008 to $119 million. After 37.6 percent compound annual growth from 2003 to 2008, PQ Media predicts total U.S. word-of-mouth marketing spending will continue growing. They estimate an increase of 14.5 percent compounded annually between 2008 and 2013. Total word-of-mouth marketing spending for 2009 is estimated at more than $1.7 billion, a 10.2 percent year-over-year increase. Consumer goods firms were the biggest spenders on word-of-mouth marketing in 2008, with a 17.4 share of the tota...

Recommendations by friends and opinions posted by consumers online are the most trusted forms of purchase influence globally, according to the latest Nielsen market study. The Nielsen survey, the largest of its kind, shows that nine in every ten Internet consumers worldwide (90 percent) trust recommendations from people they know, while seven in every ten (70 percent) trust total stranger opinions posted online. However, in this new age of consumer influence, advertisers may be encouraged by the fact that brand websites -- the most trusted form of advertising -- are trusted by as many people (70 percent) as consumer opinions posted online. "The explosion in consumer-generated media (CGM) over the last couple of years means consumer's reliance on word-of-mouth in the decision-making process, either from people they know or online consumers they don't, has increased significantly," says Jonathan Carson, at Nielsen. The Trust in Advertising element of the survey was firs...

Spending on word-of-mouth (WoM) marketing jumped 35.9 percent in 2006 to $981.0 million and is expected to top $1 billion in 2007, making it one of the fastest growing alternative media segments. Driving the growth is the continued consumer shift to alternative media and the marketer's need for increased brand engagement and ROI. These are some of the findings of the first in-depth analysis of the emerging word-of-mouth (WoM) marketing industry by PQ Media. PQ Media defines Word-of-Mouth (WoM) marketing as an alternative marketing strategy supported by research and technology that encourages consumers to dialogue about products and services. And for the first time in the long history of WoM marketing, an industry has arisen by integrating strategy, technology and measurement from its earliest stages of development. Brand marketers are responding, and have begun to increase their WoM media budgets, moving from test phase to implementations that support their integrated marketing cam...