Kuan Yew’s Awesome Blog!

I attended the Google Malaysia Marketing Briefing yesterday at Hilton Sentral, KL, Malaysia. It was basically an event where Google was sharing some statistics and showing the online trends in Asia Pacific and specifically in Malaysia as well. Too bad I didn’t have a camera, but anyway, here’s what happened…

Before that, the key highlights that you should know of:
While the Internet is receiving more and more consumption by the society, most companies are only spending 6% of media budget online, spending the rest of the budget on traditional media. Looking at the bright side of the story, statistics and trends are proving that the awareness generated through online is higher as compared. Therefore, in the next 5 to 10 years, there’s so much of space for growth for all of us in the digital marketing line.
Now that’s GOOD GREAT EXCELLENT NEWS

Anyway, they started the event by showing the Stargate trailer from Youtube and stopped when it was at the climax. What a way to capture your attention. Then, Darren Keppie, Senior Client Service Associate, Southeast Asia, Google Inc. walked up to the stage and welcomed everyone.

After his welcome speech, came Mr Jayesh Easwaramony, Principal Consultant, ICT Practice, Frost and Sullivan Asia Pacific to talk about the trends and analysis of the Southeast Asia and the New Media. He shared some cool statistics and those that caught my attention were things like, Asia Pacific has the highest number of Internet users globally, 60 million blog posts are being posted everyday, 6 million youtube videos are viewed every day, and so on and so forth. Wow, those figures are really high. Mr Jayesh is an Indian or a mix I presume, as he has a deep Indian accent, it takes a lot of attention to really understand his words.

Next came Lori Sobel, Head of Sales, South East Asia, Google Inc. with her presentation – When World Collides, The Integration of Media. Her presentation was indeed the best among the three. If you look at her slides,
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Yes, for all Google followers out there, Google has reported revenue growth of nearly 60 percent in Q3 2007 since the same period last year. That’s USD $4.3 billion in Q3 of 2007, up 57 percent from Q3 2006 and up 9 percent from Q2 2007, when revenues reached $3.87 billion.

Here’s an interesting excerpt from ClickZ’s article:

The portion of revenues gleaned through Google-owned sites has increased in the quarter ended Sept. 30, 2007 since Q3 2006. Revenues derived from Google’s sites accounted for 65 percent of total revenues, or $2.73 billion, up 68 percent over Q3 of last year. During that quarter, Google-owned sites generated 60 percent of total revenues.

AdSense partner site revenues accounted for 34 percent of all revenues in the third quarter of this year, reaching $1.45 billion, up 40 percent over the same period a year ago. Since Q3 2006, the portion of network site revenues has lowered from 39 percent of all revenues. “We’re working on expanding our breadth of ad offerings,” said Google Chairman and CEO, Eric Schmidt while addressing investors.

Click here to read the whole thing at ClickZ but here’s what I’m really interested in…

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On 10th October, 2007, Bill McCloskey, one of the writers from MediaPost.com, wrote an interesting article with the title “The Karma of E-mail”. MediaPost Communications is an integrated publishing and content company whose mission is to provide an array of resources to super-serve media planners and buyers. Their HQ is in New York if I’m not mistaken. Visit their site for more info.

Anyway, back to the topic, in his article, I would like to highlight the following…

This is one of the problems facing email. As we progressively move to less and less personal forms of communications — from handwritten letter, to targeted direct mail appeal, to email blast –we gain reach and increased ROI, but face the danger of disengaging from our customers.

As we head into this holiday season, it might be good to look back at last year’s data pulled from Return Path’s Holiday Consumer Survey last January. The key finding is that consumers want to be treated as people, not a data point in a database. They rewarded those marketers with a track record of providing valuable and useful emails in the past, and ignored those that didn’t, even when they recognized the brand and the email sender.

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This actually came as a shock, before I tell you what happened, let me just briefly explain how this post landed itself here on my blog. I was reading this article by Jeanniey Mullen titled Why E-Mail ROI Is So Amazing and there she was talking about the top three reasons why e-mail marketing’s return of investment is so amazing and would remain the queen of ROI compared to other marketing channels.

Here’s a glimpse of her article…

In today’s digitally driven world, there’s a strong chance e-mail will remain queen of ROI, no matter the investment’s size. Here are three reasons:

E-mail marketing’s old business model is dead. E-mail’s new business model is predicated on lifestyle relevancy and management. It will remain the backbone of our communications.

Budget reallocation generates higher ROI through cost savings. You can pay $500,000 for a TV ad. Or you can reallocate $150,000 of that $500,000 for a digital video embedded in e-mail, in display ads, and on the site, creating a very cool viral element. The cost savings alone allow you to set up a higher ROI from the get-go. E-mail gets more funding as part of an integrated strategy, and the digital effort costs less.

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