MediaCorp sets up for digital media's new creative era
Internet media and advertising group Media Corporation plc (MDC.L) has been restructuring to tackle the creative and technical challenges that advertisers face in the digital world.
Chief Executive Justin Drummond (pictured) said in an interview that the fragmentation of consumers' media habits had made life tougher for marketers and suppliers, including traditional advertising agencies.
"The rapid rise of digital media like the Internet, mobile phones and MP3 players is splintering people's media consumption and making it harder for conventional ad campaigns to make an impression.
"Digital technology is making it easier for people to switch between media, so in the digital world consumer engagement is critical. Ad agencies must respond and this is where we have been focussing a lot of effort in our online marketing and advertising division, Eyeconomy."
"If you can create really good, relevant content, people will engage with it and, equally important, share it with others," Mr Drummond said.
In addition to its in-house creative team, Eyeconomy produces dynamic on-line advertising solutions, including SubSites (which is full screen pop unders) and rich-media floating toolbars (SubLines), that deliver potential customers to their advertisers web sites.
Online network
The firm operates like an online network. SubSites and SubLines, for instance, engage Internet users through a network of over 750 host sites, offering access to a total reach of 30 million unique users each month.
It’s a sea change from more traditional advertising. Passive TV adverts tied to particular programmes or billboards at football grounds are rough and crude by comparison.
The new on-line ad agencies, like Eyeconomy, enable advertisers to target their audiences with great precision because of the Internet’s operating protocols that identify individual computers and track usage data, access routes and links.
One of the important business characteristics of these new ad agencies is their building of a network of sites, which opens up the potential for Eyeconomy to broker marketing and selling collaboration between sites.
Traditional ad agency clients used to say with a weary smile that they knew that half of their advertising budgets was well spent; they just didn’t know which half.
In the Web 2.0 environment, that need not be the case. “A great benefit to our clients is that we can measure precisely user/customer flow through and feedback transparent data,” Mr Drummond said.
Other divisions
AIM-listed MediaCorp has two other divisions. Search Focus is a supplier in the Paid Search market. IAB figures show that Paid Search accounted for 58% of all UK online advertising spend in the first six months of 2006. Total online advertising spend was almost £1bn in the UK for the first six months of 2006, representing 40% growth over the same period in 2005.
Search Focus is the market leader in the gaming vertical, led by gambling.com and supplemented by syndication deals on other top-tier domain names.
Mr Drummond said that MediaCorp is currently working to expand the business' reach into fast growing vertical markets including personal finance and travel markets.
Search Focus' proprietary technology includes a live pay per click bid management search engine. This allows advertisers to create and self manage their search listing campaigns from online deposits through to bid management and real time reporting.
It also has a publishing division specialising in premium destinations and portals. Its stable of websites includes onthebox.com (the UK's prime TV listings guide) and freedeal.co.uk (a comprehensive consumer portal).
4th January 2007
