What To Expect From Digital Marketing In 2010

Alex Gerage,

With everyone seemingly focused on reliving 2009 and reminiscing over the first decade of the 21st Century, it’s refreshing to see some intriguing speculation about the year ahead. Advertising Age has posted a two part discussion about the anticipated digital marketing trends in 2010. I recommend checking out parts one and two at their website as they discuss a wide range of topics, but a couple are particularly important to us.


The piece structures an interesting argument around the future of viral videos. They explain that virals are expected to move from “art” to “science.” Essentially, over the past few years, popular viral videos have been developed and popularized without any specific goal or campaign in mind from the producer. Now that digital advertisers are aware of the potential of viral campaigns to spread the word, they will begin developing larger, comprehensive campaigns that build upon interest generated from viral videos to help promote a product. While there will always be the “fail” video on YouTube that receives 100,000 hits, expect to see more instances of companies using viral videos to jumpstart or perpetuate a larger campaign. 





The article also comments on mobile marketing’s prospects. As a medium, mobile communication has been slower to adapt to digital marketing than the Internet over the past few years (I wrote about the shortcomings in a previous article). With costs of service plans and hardware expected to go down (or at least become more reasonable), consumer spending on smart phones should increase. Consequently, companies will be motivated to create more user friendly mobile browsers that can lend itself to mobile marketing. To me, the mobile medium can be a pivotal tool in viral campaigns, and technological improvements will allow more campaigns to be more mobile based in 2010.


All signs point to digital marketing continuing to develop in the coming year. As such, I think there’s reason to be excited that viral campaigns will continue to emerge and captivate our attention.


What do you think of these expected trends? Agree? Disagree? Let us know below.

Viral Marketing

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Comments (2)

  1. Great read Alex, Thanks.

    For me marketing and viral campaigns are one in the same and for me J.J Abrams 2008 “Cloverfield” was the beginning of this all. Granted ARG’s and digital marketing has been going around way before then and was the beginning of the viral for “Cloverfield”, I only see this as the true beginning for a much needed style of promotion. Word of mouth and digital marketing combined is almost a promised sell of the produced being marketed, just look at the video above, it’s the perfect example of the combination of the two. Have a person of high celebrity status (Kobe in this case) doing a stunt (jumping the car) and showing off and claiming the product allowed him to do that (the shoe) instantly becomes a hit. People begin talking about it, off the internet. I remember my friend actually telling and showing me it. I thought it was brilliant at the time. Word of mouth makes digital marketing possible and vise versa. I see this becoming the beginning of a new promotion technique and if done right (like the Kobe video), I see a lot more videos being made and a lot more products being sold. It doesn’t even have to be that same style as the Kobe video. Some commercials are hilarious and are then downloaded and uploaded to YouTube and various other media sites. Brilliant concept, really.

  2. It is art AND science. Cameron’s Avatar is an artist story, against an artistic backdrop, with an underlying ‘science and technology’ that enables the story to go to the next level. So one of the things we see for 2010 and 2011 is the emergence of 2 way, interactive digital marketing based on interactive technologies; all while keeping in mind that the story must always come first.

    S. Broomfield – Co-Founder of Veeple, the interactive video platform solution

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