The Constantly Evolving Advertising Market
The Constantly Evolving Advertising Market
Jason Mandel, Launchsquad
One of our newer clients, AnchorFree, had a coming out party this week in conjunction with ad:tech and received quite a bit of attention from folks like GigaOm, ClickZ and MediaPost. The company has for the past couple of years been building out a platform and aggregating thousands of free wireless hotspots, and then allowing advertisers to reach consumers in a very targeted manner. It’s a really smart idea and exciting opportunity.
AnchorFree also builds on LaunchSquad’s experience with many of the pioneers in online marketing that we’ve worked with over the past dozen years or so. From folks like Flycast (ad network) and Digital Impact (email marketing) in the early days of the Web, to some of our more recent clients like Jingle/800-FREE-411, Adify, Pheedo, Unwired Nation and now AnchorFree, it’s been fascinating to watch the advertising world navigate through a period of constant, rapid change.
Internet advertising has gone from essentially zero to $20 billion during this time. Think about that for a moment! eMarketer projects that number to further double by 2011, and comprise a whopping 13% of all advertising spend.
I’m sure it’s been extremely challenging for marketers and agencies to stay on top of all of these new technologies and models, and more important, figure out exactly where the people and returns are. Ten to twenty years ago that was a far easier proposition: everyone knew that people were for the most part watching television, listening to the radio or reading the newspaper. It was much easier to figure out where and when to put your advertising spend.
But today, audiences are fragmenting exponentially and that will only continue for the foreseeable future. And even as these markets progress and shake out, there’s no end in sight to the innovation opportunity that emerging companies like AnchorFree will tackle.