Last week I was invited to a ‘Brand Marketing in a Digital World’ session at Google.

Currently in the UK,  total ad spend is £20bn, with 23% of the total spent online. However, there’s a bit of a disconnect when it comes to Brand Marketing –  offline, the split is around 50% on brand marketing; and 50% on direct response. Whereas online, just 5% is spent on brand marketing and the remaining 95% is on direct response.

Perhaps unsurprisingly the primary purpose of the session was to grab some more of that brand marketing budget… well there’s no such thing as a free lunch, right?

However, the session managed to avoid being entirely pitch, and some pretty interesting stuff was shared – so in the interests of share and share alike, I thought I’d share some of it with you.

Undoubtedly digital has profoundly changed both how companies reach their target audience, and indeed the ways in which they communicate with them. Traditionally marketing has been very much about the ”push’ – i.e. transmitting messages from the brand to the consumer. However, increasingly brands are electing to utilise ‘push’ techniques in a slightly different way – rather than simply ‘pushing’ their advertising messages, they are using ‘push’ techniques to encourage consumers to engage with their brands. This stimulates ‘pull’ – i.e. where consumers actively choose to view a brand’s content. ‘Pull’ is essentially about consumer engagement – and of course, here content is king.

The challenge for brands today is to create content which ‘pulls’ consumers in – they actively want to engage with the brand, and perhaps even participate.

Doritos were highlighted as a case study see http://www.youtube.com/user/DoritosYouMakeIt – a campaign (NB this was heavily supported offline too) encouraging consumers to create their own TV ad.

Incidentally – did you know…

1. Video accounts for one third of web traffic, and by 2013 they’re predicting this will reach 90%
2. 24 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute
3. 2bn videos are streamed every day – or in other words, everyone on the planet watches 10 videos per month
4. YouTube is the second largest search engine – proof further (if indeed it were needed) that Bing/Yahoo have a long way to go

Bruce Daisley also highlighted that of course, YouTube is not just for brands… Check out this kid – well it is Friday:

I’ll spare you the rest of the YouTube sales pitch… and instead highlight some free, fun tools which you should definitely go play with:

Google Insights for Search – check out search trends over time.

Google Ad Planner – know what your customers look like? (I mean demographically – not literally) Check out which sites they frequent here.

Twittr Ratr – see whether people are responding to your brand positively or negatively on Twitter (NB this isn’t particularly reliable, but quite fun nonetheless)

Brand Tags – a collective experiment in brand perception. See what people think of famous brands here – tons of fun…

Well that’s all for today folks, hope you have a fabulous weekend