The Global Marketer

We were wondering what all the fuss was about, so some time ago we looked up the term ‘blog’ on Wikipedia.

We checked out a book or two on the subject, then went online to learn what we could from business, political, cultural, technical and personal Weblogs floating around the blogosphere. We boned up on the technology, called a meeting or two and committed to starting a blog of our own. What you’re reading is the result of that process.

These are the first words written by Yours Truly for theglobalmarketerblog, whose purpose it is to serve as the interactive arm of The Global Marketer.

Yours Truly is Kerry E. Smith, co-founder of PROMO Magazine, PROMO EXPO and the World PRO Awards — and now co-founder and publisher of The Global Marketer, LLC.
Did You Say The Global Marketer? What Are The Diamond Awards?

If you haven’t been there yet, The Global Marketer (call it TGM for short) is a subscription-based, content-driven Web site (www.theglobalmarketer.net) that focuses on the recognition and promotion of brand-marketing Best Practices by agencies and client companies worldwide.

TGM runs the 2006 Diamond Awards (http://www.thediamondawards.com ), which this year will recognize the ‘best of the best’ from 40 national and regional awards programs around the world.

The mission of this blog (also known as http://www.tgmblog.com) is to pique the interest and encorage the ongoing participation of brand marketers everywhere. The objective is a lively and useful discourse among brand-marketing practitioners.
Who’s Using the Internet: Two of Our Correspondents Check In
To get the ball rolling we questioned a number of TGM correspondents about the use of the Internet for marketing purposes in their countries.
Our first responses were from Zeynep Arhon Apak, Managing Director of SPY, the only experiential marketing agency in Istanbul zapak@spy.com.tr …
…and from Ernesto Dorfman, former General Manager of STOPPROMOTION Agency and currently Honorary President of the CAMPRO/GLOBES Awards in Buenos Aires ernestodorfman@ciudad.com.ar .

Zeynep: Roughly 7.25 million or one in ten persons in Turkey is an Internet user, which ranks us 24th in the world, but we lag way behind North America (38%) and Europe (37%). Most users are between the ages of 12 and 35. Usage at school, in the office, at Internet cafes and/or at home peaks as high as 75 percent , but among older people and non-working women it’s insignificant and thus not a very effective tool for the brand manager who wants to target stay-at-home moms.

Ernesto: Twenty-five percent of Argentinians have PCs in their homes, but a large number of them get on the Internet via Internet cafes and at retail stores that rent PC-equipped kiosks or booths. Internet usage is growing about 10 percent per year.

Digital marketing is in its infancy here. Big companies dedicate only small proportions of their budgets to digital campaigns. People aren’t accustomed to buying things on the Internet, in general, but they do — especially young ones — use it to check prices against those in the stores.

Zeynep: PC ownership and Internet usage are growing in Turkey, but cellular phones and SMS (text messaging) are so popular with consumers that it’s hard to envision much of an increase in Internet activity by marketers in the near-term.
Many brands in Turkey have been very successful in using SMS to connect with consumers for informational and promotional purposes over the past five or six years.

Ernesto: Web-based promotions are catching on, but fewer than one in ten ran on the Internet in 2005. That doesn’t mean they can’t be successful, of course.

An automobile service-station chain recently won an award for a promotion that generated incremental sales by gettig self-service gasoline customers to leave their cars and come inside to check on desktop PCs whether their machine-generated purchase receipts had been imprinted with prize-winning numbers.

Zeynep: In Turkey the issue is not how widely but in how creatively the Internet is used. The fact is that it’s all but humiliating for a businessperson to have to say ‘we don’t have a Web site’ and almost every company does — regardless of whether that site has any relevance to the markets it wants to reach.
The Net should be more than just a place to run banners. One day companies will create true ‘brand sites’ rather than ‘corporate/product sites’. When this happens they’ll finally have functionally interactive platforms.

TGM Blog: What companies and what agencies in your countries would you say have been doing the most with the Internet so far?

Ernesto: I’d have to say it’s been the biggest brands with the biggest budgets, and those tend to be global brands and corporations. Packaged goods giants like Unilever, Procter, Coca-Cola and Nestle; automobile giants like Ford, Fiat and Chevrolet; mobile telecoms like Nokia and Motorola; and of course the entertaninment (movies and music) sector; then the e-commerce companies like mercado libre/e-bay and deremate.com.
As for agencies, checks these links out and see for yourself: http://www.digitaljwt.com.ar/awards/iab/ ; http://www.icolic.com.ar/premios/index_hair.htm/ http://awards.ogilvyinteractive.com.ar/iab05/motorolav3black/ http://www.diariosedal.com.ar/ http://www.icolic.com.ar/premios/index_io.htmhttp://www.kasiopea.net/portfolio05/julio/e_ad/Zeynep: Some of the best practices I’ve seen were at www.comeclean.com and www.jakesfault.com. In Turkey, www.jetix.com.tr is a good example. Jetix, previously known as Fox Kids, is a global TV channel for children. As a kids entertainment alliance between Jetix Europe and The Walt Disney Company, Jetix reaches 140 million households in 79 countries in 18 languages. www.jetix.com.tr has 120,000 registered members who spend average 14 mins/visit. Success of the website comes from its interactivity. Children can chat, play games, create e-cards on www.jetix.com.tr.

A generic success story is how the banks have changed consumer behavior in this country by promoting the Internet as a practical tool. They communicated the practicality of using Web banking for years, and now every leading bank in Turkey has a user-friendly site.

It’s become a win-win situation in that customers save lots of time while the banks are able to emply their branch staffs more effectively.
Thanks for Visiting Us…and Please Come Back

TGM Blog: Thanks, readers, for attending the birth of our blog — and I’ll thank you in advance for any questions, comments or criticism you might offer as to how we can make it better as we go along. My next posting will have comments from our correspondents in India and Australia.