When I was speaking at SES London, I started to lose my voice after 5 min. or so in. Yes, it’s just my luck. I apologize to people came to the session, I didn’t sound good at all. While I was speaking, I couldn’t help myself but calling “riiiiicolaaaaa” in my head. Now, that’s the power of advertising and marketing, isn’t it? The search is great, and it’s going to be even better, but in my opinion, it will never replace TV ads. Through the search, the businesses can only connect to people if and when they happen to search what you offer. On the other hand, TV ads push what they want you to know, again and again. Then I was thinking, what would be the closest thing on Internet to TV ads… Perhaps it’s the banner ads, but we all know that many banner ads are ignored, people skip right over the ads and read what they want to read on the page. It’s like when people skip TV commercials and surf channels. Those paid ads can be effective, then again, it only works when someone is searching for it. What works really well and similar to TV commercials maybe those “word-of-mouth” marketing and ads. It’s what they talk about on blogs and what’s on videos that your friends send you. You may not be searching for it, but it comes to your way from your friends and your favorite bloggers in the form of text (blog), images and videos. The thing is that while you may not always buy things you see on TV, you are more likely to try something that your friends recommend.

According to Yano Financial, “Kuchikomi blog” (word-of-mouth blog) advertising market in Japan grew to more than 3 billion yen market in 2007 from 0.9 billion yen market in 2006. Their another survey shows that more than 80% of net users have actively taken the advise/information they got through “word-of-mouth” on the net. Almost 50% of female in 30s responded that they talk to other people about their experiences and opinions about the products and the services that they purchased. In 2008, success of ad campaign may be up to how well you incorporate word-of-mouth campaign into your cross marketing strategies.