Free is always good right? Not necessarily. So there is no free lunch right? That's not always true either. So what am I babbling about?
A practice quite common in the online media world is giving out free banner impressions. Publishers do this for various reasons. Sometimes they are not able to sell all banner inventories to advertisers and rather than running self promotion banners, it looks better on the properties if ads from real advertisers are shown. Other times they just like to under promise and over deliver so every time advertisers and agencies think they are getting a good deal.
So what's wrong with this you say? What's the harm in getting more exposure if it's free?
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Last week I was asked what I thought about the Search Engine Marketing (SEM) industry in Asia right now compared to a few years ago. From the amount of activities such as seminars, workshops, and even advertising in mainstream media (mostly targeting SMEs for Pay-Per-Click services) the market is definitely being educated. This is a good sign, especially when the rest of the "developed" SEM markets are reporting double digit percentages of their overall media spent being used online while most of APAC is still stuck in single digits, SEM can be a strong driving force in advancing the use of this extremely effective medium.
I think most online marketers in APAC will agree that compared to the US and Europe, our industry is still in its infancy not because we are technically behind but because consumer demand is simply not there yet. While we see a staggering increase in online users and stronger growth rates than the rest of the world, online commerce is still not widely (or not as widely) accepted compared to the developed markets. There are various reasons for the slowly than expected growth - geographic conveniences, language barriers, slow adaptation of medium by sellers, etc. but I think we are at the point where we can expect to see some strong growth in this region in the next few years as the economy keeps marching ahead.
Let's hope advertisers do something creative in the process to spice things up.
