The Auctioneer-the official blog of Auction.ph

By Laarni Balignasa

What was merely useful for history assignments has now become the single all-important tool of the digital age. Businesses are becoming reliant on the Internet and “citizen journalism” is slowly swindling the influence of traditional media. For marketers, the virtual frontier is growing a billion bytes per second and being Internet-savvy is more important now than ever before.

In the country, television remains as the number one medium but the high costs of production and its incapacity for interaction are weaknesses unfailingly addressed by the Internet. Web 2.0 mocks television’s inadequacies with dozens of new applications being introduced all the time. Facebook even has an open-door policy which allows members to introduce their homemade applications. Nowadays, anyone can just create their own blog, embed a chat function, a forum function and a host of other cool applications for free. In fact, anyone who feels that SNS sites are a bit inflexible can simply create their own. Kickapps offers free hosting and customization of personal SNS sites.

While Internet functions continue to expand, a recent survey shows that 90% of 5,000 respondents still use the Internet mainly for reading and sending e-mail. Other online activities included downloading and uploading (53%), using search engines (44%), listening to music (42%) as well as playing online games (34%). Communicating through Instant Messenger or IM has also risen in popularity among younger Filipinos aged between 15 to 34 with more than half of the respondents (60%) indicating that they chat online.

The Internet is a flexible medium and its innovations are engaging. More importantly, the vast majority relies on the Internet as a convenient tool for communication. Marketers realize this opportunity. An inexpensive, customizable medium with massive reach. Early adopters are starting to realize the potential of Internet Marketing and are quietly starting their own bandwagon. The worldwide web is starting to rumble and will soon give rise to the new wave of marketing, Internet marketing.

Vertical marketing strategies, where companies promote and sell products to consumers using television, radio and print, may soon become supplementary activities rather than core. Internet marketing will allow horizontal strategies which will enable companies to customize products precisely according to what the consumer wants. The high-level of interaction and consumer involvement should promote enhanced product concepts and greater customer satisfaction. An era when the consumers virtually create their own products is actually beginning to take shape.

Cases in point: M-I-Y(Make-It-Yourself) and Co-creation. Two examples of popular consumer marketing trends in 2008 that basically allow consumers to take part in the process of creation—partially and wholly. Take M-I-Y for instance. In New Zealand, a company called Ponoko allows visitors to upload their own design which is then run into a laser-cutter creating the physical version of the virtual design. M-I-Y logically leads to S-I-Y (Sell-It-Yourself) and you have sites like Auction.ph created solely for that purpose. Two decades ago, concepts like these would have filled boardrooms with booms of laughter. The Internet made these concepts real and made them into serious business.

According to Kartajaya, a renowned Asian marketing guru, “the rise of new media would require a “new wave of marketing.” And the Internet posing as the most compelling communication tool of this century will demand shifts in old ways of thinking; and present new ways of acting, reacting and interacting.