A year-end message from Marketing

Today is the last news producing day for 2007 for the Singapore, Hong Kong and Malaysia Marketing magazine teams and we would like to take the opportunity to thank all our loyal readers and commercial partners for making this year such an outstanding success for us.

With the end of one year and the start of another there always comes the speculation about what the New Year will bring and most importantly what it will bring for the business community we all work in.

2007 saw the rise of some fascinating trends and while it certainly wasn't the year viral marketing or social networking were born, it was the year they hit the mainstream in a significant way.

We know we are going to see a further maturing of these technologies in 2008 and, likely, a shakeout, which will leave only the strongest and most valuable brands standing and growing.

Many detractors have suggested, for instance, that Facebook is a fleeting fancy of the attention deficit generation and that once something else shiny catches their attention they will vote with their profiles and move them somewhere else.

However this ignores the time and effort people have invested in their Facebook presence (just read some of the reports by recruiters about how much Facebook time is costing employers globally) and the fact it is now attracting a secondary audience - the parents and older work colleagues and the contacts of the initial wave - you might call them the medium term adopters.

With so much time and energy invested, and providing the ownership issues Mark Zuckerberg is battling out in court don't result in a demand to close the platform, we think Facebook should last the distance in 2008. However it will need to evolve, so we will watch with interest the further deployment of the Beacon ad platform for facebook which has had a pretty rocky reception so far after some high profile facebookers started writing about an intrusive broadcasting of their online activities.

Google again in 2008 provided the leadership model for the "new" new economy through its sprawling innovation, a lot of this year's developments proving to be under the surface tweaking of existing technologies like refining of its adsense/adwords revenue streams and testing new ways to server ads to a broader range of content other than simple written content. Any company that wants to build an equally valuable brand over the next few years will need to follow suit and innovate at a faster rate than the business world has ever seen before.

In a global community driven by such frantic innovation loyalty is also likely to be fleeting. Think for instance if a progressive innovator like Google developed a platform for, say, MySpace and introduced a simple button called: "Import my profile" and "Import my Friends" a bit like how you can use Gmail in outlook, then surely, if the Myspace offering was compelling enough, it wouldn't take much to cause a mass exodus if the wind changed.

We can moan all we like about how unreliable particularly young consumers are and that we are breeding a generation of consumers who think they shouldn't have to pay for anything or we can follow Google's model - it's OK they don't mind if you do - and create an audience then monetize them with one simple idea.

In media the question on everyone's lips is what will the Wall Street Journal, and more importantly for us the Wall Street Journal Asia, look like by this time next year. Will the changes by its new masters over at Murdoch be subtle as they have promised, or more dramatic. The scaremongers have been vocal in their protestations about a possible tabloid-isation of the Journal, but when you consider the attention spans of the new generation of consumers, would this be such a terrible commercial decision?

It could be a tough year ahead for marketers if the credit crisis is as bad as some are predicting, so Marketing magazine will be providing plenty of advice and insight as to how to protect your budgets in 2008 if the CEO starts to put the squeeze on.

There is no more important time for the marketing department to work efficiently and to prove its worth then when consumers spending trends downward. However we are very optimistic about the coming year as we feel 2007 was the first year of a longer term trend in consumer empowerment and it is wrong to see this as a bad thing, instead we should view it as enlightening. Consumers have never in history had more opportunity to tell you how they feel, what their hopes and ambitions are and how your products and brands fit into that equation.

We need to keep an open mind and an ear to the tracks and then be proactive. We certainly haven't solved the online marketing riddle yet but we hope to have some more answers for you next year.

As for us, the team at Marketing started the year with just one edition of Marketing magazine in one market, Singapore, our flagship, and we end with two monthly print editions (after launching the Hong Kong edition in March) and three newsletters, including our new dedicated Malaysia newsletter. We now have editorial teams in all three markets and will bolster them further in the coming year.

The groundwork has also been done to not only launch the print edition of Marketing Malaysia in the New Year but to break ground in several other markets as well. The reception we have received in the new markets supports our research that the marketing communities across Asia deserve and want a dedicated information source produced by on-the-ground teams who are part of that community.

So we would like to thank you all for making this year so successful and allowing us to grow.

All that remains is to wish everyone a wonderful holiday season and a prosperous new year.

Get plenty of rest because it's going to be one heck of a year ahead.

Tony Kelly
Editorial Director
Marketing Magazine Group
On behalf of the entire Marketing team.