Notes from #emeedia seminar

Nearly 150 top Estonian digital media activists gathered to KUMU museum to discuss the latest internet advertising trends in Estonia.

Social mediums:

• Estonia's largest telecom Elion claims to be monitoring social media for improving their services
• airBaltic had a physical engaging exercise and following game for getting (at least 100) followers on Twitter at seminar. Managed to get 20 new followers. One of the followers got an award of free round trip flight ticket.
• airBaltic handles various social mediums as different BBQ parties with different cultures and styles
• airBaltic's social media investment: 500EUR for iPhone and 0,3 FTEs at Marketing dept. That has made them nr 3 airline on European internet by follower count!
• Southwest is biggest airline on Facebook with 80 000 fans
• airBaltic's conversion rate of 5% in Facebook, 2% in Twitter
• Social media is defined by absence, not by presence

Display advertising stats:

• Postimees, Estonia's biggest daily: Stupid and interactive display ads are often viral too - users invite their colleagues to view and play with them. Users come to news portals for new information bits and are hungry for any fresh information/ads.
• Delfi, Estonia's top portal 1-month campaigns case study:
  150KEEK budget in portal, CPC 13 EEK. ROI positive.
  50KEEK budget in search engine, CPC 5 EEK. ROI negative, though.
• Delphi emphasized on cleverly combining search engine PPC and display advertising (especially on portals)

Other mediums:

• Bigbank's marketing plan includes e-mail, social media (Youtube, Orkut), search marketing and banners. Their They decided not to use e-mail for mass marketing, only for enhancing existing client engagements. Twitter and Facebook and Rate.ee might follow later.
• Elion believes they know their customers well and encourages to spam their customers using their database :)
• Bigbank is happy with their simple and dull, but effective creative. Same copy over many years. Key to success is planning and proper measuring . Goals on Analytics and pragmatic connecting and measuring of sources.

Other comments:

• Only ~50% of 150 listeners had thought about digital advertising ROI
• Two speakers made sexist jokes. Good positioning for male listeners, but approx 30% of listeners were female.
• airBaltic's latvian's intro of 3 sentences in Estonian was lovely! In "social networking" game, the person who hugged others the most (4 people), got a free flight as an award :)

Panel discussion indicated "more personal profiling" as the main marketing trend in 2010