DRTV MEDIA BUYER

Hillcrest Labs, a small company in Maryland, has potentially eliminated many of the downsides of hooking the Internet up to one’s TV – giving major networks another huge headache on top of the concerns they already have about online streaming video competing with their own offerings.

The company’s offering is a browser called Kylo that works particularly well on TV screens, with larger icons and an on-screen keyboard so that users needn’t have their laptop handy to manipulate what’s happening on the screen. It also comes with a remote control called a Loop that serves as a kind of combination mouse and remote. It can be waved in the air to move the cursor on the screen, and it has buttons that allow the cursor to click on icons and use the online keyboard to search.

These features are great for users who have struggled with the TV-computer hookup combination, but for the networks, it simply offers one less reason why users would want to pay money to watch shows on TV – or even look at the expensive advertisements and myriad of interesting infomercials.

Hulu.com recently banned Kylo users from their website, citing agreements with partners and investors that essentially agree that online video is designed to be kept online. As Kylo is especially designed for use with TV screens, Hulu.com raised a red flag.

Users are getting more innovative with their technology, however, and it seems it’s only a matter of time before the remaining disadvantages of watching TV online, such as smaller screen size, are eliminated for good.

Marketing across the board has been seeing budget cutbacks, but digital media has seemed like a bright spot in an otherwise bleak advertising environment.

Social media, search, video, and mobile were the most popular and cost-effective new advertising techniques that appears to actually be gathering strength in spite of the recession.

Unfortunately, that mindset may me a little hyped-up. eMarketer just cut its growth forecast for the medium to 4.5%, down from their previous optimistic number of 9%. Online advertising may not even increase from 2009 to 2010, seeing as 2009 failed to meet the predictions of continual growth.

It’s not all bad; 2010 will see more effort put into extended digital media campaigns. While many companies in 2009 were still catching up to the digital revolution and needing serious persuasion from their ad buyers to invest money into digital media, there’s a lot of evidence that shows 2010 won’t have those same setbacks. Companies are planning more extended campaigns with more research and planning put in, which may actually turn around the problems with digital media we saw in 2009.

Video advertising is another bright spot, especially with the rise of websites like YouTube and Hulu, where there are long-form advertising options in a medium that companies are well used to utilizing – video commercials. Mobile is another advertising medium that may see an uptick in 2010, with more companies looking into advertising on smartphones using apps tailored to their target demographic. Finally, display advertising is expected to increase slightly, from $4.6 billion to $4.8 billion.

Digital media may not be the sanctuary it’s been touted as, but it isn’t worth turning your back on it. It’s still one of the best ROIs in the business.

Everybody these days is using social media as a marketing tool. So who cares if big pharma gets in on the action? It’s actually a much bigger deal than you may think.

Big pharma is late to the online game largely because it’s an industry prone to huge regulation mistakes. Misleading ads can result in huge lawsuits relating to customer’s health and wellbeing, and that means the pharmaceutical industry treads softly on uncertain ground.

That said, big pharmas doing well online. Johnson & Johnson has a widely-read blog, and many pharmaceutical companies are enjoying the opportunity to connect directly with the communities built around various diseases and ailments that their products treat. People are enjoying the opportunity to get the one-on-one transparency that social media affords from the pharmaceutical industry.

Social media marketing, and the online world in general, remain to play themselves out. There are few regulations over what you can and cannot say online, especially when it comes to such social media tools as Twitter or Facebook. Big pharma has been cautious for good reason, and their arrival on the scene may mean we’ll see internet regulations on online advertising much sooner than previous anticipated.