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Even as we rush headlong towards 2013, the speed-of-light changes in our industry demand we all become visionaries, able to look past what I like to call “The Great Disruption” – the immediate and ever-evolving commotion in the media landscape – to the horizon: 2017.
That’s exactly what I’ll be talking about when representatives from 2,000 local newspapers and their digital products gather in Atlanta from September 11th to the 14th for the 2012 Local Media Fall Publishers’ & Advertising Directors’ Conference.

The digital media industry has changed dramatically in the past few years. Craig Montgomery, principal at CMG Partners, a marketing strategy firm, thinks that changes in the mobile and social world represent the most fascinating aspects of the industry’s evolution.

In online advertising’s infancy, many publishers ran what we now call “native ad formats.” At the time, “ad format” referred solely to dimensions, as ads were either GIFs or JPGs. As publishers multiplied, the number of formats increased, and ad agencies started crying foul. They couldn’t keep up with creating the seemingly countless sizes needed for a diverse, wide-reaching media plan.

CMG Partners is a marketing strategy firm specializing in both digital and traditional media. Principal Craig Montgomery focuses on consulting, strategy and business development activities for his clients. While CMG does not partake in digital media logistics on a grand scale for its own operations, the firm helps clients with their digital media logistics. Montgomery has recently noticed what he calls an “interesting and fluid dynamic” between online and traditional media. “As Newton once said, ‘For each action there is an equal and opposite reaction,’” he notes.

A new Google study identifies two primary ways people use multi-screens: 1) Sequential – moving from one device to another to complete a single goal 2) Simultaneous – using multiple devices at the same time. These types of usage modes offer key insights to marketers. For example, the study found that nine out of ten people use multiple screens sequentially and smartphones are by far the most common starting point for completing a task (e.g. booking an online flight).

Enticing consumers to engage even further with brands is the goal for most advertisers but, as we’ve learned with quick response (QR) codes in the mobile space, it can sometimes be a challenge.

Since mobile is a channel that consumers can choose to use in-store to enhance the physical shopping experience, it is the ultimate way for luxury marketers to interact with existing and potential customers on an opt-in basis.

The digital space has changed considerably over the last 10 years bringing tremendous opportunity. Mashable recently published an infograph highlighting the staggering growth, including internet users, usage, web sites, social networks, and more. We’ve come a long way. What can we expect in the next 3-5 years? How will the digital industry change?

As marketing continues to evolve, we as an industry are being asked to assign value to the actions that our advertising campaigns are driving. As we log and analyze these actions, we begin to assign value to them based on their impact on our overall branding objectives. It is important to not only focus on macro conversions, but also look at the micro conversions – the day-to-day activity that takes place to move your customers through the purchase funnel.
Continue on to read a brief tutorial on conversion tracking for the brand marketer…