Lesson’s from SARS show that Swine Flu needs to be watched carefully by businesses. Reduced international air travel should result in advertisers rethinking marketing and advertising strategies. In Australia tourism operators will focus more on intrastate & interstate sales as consumers rethink overseas travel arrangements. Also history shows that after events like this the market rebounds so a long term view is best.

We will all deal with this latest outbreak and if contained its impact will be short term, but there is and will be impact. For travel, tourism and hospitality businesses in particular, realigning advertising strategies early can soften the commercial impact of such event. Stopping a PPC campaign is not the answer, rethinking your advertising strategy will serve you better and retain market share as many businesses make poor decision during times of uncertain events. Those businesses that put a strategic marketing response in place and continue advertising will rebound faster when it ends. Continuing you PPC campaign will be your best value advertising option. Your brand will remain strong in the market place which will allow you to gain market share against competitors that get it wrong.

My advise is learn the lesson from SARS, be aware, research before reacting and if your business is being affected adjust your advertising strategies and KPI’s. Search agencies that have experienced events like SARS will be better able to recommend PPC options to suit your particular circumstances.

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Google and other companies that aggregate content without paying a fee have been likened to “parasites… in the intestines of the internet” by Wall Street Journal editor Robert Thomson.  Talking of parasites, I recently got a phone bill for $50 of ‘premium messages’ that I tracked back to a quiz I answered on Facebook. So I have paid $5 a throw for some total crap I didn’t want. These two might appear unconnected, but I want to draw attention to the irony that we consumers are willing to pay millions and millions of dollars for mobile texts while refusing to pay a few cents for professionally produced online news.
It has always struck me as unfair that media companies pay their journalists to produce content while the aggregators simply swipe it, stick a few ads round it, and reap the rewards.   Journalism at its best exposes injustice and produces in depth analysis, but think about the cost, say, of sending journalists into Afghanistan or Timor.    Finely crafted writing doesn’t come cheap.  But is anyone out there willing to pay for it?
I agree with Google CEO Eric Schmidt that newspapers need to innovate more to turn their news-making machines into profit centres. He suggests mobile as one path, and I’m guessing that means on-phone subscriptions for web-based content. If the price was right and I had the right device (which I don’t because I’m still paying for my last phone, and my kids’ phones), and it was easy to view on the screen, yes, I probably would pay to consume high-quality news on my mobile.
But I don’t want to pay through the nose for spurious, uninvited text messages…..  I’d much rather pay News Ltd for some decent reporting than some smutty text-messaging company who hijacked my details through some fineprint on Facebook….

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Tags: AAP, AP, mobile, news aggregation, SMS, text messaging, Yahoo
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