A recent Advertising Age article made me sit up and take notice. The article opens in this manner: "What's the hottest category in digital marketing? Package goods. Yes, you read that right. Staid old supermarket staples, once scoffed at as laggards in digital media, are charging online at an unprecedented pace–and their efforts are being rewarded: Traffic to industry websites in the past year has grown twice as fast as the U.S. internet population."


What's that all about, I wondered, so I read the article and thought it well worth sharing. The important points the article made:
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CPG (Consumer Packaged Goods) companies were slow to get into digital marketing, but they are committing to it more now and making a concerted effort to increase their online traffic.
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According to data compiled by ComScore, the chief reason for the increased traffic on these sites: targeted banner ads on other heavily visited sites, including Oprah.com and FoodNetwork.com. Doing this generated millions of visits to specific CPG sites.
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According to ComScore, much of the increase in traffic results from online display. The study cited food companies that are advertising on the home pages of portals like Yahoo.com, for example.
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Food marketers account for much of the growth among CPG companies. In fact, that top 10 cited by ComScore and seen in the table below, are food marketing sites.
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Note that some of the fastest growing sites market candy, snacks and soft drinks. Is this the way food manufacturers intend to market to children since so many have agreed to remove or cut back on TV advertising around children's programming. Children are very Internet oriented and highly impressionable. This may lead to problems with parents.
The trend: manufacturers of personal care and household products are beginning to invest more in digital media and digital advertising, as well. However, the article concludes by noting that CPG giants like P&G and Unilever, while ramping up their digital marketing spends to unprecedented levels, still lag behind the 7.6% average of total advertising spends by marketers among all sectors. P&G's Internet spending was 2.1% in the first half of the year; and Unilever's was 5% for the same period. This information courtesy of TNS Media Intelligence.
So what's the point of all this? I see a few important points that we can glean from this.
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First, even the most staid companies with product offerings in the most basic categories are learning that they need to have more of an online presence.
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Secondly, these companies understand that they have to do more digital advertising to drive traffic to their sites.
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Thirdly, if they build more of an online presence, they (the consumers) will come.
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Lastly, the Internet is increasingly becoming the place consumers turn to for information, and to shop. It's easy, convenient, fast.
Maybe it's time for all product companies and service providers to make better use of online media and online advertising to drive traffic to their own sites.
What do you think? Are there companies you know of that do a good job driving traffic to their sites? I'd love to hear from you.