The headline reports that 95 per cent of advertising spend in the 2009 had no impact on its intended audience.

By contrast the report finds that a third of consumers are actively engaged in social media and report a positive connection with brands.

According to David Eldridge, CEO, Alterian:

”We are witnessing is an era of individualisation. It is no longer adequate to adopt a strategy of mass broadcast and one-way conversation.”

Surveys are surveys that are typically used a tool to support a company’s own PR agenda. But this report is written by Professor Michael Hulme, an academic at Lancaster University, and speaks to a trend that cannot escape anyone in the communication, marketing or PR industries.

The risk, Alterian claims, is that brands will become irrelevant if they fail to engage with their audiences using relevant channels.

I’ll return to this report in future blog posts as it contains some great insight. Its only failing is that it stops short of describing how quickly these changes are taking place.

The report says that earned media, the goal of any PR campaign, is a highly effective way for a brand to generate awareness in a social network such as Facebook – but cannot be guaranteed. Meanwhile, social ads (a form of network endorsement on ads) drive engagement and reach similar to traditional paid-for campaigns.

The Nielsen report is compelling but is flawed by its focus solely on social ad campaigns. It omits an analysis of the impact of standalone earned media campaigns on Facebook, what we’d more commonly recognise as traditional PR or word of mouth campaigns. Its uncountably a vehicle to sell ad campaigns on Facebook but is worth reading nonetheless.

Understanding the Value of a Social Media Impression

$3million dollars for 30 seconds is all but out of reach for most advertisers but its loose change for Google.

So why is Google backing an ad campaign on a platform that its CEO Eric Schmidt famously called a “bastion of unaccountability.”

Martin McNulty, director of online agency Forward3D (disclosure: Speed client), says that this is a bid by Google to understand how marketing channels interact and that Google analysts will be closely watching how the ad impacts search traffic.

“Google is nothing if not experimental. It’s a mistake to view this latest campaign as rearguard,” said McNulty.

“Google wants to control (and integrate) every platform and every possible media and what better way to learn the true potential of the world’s most expensive slot than to buy it,” he said.

Rick and his business partner Matt Waring are the team behind the Addiply local ad network that is brokering deals with regional media groups such as Trinity Mirror in the North East for its Your place network and independent hyperlocal sites such as Josh Halliday’s Sunderland’s SR2 Blog and Philip John’s Litchfield blog.

Addiply’s contention is that existing ad platforms are too complex to setup for local advertisers and aren’t sufficiently granular to work on a hyperlocal basis.

Addiply makes advertising as simple as posting an ad in a newsagent. And that’s important for small businesses and site owners alike. Costs are intentionally low to buy an ad on a hyperlocal blog (typically £10 per week) with 90 per cent of the fees returned to the publisher.

Rick’s goal is to sign-up more hyperlocal publishers nationwide and then package deals for brands and the public sector that are seeking to reach regional markets on a local basis. He’s got several deals with regional publishers in the works so watch this space.

According to econsultancy’s Meghan Keane:

“Google has been slowly easing standards on its advertising for months, as companies have been bidding less on keyword search terms and the economy has forced margins ever slimmer”.

But Google isn’t relaxing its keyword editorial policy in any other area. Alcohol, drugs, gambling, and prostitution, among others, remain no go. We still can’t use Speed.