A recent scroll through our video library brought to light a notable trend spawned by an underexploited market. It’s an all-too-often overlooked market right here in our very own country.

According to the *IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau of Canada) in 2010 out of the $2.23 billion in online advertising revenue (2011 stats were estimated at $2.6 billion), approximately $428 million or 19% were from French websites (2011 stats were estimated at $500 million, 17% increase) with a predicted continued steady growth for 2012. The article also goes on to state that 2010 was the year that online ad revenue officially beat out newspaper ad revenue, therefore bumped up to place second and looking to be number one in the coming years. So basically, if you aren’t creating marketing content for online use yet, that’s your first problem. However, if you are…start transcribing! These stats give an idea into how large of a market French-Canada really is when considering online advertising revenue. The chart below sourced from IAB, shows the French proportion of ad revenue in display advertising vehicles (ie. Banners etc.)

French Canada, mostly of course located in Quebec are some of the top rated Internet users and growing each year. What does this mean? There’s a huge market, not being spoken to in their own language! How can this be? As companies and brands begin to merge their marketing efforts online and get more comfortable using this as an ongoing platform its not that shocking that areas become overlooked or forgotten altogether. A critical mistake being made by many companies and brands worldwide is forgetting to translate their videos and other online content. If I haven’t convinced you yet, here are some more Quebec stats that might get you to say “sacré bleu”.

• 43% of Quebecers have a Facebook account;
• Of those, 49% access it at least once every day;
• Only 3% of Quebecers have a Twitter account, but this number is expected to significantly increase in the next few years;
• 15% of Quebecers follow a company on Facebook and 6% on Twitter.
**source: http://www.adeointernetmarketing.com/news/social-media,-a-growing-movement-in-quebec-59.aspx

Just a few examples pulled from our own library of companies tapping into French-Canada and beyond.

*All IAB statistics sourced directly from: http://www.iabcanada.com/blog/2010-internet-revenue-survey

JCpenny’s “The Doghouse” viral short film

As a rule I generally have a low opinion of buzz words and corporate market speak.  It’s a vocabulary too often used by the uninformed trying to pose as the overly informed and in the end those fancy words we come up with to describe new trends grow stale and wind up ridiculed by just about everyone in the know.  Well at the risk of ridicule I’m going to break my own rule and become a contributor, nay a revivalist to the buzz word lexicon with “Advertainment.”  Sure it’s not my own invention and you’ll find it floating around on the blogosphere here and there, maybe in a few industry articles etc. but it hasn’t really found a catch yet.  I’m using it now because there really is no better word to describe the growing trend I’ve been seeing from big brands experimenting with long-form-video-entertainment-advertising (see why we need a buzz word?).

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