| ||||||||||||
PRINT
COMMENT
SUBSCRIBE
RSSErwin Ephron, godfather of modern media planning, stopped by the Clickable offices for a visit last week. I felt as if he shared 40 years of advertising wisdom in 60 minutes. He may be an old-timer, but his insights are timeless and highly relevant to our work in digital advertising innovation.
We talked about integration and performance of different media formats, and most importantly, purpose. For example, what is the purpose of television? Awareness. The purpose of print (while it's still around)? In-depth and qualitative communication. The purpose of radio? To connect with shoppers. And the purpose of outdoor advertising? To remind people who are in a position to shop. I know, this all seems simplistic.
But what about online advertising? Surely, search advertising's purpose is to capture shopper intent. It does so extremely well, providing more economic visibility than any other advertising medium. It's made Google one of the most valuable media companies in only a few short years. But what about the rest of online advertising, such as display?
And that's precisely the problem. So far, with the exception of search, online advertising has failed to find its core purpose. And to characterize the rest of online advertising as a single entity wrongly diminishes the challenge, because there are many online ad formats.
The solution? Erwin underscored that we're still lacking fundamental ethnographic research about how people interact with and use online advertising. The problem is that basic. We need to better understand it before we can even begin to think about measuring and connecting it to business performance goals.
Lastly, we arrived at the ultimate truism: If you don't like online advertising, it's easy -- especially easy -- to condition yourself to ignore it. I used to think that Adblocker Plus, the browser plug-in that removes all ads from your Web experience, was a potential threat to the advertising business. I realize now that it's only a red herring. The human brain subconsciously takes care of the problems of irrelevance, clutter and waste for us -- most of the time.
What do you think?
2 people recommend this article.
RSS FEEDS
What we have failed to do is help consumers of online content understand the value we can bring to them on their terms. The spray and pray, and build it and they will come approaches are so old school.
When we focus our efforts on content relevance, and delivering customer utility, then we are using digital to mutual advantage.
At the end of the day however, it all comes down to "your cost per click"........
Also I do have to comment on the last paragraph of the article where you mention blocking out the ads subconsciously. Wouldn't it also have to apply to traditional advertising and haven't people had more time to learn how to ignore advertising that they don't want in print, radio and television?
http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/15489.asp
I am quoting one important paragraph:
"People are supposed to be good at blocking -- not looking -- at ads. Sorry, that's poppycock. You can't not see something that's in your visual field. You can consciously and non-consciously choose to ignore something. To do either, your mind-eye-brain system needs to acknowledge the ad's existence for you to know where not to look, what not to look at, et cetera."
There are many reasons/benefits for online advertising, but we also need to reshape the dialogue about how we are impacted by what's in front of us.
Television: pays for content, gives DVR something to forward through
Radio: air space that airs when most are not listening
Outdoor: big visibility
Online: Builds community, connects with content
Print: wastes budgets, expect for full pages with great creative.
Search is, for the most part, at the end of the purchase intent cycle..while it may be the beginning of research or right at the point of purchase, it creates no demad for the product or service. Banner, pre-roll, advertorials, mobile and other new media products are emerging as a new platform for awareness and can create demand that is 100% trackable by click-through. Just as valuable as click-through though is view-through.The lift in search and brand awareness by view- through is proven in a number of recent studies including those of Magid and Specific Media. At any given time only a very small % of the world is in the market for a particular product, thus those in the market will notice and those not in the market will not. This hasn't changed since the advent of advertising.
There is also a rapidly emerging demo of consumers that do not listen to the radio...they program their own music. They do not read print for their news, they get it when they want it online. For them, the web is many media rolled into one.
I've heard search brilliantly described as 'an opportunity for a marketer to join a conversation that a consumer is already having with himself'. By looking for and measuring a greater understanding of what online consumers want and are motivated by, there's no reason why other forms of digital marketing can't have the same effectiveness of connectivity that search does...namely, getting the most relevant message in front of a consumer at the best time for them to receive that message.