• by Masha Geller , June 13, 2002

The online advertising industry has officially forgotten the basics of advertising. That may sound like an unfairly strong statement, but it’s true.

At the Jupiter Online Advertising Forum last month, everyone talked about measurability, targeting, larger sizes, premium placement, and a host of other quantifiable issues, but not a single eyebrow went up when a Jupiter researcher suggested that publishers should place premiums on media, not creative.

“Splashy creative and fat bandwidth will not solve the industry’s problems,” the report said. “Premium inventory today is largely a function of creative unit size and placement—while only the latter makes sense.”

I beg to differ. Have we all lost ourselves in numbers and ad sizes? Why is creative—one of the most important components of any advertising campaign, online or off—almost habitually ignored?

Well, as creative director John Carter put it, “the industry likes process and media because it is easier to measure. Creative is messy.”

It may be messy, but remember the M&Ms of this business—the medium AND the message? By now, I think the medium has been analyzed and measured so much, it’s made brain surgery look vague.

But, as one reader of my online column Just an Online Minute pointed out, the most important element of any communication, be it broadcast, print or smoke signals, is the message. “Most ads do not work because there is no message.”

Hmmm… And aren’t most clients paying their agencies huge amounts of money specifically to “get the message out?” Ironic, isn’t’ it?

Without good creative—and let’s face it, there’s not much of it out there right now—premium reach and premium targeting alone won’t ever come remotely close to doing the trick and providing advertisers with palatable returns on investment.

Obviously, creative can’t exist in a vacuum. As another reader said, “At the end of the day, the strongest factors you can depend upon is relevance—if the customers aren’t looking for your product, they’re not going to click. It’s up to the creative, then, to get the message across and make it worthwhile.”

Ad campaigns are made up of many equally important components, none of which is a panacea. But if your campaign isn’t getting the response you hoped for, try a different creative before you blame it on size, target, or placement. And, instead of screaming “think outside the box”; instead of blaming the low response rates (click-throughs and all others) on sizes of banners, poor reporting, poor placement or poor targeting, first figure out what’s really wrong inside the present box.

Masha Geller is Editor-in-Chief of MediaPost.