• by Bill McCloskey , May 24, 2002

By the end of last year I was spent, drained of anything new to say. My personal pendulum had swung all the way over and it was time for a rest so that it could begin to swing back. Now that everyone’s back to work, I’ve also begun to notice movement in the advertising industry’s pendulum. I read in the Wall Street Journal, for instance, that investors believe that there is going to be a big turnaround in the advertising community: Omnicom and Interpublic stock prices are both up over the last quarter, and there was a rally in the European advertising market. According to the WSJ, while advertising is the first to be hit in a recession, it is also the first to recover as the economic climate changes.

I expect that we will soon see the pendulum move for publishers also. And by that I don’t necessarily mean the amount of ads they are serving, but hopefully the quality of those ads and the type of advertisers they accept. While things like rich media were used more frequently last year, the actual quality of advertising in general on the web went down dramatically. Pop-unders have become the Chinese takeout menus of the online ad industry.

Early on, the pendulum was at one extreme: publishers were overly concerned with their audience and wouldn’t do anything that annoyed visitors to their site. As a result, advertising became bland and ineffectual. Now, with cheap media available and revenue falling, the pendulum has moved to the dark side, and it seems that publishers will do anything for revenue including cluster-bombing their visitors with thousands of untargeted pop-unders. Consequently, advertising has once again become bland and ineffectual, and users are getting carpal tunnel syndrome from zapping all the pop-unders littering their computer screens.

The pendulum needs to start swinging the other way a bit: we are in danger of falling into a pit of our own making. If online media properties become devalued and associated with the lowest form of advertising, big brands will never be on board. A five-star restaurant doesn’t want to be associated with cheap chow mein.

We need to reduce the clutter. We need to tell a story with advertising. And we need to stop using technology for technology’s sake: rather than shoehorning the message into the latest container, the brand should dictate the technology being used. All of this takes education, imagination, and guts. For publishers it means turning down campaigns that devalue the property: the advertising should reflect and support the content, not just editorially but also stylistically. What website other than CNet looks as exciting as Wired magazine did?

Agencies, especially traditional brand agencies, need to educate themselves and broaden their palette. Whether they like it or not, people are moving to the web and leaving traditional media behind. They need to be up to speed or their advertisers will desert them, and rightly so.

And advertisers need to demand more from both agencies and publishers. They need to demand that their brands be represented in an integrated way across all media, including the Internet. They need to demand better work, better creative, better thinking. And they need to dissociate themselves from clutter, from a dearth of imagination, from the Chinese takeout menus of the world.

Emerging Interest founder and CEO Bill McCloskey can be reached at bill@emerginginterest.com.