• John Battelle's Searchblog, Wednesday, April 2, 2008 11:05 AM

The Web is (currently) a lousy medium for brand marketing. An advertiser is going to get a lot more mileage out of a targeted two-page spread in a magazine than a standard IAB unit. In other words, branding on the Web doesn't scale, in part because current online methods lend themselves to direct response, leaving consumers, brands and publishers out of the conversation.

Search, ad networks and other cost-per-click vehicles are clearly not the answer to brand building. Marketers need to go to where the consumers have gone to keep building their brands. That would be social networks.

According to comScore, 600 million people visit so-called "conversational marketing sites" each month. With the rise of social networks and the rich data contained in the social graph, we're on the right track. But the ideas of joining, initiating and convening in the conversation are still largely just ideas. Marketers just need to figure it out.

Read the whole story at John Battelle's Searchblog »