• by Jim Meskauskas , February 6, 2003

You know, I’m always amazed at just how little thinking and reflecting goes on at the upper echelons of marketing departments throughout this great nation of ours. Though, when I think about it, the same could be said for government, but I won’t get into that now.

As often as I encounter it, I am still taken a-back by the simplistic manifestations of solipsism, circular logic, fallacies of distraction, inductive fallacies, causal fallacies, and simply just plain old “I don’t believe it” when talking about the pros of using the web as an advertising medium in lieu of, or in addition to, other media. So many clients simply don’t want to believe whatever you may have to say about it.

The biggest mistake advertisers and media people who don’t believe make is using themselves as the only point from which their concept of reality is developed. I was having lunch recently with a very senior person at a very large, very reputable media buying concern. He was telling me how AOL and all things related to it were doomed (which may be true) because the Internet was really just "a passing fancy." You read that right, kids. Not because there might be some flaws with AOL’s current business model, or because the economy will continue to beat down on digital and telecommunications entities until they can get up no more. It’s because he didn’t believe that the Internet was, in essence, real.

Why did he think that? Because he didn’t use it. I asked him if his kids did. He said, yes. I asked if they used things like Instant Messenger. He said, yes. He followed up by saying that he currently had AOL in his house, but only for the kids. When they left for college, he’d get rid of it. I asked him if he didn’t think that the patterns of behavior being established now, while they were young, wouldn’t carry with them into their dorm rooms, where they will continue using IM and AOL (or some other provider of Internet service). His response – just thinking about this makes me get hot in the face with incredulity at his stupidity – was “that remains to be seen.”

Was this guy serious?! If it were the 17th-century, this is the guy that would have declared, “If she floats when we throw her into the water, this woman must be a witch!”

All human beings make the mistake of declaring to themselves and, far too often, to those around them, that the world exists only in the way that they see it. Now, I’m willing to concede to some degree that reality is in some part dictated by those sentient agents that rub up against it. The means of perception do, indeed, alter the perceived. But as an advertising or marketing sort, it would seem imprudent to assume that the world is as you are.

When pundits, wags, and other such media and marketing seers speak on what it will take to get advertisers to start making better, more regular use of the Internet as an advertising vehicle, they suggest all manner of tools and tactics – I included. But the truth of the matter is that the biggest obstacle to adoption is a simple lack of faith. A stubborn refusal to believe when confronted by the truth will forever predispose one to never accepting the truth.

George Bernard Shaw once wrote that “all great truths begin as blasphemies." Maybe that is how talk of the benefits of using the Interactive medium as a powerful advertising vehicle is seen - a blasphemy. Folks who’ve spent their lives telling themselves and their clients that TV is the end-all, be-all of advertising simply cannot accept that another medium would be capable of acting as rival. I mean, it took the Vatican 350 years to declare that Galileo had been “ignominiously opposed.”

Let’s hope it isn’t that long before the broadcast brandinistas comprehend that, whether they like it or not, lots of people are using the web in a very attentive and active fashion and that most of the time television is becoming a background medium.