Will the Internet Become a Significant Advertising Medium?
When "Push" Comes to "Pull"
From: Robin D. Hafitz
To: Rishad TobaccowalaPosted Monday, Jan. 13, 2003, at 5:17 PM ETWho are these people?
The last two years have been hard on people whose jobs require them to be bullish on the Internet. As you note, it's been painted as a "sad-sack medium ... whose biggest fans are still mired in a blend of depression and regret." But don't feel too bad for them. Everybody in the advertising business has suffered over the last two years as the Internet meltdown took the advertising economy with it. Thirty thousand advertising people lost their jobs in 2001 in New York alone. But, ironically, the Internet as a medium probably benefited from its own implosion during that period. As economies go bad, advertisers turn away from brand-building to promotion, from advertising that generates good will to advertising that has immediately measurable behavioral results.
In short, they turn from long-term to short-term strategies, living off brand equity they built in the past while promoting price and other special offers. Internet advertising, with its focus on click-throughs, was thought by many advertisers to fit the bill—as was junk mail and couponing. Though Internet advertising went down in 2001 (-11.6 percent vs. 2000), it probably did better than it would have had advertisers been less obsessed with measurable ROI.
But, of course, you are right: The Internet will grow as a force in advertising as it grows as a force in culture. How it will grow is the interesting question. It will not grow because it is "the first addictive medium since television." (This claim is a bit bogus—radio, newspaper, magazine, and outdoor advertising all predate television. Radio transfixed America before television came along, but Americans now spend almost eight hours a day on average watching television. And try telling someone who must have their Wall Street Journal with their coffee or who checks their mailbox for their weekly New Yorker that print can't be addictive.) That people who've spent more years on the Net spend more time on the Net proves not that it's addictive but that it can be a difficult medium to master, especially since it's continuously "evolving." These phenomena are more emblematic of growing pains than of tremendous promise.
But, again, there is tremendous promise. As you hint, that promise will likely be fulfilled as the Internet becomes an enabling mechanism for other advertising media. If it continues to try to sell itself primarily as a "push" medium, its promise will be limited and its cultural impact will be negative. Like direct mail, it may become a needed part of marketers' plans, but, also like direct mail, it will cater to the 1 percent of humanity who can stand the stuff, alienating the other 99 percent. (Why do you think they call it "spam"?) People currently resent most Internet advertising as intrusive and annoying and a betrayal of what they'd hoped the medium would be.
As an enabling medium that works in tandem with other media (working, for instance, with TV advertising to provide deeper levels of information, segmented added-value opportunities, highly targeted promotions, or even longer-form "advertainment" [BMW Films]), Internet advertising can focus on providing a unique "pull" medium that is welcomed rather than shunned. The people who sell Net advertising could then capitalize on the empowering and personalized potential of the medium rather than trying to cram another big mailbox with more and more crap. Whether the hybrid programs that result from that kind of convergence should truly be called "Internet advertising" is another question.
When "Push" Comes to "Pull"
From: Robin D. Hafitz
To: Rishad TobaccowalaPosted Monday, Jan. 13, 2003, at 5:17 PM ETRishad Tobaccowala is president of SMG IP, an operating unit of Starcom MediaVest Group, which is one of the nation's largest communication companies. He has been selected by Time magazine as a leading marketing innovator and been elected to the Ad Age Interactive Hall of Fame. Robin D. Hafitz is co-chair of Mad Dogs & Englishmen, an award-winning advertising agency with offices in New York and San Francisco. She co-chairs the American Association of Advertising Agencies' committee on account planning, and serves on the board of the Account Planning Group US.
Remarks From The Fray:
The problem with Internet advertising, and what will continue to drive ad money away, is that the Internet makes it too easy to check your results. Most advertising is ignored by most people most of the time. Technology lets us quantify this to a depressing degree, so you can see that, say 99.5% of the people who see your ad completely ignore that.
Print mags should be grateful that advertisers can't check up on them like that.
-- boog
(To reply, click here.)
Idealistic hopes for the potential of the Internet as a "pull" medium will probably have to stay on the back burner for a while. Virtually all of the new Internet ad technologies I've seen have been devoted to coming up with new and more intrusive ways to get unwanted messages to people who don't want to hear them.
ONE: Kazaa now "features" obnoxious audio ads that will cut into the middle of your (admittedly pirated) music selection and shout "Hey! Click over here!" at a decibel level 50% higher than the average jet.
TWO(A): The authors of crap SPAM e-mails have honed their understanding of psychology to a razor's edge, and are actually getting quite good at disguising their crud as messages you might want to have a look at. My personal favorite (the first SPAM to take me in since college) was perfectly disguised as a "message undeliverable" error notification from a mail server.
TWO(B): Perhaps even more alarming, mainstream companies like (inter alia) Crest and J.C. Penney have gotten into the game, sending SPAM out under their corporate trademarks. Given the resources available to corporate America, this toe in the water could quickly turn into the internet equivalent of Leviathan sunning himself in your 3 year old's backyard wading pool.
THREE: That impossibly annoying Qwest T-Rex ad spawned a whole phylum of progeny. Proliferating beyond reason, they all have this in common: they're designed to force you to actually pay attention to them in order to figure out where you need to click to make them go away.
Sure. . . psychoexgirlfriend.com, Napster, All Your Base Are Belong To Us, Odd Todd, Libby Hoeler, and the Theban Mapping project are examples (of varying legitimacy, desirability, and effect) of the power of "pull" advertising to create "viral memes" that can suffuse the whole of culture damn near instantaneously. Any actual products attached to these sites would have been overnight sell-outs (yes, the play on words is intentional). . . unless, of course, the lack of crass commercialism is what made these sites so popular to begin with. (Well. . . okay . . . Napster and Libby Hoeler need no explanation; for the rest, then).
Long-Awaited Conclusion
What seems to be coming down the pike is an interesting mix. People's resourcefulness in detecting, avoiding, and retaliating for (see, e.g. my riff on the CloudMark idea for a humble proposition) crap Webvertising is on the rise; but people's vulnerabiliy to clever, noncommercial memes is at an all-time high.
Maybe we're going to see an age of advertisers evocative of the famous french "precious" movement, which held it unimaginably vulgar to say "chair" when you could say "place of half-repose", or tell someone that "It is night" when you could instead regale them with the intelligence that "the curtain of the sun's long dreaming has been drawn across the firmament of aster."
Who the hell knows? Speaking of transiently invincible memes, where's Suck.com when we need them? No doubt THEY could explain the whole schmeary mess to us in a heartbeat.
I dunno. Y'All THINK I'm selling half-arsed Internet commentary here. . . but I'm really selling shotguns! Star Poster hunting season starts in 5. . . . herbal viagra. . . . 4. . . . . Teens + Farm Animals = :-). . . . . 3 . . . . Let US Refinance your house!. . . .. 2. . . . Shotguns are available on e-Bay . . . . .1. . . . . I'm tied to a chair on the outskirts of Memphis. . . .
0.
-- Thrasymachus
(To reply, click here.)
Internet advertising didn't fail! In fact, it succeeded beyond anyone's wildest imagination. It singlehandedly proved that advertsing itself doesn't work anywhere near as well as anyone in the industry would have you believe.
-- Truthteller
(To reply, click here.)
But fundamentally, it's boring to listen to advertisers talk about the internet. To them, it's all a question of eyeballs... where will they pool, and what can we do to them when they get there? I suspect that the guess that, from an advertising perspective, the internet isn't particularly different from any other medium is likely true. Which is why it's tragic to participate in the internet from an advertising perspective.
They could at least be discussing INTERESTING episodes in the history of Internet advertisement (like the "game" that came out in advance of the movie A.I. which turned into one of the most oddball and stunning testaments to the crazy potential for new behaviors that I've ever seen)... not the virtue of "pop-up" ads vs. "lie-down" ads...
-- Geoff
(To reply, click here.)
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Remarks From The Fray:
The problem with Internet advertising, and what will continue to drive ad money away, is that the Internet makes it too easy to check your results. Most advertising is ignored by most people most of the time. Technology lets us quantify this to a depressing degree, so you can see that, say 99.5% of the people who see your ad completely ignore that.
Print mags should be grateful that advertisers can't check up on them like that.
-- boog
(To reply, click here.)
Idealistic hopes for the potential of the Internet as a "pull" medium will probably have to stay on the back burner for a while. Virtually all of the new Internet ad technologies I've seen have been devoted to coming up with new and more intrusive ways to get unwanted messages to people who don't want to hear them.
ONE: Kazaa now "features" obnoxious audio ads that will cut into the middle of your (admittedly pirated) music selection and shout "Hey! Click over here!" at a decibel level 50% higher than the average jet.
TWO(A): The authors of crap SPAM e-mails have honed their understanding of psychology to a razor's edge, and are actually getting quite good at disguising their crud as messages you might want to have a look at. My personal favorite (the first SPAM to take me in since college) was perfectly disguised as a "message undeliverable" error notification from a mail server.
TWO(B): Perhaps even more alarming, mainstream companies like (inter alia) Crest and J.C. Penney have gotten into the game, sending SPAM out under their corporate trademarks. Given the resources available to corporate America, this toe in the water could quickly turn into the internet equivalent of Leviathan sunning himself in your 3 year old's backyard wading pool.
THREE: That impossibly annoying Qwest T-Rex ad spawned a whole phylum of progeny. Proliferating beyond reason, they all have this in common: they're designed to force you to actually pay attention to them in order to figure out where you need to click to make them go away.
Sure. . . psychoexgirlfriend.com, Napster, All Your Base Are Belong To Us, Odd Todd, Libby Hoeler, and the Theban Mapping project are examples (of varying legitimacy, desirability, and effect) of the power of "pull" advertising to create "viral memes" that can suffuse the whole of culture damn near instantaneously. Any actual products attached to these sites would have been overnight sell-outs (yes, the play on words is intentional). . . unless, of course, the lack of crass commercialism is what made these sites so popular to begin with. (Well. . . okay . . . Napster and Libby Hoeler need no explanation; for the rest, then).
Long-Awaited Conclusion
What seems to be coming down the pike is an interesting mix. People's resourcefulness in detecting, avoiding, and retaliating for (see, e.g. my riff on the CloudMark idea for a humble proposition) crap Webvertising is on the rise; but people's vulnerabiliy to clever, noncommercial memes is at an all-time high.
Maybe we're going to see an age of advertisers evocative of the famous french "precious" movement, which held it unimaginably vulgar to say "chair" when you could say "place of half-repose", or tell someone that "It is night" when you could instead regale them with the intelligence that "the curtain of the sun's long dreaming has been drawn across the firmament of aster."
Who the hell knows? Speaking of transiently invincible memes, where's Suck.com when we need them? No doubt THEY could explain the whole schmeary mess to us in a heartbeat.
I dunno. Y'All THINK I'm selling half-arsed Internet commentary here. . . but I'm really selling shotguns! Star Poster hunting season starts in 5. . . . herbal viagra. . . . 4. . . . . Teens + Farm Animals = :-). . . . . 3 . . . . Let US Refinance your house!. . . .. 2. . . . Shotguns are available on e-Bay . . . . .1. . . . . I'm tied to a chair on the outskirts of Memphis. . . .
0.
-- Thrasymachus
(To reply, click here.)
Internet advertising didn't fail! In fact, it succeeded beyond anyone's wildest imagination. It singlehandedly proved that advertsing itself doesn't work anywhere near as well as anyone in the industry would have you believe.
-- Truthteller
(To reply, click here.)
But fundamentally, it's boring to listen to advertisers talk about the internet. To them, it's all a question of eyeballs... where will they pool, and what can we do to them when they get there? I suspect that the guess that, from an advertising perspective, the internet isn't particularly different from any other medium is likely true. Which is why it's tragic to participate in the internet from an advertising perspective.
They could at least be discussing INTERESTING episodes in the history of Internet advertisement (like the "game" that came out in advance of the movie A.I. which turned into one of the most oddball and stunning testaments to the crazy potential for new behaviors that I've ever seen)... not the virtue of "pop-up" ads vs. "lie-down" ads...
-- Geoff
(To reply, click here.)