Will the Internet Become a Significant Advertising Medium?
When Push Comes to Pull
From: Rishad Tobaccowala
To: Robin HafitzPosted Tuesday, Jan. 14, 2003, at 2:29 PM ETWho are these people?
There is nothing bogus about the reality that the Internet is the most addictive medium after television for a large proportion of the 160 million users of the medium in the United States. As a loyal subscriber of The New Yorker, I empathize with the attachment many have with the magazine, but two facts and an anecdote underline the passion that millions have for the Web.
First, according to SRI Mediascan—a research service—the average adult 25-54 spent 7.7 hours per week with the Internet versus 1.6 hours reading magazines in spring 2002. Second, teenagers repeatedly say they will give up food rather than the Internet.
The anecdote comes from my younger daughter who, on reading your comment observed, "Dad, doesn't this lady realize that she can go to NewYorker.com and read some New Yorker articles if she misses her New Yorker, but she can't connect with the world if she had the magazine but no Internet?" (Yes, I know The New Yorker site has only a sampling of articles but you get the point.)
I do disagree with your assertions disparaging the Internet as a "push" medium and suggesting the increasing usage of the Web is due to the difficulties of mastering the medium rather than its increasing usefulness and capabilities.
There is already a wider spectrum of Internet advertising opportunities than in most other mediums. A minority of such advertising—spam and pop-ups—are of the push variety. And this unfortunately is prevalent enough to create a backlash against Web advertising. Hopefully, reduced use of pop-ups and better e-mail filtering software should reduce these forms of advertising. (Interestingly, the reason you see so much of these annoying ad types is that they deliver results.) But a majority of online advertising is pull oriented because the medium is a pull medium. You go to the content versus the content coming to you. From sponsorships to surround sessions to online gaming and commercially sponsored utilities, you, the consumer, decide which sites and applications to go to among a plethora of choices that make even a 500-channel universe seem puny. You decide whether to click, interact, or read an ad. You follow your passions. You interact with programming and content when you want to. You search archives and switch between choices that span the world. You are in control more than in any other medium. You do not have to channel-skip or station-hop to avoid commercials. In fact, as personal video recorders and video on demand give control of television to the viewer versus the distributor, the biggest push medium of all (television) will soon become a pull medium, and many executives are beside themselves just thinking about a consumer-controlled world! Interestingly, the answers on how to do this are clear. Be relevant. Offer value. Recognize consumer control. Be like the Internet.
Your second assertion that the reason hours spent using the Internet are increasing is because it is difficult is also one I disagree with. No doubt there are quite a few folks who find the Internet initially hard to use, but every single piece of research indicates that the more one is experienced with the Internet, the greater the proportion of time and tasks conducted on the web. In fact, since the 18 percent of U.S. homes with broadband access consume more than 50 percent of all page views, it suggests that the faster and easier the Internet becomes the more people use it.
Finally, while I agree that many of the success stories in leveraging the Internet will fuse other media with the Internet, it does highlight the reality that the Internet has become an important part of the media mix and therefore an important ad medium.
Call it convergent media or fused media or Internet advertising or whatever you may:
Internet advertising is growing bigger by the day.
When Push Comes to Pull
From: Rishad Tobaccowala
To: Robin HafitzPosted Tuesday, Jan. 14, 2003, at 2:29 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.)