Will the Internet Become a Significant Advertising Medium?
The Enemy Within
From: Rishad Tobaccowala
To: Robin HafitzPosted Wednesday, Jan. 15, 2003, at 1:04 PM ETWho are these people?
Robin,
Depth of addiction and of "Net narcissism" aside, the two of us seem to be in agreement that Web marketing is effective—especially when used in tandem with other media and in ways that respect the user—and is likely to grow larger and more important with the passage of time. Yes, it has more evolving to do, but it is evolving fast.
We also agree—I a little more than you—that the hysterics associated with online advertising and marketing have been washed away by the cold reality of the past two years. The sellers and publishers of media for the most part are far more professional and reasoned than ever before. The prices are lower. The ranges of creative possibilities are exploding. The proof of performance and delivery against a host of objectives is irrefutable. Any reader of this discussion who is willing to spend an hour browsing the online industry sites of the Internet Advertising Bureau or Online Publishers Association will see a plethora of independent research, success stories, and compelling creativity with minimal heavy breathing or ranting to become a believer in the future of Web marketing.
But even with all the Darwinian improvement to the medium with enabling technology, enhanced research, and streamlined standards; even with cross-media studies that show the compelling results of incorporating the Web into campaigns; even with the growth of households, increased usage, and gains in broadband, something seems to be holding back Internet-based (whether solo or in combo with other media) advertising from explosive growth and achieving its true potential.
I believe the enemy is us.
It is us on the buy side. Agencies, creative professionals, account planners, media buyers, as well as our clients and the industry periodicals we read. Over the past two years, the sell side has changed with new people, new approaches, and a far greater flexibility to try anything. The medium has improved. The measurement possibilities are far more sophisticated than clicks. The consumer is using the medium more. All the while most clients and their agents have reduced their resources and talent covering the Web to a skeleton or nonexistent staff. This extends to the major ad and marketing industry periodicals. Ad Age or Brand Week has puny coverage of this medium, treating digital media like soiled goods.
We got spooked by the meltdown. We find the medium difficult to work with. Client organizations do not know how to organize or compensate for this medium. Senior management hopes to retire before the future hits them. The best creative and planning talent is not putting its mind to this. It is so much cheaper to buy 30-second spots when clients are cutting fees rather than mucking through this really difficult stuff. We can measure against objectives and not clicks or impressions but few do. This stuff is hard.
So, instead of changing our organizations, instead of finding ways to deliver today's numbers while investing in preparing for tomorrow, instead of hiring new talent and developing new ways to get compensated and new ways to measure success, we blame the dot-com wreck and excesses of the past or blame the salespeople or blame Wall Street.
The consumer will be there. The enabling technology will be there. When the marketing community gets there, the Internet and convergent advertising will achieve its potential. And if we don't, someone else will.
What do you think?
The Enemy Within
From: Rishad Tobaccowala
To: Robin HafitzPosted Wednesday, Jan. 15, 2003, at 1:04 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.)